By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 17th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Historically, IT projects in the public sector have tended to be overspent and underperforming. Not the sort of track record that sends out the right signals during a poor economic climate – but can things be done differently? One major problem is that central and local government have never been regarded as a joined up set of agendas or processes, and each part has gone its own way with its own systems and software. Therefore, when central government decided that a main aim was to centralise reporting, problems arose around what format the data needed to be in – and how to retro-fit existing systems to monitor and report events in the right manner.

Many different approaches have been put forward over the years, with minimal success due to lack of impetus, funds or just poor implementation. One that keeps being trotted out is the use of open source software to lower the cost of public sector IT.

On the face of it, this seems valid – using commercial, off the shelf software (COSS) involves paying a licence fee up front and then a maintenance fee per year after that, or an on-going yearly fee that nominally covers the licence and maintenance such that the customer (in this case the government) can use whatever version of software it wants whenever it wants. With free open source software (FOSS), the licence fee disappears. With millions of employees in the public sector, saving even a few pounds per person on licence fees must be good news.

However, software support is still required, and for FOSS this tends to come as a subscription, which in many cases is pretty similar to the maintenance component of COSS. For front end systems, such as operating systems and office software, familiarity is a big issue. The majority of employees understand Windows and Microsoft Office, and training can be kept to a minimum. A Linux/OpenOffice or equivalent system can present a major training problem, and on-going help desk issues which can easily wipe out any savings made from the licences. Also, there can be issues with “round-tripping” – the sending of documents to others in the process chain where actions are required and the document is then sent back. For standard government-to-citizen documents, this should not be a problem, as forms should either be web based or sent out in final format (e.g. Adobe PDF), but for supplier documents or others where e.g. macros may be involved, the loss of fidelity during the round-tripping could result in a less than legal contract being put in place.

But, for back-end systems, COSS can make a great deal of sense – the use of Linux as an operating system for large scale operations is proven, and can save significant amounts of money where the application is agnostic as to the underlying operating system. An area where this may be the case is in what was originally termed by Sir Peter Gershon in his report looking at streamlining government IT as “shared services” and is now being touted as the G-Cloud.

The idea behind the G-Cloud is to provide a set of services that are common amongst a broader group of users than a single department in central and local government. For example, HR tends to be similar across the public sector – employment contracts are by role, booking holiday is a common process and so on. Therefore, having many hundreds or thousands of bespoke systems dotted around the public sector is nonsensical, and expensive. By centralising a HR application in a manner that allows any department to use the same system, redundancy of function can be driven out of the process. Along with this, the scale of the master contract can drive down licence and/or support costs, and data becomes centralised allowing better monitoring and reporting.

A cloud platform requires flexibility at the basic level, however. The workloads involved may be unpredictable or, even where there is predictability, may be cyclical as with payroll, which runs weekly or monthly with little activity in between. Therefore, a highly scalable, flexible and sharable platform is required spread across a large number of servers. Using COSS operating systems can end up with large costs to cover the number of CPUs and cores involved, whereas FOSS gets rid of this cost.

Another aspect of G-Cloud is that it should lead to a lowering of costs for COSS through the centralisation of licensing. At the moment, a high degree of procurement is carried out at a local or departmental level, leading to licence and maintenance costs being relatively high. Centralising license usage through to G-Cloud means that greater economies of scale can be applied, and central contracts used to drive licence costs down to a minimum. Also, actual usage can be monitored, and over-licensing can be identified and removed, as well as negotiating with vendors to allow the use of concurrent licences, where the number of people using a licence at any one time is covered, rather than the number of people who could use a licence.

Another aspect of G-Cloud is a statement by central government that it agrees that there is a need to make dealing with government easier and cheaper so that smaller suppliers can get involved. Historically, public sector projects have involved suppliers jumping through so many hoops that only the large vendors and systems integrators could afford to get involved. G-Cloud is supposed to make it easier and less costly to become a government supplier – and once on the list, for government and local departments to easily find what is most cost-effective for them and take the service directly without the need for new negotiations. Encouraging smaller suppliers into dealing with the public sector should create more competition and so drive costs down.

Even with the financial climate remaining gloomy, the government has stated that G-Cloud remains a priority. It is to be hoped that this is the case, as it does offer the best promise for IT costs within the public sector to be driven down.

However, the biggest issue may well be around how data is managed and used across the public sector. It is all well and good being able to gain access to applications and services directly and to implement them via self-service, but if the end result is a silo of data that cannot easily be shared across departments as required, or cannot be reported against in context against other relevant information, then any cost savings will have been wasted.

Open data is required – both in the way that it is formatted, and in the way that it is made available for use. It is a given that the public sector has to be very careful in how data under its control is secured – there have been far too many headlines in the press about how information has been lost, leaked or stolen. However, this should not result in a knee-jerk reaction aimed at locking down the data – far from it; the end target has to be for all information to be made available in a manner that ensures that it is secure in the context in which it is being used. 

For example, a citizen should be able to see all information that appertains to them – but should not necessarily be able to see the same information for their neighbours. A public sector worker may need to be able to see a sub-set of information about a defined group of people, whereas an external contractor may only be able to see such results with any personal identifiable information excised. This capability requires data to be held in an open format, such that the overlying systems that manage the granular security required can deal with each data source adequately.

On top of this is the need for other data types to be included. An increasing amount of information about citizens, departmental work and laws is being held in standard documents, rather than directly in formal databases. As time goes on, this is likely to grow to include voice and video information as well. Tools will be required to ensure that any type of information can be included in public sector processes, and that the process chains can be open enough for public and private employees to be able to fully participate in the processes as needed.

The future of public sector IT is still in the balance. The G-Cloud is undoubtedly the biggest change that can bring cost savings to public sector processes, but needs more weight and impetus behind it to make it more generally available with more functionality, faster.

The judicious use of FOSS can help in managing costs – but an ivory-tower attitude of “FOSS everywhere” could have process costs that wipe out the technical savings. Open data has to be at the core of any public sector technology strategy – getting this wrong could destroy any possible cost savings, and could make it difficult to recover the situation in the near term.

Although still in the balance, the government must take this opportunity to drive a more flexible and functional platform across the public sector. This will be a slow process overall – but quick wins can be made for little investment, and the savings made must then be ploughed back in to gain greater savings in the future.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 13th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Many are the tales of the public sector getting poor deals in IT (well, in many areas of procurement, actually). Finally, however, it looks as if someone is getting a handle on what public sector procurement could—and should—be like.

From the outside, it often seems that public sector procurement has either suffered from a lack of negotiators who have the capability to stand up to IT vendors, or who have a lack of understanding as to the purchasing power of the public sector. Nearly 6 million people work directly in the public sector, or close to 20% of the total working population. However, this does not include all the quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (Quangos) and outsourced jobs that are 100% dependent on the public sector—all of this drives the true public sector employment level account for around one quarter of all jobs across the UK. This makes any deal that covers a large part of the public sector a real crown jewel for the vendor.

Recently, the government announced that it had renegotiated its agreements with Microsoft and SAP, which would lead to savings of around £70m, with these growing to a possible £150m by 2015. The new agreements are not just based on managing to negotiate better licencing deals, however: there are also other aspects that show that the public sector is waking up to the power it can wield.

Sure, for Microsoft, it is looking at a large proportion of those 6 million workers needing to use Microsoft software. For some time, the government has been talking about the possibility of moving to an open source model—and this seems to have worked as a bargaining chip. Whereas previously, it looked doubtful that the public sector would move from tools such as Microsoft Office to something like OpenOffice, suddenly this looked as if it could happen—Microsoft stood the chance of losing up to 6 million desktops.

This could have led to further problems—these 6 million people also have home devices, and once they get used to using an alternative, they could move to it themselves—particularly if it is free to them. The further knock-on effect could be that those organisations that deal directly with the public sector could find that the fidelity of transactions is better for them if they move from a commercial off the shelf system (COSS) to a free open source software (FOSS) model. Microsoft must have felt significant pressure—and has not only agreed to lower its licencing costs, but also to hold the prices when it ups costs across the board to its commercial customers, and to its public sector customers in other countries.

On top of this, maintenance and support charges have also been controlled—and this is where the SAP agreement also scores well. Over the past couple of years, SAP has been trying to increase the amount of maintenance revenue it can gain from customers—however, the government has managed to secure a longer-term contract in place that makes the SAP environment far more cost efficient through beneficial maintenance terms. With around 125,000 SAP users in the public sector, this is one of SAP’s largest accounts—and so it found that it had to respond positively when faced with real negotiation over the whole contract.

A major aspect of the negotiation that just couldn’t have been used even a year ago is the use of the G-Cloud. Previously, procurement was relatively piecemeal with different departments and each local authority dealing with their own areas—and so appearing to IT suppliers as individual SMBs or relatively low-end enterprises. Now, as the G-Cloud begins to take shape as a procurement gateway, the public sector can present itself as this super-enterprise of 6 million employees, with massive dependencies between itself and the rest of its value chain of suppliers and citizens.

Quocirca believes that the Microsoft and SAP contract negotiations are just the thin end of the wedge. Previously, the government had also renegotiated its existing agreements with Oracle and with CapGemini. Each negotiation has taken between 4 and 9 months—these are in-depth negotiations unlike those the government has entered into before, and show that the procurement officers and lawyers are now stepping up to the mark and demonstrating the same negotiation skills as the professionals from the vendors they are up against. We expect to see further large savings against standard IT contracts as they come up for review.

However, this still leaves the IT component of some of the private finance initiative (PFI) projects and other large, but poorly defined, IT projects where procurement is carried out outside of the G-Cloud/new procurement capabilities. These areas are where the biggest savings are to be made—and Quocirca is waiting with bated breath to see how the government approaches these problems.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 3rd May 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Increasingly, government at central and local levels is coming to realise the benefits to itself and its citizens by moving services on-line. Housing, health, benefits—you name it, the public want to be able to interact via the web, rather than having to travel to some poorly lit and low-spirited office somewhere to sit and wait for someone to go through some basic advice.

However, opening up to the citizen has its risks—and this has made many government departments shy away from going as far as they could. The risk of someone being able to get hold of the wrong information sends shivers down the spine of the average public sector manager, and sends ministers and mandarins into paroxysms as the thought of being forced to resign crosses their minds. The number of embarrassing press reports about public sector data leaks in recent years do not help.

Yet there is no reason why this should be the case. The problem seems to be that the government has been wrongly advised in the past when it comes to information security. The focus has been on database security—which misses the point completely. The focus has to be on information security—which needs a different approach.

Database security is predicated on making a given database secure. If the security is compromised, then the whole database is then available to the person who has compromised the system, unless complex rules have been put in place to try and lock down individual fields within the database—yet this then puts barriers in the way for normal working.

Information security turns the problem around—instead of trying to stop people from getting hold of data for which they do not have access rights, how do we give them access to what they should be entitled to? This then means that you start from a total locked down position—the starting point is that the person should have no access at all.

The first task then is to identify them uniquely and authenticate them—they have a name and other details that should be able to provide an outline to narrow this down to just the one person: things such as address, postcode, national insurance number and so on. However, these details are easily obtained by outsiders, and so do not provide the necessary overall security. Token based systems are theoretically OK, but with 60+ million citizens, the loss rate of tokens and the need to provide replacements and deal with exceptions while these are being provided would be prohibitively expensive.

However, biometrics should be more cost effective—and have reached a level of functionality where the risk of false positives and negatives is now negligible. Yes, there is a high initial cost involved with this, each household would require a biometric reader. However, by associating the reader with the house, the house with the inhabitants and the inhabitants with their own unique identifiers, it becomes very difficult for any security breaches to be initiated.

First contact between the individual and the public sector network should then be via a simple starting master database. Here, the credentials of the individual are checked, and rather than then giving them direct access to data held in the same database, the individual is assigned a one-time token or set of tokens. These tokens are then used to gain access to the other databases where the individual is seeking information from. Such an approach is already used for single sign on (SSO) solutions as available from the likes of Symantec 03, Ping Identity or AEP Networks’ Ultra Protect.

This is important, as what it allows is for the subservient databases to be anonymised; rather than having a health database that has fields of name, address, contact phone number and then all the fields to do with the individual’s health, all anyone would see that has not come in through the master database would be a hash key (which is aligned with the individual’s details) and the health records.

Without being able to recreate the hash key and match this with the master database, no-one can see any personal information in any database—and as the master database requires biometric information, compromising this is difficult.

So far, so good. But how about the public sector workers who need to access broader swathes of information? The approach still works for them. They still come in through the master database with a mix of credentials based on user identification and biometrics. They then pick up their own tokens—tokens which dictate what their levels of access are to the various different databases. Therefore, a housing benefits person would gain tokens that allow them access to the housing database, but nothing else. A nurse would gain access to complete patient records, whereas a paramedic on the road may only gain access to partial records.

Combined with data leak prevention (DLP) applied to information flows from public sector employees to citizens, ensuring that personal information cannot be accidently published and digital rights management (DRM) to ensure that off-line data is secured, has limits applied on what can be done with it and has time limits on its storage, a rounded approach to information storage can be put in place.

With the governments renewed commitment to cloud computing through the G-Cloud and a drive for greater citizen engagement, information security is critical. Taking old-style approaches just does not meet the needs of the government or the citizen—new thinking is required.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Why would a blind person go into a library? Maybe to borrow a book in Braille, or more likely to borrow a talking book, CD or DVD. In Lambeth the new answer is to learn to use a computer.

Computers have the potential to improve the quality of life and job prospects of anyone who is blind or has a vision impairment (a Vision Impaired Person or VIP for short). A very large percentage of the world's knowledge has only been available in printed form on paper. This meant that it was inaccessible to anyone with a limited or no vision. Over the years various solutions have been used to close this gap a bit.

Braille was one very clever and successful solution but it is limited by: the cost of setting and printing any document; the size of a Braille document, which is a disadvantage; but probably the biggest issue is that it is difficult to learn, especially for anyone whose lost their vision later in life.

Audio books is a wonderful medium for fiction, where a book is read, and listened to, from the beginning to the end. It is not such a useful solution for reference or text books where navigation becomes a major issue. The cost of production also limits the titles available.

DAISY talking books provide the benefits of audio books and adds navigation capabilities.

All of these solutions have major limitations, as the number of titles is limited and great swathes of printed material - newspapers, magazines, journals - are generally not available and certainly not in a timely fashion.

More recently the rise of the computer, the Internet and various forms of electronic publishing have enabled a whole new set of sources of textual information; emails, blogs, wikis, online news channels etc. All of this is displayed on a screen and is again not accessible.

However, the fact that this information is electronic and therefore can be manipulated means that it is possible to turn the electronic words into spoken words that are accessible to people with vision impairments. All of human knowledge is being rapidly turned into electronic format and thus the knowledge available to a VIP is growing exponentially.

Unfortunately there are two barriers that need to be removed before all this information is available. Firstly the user needs access to suitable hardware and software that will read the information on the screen and enable them to navigate easily. Secondly they need to learn how to use the hardware and software. A VIP who has not learnt to use the system will not be able to assess the benefit to them and therefore will not be able to justify the initial outlay. The cost of a suitably configured machine is a considerable barrier to adoption.

The libraries in Lambeth have recently been the venue for an experiment to fix both these problems. The initiative is being driven forward by a local resident, Christina Burnett of Wide Eye Pictures, who is passionate about the benefits of computing to VIPs.

Like every modern library Lambeth has several computers in each library. The only extra hardware required was headphones; these are obviously essential if there are going to be several screen reader users in the library at one time. It is probable that headphones would have become necessary anyway for the general public as more and more audio information is available on the Internet. The other addition was to install screen reader software on all the library machines; it was decided to install it on all machines so that a VIP could use the system whichever library they wanted to visit. Some screen reader solutions are expensive and it would have been prohibitive to equip all machines; this was resolved by installing a free screen reader called Thunder which is available from www.screenreader.net. So for a minimal expenditure the libraries removed the first of the barriers.

To assist the VIP to learn to use the system a series of seven weekly training sessions was run, called DTvip (Digital Tuesday for Vision Impaired People). The initial set of sessions trained some VIPs and some volunteers so the scheme can be repeated and extended in the future. Screenreader.net, which developed Thunder, has obtained funding from Awards for All to work with DTVIP on this pilot training scheme at the Tate South Lambeth Library.

The first set of sessions was a great success and proved that the model works. Naturally, lessons have been learnt, in particular to have a structure that can support different users, ranging from a VIP who has never used a keyboard, through to a VIP who is an expert PC user but, through failing sight, needs to learn how to use a screen reader.

The second set of sessions is under way. The question now is how to quickly extend this model throughout Lambeth and the rest of the UK.

By: Andy Jones, Director and General Manager, Europe, Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Posted: 25th July 2011 Copyright Xerox Global Document Outsourcing © 2011

Cost savings remain top of mind in the wake of the UK Government’s first official budget and as we anticipate the next stage of the Comprehensive Spending Review. This focus has created a number of unique challenges that are increasing the demands on an organisational infrastructure: 

• Deep budget cuts to central and local government programmes and, inevitably, to headcount, have encouraged public sector bodies to consolidate the number of suppliers and procurements between departments in an effort to lower costs. Suppliers must support the UK Government’s search for efficiency and savings and are expected to provide the expertise to improve services.

• In order to deliver services more efficiently, the Government is looking to best-in-class delivery models which are standardised, optimised and scalable.

• As taxpayers increasingly want to know where their money is being spent, there is a need for greater transparency. The public focus on performance, results and return on investment means public sector organisations need clear, appropriate service level agreements. Management information to track performance against the agreements is also a must.

• The demand by constituents for convenience and choice in the communications channels that they use to interact with UK Government means agencies must adapt. To instil change, agencies will need to study best practices from the commercial sector and Government activities abroad, as well as between existing departments and agencies.

Meeting the new expectations is not an easy task, and many organisational infrastructures, in both the public and private sector, simply are not up to the challenge. Today’s emphasis on meeting short-term financial targets by avoiding large capital expenditures and taking existing assets off the balance sheet takes precedence over decisions to initiate change. And, as time passes, the infrastructures become ever more costly to update. To reverse this trend, it’s best to think of infrastructure as a strategy for growth and identify the areas that would benefit most from modernisation.

Picking your targets
When it comes to an organisation’s infrastructure, most people immediately think of information and communications technologies. This is true of the UK Government too, with the ICT industry being an immediate target for achieving cost savings through the formation of the Efficiency Reform Group. The estimated UK Government expenditure in this area is c£18bn p.a., according to the likes of Kable and Intellect.

Yet there are additional and even larger areas to consider. We believe the document-related costs of UK Government could be as much as £50bn p.a. The costs of handling, processing, filing, archiving and destruction of documents—as well as other steps in the document life cycle—are several times those of ICT. As such they are a very worthwhile target for efficiency savings.

In the past, improving these processes did not go much beyond a simple review of office-based printing with the idea of ‘printing less’. This narrow approach ignores the critical role printed documents play in business processes. To truly improve the infrastructure, it’s preferable to review how documents are printed across an organisation.

For example, there are multiple records that relate to one individual citizen, so Government departments have typically used printed records to understand the whole picture. Paper essentially is the ‘glue’ that holds many of these existing processes together. However, in an increasingly digital world, print often limits processes, representing one of the key features of a ‘legacy infrastructure.’  Following are several examples of where Xerox has helped public sector organisations transform their document-related processes.

Transformation in practice – The Department for Work & Pensions
The UK Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) wanted to review and revamp the end-to-end management of forms across more than 1,000 offices. The idea was to make information clearer and more accessible to the more than 20 million UK citizens it serves. The DWP faced two major challenges: meeting UK Government requirements to improve efficiency and reduce costs and eliminating repetitive processes performed by multiple suppliers in individual department silos.

Xerox worked with the DWP to create an infrastructure that supports continually improving service, is measured against advancing targets, and delivers value at every stage. The chosen solution transformed document services by creating a single-service management infrastructure for all core print and related requirements.

The effort has produced savings in a number of different areas:

• 30,000 office devices rationalised to 8,000
• Device energy use cut in half
• Warehouse space cut by 12 percent, from 90,500 to 80,000 square feet
• Wasted print reduced by 66 percent
• Average document review cycle shortened by 40 percent, from five months to three
• Improved quality and effectiveness of communications with citizens
• 21 percent overall savings in line with Government efficiency review targets

Transformation in practice – Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust wanted to digitise traditionally paper-based services, specifically patient records. The Trust looked to achieve a 20 percent reduction in costs and a 20–25 percent improvement in lead times for print jobs through the use of a Web portal and standardisation of work processes. In order to meet the needs of both patients and staff, it also needed transparent reporting on service levels, demonstrating immediately improved efficiency.

Xerox worked with Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust to develop a ten-year records management partnership. The project was broken down into phases with the idea of continually improving service while rolling out the use of electronic records. Medical and union stakeholders would be involved throughout the process.

Just two years into the project, improvements have appeared in a number of areas:

• 7,500 missing records found, leading to improved patient safety
• Complaints eliminated as files available at point of need
• Records staff transferred to Xerox, equipped with new skills and now working in safe environment
• Expected savings of £2 million over ten years
• Secure information governance and auditing standards implemented

What are the barriers to transformation?
These examples demonstrate the substantial benefits of modernising government infrastructure, and they point to what can happen when organisational leaders look beyond hitting short-term financial targets. It’s important to note, however, that these efforts do not come without a lot of work and a certain amount of risk. It seems a fairly obvious point, but suppliers need to demonstrate the return on investment of every single project and ensure they focus on outcomes.

Through its experience working with a number of different organisations, Xerox has identified six key guideposts that mark the path to successful modernisation. These points were summarised in a whitepaper presented by ACS, a Xerox company, to the U.S. White House last year. The whitepaper was prepared following the White House forum on modernising government, which took place on January 14, 2010.

According to the white paper:

• Success breeds success, incrementally. Don’t try to do too much too soon. Success requires continuous improvement and refinement.
• Start at the end. Focus on what your customers—or rather citizens—want, and don’t forget to communicate.
• The social and technological landscape may be changing with extraordinary speed, but many core human characteristics remain vital. Be sure to look at how technology fits into the bigger picture of what customers really want.
• Technology alone won’t deliver transformation. Policies and regulations, staffing, programme design and other aspects of operations all play a part as well in driving cultural change.
• Focus in on risks. Manage risks actively, be ready to recover, and get experts involved to help you keep your project on track.
• Measure what matters, know what counts, and deliver results.
• No two modernisation efforts are alike. Set goals, plan accordingly and prepare for the unexpected.

At Xerox, we believe these points are extremely relevant to the UK public sector. As the case studies above illustrate, results happen when focus is put on the interactions between operations, technology, and policy.  Marrying the demands of government and citizens with the capabilities of your infrastructure requires vision and the help of a trusted partner experienced in making these transformations happen. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: 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: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 8th December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

In October, Martha Lane Fox, UK Digital Champion, wrote to Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, with the results of a strategic review of DirectGov he had commissioned.

I enclose some short excerpts from her letter below.

The letter and Francis Maude's positive response are well worth reading and can be found at the Cabinet Office Newroom http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2010/101122-defaultdigital.aspx.

The major thrust of the recommendations is "to improve citizens' experience of key transactions". I understand this to mean that usability and accessibility need to be improved. The need for improvements in accessibility were inadvertently highlighted when the report was first published on the web as an inaccessible PDF file. When I reported this error to the webmaster the response was a rapid 'mea culpa' and an agreement to resolve it as soon as possible.

In general I agree with the suggestions in the report as it suggests ways of:

• Making it easier for citizens to navigate around and through the government websites.
• Reducing the cost of providing the various services.
• Improving the quality of the services, including usability and accessibility.

The simple answer to all of this is to take the hundreds of existing government websites and centralise them under the DirectGov banner. In the process provision, control and technology could all be centralised and simplified.

I suspect that reducing the number of websites is certain to improve the services. However, I have seen many reorganisations in my business life, and I have always been struck by the fact that the proponent of the reorganisation always explains the benefits that will accrue but never seems to consider what may, or will, get broken in the process. I believe what is likely to get broken is the ability of individual parts of the government to react quickly to changes in circumstance or opportunities. The new structure will be big, inevitably bureaucratic, and liable to stifle innovation.

The intention of the new structure is to enable a citizen to go to one place whatever the issue. It is not clear exactly how wide the net would be, for example would it include the NHS, Local Government, the Citizens Advice Bureau or the remaining Quangos, etc. If it does then the structure is gargantuan, if it does not then it cannot meet all the requirements of the citizen.

Getting the balance right between centralised organisation and control, and flexibility for the departments, is going to be the major challenge for the new CEO for Digital (see recommendation 4 below).

I will watch the progress with interest and report back on a regular basis.

Extract from Martha's Letter:

"You asked me to oversee a strategic review of Directgov and to report to you by the end of September. I have undertaken this review in the context of my wider remit as UK Digital Champion which includes offering advice on "how efficiencies can best be realised through the online delivery of public services." This means that I have not reviewed Directgov in isolation but as part of how the government can use the Internet both to communicate and interact better with citizens and to deliver significant efficiency savings from channel shift. This letter sets out my findings and key recommendations.

Summary of Key Recommendations

1. Make Directgov the government front end for all departments' transactional online services to citizens and businesses, with the teeth to mandate cross government solutions, set standards and force departments to improve citizens' experience of key transactions.
2. Make Directgov a wholesaler as well as the retail shop front for government services & content by mandating the development and opening up of Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) to third parties.
3. Change the model of government online publishing, by putting a new central team in Cabinet Office in absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments.
   • Departmental experts will still produce much content, on a commissioned basis.
   • Over time, departments will stop publishing content to their existing sites.
   • Any savings from the reduction in duplication should remain in departments, once transition costs and ongoing funding for the new central team have been taken into account.
   • Ultimately, government should use just one Internet domain, which could be direct.gov.uk or hmg.gov.uk .
   • A shared, agile, cost-effective suite of web services should replace existing departmental web publishing infrastructure.
   • Put more effort into syndicating government content across the third party websites
4. Appoint a new CEO for Digital in the Cabinet Office with absolute authority over the user experience across all government online services (websites and APIs) and the power to direct all government online spending."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 8th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

In October last year I penned a commentary piece on Symantec, finishing the article with the line, “Is Symantec on track? Probably. Will it be successful? Maybe.”

This year’s Vision 2010 Europe event was a chance to see what they have been up to and to check point their progress.

Enrique Salem, CEO, articulated his vision based on the evolution of Symantec, now entering its third phase, The first two phases saw the transition of the company from software publishing through a product-centric world and now a refocus on making Symantec “relevant to today’s world.”

The company will follow 6 of what they call megatrends over the next few years:

• Consumerisation of IT
• IT-isation of the consumer
• Mobile
• Social
• Virtualisation
• Cloud

No surprises here, but they do need to come up with a better term than the dreadful term IT-isation. It basically means that consumers are now driving the adoption of technology and the need for security vendors and practitioners to be in front of the threat curve. As many security professionals are finding out supporting the tide of iDevices is a nightmare, so any help they could get to be ahead of the game would be really appreciated.

The huge array of products from Symantec are at long last being squashed together to form 4 product suites, so at least we should see better coordination even if we don’t quite get the centralised management tools many customers look for.

Symantec are not poor—in fact a recent round of funding has seen a war chest available for acquisitions. After all, cash earns a pathetic rate of interest, even when you are a multi-billion dollar business, so expect to see some merger and acquisition activity in support of delivering the Symantec growth strategy. Likely areas will be mobility, SaaS and solutions that help with the contextual analysis of data, so any boutique vendors out their with cool solutions give Symantec a call, you may be able to get your exit at long last.

So what of the elephant in the corner AKA the Intel/McAfee deal?

The public face of Symantec accompanies any discussion of the subject with a perplexed look and a degree of (fake?) incredulity. Admittedly they are in good company as few with insight can see how the fit will work—even at the basic level how much of the McAfee portfolio can actually be engineered in to silicon? Or is this a step too far for Intel?

Of course Intel needs to diversify, and they have a huge war chest (now $7bn lighter) able to be deployed as and when required, but how far should they go?. Symantec have a pretty cosy relationship with Intel, something that seemed to attract amusement at the conference that was part sponsored by the ubiquitous chip maker. No doubt to hedge their bets Enrique Salem admitted to developing relationships with other chip vendors. And any discussion of the Intel/McAfee deal was accompanied by the audience being reminded that Symantec is “the largest security vendor in the world.” So will Symantec be acquired? Well, think back to April this year (2010) when it was believed that HP may be out to purchase McAfee. If they are interested in a security and data management company then maybe they could go after Symantec, but at a market capitalisation around $12bn it would be an expensive purchase.

Is Symantec on track? Probably. Will it be successful? Maybe.

Has that line changed? Not yet.

Let’s review it again in a years time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 2 PLM Functionality Source:  PLM Technology Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: 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: 27th September 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Technology innovation is often hard to demonstrate to those in senior decision-making roles in most organisations, and generally for very straightforward reasons. Many vendors pitch their products or services as being full of benefits, but often these are simply features dressed up with a few marketing buzzwords ending in ‘ability’. The answer to the question ‘what will it do?’ is generally ‘anything’ as those flogging the idea, either from outside or with the help of internal IT champions typically ignore the unspoken part of the question ‘...for me, our company, against the competition, etc’.

It is an issue of putting the innovation into specific context.

In October 1993 the then Anderson Consulting created a dramatic way of doing this for their retail prospects in Europe, through a ‘blue sky thinking’ experience called ‘Smart Store’, built at its office in Windsor, which aimed to transport senior retail executives into the distant future of 2010. The multi-room showcased the impact of technology in a context that would grab and sometimes shock retail executives into action. Many of the concepts, such as self scanning, logistics tagging and tracking, are now pretty much the norm, so it must have been a successful, if rather expensive investment.

While Smart Store showcased other company’s technology innovation to help Anderson Consulting sell services, other centres of innovation and executive briefing centres have been built by technology companies keen to show off their thought leadership. Both IBM and Sun Microsystems developed these sorts of facilities and have tried as hard as possible to justify the generally hidden back end ‘big tin’ with applications and services set in the context of real business.

Although the theatrics rarely meet the impressive standards of Anderson Consulting, some effort still goes into filling the demonstrations with props. It might seem trivial, but there is merit in demonstrating real world examples and doing some sort of scene setting. After all, how many business leaders or managers seeking solutions to specific business problems want to be faced simply by banks of (expensive) IBM and Sun servers?

From a recent visit to Motorola’s innovation centre in Basingstoke it is clear that money had not been frittered away on superfluous theatrics. The markets being targeted and applications shown address down-to-earth everyday business needs, not blue sky concepts. The main room is filled with many diverse communications devices from simple two way radios to smart consoles for forklift trucks; all great examples of Motorola’s innovation and technical prowess, but how do they connect to business?

Rather than looking for props or theatrics, the clues come from Motorola’s recent changes in corporate structure, in particular the decision to spin off the phones division earlier in 2010 and the acquisition of Symbol in 2006.

As the spinoff of the consumer oriented mobile phone part of the company concludes in 2011, what remains is business and public sector organisation focused, covering wireless LAN, drop in cellular networks and mobile devices. Rather than having the generic devices that might be picked up as consumer friendly phones by the average office worker, the new Motorola has large ranges of more specialised devices, some offering voice communications, some mobile data, others converging both. Why? It allows Motorola to provide different devices to target the specific working needs of different groups of workers, with tools that are sometimes rugged, often just robust, but always designed and dedicated to do a particular job—hence the reason there are so many in the innovation centre.

That is all well and good and, to be honest, what you might expect from a large technically driven company with over seventy years of innovation, but while the hiving off is bringing much needed focus, it is the acquisition and subsequent slow absorption of Symbol that turns that focus into revenue. Symbol not only brought smart small IT devices to the radio company, it also introduced an ecosystem of applications, application developers and channel partners.

This has become the driver for much activity and is where the business innovation is happening; developing a mobile application to meet the business process need of an individual worker, blending small robust hardware with the right interface options to fit their role and adding the spice of well engineered radio technology.

If Motorola can stay partner friendly and avoid the arrogance that so often surrounds long term industry players who think they can do it all themselves, this sounds like a recipe for success for all parties involved.

Mobile applications that address business needs rather than massage egos or satisfy gadget lovers will appeal to the business decision makers. That should put Motorola’s mobile innovation into context, and while its innovation centre is not overly theatrical in its presentation, this is not an issue for the practical business needs being addressed.

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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