By: Dale Vile, Managing Director, Freeform Dynamics Posted: 6th October 2008 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

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The story goes that once you have experienced the Mac, there is no going back. Time and again, we hear this line from recent converts to Apple‟s competitive offering to the traditional PC/Windows combination.

When you talk to developers and media guys, they can give you good solid reasons for the switch, and there can be no question that the Mac operating system, OS X, and some of tools available for this essentially unix-based environment, offer benefits if you are into code cutting and heavily creative activities. Many consumers too seem to like the platform, as the Mac presents arguably a cleaner and simpler environment for the home/recreational user.

What‟s interesting, however, is when you ask everyday day business users who have converted to the Mac about why they did it. The answers that come back are then usually quite woolly, and often degenerate into "It‟s just better at everything than Windows" or "It just makes me feel more creative". When pressed, such users find it difficult or impossible to articulate precise benefits.

If you push the conversation, you get into the discussion of security, anti-virus, etc, but these are IT issues in most business environments that are pretty well understood and reasonably easily managed on Windows nowadays, and likely to hit the Mac community at some point anyway. The conversation then gets really confused when talking about "office functionality"—email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. With the world and his dog essentially standardised on Microsoft Office for business, how does the average Mac user in a mainstream commercial setting handle that? Well, they typically run a copy MS Office in a Windows virtual machine using Parallels or VMware Fusion. Most say they flip to this to do a lot of their more "boring‟ work such as messaging and collaboration via the Exchange server, and participation in the document production/review/approval cycle with colleagues, clients, suppliers and so on, then do everything else in OS X. Of course the big question then becomes what does "everything else" actually translate to—accessing corporate applications and the Web through a browser probably—i.e. things that the desktop OS has little bearing on.

I am generalising here, of course. Some manage with Apple‟s iWork Office suite and live with the reduced functionality and file formatting/exchange challenges. Others buy a copy of Microsoft Office that runs natively on the Mac, which probably offers the worst of both worlds. For some, they simply don‟t have a need to interoperate with the Windows world in very big way so they use whatever native applications they like.

Despite the confused views, behaviour and apparent contradictions, however, Mac converts are typically very forceful, at least emotionally, about defending their move, regardless of the type of user they happen to be. So there‟s clearly something interesting going on here.

Acknowledging that I might be thinking about things too logically and relying too much on values and assumptions arising from years of Windows usage, I concluded that that there was at least a possibility that I was missing something intangible that Mac users just "get‟. So, a few months ago, I bought a Mac, started to experiment with it, and ultimately instigated a pilot of Mac OS X in my company (a small industry analyst and research firm) to see how well it would support our core business activities.

Fast forwarding to the result, of the five Macs we have invested in (one MacBook and four MacBook Pros), two are currently sitting here waiting to be repurposed as Vista machines, and the others have been set up to allow Windows to be used for core business purposes (either via dual boot or virtualisation), but still allowing access to OS X for experimenting and maintaining a working knowledge of the operating system for research purposes.

So why was the pilot not successful?

The answer is actually pretty simple—we found that as a business, we were far more reliant on Microsoft Office under Windows than we had anticipated, and while most of the other productivity and business apps we use had native Mac equivalents, this was not true for all of them. The end result was that we couldn‟t get away from Windows, so ended up with a hybrid Windows/OS X environment which got in the way of productivity.

At this point, I can hear all of those converts out there screaming about how great the integration is between Windows and OS X if you use the latest virtualisation offerings, and some of the stuff that can be done is indeed very clever. In Parallels, for example, you can put the system into "coherence mode‟, which basically means that Windows applications are surfaced individually in OS X. Rather than having to flip between your Windows and Mac environments, you can essentially live in OS X and fire up Windows applications from within it. VMware Fusion achieves the same result through its "unity mode‟, and both virtualisation solutions (latest beta in the case of Fusion) allow native Mac applications to be set as defaults for actions under Windows. As an example of the latter, you can set up the environment so if you click on a link embedded in an email received in Outlook, the native OS X version of Safari or FireFox is invoked. Similarly, if you click on a document attachment, it will open in the Mac version of Office, PhotoShop or whatever other application is relevant based on the file extension.

We were really excited when we got all this working in with both Parallels and Fusion (we piloted both). With the integrated hybrid environment running pretty flawlessly on the bench, we thought we had a workable system that that would allow us to test the claims about OS X superiority from a usability, experience and productivity perspective, and still run the Windows stuff we need in order to operate as a business.

After a few weeks of trying this for real, however, two pretty significant problems surfaced. The first was performance, with users complaining that delays in opening new windows, switching between applications, etc were a distraction. This was true even on the MacBook Pros with 4GB of memory, 2.4/5 GHz dual core processors and high end graphics cards. The second issue was the user experience delivered by hybrid environment itself. Mixing two UI conventions is simply not as smooth and productive as one or the other used alone. Sure you get used to differences in key mappings, special keys, and the way in which minimising, maximising and closing windows works as you flit between apps, and it even becomes subconscious after a while, but it is far from ideal.

The end result is that users found it much more convenient to run Windows in full screen mode for core business activities, though even then some complained (particularly those who do a lot of task switching) that performance was not as good and the experience not as smooth as their old Windows machines. When we realised that as a result of the above, most of us were spending 90% of our time in Windows because everything just hung together and worked together better that way, we called the pilot to a halt.

The whole experience can be summed up with the feedback from one of the users involved in the pilot who just happens to be a level-headed woman with no interest in gadgets, image, etc—"I would say Macs are just different, not better, but either way, I am really glad to have my old [Vista] machine back as I can get things done twice as quickly with that and with no distractions. Everything works together properly again".

So given our experiences, would I recommend against using Macs in a mainstream business environment? Well no, but I would urge anyone considering a switch to do their homework, and be honest about their dependency on Windows applications. For productivity applications in particular, the truth is there is nothing on the Mac that even comes close to Office 2007, especially if you are an Exchange shop and make full use of Outlook, or do anything beyond basic word processing (formatted documents, macros, fancy presentations, etc) and need to exchange documents with non-Mac users. This is not just about how comprehensive or mature the applications are; it is also about harmony with the rest of the Windows/Office using business world.

The other piece of advice is to do as we did and run a pilot with real users and assess the pros and cons, beyond the initial novelty phase (in which users are invariably enthusiastic), through a period of extended use. I think the trouble with listening to some converts is having committed themselves to the switch then raved about how great things are in the honeymoon period, they tend to downplay many of the compromises they learn to live with over time. When setting up pilots in larger environments, it will also be important to look at systems administration, monitoring and support, something we didn‟t spend a lot of time on in our little experiment.

As a final note, it is probably worth me saying that the techie in me still loves OS X for its fundamental superiority as OS over Windows, and while SP1 has now made Vista fit for purpose, I still regard it as an over-engineered and overly complicated platform in general. None of that matters, however, if you look at a potential switch from a user and business benefit perspective in the context of your environment. For some I am sure a move to Mac will be right, but based on our own experiences, I doubt it will make sense for most businesses at the moment if the decision is taken in an objective and informed manner.

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By: Priya Mistry, PR account executive, Context Public Relations Posted: 3rd October 2008 Copyright Context Public Relations © 2008

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Google Adwords; everyone's doing it—or at least they should be as it's a quick and easy way to advertise and effectively reach a wide audience. With Google being the online experience for most web users and the method most people use to gather information about a product or service, an Adwords ad can position your business as a prominent player in your field—making it a very powerful advertising tool.

To create an Adwords ad you simply choose the keywords that will trigger your ad and specify the amount you're willing to pay per click. Your ad will appear in Google under the ‘sponsored links' section, and the beauty is, apart from paying a nominal activation fee, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Sounds straightforward enough? In theory yes, but in practice, making the most effective Adwords ad needs to be carefully thought out if your investment isn't to be wasted.

So, how do you know if you're getting it right?

These are my top tips to unlocking Google Adwords. By following these basics you can make the most of your online advertising budget by getting your Adwords to work as hard for you as possible.

Keyword Selection
Be selective about keywords. Don't go for generic keywords that will bring heavy traffic, aim for keywords that will convert. For example, instead of 'toys', use 'wooden toys'. Ensure the keyword links to a relevant page and not just the website homepage—users are impatient and don't want to have to work too much to find what they want.

Ad Groups
Create individual ads for each keyword, and ensure they each link to a relevant page. This will increase quality score (which in turn reduces costs) and 'click through'. Relevant landing pages will increase conversions.

Geo targeting
If your target market is local, Adwords allows you to specify regions that can see your Ad. If, for example, you're a wedding photographer than only works within a 10-mile radius, there is little point showing your ad to people the other end of the country.

Review the competition
Look at your competitors ads—what makes you stand out against their selling point? Do they show pricing within their ad? If so, are your prices more competitive? A more appealing ad will get more clicks, and the more successful the ad, the higher up the Google page it will show (without having to pay through the nose!).

Effective matching options
Using an exact match on keywords ensures that you're only bidding on that individual search. This has the benefit of increasing your CTR (click through rate), which in turn reduces the cost per click—the higher the CTR, the less you are likely to pay for that keyword.

The negative aspect of using an exact match is that you are likely to only receive a low amount of clicks, and you will be targeting a very specific audience. Therefore, it's worth adding phrase and broadmatch versions of your exact match keywords, and also adding negative keywords and phrases to filter out unrelated searches.

Budgeting
When starting out it's important to start with a low daily budget to ensure you're bidding on the right keywords at a price that is profitable for you. It will take a little time to filter out the irrelevant searches you need to add negative keywords for, so you want to do this without losing too much. Gradually increase your budget once you see a positive ROI.

Effective Ad Text
An effective ad describes what you can offer and why a visitor should click your ad. Including the search term within the ad will increase your quality score, whilst also highlighting the term in bold—which helps grab attention to your ad. Call to actions such as browse, buy or sign up also tell the user what they can expect to find if they click through to you. Larger campaigns can make use of dynamic keyword insertion—though this should be used with caution.

Conversion tracking
It's all very well identifying keywords that are low cost, high traffic—but what if none of them convert? Some keywords might only generate a handful of clicks each day, but it could be those keywords generating 90% of the sales/leads. Conversion tracking allows you to see which keywords are actually generating sales, and which are only generating traffic. This data is enormously valuable both short-term and long-term and will also help you understand your visitors better.

The process of creating an Adwords ad itself is really very simple, but just putting a little extra thought into its content and positioning will help ensure you maximize your ad's potential. Get the formula right and your Adwords can turn Internet surfers into potential customers for your business.

by Lee Bailey, from online marketing specialist Maxafi

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd October 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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InterSystems has just announced InterSystems DeepSee, which represents an interesting and rather different approach to operational business intelligence.

Put simply, DeepSee provides a development environment for embedding real-time business intelligence into operational applications without the need for a data warehouse or any other form of extraneous data store. That is, you take live data from your transactional system and perform relevant analytics on it directly without needing to store it somewhere else first, though you can pull in historic data from a warehouse if you want to. To put this another way, developers can build BI directly into transactional applications as they build them rather than them being, essentially, two separate things.

That said, DeepSee is not a stand-alone capability as it is built on top of InterSystems Caché (which is a combined database and development environment) and InterSystems Ensemble (an integration platform) and is designed to run in conjunction with those environments. But if you don't happen to be an InterSystems customer or partner don't stop reading just yet, because this may be a sign of things to come.

There are four key DeepSee capabilities: connections for accessing third party applications, databases and data warehouses; DeepSee Designer for creating dashboards and for extending operational applications with BI results; DeepSee Analyzer, which is employed by business users who understand those applications to explore and display relevant data; and the DeepSee Architect, which is used to define your data model. This is implemented on top of the existing Caché data model without requiring changes to the latter, though you may wish to define additional (bit mapped) indexes. This step would also include defining relevant dimensions (for those of you who don't know, Caché has built-in multi-dimensional capability), measures, aggregations, meaningful names and so on. I should also mention that DeepSee leverages the Ensemble rules engine as a part of your business processes.

Now, it is probable that a significant number of readers have not heard of InterSystems. Indeed, because it drives most of its revenues through its partners it is even possible that you are an InterSystems user without knowing it. Anyway, some background may be useful and, briefly, the company is 30 years old, it has annual revenues in excess of $250m, has offices in 22 countries, has installations in more than 90, and has in excess of 1,300 partners. In short, InterSystems is a significant player.

Which raises an interesting question: if InterSystems is successful with DeepSee (and there is already significant interest in it from the company's partners) then will other companies with a similar go-to-market model such as Progress and IBM (Informix) take a similar approach? Of course, they don't have the multi-dimensional capabilities of Caché so it would probably take a bit more work but no doubt they could think of something.

I have to say I like the idea of this approach. Why are applications, business processes and business intelligence all separate things (albeit linked through web services) when they could be one thing? There seem obvious advantages to this latter approach and that is exactly what DeepSee offers.

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd October 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The Agile Business Conference—held in Docklands' Excel this year—seemed well attended. Perhaps this was because Leith's serves up a decent conference buffet menu (it was quite good) but more likely, I think, because "integrating IT into the business" really is coming onto the agenda. This is a disruptive change and the people issues involved will be at least as important as the technolgy issues, probably more so.

Conference attendance is a useful "hype curve" indicator. People come to conferences when they think something will be very important but it hasn't got beyond innovators and early adopters yet (that is, it's at the top of the hype curve), so impartial information gathering is all-important. And you want to meet people from where you want to be, not from where you are now.

Once something becomes mainstream, conference attendance falls off, as serious players increasingly take on people with experience of the new order and simply get competing vendors to line-up their technical evangelists for assessment.

The sponsors at Agile Business included Lamri, a process improvement company - but tools vendor Accurev was also there, positioning its SCM tool as part of business process management. And the DSDM Consortium, which is all about managing development process to support Agile Business, is the organiser of the show. Obviously, Agility comes from having (the right sort of) disciplined process—it may be counter-intuitive, but it is much easier to take risks if you're in control of, and can measure risk—but it is good to see tools vendors seeing they are part of the Agile business message, not just something to do with Agile technology.

Talking of tools vendors with a grip on process and Agility, Pete Morowski (Senior Vice President Products at Borland Software) gave a fascinating keynote on "Driving Agile Transformation from the top". This emphasised that Agile practices relate to business outcomes—Agility isn't a religious thing, if some people are achieving the desired business outcomes using less Agile methods, don't worry about it. You really don't have to be "100% Agile" just for the sake of it.

Morowski's message is that informed buy-in at all levels is important; but that Agile transformation must be driven from the top (but without micro-management). Key lessons he identified for executives included:

• Requirements matter. Plan by business features delivered (business requirements), not by development tasks—and business features are easy to prioritise with the business;
• Change is an advantage—it's part of the process not an exception condition—and allowing the progressive addition of detail helps you to get it right;
• Understand the implications of IT development outside of the IT development team; Agile is a disruptive force, it'll even change your seating plans.

In summary: "Agile" doesn't mean undisciplined; commitment between team members is powerful; transparency and visibility lead to trust and empowerment; leaders need to respect process and promote a culture of continuous improvement.

There was some "off the wall" stuff too Most interesting to me was Gary Purser of facilitate4change because he talked about the people implications of managing Agile change in terms of Systems Theory, something I think may be key to understanding the dynamics of Agile organisations undergoing change.

Systems aren't static; they exist in dynamic equilibrium; everything can change but the state, the business outcome, is dynamically stable—up until when you prod it too hard and it changes to another stable state (which may not necessarily represent the outcome you expected). And there's another Systems effect for organisations managing Agile change to be aware of—you can move a system to an unstable state by applying effort to overcome inertia. Then, once the pressure is off (management takes its eye off the ball) everything slips back to its initial state. It is important to keep the pressure up—via mentoring, perhaps, and continuous improvement—to institutionalise changes, until you can bring the organisation to a new state of dynamic stability for a little while. Once you've achieved change, the job is just starting!

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By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 1st October 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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This is the third in a series of articles I shall be producing based on a major piece of research being undertaken by Bloor Research on the BPMS market. My thanks go to Matt Durham, VP for Market Development and Phani Pandrangi, Director of Product Management (BPM).

It is just over one year (July 2007) since Software AG and webMethods announced their merger, the objective of which according to Ivo Totev, Chief Marketing Officer of Software AG was, “to create the world’s largest independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software.” So what has happened in the last year in terms of the combined company’s BPMS strategy?

The strategy outlined in 2007 for BPMS was based around the webMethods BPMS product suite, with webMethods BPMS becoming the brand name. Durham explained that Software AG saw BPMS as software that needed a combination of capabilities. He talked about what he termed the “3 Big Chunks”; namely process management that spanned from process modelling to runtime execution, application development that was codeless and rapid as well as exploiting Web 2.0 standards, and lastly real-time business process monitoring that provides process analytics. Customers include:, TD Banknorth, Cox Communications and Fonterra.

webMethods BPMS consists of the following components:

• Designer: an Eclipse-based development platform that supports process modelling, debugging, simulation, process development, form building and composite application development.
• Fair Isaac Blaze: Business rules development and runtime engine. This has been seamlessly integrated into the product set.
• Library Server: this is a semantic metadata library that is used to capture and store metadata about assets that are developed, thus supporting reuse and dependency analysis of business objects.
• Integration Server: the runtime process engine and system integration environment.
• My webMethods Server: the composite application runtime environment that is AJAX-enabled supporting JSR and WSRP standards.
• Optimize: the business activity monitoring (BAM) capability . It is also available separately and being applied to other areas (a customised version for SAP is already available).

Figure 1: webMethods BPMS Architecture (Source: Software AG)

When I asked Software AG to explain what their differentials to their competitors were, Pandrangi stated that they saw them as:

• “Measure First Option”: this is geared at helping organisations get started by allowing them to analyze the current process (as opposed to modelling) prior to doing significant amounts of orchestration and then use Optimize to identify where the issues are. From a user perspective this is a great way to get started, and Software AG have the toolset to support this concept.
• “There is only one centric—process centric”: the claim is that webMethods BPM provides a single platform to support any type of business process. This claim is well supported with the support for workflow, simple and complex routing, plus the suites support for document management as well as integration and SOA.
• Support for multiple stakeholders: here the claim is for the suite to be able to be used by all personnel in an organization involved in a business process from Business Executive and Process Worker through Business Analyst to IT Developer. The support for this claim can be seen in the support of a single process model for all users based on the BPMN standard and the big plus the semantic metadata repository.
• “Share Control, Don’t Lose Control”: this is all about getting the right balance between giving control of the business processes to the business users who use them, whilst maintaining IT’s need to control the implementation on the physical environment. Once again the support of a single process model is used to support this claim alongside the use of the meta-model repository to control and share assets, as well as its importance in the implementation of governance.
• “Leverage, Integrate, and Innovate”: this claim is about the position of Software AG as a company supplying integration and SOA software. Software AG has 4000 customers.

Bloor sees that the claims made by Software AG can be supported. Of course, some of these are subject to the usual rider of being in the eye of the beholder. The key to Software AG’s BPM strategy is the ability to work with other parts of the product suite to provide not only support for BPM but also SOA and Governance.

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By: Priya Mistry, PR account executive, Context Public Relations Posted: 1st October 2008 Copyright Context Public Relations © 2008

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Whoever invented the expression "talk is cheap" obviously didn't have to pay his company's mobile phone bill. Mobile handsets have become the primary phone for many business users, even when they're in the office.

The sheer convenience of a single, roaming device makes the mobile phone the preferred choice for many, especially when that device includes essential business features such as address books, calendars, to-do lists, and email and web clients.

But few business mobile users think closely about the cost implications of all that convenience and accessibility. According to the telecoms consultancy Analysys, around 80% of corporate telephony spending now goes on calls made to or by mobiles.

In-country mobile-to-office and office-to-mobile calls are a pain point for business, and international mobile roaming and interconnection charges are worse still. Even though a May 2007 EU agreement capped the price of a mobile call while abroad at €0.49 per minute, and incoming calls at €0.24 per minute, mobile costs remain high.

So while few companies want to scale back the use of mobiles, the majority are actively seeking ways to slash the running costs of their mobile fleets. Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) via Skype offers a way to do just that.

Device definitions
Before going further, let me define what I mean by FMC. There are a number of different definitions of the term, using competing approaches and different technologies. Here, I am defining FMC as a solution to the simple business problem of how to curb mobile phone costs, using readily available solutions that can be cost-effectively and seamlessly integrated into a company's communication infrastructure. The key components for this flexible and easy to deploy FMC solution include Skype-enabled mobile handsets equipped with mobile broadband (EDGE, 3G, WiFi, etc...), and PBX-to-Skype application gateways that link the office PBX to Skype—the World's largest VoIP network.

Using PBX-to-Skype application gateways within the office already enables business users to take advantage of VoIP benefits—low international call costs, enhanced inter-office comms—without having to replace their existing investments in PBX equipment. What's more, it does this for a low one-time upgrade cost.

And now, with increased uptake of Windows smart phones and devices, the benefits of connecting over VoIP can extend to mobile users too, to make a profound impact on the biggest proportion of business comms charges.

Bridging the mobile gap
So how does this work? How does a business link its mobiles and its office telephony via VoIP to gain the benefits?

First, the business deploys a PBX-to-Skype application gateway at its offices. This adds up to 8 Skype lines to the company's existing PBX that can be picked up and transferred between extensions like an ordinary call. The gateway also centralises Skype provisioning and management, giving IT managers full control over use and eliminating the need to install Skype on each PC.

The mobile device can be any smart phone that can run the Skype Mobile client (such as the latest BlackBerrys, the Nokia N95, or phones that run Windows Mobile etc).

With the Skype client installed on the mobile, the user's Skype account can be managed centrally by the business IT team, and call preferences set up via the gateway to give alternate routing to the mobile user's Skype account. The Skype call is placed to the mobile via 3G, and even when 3G services are not available, the mobile call can be done via SkypeOut from as little as 2 cents a minute—in any case cutting over 80% of the cost from the mobile call, whether the call is domestic or international.

Proof in practice
Let's take a look at some specific examples of how this FMC solution works to deliver cost savings, and productivity gains in real-life scenarios.

Example #1: using a BlackBerry on a US GSM Network with Skype Mobile Client. The user can make Skype calls from the BlackBerry to his gateway-equipped UK office in the morning, and calls to his gateway-equipped office in Asia in the evening. The user will not incur any international charges for the Skype calls to the UK or Asia locations since these calls are treated as normal domestic calls that are part of the user's monthly voice/data plan (typically £40 per month for AT&T Voice/Blackberry plan). Yet for a UK Vodafone mobile customer using an ordinary mobile phone, these calls would be 30p–90p per minute.

Example #2: saving on international roaming charges using a Windows Mobile smartphone, with Skype Mobile Client over 3G. The user can make and receive Skype calls to and from gateway-equipped US and UK offices while traveling in Asia. With the Skype-enabled FMC solution, the call is again part of the user's 3G data plan. With a conventional mobile call, typical UK international roaming charges range from 33p up to 149p per minute.

Example #3: using a Skype 3 Phone to make and receive Skype calls to and from gateway-equipped US and UK offices while traveling internationally. In this case, the Skype calls are free as part of the phone package, again comparing well with typical UK international roaming charges range from 33p up to 149p per minute.

Moving to Mobile 2.0
So implementing the Skype FMC solution is easy, and management of the solution is under full control of your IT team. This ensures accountability and user compliance when using the system, as the team can set up speed-dials and alternate routing to maximise use of the solution, and cost savings too.

It also has the key advantage of being easy to set up, as it requires no changes to a company's existing PBX equipment, office phones or computers. All it needs is the right type of smart phone.

FMC presents an easy win to the cost-conscious business, by enabling them to slash mobile costs, and to keep those costs low. But it also gives businesses a pathway to truly converged, flexible communications, using IP as the conduit—what some people would describe as Mobile 2.0. The good news is that FMC is available today, and businesses can painlessly and cost-effectively deploy it to reap the benefits.

And perhaps giving business people the freedom to roam, and talk for free while roaming, will be the killer Mobile 2.0 application?

David Tang
http://www.vosky.com/

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By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 30th September 2008 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2008

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Citrix Systems has announced Citrix XenServer 5, the latest version of its server virtualization product line that is powered by the Xen hypervisor, and a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, a comprehensive datacenter-to-desktop system that targets organizations wishing to transform their traditional static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers.” This latest offering adds 100+ virtualization management features including what the company states utilizes the industry’s most advanced High Availability, auto-restart, failover, and disaster recovery technologies that can be upgraded to full fault tolerance for the most mission-critical applications. This is achieved in part by XenServer’s distributed management architecture, support for replication and remote mirroring architectures, and built-in replication for virtual machine metadata information to provide easy and reliable virtual machine and application recovery for site failure scenarios. According to Citrix, XenServer 5 is the first server virtualization platform to be validated for both AMD and Intel 32-bit and 64-bit systems through Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validated Program, which validates vendor’s virtualization software to run Windows Server 2008 and previous versions.

XenServer 5 features an open architecture that helps organizations leverage their existing storage and datacenter management investments. The open storage APIs allow organizations to access directly from within the XenServer management console advanced functions such as snapshotting, cloning, replication, de-duplication and provisioning in storage systems from vendors including EqualLogic and NetApp. The XenServer 5 management console supports most storage environments including NAS, DAS, and SAN implemented through fiber channel and iSCSI as well as support for 8GB HBAs from QLogic and Emulex.

XenServer 5 includes new configuration wizards, intuitive interfaces, and easy point-and-click conversion of physical servers into virtual machines. New enhancements include a Web 2.0-style tagging and searching capability which allows IT professionals to track and locate virtual machines through powerful searching and sorting capabilities based on application type, QoS requirements, department, cost center, location, etc. There are also enhanced performance monitoring, reporting, and alerting dashboards that assist IT professionals through realtime and historical views of virtual machines and physical host performance.

Pricing and Availability
Citrix XenServer 5 is available immediately through Citrix’s worldwide network of Solutions Advisors and channel partners. XenServer 5 pricing begins with a SRP of $900/server, and there are no additional CPU or socket fees. Pricing includes XenCenter management technologies and a one-year Citrix Subscription Advantage membership. XenServer Express, a production-ready, single-server version of XenServer with unlimited virtual machine and memory support capabilities, is also available for free download at www.citrix.com.

Net/Net
This announcement is interesting as it represents more than just the latest version of a virtualization offering; it illustrates the potential for transforming application delivery environment that we posited last year when Citrix acquired XenSource. With XenServer 5, Citrix has signaled its desire to achieve a more strategic position in its customers’ datacenters by delivering a solution that potentially will allow organizations to fundamentally transform how they view their datacenters. Despite the considerable marketplace infatuation with virtualization, for the most part it remains viewed in a rather narrow fashion focused on simply reducing the number of servers supporting an organization’s workloads. Although the stereotype has progressed beyond that of generic white-box x86 servers running Linux, the reality is that most organizations are barely making their first steps towards a strategic virtualization path, one that would transform legacy data centers from static bastions of siloed applications and information into a dynamic, flexible, and much simpler application delivery infrastructure.

The acquisition of XenSource by Citrix was much more than a land grab for ownership of the virtualization hypervisor. The combination of Citrix’s existing technology and the virtualization potential of XenSource broadens virtualization beyond the relatively simple task of server consolidation to include a much more holistic view of network application delivery and its associated impact on storage, networking, and client consumption devices. In effect, Citrix is offering a new view of the future datacenter. This new view is one in which most all physical aspects of servers, applications, and network functions are largely transcended by a virtual service bureau through which needed IT resources are delivered to users largely without concern as to their physical or even virtual location within the infrastructure. The operational distinction between a physical server and a virtual one has increasingly become cosmetic and there are few reasons why IT professionals who are tasked with application and information delivery should even be concerned.

By building upon its existing live migration resource pooling and workload provisioning capabilities Citrix is seeking to transform assumptions about how datacenters are configured, deployed, and managed. This completely virtual view is one that will potentially yield benefits with respect to space requirements, cooling, energy efficiency, and the requisite IT personnel. The ability of the XenServer Management Console to directly interact with the common storage environments permits organizations to continue using existing data center tools and skill sets just as they have with physical servers. Hence, sophisticated storage technologies should be as easy to access from either physical or virtual servers, without mandating two skill sets to support it. Further, XenServer 5’s workload provisioning makes it possible for administrators to boot servers and deliver multiple workloads from a single image to target servers, even servers that lack any local storage or hypervisor. This could be of considerable interest to power constrained data centers or those who are investing in highly consolidated blade-centric server solutions. These storage centric capabilities illustrate how Citrix is looking to provide much more than simple server virtualization in addition to its application delivery technologies.

While this latest release of XenServer will not change its customer’s datacenters overnight, it does offer a data center strategy that seeks to remove most dependencies on physical IT attributes and shifts the focus onto applications and information. This increased abstraction of physical elements from applications is well positioned to assist organizations in their quest to deliver dynamic applications to increasing numbers of local and remote users while simultaneously improving the efficiency and cost effectiveness of IT investments. Although there is still much work to be done, the scope of virtualization and application delivery finesse being offered by Citrix places the company in a leading, if not unique, position in the marketplace that bodes well for the company, and more importantly, its customers.

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 30th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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A chance to talk with Danny Sabbah (General Manager, Rational Software) at the London Rational Software Developers Conference (RSDC) is not to be missed—but more of that anon.

First, I was impressed at the conference by the sense of "life" in Rational these days—well, in the Rational brand as a whole—with acquisitions like Telelogic and BuildForge, Rational has come a long way from the 400 employee Rational around 1993/94 (pre-IBM). I think IBM's Rational brand may be about to surprise us with its agility—rumour has it that the next version of RUP (Rational Unified Process), for example, will be based on OUP (Open Unified Process). OUP isn't a cut-down RUP but a rethink on RUP, by some of its original architects, to provide something more open and lower-ceremony—more Agile. Not before time, in my opinion, as having a vendor's brand on what should be a universal, intellectually-rigorous and abstracted process behind a tool vendor implementation seems all wrong to me (see my article here).

Jazz itself really impresses me—and Sabbah seems to have a strong roadmap vision for it. I've heard people claim that Team Concert (the first Jazz tool released) is currently a bit lacking in "heavy-lifting" capabilities compared to more established tools such as ClearCase but that's not really the point. If other non-IBM tool vendors find that they can't easily deploy on the Jazz platform, that would be a serious issue, of course—it's Jazz the platform that's important—but Team Concert's light "just enough ceremony" approach is different to that of more established tools and that may be important in itself.

Jazz already uses OUP, not RUP; and BPMI modelling instead of UML (much easier for some developers, and end users, to get into); just a couple of signs that Jazz is a ground-up revisit of the developer tool environment.

According to Sabbah, he's seeing "viral" adoption of Jazz, even though the enterprise edition won't be available until next year (and he looks at emerging scalability from two points of view: the number of projects/users it can support; and also the number of different tools it can support). Sabbah really doesn't see the Eclipse-style Open Source model as at all appropriate for Jazz, which is a globally deployable web-centric infrastructure, not just a desktop-oriented framework, but he does see Jazz as an open platform supporting many non-IBM tools (using Jazz the other way round, as a "service" for other frameworks, would be harder, he admits).

Interestingly, Sabbah says that the Telelogic people that IBM acquired are adopting Jazz enthusiastically as an enabler for their own ideas about a web-centric architecture for developer tools, which they bought with them to IBM.

Sabbah seems very aware of the need to keep the 80% of his customers who aren't into "pretty awesome new stuff" happy while not blocking them off from moving to the new ideas in their own time. This seems to be a pretty mature approach, to me—although it might make IBM look staid compared to small start-ups without legacy customers to support.

I did ask Sabbah about offering governance for end-user business mashups and he seemed to say that this was on the Jazz roadmap although it wasn't being pushed explicitly yet. I think that some form of (transparent) configuration management, at the least, around Business Mashups is essential if we are to avoid replaying the end-user spreadsheet chaos of the 1990s. However, we have a little time as I don't see widespread adoption of business mashups for anything "mission-critical" yet (but remember that the widespread adoption of spreadsheets for mission-critical stuff rather crept up on the IT department from nowhere in the 1990s).

Serena (by no means small start-up but nothing like as big as IBM Rational) seems to be taking the lead here but, while Sabbah is concentrating on the 80% plus who (for the moment) have no intention of using something as potentially uncontrolled as "web 2.0" business mashups for anything important, Serena seems to be targeting the top slice of innovators and early adopters. And, by the way, after a period of stressing innovation over governance, I'm glad to see Serena's Business Mashups website now stresses its undoubted governance capabilities too. We shall have to see which approach to delivering industrial-strength end user computing works better in the long term.

Finally, I had a "user experience" thing with Second Life at RSDC. Grady Booch was present in Avatar form—and, frankly, I wouldn't want to share the stage with an avatar (even if it does have a smart "sergeant major stance", shoulders back, chest out, as Avatar Grady did. Grady lost connection at one point, which rather spoiled the build-up to Erich Gamma's keynote, and we wasted a fair bit of time watching an avatar in confusion, looking for its life-support system. As Sabbah admitted afterwards, Second Life isn't capable of supporting a sustainable collaborative development environment—yet…

Nevertheless, I think it will in the not-too-distant future (although face to face meetings will always be an important part of building trust relationships maintained in Cyberspace, I think). Just like the use of end-user business mashups for integrating IT into the business, virtual collaboration is nowhere near mainstream yet—but it is something that companies should be aware of and allow for in long-term strategic planning.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 29th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Oracle has just announced the Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine as its answer to the likes of Netezza and other appliance vendors. The project went under the codename of Sage and, while Oracle didn’t tell me more than that, I am guessing that this actually relates to the Marvel character of the same name, pictured right, a member of the X-Men and X-treme X-Men. She is described on the official Marvel site as “a mutant who possesses a cyberpathic mind that functions like a computer with unlimited storage capacity. Sage is able to record and analyze vast amounts of data… and can also calculate complex statistics in mere seconds… like a computer, Sage is able to perform multiple tasks at once by allocating a partition of her brain to each task.”

Anyway, down to the serious stuff. Briefly, the Database Machine is the data warehouse offering and the Exadata Storage Server provides massively parallel capabilities that back-end onto your conventional Oracle database to enable the Database Machine. What happens is that when a query is processed, data is read from disk, unwanted rows and columns are filtered out by the Storage Server and the remaining data is passed to the database for processing. This will provide significantly better performance for queries where you retrieve a lot of extraneous data from disk but will have less impact where that is not the case.

Oracle is claiming up to 10x performance benefits and this seems reasonable. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Oracle will be able to compete effectively with other products. Take a query where you need a full table scan and suppose that that table has 1 million rows each consisting of 60 columns and suppose that you only need to retrieve data from 3 of those columns. Then a column-based database such as Sybase IQ or Vertica only reads those 3 columns so it has 20x less work to do than Oracle. And that doesn’t mean that Oracle will be only half as slow (assuming 10x performance enhancement) because the filtering process (unnecessary if using columns) is still required.

To take another example, Netezza doesn’t just filter the data close to the disk but processes it there too—it is only collation that is done centrally—so you would still expect appliance vendors to outperform the HP Oracle Database Machine.

The margin of performance benefit from appliance vendors will be reduced in some instances but you also have to consider the impact of the Oracle environment as a whole. The key to getting good performance out of Oracle is defined indexes, materialised views and so on. It is when you have unplanned queries or complex analytics where no such structures have been defined that you can run into a performance black hole when using Oracle and which appliance vendors are particularly good at. You may get some benefits from using the Database Machine in these environments but I expect them to pale in comparison to what the appliances offer.

It is noteworthy that no benchmarks have been presented by Oracle in terms of performance: I suspect that this is because, while it is much better than it was before, it still can’t compete across the board with all the new boys on the block. It could probably have put out good benchmarks against IBM and Microsoft but everybody would have spotted the absence of Greenplum, Netezza, ParAccel and the rest, so it wouldn’t have worked as a marketing tool.

Also worth bearing in mind is that while the database may have been pre-installed it will still require administration, and Oracle doesn’t have a reputation as the database requiring the most DBA attention for nothing. If you think that low/minimal administration is a feature of an appliance then this isn’t it.

Leaving that aside, this is certainly a significant step forward but it isn’t ground-breaking. It will encourage existing Oracle shops but I would recommend a proof of concept. In addition, I expect it to hurt IBM and Microsoft (because Oracle should now have clear performance advantages over these vendors in appropriate situations) more than it does the specialist data warehousing vendors. The latter may suffer where it is a close call between staying with Oracle or going elsewhere, but otherwise the appliance and column-based suppliers should still be able to beat Oracle hands down, at least where performance is a major issue.

Which only leaves one question: if the data warehouse is Sage who does that make Larry? Dr Xavier or Magneto?

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By: Gerry Brown, Associate Analyst - BI and CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 26th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The ad:tech conference and exhibition is ‘the event for interactive marketers' according to the show guide. ‘Interactive marketers' in essence means the young, ambitious advertising agency types, who came in their droves.

I have never seen such a long queue to get into an exhibition. It snaked virtually the whole length of the Olympia exhibition centre—maybe 100m long with 250 people in the queue. And this was the ‘pre-registered fast track'! Dot-com boom times must be here again. Interactive marketing must be hot.

Maybe it was the aggressive promotional campaign that accompanied the show that got the people there—I was "pushed" at least 10 email and text reminder messages leading up to the show. Ironically this is the opposite of what good digital marketing is, which is all about listening to, and being "pulled" by customer needs, and giving them what they want.

In the exhibition hall it was bedlam. People everywhere with noisy presentations and music bellowing from every angle (I must be getting old… ). Eye candy cavorted seductively—the blondes with short skirts from White Label Dating and dotMailer were on every red-blooded man's ‘must see' list. For the ladies there were Roman soldiers (visualise Russell Crowe in the film Gladiator) and American Football players in helmets and padding. Well—this is the advertising industry I suppose.

Many were at ad:tech to catch the free vendor seminar presentations on Online Marketing / Ad networks, Email Marketing / Video, Search / Web Analytics, Social Media / Targeting, and Mobile Marketing. The ardour for attending these subsided as the day went on as audiences tired of these 30 minute races to impress listeners and gather up business cards. Maybe the really good stuff was reserved for the pay-for conference.

An interactive marketer for an online retailer (who should therefore know what he is talking about) commented to me "the show is confusing isn't it? I am definitely the target audience and I don't know what to look for and who to talk to". So true. All the stands were jumbled up rather than being clustered by category, so it was difficult to work out who did what.

But mostly both the vendors and the attendees were happy. Lots of buzz, and lots of good quality punters. At last year's show many bosses sent their junior executives to find out what digital marketing was all about. This year they came themselves, and seemed to be talking with vendors on the stands, rather than just slipping in and out of educational seminars.

The digital marketing space is very exciting and offers lots of opportunities for end customers and advertising agencies. Digital marketing allows all companies the ability to identify, target and track potential customers on the Internet, so they can offer their products and services in a personalised, relevant, and timely manner. In other words, the promise is of better sales engagement and customer experience, especially on company web sites. And measurable too.

Every single company needs to improve in the digital marketing area, so I forecast lots of market growth as marketing budgets are switched out of traditional print adverting and into digital marketing. The vendors' own marketing and messaging also needs to improve, especially in terms of selling customer solutions rather than undifferentiated products and services.

The best-of-breed category champions will emerge and market consolidation will start to take place over the next couple of years. The big players such as Microsoft, Google and AOL will undoubtedly make more acquisitions (they are already well represented in this market, albeit through some non-branded acquisitions). Google has thrown down the gauntlet and made advertising a key strategic battleground for software vendors and media companies alike.

Lou Gerstner once likened new dot-com companies to "fireflies before the storm". This statement has resonance with the latent emergence of the big players in the digital marketing arena. ‘The best is yet to come' in other words.

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By: Michael Warrilow, Director, Hydrasight Posted: 25th September 2008 Copyright Hydrasight © 2008

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Hydrasight research, conducted in early 2008, showed generally low levels of adoption and maturity for information leakage prevention (ILP) in Australia and New Zealand. Moreover, we note that any planned adoption of ILP is expected to leverage built-in functionality within existing technology infrastructure (e.g., email).

Hydrasight research also highlights several key characteristics in regard to the current state of ILP within Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ). Namely:

• Adoption: Limited adoption is planned for specific/further ILP technology in 2008+. This finding is consistent with previous Hydrasight research. On average, slightly more than half of the respondents either did not know or had no plans to adopt technologies associated with ILP.
• Maturity: While most respondents considered their (self-assessed) level of ILP maturity to be low, they did indicate moderate levels of importance for the topic when prompted. Given the limited adoption plans highlighted above, this suggests that maturity will remain low through at least 2010.
• Implementation: While the activation of in-built ILP functionality is somewhat common (e.g., 47% filtering outgoing email, assumedly based on keywords or regular expressions), the adoption rate for installing client-side ILP software agents is low.
• Vendor support: We note that the market across Asia Pacific is influenced, and impacted, by the maturity and status of ILP vendors—many of whom are relatively young companies without extensive/complete geographic coverage and/or comprehensive ILP solutions.
• Drivers: Few, if any, formal legislative / regulatory requirements currently mandate the disclosure of unauthorised use / modification / disclosure of sensitive data-either commercial or personal-within A/NZ. In contrast to the USA, A/NZ organisations tend to operate in a more punitive compliance environment. In other words, this environment lacks a strong, broadly-applicable regulatory/legislative driver to mandate further adoption of information leakage prevention. We do however note significant increase in hype within Australia surrounding revised/amended electronic privacy legislation. Furthermore, the low adoption rates for ILP in A/NZ indicate that business risks are, in general, not considered sufficiently compelling enough to drive adoption without further regulatory/legislative triggers.

We note that organisations recognise that further attention to ILP will be required in order to prevent common (electronic) causes of information leakage. While Hydrasight research shows that email filtering is the most widely-deployed ILP technology at present, 67% of respondents acknowledged that filtering email traffic affords insufficient protection against the leakage of sensitive data.

As the number of use cases for information access continues to expand, we believe the interest in ILP is only likely to increase. Nonetheless, Hydrasight notes that prior, cyclic interest in information leakage has rarely translated into significant technology spending. In most cases, a significant leakage event has been treated with a review of IT policies, enhanced communications and employee training programs rather than investment in technology. Hydrasight has therefore previously recommended that IT organisations continue to assess key environmental risks and business drivers so as to determine the appropriate technology investments related to information leakage. This advice remains unchanged in light of these survey results.

Hydrasight maintains that while ILP is an important business need, use of technology driven solutions must be targeted. As a result, we believe that adoption of ILP technology will remain highly selective and therefore largely immature within Australia and New Zealand through at least 2010.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 24th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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I recently wrote (see "IBM, BEP and CEP") about IBM's release of InfoSphere Streams. I reported that rather than referring to this as a complex event processing (CEP) product they are instead calling it a "stream computing engine used for CEP deployments". However, I did not discuss this further in that article because that piece was factual whereas here I intend to be fanciful.

The question is: why this distinction? If InfoSphere is "used for CEP deployments" then does that not imply that it might be used for other purposes? If so, what might these be?

Well, what is the product doing? Put simply, InfoSphere Streams is processing streams of data very quickly. Where else might you wish to do that where CEP is not the right solution? Now, there may be esoteric applications where this would be relevant but I can only think of one mainstream environment where this would be useful.

But before I go into that, it is pertinent to remind you that InfoSphere Streams is hardware agnostic. Now, in my previous article I referred to the fact that it might be deployed on IBM supercomputers for very large scale, low latency requirements. However, hardware agnosticism also means that it should be deployable on a low-end Intel processor or PowerPC, for example.

Which brings me to Netezza. Netezza is built around multiple parallel nodes processing data that is streamed off disk, and then the results are collated by the central database management system which, of course, also despatched the queries in the first place.

You see the similarity? If IBM was to implement InfoSphere Streams in parallel at the node level, and then link that to DB2 then you would have an MPP (massively parallel processing) version of DB2.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. Certainly they'd be a lot of work to do but Dataupia has already proved that you can deploy MPP-based architectures underneath DB2 (and Oracle and SQL Server) so it's not of the question?

Anyway, that's my little confabulation. I haven't put it to IBM because if they said it was true I'd be put under non-disclosure and if they denied it, it wouldn't mean anything. Time will tell.

And talking about time telling, it's shortly time for Larry's big data warehousing announcement that we've been waiting for since last August. My spy is lukewarm about it (but then he would be, given that he's at another data warehousing company) telling me that it is good for some types of queries but otherwise not spectacular.

But the big question is this: what does this announcement have to do with the X-Men? The answer, along with views on Oracle's announcement, will follow in due course.

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By: Simon Perry, Principal Associate Analyst - Sustainability, Quocirca Posted: 23rd September 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

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HP recently hosted its EMEA Analyst briefings in order to update Quocirca and other industry watchers on its current capabilities, and its current and future strategies. The message was pretty clear: that HP is placing a high importance on blade architecture for hardware; that it wishes to dominate the storage market; that it places a relatively high importance on a “green” message; and that it expects significant revenue to come from its “mainframe alternative” programme. Clearly the EDS acquisition is no small thing in terms of how it will shape the company’s path and modus operandi in the years ahead. However, next to nothing was given up on that topic—not for lack of probing—and it remained the unacknowledged elephant in the room.

Of all these topics, first amongst equals was the Mainframe Alternative Program, which HP went to significant effort to talk up. To ensure that there was no mistaking the level of importance HP is placing on the programme, it went as far as hosting the actual briefing sessions in Madrid so that all assembled could bask in the atmosphere of the mainframe alternative “Centre of Excellence”, which is located just outside the city. HP points to a proven and honed delivery methodology, executed through this centre, as being the reason for its successful conversion project track record. So perhaps it is fair to say that those staffing it deserve their day in the spotlight.

HP labels the programme as offering a low cost, “open” systems alternative to what the vendor labels IBM’s “closed” and “legacy” mainframe platform and claims a flawlessly delivered record of forty customer conversions in EMEA. Sometimes briefing sessions are an exercise in the “tell them enough times and they’ll eventually believe us” style of persuasion. Hence the emphasis here of the words “closed”, “legacy”, and “open”, as these labels were oft repeated. So much so that they deserve examination, for behind those labels everything isn’t necessarily all that it seems.

The main targets of the conversion efforts are IBM zOS and VSE-based workloads, though other vendors such as Unisys and Bull are also on the hit list. HP does have a point when it labels vendors such as Unisys and Bull as “legacy” and it would be a rare CIO who would argue that those vendors are committed to supporting a viable and innovative processor strategy. Meanwhile, since the demise of Amdahl and the withdrawal of Hitachi from the IBM clone market, it is true that IBM is the only stable in town for those wishing to run VSE or MVS derived operating systems. Whether that is a good thing or not for the average CIO is another matter; what is relevant here is that when HP uses the word “closed” in referring to IBM it really means “single vendor”.

The use of “closed” as a synonym for “single vendor” is an important one, because HP also describes it's mainframe swap-out programme as “unique”. It regards that uniqueness as a market differentiator that provides key competitive advantage over other open systems vendors. Therein lies the problem. You can’t have it both ways and label the choice of a single vendor as being closed in one breath, and open the next. CIOs who strip their jockeys off the horse supplied by the IBM stable and take them over to the unique vendor “open” alternative will quickly find themselves saddled to a similarly narrow field of hardware and software choices.

Of course, every IBM mainframe is also running a wide assortment of ISV software too and that will need to be swapped out for an “open systems” alternative. While Oracle and Microsoft get a look in as replacements for DB2, and Oracle/BEA’s Tuxedo is the HP recommendation for replacing CICS/IMS; HP software stands first in line for everything else. HP recommends HP software as the replacement for any Compuware, BMC, CA or other systems management software you might currently run, and backs that up with the expected price breaks.

The notable exception to that selection strategy will be an open systems alternative to IBM’s RACF, or CA’s ACF2 or TopSecret, because with the end-of-lifing of HP’s Openview Select Access product, HP doesn’t offer a host-based access control solution. Both the assembled set of HP Mainframe Alternative experts, and the reference customer who took us through his experiences, assured us that “open systems don’t need anything like RACF”. According to HP, none of the forty customers who have already swapped out their legacy mainframe for some new HP kit even asked for an alternative. In Quocirca’s opinion HP Hubris v1.0 should not be solely relied upon to be a functional equivalent of RACF or its ISV alternatives. In fact, there are a number of open system RACF alternatives that might be considered: CA’s Access Control product and Tivoli Access Manager For Operating Systems being the two closest contenders for equivalent functionality. There are others too, but at least considering those products gives the advantage of being able to compare like with like, given that you’ll be running either vendor’s security software already on your IBM mainframe. Quocirca recommends that security considerations be placed at the forefront of any mainframe workload migration consideration and proposed architecture.

Looking at the financial case for the move is also enlightening. HP uses a spreadsheet-based ROI calculator to support its claim that HP’s hardware and software costs will be substantially less than your current mainframe costs. Even factoring in the conversion costs themselves, ROI is claimed in the third year. If nothing else, these numbers are worth looking at and then waved in the direction of your mainframe ISV and HW provider to see if the wheels of negotiation are greased. But again, there is more to it than first meets the eye.

HP claims that almost all mainframe workload can be migrated to its platform. Easily and fully transportable workload includes off-the-shelf packages such as SAP, which is of course available on either platform. CICS or IMS transaction workloads move fairly easily to Tuxedo. In order to reduce end-user retraining efforts you can even retain the 3270 look and feel, including a recommended ISPF emulator. Batch can also be fairly easily moved to shell scripts, while JCL gets converted to a syntactically similar open systems alternative. COBOL is similarly supported these days on UNIX. The further you go down that stack though, the more difficult, expensive, time consuming and risky the conversion effort will become. Any undocumented COBOL programs will probably need to be scrapped and their functionality rewritten. That also applies to any Assembler programs you have today, none of which can be flipped to the new platform.

The HP alternative might indeed be cheaper then; if you can manage to actually decommission the mainframe completely that is. If you can’t, and you probably can’t unless all you run on your mainframe is a fully transportable workload, then you’re going to end up running both systems in parallel. Unfortunately one potential pesky side effect of having to run both the legacy mainframe and the new HP kit is that your energy bill, and therefore your data centre emissions, will go up. Indeed HP’s own calculator showed that such an outcome was indeed to be expected. It goes almost without saying that this is not a good strategy.

In short, the staff of HP’s Mainframe Alternative Centre of Excellence deserve an “A” for managing to deliver forty successful mainframe swap-outs. However the vendor gets a “D” for grammar due to its confused use of the word “open” in describing the benefits of the alternative. It also gets a “E+” for driving up a data centre’s energy usage. Lastly, it gets an off-the-scale “G” for its dismissive stance on security, mainly because the word “gobsmacked” comes to mind when thinking about it.

Migrating some of your current mainframe workload to the HP alternative may make sense for you, if for no other reason than to avoid an impending MIPS expansion by freeing up headroom through offloading some work. Some CIOs find themselves with mainframe skills shortages too. Although at an industry level, it is worth asking whether the scope of that problem is somewhat overstated by those with a vested interest. In a world of ever changing technology alternatives, Quocirca recommends that CIOs continue to measure the performance of the status quo. However, any potential changes should be given thorough consideration that goes beyond vendor positioning.

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