By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 1st November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

People of a certain age often enjoy recalling for younger folk the size of the early mobile phones that were lugged around in the mid-1980s, whilst marvelling at the latest smartphones. These brick-sized devices could not even send text (SMS) messages (the first of which was sent in 1992); they were good for voice only. But, what would it have taken almost three decades ago to have had all the capabilities of a 2011 smartphone based on the available technology of the day?

This was one of the subjects covered in a recent New Scientist article titled “They said it couldn't be done: 7 impossible inventions”. To quote the article:

“The components for the iPhone à la 1985 we've listed so far would fill a large wheelbarrow. But we have left out something important.”

“The processor at the heart of the iPhone 4 can perform up to a billion operations per second (the new iPhone 4S is even zippier). You might have matched that in the mid-80s if you had bought the Cray X-MP, then the world's most powerful supercomputer. But the Cray would have filled an office cubicle and also required an industrial-strength refrigerator to remove the waste heat. So cancel the wheelbarrow. To haul the 1985 iPhone around, we're going to need a truck.”

Interesting stuff, which underlines why the consumerisation of IT has become such a big issue. When I left the academic world for the commercial one in 1986, for the first time in my life, on my desk at work I had dedicated access to a computer (albeit a text-only dumb terminal) which was linked to a network providing me with any information my employer had stored that it felt would be useful to do my job. I also now had a telephone with its own number; my friends and family could now contact me when I was at work (before that hand written letters had been the main method).

The new entrant to the work place now has all this and much, much more in their pocket. This is the issue driving IT consumerisation. Employers can no longer impress new recruits with technology and connectivity, they are more likely to disappoint. Competitive employers today are those that allow their employees to use the advanced technology they have become used to at home in the workplace.

Consumerisation does of course throw up many challenges, not least how data security, contracts and billing are handled. These issues were discussed in a recent free Quocirca report “Carrying the can” sponsored by ttMobiles and the subject of a recent conference organised by the Wireless Improvement Group (WIG). Quocirca’s presentation given at the conference can be downloaded here.

By: David Norris, Practice Leader - Analytics, Bloor Research Posted: 19th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

As part of my research into Big Data it is sometimes difficult to describe things that convey the scale and capability that is a step change from anything that most of us are used to. So much that goes under the big data banner seems to be just more of what we have done for a long time, with POS data analysis in retail, and CDR analysis in Telco as obvious examples. But every so often you come across something that is really jaw dropping and Quantcast is one such. The scale is staggering and shows a need to operate in real time, so that execution has to be conducted in the time that it takes for you to hit the send button and for the web page to come back with the content you requested, supported by the advertising that Quantcast has identified to the ad server as the most relevant. When it comes to big data, nothing that I have come across so far is as big and demanding as online advertising, and Quantcast are leaders in this field.

There is a seismic shift going on within the online advertising market; not only is it growing in importance at the expense of more traditional channels, but the nature of the advertising displayed is changing rapidly. The advertising world used to be one based upon periodic agreements to buy slots over months - if not quarters - but now that is fast being replaced by real time bidding for each and every slot. Online advertising used to be based on the search request submitted by the consumer, but that is fast being replaced by displaying ads based upon a profile, not of what was requested but by who is doing the requesting. Display advertising is initiated when a consumer submits a request, and has to be concluded quickly enough to allow the correct ads to be brought to their screen with the requested content. That involves making a profile of the user, assessing the options of what to target them with to maximise the chances of them actually buying, and also making a bid for the slot. And to do all of that billions of times a minute and all in the blink of an eye - impressive stuff!

To cope with the requirements of display advertising requires something more than just a bit more of what has gone before: what is required is a revolutionary approach. We are talking about a major step change, it's mass production on an awesome scale. We are talking about petabytes of data being processed, which is not just about the application of static business rules but is about real time machine learning and optimisation; and all of that has to be brought together as a coherent whole and repeated billions of times a minute 24 by 365.

Quantcast are market leaders in this field based upon business knowledge, technical excellence and an amazing ability to deliver on a vision. Quantcast have built the largest data set of human interests on the planet, so whilst Google and Facebook know a lot about certain aspects of what you do, Quantcast have most of the other data that is of value. What that gives them is the facts on which to build their insight. They can profile a user based upon an understanding of who they are in terms of income, education, lifestyle, family etc. and then use that data to make a judgement on whether or not they are likely to buy.

Online advertising is not Marketing - it is about sales. The advertisers are not interested in brand awareness, they want to see things translated into hard sales, and this is where Quantcast excel. Quantcast have the ability to identify what they term a "Lookalike". A lookalike is someone who they can say is more like a buyer than a non-purchaser. They do that quickly enough to then allow a bid for the display to be made, which will allow the ads to be requested from the ad server and displayed with the content without any discernable delay to the consumer, and with a very high likelihood that the display will be made to a purchaser.

The scale of all of this is quite staggering. Quantcast are processing over 20+ billion records a day to build their insight. They are handling over 7 billion auction bids a day. This is all continuously growing and undertaken on proprietary software stack assembled from massively redundant arrays of commodity hardware, because at the volumes these guys operate at failure is certain so keep it cheap and use software to ensure you keep running! This I think provides a real insight into what Big data is all about, and shows just what is going on the background when you submit a request on-line. All of this is truly remarkable and Quantcast are deservedly leaders on their chosen field because all aspects of what they do exhibit a fantastic ability to deliver.

By: Martin Gandar, Independent Research Analyst, Independent and Ovum Associate Analyst Posted: 22nd September 2011 Copyright Independent and Ovum Associate Analyst © 2011

It’s now the norm for operators to limit data downloads on most of their mobile tariffs. There are exceptions and depending on your country you may still find unlimited data-plans or special broadband tariffs, but for moist users there will be limits that start low at 200MB per month and range up to 1GB.

Providers should inform you via email or text if you are close to exceeding your mobile data allowance. Different operators have different policies on what action to take against customers who exceed their allowances and the most common include:

• Cutting-off your connection (though this is rare and normally reserved for those who excessively and repeatedly exceed their allowance).
• Throttling your speed (many operators, including T-Mobile and Vodafone in the UK, will downgrade your connection to their 2G network).
• Charging you per extra
• Cancelling any bundled access to wi-fi hotspots

This isn’t going to be a great problem for most users as we seldom use more than 200Mbytes of download in a month, and the table below shows that we can get quite a lot within the limits on offer

Source of estimates: O2 [1, 2]. Online radio calculation assumes 128kbps bitrate. 

So there shouldn’t be any panic, but if you are the sort of user who wants to stream TV to your phone then be careful ! Service2Media offers the following guidelines on how to avoid surprises.

1. Buy a SIM card when abroad: If you’re going for more than a couple of days, it might be cheaper to buy a pay as you go SIM card in your destination country. It will almost certainly be cheaper to make calls within that country; although not necessarily cheaper to make a call back home. Double check the tariffs. You’ll also need to ensure your handset is unlocked. 

2. If you don’t get a SIM then watch out for roaming costs: Your data-plan is unlikely to be Global or even EU wide so you need to agree a ‘passport’ style deal with your provider if you want to avoid the sort of unexpected bills reported in the press You can also do simple things like getting people to call you rather than calling home. It’s always cheaper to receive a call when you are abroad. Your friends pay the normal cost to call your phone and you pay a call to receive it in the country where you are traveling but this is a lot less than calling home from abroad.

When it comes to data charges fortunately in many EU countries mobile operators have been forced to introduce a cut-off limit for roaming data charges. However, this doesn’t apply to customers travelling beyond the EU.

So if a typical smartphone uses around 200MB of data per month. Typically the networks charge between 4 euro/MB and 8 euro /MB for data roaming. If you are abroad for a month and don’t limit data roaming then you’ll end up with a bill about 1,000. Euro Downloading a typical MP3 file would cost you about 20 euro. Watching one hour of television would cost about 2,500 euro, so getting a special rate from your provider is a must.

3. Turn off data intensive features of your phone. You only need to do this if you aren’t sure of what you’ll be downloading and either you’re close to your limit or you are abroad and unsure of the cost.

• iPhone: Go to Settings > General > Network > Data Roaming and select Off. For an extra precaution, you can disable all internet connectivity in iOS4.
• Android: Go to Settings > Wireless & networks > Mobile networks and uncheck ‘Data roaming’. Android also offers the option to disable internet connectivity altogether.

4. Limit yourself for high bandwith activity. Only do the items below if you are aware of the amount of data you are downloading.

Downloading or streaming video/music (for example applications such as YouTube, Spotify, Last.fm, TVCatchup, BBC iPlayer).

• Using P2P applications on your phone (e.g. BitTorrent)
• Using voice-over-IP applications (e.g. Skype)

5. Don’t Tether unless you know what you are doing

Tethering means connecting your mobile phone to a PC or laptop as a modem and sharing your phone’s 3G mobile broadband service. This includes USB tethering and tethering via the iPhone & Android personal hotspot features.

Recently, though, some providers such as AT&T have made tethering an official data plan add-on. Paying $20 extra per month. Similarly Sprint charges $30 per month for tethering access through its new HTC EVO 4G for Android users and T-Mobile offers Nexus One models Android 2.2 "Froyo", providing both tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot creation options..

6. Use apps rather than web browsers: Apps are far more efficient at communication that working through the extra layers imposed by web access. If you can make use of native apps that are efficient communicators it could save you a considerable amount of data traffic for your popular applications. Always look for a well-built app if there is a choice between web usage and app.

7. Check how you download emails
If you use a web-based email system such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Googlemail, checking your email is just counted as surfing the web (except if you download an attachment ) This is a safe way to avoid getting large data downloads as you can always see what’s there before you download it.

If you use Outlook then you might end up downloading everything that’s sent to your e-mail attachments included even if you don’t open them. This may not be a problem if you

8. Use VoIP/instant messaging (e.g. Skype) over Wi-Fi not 3G 

Use VoIP(Voice over IP) on your smartphone or IM (Instant Messaging) application such as MSN Messenger, Skype or Google Talk. But only use them for a WiFi hotspot don’t use them over the mobile network though as they’ll eat into your data limit.

9. Know how to control your phone: We see many people who don’t install a power control bar or the equivalent so that they can toggle on and off things like the use of WiFi and in this context, the synching of data. Using such tools allows you to say whether you want to synch data between your various messaging and e-mail accounts and your smartphone and turning these off can save a lot of unnecessary downloads, that you might prefer to do using WiFi or if you are travelling might prefer not to do at all. It’s also of course useful for it’s primary purpose that is to conserve battery life.

10. Monitor your usage: so you can see where you are against your monthly limits.Finally and almost most importantly, be aware of your usage by monitoring it using an app such as 3G Watchdog for Android phones or something like At&T’s myWireless iPhone App to show you where you are on data usage for that billing cycle.

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

Despite fears of being replaced by robots or computers, the terms that twenty-five years ago described the use of IT in different professional sectors were less about substitution and more about support. Programmers used computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools, doctors used computer aided tomography (CAT) scanners and engineers used computer aided design and manufacturing (CADCAM) systems.

As IT has crept insidiously into all elements of life with applications and ‘amateur’ users everywhere, there has been a tendency towards over-reliance on the technology. This is often to the detriment of individuals with poorer employee training and to the detriment of business processes that are often simplified to fit the technology, rather than the end need.

Business processes should be strategically aligned to the overall goals of the organisation and tactically deliver on the day-to-day demands of stakeholders – in particular customers and ultimately shareholders. All to often solutions have been introduced by IT that don’t quite meet the operational business requirements, and adjustments are typically only one way. No wonder that the UK comedy programme Little Britain’s catchphrase “computer says no” has so much resonance, highlighting limitations of the technology and the initiative of the employee involved as well as inadequacies of the business process.

Losing the ability to spell and do simple arithmetic have also been put down to individuals relying on technology to do the thinking for them, with students even using internet search engines to generate entire pieces of work. Individual over reliance on technology is also well demonstrated by the appearance of road signs indicating ‘sat–nav error’. Some drivers slavishly follow their personal navigation systems, rather than thinking about their surroundings or using the sat-nav as only a guide and have become trapped or lost.

There is nothing wrong with using the computers to support, aid and assist, but abdicating all responsibility for the process that has been badly or incompletely thought out is not showing signs of artificial intelligence but automated stupidity.

This is not just a problem of navigation and sat-navs, but also more fundamental business processes, which ought to be supported, streamlined and improved by technology, rather than simply or clumsily automated. Printed communications from large businesses and institutions offer clear examples of this. 

Contact databases are often mined and mail merged to automatically generate letters, which completely fail to apply even the most basic intelligence to the process. For example letters from hospitals exhorting octogenarian outpatients to bring in money for prescriptions, when the IT system should have all the data it needs to ‘know’ they are exempt, but a suitable software trigger is not in place.

Perhaps some of the blame for this could be placed in the money grabbing palms of IT vendors and consultancies who advocated business process re-engineering (BPR) in the 1980s and 1990s, and offered it, silver bullet-like, as an externally delivered service. In prior years, many companies, especially in manufacturing would have had their own internal ‘organisation and methods’ departments, or would have employed consultants to simply measure or rationalise existing processes with time and motion studies and progress chasers.

The problems with BPR were two-fold; often due to the high cost it was a huge one-off exercise rather than continual incremental process, and it was often conducted by consultants with little direct experience of the specific market sector. Not only would these consultants often fail to understand the nuances of the industry sector they were advising, but the need to maximise their billable hours would mean they were unlikely to have sufficient time to keep completely up to speed with advances in technology. Result? BPR was an expensive blip, and now has a damaged reputation.

The type of ‘re-engineering’ generally proposed smacked of being so big an exercise that not only did it take too long, but no single person could understand its totality and it was not sufficiently flexible to deal with rapid changes and advances in IT. The emphasis shifts from assistance of something that anyone can understand to dependence on something too big to fail or be wrong.

However, new technologies and innovation – mobile working, social media, services in the cloud – force change in business processes, and so some different aspects of engineering should be applied from systems engineering – encapsulation and insulation.

The impact of the highly connected digital world on a business does not have to be tackled in one go in some massive unified or convergence process, but in incremental steps. The clever human part is in defining the separate objects and the intelligence to link them together, and then use IT to provide automated aid and deliver efficiency in each element.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 4th February 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Just as Mobile World Congress 2011 is about to kick off with lots of pizzazz, hype and fanfare from the mobile industry; many enterprise IT managers will be feeling nervous. Many businesses might have started their love affair with mobile with a few executives innocently picking BlackBerrys, but mobile adoption has now become so widespread, that any security ‘niggles’ will have a significant impact on a much larger percentage of the workforce.

The upsides of enterprise mobility have been well promoted and, unusually, the reality bears strong resemblance to the marketing hype. More flexibility for the individual, more responsiveness for the organisation and more productivity all round. These benefits are accrued to a greater or lesser extent depending on the nature of the business, type of applications and needs of the business processes that employees are engaged in.

The incremental upside of the positives tends to tail off as deployments widen and business cases become less watertight; however the downsides of scaling up, such as managing the end point device itself, continue to grow and sometimes escalate.

Mobile security is something enterprises have always been rightly concerned about and Quocirca research studies have often highlighted security as a number one issue for mobile deployments. No wonder, as so many smartphones and laptops are left in the back of taxis or are seen as desirable items to steal and sell on. The risk of data loss from the device through theft or carelessness is one issue; another is the vulnerability of the enterprise itself if an unsecured point of access falls into the wrong hands.

These risks have been well understood for some time, and small families of devices can be “sandboxed” by only issuing to known groups of employees and having appropriate software installed and so kept well under control. However, early deployments of smartphones tended to be managed in one of two ways—badly, as just phones, leaving big holes, or pretty much, but in a similar way to laptops. The problem is that while smartphones (and for that matter tablets) share many attributes in common with both regular phones and laptops, they are not the same and require more specific controls, especially as they are more likely to have consumer as well as business use.

The numbers of consumer-style mobile devices in enterprise use now, either from official deployment or employees self-choosing—BYOD (bring your own device)—has soared. Not only has ensuring security become harder through this diversity of devices, but also the broader swathe of employee brings a variety of attitudes, skills and experience, many of which will only lead to higher enterprise risks. At the same time, those with malicious intent will increasingly recognise the growing size of the opportunity from the mobile installed base and the valuable purposes to which they are being put which are diversifying rapidly, from communication, information and navigation to banking, m-commerce and bill payments. These people will increasingly target any weak links in order to gain access to information, or to find ways into the organisation using the device as a gateway.

The value of targeting mobile devices specifically will start to exceed that of targeting desktops. This will eventually result in direct attacks in the same manner that under-protected PCs and their software has been exploited, but also increasingly from indirect approaches such as multi-modal exploits where malware uses a combination of mobile device, traditional desktop and online services. Another area of concern is the combination of computer attributes, with the associated malware—viruses, Trojans, etc—and those from the telephony world such as the use of SIMs to attach the device’s identity to its user, and non-IP ‘telephony’ modes of communication such as voice, SMS and MMS. A consequent risk is of mobile smartphone specific attacks that use all methods of communication in concert. 

These mobile devices are also highly personal, but in a way that ‘personal’ computers never really have been. Users tend to trust their mobile phones and believe that they are less vulnerable, when in fact even phone calls can be easily eavesdropped upon (as can be seen with the on-going News of the World celebrity eavesdropping discussions in the UK). With the explosion in social networking, there is also the likelihood of an old-fashioned ‘social engineering’ attacks (e.g. contacting someone and pretending to be the IT department to draw out information) gaining information that can be used for more classical attacks.

The diverse mix of mobile device categories all appear to be doing well in the enterprise domain, which make life even harder for the beleaguered IT manager, especially when it comes to closing down vulnerabilities. Those responsible for ensuring mobile security for their organisations need to become much more vigilant and employ a different approach to the traditional security ‘blanket’ or firewall. Essentially the main points of vulnerability—the users—are already on the network, and will need to be channelled down virtual private tunnels, restricted from pockets of data and controlled by automated policy enforcement.

The different aspects of focus required might make it seem like ‘herding cats’, but there is no retrenching to a mobile world of single platform, corporate issued devices, nor one where employees only use official lines of communication. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets may seem like small scale mobile computers bringing flexibility to their users, but they bring increasing complexity to those tasking with securing enterprise assets. This will require a dedicated approach to the problem of smart mobile security, and not simply an extension of the traditional IT laptop and desktop approach.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 20th December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

The retail industry is one that operates under tight profit margins and the recent economic slowdown has seen those margins put under even greater pressure, with many retail chains reporting that the outlook for consumer spending still remains fragile. Key initiatives in the retail sector revolve around cost-cutting activities, drives to improve operational activities and efforts to reduce shrinkage.

Much of these efforts focus on expanding the use of technology within the retail sector. In the past few years, retailing processes have become increasingly automated, including activities at the point of sale, and processes such as promotion management, forecasting and replenishment. The use of automation for processes previously performed manually has led to efficiency and staff productivity improvements that directly impact the bottom line.

However, through automation, many of the old safeguards such as manual inventory checking and management authorisation have disappeared, opening up further chances for shrinkage to occur. According to the Global Retail Theft Barometer 2010, produced by the Centre for Retail Research, retail shrinkage averaged 1.4% of retail sales across the 42 countries that it surveyed. There have been numerous studies concerning losses from shrinkage within the retail sector. They all vary to some extent, but all agree on one point—losses from employee theft or error account for more than half of all shrinkage, more important than shoplifting in almost all the surveys. Also, employees tend to steal larger amounts; according to the Centre for Retail Research study, average loss though employee theft amounted to $1,890, compared to $438 for shoplifters.

Automation can actually make theft or mistakes easier. For example, the University of Florida found in a recent study that "sweethearting" is the most common type of employee theft, whereby cashiers fail to ring up or scan goods for friends and relatives at the point of sale, or scan in a much cheaper item than the one handed to the customer. Another growing problem is organised crime, whereby criminals may falsify receipts to claim unwarranted refunds or pressure employees to slip them goods or, increasingly, gift cards that can be sold through online auctions.

Retailers looking to combat retail shrinkage, measure promotions, manage staff productivity and identify training requirements now have a new tool available—VigilancePro Retail from activity management software vendor Overtis. The tool is built on its flagship VigilancePro Enterprise product, which is used by enterprises and public sector organisations to visually identify and manage exactly how users access, process, store and transmit sensitive information.

Recognising that there is a specific need for such capabilities in the retail sector, Overtis developed VigilancePro Retail for this vertical, with the software integrated with the point of sale terminal to analyse all transactions made to look for unusual patterns of activity that could point to a mistake being made, such as the wrong change tendered, or deliberate acts of fraud. Every transaction entered by the employee is captured for real-time reporting and analysis and a visual record is captured by linkage with CCTV surveillance systems for evidence of which employee performed which actions.

Retailers will see many benefits from integrating this software into their existing security environments, from reducing profit shrinkage and excessive refunds or under-ringing to improving productivity by identifying areas where staff need extra training. However, it could also have extra advantages, such as preventing customers from abusing or harassing staff, helping retailers to meet health and safety objectives.

Not only will VigilancePro Retail be a boon to retailers, it could also be beneficial to other organisations involved in activities where staff handle money, such as bars, restaurants and fast food outlets, petrol forecourts and in the gaming industry, and casinos in particular. By providing a user-centric view of all transactions, backed up by video evidence, such organisations have a powerful tool available to them to reduce the cost to their business and other problems associated with the insider threat.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 17th December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Last week I posted a short blog post about a collaboration between NXP Semiconductors and Google to provide an open source software stack for NFC. This article looks at this announcement in a little more detail.

In a nutshell what is this announcement about? Well, firstly, the NFC stack will be fully integrated and validated on Gingerbread, the latest version of the Android platform. The other piece of the announcement relates to Google integrating NXP’s NFC controller (PN544) into its newly launched Nexus S phone, co-developed by Google and Samsung, offering users access to NFC based services and applications. Using natural touch gestures, NFC devices can easily pair with accessories, interact on a peer-to-peer level to exchange data, and connect to a huge installed base of reader and tag infrastructures. Nexus S will offer consumers immediate access to read NFC tags.

What does this mean? For developers of applications for Android it means that they are now able to access an open source NFC implementation, giving them a faster time to market and lower implementation and development costs. NXP have agreed to help drive the development of new applications that extend the touch interface of mobile applications beyond the devices screen.

Launched in 2009, the PN544 is, according to NXP, the world’s first truly industry standard NFC controller. It provides a fully compliant platform for handset manufacturers and operators to introduce NFC devices and services. The NXP PN544 chip is fully compliant with all released NFC specifications on the Single Wire Protocol (SWP) connection with the SIM and the Host Controller Interface (HCI). Features include:

• Small footprint for size optimisation
• Optimised for low power consumption
• Optionally working in Battery Off and Battery Low modes
• MIFARE 1K/4K Reader/writer functionality enabled in host baseband
• Optionally available with an modular, generic and platform independent software stack
• Optimised antenna designs for best-in-class RF performance

Eric Chu, Mobile Platforms Program Manager, Google, stated: “With NXP's contribution, the introduction of NFC in Android provides developers, service providers, and device manufacturers a game-changing opportunity to deliver new services while enabling users to interact with each other and the physical world in ways previously not possible.”

NFC is a market proven technology co-invented by NXP in 2002. In 2004 NXP co-founded the NFC Forum to lead the collaboration with all industry stakeholders and help standardise the technology. NFC technology evolved from a combination of contactless identification (RFID) and interconnection technologies. NXP have been ranked as the number one contactless IC vendor by ABI Research for three years in a row.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

For anyone with a disability, navigating a website is likely to take longer than it would for a fully able person. If you have very good eyesight, good hand-eye coordination, the ability to scan text and images quickly, and an understanding of how the Webmaster's mind ticks, then with a few quick moves of a mouse and a few deft clicks you will get to the information you require simply and quickly. If, on the other hand, you have to use a screen magnifier and can only use the keyboard you can spend a frustratingly long time finding the link you are interested in, and this will be repeated for each page you have to traverse to get to the information, or process, that you need.

There are several ways in which a website can be made more navigation friendly, including:

• A well structured, understandable menu hierarchy.
• Jump to, skip to, links to the most important parts of a page.
• A simple heading structure within a page.
• Potentially an A to Z of all the website.
• A search function.

But none of these are as easy to use as asking a real person questions like "How do I pay my parking fine?" Or "What time are the trains from London to Cambridge next Sunday morning?" The real person may be able to answer the question immediately or may need to ask you some additional clarification questions, but you will get to the correct answer or procedure very quickly.

The Virtual Zone (http://www.thevirtualzone.co.uk) now provides consultancy and software to create virtual assistants that can provide the ease-of-use of a real telephone operator within a website.

The software provides the ability to analyse natural language and extract the salient information from the question and then initiate:

• A direct connection to the relevant webpage.
• A structured question-and-answer session similar to those used by real telephone operators.

The consultancy is needed for the initial analysis of the type of questions that may be asked by visitors to the site and how the relevant answers can be retrieved from the site.

When the virtual assistant is initially put into production it is expected that it will be able to answer about 80% of the questions put to it. The software records all the questions and answers in a database, which can then be analysed to see how the process can be improved. This learning process should quickly bring the hit rate to above 95%.

Because this technology greatly reduces the number of links traversed to get to the answer and is also a human friendly interface it will appeal to all users; but particularly those who find using the Internet difficult, either because they have a disability or because they are not that familiar with the technology.

I have played with several sites that include this solution and have been pleasantly surprised at how easy it is and how quickly I found the information I was looking for.

To make the technology as user-friendly as possible it is important that the function is well signposted so that a new user to a site will be immediately aware of its existence. This probably requires that it is near the top left-hand corner of the homepage, and also that it is signposted by a ‘jump to' link at the very top of the page (those of my readers not familiar with this concept it is a link that is read out by a screen-reader that says something like "jump to virtual assistant", the user can then hit enter and go straight to the requisite part of the page).

The technology is already being used in a variety of different types of site including:

• Transport, for example Lisa at National Rail Enquiries (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/).
• Shopping, for example Anna at IKEA (http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/), which also has an audio output which really improves the experience.

I would recommend trying out a few examples to see how you could adapt the technology to your industry and website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 6th October 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: 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: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 29th September 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

ICT Accessibility is important today. But will it be important in 5 years time and what will it look like? What should organisations that are involved, interested or dependent on ICT Accessibility be planning for over the next 5 years?

Firstly, a short definition of ICT Accessibility to ensure that we are all on the same page. The international standard ISO 9241-171:2008 (Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 171: Guidance on software accessibility) defines accessibility as:

"Usability of a product, service, environment or facility by people with the widest range of capabilities"

The term "widest range of capabilities" is really a politically correct way of saying "including people with disabilities".

This article will use a slightly more limited definition:

"ICT for people with disabilities including: vision, hearing, speech, muscular-skeletal, learning and ageing".

Ageing is included not because it is a disability in its own right but because as we age we will tend to become less able through diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or failing eyesight or hearing.

To try and answer the questions this article will look back 5 years, look at the present and then extrapolates 5 years in to the future.

ICT Accessibility is complex intertwined area so the discussion will be based around the following questions:

• How important is it for an individual to access digital information?
• What is the impact of laws, legislation and standards?
• Are decision makers aware of the requirements and benefits?
• Do the various professionals have the implementation skills?
• How does technology help or hinder?

How important is it for an individual to access digital information?

This is the key question that influences changing views on accessibility.

2005

Primary sources of information and services were offline: paper, telephone or face-to-face. In some cases alternative formats were offered, for example Braille or large print. Some basic information (brochureware) and some bleeding edge services were available on-line.

The majority of the population were not regular users of the Internet. People with disabilities had access to the information and services they needed off-line and access to digital information was not that important. However, there was an awakening to the potential benefits of access to digital information, especially amongst those with vision impairments who could access such information through screen-readers rather than being dependent on the information being transformed into another format.

2010

Digital is the preferred channel for most providers: how often do you hear/see "for more information go to our website"? This implies that the information is on the web but not available in any off-line format. Better service is now provided via online shopping, banking and travel than is available face-to-face or via the telephone. In particular there is a strong push in the public sector towards e-government as a way of providing better services more efficiently; hardcopy documents and forms will continue to be provided but only grudgingly.

Some providers have gone the next step with information and services only available on-line: Amazon, iTunes, EasyJet, comparison web sites etc. Where possible the product has also gone digital: music and electronic books. We are seeing the slow death of printed books; for example Amazon now sell more electronic than paper versions of some titles and the Oxford University Press has announced that it is not going to produce another printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is now only be available on-line.

The other major area of push towards the need to access on-line is the meteoric rise of social networks of all sorts.

Lack of access to digital information, services and products is now serious enough to have a name, 'the Digital Divide'. Those on the wrong side of the divide are now disadvantaged but can still survive.

According to the Office for National Statistics about 1 in 5 UK adults are not on-line. This group includes people who are old, poor, or lack the necessary skills and also a small group who who wish to remain off-line.

The British Computer Society (BCS) has just published a report that shows access to IT makes people happier; not only does it enable people to do things better but it also improves their view of their quality of life.

Unfortunately some people with disabilities find themselves on the wrong side of the divide, even though they are keen to be on the right side, because the information, services and products are not provided in an accessible form.

2015

By 2015 the trend from off-line to digital information, services and products will be complete. Anything that can be provided digitally will be digital by default and will only be available in other formats by request, if at all, and probably at a premium.

By this date anyone on the wrong side of the divide will find it very difficult to carry on as a member of society. They will lack access to basic government-supplied services, most commercial services such as insurance, banking, many retail outlets, and all electronic social networks.

There will be pressure from a new group, "the recently old". This group will have been using digital channels for some years and will be furious if they cannot continue to do so because of illnesses of old age.

As the digital divide closes down it is essential that people with disabilities are not left on the wrong side through no fault of their own and therefore everything digital needs to be accessible.

It would not be overstating it to say that by 2015 access to digital information will be considered a basic human right.

What is the impact of laws, legislation and standards?

2005

Legislation existed in many countries relating to disability, including the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the the US Rehabilitation Act 1973 (and in particular Section 508 1998). These laws were either limited in relation to ICT or only relevant to government, they also seemed to lack teeth. They did not have a major impact on the accessibility of most ICT systems.

The W3C developed guidelines for web accessibility—the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) 1999.

The British Standards Institute (BSI) published PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites in 2006.

At this time it was not clear if the legislation applied to ICT and, if it did, whether it only applied to specific parts of ICT: did it apply to websites, did it just apply to public sector organisations?

Because of this confusion the guidelines and guides were not enforced by legislation. This meant that most webmasters and their organisations were either unaware of them or ignored them.

2010

In the last year, or two, case law has made it clear that all areas of ICT are covered. Probably the most publicised example is the case against Target (a large US retail chain). An individual sued Target because its web site was not accessible and therefore he was getting a poorer service than members of the able-bodied community. It took a least two years to go through the courts. In the end it was agreed that the website had to be accessible, Target had to pay out compensation to the individual and also to a group who took out a class action, and Target had to fix the site within a given timescale. The total cost came to more that $10M.

There is still a lack of awareness amongst many business decision-makers and plaintiffs are still put off pursuing claims because of the effort involved and potentially small returns.

In 2010 eBay announced changes to their systems to support users of screen readers. There were good moral and financial reasons for implementing the changes, but it can be assumed that the possibility of legal action also encouraged their implementation.

There are still cases going through courts, for example Donna Jodhan v the Canadian Government. The number of cases going to court is likely to decrease as organisations cry 'mea culpa' rather than spend money on legal support for a case they are likely to loose.

2015

In 2010 several acts are going through the US Senate, Mandate 376 Phase 2 is progressing through the EU, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been ratified by most member states, rules and regulations are being passed through many other governments. All of these will have had a major impact by 2015.

By 2015 legislation across the world should be clear and have sufficient teeth so that it cannot be ignored. As it cannot be ignored, any relevant person (manager, procurer, technician, user) will be aware of the legislation and the importance of accessibility.

Are decision makers aware of the requirements and benefits?

ICT systems will only be fully accessible if accessibility is built in during all phases of implementation. This will happen if the decision makers dictate that it should. Ideally the edict should come from top management but it could be at the level of procurement or a highly motivated development manager.

2005

By 2005 most decision makers were aware of the need to provide physical access to people with disabilities, most obviously users of wheelchairs. This was certainly true in the UK and North America but may not have been so common in some other parts of Europe and the World. The decision makers were aware because the laws were clear and because the problem was easy to understand: a client in a wheelchair at the bottom of a flight of stairs leading to their building was not a photo-call that a CEO wanted to deal with.

The same could not be said about ICT accessibility. Firstly the law was not clear and had not been tested. But also the issue was not so easy to understand or even be aware of. If the issue was raised the initial reaction was "how can blind people use computers" not "what has to be done to our systems to make them easy to use by people who are blind?".

The users were only beginning to push for ICT accessibility because access to ICT was less important and because alternative formats such as braille and large print were the main requirement.

2010

Today the situation is not so different to 2005, with most decision makers still not being aware of the need for accessible ICT. The biggest improvement has been in the public sector where legislation has made the requirement clear. In the US, Section 508 makes it mandatory for government organisations and in the UK the push to e-government and the Disability Equality Duty have raised the awareness significantly.

The commercial sector is only just beginning to understand and be aware through court cases such as Target and by major organisations, most recently eBay, realising the importance of accessibility and going public with the changes they have made and the benefits to their clients and to their organisations.

The decision makers are also becoming more aware because of the noise being generated by disabled users. People are complaining when systems are not accessible and these complaints are beginning to percolate up to those who can instigate the changes.

2015

By 2015 most decision makers will be aware of the need for accessible ICT, this greater awareness will be driven by:

• Legislation will have been extended, given more power and written to explicit include ICT.
• Disabled Users will become more vocal.
• The ageing population will include users who expect to be able to access digital information and who will not accept that age related illnesses have removed that ability.
• The economic imperative to move towards digital information will highlight the need to make that information available to all.

The only question is, will this increased awareness always ensure that the systems are made accessible? There will still be a conflict between using the latest whizzy technology and the need to ensure accessibility.

Do the various professionals have the implementation skills?

Even if the decision makers decided that all ICT systems should be accessible it would not be possible if the professionals who were implementing it lacked the necessary skills. The professionals include the designers, coders, content creators, and testers.

2005

A small cohort of dedicated professionals were available to implement accessible systems, but they were the exception. Most professionals knew nothing about accessibility and were not interested in finding out. Professional education ignored accessibility with tutors not understanding why it should be included.

2010

In 2010 the number of skilled professionals has grown significantly but is still a small minority of those involved in implementing and developing ICT. If there was a sudden drive to improve the accessibility of ICT then skills would become a real issue.

The only way to know if an system is accessible is to test it. Testing needs to be done throughout the project and should use automated checking tools and user testing. There are an increasing number of professional testers who have the necessary skills to run the automated and user tests.

There are some good signs in the education field:

• Accessibility and user-centred design are now included as modules in many ICT courses, but they still tend to be add-ons delivered quite late in the schedule. Accessibility is still not built-in as an inherent part of implementation.
• The BCS is reviewing accessibility across the whole of the organisation. One aspect is to look at the inclusion of accessibility in SFIAPlus, the IT skills, training and development standard. Inclusion of accessibility in the right places in SFIAPlus will have a significant long term impact on the development of accessibility skills.
• Middlesex University now offers a MSc in Digital Inclusion.

This trend in education should ensure that accessibility becomes business as usual in the next few years.

2015

By 2015 skilled implementers should be available and should be willing to keep their skills honed because of demands for such skills from aware decision-makers.

Technology—Will Assistive Technology keep up?

There are two areas of technology that need to be considered:

• Assistive Technology: covers hardware and software that helps people who cannot see the screen well, or find it difficult to use a standard keyboard or mouse.
• The interface between the system and the user: drives screens, keyboards and pointing devices directly and needs to be accessible to the widest possible population, but it also needs to communicate with Assistive Technologies so that users of these technologies can access all the functions of the system.

2005

Speech recognition and text to speech were both available but without being too disparaging they were both fairly clunky and were only used by those who had no option. If you were blind, text-to-speech was the main way you could get access to digital information. If you could not use a keyboard, voice recognition software did enable you to input text and control the computer.

Predictive text was originally developed as an Assistive Technology, users who could only type very slowly only had to type a few letters rather than a whole word or phrase.

There were a variety of alternatives to the standard mouse, ranging from bigger mice, to rollerballs, through to controlling the mouse through winking an eye.

2010

The increase in processing power and significant advances in the software now mean that solutions that were clunky in 2005 are now so good that they are being used by people without any disability as they become a natural and efficient way to interact with ICT. This has led to some assistive technologies being built in to standard products. Examples include Voiceover text-to-speech on Apple products, and voice control in new cars; saying 'call home' whilst driving is much easier and safer than fiddling with any buttons.

Built-in touch technology has provided solutions for many people, for example those suffering from rheumatism or RSI, who cannot use a standard mouse.

Other alternatives to standard keyboards and mice are available but due to limited demand they are expensive.

2015

There will be new forms of AT, direct brain connections, wearable devices that will enable certain people to more easily control and access their ICT environment.

There will be a continuing improvement in the power available to AT: for example text to speech today tends to be fairly flat, with more power it will be possible to include emotions and clearer pronunciation and intonation.

Technology—Will the User Interface be accessible?

2005

In 2005 most of the input and output was text and that meant that it was fairly easy for the Assistive Technologies to interact. Some ancillary technologies were causing problems; probably the biggest examples were Flash and PDF, which did not always interface well to the Assistive Technologies.

There were also some web development tools that produced HTML that did not follow the W3C guidelines and was, by definition, not fully accessible. In fact it was difficult to find a tool that made it easy to produce accessible HTML

2010

Significant strides have been made since 2005. Most development tools can now produce websites that are accessible, the issue now is that it is still up to the creator to use the tools in the right way as the tools give very little assistance or guidance on how to create accessible sites. Adobe now provides PDF and Flash products that can be made accessible and has worked with the Assistive Technology vendors to ensure that the interface works.

Unfortunately there are other new technologies that have been developed that are not accessible, for example the standard YouTube screens are not accessible; so if YouTube clips are included in a website the site is not fully accessible to users of screen readers or users who cannot use a mouse. However YouTube now supports closed captioning to support people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Developers of other widgets have not been aware of the accessibility issues and have created solutions that are not accessible.

Vendors are recognising the need for solutions in specific niches, for example Xenos Axxess is a tool to create accessible transaction reports (e.g. bank statements) from non-accessible print streams.

2015

It is impossible to predict all the new user interfaces that will be used in five years time but 3D, interactive gestures and emotions will be three areas that will be commonplace. Emotions will be supported with the Emotion Markup Language (EML) that is currently being developed by the W3C. The EML will be added to text and then a text-to-speech engine will be able to vocalise the text with the right intonation or an avatar could make a suitable gesture or facial expression. The question with all of these interfaces is will the system be able to interface to the user, directly or via a suitable Assistive Technology, so that it is accessible?

New and exciting interfaces will always be attractive to the marketing departments, as a way of being ahead of the competition. It will be an uphill struggle to stop them being used if they are not accessible.

The likelihood is that new interfaces will be developed to include accessibility features built-in, however there will be a need for continuous vigilance by the accessibility community to ensure that this is the case. The community will have to recognise the new interfaces early and put pressure on the developers, standards bodies and users of the technology to ensure that it is accessible from first delivery.

Summary

By 2015:

• Accessibility will not be optional: everyone who provides digital content, services or products will need to make sure that they are accessible.
• There will be moral, legal and financial imperatives for this to happen. In particular there will pressure from users to be on the right side of the digital divide as a human right.
• Awareness will be much higher both at the user and the supplier end.
• Skill levels will have increased and should be sufficient for the demand.
• New user interface technologies will need to be accessible. Ensuring this happens will be the major challenge to the accessibility community.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 28th September 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

When you’re been brought up with some IT industry certainties, such as Moore’s Law of transistor doubling or Metcalfe’s Law of network value, it can be daunting to realise that these laws can have other unintended, but significant, consequences.

Metcalfe’s Law says that the value of a telecoms network increases with the square of the number of connections. Whether that rule is precise or not has been subject of some debate, with various proponents of different formulae, but that is not the point.

It has always been pretty clear from the days of the telegraph to phone, fax, web connection or mobile phone that each of these networks pass some sort of tipping point as the number of users soars when the network becomes mainstream.

However, while the total value of each network grows—and that’s great for all those providing products or services in the supply chain—how does it affect individual users? There is, for each individual, the increasing value in being able to reach more and more contacts within the one medium.

After all, being the only person on the planet with a fax machine is pretty useless, but when there’s a few others it becomes marginally interesting, and when all business associates have one it becomes a powerful tool.

But is there a downside to network connection ubiquity?

Clearly some networks become stretched to breaking point as available resources struggle to cope with the demands of increasing numbers of users.

Some mobile networks in particular have been hard hit, dealing with surges in new users or new mobile application usage, with the iPhone and Android platforms being cases in point.

The problem is, once people have a new, highly flexible tool, it is difficult to predict the variety of innovative uses to which it will be put. 

This issue is especially true of communications devices where it is even harder to predict the speed at which innovation will propagate.

But something other than stretched resources is starting to affect the value of networks: a corollary of Metcalfe’s Law is that the larger the physical network of connection points, the larger the social network of people.

This relationship can prove really useful, as it increases the likelihood for example of someone having an answer to that tricky question, or someone being interested in a particular quirky subject, but it also increases the volume of the banal, irksome, trivial and stupid—in short, the more chaff there is to disguise the wheat.

There are further problems in that some of the rubbish clogging the system can be automatically generated, such as spam or email updates that have been signed up for but later regretted—sometimes referred to as bacon. This rubbish propagates rapidly and it is not at all easy to distinguish from valuable communication.

Whether it is search engine results, friend requests, emails or interstitial web pages, there will be some that are too important to miss hidden amid the noise.

Thus as the physical network continues to grow in size its social value growth is affected by increasing viscosity. If there is wisdom in the crowd, the sheer numbers makes progress towards it feel like running through treacle.

At a personal level the effects are pretty clear: constant interruptions, alerts and messages which we deal with by calling it multi-tasking, endless trawling through search engine hits to try to find the thing we were really looking for and so many emails that we fear going on holiday or mitigate the fear by taking a BlackBerry and not really having a proper break.

In many respects this is analogous to the real-world inefficiencies of meetings having too many attendees or the old adage about a camel being a horse designed by committee. However, in both those instances we have built strategies and tools to cope with their worst effects. 

At least in theory, although many fail to put them into practice, which is why the Video Arts short training film from the 1990s “Meetings bloody meetings” still resonates today.

Now remember that the goal of deploying technology was to be MORE productive, not just to have more prods, dead ducks and activities.

This goal means that some artificial constraints may have to be placed on all of this networking, so that personal as well as corporate productivity does not unduly suffer.

It is unlikely that a binary switch—banning social networking during office hours, switching off corporate mobile email during holidays—will work or even be desirable, but, just like the filters that have been put in place for the unwelcome deluge of spam, something automatic will be required.

There are already some social media and content filtering tools and services available, although mostly emerging from the need to curtail access or protect data. These are generally deployed by IT, network and security specialists and justified on the grounds of reducing risks and vulnerability.

However given the increasing risk to productivity at both a personal and organisational level, a new set of tools—or interfaces to existing filters—needs to emerge to be marketed and sold to the line of business management, human resources and individual employees.

It is no longer a technical sell, but if presented and positioned correctly could be knocking on an open door. A flexible and easy-to-use time management solution for the digital age—perhaps Filofax 2.0?—would be most welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among the new and rebranded Apigee products:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Morphlabs, a provider of enterprise cloud architecture platforms, has simplified the process of building and managing an internal cloud for enterprise environments -- enabling companies to create their own private cloud infrastructure.

The Manhattan Beach, Calif. company today announced a significant upgrade to its flagship product, mCloud Controller. The enhanced version introduces Enterprise Cloud Architecture (ECA), a new approach that provides enterprises with immediate access to the building blocks and binding components of a fault tolerant, elastic, and highly automated platform.

Morphlabs also announced a partnership with Zend Technologies Ltd., whose Zend Server will be shipped as part of the mCloud Enterprise, said Winston Damarillo, CEO at Morphlabs.

mCloud Controller is a comprehensive cloud computing platform, delivered as an appliance or virtual appliance, as well as providing open mCloud APIs (you can manage the ECA cloud from an iPad, for example). To support the leading platforms, mCloud Controller will have built-in ECA compliant support for Java, Ruby on Rails, and PHP.

Fittingly for enterprise private clouds, the Morph offering also provides direct integration to mainstream middleware via standards-based connectors. It also supports a plethora of VMs, from KVM to Xen, and and VMware, and allows for others cluster managers to be used as well.

Look for Morphlabs to seek to sell to both service providers and enterprises for the compatible hybrids benefits. Of course, we're hearing the same from Citrix, VMware, Novell, HP, etc. It's a horse race out there for a de facto hybrid cloud standard, all right.

Productivity gains
“PHP has been broadly adopted for the productivity gains it brings to Web application development, and because it can provide the massive scalability that e-commerce, social networking and media sites require,” said Matt Elson, vice president of business development at Zend. “Integrating Zend Server into Morphlabs’ mCloud Controller enables IT organizations to leverage the elasticity of cloud computing and automate the process of deploying highly reliable PHP applications in the cloud.”

Key features of the mCloud Controller with ECA include:

• Uniform environments from development to production to help users simplify system configuration. Applications can grow as needed, while maintaining a standardized infrastructure for ease of growth and replacement.
• Simplified system administration with automated monitoring and self-healing out of the box to avoid complicated system tuning. mCloud Controller also comes with graphical tools for viewing system-wide performance.
• Self-service resource provisioning, which frees the IT department from numerous application provisioning requests. Without any system administration skills, authorized users can start and stop computes and provision applications as needed. Billing is also included within the system.
• Streamlined application management automates the process of deploying, monitoring and backing-up applications. Users do not have to deal with configuration files and server settings.

The mCloud Controller v2.5 is available now in the United States, Japan and South East Asia. For more information contact Morphlabs at info@mor.ph.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 21st September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Aster Data has taken big data management and analytics to the next level with the announcement of its Aster Data nCluster 4.6, which includes a column data store and provides a universal SQL-MapReduce analytic framework on a hybrid row and column massively parallel processing (MPP) database management system (DBMS).

The San Carlos, Calif. company's new offering will allow users to choose the data format best suited to their needs and benefit from the power of Aster Data’s SQL-MapReduce analytic capabilities, as well as Aster Data’s suite of 1000+ MapReduce-ready analytic functions. [Disclosure: Aster Data is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Row stores traditionally have been optimized for look-up style queries, while column stores are traditionally optimized for scan-style queries. Providing both a row store and a column store within nCluster and delivering a unified SQL-MapReduce framework across both stores enables both query types.

Universal query framework
For example, a retailer using historical customer purchases to derive customer behavior indicators may store each customer purchase in a row store to ease retrieval of any individual customer order. This is a look-up style query. This same retailer can see a 5–15x performance improvement by using a column store to provide access to the data for a scan-style query, such as the number of purchases completed per brand or category of product. The Aster Data platform now supports both query types with natively optimized stores and a universal query framework.

Other features include:

• Choice of storage, implemented per-table partition, which provides customers flexible performance optimization based on analytical workloads.
• Such services as dynamic workload management, fault tolerance, Online Precision Scaling on commodity hardware, compression, indexing, automatic partitioning, SQL-MapReduce, SQL constructs, and cross-storage queries, among others.
• New statistical functions popular in decision analysis, operations research, and quality management including decision trees and histograms.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 21st September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

HP is pushing the automation card again with new tools for hybrid IT environments. The company Wednesday announced “enhanced automation solutions” that set the stage for lower-cost business application deployment — whether those apps are deployed traditionally, virtually or via a cloud.

HP’s latest Business Service Automation (BSA) enhancements beef up its solutions for hybrid IT environments, which the company defines as any combination of on-premise, off-premise, physical and virtual scenarios, including cloud computing. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP has identified a strong need in the enterprise, which is why it’s moving so fast on the BSA front. Although hybrid IT environments can increase a business’s agility and speed time to market, they also increase complexity, risk and costs by creating IT silos — if the environment isn’t holistically managed. HP’s new BSA software enhancements work to take the “if” out of the equation.

A 360-degree hybrid solution
This week’s BSA announcement builds on HP’s recent cloud announcements for hybrid IT environments. The just-announced software enhances the HP’s BSA portfolio to offer unified server, network, storage, and application management. The goal is to break down IT silos to simplify application development and hybrid IT management.

HP is promising financial returns for companies that adopt its solutions. According to a June 2010 ExpertROI Spotlight, conducted by IDC on behalf of HP, organizations that deploy HP BSA solutions can realize up to $4.82 in benefits for every IT dollar invested, reduce annual IT costs by up to $24,000 per 100 end users, and reduce outsourcing costs by 40 percent to 80 percent.

“Organizations are seeking solutions that deliver business applications and services with greater agility, speed and at the lowest cost to the enterprise, regardless of their IT environment,” says Erik Frieberg, vice president of Marketing, Software and Solutions at HP. “Clients can achieve up to 382 percent ROI by deploying HP’s leading automation software and leverage the benefits of new hybrid delivery models.”

HP’s acquisition of Stratavia has strengthened its automation portfolio by adding deployment, configuration and management solutions for enterprise databases, middleware and packaged applications. These solutions aim to bridge the gap between application development and operational teams. With Stratavia’s technology in its portfolio, HP said it can now provision all of the components, rapidly deploy changes and manage the ongoing configuration and compliance management.

Under the BSA hood
HP’s BSA portfolio now offers new capabilities in application deployment and risk mitigation, as well as better efficiency and productivity. For example, HP Server Automation 9.0 helps clients automate the entire server life cycle, control virtualization sprawl, and provide more flexible provisioning and deployment of applications. New Application Deployment Manager (ADM) functionality lets IT organizations automate the release process to bridge the gap between development, quality assurance and operations teams. HP said these enhancements can accelerate application deployment by up to 86 percent.

What’s more, HP Network Automation 9.0 now helps clients contain costs, mitigate risk and improve efficiency of the network by automating error-prone tasks, reducing outages and enforcing policies in real-time regardless of the environment. And HP Operations Orchestration 9.0 helps clients faced with constant alerts and siloed teams improve service quality across hybrid environments. It gives clients the ability to automate the IT processes required to support cloud computing initiatives.

HP Operations Orchestration software can help manage a hybrid infrastructure through a single view while HP Client Automation 7.8 helps clients reduce administration costs for managing physical and virtual machines through a single tool. And HP Storage Essentials 6.3 helps clients reduce complexity in hybrid environments, while improving storage utilization and controlling capacity growth.

IT needs to play at productivity better
The BSA offerings come at a crossroads for enterprise IT. The fact is that IT can no longer just compete against its own past practices and cost structures. There's a looming gulf between what IT costs the IT department to provide and what a small army of outside hosts is coming to market with. IT now needs to compete against the costs structures of pure-play cloud and SaaS providers and hosts.

The solution for IT to remain competitive, and to pick and choose what to retain and what to outsource, is to make all of its systems and apps perform better and more efficiently. And it also needs the governance and management to automate those apps and systems to keep complexity and costs in line.

Visibility, automation and management are essential for IT to stay in the game against hosts, MSPs, clouds, SaaS providers, etc. And the same management allows IT to function as the best broker of services, regardless of where the servers reside. This is clearly the target HP's BSA portfolio has in its sights.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 20th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Getting developers on board. That’s the challenge technologies from Linux to Android face every day. Genuitec has helped Eclipse overcome this challenge with Pulse. Indeed, more than one million developers around the world have now installed Pulse.

Pulse works to give software developers an efficient way to locate, install and manage their Eclipse-based tool suite, among other tools. The software essentially empowers developers to customize their installs while avoiding plug-in management issues—even when crossing operating systems. [Disclosure: Genuitec is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“When we envisioned Pulse in 2007, we knew the developer community badly needed an easy technology to help manage their Eclipse tools,” says Maher Masri, president and CEO of Genuitec, a founding and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation. “Now with one million users, we can happily say Pulse is a great success story.”

The Pulse advantage
One of the advantages Pulse is pushing out to its one million developers is the ability to manage four years of Eclipse platform technologies from a single dashboard, including Eclipse 3.0, also known as Helios.

That’s no small feat, seeing how many enterprises standardize on older Eclipse versions, yet still demand an easy migration path to upgrade their projects, technical artifacts, and other mission-critical subsystems. Developers can even access Eclipse 3.7, also known as Indigo, as the milestones are rolled out in coming months.

This multi-year tool stack feature is part of the reason why Pulse has attracted so many Eclipse developers. Pulse is the only product on the market that supports this type of lifecycle-based stack management.

Getting to know Pulse
Pulse also provides a product family of offerings. There’s a Community Edition that’s free, a Managed Team Edition that aims at the needs of development teams, and a Private Label software delivery version designed for corporate use. Pulse Community Edition is free for individual developers, while Pulse Managed Team Edition is $60 annually. Pricing for Pulse Private Label, a software delivery and management platform, is based on individual requirements.

“Pulse, like many other powerful Eclipse-based technologies, continues to attract world-class developers to the Eclipse platform,” says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “As we continuously enhance our code base and march toward Eclipse 3.7 next summer, we’re pleased that Genuitec will continue to support developers using Eclipse with its Pulse management software.”

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

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

Delphix has brought virtualization techniques to database infrastructure with general availability of Delphix Server, which reduces structured and relational data redundancy while maintaining full functionality and performance -- and operating in a fraction of the space at lower cost.

The Palo Alto, Calif. company, just launching this week at DEMO, says that Delphix Server solves two major IT challenges: the operational complexity and redundant infrastructure required to support applications lifecycles via multiple database caches. Delphix software installs on standard x86 servers or in virtual machines, allowing customers to virtualize database infrastructure into a "single virtual authority" and do for relational data what storage innovations and "de-dupe" have done to reduce myriad standing copies of data caches.

The interface for managing the data is very clean and time-line based down to seconds. It reminds me of an enterprise-level version of Apple's Mac OS X Time Machine, but far more granular. This allows all those with access to the data to manage it intelligently but sparingly.

While Delphix consolidates storage and reduces database provisioning and refresh times, it adds little or no impact to production systems through its innovative synchronization technology, says Jed Yueh, CEO at Delphix. Other benefits include:

• Agile application development: Delphix automates the provisioning and refresh process, enabling developers to instantly create personal sandboxes or virtual databases (VDBs) that are up-to-date and isolated from other VDBs. Developers can cut months out of project schedules and perform destructive or parallel testing to improve overall application quality and performance.

• Improved data resiliency: Patent-pending TimeFlow technology enables customers to create a running record of database changes; VDBs can be instantly provisioned from multiple points-in-time, with granularity down to the second. This time-shifting capability enables businesses to dramatically reduce the time required to recover from logical data loss.

• Storage consolidation: The average customer creates seven copies of each production database for development, testing, QA, staging, operational reporting, pilots, and training, with each copy typically having its own dedicated and largely redundant storage. Delphix creates a single virtual environment, where multiple VDBs can be instantly provisioned or refreshed from a shared footprint -- coordinating changes and differences in the background without compromising functionality or performance.

Both enterprises and service providers for SaaS and cloud will benefit from reducing the vast data redundancy across the app dev and ops lifecycle. By shrinking the hardware requirements, those hosts seeking to improve their margins gain, while enterprises and ISVs can devote the server and storage resources to more productive uses.

I should think that the app dev and test folks would grok the benefits too. Why not cut the hardware and storage costs for bringing applications to maturity by virtualizing the databases? What works for the OS and runtime works for the data.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

We've all heard about client virtualization or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) over the past few years, and there are some really great technologies for delivering a PC client experience as a service.

But today’s business and economic drivers need to go beyond just good technology. There also needs to be a clear rationale for change -- both business and economic. Second, there needs to be proven methods for properly moving to client virtualization at low risk and in ways that lead to both high productivity and lower total costs over time.

Cloud computing, mobile device proliferation, and highly efficient data centers are all aligning to make it clear that the deeper and flexible client platform support from back-end servers will become more the norm and less the exception over time.

Client devices and application types will also be dynamically shifting both in numbers and types, and crossing the chasm between the consumer and business spaces. The new requirements for business mobile use point to the need for planning and proper support of the infrastructures that can accommodate these edge, wireless clients.

To help guide business on client virtualization infrastructure requirements, learn more about client virtualization strategies and best practices that support multiple future client directions, and see why such virtualization makes sense economically, we went to Dan Nordhues, Marketing and Business Manager for Client Virtualization Solutions in HP's Industry Standard Servers Organization. The interview is conducted by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Nordhues: In desktop virtualization, what really comes out to the user device is just pixel information. These protocols just give you the screen information, collect your user inputs from the keyboard and mouse, and take those back to the application or the desktop in the data center.

When you look at desktop virtualization, whether it’s a server-based computing environment, where you are delivering applications, or if you are delivering the whole desktop, as in VDI, to get started you really have to take a look at your whole environment -- and make sure that you're doing a proper analysis and are actually ready.

On the data center side, as we start talking about cloud, the solution is really progressing. HP is moving very strongly toward what we call converged infrastructure, which is wire it once and then have it provisioned and be ready to provide the services that you need. We're on a path where the hardware pieces are there to deliver on that.

But you have to look at the data center and its capacity to house the increased number of servers, storage, and networking that has to go there to support the user.

So now you get the storage folks in IT, the networking folks, and the server support folks all involved in the support of the desk-side environment. It definitely brings a new dynamic.

This is not a prescription for getting rid of those IT people. In fact, there is a lot of benefit to the businesses by moving those folks to do more innovation, and to free up cycles to do that, instead of spending all those cycles managing a desktop environment that may be fairly difficult to manage.

Where we're headed with this, even more broadly than VDI, is back to the converged infrastructure, where we talked about wire it once and have it be a solution. Say you're an office worker and you're just getting applications virtualized out to you. You're going to use Microsoft Office-type applications. You don’t need a whole desktop. Maybe you just need some applications streamed to you.

Maybe, you're more of a power user, and you need that whole desktop environment provided by VDI. We'll provide reference architectures with just wire it once type of infrastructure with storage. Depending on what type of user you are, it can deliver both the services and the experience without having to go back and re-provision or start over, which can take weeks and months, instead of minutes.

Also, really a hybrid solution could deliver in the future VDI plus server-based computing together and cover your whole gamut of users, from the very lowest task-oriented user, all the way up to the highest end power users that you have.

And, we're going to see services wrapped around all of this, just to make it that much simpler for the customers to take this, deploy it, and know that it’s going to be successful.

Why VDI now?

It’s a digital generation of millions of new folks entering the workforce, and they've grown up expecting to be mobile and increasingly global. So, we need to have computing environments that don’t have us having to report to a post number in an office building in order to get work done.

We have an increasingly global and mobile workforce out there. Roughly 60 percent of employees in organizations don’t work where their headquarters are for their company, and they work differently.

When you go mobile, you give up some things. However, the major selling point is that you can get access. You can check in on a running process, if you need to see how things are progressing. You can do some simple things like go in and monitor processes, call logs, or things like that. Having that access is increasingly important.

Delivering packaged services out to the end user is something that’s still being worked out by software providers, and you're going to see some more elements of that come out as we go through the next year.

And, of course, there's the impact of security, which is always the highest on customer lists. We have customers out there, large enterprise accounts, who are spending north of $100 million a year just to protect themselves from internal fraud.

With client virtualization, the security is built in. You have everything in the data center. You can’t have users on the user endpoint side, which may be a thin client access device, taking files away on USB keys or sticks.

It’s all something that can be protected by IT, and they can give access only to users as they see fit. In most cases, they want to strictly control that. Also, you don’t have users putting applications that you don't want ... on top of your IT infrastructure.

And there is really a catalyst coming as well in the Windows 7 availability and launch since late last year. Many organizations are looking at their transition plans there. It’s a natural time to look at a way to do the desktop differently than it has been done in the past.

Reference architectures support all clients

We've launched several reference architectures and we are going to continue to head down this path. A reference architecture is a prescribed solution for a given set of problems.

A lot of the deployment issue, and what makes this difficult, is that there are so many choices.

For example, in June, we just launched a reference architecture for VDI that uses some iSCSI SAN storage technology, and storage has traditionally been one of the cost factors in deploying client virtualization. It has been very costly to deploy Fibre Channel SAN, for example. So, moving to this iSCSI SAN technology is helping to reduce the cost and provide fantastic performance.

In this reference architecture, we've done the system integration for the customer. A lot of the deployment issue, and what makes this difficult, is that there are so many choices. You have to choose which server to use and from which vendor: HP, Dell, IBM, or Cisco? Which storage to choose: HP, EMC, or NetApp? Then, you have got the software piece of it. Which hypervisor to use: Microsoft, VMware, or Citrix? Once you chase all these down and do your testing and your proof of concept, it can take quite a substantial length of time.

We targeted the enterprise first. Some of our reference architectures that are out there today exist for 1,000-plus users in a VDI environment. If you go to some of the lower-end offerings we have, they are still in the 400-500 range.

We're looking at bringing that down even further with some new storage technologies, which will get us down to a couple of hundred users, the small and medium business (SMB) market, certainly the mid-market, and making it just very easy for those folks to deploy. They'll have it come completely packaged.

Today, we have reference architectures based on VDI or based on server-based computing and delivering just the applications. As I mentioned before, were looking at marrying those, so you truly have a wire-it-once infrastructure that can deliver whatever the needs are for your broad user community.

What HP has done with these reference architectures is say, "Look, Mr. Customer, we've done all this for you. Here is the server and storage and all the way out to the thin client solution. We've tested it. We've engineered it with our partners and with the software stack, and we can tell you that this VDI solution will support exactly this many knowledge workers or that many productivity users in your PC environment." So, you take that system integration task away from the customer, because HP has done it for them.

We have a number of customer references. I won’t call them out specifically, but we do have some of these posted out on HP.com/go/clientvirtualization, and we continue to post more of our customer case studies out there. They are across the whole desktop virtualization space. Some are on server-based computing or sharing applications, some are based on VDI environments, and we continue to add to those.

With any new computing technology, the underlying consideration is always cost or, in this case, a lot of customers look at it at a cost-per-seat perspective, and this is no different.

HP also has an ROI or TCO calculator that we put together specifically for this space. You show a customer a case study and they say, "Well, that doesn’t really match my pain points. That doesn’t really match my problem. We don’t have that IT issue," or "We don’t have that energy, power issue."

We created this calculator, so that customers can put in their own data. It’s a fairly robust tool, but we can put in information about what’s your desktop environment costing you today, what would it cost to put in a client virtualization environment, and what you can expect as far as your return on investment. So, it’s a compelling part of the discussion.

Obviously, with any new computing technology, the underlying consideration is always cost or, in this case, a lot of customers look at it at a cost-per-seat perspective, and this is no different, which is why we have provided the tool and the consulting around that.

On that same website that I mentioned, HP.com/go/clientvirtualization, we have our technical white papers that we've published, along with each of these reference architectures.

For example, if you pick the VDI reference architecture that will support 1,000-plus users in general, there is a 100-page white paper that talks about exactly how we tested it, how we engineered it, and how it scales with the VMware view or with Microsoft Hyper-V, plus Citrix XenDesktop.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 10th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

We're only in the first years of the data-driven decade. More companies will be making more of their business decisions—and also added revenue—on their own data services.

Investing in good data analytics infrastructure now allows companies to know themselves and their markets far better. It eliminates guessing and brings more of a real-time picture of their operations, challenges and opportunities.

Good data organizers can also then share or sell that data and analytics to partners and/or customers, and acquire meaningful additional outside data themselves from other data services purveyors.

The trick for IT is to allow their companies to extract business intelligence (BI) from these vast data sets at an affordable price. And more companies—that is small and medium businesses—will want in on the data and analytics revolution. Competition will drive them to.

So what's needed now is a change in the economics of business intelligence via value-oriented offerings for the mid-market. Traditional entry points for large data warehouses are often $500,000 and up, not to mention the ongoing operations costs and need to acquire data and systems management skills.

BI comes to wider audience
SAS, at the A2010 conference last week, launched Rapid Predictive Modeller (RPM), a service targeting non-analytical business users to help create more BI reports. SAS RPM joins the latest release of SAS Enterprise Miner 6.2, which includes an add-in for Microsoft Excel.

These steps toward making BI and reports available to more users at a lower price will no doubt be welcome to SMBs and enterprises dripping in data, but struggling to make sense of it all.

We're only now seeing massively parallel data warehousing appliances priced at the $50,000 mark. And these appliances tend to be cheaper to administrate and operate. Aster Data Systems, for example, recently came out with a lower-cost competitive solution dubbed MapReduce Data Warehouse Appliance – Express Edition. Aster also has a new CEO, Quentin Gallivan, announced today.

Aster, Netezza and Teradata are all focusing on the mid-market. Green Plum was recently bought by EMC. A recent Forrester report put Teradata, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft at the head of the data warehouse market, with Netezza, Sybase and SAP noted for niche deployments.

Oracle and HP teamed up two years ago on the Exadata appliance for Oracle warehouse workloads. And now Oracle is putting its Sun Microsystems acquisition to use for its own Exadata appliances line-up.

Expect a vendor slugfest on the lower end of the data warehousing and BI market in the next few years. It will be fascinating to see how these vendors will both enter the entry-level markets, while also seeking to maintain the high-end pricing for the largest users. There could be a value sweet spot in the middle.

We should therefore expect to see prices come down on these systems across the board, making the systems more attainable for even more types of uses and users.

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

Figuring that small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) want the best in IT advances too, HP on Wednesday unleashed a barrage of products and services that use integration, low-cost, and simplicity to bring cutting edge enterprise IT capabilities to the global mid-market.

The new products and services—ranging from the $329 HP ProLiant MicroServer to $424 minitower PCs to simplified virtualization, networking and storage bundles—come from multiple organizations across HP, but with a singular Goldilocks target of “Just Right IT” for SMBs. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The slew of value-oriented offerings is also designed to give HPs various global channel partners a new horse to ride into town on as the SMBs look beyond recession-reckoning for how to grow their operations while becoming more productive. The products and services are also available from HP directly.

HP is also putting financial muscle behind the channel partners and users by providing aggressive financing options leasing, life cycle asset management and upgrade services. HP Financial Services is the second-largest captive IT leasing company in the world, said HP. Leasing provides SMBs with flexibility (with no or low upfront payments) and a path to migrate to newer technology.

While the value and utilization benefits of virtualization have been quickly adopted by larger companies and IT departments, the use of hypervisors has been slower in SMBs. To help solve that, HP has developed more complete virtualization environments using Virtualization Smart Bundles with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. The bundles target storage, servers and networking virtualization technology uses.

The SMB-targeted worker productivity releases include:

• HP ProLiant MicroServer, an energy-efficient file server designed for businesses with up to 10 employees to centralize information and securely access files faster (at about half the size and 50 percent quieter than most entry-level servers).
• Web connectivity in the low-cost HP Officejet Pro 8500A e-All-in-One series and HP Officejet 7500A Wide Format e-All-in-One, which allow users to send print jobs from mobile devices as well as access content from the web without a PC.
• Slashed costs and energy use in the now-available HP 500B and 505B Series Business Desktop PCs, mini-towers installed with Windows 7 with Intel or AMD processors
• Simplified HP Insight with Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 for monitoring and management of IT from a single console so midsize businesses can adopt or expand use of virtualized servers and storage.

The SMB-targeted storage management releases include:

• Storage advancements via the 10GbE iSCSI capabilities of the HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array (MSA), which speeds the server/storage connection bandwidth by 10 times.
• HP ITSM Assessment for Virtualized Environments Service for increased system availability and process improvements
• HP Data Protector Express 5.0 Software, designed for the general user for managing data backup and recovery on single servers as well as small networks in Windows, Linux and NetWare environments.
• Simplified shared storage with the HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) so those using virtualized servers (deployed on Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware virtual machines) can move to shared storage without purchasing costly physical storage area network infrastructure.

The SMB-targeted networking and communications releases include:

• HP voice-over-IP and wireless offerings with the HP V-M200 802.11n Access Point Series, which connects up to 64 simultaneous mobile users to the network at wire-like speeds.
• HP VCX 9.5 IP Telephony system and 350x IP Phones (starting at $119), which enable the convergence of voice and data onto a single network infrastructure.

SMBs are where economists look for growth to emerge from recessions, and in developing countries. For years, though, large IT vendors have focused on the top ends of the IT market. It makes a lot of sense for HP to scale the technology and offerings down to the SMBs—which is a huge total market, poised for unprecedented growth in the world's most populous regions.

Fact is, too, that due to proliferating mobile devices and wireless networks, nearly all companies of any size need to deeply embrace technology and networking to remain competitive. Data explosion also makes it unavoidable to bring in managed storage and backup, not to mention the burgeoning requirements of security and managed access.

While many of us analysts harp on about the virtues and inevitability of cloud computing, for many small companies and in many regions, the promise of cloud cannot be considered until the basics of IT are modernized and managed.

Mobile devices alone can not take the place of a LAN and managed storage. In many ways, these new HP products and bundles—with their pricing and simplicity—can be seen as stepping stones for SMBs to soon be able to exploit the value and potential of cloud-based services, too.

And then we actually might see these SMBs leap-frog their larger corporate brethren, rather than be seen as a lagging market category, in regards to IT productivity and enablement. And wouldn't that be exciting?

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The trap of unchecked virtualization complexity can have a stifling effect on the advantageous spread of virtualization in data centers.

Indeed, many enterprises may think they have already exhausted their virtualization paybacks, when in fact, they have only scratched the surface of the potential long-term benefits.

Automation, policy-driven processes and best practices are offering more opportunities for optimizing virtualization so that server, storage, and network virtualization can move from points of progress into more holistic levels of adoption.

The goals then are data center transformation, performance and workload agility, and cost and energy efficiency. Many data centers are leveraging automation and best practices to attain 70 percent and even 80 percent adoption rates.

By taking such a strategic outlook on virtualization, process automation sets up companies to better exploit cloud computing and IT transformation benefits at the pace of their choosing, not based on artificial limits imposed by dated or manual management practices.

To explore how automation can help achieve strategic levels of virtualization, BriefingsDirect brought together panelists Erik Frieberg, Vice President of Solutions Marketing at HP Software, and Erik Vogel, Practice Principal and America's Lead for Cloud Resources at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Vogel: Probably the biggest misconception that I see with clients is the assumption that they're fully virtualized, when they're probably only 30 or 40 percent virtualized. They've gone out and done the virtualization of IT, for example, and they haven't even started to look at Tier 1 applications.

The misconception is that we can't virtualize Tier 1 apps. In reality, we see clients doing it every day. The broadest misconception is what virtualization can do and how far it can get you. Thirty percent is the low-end threshold today. We're seeing clients who are 75–80 percent virtualized in Tier 1 applications.

Frieberg: The three misconceptions I see a lot are, one, automation and virtualization are just about reducing head count. The second is that automation doesn't have as much impact on compliance. The third is if automation is really at the element level, they just don't understand how they would do this for these Tier 1 workloads.

You're starting to see the movement beyond those initial goals of eliminating people to ensuring compliance. They're asking how do I establish and enforce compliance policies across my organization, and beyond that, really capturing or using best practices within the organization.

When you look at the adoption, you have to look at where people are going, as far as the individual elements, versus the ultimate goal of automating the provisioning and rolling out a complete business service or application.

When I talk to people about automation, they consistently talk about what I call "element automation." Provisioning a server, a database, or a network device is a good first step, and we see gaining market adoption of automating these physical things. What we're also seeing is the idea of moving beyond the individual element automation to full process automation.

As companies expand their use of automation to full services, they're able to reduce that time from months down to days or weeks. This is what some people are starting to call cloud provisioning or self-service business application provisioning. This is really the ultimate goal—provisioning these full applications and services versus what is often IT’s goal—automating the building blocks of a full business service.

This is where you're starting to see what some people call the "lights out" data center. It has the same amount or even less physical infrastructure using less power, but you see the absence of people. These large data centers just have very few people working in them, but at the same time, are delivering applications and services to people at a highly increased rate rather than as traditionally provided by IT.

Vogel: One of the challenges that our clients face is how to build the business case for moving from 30 percent to 60 or 70 percent virtualized. This is an ongoing debate within a number of clients today, because they look at that initial upfront cost and see that the investment is probably higher than what they were anticipating. I think in a lot of cases that is holding our clients back from really achieving these higher levels of virtualization.

In order to really make that jump, the business case has to be made beyond just reduction in headcount or less work effort. We see clients having to look at things like improving availability, being able to do migrations, streamlined backup capabilities, and improved fault-tolerance. When you start looking across the broader picture of the benefits, it becomes easier to make a business case to start moving to a higher percentage of virtualization.

One of the things we saw early on with virtualization is that just moving to a virtual environment does not necessarily reduce a lot of the maintenance and management that we have, because we haven’t really done anything to reduce the number of OS instances that have to be managed.

The benefits are relatively constrained, if we look at it from just a physical footprint reduction. In some cases, it might be significant if a client is running out of data-center space, power, or cooling capacity within the data center. Then, virtualization makes a lot of sense because of the reduction in asset footprint.

But, when we start looking at coupling virtualization with improved process and improved governance, thereby reducing the number of OS instances, application rationalization, and those kinds of broader process type issues, then we start to see the big benefits come into play.

Now, we're not talking just about reducing the asset footprint. We're also talking about reducing the number of OS instances. Hence, the management complexity of that environment will decrease. In reality, the big benefits are on the logical side and not so much on the physical side.

Frieberg: What we're seeing in companies is that they're realizing that their business applications and services are becoming too complex for humans to manage quickly and reliably.

The demands of provisioning, managing, and moving in this new agile development environment and this environment of hybrid IT, where you're consuming more business services, is really moving beyond what a lot of people can manage. The idea is that they are looking at automation to make their life easier, to operate IT in a compliant way, and also deliver on the overall business goals of a more agile IT.

Companies are almost going through three phases of maturity when they do this. The first aspect is that a lot of automation revolves around "run book automation" (RBA), which is this physical book that has all these scripts and processes that IT is supposed to look at.

But, what you find is that their processes are not very standardized. They might have five different ways of configuring your device, resetting the server, and checking why an application isn’t working.

So, as we look at maturity, you’ve got to standardize on a set of ways. You have to do things consistently. When you standardize methods, you then find out you're able to do the second level of maturity, which is consolidate.

Vogel: It becomes more than just talking about the hardware or the virtualization, but rather a broader question of how IT operates and procures services. We have to start changing the way we are thinking when we're going to stand up a number of virtual images.

When we start moving to a cloud environment, we talk about how we share a resource pool. Virtualization is obviously key and an underlying technology to enable that sharing of a virtual resource pool.

We're seeing the virtualization providers coming out with new versions of their software that enable very flexible cloud infrastructures.

This includes the ability to create hybrid cloud infrastructures, which are partially a private cloud that sits within your own site, and the ability to burst seamlessly to a public cloud as needed for excess capacity, as well as the ability to seamlessly transfer workloads in and out of a private cloud to a public cloud provider as needed.

We're seeing the shift from IT becoming more of a service broker, where services are sourced and not just provided internally, as was traditionally done. Now, they're sourced from a public cloud provider or a public-service provider, or provided internally on a private cloud or on a dedicated piece of hardware. IT now has more choices than ever in how they go about procuring that service.

But it becomes very important to start talking about how we govern that, how we control who has access, how we can provision, what gets provisioned and when. ... It's a much bigger problem and a more complicated problem as we start going to higher levels of virtualization and automation and create environments that start to look like a private cloud infrastructure.

I don’t think anybody will question that there are continued significant benefits, as we start looking at different cloud computing models. If we look at what public cloud providers today are charging for infrastructure, versus what it costs a client today to stand up an equivalent server in their environment, the economics are very, very compelling to move to a cloud-type of model.

Without the proper governance in place, we can actually see cost increase, but when we have the right governance and processes in place for this cloud environment, we've seen very compelling economics, and it's probably the most compelling change in IT from an economic perspective within the last 10 years.

Frieberg: If you want to automate and virtualize an entire service, you’ve got to get 12 people to get together to look at the standard way to roll out that environment, and how to do it in today’s governed, compliant infrastructure.

The coordination required, to use a term used earlier, isn’t just linear. It sometimes becomes exponential. So there are challenges, but the rewards are also exponential. This is why it takes weeks to put these into production. It isn’t the individual pieces. You're getting all these people working together and coordinated. This is extremely difficult and this is what companies find challenging.

The key goal here is that we work with clients who realize that you don’t want a two-year payback. You want to show payback in three or four months. Get that payback and then address the next challenge and the next challenge and the next challenge. It's not a big bang approach. It's this idea of continuous payback and improvement within your organization to move to the end goal of this private cloud or hybrid IT infrastructure.

Vogel: We've developed a capability matrix across six broad domains to look at how a client needs to start to operationalize virtualization as opposed to just virtualizing a physical server.

We definitely understand and recognize that it has to be part of the IT strategy. It is not just a tactical decision to move a server from physical machine to a virtual machine, but rather it becomes part of an IT organization’s DNA that everything is going to move to this new environment.

We're really going to start looking at everything as a service, as opposed to as a server, as a network component, as a storage device, how those things come together, and how we virtualize the service itself as opposed to all of those unique components.

It really becomes baked into an IT organization’s DNA, and we need to look very closely at their capability—how capable an organization is from a cultural standpoint, a governance standpoint, and a process standpoint to really operationalize that concept.

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: 1st September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Platform Computing has paved the way to faster private cloud adoption with a low-risk, low-cost way for companies to evaluate their use of cloud computing. The Platform ISF Starter Pack, announced this week, will enable architects and IT managers to get a cloud sandbox environment up and running in less than 30 minutes, the company says.

The $4,995 Starter Pack announcement comes as a slew of vendors are focused on the adoption path for private clouds. More private cloud developments are expected at this week's VWworld conference.

Platform ISF manages application workloads across multiple virtual machine (VM) technologies and provisioning tools. It includes self-service, automated provisioning and chargeback capabilities. It supports multiple VM technologies, including ESX, Xen, KVM and Hyper-V, as well as popular provisioning tools, such as Red Hat Satellite, IBM xCAT, Symantec Altiris, and Platform Cluster Manager. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Organizations have plenty of toolkits to choose from as they evaluate private cloud, but they require multiple tools that users must string together themselves,” said James Pang, Vice President Product Management for Platform. “What’s more, these toolkits can cost $50,000 or more, and require 30-plus days of onsite consulting to build and customize an evaluation environment. We wanted to provide a cheap and easy way for users to get up and running quickly with a single product."

Software and best practices
The ISF Starter Pack, which costs $4,995, includes software, best practices advice and help to set up private cloud and includes:

• One-year Platform ISF term license for 10 sockets, including support
• Half-day orientation training
• Half-day cloud building consultation
• Integration advice for Platform ISF with your internal tools