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

Bloor Research is proud to announce it has become a partner of a major new national campaign to raise awareness about the barriers faced by people with disabilities in accessing the internet and other new digital technologies, and help overcome them.This is a natural follow on to the research into accessibility that Bloor has conducted over the last 7 years.

Bloor believes that our readers should follow suit and show their support for ICT accessibility and gain the benefits available from a community of interest.

Go ON Gold aims to encourage businesses, organisations and policy makers to become more aware of the needs of disabled people - including their own staff and customers - and of the benefits to the economy of enabling everyone to be online.

New technology, from the internet to smartphones and digital TV, can be liberating for disabled people but can also turn into another way of excluding them from work, entertainment, shopping and other everyday activities. But shockingly, some four million disabled people in the UK have still never used the internet, either because of design barriers or because they may be unaware of advances in technology that can make access easier.

As part of its awareness-raising work, Go ON Gold has filmed a series of videos of campaigners and technology users.

One of the video subjects is Paralympian peer and disability rights campaigner Tanni Grey-Thompson. The sixteen-times medal winner is a firm believer in the enabling power of IT: "For people whose mobility is compromised or who lack the resources to be able to get out and about as much as they would like, full internet access can be hugely liberating. In front of the screen, we can all be equal and Go ON Gold is set to make this a reality."

Watch the video here: http://bit.ly/L88fjB

Go ON Gold, funded by the Nominet Trust, is a partner campaign of Go ON UK, the new national digital inclusion charity chaired by UK digital champion Martha Lane Fox and backed by the BBC, Age UK, the Post Office, TalkTalk, Lloyds Banking Group, the Big Lottery Fund and Eon.

The Go ON Gold website will act as a central focus for links to key resources and expertise, ranging from charities providing free or subsidised equipment, to centres offering one-to-one advice, and guidance for website developers to ensure the accessibility of the digital content they produce.

Visit the Go ON Gold website http://www.go-on-gold.co.uk/ for videos, insights and information on how you can help.

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

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

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

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

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

So what about unwired net neutrality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 11th February 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I recently blogged about the Qualitest Group and its third party testing services. I like the idea of using an external testing organisation because I believe that testers need a different mind-set to developers - a delight in breaking things and finding defects perhaps - and, in most organisations, such a mindset is career limiting. It's a question for an IT group to ask itself - do we like having people that regularly find our mistakes and publicise them to those around us? If not, perhaps it should be considering a third party testing organisation, that fully understands testing in all its aspects and employs people with the "testing mindset".

That choice raises further questions, however, which really concern the governance of the development process and its quality assurance. Does your external testing partner allow developers to unit-test their own code, for example? With old-style development practices, people probably shouldn't test their own code (the developers often have the wrong mindset and their test cases can embody the same misconception of the requirement as the code does); but developers unit-testing their own work is pretty fundamental to eXtreme Programming and Agile development. Agile, also, is generally becoming accepted as the way to go, both for productivity and quality. It's a question to ask your testing partners: "do you support agile development effectively without 'spoiling' the Agile culture we're trying to promote?".

Another thing I like about Qualitest is its results-based testing approach. However, this rather assumes that you have something to compare your results against and that the results you want are feasible. You can never claim 100% confidence that there are no bugs in a system, even a safety-critical system; and Qualitest would say that you can never say that "testing is finished".

Nevertheless, I would suggest that that's actually a matter of semantics, to a large extent. Should you discuss the semantics of a results-based testing SLA saying something like "Find at least 95% of the bugs" with your testing partner? There are ways of estimating the total bugs in a piece of code (here, for example) but does the SLA refer to these estimates or merely to finding 95% of the bugs actually reported by users? Does a design flaw count as a bug? What about the possibility of a systematic testing bias that puts the most business-critical bugs in the 5% that aren't found? And, what about latent bugs which haven't been found and perhaps can't ever be reached - with current workloads and data patterns? Are they worth wasting time on? Perhaps not; but latent bugs can represent a potential production disaster waiting to happen when workloads change or new data enters the system (perhaps you gain a significant Far East customer for the first time and its data looks different to what you've been processing before). So perhaps latent bugs are important (which is partly why static code analysis can be important).

I like results-based testing because it promises to give you a fair and equitable contract with your external testing partner. It can also, perhaps, give you a handle on the "is testing finished" issue - something else to question your testing partner about, I think.

"Is testing finished" is really another question of semantics. If you can place confidence limits on the number of bugs found relative to the number of bugs expected; if you can put numbers on the risk associated with "going live"; and if you can estimate, with confidence, the cost associated with the risk going live against the cost to the business of withholding the new automated service; then you have, in a real and practical (although limited) sense, "finished testing". Even if running some more tests (perhaps tests which you haven't thought of and which aren't in your test pack) might find some more defects.

Part of the value of employing an organisation like Qualitest is that it is a testing specialist and understands the testing process and its semantics, probably better than most developers do. However, although management can outsource responsibility for the execution of testing and quality assurance, it can't outsource responsibility for Quality. If, for example, one of the 5% of defects Qualitest hasn't found (while satisfying its testing by results SLA) results in confidential customer credit card details held by a company being splashed over the Internet, it'll be (potentially) the company's directors in the dock facing gaol, not Qualitest's directors.

So, the semantics of testing is probably important to the managers employing a firm like Qualitest. For example:

• Is a "bug" in an automated system a coding error; an error in automating business logic; an error in the business logic being automated; or a fundamental misunderstanding of the business operation and its commercial context by business management? Even if you replace "bug" with "defect", depending on where I am in the organisation and how technical I am, I might reasonably expect one, some or any of these to be addressed by a quality assurance or testing team that promises to help me control the "quality" of my automated business systems. And I've been, sloppily, mixing up "bug" and "defect" throughout this piece; this is common (although I do hope that many readers noticed), but is it acceptable?
• Is "defect free" software possible? Altran Praxis (formally Praxis High Integrity Systems) promises to deliver "zero defect" software and this claim has been validated by the NSA. This isn't trivial and Praxis achieves zero defects by using mathematical proof where it is cost-effective (but only where it is cost-effective, not everywhere) and by developing in a restrictive subset of Ada that doesn't support constructs which facilitate coding errors; but what it means by "zero defect" is that the code complies 100% with the spec. Is this the same as what you mean by "defect free"? Mind you, just 100% compliance with spec would be a useful step forward for many systems.
• If I design my system to store credit card details in a database that is accessible via SQL queries embedded in orders sent over the web, is this a "bug", a "system defect" or a "design fault" and would you expect your testing team, or Qualitest, to find this? Or, does this, perhaps, depend on what you ask (and pay) your testers, or Qualitest, to do? Perhaps you think this is something your security team should be testing; but perhaps they think it's a development issue and, in practice, nobody takes ownership of such issues.
• If I say that you have bugs in your systems because you tell your developers that you want bugs in your systems are you shocked and in immediate denial? But if you, perchance, reward developers for delivering ahead of schedule and reward them again for coming in out-of-hours to fix production bugs, aren't you, in effect, telling your developers that you are happy to live with bugs in the interests of immediate delivery and conspicuous "company loyalty" in your developers? Especially if you try to reduce what you spend on quality assurance as much as possible. I would see this as a "cultural defect" or "organisational defect" - a failure of "good governance", perhaps - which will impact the business; but, in semantic terms, does this count as a "system defect" which you could expect your quality assurance partners to help you eliminate?

I just raise the questions and they don't invalidate my view that external testing by an organisation such as Qualitest may bring significant improvements to system quality. But the outsourcing of testing has consequences and raises governance issues which are often cultural and semantic as much as technical - but no less important for all that.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 22nd October 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available. Something similar could be said about network bandwidth; left unchecked, the volume of data will always increase to consume what is available. In other words, continually increasing network bandwidth should never be the only approach to network capacity provision; however much is available it still needs to be used intelligently.

There are three basic ways to addressing overall traffic volume:

• Cut out unwanted data
• Minimise volumes of the kind of data you do want
• Make use of bandwidth at all times (akin to peak and off-peak power supply)

There are two types of unwanted data. First, there are the legitimate users who are doing stuff they really should not be doing. From the network perspective, this really only becomes a problem when that stuff consumes large amounts of bandwidth such as watching video or downloading games, films and music. A mix of policy and technology can be deployed to keep users focussed on their day jobs and thus making productive use of bandwidth.

The technology available includes web content and URL filtering systems from vendors such as Blue Coat, Websense and Cisco and filtering/blocking network application traffic with technology from certain firewall vendors including Palo Alto Networks and Check Point. In both cases care must be taken to ensure false positives are avoided that end up blocking legitimate use.

The second source of unwanted data is external and insidious; cybercrime and hacktivism. At one level this means pre-filtering of network traffic to keep spam email etc. at bay, especially as spammers have started exploiting increased bandwidth to send rich media messages. Most organisations now have such filtering in place using services such as Symantec’s MessageLabs or Mimecast’s email security.

Perhaps more serious is to avoid becoming the target of a denial of service attack (DoS). Generally speaking, these are aimed at taking servers out, but one type, the distributed DoS (DDoS) attack does so by flooding servers with network requests, so also has the effect of slowing or blocking the network. Technology is available to identify and block such attacks from vendors such as Arbor, Corero and Prolexic.

So now (hopefully) only the wanted traffic is left, but this will still expand to fill the pipe if left unchecked. One way to keep it under control is to keep as much 'heavy-lifting' as possible in the data centre. This means deploying applications that minimise the chat between server and end user access devices. To achieve this, data processing should be at the application server with just results being sent to users.

For the data that does have to be sent, techniques such as compression, de-duplication and caching can minimise the volume further. Two types of vendors step up to the plate here; those that optimise WAN traffic, for example Silver Peak, Riverbed and Blue Coat. Such products also help with the local caching of regularly used content but there are also services providers that specialise in doing this, notably Akamai.

All of the above will free up bandwidth for applications that must have the capacity they need at the time the user wants it; telephony, web and video conference etc. Others applications such as data backup or uploading data to warehouses for number crunching must be given the bandwidth they need but this can be restricted to times when other applications are not in use, which in most cases will be overnight.

Of course, for global companies there is no single night time; the same is true in certain industries which may have urgent network needs at all times of day, for example healthcare. When this is the case, then both urgent and non-urgent network requirements must run side by side and this requires certain network traffic to be prioritised to ensure quality of service (QoS), an issue that it only makes sense to address when the data flowing through data pipe is clean and wanted.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 7th September 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

The next BriefingsDirect discussion examines how two companies are extending their use of cloud computing by taking on IT service desk and incident management functions "as a service." We'll see how a common data architecture and fast delivery benefits combine to improve the efficiency, cost, and result of IT support of end users.

Our examples are intelligent energy-management solutions provider Comverge and how it’s extended its use of Salesforce.com into a self-service enabled service desk capability using BMC’s Remedyforce.

We'll also hear the story of how modern furniture and accessories purveyor, Design Within Reach, has made its IT support more responsive—even at a global scale—via cloud-based incident-management capabilities.

Learn from them more about improving the business of delivering IT services, and in moving IT support and change management from a cost center to a proactive IT knowledge asset.

Here to share their story on creating the services that empower end users to increasingly solve their own IT issues is Danielle Bailey, IT Manager at Comverge in Norcross, Georgia, and Alec Davis, the Senior System Analyst at Design Within Reach, based in Stamford, Connecticut. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: BMC Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: When you began looking at improving your helpdesk solutions and IT support, what were the problems were that you really wanted to solve?

Bailey: We had three pretty big pain points that we wanted to address. The first was cost. As our company was growing quickly, we were having some growing pains with our financials as far as being able to justify some of the IT expense that we had.

The current solution that we had charged by person, because there was a micro-agent involved, and so as we grew as a company, that expense continued to grow, even though it wasn’t providing us the same return on investment (ROI) per person to justify that.

So we had a little over $55,000 a year expense with our prior software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, and so we wanted to be able to reduce that, bring it back more in line with the actual size of our IT group, so that it fit a little bit better into our budget.

One of the reasons we went with BMC Remedyforce is that rather than charging us by the end user, the license fees were by the helpdesk agent, which would allow us to stay within the scope of our IT team.

The second big issue that we had was that a lot of our end users were remote. We have field technicians who go out each day and install meters on homes, and they don’t carry laptops, and the micro-agent required laptops for them to be able to log tickets.

We wanted to be able to use something that would allow us to give our field techs the ability to log tickets on a mobile application, like their iPhones, and Remedyforce had that.

The third issue was that we were Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliant and we needed to make sure that whatever solution we chose would allow us to track change management, to go through approval workflows, and to allow our management to have insight into what changes were being made as they went forward, and to be able to interact and collaborate on those changes.

So that was the third reason we chose Remedyforce. It has the change management in there, but it also has the Salesforce.com Chatter interface that we are able to use to make sure that managers can follow some of the incidents and see as we go through if we have any changes that we can quickly work with them to explain what we may need and that they can contribute to that conversation.

Davis: We have a different story. A couple of years ago we made a huge corporate move from San Francisco to Stamford, Connecticut. At that move we saw that it was an opportunity to look at our network infrastructure and examine what hardware we needed and whether we could move to the cloud.

So BMC Remedyforce was part of a bigger project. We were moving toward Salesforce and we also moved toward Google Apps for corporate email. We wanted to reduce a lot of the hardware we had, so that we didn’t have to move it across the country.

We were also looking for something that could be up and running before that move, so we wouldn't have any downtime.

We quickly signed up with Google, and that went well. And then we moved into Salesforce.com. At Dreamforce 2010, Remedyforce was announced, and I was there and I was really excited about the product. I was familiar with BMC’s previous tools, as well as some of the other IT staff, so we quickly jumped on it.

But as part of that move, something else kind of changed about our IT group. We did grow a bit smaller, but we were also more spread out. We used to all be in one location. Now, we're in San Francisco, Stamford, and also Texas. So we needed something that was easily accessible to us all. We didn’t necessarily want to have to use a virtual private network (VPN) to get onto a system, to interact with our incidents.

And we also liked the idea of a portal for our customers. Our customers are really just internal customers, our employees. We liked the idea of them being able to log in and see the status of an incident that they have reported.

We're also really big on change management. We manage our own homegrown enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. So we do lots of changes to that system and fix bugs as well. And when we add something new, we need approval of different heads of different departments, depending on what that feature is changing.

So we are big on change management, and prior to that we were just using really fancy Microsoft Word documents to get approvals that were either signed via email or printed out and specifically signed. We like the idea of change management in Remedyforce and having the improved approval process.

Gardner: Tell us about Comverge.

Bailey: Comverge is a green energy company. We try to help reduce peak load for utility companies. For example, when folks are coming home and starting to wash clothes, turn on the air-conditioning and things like that, the energy use for those utilities spikes.

We provide software and hardware that allows us to cycle air-conditioning compressors on and off, so that we reduce that peak. And by reducing that peak we are able to help utility companies to meet their own energy needs, rather than buying power from other utilities or building new power plants.

We have been in business for about 25 years. We originally started out as part of Scientific Atlanta, but they have taken on new companies across the country to integrate new technology into what we offer.

We are now nationwide. We provide services to utilities in the Northeast, from Pennsylvania, and then all the way down to Florida, and then all the way west to California, and then to Texas, New Mexico, and different areas inbetween. And we’ve recently opened new offices in South Africa, providing the same energy services to them.

Comverge tries to make sure that the energy that we're able to help provide by reducing that load is green. It’s renewable. It’s something we can continue to do. It just helps to reduce cost as well as to save the environment from some of the pollution that may happen from new energy production.

In a nutshell, Comverge is a leading provider of intelligent energy management solutions for residential, commercial and industrial customers. We deliver the insight and controls that enables energy providers and consumers to optimize their power usage through the industry’s only proven comprehensive set of technology services and information management solution.

In January, Comverge delivered two new products, the Intel P910 PCU that includes capabilities to support dynamic pricing programs, and Intel Open Source Applications for the iPhone. The iPhone is very important to us. Our field technicians are using it at residential and commercial installations, and we just want to make sure that we continue with that innovation.

Gardner: And how many IT end users are you supporting at this point?

Bailey: About 600, and those are in South Africa, as well as all around the U.S. We transitioned in April to Remedyforce from our old SaaS system, but the users say that Remedyforce is a lot easier for them to use, as far as putting in tickets and for them to see updates whenever our technicians write notes or anything on the tickets. It's a lot easier for them to share with others whenever they have to change what we are working on.

We are still building our knowledge base. We didn’t have that capability previously. So we are able to use some of the tickets that we have come in as we process and update those and control and close those. We are able to build articles that our technicians can use going forward.

I have recently switched my ERP analyst, but because I was able to pull some of that information out of Remedyforce, where I had my prior ERP analyst, it actually helped me to train this new person on some of the things they can do to troubleshoot and resolve problems.

We are also able to use the automated reporting out of Remedyforce so that I can schedule reports on our tickets, see how many we have open, and for what categories and things like that, and take that to our executive management. They're able to see our resource needs, see where we may have bottlenecks, and help us make decisions that help our IT group move faster and more efficiently.

Gardner: Tell us about Design Within Reach.

Davis: Design Within Reach is a modern furniture retailer. We've been around for 12 years, starting in San Francisco. We have a website that has the majority of our sales. We also have “studios” that are better described as showrooms. We have usually about five reps in those studios, and we have about 50 studios around the U.S. and Canada.

So those [reps] are our users that we support. We've become a very mobile company in the last couple of years. A lot of our sales reps are using iPads. One of the requirements we've had is to be able to interact with corporate in a mobile fashion. Our sales reps walk around the showroom and work with our customers and they don’t necessarily want to be tied to a desk or tied to a desktop. So that is definitely a requirement for us.

Our IT staff is small. We have an IT group, information technologies, and we also have our information systems, which is our development side. In IT we have about six people and in our IS department we also have about six people. We have kind of a tiered system. Tickets come in from our employees, and our helpdesk will triage those incidences and then raise them up to a tiered system to our development side, if needed, or to our network team.

We do have also some contractors and developers. As I mentioned before, we have our own ERP system. We do a lot of the development in house, so we don’t have to outsource it. It's important for those contractors to be able to get into Remedyforce and work the change management we have into the requirement, and also in some cases look at incidences to look how bugs are happening in our ERP environment.

Gardner: How have you been able to empower those end users to find the resources they need, to keep you fairly lean when it comes to IT?

Davis: We have put most of the onus on our IT department to know how to resolve an issue, and we did have a lot of transition with new employees during our move. So building a knowledge base with on-boarding new IT people is also very important. Again, we're a small team and we support a larger internal customer base, so we need them to start and have the answers pretty quickly.

Time is money, and we have our sales reps out there that are selling to our large customer base. If there's an issue with the reporting, we need to be able to respond to it quickly.

Gardner: And the conventional wisdom is that helpdesks are still costly, and the view has been that it’s a cost center. Is there anything about how you have done things that you think is changing that perception?

Davis: The reporting has helped us to isolate larger issues, and to also identify employees that put a lot of incidents in. With the reporting, which is very flexible, and with reporting for management, requirements can change. With the Remedyforce reporting, I can change those existing reports, create new ones, or add new value to those reports.

Mainly you see how many tickets are coming in. We can show management how many incidents we are handling on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, and so forth. But I use it mainly to identify where are the larger issues. Managing an ERP system is a large task, and I like to see what issues are happening and where can we work to fix those bugs. I work directly with the developers, so I like to be as proactive as I can to fix those bugs.

And we are very spread out and very mobile, so we like the flexibility to be able to get into Remedyforce without VPN or traditional methods.

Collaboration is becoming very important to us. We did roll out Salesforce.com Chatter to most of our company, and we are seeing the benefits in our sales team especially. We are trying to use Chatter and Remedyforce together to collaborate on issues. As I said, we are spread out, and our IT group has different skill sets.

Depending on what the issue is, we talk back and forth about how to resolve it, and that's so important, because you do build up knowledge, but the core of our knowledge is in every one of our employees. It's very important that we can connect quickly and collaborate in a more efficient way than we used to have.

Bailey: We have been able to show where IT is actually starting to save money for the rest of the company by increasing efficiency and productivity for some of our groups. There are some of the development works that we are able to do by being able to track and change processes for folks, making them more efficient.

For example, one of the issues that we had was that we were tasked with trying to reduce our telecom expense. We were able to go through and log all of the different telecom lines and accounts. We had to trace them down and see where they were being used and where they may not be used anymore. We worked with some folks within the team to reduce a lot of the lines that we didn’t need anymore. We have been moving over to digital, but we still had a lot of analog lines.

Before, we didn’t have a way to really track those particular assets to figure out who they belonged to and what their use was. Just being able to have that asset tracking and to work through each of those as a group, we were able to produce a lot.

The first quarter of the year we reduced our telecom expense over $50,000 a year and we are continuing with that effort.

With the knowledge base that we're building, we're able to let a lot of users begin to self-help. We have a pretty small IT team. We have only two people on what we call helpdesk support. Then we have two network team members, and we have about 10 people on our information services team, where we do development for the software and data services.

The knowledge base has been a lot of help for us to just start building that knowledge repository. Whereas before, if someone left the company, you would lose years and years of knowledge because there was no place that it was documented.

Because Remedyforce also ties into Salesforce.com, we'd [like to soon] be able to track some of our residential and utility customers in the Salesforce side as well, so that if the salesperson is aware that there is an issue going on with their utility, they can follow the information as it applies to that contact. Then, they're able to also reach out directly to the utility and make sure that things get handled the way they need to be handled according to contracts or relationships. So it's certainly something we are hoping to expand on.

We are also planning to use, and have already started using, Remedyforce for our HR group. When we have new hires or terminations, they're able to able to put in IT support tickets for that. We're able to build templates for each individual, so that as we receive notification that someone has been terminated, we can immediately remove them from the system too. HR has that access to put in those tickets and build those requests, and that helps maintain our SOX compliance.

Gardner: What else have you have been doing with Remedyforce?

Davis: Information is very important to us, very important to myself. I like to see what is happening in organizations from a support standpoint. We haven’t really pushed out Remedyforce to a lot of other departments outside of HR, who of course is helping us with on-boarding the new employees and off-boarding as well.

But all of our internal support teams, our operations team that support our sales teams, some people in finance, and of course HR, are all using Salesforce cases.

So we have all of our customer information. We have all of our vendor information. That would be the IT vendors, but we're also a retail company, so our product retailers are in there too.

We've also moved it out to our distribution center. They have the support team there. We've also started bringing in all of our shipping carriers and all the vendors that they work with. So we have all of our data in one place.

We can see where a lot of issues are arising, and we can be more proactive with those vendors with those issues that we are seeing.

It's great to have all of our data, all of our customer information, all of our vendor information, in one location. I don’t like to have all these disparate systems where you have your data spread out. I love having them in one location. It's very helpful. We can run lots of reports to help us identify what’s happening in our company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally posted at Lunacloud Compute & Storage Blog

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 25th June 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

A recent article from Harvard Business Review entitled Three Myths about What Customers Want elicited 165 comments last month. The key conclusions of this 7,000 response survey showed:

1. 77% of consumers don't want to have relationships with brands
2. Marketing interactions don't necessarily build better customer relationships
3. Too many marketing interactions have a negative effect on customers

Interestingly, the 23% of consumers who want relationships with brands mainly want these as they share the same values as the brand, rather than necessarily wanting to be intimate with the brand.

Here's some of the reader comments that pertain to digital marketing: "The last thing I want is frequent emails . . . (send me) one email so I know you are out there and know what you offer is tolerable. More than that and you're working against yourself. When you push email at me, you're pushing me away". "Frequency of messaging in an attempt to reach that elusive new goal of 'engagement' turns me off".

"No, I don't want a 'relationship' with a rental car, banana, gallon of gas, trash bag, PC antivirus software, television, automobile or the providers thereof. When marketers add to, rather than reduce, 'cognitive overload', I unsubscribe". "Don't stalk me, if I want something I'll find you". "I don't want to talk with you after the transaction, it's over. Done. Kaput".

"Marketing people too often understand interactions with customers as an opportunity to scream their messages at them. Unfortunately too few are genuinely interested to listen what is important to the customers in context of their experience with the product or service. It is not the way to build trust in relationship."

Some marketers have hardly shrouded themselves in glory in the way they have used digital technology. Many promotional emails are technically 'spam' - untargeted and lacking relevance to customer needs. In addition, the content offered is often over-hyped and lacks substance and granularity.

Sales follow-ups can be equally unfocused. For example, I often download vendor white papers and case studies. Sales call follow-ups may happen months later (when I have forgotten the content) or the next day (when I have not read the content). Either way, the sales question is often a scripted and inappropriate "do you want to buy something?" rather than evaluating my contact details and profile and routing me to a relevant Analyst Relations or Investor Relations representative for stakeholder nurturing and development.

Some vendors, such as Virgin Media and BT, alienate their own loyal customer bases by offering cheap price deals that are only available to non-customers. Others make it difficult for customers to unsubscribe, cancel a contract, or understand their pricing programmes. This is reflected in the 2012 Edelman Trust barometer research that shows consumers trust CEOs and their marketers less. Consumers trust 'a technical expert in the company', 'a person like myself' and 'a regular employee' much more highly.

We trust 'someone like us', even when we don't know them personally - hence the importance of social media. Digitally savvy customers sense digital tricks and techniques online, and warn off friends and followers when fair play is not being followed.

Marketers need to have the discipline to use customer data in a respectful and measured way that adds value from a customer perspective. Too much digital marketing today is sales / price promotions. Early text promotions on mobile phones are going the same way - with no unsubscribe link or reply mechanism, so there's no way out.

Marketers can use digital marketing technologies to deliver relevant, personalised and exciting digital experiences for their customers and potential customers. But this is not easy. It requires investment in people, process and the correct technology. Short-cutting this process using indiscriminate spamming and message blasting actually damages brands and results in diminishing longer-term returns from marketing investments. The customer trust is gone.

In summary, marketing needs to act in a responsible manner using the digital tools at its disposal to add value to customer experiences. The time for a 'land grab' for customer attention is over, and is jeapardising marketing's own image and credibility with customers. A new enlightened approach to responsible digital marketing is required.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 6th June 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Late in 2011 Quocirca conducted a research project across the USA and Europe to investigate what would be top of mind for CIOs and their management teams in 2012. We asked respondents to select their top 5 priorities from a list of 15 hot IT issues. These ranged from desktop upgrades, through various types of cloud deployment, network issues to improving the way applications are delivered.

Top of the list by a long chalk, selected by more than half the 500 respondents as a top 5 issue, was application performance management (APM). Perhaps this is not surprising; the other issues with high scores included private cloud deployment, data centre virtualisation, optimising the application lifecycle, deploying new customer applications and business transaction management. All of these involve delivering more effective applications to the business, but APM is about ensuring that this goal is actually achieved.

As with any investment that a business makes, ensuring that it delivers as promised requires measurement. Ultimately IT is about delivery of the applications that enable the business, be they utilities such as email and document management systems or core applications that drive the business processes that differentiate one business from another. APM is about measuring the effectiveness of applications and therefore IT.

APM tools enable the proactive monitoring of the various factors that affect the overall performance of an application and ultimately the experience of its users. This includes the various application software layers (database, application server etc.), the network and user access environment. APM tools also provide the ability to see how performance changes through time. The output is actionable advice on how to maintain and improve application performance levels.

Consistently through the research it was CIOs (20% of the sample) who recognised the importance of these issues and expressed greatest concern about their organisation’s ability to address them. That is not to say other IT managers were complacent, they were not far behind their bosses in most cases.

There was widespread recognition of the pressure to deliver better application performance with 70% overall saying user demand will increase. CIOs were particularly worried with 80% saying that they did not have the application performance metrics well mapped to business goals and that monitoring needed to be more proactive. This latter point was consistent across the industries covered by the survey which were ecommerce, financial services, technology and a range of other commercial organisations.

The value of being able to better measure application performance and deliver measurable improvements efficiently goes beyond business and user satisfaction. One of the key aims, especially for CIOs, was to free up their staff to focus on more strategic goals rather than just fighting to keep the lights on. There was a clear willingness to invest in APM tools that delivered on promise rather than just seeking out those that cost the least. IT managers recognise that being able to measure the performance of their applications is the only sure-fire ways of ensuring all IT investments are delivering as promised.

Quocirca’s report “2012 – The year of Application Performance Management (APM)” is free for download here.

The report includes a self-evaluation tool to enable readers to measure where their organisation’s maturity, with regard to APM, sits.

Quocirca will be presenting the report findings at two webinars on June 28th and at UK seminar on July 5th, links below:

• European webinar Thursday June 28th, 10:00 BST/11:00 CET – register here.
• US webinar Thursday June 28th, 12:00 EST/09:00 PST – register here.
• UK event “APM Performance Day” 4th July 2012 – register here.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 24th May 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Too many creators of content only worry about how fast they can create the content rather than worrying about how easy the user will find it to absorb the content.

I came to this conclusion after being asked to complete an online survey. The survey was being run by a major public opinion company and was about my views on the facilities available to me to play my favourite sport, squash.

The questionnaire started OK with some general questions and then went into a series of specific questions relating to facilities, access, friendliness etc. After five minutes I begun to wonder how much longer it would go on so I looked at the per cent complete and it said 50%. I had hoped I was more than 50% complete but having got that far I decided to persevere. I filled in two more rounds and looked again and the per cent complete was still 50% at which point I stopped.

I write about usability and accessibility so I felt I could not just forget this so I found a contact us button on the survey and complained. The good news was that I got an answer the same day so plus points for the organisation. The bad news was the reason that the complete per cent did not move is that I was answering the questions relevant to my sport which were part of a bigger survey relating to many sports. This meant that the per cent complete was meaningless, I was probably more than 90% complete, but I did not have the time or the inclination to try and finish the questionnaire.

The problem was that they had thought creator and not user and the result was that I, and probably many other people, aborted the process and the survey results were less useful than they could have been.

Many years ago when I first started writing business reports I went on a course. I do not remember much about it except the adage 'think reader not writer'. Later I learnt that Shaw ended a letter to a friend 'Sorry this letter is so long but I did not have time to write a shorter one'.

I have updated the sentiment to 'Think user not creator' and I hope the reasons are obvious, they include:

• The user will be pleased by a process that is quick, easy and requires the minimum of thought to understand.
• There will normally be multiple users and therefore a little extra effort by the creator will be multiplied to a large reduction in effort for the user community.
• Clarity will reduce, hopefully eliminate, the number of users who abort the process midway, whether that is completing a survey, buying a product, agreeing an action or just being better informed.

So please, whenever you create a digital artifact, web site, mobile app, on-line document or even a blog, like this one, please 'Think user not yourself'. Conversely if you are a user of a digital artifact and it is clear that the creator thought of themselves rather than you tell them.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 19th March 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

In recent Quocirca research, businesses report that, on average, their system administrators (sys-admins) make errors carrying out about 6% of tasks. This might not sound much, but actually it adds up to quite a big number.

If system administrators carry out an average of 10 tasks per day, or 50 per working week, that is 3 errors per week or, around 150 per year. And remember, these are errors under privilege. “Normal” users may accidentally delete a file or send an email to the wrong recipient. Privileged users may be reformatting a disk drive or writing new rules for a firewall. Here errors may lead to lost data, major security vulnerabilities or inconvenienced users who can no longer access systems they need to do their job.

The degree to which errors are made varies from one organisation to the next; the research shows industrial organisations to have the highest error rate and retail ones the lowest. This may be because industrial organisation deal with less regulated data, but they are still vulnerable to system outages caused by errors.

Making the task of identifying target devices requiring maintenance easier and getting system administrators to confirm the identity of devices and their intended actions before carrying them out can mitigate the problem and reduce overall error rates.

To see the full research behind this and get a free copy of Quocirca’s report – “Conquering the sys-admin challenge” – go to http://www.osirium.com/alpha-files/wp

By: Ike Ononogbu, Managing Partner, InforData Consulting Posted: 23rd February 2012 Copyright InforData Consulting © 2012

Two weeks ago, I attended Gartner’s Master Data Management Summit in London. What an event it was, both in terms of information and the people.

I took a lot away from the event. What struck me was the oft-mentioned challenges organisations face in their bid to attain a single version of the truth—Data Quality and Data Governance. These challenges were not restricted to organisations intent on implementing an MDM solution, but in general something faced by many.

What is impressive about Gartner events, and this was not an exception, is their ability to collate existent and, for want of a better word, should-be practices into a structured workable framework. This was evident in Gartner’s ‘Seven building blocks for MDM’. Gartner’s seven building blocks for MDM touch on Vision, Strategy, Metrics, Information Governance, Organisation and Roles, Information Life Cycle, Enabling Infrastructure. Gartner's assertion could not have been more accurate. Organisations are aware of these practices, some have already adopted it in one shape or form, but most don't realise its importance in the successful delivery of an MDM or data integration project.

These processes, which practitioners have been preaching for a long time, are a business driven, holistic approach to MDM.

During the course of the event, I spoke to many delegates and they all had one common question—how do we deal with data governance and data quality?

Governance as a concept is not new. In an MDM context, Gartner has defined MDM Governance as ‘the specification of a framework for decision rights and accountability to encourage desirable behaviour in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archiving and deletion of master data.’ Decision making and accountability becomes a thorny issue, considering Master Data is shared across functions and lines of business. Addressing this challenge plays a big role in putting into place an effective Data Governance program.

In a survey by Gartner, 38% of respondents indicated post-implementation that they should have more forcefully managed the analysis and processes pertaining to the initial data quality of the source system master data.

This challenge is illustrated in one delegate's question to me: ''what is the difference between Data Quality and MDM?”. The delegate went further to say they were considering carrying out a data quality initiative, apparently having already implemented an ‘MDM’ solution. The question and statement laid bare the lack of understanding of the importance of Data Quality in an MDM implementation and business processes in general.

It was a well-attended summit and we left the arena with one thing in mind—ensure organisations understand the pivotal roles Data Governance and Data Quality play in MDM and Data Integration, and continue to help them achieve their goal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: 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: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th February 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Nearly two months ago, we announced the formation of The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF), a global standards initiative among technology companies, customers, government and supplier organizations to create and promote guidelines for manufacturing, sourcing, and integrating trusted, secure technologies.

The OTTF’s purpose is to shape global procurement strategies and best practices to help reduce threats and vulnerabilities in the global supply chain. I’m proud to say that we have just completed our first deliverable toward achieving our goal: The Open Trusted Technology Provider Framework (O-TTPF) whitepaper.

The framework outlines industry best practices that contribute to the secure and trusted development, manufacture, delivery and ongoing operation of commercial software and hardware products. Even though the OTTF has only recently been announced to the public, the framework and the work that led to this whitepaper have been in development for more than a year: first as a project of the Acquisition Cybersecurity Initiative, a collaborative effort facilitated by The Open Group between government and industry verticals under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Defense (OUSD (AT&L)/DDR&E).

The framework is intended to benefit technology buyers and providers across all industries and across the globe concerned with secure development practices and supply chain management. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

More than 15 member organizations joined efforts to form the OTTF as a proactive response to the changing cyber security threat landscape, which has forced governments and larger enterprises to take a more comprehensive view of risk management and product assurance. Current members of the OTTF include Atsec, Boeing, Carnegie Mellon SEI, CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, IDA, Kingdee, Microsoft, MITRE, NASA, Oracle, and the U.S. Department of Defense (OUSD(AT&L)/DDR&E), with the forum operating under the stewardship and guidance of The Open Group.

Over the past year, OTTF member organizations have been hard at work collaborating, sharing and identifying secure engineering and supply chain integrity best practices that currently exist. These best practices have been compiled from a number of sources throughout the industry including cues taken from industry associations, coalitions, traditional standards bodies and through existing vendor practices. OTTF member representatives have also shared best practices from within their own organizations.

From there, the OTTF created a common set of best practices distilled into categories and eventually categorized into the O-TTPF whitepaper. All this was done with a goal of ensuring that the practices are practical, outcome-based, aren’t unnecessarily prescriptive and don’t favor any particular vendor.

The framework
Best practices were grouped by category because the types of technology development, manufacturing or integration activities conducted by a supplier are usually tailored to suit the type of product being produced, whether it is hardware, firmware, or software-based. Categories may also be aligned by manufacturing or development phase so that, for example, a supplier can implement a secure engineering/development method if necessary.

Provider categories outlined in the framework include:

• Product engineering/development method
• Secure engineering/development method
• Supply chain integrity method
• Product evaluation method
• Establishing conformance and determining accreditation

In order for the best practices set forth in the O-TTPF to have a long-lasting effect on securing product development and the supply chain, the OTTF will define an accreditation process. Without an accreditation process, there can be no assurance that a practitioner has implemented practices according to the approved framework.

After the framework is formally adopted as a specification, The Open Group will establish conformance criteria and design an accreditation program for the O-TTPF. The Open Group currently manages multiple industry certification and accreditation programs, operating some independently and some in conjunction with third party validation labs. The Open Group is uniquely positioned to provide the foundation for creating standards and accreditation programs. Since trusted technology providers could be either software or hardware vendors, conformance will be applicable to each technology supplier based on the appropriate product architecture.

At this point, the OTTF envisions a multi-tiered accreditation scheme, which would allow for many levels of accreditation including enterprise-wide accreditations or a specific division. An accreditation program of this nature could provide alternative routes to claim conformity to the O-TTPF.

Over the long-term, the OTTF is expected to evolve the framework to make sure its industry best practices continue to ensure the integrity of the global supply chain. Since the O-TTPF is a framework, the authors fully expect that it will evolve to help augment existing manufacturing processes rather than replace existing organizational practices or policies.

There is much left to do, but we’re already well on the way to ensuring the technology supply chain stays safe and secure. If you’re interested in shaping the Trusted Technology Provider Framework best practices and accreditation program, please join us in the OTTF.

Download the O-TTPF paper, or read the OTTPF in full here.

This guest post is courtesy of Andras Szakal, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of IBM's Federal Software Architecture team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building blocks of Unified Comms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 7th December 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Barcelona -- Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP SoftwareUniverse 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here in the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

This customer case-study from the conference focuses on AIG-Chartis insurance and how their business has benefited from ongoing application transformation and modernization projects.

To learn more about AIG-Chartis insurance’s innovative use of IT consolidation and application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, I interviewed Abe Naguib, Director of Global Performance Architecture and Infrastructure Engineering at AIG-Chartis in Jersey City, NJ.

Here are some excerpts:

Naguib: AIG is a global insurance firm, supporting worldwide international insurance of different varieties.

We're structured with 1,500 companies and roughly about eight lines of business that manage those companies. Each group has their own CIO, CTO, COO structure, and I report to the global CTO.

What we look at is supporting their global architecture and performance behavioristics, if you will. One of the key things is how to federate the enterprise in terms of architecture and performance, so that we can standardize the swing over into the Java world, as well as middleware and economy of scale.

When I came on board to standardize architecture, I saw there was a proliferation of various middleware technologies. As we started going along, we thought about how to standardize that architecture.

As we faced more and more applications coming into the Java middleware world, we found that there’s a lot of footprint waste and there’s a lot of delivery cycles that are also slipped and wasted. So, we saw a need to control it.

After we started the architectural world, we also started the production support world and a facility for testing these environments. We started realizing, again, there were things that impacted business service level agreements (SLAs), economy of scale, even branding. So, we asked, how do we put it together?

One of the key things is, as we started the organizational performance, we were part of QA, but then we realized that we had to change our business strategy, and we thought about how to do that. One key thing is we changed our mindset from a performance testing practice to a performance engineering practice, and we've evolved now to performance architecture.

The engineering practice was focused on testing and analyzing, providing some kind of metrics. But, the performance architectural world now has influence into strategies, design practices, and resolution issues. We're currently a one-man or one-army team, kind of a paratrooper level. We're multi-skilled, from architecture, to performance, to support, and we drive resolution in the organization.

We also saw that resolution had to happen quickly and effectively. Carnegie Mellon did a study about five years ago and it said that post-live application resolution of performance issues was seven times the cost of pre-live [performance application resolution].

In other words, we realized that the faster we resolved issues, the faster to market, the faster we can address things, the less disruption to the delivery practices.

Too many people involved
In normal firefighting mode, architecture is involved, development is involved, and infrastructure is involved. What ends up happening is there are too many people involved. We're all scrambling, pointing fingers, looking at logs. So, we figured that the faster we get to resolution, the better for everyone to continue the train on the track.

... I have experience with Quality Center and the improvements that have gone on over the years. Because of our focus, we built our paradigm out of QA and into the performance world, and we started focusing on improving that process.

The latest TruClient product, which is a LoadRunner product, has been a massive groundbreaking point solution. In the last two years, frankly, with HP and Mercury getting adjusted, there’s been kind of a lag, but I have to give kudos to the team.

One of the key things is that they have opened up their doors in terms of the delivery, in terms of their roadmap. I've worked extensively for the last, roughly, year with their product development team, and they have done quite a bit of improvement in their solution.

Good partnership role
They have also improved their service support model; the help desk actually resolves questions a lot faster. And we also have a good partnership role, and we actually work with things that we see, and to the influence of their roadmap as well.

This TruClient product has been phenomenal. One of the key things we're seeing now is BPM solutions are more Ajax-based, and there are so many varieties of Ajax frameworks out there than we know how to deal with. One of the key things with the partnership is that we're able to target what we need, they are able to deliver, and we are able to execute.

LoadRunner and TruClient allow us to get in front of the console, work with the business team, capture their typical use cases in a day-in-the-life scenario, and automate that. That gets buy-in and partnership with the business.

We're also able to execute a test case now and bring that in front of the IT side and show them the actual footprint from a business perspective and the impact and the benefits. What ends up happening is that now we're bringing the two teams together. So, we're bridging the gap basically from execution.

... We also started working with the CIOs to figure out a strategy to develop a service-level target, if you will. As we went along, we began working with the development teams to build a relationship with the architectural teams and the infrastructure teams.

We became more of a team model, building more of a peace-maker model. We regrouped the organization, so that rather than resolve and point fingers at each other, we resolved issues a lot faster.

Now, we're able to address the issue. We call it "isolate, identify, and resolve." At that point, if it’s a database issue, we work directly with the DBA. If it’s an infrastructure or architecture issue, we work directly with that group. We basically cut the cycle down in the last two or three years by about 70 percent.

Because there is a change in our philosophy, in our strategy to focus more on business value, a lot more CIOs have started bringing in more applications. We see a trend growth internally of roughly about 20–30 percent every year.

I have a staff of nine. So, it’s a very agile, focused team, and they're very delivery-conscious. They're very business value-conscious, and we translate our data, the metrics that we capture, into business KPIs and infrastructure KPIs.

Because of that metric, the CIOs love what we do, because we make them look good with the business, which helps foster the relationship with the business, which helps them justify transformation in the future.

There is a new paradigm now, they call it the "Escalator Message." In 60 seconds or less, we can talk to a CIO, CTO, COO, or CFO about our strategy and how we can help them shift from the firefighting mode to more of an architecture mode.

If that’s the case, the more they can salvage their delivery, the more they can salvage their effective costs, and the more they can now shift to more of an IT-sensitive solutions shop. That helps build a business relationship and helps improve their economy of scale.

I would definitely send the message out to think in business value. Frankly, nobody really cares as much about the footprint cost, until they start realizing the dollars that are spent.

Also, now, business wants to see us more involved from the IT side, in terms of solutions, top-line improvements, and bottom-line improvements. As the performance teams expand and mature and we have the right toolsets, innovative toolsets like TruClient, we're able to now shift the cost of waste into a cost of improvements, and that’s been a huge factor in the last couple of years.

Last, I would say that in 8,000+ engagements—we're actually closing in on now 10,000 events this year—we've seen roughly $127 million in infrastructure savings that we have recouped. Again, that helps to benefit the firm. Instead of waste, now we're able to leverage that into more improvement side.

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: 29th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

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

The topic of ALM will be a big one at this week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore the current state of applications in large organizations. Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches.

In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective.

This is the first in a series of three podcasts with the authors the ALM book to learn why they wrote it and to explore their major findings. They are: Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: In most large enterprises, applications have been built up over many, many years. You throw acquisitions into that and you end up with layers of applications, in a lot of which there is redundancy. You have this wide mix of technology, huge amounts of legacy, all built different ways, and the business just wants response faster, faster, and faster.

So, we have old technologies hampering us. We have an old approach that we've built that technology on, and the modern world is dramatically different in a whole host of ways. We're changing our process. We're changing the way our teams are structured to be much more global teams, outsourced, nearshore, far-shore, all of that stuff, and the technology is fundamentally shifting as well.

That's the context for why you see all these horror stories and these stats about the businesses' level of satisfaction with the responsiveness of IT, particularly in applications. If you think about it, that's what the business experience is... IT organizations are looking to change the game.

Hipps: A lot of these trends that we talk about—outsourcing, service-based architectures, more flexible methodologies, whether it's iterative or agile—you wouldn't necessary call any one of those brand new. Those things have been around for a few years now. Many enterprises we speak with and deal with have been leveraging them for a few years in some form or fashion.

If you're an owner of application teams or of a series of applications within an enterprise, these things tend to sneak in. ...you wake up one morning and realize all of a sudden that fundamentally the way your teams have long operated has been changed.

In some ways, it's death by a thousand cuts. No single one of these initiatives is going to force you to take a step back and say, hold the phone, let's figure out if the way we deliver applications now requires us to, in some significant way, rethink the mechanisms by which we conduct delivery.

From my own experience, it's difficult to get the time or the brain space to do that. Usually, you're neck deep in getting the next application out the door. You've got deadlines. You've got other applications or enhancements coming down the pike.

You may not have the time to take a step back and say, "Wow, we're using these different methods" or "We're relying more on outsource teams, so we are not all colocated."

One of the objectives of this book was to do just that. Mark and I had the luxury to take a step back and think about what these trends mean soup-to-nuts for the way applications get stood up and delivered, and how—from an enterprise perspective—we have responded or not responded to those new complexities.

The nature of an application today is that it's not a monolith. It's not owned by a single project team or a program consisting of several teams.

More often than not, it's something that has been assembled using a series of subcomponents, reusable services, or borrowed function points from other applications, etc. It's this thing that is, in the best sense, cobbled together. Rather than writing it all from scratch, we're leveraging what we can.

We can all agree that this makes sense, it’s the right way to do it, it's much more assembly line production versus handcrafting everything, which is certainly the direction we want to be headed in, from a software perspective.

But, that also presents us a lot of new challenges. How do I have visibility or discover the components that are out there, that are available for me to use? How do I trust that those components are reliable, that they are going to behave and perform in the way I want them to? Given the fact that I, as a given developer, didn't actually create it myself, how can I have faith in it? And, how are we going to authenticate all these different pieces?

So you've got these questions. How do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How do we notify each other of defects? How am I aware when something is ready to retest?

Relying on email is, let's just say, less than ideal. And, of course, we may be using different methods. Multiple teams could be using different methods. Those over there are working in agile fashion, we are working in waterfall fashion.

So the catchphrase we have, which may or may not make sense, it's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

Sarbiewski: The idea now is that you need both management and automation to achieve your end-goals.

People have long thought of those things in very narrow ways. They've thought of management of a narrow domain space, like managing requirements and automating GUI functional tests. Those were all good steps forward, important things, but there was little connection between management across the lifecycle and automation across the lifecycle.

Part of what we're trying to get at here is this interplay. You've got to think about both—not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock—to create the situation where I see what's happening. I see across these very complex endeavors that I'm undertaking; many people, many teams, many stakeholders, lots of projects, lots of interdependencies, so I have that visibility. When we need to step on the gas and go in a particular direction, and speed everything up without blowing everything up, that's when I can rely on nicely integrated automation.

Just about every square inch of the enterprise is automated in some way by software. What it has meant for IT teams is that you now have to understand every square inch of the business, and the businesses are incredibly dynamic. So any part that changes almost drags along, or in some cases, is led by, and has to be led by, innovation in the software to make that happen.

...You need to make software a core competency if you are going to differentiate your business going forward. So it's hugely important.

Hipps: Business can't twitch without requiring some change in a set of applications somewhere ...we've got applications everywhere. They're going to be under constant review, modification, enhancement, addition, etc., and that's going to be a an endless stream.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing to meet whatever the latest, greatest idea is, and we have got to run them accordingly.

We have got to make sure that once they are out there and available, they are responsive. We have got to make sure that the teams that own them in the data centers are aware of their behaviors, and aware of which of those behaviors are configurable, without even coming back to the application teams.

The legacy view said, "Wow, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the end-all, be-all. If I get the SDLC right, if I get requirements and deployment done right, I win." We realize that this is still critical. What we would describe as the core lifecycle is still where it all begins.

If I'm going to really be successful against what it is the business is after, I do have to account for this complete lifecycle? All the stuff that's happening before requirements, the portfolio investigation that's occurring, the architectural decisions I am making, have got to be true across the enterprise, as well of course as everything that happens once that thing goes live.

How well connected am I with my operation peers? Have I shared the right information? Have I shared test scripts where possible? Am I linked into service desk? Am I aware of issues, as they are arising, ideally before the business is hearing about it?

Those things are what we mean by getting your arms around the complete lifecycle. It is what's necessary, when you think about the modern delivery of applications.

Sarbiewski: Even in the requirements, there is an aspect that can be a level of automation and a level of management.

Automation can come in when I am building a visualization, a quick prototype, and there are some great solutions that have emerged into the market to help a non-technical user create a representation of an application that has almost the perfect look and feel. We're not talking about generating code. We're talking about using HTML and tools to create the flow, the screen views, and the data input of what an application is going to look like.

... Once we get to that look and feel of an app, at the push of a button, I can interpret all those business rules, all those rules about where was data, what was on the screen, was this data hidden, what was inputted, when did it flow to the next one, under what condition. All of that will get translated into a series of text-based requirements, test assets to test for that logic, and even the results and the rules and the data that needs to be input.

So, I have a process. I have had discussion and used some technology to visualize these requirements. At the push of a button, I automated the complete articulation, with perfect fidelity, including the positive test cases I want to run. I can manage those now, as I have always have, and as my systems and teams expected to.

Those requirements trigger test and defects and go against code, all of which can be linked. Whenever progress is made in any dimension against those requirements, I have created a test for one, I have run a test for one. I have run ten tests and eight paths. I have checked new coding against the bugs. All of that can be tied together and automated with workflow.

So, you start to see how I've got a creative series of information. I use automation to advance it to the next stage. I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that.

This is what we mean when talk about changing the game and how you deliver software, by doing just that, thinking about, what are the things that I have to manage and how does automation speed things up, and create outputs with greater fidelity and greater speed.

Hipps: The endgame should be that what I've got is a unified way of getting these various operations connected, so that my management picture has a straight flow through from the automated things that it's kicked off.

As those automated events occur, I'm getting a single, unified view of the results in my management view, which is, nine times out of 10, not the world we have when we look at big, big enterprise delivery. It is still a series of point tools, with maybe Excel laid over the top to try to unify it all.

... If you want to understand the future of IT, you just need to look at where manufacturing has come. We've plagiarized the lion’s share of what we do in IT and the way we work a lot from what we have seen in manufacturing and mechanical engineering. That extends to lean methods. It starts probably all the way back to waterfall.

Maybe it's no surprise that when you ask us to talk about what you mean by integrated management and automation, we are borrowing an analogy from the world of mechanical engineering. We're talking about what planes can do, what ships can do, and what cars can do. So, I hope this is very much a natural advancement.

Sarbiewski: I talk about the industrialization of IT. Sometimes, there's a little pushback on that, because it feels heavy. Then, I say, "Wait a minute. Think about how flexible Toyota or Boeing is." These companies have these very complex undertakings and yet can manage parts and supplies for providers and partners from every corner of the world, and every other car can be different coming off that assembly line. Look at how quickly they have shrunk their product lifecycles from design to a finished model.

Part of what's done that is exactly what Brad was talking about, an enormous investment in understanding the process and optimizing that, in supporting the various stakeholders, whether it's through design software, or automation on the factory line, all of that investment. We didn't do it in IT. We built it ourselves. We used Excel and post-it notes and other things, and we created from scratch everything that we have done, because we can, because we made it easy to do that. We have made it easy to design and build it a thousand different ways.

There is this counterintuitive perception that because there is an infinite number of ways, we hold ourselves to be different than that. People are realizing that's not really the case. In fact, the more I can industrialize and keep it lean and agile, how I do this, the tools I use, if I give the people incredible tools to do it, and not just point tools but integrated, the results really speak for themselves.

When we talk to customers that have done this, they achieve incredible results in three critical dimensions. There's a very longstanding joke that you can't go faster, you can't raise quality and take cost down. It's not just possible. This is this impenetrable triangle or it’s squeezing a balloon. We see with our customers that you absolutely can.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process. Guess what, they go faster, they take cost down, they drive quality up.

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

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

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 29th November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Some of you have been following my articles may remember an article I wrote about Convergent Software (A demonstrator for the new standards for RFID in Libraries) in February 2009. Well this week, Paul Chartier, their Managing Director, let me know that the company was launching a range of software products for the library community.  These meet the new conformance requirements recently announced on the RFID for Libraries Support website (http://biblstandard.dk/rfid/).

There are two products in the initial offering designed to help stakeholders to future-proof their investment in ISO 28560-2:

• ISO 28560-2 Planning and Modelling software:  This software allows libraries and other stakeholders to experiment with the encoding options of ISO 28560-2 by selecting and arranging data elements and encoding these on a simulated tag.  The main advantage of this software is that it can be used as part of a pre-investment process without requiring any RFID hardware or tags. This product incorporates their Template Builder and Data Builder tools that I reviewed in February 2009.
• ISO 28560-2 Quality Control software: This software combines the functionality of a fully compliant decoder with the additional powerful function of diagnostic software that identifies encoding errors and points to possible causes of those encoding errors. This product incorporates our Template Builder, Data Decoder and Data Doctor tools.

The announcement also contained details of 2 other products that are to follow shortly; namely:  

• ISO 28560-2 Comprehensive software: This software combines the functionality of the planning software and the quality control software products with their Data Editor tool. Chartier stated that this will provide the most comprehensive support for ISO 28560-2.  
• An interface module that enables the various software-only products to be linked to specific RFID encoding/decoding devices. This version of the software will take the simulation one stage further and allow prototype tags to be produced for testing purposes. It also can read tags claiming compliance with ISO 28560-2 and report any errors in a comprehensive diagnostic report.

All the products meet the requirements of the recently published Guidelines for ISO 28560-2 Conformant Devices and Processes.  A Compliance Statement is available on their website which explains in detail how the software products achieve this.

Convergent Software Limited is still offering its two software development schemes to help RFID vendors in the library sector to rapidly develop their support for the new ISO standard:

• The Benchmark scheme provides software and support to those companies developing their own bespoke system to support ISO 28560-2.
• The Integration scheme enables software developed by Convergent Software Limited to be embedded in vendors' software as an OEM component.

Convergent Software Limited develops and markets software and tools to support the encoding and decoding of data on RFID tags. The company also has products to support IATA RP1740C baggage handling (see article: Bagging Handling Applications get an RFID Simulator and Diagnostic tool).

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 (Moved) 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: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) 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: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 15th October 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

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

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

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

So how about taking a different approach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 15th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

At the end of September 2010, TIBCO unveiled their strategy to support “Enterprise 3.0” at TIBCO NOW. To understand the strategy, you first need to understand what Enterprise 3.0 is all about.

The term was coined by Sramana Mitra who is an an entrepreneur and has been a strategy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994. Mitra defines Enterprise 3.0 as an organisation, being a confederation of customers, partners, suppliers, outsourcers, distributors, resellers, and other kinds of entities, rather than one monolithic organisation. “Collaboration” and “sharing” become the key words in making this all work. However, TIBCO have a simpler view of Enterprise 3.0 as the evolution of the traditional transaction-based enterprise into one where real-time event-based information is taking an ever more important role.

Stefan Farestam, TIBCO’s EMEA Director of Product Marketing defined the difference between Enterprise 2.0 and 3.0 as:

• Information has moved from being static to dynamic in nature
• Processing has moved from transaction-based to event-based
• Processing of data has moved from database to Enterprise Service Bus
  
• Applications have moved from ERP to BPMS based sitting on top of legacy applications
• Business intelligence has moved to real time business rules
• From a 2 dimensional world to a 3 dimensional one.

Farestam went on to explain how TIBCO were going to help organisations achieve what he called “The Two Second Advantage”—using a quote from Vivek Ranadive “A little bit of the right information, just a little before hand—whether it is a couple of seconds, minutes or hours—is more valuable than all of the information in the world weeks or months later.” Farestam and other presenters illustrated this concept by talking about a number of TIBCO customer scenarios showing how business is event-based, whereas IT systems are transaction-based:

• Citibank, in Hong Kong, where they track all financial events that preceded the withdrawal of cash at the ATM and intelligently guesses that the person withdrawing cash is, for example, at the hospital with his pregnant wife and thus interested in a promotion for baby store.
• Southwest Airlines, who are able to notify customers when a flight is delayed or cancelled (and rebook automatically) and reroute flights.
• Bank of America, who have 145 million customers and 10–20 thousand events per second, which adds up to 1 billion events (not processes) per second.

Alan Harrington, Worldwide Director of Business Optimization, added to this theme by saying, “Organisations have massive amounts of data and more events but with little time to understand them. The pace of business is not going to change so this situation will only be exasperated.” Harrington went to suggest that there were 4 critical requirements to providing a solution to this issue:

• The ability to handle events on a massive scale;
• Universal development tools that allow an organisation freedom to innovate;
• The ability to integrate people naturally; and
• The ability to deploy software where and when you needed it.

Harrington and then Thierry Schang, Vice-President Engineering, then described how TIBCO’s new universal platform would support Enterprise 3.0 and the 2-Second Advantage. Figure 1 shows the high-level architecture diagram that was used.

Figure 1:TIBCO ActiveMatrix Universal Application Platform (Source: TIBCO)

This product architecture shows how TIBCO have, over the last few years, been pulling together their various acquisitions and home grown products into a single cohesive whole that is able to work together as one, whilst, at the same time, being open to work with competitor products. However this still doesn’t cover the whole portfolio, such as Spotfire for business intelligence and the new Silver suite, which is part of the part of the Deploy message providing build-scale environment to develop for clouds. It consists of:

• Silver Fabric: construct self-service clouds
• Silver Grid: local and external cloud scalable deployments
• Silver CAP: develop solutions for clouds
• Silver BPM: run BPM solutions in the cloud
• Plus applications built on the platform such as Silver Formline, tibbr, and Silver Spotfire.

To support the need for an application development environment which supplies the ability to innovate freely, TIBCO have what is now branded ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks; their model-driven approach to application integration and process orchestration that requires no coding. As part of this environment, there is a free download TIBCO Business Studio Developer.

TIBCO now have some 130 adapters that form their ActiveMatrix Adapters product to support the needs of businesses to integrate naturally. The engine driving integration is ActiveMatrix Enterprise Service Bus. This is a key component in TIBCO’s support for SOA. An underlying grid-based architecture makes it possible to scale up and out dynamically at runtime. To support the building of composite applications, TIBCO have ActiveMatrix Service Grid, which is built on open standards, thus being complete application neutral with support for both Java and .NET.

Governance, from TIBCO’s viewpoint, includes Management. I am not sure that I fully agree with this. There is often confusion between monitoring and management; I see the former as the passive ability to see what is happening while management is about active control. TIBCO have an impressive portfolio of products, including ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager, which provides active management of SLAs, and Hawk. The other 2 components on offer to support Governance is TIBCO ActiveMatrix Lifecycle Governance Framework, which provides an SOA registry and repository foundation, and ActiveMatrix Policy Manager, which defines policies across services hosted on heterogeneous SOA environments, mediated by the ActiveMatrix Service Bus and through TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus for authentication and authorisation, encryption, logging, auditing, and service versioning.

That leaves Process in their diagram. TIBCO, through ActiveMatrix, are providing solutions for in-house and cloud as well as for complex event processing. What wasn’t clear to me was if or how ActiveMatrix BPM and Silver BPM are connected to TIBCO’s CEP product BusinessEvents.

Figure 2: TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM Architecture (Source: TIBCO)

Justin Blunt, Senior Product Manager for BPM, presented TIBCO’s solutions as 3rd Generation BPM. Interesting; have we already reached that number?! If we forget which generation, TIBCO, since the Staffware acquisition, have always been able to place them at the top of the pile in BPM, and many analyst reviews have it placed in the top area. TIBCO understand how critical to business processes are in terms of supporting customers, delivering goods and services and managing operations. They also recognise that business processes involve not just applications/systems but also people, both inside and outside organisation boundaries. Our business processes don’t exist on their own. The critical mission, as TIBCO sees it, is to manage business processes as a managed service within an organisation. To aid the speed of development, TIBCO have developed the concept of “workflow patterns”. These provide built-in, model-driven support for control, resource, and data patterns (an initiative based on the work of a joint effort of Eindhoven University of Technology and Queensland University of Technology), eliminating the need for complex code or rules.

This was the first time that I have started to understand how the TIBCO portfolio fits together. Yes there are some still some holes, but that is more due to time-constraints of trying to cram into a set time, information on the complete portfolio. Bloor applaud TIBCO for developing a strategy that both pulls together all their product portfolio into a seamless whole whilst at the same time being able to offer the ability to switch parts of the portfolio out because of the big use of open standards. Well done TIBCO. More please.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 11th October 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to know if the users of a given IT application were happy with their experience, you could usually just wander along the corridor and ask them. They were mostly in the same single central location as the computer running the application, using a VDU linked directly to that machine—one of only a few in the building.

It is all very different today. Users of most applications are widely dispersed. They can be using a range of devices to access numerous applications. The growth in the number of users is not just because many more employees have direct access to IT as part of their day-to-day job, it is also because applications are increasingly open to use by outsiders.

These outsiders are either active, such as supply chain partners, online shoppers and users of internet banking, or passive, for example, viewing video displays in stores or passing through ticket readers at train stations. If external users receive a poor experience they will at best be disgruntled and form a poor opinion of the organisation whose service has let them down, and at worst go to a competitor.

If internal users are dissatisfied, they may put up with it. However, that dissatisfaction can reduce the efficiency of business processes and lead employees to bypass procedures, which can harm compliance and provide an excuse for inactivity and distraction. Whether the users are internal or external, you cannot rely on them to report poor experience.

It is therefore essential for any organisation to be able to gauge the experience of all users and take effective action to improve it when it is not good enough. The service users receive depends on three things: their location, the network that connects them to the relevant applications and the run-time environment of the application itself.

The last of these, the run-time environment, has become even more problematic in the past 10 years with the increasing use of virtualisation and cloud-based services. Both have many benefits, but they also divorce applications from the hardware that drives underlying performance, which is being shared with other applications or, in the case of public cloud, with other organisations.

However, with the right tools firms can collect the data needed to understand and improve the user experience, including data gathered from a wide range of network and security devices: for example, routers, load balancers, and content filters. It also includes data on the performance of applications, collected using specially located performance monitors.

There are a number of vendors that provide such tools. These include Visual Performance Manager from Visual Network Systems—VNS, née Fluke Networks—which combines both network and application performance monitoring to provide a unified view of the user experience, a suite of products from SolarWinds which focuses on network performance, and tools from Opnet for both application and network monitoring.

The aim of using such tools is not just to improve the user experience, but to do so at an acceptable cost. Often the wrong resources are thrown at performance problems: for example, some people opt for more network bandwidth when a lack of processing power in a virtualised environment is causing the problem. Money is spent for little improvement.

In fact, with the understanding provided by user experience monitoring tools, you should be able to gain enough insight to make immediate improvements at no cost—for example, you might be able to schedule tasks at different times, not run a batch report at periods of peak customer activity, or ask users to avoid certain bandwidth-hungry applications.

Other changes can be introduced quickly and may not cost that much, such as enforcing controls on internet usage through URL filtering, and moving content closer to users through content distribution services from providers such as Akamai or Limelight.

Of course, ultimately, new networking equipment or more processing power may be the answer but, at least, armed with the right data, the cost can be justified and the expected improvements are more likely to be achieved.

Putting all the components together to provide a comprehensive view of the user experience comes at a price. This cost includes not just the tools to consolidate, process and display statistics, but also the monitors to gather data. For large enterprises at least, as Quocirca argues in their free report on user experience monitoring, the total value proposition is sufficient to justify the necessary investment.

However, such monitoring is no longer just for large organisations. The barrier to entry has been lowered recently by VNS, which has announced VPM Xpress—a single appliance that includes all the necessary components.

It is suitable for mid-market organisations with users spread over a limited geographic area or discrete parts of an enterprise where application performance can be critical to the experience of users, such as a call centre.

Information technology can be a wonderful thing when it works, but a miserable experience when it fails. This truth applies to all businesses, large and small. The technology is there to enable users, not frustrate them. Ensuring the experience is more often good than bad is the only way to create a productive harmony between humans and computers.

Quocirca's report, User experience monitoring, can be downloaded free of charge at the following link:
http://www.quocirca.com/reports/466/user-experience-monitoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 13th September 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

It's a software developer's job to write application code that satisfies customer requirements and meets business objectives. This code needs to be functional, usable, reliable and with acceptable performance and supportability. As the modern world relies on software to function, teams of developers must do their best to churn out millions of lines of code under huge pressure to satisfy customer demand.

With looming deadlines and the need to do yet more work developers, in the past, had little time to ensure their code was free from bugs or errors that opened security holes in the application. Fortunately, as many applications ran within a client server network, relatively isolated from the outside world, this approach was normally successful.

Then along came the Internet, the World Wide Web and the subsequent massive growth in handheld devices that exposed what would be normally closed applications to millions of anonymous users. Combine this with the recent introduction of organised cyber criminals continuously looking for new ways of committing crime, and the computer security ground rules have been rewritten forever.

Development teams realised very quickly that their approach to software development was insufficient to cope with the explosion of malware and hacking that was exploiting flaws in software code. The scale of this problem is immense; in 2009 alone over 7,000 new software security vulnerabilities were found, putting pressure on developers to rapidly improve their knowledge of security issues if they are to see their applications survive.

Against this background we have seen a huge move towards componentised code, and the reuse of code libraries and functions that had been developed in house, purchased or borrowed from other developers. As customers have looked to slim down their costs, the use of commercial and open sourced software grew. Outsourced software development has seen projects sent across the other side of the world to be written by developers they have never met in a country they may never have visited. So not only do developers need to worry about security defects in the code they write, but also in the code they reuse.

This perfect storm raises huge concerns in the minds of information security professionals who are trying to get a grip on the scale and diversity of software entering their organisations.

How can code be checked for security flaws? How can the executive be assured that the various components used in an application are free from potential security bear traps? What can be done to verify that software complies with internal and external governance, compliance and regulatory standards?

Conventional application code testing by either scanning the source code, undertaking manual penetration testing or using a web-based scanner is, at best, only providing partial coverage of an application. It is also expensive, requiring manual, time-consuming processes that are simply not scalable and are prone to missing security flaws.

Worse of all, this testing provides a false sense of security.

On the other hand we need to consider the developers. The sheer volume of potential security flaws and new and emerging threats can be overwhelming to a developer under pressure to roll out yet another new feature.

The only realistic solution to this problem is to take the pressure off the developer and automate the checking for security flaws in a comprehensive way as part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). By integrating independent security scanning, using multiple techniques as part of the SDLC, it becomes second nature to the developer to get their code thoroughly checked as part of the regular development process. Customers and the business can be reassured that a trusted third party has viewed the code and passed it fit for purpose.

Software that is bought in from a third party, often without available source code, needs to be part of this informed review of code security. Traditionally, lack of source code has thwarted any investigations of such a black box software solution, forcing customers to take it on trust that the code is secure and unlikely to present a security problem. Fewer organisations are prepared to accept this situation with such blind trust and will expect an independent assessment of the code's security profile.

Software development managers and information security professionals need to act now to address the security of the software they write, purchase or co-opt into their solutions.

Failing to act due to lack of a pragmatic and cost-effective solution is no longer excusable.

If you are interested in finding out more about application code security then I will be running a webinar on 16th September in conjunction with Veracode. Details here.