By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 1st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I've just had a hands-on demo of Huddle (which describes itself as an "enterprise content collaboration platform") with Jonathan Howell (its CTO) and James Pipe (one of its product managers, focused on mobile and desktop). As I've said before, there are limitations to this, as I'm not working on a real collaboration issue at my workplace, but I have used Huddle before (at the BCS) and I do think its redesigned interface is "cool" and supportive. Huddle's promise to provide its users with "just enough" information to let them get their work done seems a reasonable, and achievable, objective.

Huddle provides cross-platform support, which is good. Somebody can make an update on their desktop and the updated content appears on peoples' iPads and iPhones in real time. The permissions and so on needed to make this work seem reasonably flexible and sufficiently powerful - this is an important aspect of collaboration software. People must be able to collaborate on sensitive information and control who sees what - without obtrusive controls that disincentivise collaboration. Huddle seems to do a reasonable job but this is an area in which any purchaser of collaboration software needs to do its own due diligence; with his own staff, collaborating on tasks they are familiar with.

This is where Huddle's "start small and grow success" approach is good (it isn't unique to Huddle, but that doesn't make it any less worthwhile). The conventional approach to implementing collaboration software, often adopted by vendors of licensed software and driven by the IT group, is to install as many licenses as you can afford (often promoted by bulk discounts) and then look for problems to solve with them. Often a lot of these licenses remain as shelfware. In contrast, Huddle's subscription model means that there's an incentive to only buy as much Huddle as you need and get rid of any subscriptions no-one is using. That's a good start, although an organisation can still choose to mess up a subscription model. However, Huddle (according to Chris Boorman, CMO) is adopting an incremental marketing approach - it encourages a customer to install Huddle for a small group with a real need for collaboration and then supplies experienced mentors to help the initial group make this a success. It aims at 'skills transfer' to its customer and to educate 'champions' amongst its initial customers. It then hopes that its initial deployment will grow, with more subscriptions, as the early adopters demonstrate success. If that is what really happens in practice, it should overcome any prejudices about collaboration shelfware.

Another risk-reduction feature of Huddle is its security certifications - if you understand what these mean and don't see them just as a check-box delivering mindless comfort. Huddle has achieved ISO 27001 certification (part of a range of ISO 27000 standards), which does not guarantee security but does provide a framework for a company to implement security around Huddle and gives all stakeholders a common, defined, vocabulary for discussing security issues. Of course, if you understand certification, you'll now be asking about the scope of assessment and when Huddle was last assessed - there's a starting point for this here.

Moreover, Huddle is Pan Government Accredited (PGA) at Impact Level 2 (IL2), which means "based on good commercial standards, centred around a suitably scoped ISO27001 certification", and claims that it is used by 80 per cent of central UK government departments, including the Cabinet Office, Ministry of Justice, Defra and Department for Business Innovation and Skills. This does not mean that "the government says Huddle is totally secure" or anything like that; but it does give users confidence that it is secure enough to accommodate serious work - although you'd want to do more due diligence (especially around physical access on your premises) if you were using it for, say, personal data or anything else where security is critical.

I'm also impressed that Huddle has what it says is a usable and well-documented RESTful API ("this time around, we got our developers to write the documentation first and then produce the API, so we have confidence in the documentation", says Howell). This should allow customers to integrate Huddle collaboration with other software-supported processes - a useful success factor and will allow a Huddle community to develop, sharing third party Huddle utilities and customisations. Huddle is more likely to succeed as part of a larger community including third parties - better a small slice of a large pie than all of a small pie, perhaps. There isn't a formal AppStore for Huddle yet - but who knows?

I think that Huddle sees its main opportunity as failing or less-than-popular SharePoint installations - and it seems to address many of the issues that SharePoint customers report, including the shelfware issue. Nevertheless, SharePoint is a moving target and Microsoft has a history of reinventing its products without necessarily changing their name. I wonder what Microsoft collaboration around Office365 will look like in 2014? I do think the conventional licensing model, especially for collaboration software, is dying (although I'm not stupid enough to predict the actual death-date - in anything to do with IT, a better model co-exists with the old ways for ages).

Unfortunately, I think that some people who failed with SharePoint will also fail with Huddle (and other collaboration solutions) - and for similar reasons, around blame cultures, egos and politics - and will blame the software instead of their organisational/management failings. To end on an optimistic note, however, this is the sort of customer maturity issue Huddle's "start small and grow with success" model might help with - as long as top management buys into and understands collaboration.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd April 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

At one, rather over-simplified, level, New Development is about building mobile apps: get them out quickly, sell them cheap, throw them away and build another if they don't work. I know of a games manufacturer whose test methodology consists of throwing a new game at a crowd of students for an afternoon. On one occasion, by chance, this resulted in a game being sold that was unplayable by anyone left-handed... A disaster? Not really, the game sold for 50p or so - so a lot of left-handed people who bought it simply didn't care much that it didn't work - and no-one in that space remembers who built a game anyway. No doubt that company will smarten its ideas up (if it can - which is another discussion) when it comes up with another "Angry Birds".

However, new development is also being used by enterprises coping with the BYOD movement, trying to provide mobile access to company systems. Here, whether the app works impacts the business; and issues of maintainability, security, complexity and governance matter.

Organisations can no longer expect to dictate to staff, let along customers, what mobile devices they can use. On the other hand, there are advantages to writing in native code for iOS, Android etc (improved application functionality and quality of user experience; performance; security) if you can overcome the major issue, if you use the vendor's device SDK, of needing a different code-base for every kind of device,. Of course, you can write to a virtualised platform - for example, Java Xamarin, Mono etc. - if you can manage the overheads of an extra layer of code and, possibly, the security implications on running on what is a very large target for malware developers (remember the recent Java exploits).

Embarcadero now claims to have come up with a third choice. It can provide developers with as agile and programmer-friendly rapid-prototyping development environment as offered by scripting languages etc (a claim lent credence by its experience with Delphi/C++, originally from Borland); yet deliver genuinely native ARM code for several different platforms from a single code-base.

On a first look, I'm rather impressed; although I might take pedantic issue with the "multi-platform" claim for what you can buy today, at least. Embarcadero RAD Studio XE4 currently supports Windows and Mac OSX desktops and iOS mobile, with Android to follow shortly. That's certainly several platforms supported natively from a single code base, so "multi-platform" is justified technically even for mobile, once Android support arrives; but I'd think that an enterprise might expect "multi-platform" to include something approaching everything out there; i.e. including Symbian and BlackBerry too. An enterprise buying a mobile development platform might well expect it to support everything from a single code-base - even stuff that is non-strategic or even obsolete or only popular in an odd corner of the world, but which it isn't expedient to replace just now. I remember the cries of pain from enterprises when Microsoft dropped old versions of Visual Basic from its distribution CDs, because the overheads of managing change across the world mean that many enterprises, even those recognising the benefits of the modernised VB, still had to maintain old technology well past its sell-by date.

Nevertheless, I'm not selling this stuff and I have to assume that those who are, do understand their market - and will respond to customer feedback if or when they get it. If you are trying to develop for Android and iOS from a single code-base (which does make a lot of sense), Emabarcadero says that RAD Studio provides a similar or better environment to that of other C++ or Objective C coding environments and also provides enterprise-class database connectivity (and Embarcadero does understand data structures). However, because of its generation of truly native ARM code, Embarcadero also claims that it offers:

• Higher performance for number crunching applications;
• Lower latency, with a responsive native user experience and no garbage collection issues;
• The ability to talk directly to APIs, peripherals, and gadgets (which has advantages; but so does virtualising hardware);
• The placing of the developer in control of app performance (although that's a two-edged sword, as some developers don't really understand the need to optimise only real bottlenecks);
• A smaller footprint, which is ideal for small fixed size devices;
• Native security with a reduced risk of generic 3rd party attacks (although that's only part of the application security issue, of course).

So, mobile developers now have another cross-platform choice (I think trying to maintain several native code-bases, one per platform, is a bit of a dead-end), which delivers native code; to add to scripted and VM approaches such as Java, HTML5, Appcelerator, Xamarin, Mono and so on. I think Embarcadero RAD Studio XE4 merits careful consideration by enterprise mobile developers (and it is probably also useful for Windows and OSX desktop developers, of course).

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 7th January 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

There is no question that C++ is currently used in a lot of mission-critical applications (but, then, so is COBOL) and in a lot of commercial software packages. But is it a dying language, due for replacement by Java, C#, Python, Scala and so on? And, considering that a lot of COBOL and Fortran is still in active use, does this matter much anyway?

The answers are probably "no" and "no". Things are still happening in the C++ world. The latest Intel compilers, for example, are extremely good at optimising code for the latest Intel architectures and its Threading Building Blocks helps you exploit parallel programming on multicore architectures efficiently. Now there's a new C++ standard which addresses many of the issues associated with C++ programming. Even Bjarne Stroustrup says that C++11 feels like a new language here - read more in this interview.

Standard C++11 still lacks Java-style garbage collection, used to clean up allocated memory that is no longer needed (and I'm not sure that relying on programmers to do their own garbage collection is entirely safe), but it does include a state-of-the-art threading library. Many programmers don't like garbage collection, because of the propensity for basic Java to stop for a few seconds while garbage collecting, but that's an implementation issue and you can get modern high performance Javas with better-managed "deterministic" garbage collection facilities offering predictable latency (see, for example, Oracle JRockit). Read about the C++11 innovations here.

Embarcadero's new C++Builder XE3 compiler, which supports the new C++11 standards and allows VCL (Visual Component Library, a visual framework for building Windows applications originally developed by Borland) and FireMonkey (which is what Embarcadero calls its "modern, multi-platform, hardware accelerated GUI and application framework") to be moved onto 64bit platforms, is another sign that interest in C++ is still active. Embarcadero (or, rather, Borland, part of which it acquired in 2008) has a good record for providing productive developer tools and its new compiler promises "agile C++". In other words, developers can use Embarcadero extensions to make C++ up to 5x faster than traditional development, Embarcadero says, using rapid prototyping, PME (properties/methods/events) component-based programming, and visual development. Of course, that's hard to verify in the general case (and no improvement at all satisfies the "up to" 5 times promise) but if you are, or want to be, a C++ shop, it's probably worth investigating (the original Borland C++ Builder was pretty good).

Embarcadero's new compiler builds on clang, a front-end for the respected open-source LLVM compiler, which (it says) will address any advantage Intel compilers have in exploiting Intel's architectures And, usefully, Embarcadero promises industry-leading compliance with the C++ standards.

The key promise of C++Builder XE3, however, is that it will let you target multiple platforms with a single codebase and a single developer team. That sounds good to us, although it won't really come to fruition until its iOS and Android on ARM capabilities arrive. This is also a 64bit compiler, with good support for a Windows 8 look and feel interface, so it offers lots of options for legacy C++ Windows application modernisation (it supports (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8). And support for Mac OS X and Retina Display (letting developers deliver a native user experience and automatic HiDPI display support in Mac applications) has to be a bonus. Despite the C++11 improvements, we suspect that native support for a wide range of popular desktop and mobile user environments will be what drives any actual C++ resurgence.

On balance, C++ probably wouldn't be our language of choice these days for general business systems, where something like Java (or Scala) will probably be more productive overall. But C++ is still the optimal choice for some applications and a perfectly adequate choice (if you have the right C++ skills) for many more; and we aren't in the business of building applications anyway. C++ certainly isn't anything like dead yet and, according to C++ guru Herb Sutter, now "computing feels young and fresh in a way that it hasn't felt for years, and that has only happened to this degree at two other times in its history" - although he's talking about the UI and mobile devices, which are what modern C++ has to support.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 13th December 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

This article outlines 4 key underlying strategic IT business drivers that will shape the global IT industry of 2013 and beyond. No mention here of short term 'here today / gone tomorrow' products. We focus on the big things - our changing perceptions, behaviours and attitudes towards IT management, and how they will affect the way we choose, use and manage IT for strategic business advantage.

Trend 1: Tech adoption and spend will be conservative rather than radical
We will adopt more technology from 2013-2015. But perhaps not spend that much more to get it. Tech in general is getting cheaper, driven by intense competition, so you will also get more for your money. The transparency of supplier product and pricing information means customers can evaluate offers without direct engagement with sales people. Procurement departments are powerful and engaged, and vendors now need to offer free trials and other commercial incentives such as discounted professional services to get a foot in the door.

Annual rental contracts for cloud solutions turn software and services into operating expenditure rather than capital expenditure. So there is less up-front financial investment and potential supplier lock-in, and vendor switching is easier. Large enterprises have rationalised their IT suppliers and have largely chosen those they wish to have long-term relationships with. This does not mean that enterprises are not amenable to approaches from new innovative vendors, but new vendors need to prove they can work within an established enterprise IT framework to be successful.

IT budgets will be tight, procurement processes will be extended, and deals made (in both monetary value and long-term commitment) will be below vendors' expectations. It's a buyer's market. Customers will only buy IT where there is a clear requirement that delivers a clear business benefit, and where there is a high probability of deep user adoption.

Trend 2: Tech procurements will aim to deliver incremental improvements rather than complete infrastructure change
A tiny fraction of the capability of software is utilised. Most features and functions are never used. Most applications are too intricate and complex for end users to absorb their depth and breadth. A surgical focus on the latent points of business pain is required rather than asking end users to sink or swim within a seemingly never-ending list of difficult-to-understand menu options.

Investments will be in discrete 'no brainer' applications. For example in digital marketing some elements of search engine optimisation (SEO), web site navigation and e-commerce check-out, and retargeting old sales leads deliver virtually guaranteed ROI. They provide some sales lift at relatively low cost and low user learning and time investment, hence increasing profit. Focused investments will be preferred over speculative large IT investments involving maximising the use of all product features and functions. Move the needle rather than boil the ocean, in other words.

Mostly end users don't know where business inefficiencies are, except when there are glaring inefficiencies. They need to know where new technology can be applied to improve business processes. 'Best practice' benchmarks and ROI case studies from vendors will be in demand to unearth 'proof points' to justify investments and fuel business cases.

Trend 3: The IT department will become a business support function rather than a geek castle
IT and Marketing have a lot in common in this area. Both are often perceived as necessary evils. Both are poorly understood by senior management and are rarely represented at Board level. Both are accused of being spendthrift and lacking commercial acumen. IT and Marketing leaders have low job security, as they are both perceived as being easily replaceable. Ironically however, both are seen as the saviours of modern businesses by business leaders.

As McKinsey says "we're all marketers now". They should also add "we're all digitally savvy now".  As the popular phrase goes "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Both IT and Marketing appear easy to perform to voyeuristic enthusiastic amateurs. It's only when people start practicing marketing and IT do they realise their latent complexities.

IT needs to start behaving like a concerned mother encouraging its baby to master the skills of walking, rather than always setting down rules and enforcing discipline. IT needs to become the first port of call for users, rather than the last. Business needs will eclipse IT policies and standards. IT needs to earn respect for its helpfulness, responsiveness, expertise and patience. This will help put a stop to rogue departmental buying of technology solutions which are often unfit for purpose.

Trend 4: Vendors will be selected for relationship and helpfulness rather than hard sell
IT folk are plagued by the incessant 'product push' emailing of vendor marketers and ill-informed pestering of their tele-sales teams. IT hasn't got much time to investigate new IT product categories and devour white papers. But they do want to be informed about products and services that are relevant to their organisation's needs.

Smart vendors like Marketo and Hubspot win by adopting high quality content marketing strategies. They argue that interesting, targeted, well-researched and thoughtful content will win the trust of the customer and, sooner or later, a share of their budgets. Such information needs to be relevant to the person's role, delivered at the right time, and at the right frequency, and via the appropriate media (online, press, magazines etc) that IT people learn from. Not easy, but it can be done.

Vendors need to stop fatiguing potential customers with endless emails and promotions and start focusing on building trust and professional relationships between buyers and sellers. The Wild West days of the hard sell IT industry are hopefully behind us now, and both vendors and IT need to demonstrate competence, capability, honesty, authenticity, and a willingness to form business partnerships. Continuity and trust are needed to form long term relationships that will be to the mutual business and financial benefit of both parties.

By: David Norris, Practice Leader - Analytics, Bloor Research Posted: 16th November 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Pentaho, unlike most of the big BI vendors, is a BI specialist. I was introduced to Pentaho last year and was impressed. With the latest release, Pentaho continue to develop and strengthen their product's capability. Business Intelligence is a demanding area, and the demand for more capable products is growing rapidly. Whilst the demand is for ever greater sophistication and availability, that is matched by a balancing desire for tools to become ever more intuitive, with the need for technical expertise being downplayed, whilst the ability to support a greater range of business decision making scenarios, with powerful, yet easy to use tools, available on as wide a variety of platforms as possible, is seen as essential. BI vendors have to react to a world in which the business is faced with a need to handle ever more sophisticated scenarios demanding insight that is powerful yet accessible, where decision makers cannot wait until they have technical support, or access to a desktop machine. Added to which, the volume of data that can support those decisions is increasing month on month, so instant access to very large data sets, with the ability to interact with that data, is the order of the day, and these are the challenges that Pentaho 4.8 meets.

The mobile user is catered for with Pentaho being made available for the iPad. The iPad is currently the favoured accessory of a large number of managers and, with 4.8, Pentaho provides a sophisticated environment which allows the iPad to be used as a high quality visual means of consuming, and interacting with, the data. Pentaho for the iPad embraces all of the native gestures that make up the iPad experience. So the implementation is a full drag and drop interactive experience entirely consistent with iPad's native capability; it's easy to deploy, easy to use, and the apps are easy to embed. The mobile application is not considered as a desktop replacement, but is very much in line with the lean back and survey style of BI that the iPad encourages, so it should be thought of as the ideal tool for spending up to about half an hour exploring the data.

In a similar vein, when it comes to Big Data, as this comes into the mainstream of data analysis, so the original Heath Robinson nature of big data, with the hand crafting, and technical run and operate cranking of the MapReduce functions that were the way to exploit the data of only a couple of years ago, these are now being replaced by simple to use template-driven tools that do not require data scientists with extensive technical computing expertise to utilise. What Pentaho are offering is three quick steps from data to the analytics, so, with a few simple steps, the data can be grouped, sorted, aggregated and visualised. This capability is being made available for data in Hadoop clusters, and Non SQL data stores, making it possible for a data analyst to access, explore, and visualise any big data set - that is with the same ease and lack of technical barriers they have come to expect with the Enterprise Data Warehouse.

Pentaho provides out-of-the-box templates, which are readily edited, and there is the ability to then create new templates. The templates cover the integration component allowing the required ETL to be set up. The model component to allow the meta data to be managed to configure the data for analysis; and the cache component then controls the access. Pentaho call this Instaview, and describe it as a "schema on read". What that means is that you do not have to pre-create ETL or models to get going with analysis. Such visual development reduces the time and complexity of the technical requirements to use Big Data. Essentially, with Pentaho you are now seeing a simple visual development environment enabling access to all forms of data that forms the repositories of an enterprise BI solution, from the EDW to the Hadoop cluster to the Non SQL data store. This enhanced productivity in the creation of apps is also matched by enhancements to the parallel execution of MapReduce functions, with Pentaho VisualMap Reduce, which further speeds up the run time execution.

All of which is pretty impressive and shows that Pentaho have not only the ability to understand where the market is moving, but also the capability to fulfil that vision with the appropriate solutions and, as you may know, one of the great strengths of Pentaho is that it also comes at the appropriate price for the vast majority of the market to seriously consider its use.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 2nd November 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

I attended the IBM THINKMARKETING event last week in Paris. 280 CMOs and CIOs representing $3 trillion in global commerce were concentrated in one room. Wow. The good and the great congregated to see a show hosted by Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, and featuring presentations by the CEOs of Vodafone (Vittorio Colao), WPP (Sir Martin Sorrell), and Starbucks Europe (Michelle Gass). Pretty impressive, to say the least. It was a privilege to be invited.

The event was billed as a CMO+CIO Leadership Exchange. The gist was that Marketing and IT, two historic internal foes, need to work together to address the needs of increasingly discerning and digitally savvy customers in the new digital age. I was pleased IBM supported the position I took in my June 2012 article Digital Marketers and IT folk must become more interdependent. The conclusion echoed IBM's message "the rapid change in the data-driven way that Marketing now does its business, and the rising importance of digital commerce and digital device use for customers makes a combined (CMO + CIO) approach to digital marketing an increasing business necessity."

IBM chose to avoid talking about their products, and instead focused on the market environment and business context. The growth and availability of 'big data' and IBM's ability to process it. The death of the 'average' customer, and the need for personalisation of customer communications and offers. The need for an interactive 'system of engagement' (with the customer) rather than a traditional inert 'system of record'. The need for corporate brand authenticity and delivering the corporate brand in a consistent way, across all channels of communication and customer touchpoints.

There were some great soundbites:

"We should be talking 'infostructure' rather than 'infrastructure'" (IBM's CEO)

"Millennials (are not so frightened of privacy issues and) want us to know all about their personal situation data when they contact us" (Vodafone's CEO)

"We need (customers' data) to be liquid and linked". When approaching digital marketing projects "think big, start small, scale fast"; and "move from a global to a networked company"; "whatever you do, stay relevant (to your customers)" (Coca-Cola's CMO)

"Finance and Procurement have become too powerful - Marketing needs to be taken more seriously" (WPP's CEO)

A global retailer talked about the importance of embedding social (media) into the fabric of the way you do business, rather than as a separate functional department. The retailer believes in enabling its community of customers and staff to become self-moderating and self-curating, as Wikipedia does, by empowering them with the right social tools.

Of course this is all great stuff from some of the acknowledged thought leaders in the digital marketing space. The online polls (we were all loaned an iPad for the duration of the show) revealed that most large enterprises agree that a significant corporate investment in digital marketing is required going forward. The CMOs and CIOs were broadly in line with IBM's thinking. This is good news for the digital marketing industry where investments to date have been largely piecemeal rather than strategic.

The tide is turning and IBM is well placed to exploit the digital marketing systems requirement given its investments in products (having acquired Unica, Coremetrics, DemandTec, and Tealeaf). IBM also has an unmatched depth and breadth of professional services resources at its disposal and the continuity of deep customer relationships within large enterprises. These assets reduce the perceived risks to the tenure of CMOs and CIOs who are making a big and highly visible bet on enterprise digital marketing.

IBM is clearly considered 'a strategic partner' rather than 'a seller' by its enterprise customers. This approach should enable IBM to further grow its footprint in the digital marketing space and take a stronger leadership role in shaping the industry.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 29th October 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

IP Expo was a chance for me to get a broad if brief snapshot of the business IT climate in 2012. On the surface, things looked fairly healthy - and record numbers apparently came through the door - but I sensed uneasiness among vendors and concern among their potential clients.

I was there, more than anything, to get the latest on storage and data protection, but over the years I have worked in many IT disciplines; so my interest is in the interplay between these and the genuine innovation that can result from lateral thinking.

For instance, a big noise this year was big data, for many only a curiosity so far: "I have a lot of data and it's growing fast (whose isn't?). But does that mean I must now classify it as big data?" Hadoop, that goes with it, is a great piece of open source software; but most end-users may have higher priorities regarding their stored data right now. So, by the end of my visit I felt: "I had had Hadoop oop to here" (but remember that we oldies can get a little jaded at the end of a long day).

I noticed a move away from purpose-built storage hardware (for which read "premium pricing") towards bolt-on commodity boxes - belatedly following the trend for servers. That brings opportunities for more versatile software to achieve the greater scale-out and scale-up capacity and performance needed to match the ever-growing virtualised storage cloud market (about which there was also much noise). This approach featured in a debate involving Fusion-io founder and CEO David A. Flynn and is a trend likely to be good news for business customers hoping for a drop in hardware costs.

Fusion-io is also pushing the 'commodity' architecture boundaries by treating NAND flash as memory rather than a spinning disk substitute - and at a stroke eliminating most layers of logic including I-O scheduler logic for storage access (albeit introducing a new device type to recognise). Less radical is Nimble's use of MLC flash and its Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) to achieve turbo-charged storage performance.

Otherwise, there was less noise this year on flash/solid state disk (SSD) in general; Fusion-io arguably excepted, SSD is now part of the disk mix and has all but replaced 15k rpm spinning disk. The speed at which it replaces lower-spec drives is now down to cost- factoring in the much lower SSD running costs - a few years yet I think.

At the other end of the spectrum, tape seems destined to last forever. It is a frightening thought that, when (in my late teens in 1965!) I began working on mainframes, reel-to-reel tape drives were already well established for backup; disk hadn't even appeared (but I bet some remember the C.R.A.M. random access device that I used back then). Sequential backup involved a rotation of tapes called "grandfather, father and son" (while, in the intervening years, I've progressed from son to father to grandfather!).

There was a major tape forum and I spoke to Brian Grainger, VP of Worldwide Sales at Spectra Logic, a long-established tape systems provider. He was very bullish about LTO's future - a fifth generation coming with new density levels and speeds - and his company's own modular and scalable systems approach. Tape will now support 10GbE transmission and, of course, it remains "green" as it needs no power when not in use.

Historically, many are heavily invested in proprietary vendor solutions. To extricate themselves, "helped" by their incumbent vendors, could itself prove costly and anyway carries an inevitable transition risk. Companies now also wrestle with the implications of workers deploying their own mobile devices - adding complexity to company IT security and data protection. Plenty of stands were offering solutions here (but I stayed focused on my core area so by-passed these).

Yet, any company committed to achieving a truly agile server-storage environment must eventually bite the bullet of this type of change or its infrastructure will end up tired and creaky (like me?). The message is, as ever was: do thorough research and plan your strategy carefully before you commit to the latest fashion. An event like IP Expo is good for picking up ideas to start your research (but not sign contracts).

I continue to enthuse over ATA over Ethernet (AoE) as a means of transporting data (arguably a protocol), about which I have already written a couple times; it's in the public domain and also available in the Linux kernel. Yet, so far, only Coraid (the NAS server provider from where it emanated) is really exploiting its speed and simplicity for PB scale-out expansion capabilities. I spoke to Carl Wright, executive VP of worldwide sales, who recounted Coraid's rocket-like growth right now (which is no coincidence). He also briefly discussed Coraid's plans for policy-based automated orchestration of the whole virtualised cloud storage (using its Yunteq full stack orchestration acquired last year); this is also interesting stuff and I suspect Coraid is again ahead of the game.

Finally, whatever underlying storage technologies a company deploys, controlling the environment is often a headache. Here I'll give a mention to Aptare. (I did Latin at school so think you should pronounce the "E" at the end - but moving swiftly on…) I met Nigel Houghton, Aptare's EMEA regional sales manager, who described Aptare's heterogeneous storage console that gives an end-to-end vision of the storage capacity for forecasting, auditing, compliance, and the ability to offer charge-back - for which expect increasing demand from cost-conscious executives. This type of software is surely handy if not a must for enterprises with mixed storage, and I am guessing it quickly pays for itself. Aptare includes agentless data collection from hosts, produces a logical and physical connection map, shows data space allocated but unused and high and low volume usage; how many businesses have that information at their fingertips right now?

I learnt much more at IP EXPO 2012 (for another day perhaps) and it was well worth a visit. So now, slippers on and feet up (I'm semi-retired you know); a little less noise now please.

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

Oracle held a 'Customer Experience' summit in London last week for 250 attendees. I must admit to being a tad cynical about Oracle talking about customer experience. After all, Oracle has built its business and reputation on its highly efficient and aggressive sales execution. The customer-centric luvvy-dovey approach implied by 'customer experience management' doesn't really seem a good fit.

Oracle's main message was that you can extract more money (premium prices) out of your customers if you give them a great customer experience. Oracle's president, Mark Hurd, said that to grow Oracle's enterprise market share from 6% to 12% there is no chance of Oracle acquiring another 400,000 customers. He wants to increase his share of wallet from the customers he already has. His goal is to sell more standardised (non-customised) products to Oracle customers to gain economies of scale. In summary, he wants to sell you the full Oracle enterprise product stack, which is now being extended through Oracle's customer experience products.

Over the past 2 years Oracle has acquired 8 customer experience software product companies: ATG for eCommerce, Fatwire for web experience management, Rightnow and InQuira for customer service, Endeca for Search, and Vitrue, Involver and Collective Intellect for social media marketing.

Oracle is fusing these product lines together into a suite. On the upside, there are many excellent products here, many of which could be considered 'best-of-breed'. On the downside, 'fusion', even with 4,500 Oracle developers on the job, seems to take a long time. Fusion apps were first announced in 2005, and finally appeared in the market in late 2011.

However, many of Oracle's acquired customer experience products are Cloud-based, which should simplify the task. Oracle has a renewed appetite for the Cloud and now has a fast-growing $1Bn SaaS business. Oracle also offers multiple Cloud deployment options - Public, Private, and Hybrid, which is a differentiator from its arch-rival, salesforce.com. Also CaaS (Consulting as a Subscription) that enables fixed monthly payments for consulting over a 1, 2, or 3 year SaaS project is a nice idea.

But the Oracle customer experience pitch is very product oriented. Phrases such as 'change management', 'cultural change', 'business agility', 'learning organisations', 'front-line staff empowerment' and 'innovation' were little mentioned by Oracle presenters. However, these are the type of concepts that are burnt into the DNA of organisations like Virgin that truly take customer experience seriously. For those organisations wanting to transform into customer centric organisations, a long and difficult journey lies ahead - Aviva for example has been working at it for over 7 years. 'Customer experience' product investments are no quick fix for failing organisations.

Maybe their partners, such as the digital marketing agency LBi and Deloitte Digital, are expected to fill this services void in the Oracle value proposition. Also I am still unsure as to how Oracle Customer Experience "empowers people" and "powers brands" or even "drives business value and advantage" as it says on the tin. If Oracle is going to be successful in the Customer Experience market it needs to behave like a company that truly believes in delivering its own quality customer experiences. Just using its own Customer Experience products internally is not enough.

Oracle has acquired some truly outstanding companies and products to enable it to compete in the customer experience market. Oracle now needs to accelerate its product integration and go-to-market with a more balanced product and services proposition. It's not a 'done deal' that Oracle's 400,000 customers will invest in Oracle's customer experience proposition. They need to see that Oracle is truly drinking its own kool-aid first.

Mark Hurd is proud of Oracle having one of the largest sales organizations in the (Tech) industry, but as the LBi speaker Tom Burrell said tellingly in his presentation "customer advocacy is the biggest sales channel". Some might say Oracle wouldn't need its large salesforce if it could truly count on customer advocacy. Now that would be a cost saving.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 19th October 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

There's a lot of talk about customer retention and customer loyalty these days. And understandably so. In difficult economic times, when new customers are scarce and competition is fierce, holding onto customers is key.

A senior executive of a well-known digital consultancy with access to many blue chip clients' customer databases recently confessed: "loyalty is for Labradors". To some extent this is true. It's a promiscuous world out there driven by transparent Internet pricing where 'the best deal wins'.

Loyalty is all very well, but customer retention is the key metric that drives business success. Fred Reichheld, inventor of the Net Promoter Score, claims a 5% reduction in customer defection increases profits by 25% to 80%. McKinsey says retaining customers is 3 to 10 times cheaper than acquiring new customers (most commentators put this figure at 6X to 8X). The value of retaining existing customers is indisputable - they are lower cost to serve, spend more, are more prepared to pay a price premium, and act as brand advocates and references to attract new customers.

Technology companies are waking up to this fact. For example, Oracle would be a loss-making company without its maintenance revenues. But the risks to securing recurring revenues are increasing. Technology no longer comes with a proprietary software lock-in clause as standard. Many ex-customer service staff from enterprise vendors have set up as local service providers to steal away highly profitable (and expensive) enterprise maintenance contracts. Indian outsourcing groups such as InfoSys and Cognizant offer seemingly cut-price outsourced service alternatives.

Traditionally many have considered the management of maintenance renewal contracts as an ad hoc annual administrative and financial function. High margin new business software licences were the primary focus, and maintenance renewals were largely taken for granted. Invoices were sent out to customers demanding maintenance contract renewals (at c. 20% of the software contract price), otherwise support was to be 'cut off'. Paying such support contracts was a grudge purchase from the customer perspective, a price to pay for an essential service that didn't deliver much perceived value.

ServiceSource recognised the need for technology-based companies to have more certainty in closing maintenance, support and subscription renewal contracts and the resulting cashflow. Investors treat missing financial targets and guidance harshly in the technology world.

ServiceSource controls and manages service revenue leakage and claims to be the market leader in recurring revenue management. Under this banner they offer a mix of business process consulting, outsourced end customer renewals account management, and a renewals software platform available on a SaaS basis. 

ServiceSource firstly conducts a SPA (Service Performance Analysis). This audit analyses the data, business processes and management policies around the renewals process. ServiceSource then produces a pay-for-performance offer to manage part or all of the maintenance renewal process. Each contract is customised. For example, a partnership may only cover a sub-set of small and medium size customers, or channel partner customers, both of which are often less well-managed than direct enterprise customers. The goal might be to increase renewals from 70% to 90% over a given timescale, for example. The company claims to increase customers' recurring revenue by an average of 15% points, but improvements of 44% have been recorded.

ServiceSource's managed services team consists of professional renewals salespeople who use state-of-the-art renewals process software to guide and manage workflows and optimise the renewals experience from the technology vendor's end customer's perspective. This takes place within the end customer's local region. For example, in ServiceSource's Liverpool office multi-lingual employees speak 20 different languages to service end customers across EMEA.

ServiceSource manages $7bn in renewals revenues on behalf of technology companies like Adobe, CA, Microsoft, Sage, Avaya, EMC, F5, Hitachi, NEC, NetApp and Riverbed. Increasingly it is diversifying into wider technology markets such as Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Industrial systems. Hence GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthcare and Johnson Controls are customers.

Research by the University of Pennsylvania shows that 96% of dissatisfied customers leave quietly. ServiceSource ensures this does not happen by engaging customers in an ongoing dialogue and managing the renewals process professionally through to fruition. ServiceSource continues to grow at c. 35% per annum, as it has been for the past 5 years. It now has the capital (the company IPO'd in March 2011) to support investment in its continued growth globally, and to expand from its base of 2,100 employees and turnover of over $200m.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 12th September 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Last week the Marketo Rock Star tour was in London. The lead singer was Phil Fernandez, Marketo's CEO, who sits somewhere between Freddie Mercury and Mick Jagger as software CEOs go. He did an outstanding stage presentation to 200+ marketers, and was equally impressive when I met him face-to-face backstage, once I had fought past the Marketo groupies. He was very engaging and open, clued up and creative. So moving on from the charm offensive, what did he have to say?

Marketo, which claims to be the fastest growing market automation vendor, powers on fuelled by big ticket VC funding and a groundswell of popular support. Marketo now boasts 2,200 global customers and is rapidly expanding its market reach in Europe and Asia (it has recently started direct operations in London, and has opened an office in Australia). It is also now spreading its wings from its Small Medium size Business (SMB) roots into Global Enterprise accounts. For example, GE now has over 800 Marketo seats.

Traditionally Marketo has sold into B2B high technology companies, but now is selling more broadly into all sectors, but especially Healthcare, Financial Services, and Publishing. The rate of product development is voracious. Marketo claims to introduce a new product category every 9 months. Next off the block is likely to be back-office marketing resource management (MRM) for managing marketing budgets, resources and brand assets.

Marketo is also looking to grow by extending its channel partner model and by recruiting established marketing services providers (MSPs) as referral partners. For example, creative agencies whose adverting clients are looking to adopt marketing automation are ideal.

Marketo is a software company in a hurry, with a big hairy audacious vision, and an infectious 'can do' attitude. There is a palpable 'buzz' around Marketo which is energetic and fun, and hence perfectly suited to the gregarious, outgoing personality types that inhabit Marketing Departments.

But what does Marketo actually do? Traditionally, marketing automation has been associated with vendors like Unica (acquired by IBM) and SAS Institute who sell big ticket ($500,000+) systems to large B2C companies (think Vodafone or BSkyB for example). Such companies want all-encompassing integrated enterprise systems to manage their colossal number of promotional campaigns.

Marketo, and their arch rival Eloqua, have re-defined this market space to focus on SaaS-based B2B sales lead management - helping to improve the flow of quality sales leads from Marketing to Sales at a fraction of the cost of the larger vendors' solutions. The principal tools for this are demand generation, lead nurturing and lead scoring. Technology companies were an obvious easy first target market for both Marketo and Eloqua, as they have complex and difficult sales cycles and expensive direct sales forces. Hence a small increase in sales pipeline productivity has a big effect on technology company profitability.

To automate demand creation processes, Marketo offers email marketing, event marketing, web site landing page creation, and social media capabilities. Marketo's foray into social media marketing has been accelerated by Marketo's recent acquisition of Crowd Factory, and the installation of its CEO (Sanjay Dholakia) as the Marketo CMO. Now Marketo offers social apps such as Facebook page management, social analytics, and integrated social marketing.

The whole value proposition is packaged up within the concept of Revenue Performance Management - how to organise and align Sales and Marketing, and measure and optimise their combined performance. Just to make sure you 'get' this idea, Phil has just written a book called 'Revenue Disruption' (published by Wiley) to explain the concept. When does this guy find time to sleep?!

Marketo are doing an amazing job of maintaining its momentum while keeping many plates spinning. Its product range and quality and Marketo's excellent web site education content are setting a new standard for 'next generation' marketing. Currently they are recruiting like mad (they have 50 open positions), primarily for technical roles at their HQ at San Mateo, California. Let's hope their support resources don't get too stretched in the rush for growth. For the meantime however, Marketo is exciting, fun, and long may it continue to dazzle marketers.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 6th August 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

We're all told that hard disks fail and that we must always backup everything - but is system backup actually a security threat?

Well, at one level, it is, of course; if I wanted to put malware into a system, an old trick is to get at the backups (often not well-protected), insert my corrupted software and then engineer a production crash. The recovery neatly moves my malware code into production.

But I don't think this is quite what Kaspersky tech support meant when it told me: "You will not be able to back up files on the C drive if Kaspersky is running. Kaspersky has self defense - this function prevents any access and changes to its files."

I had found that my Windows 7 auto backup (which I had thought might be a 'read only' operation, although it probably updates attributes) stopped working after I installed Kaspersky AV. It took me some time to blame Kaspersky because the (Windows) error message was misleading - "can't create Zip file", with the suggestion that space isn't available somewhere (perhaps it's trying to create its working file on the small recovery partition, was a Microsoft knowledgebase suggestion). Then I switched off Kaspersky - and backup worked again.

This is not a very satisfactory workaround really - instead of automatic backup, I have to remember to switch off Internet access, switch off Kaspersky, run a manual backup and then switch Kaspersky and Internet back on. Some real opportunities for "user error" here; and I bet I don't do as many backups with this process!

However, the response of Kaspersky's technicians seems to be, not that I've found a problem with its software but that I've simply noticed a security feature! Perhaps I can claim a lack of useful error messages, at least.

I've been using antivirus (AV) software since the days of Alan Solomon and I even remember the release of the "Concept" word macro virus on a commercial software CD-ROM (although any discussion of this seems to have disappeared from the web). AV has always annoyed me as a user, partly because of its system overheads (which lead a lot of people to switch it off).

AV software really shouldn't be necessary; and if Windows had been designed like OS/400 (for the AS400, now iSeries), it probably wouldn't be. Also, even leaving aside some of the AV people I suspected of writing viruses in the early days, many legitimate AV companies played it, in effect, as a game, chasing lab-built viruses that built up a real virus-writing expertise in the "enemy" - until it stopped being a game and started being criminal activity, with a real enemy.

Even today, many AV vendors compete on the numbers of viruses they can detect, even though some of these are never found "in the wild"; and they gloss over the problem of "false positives" - the more viruses you detect and the less tolerant your heuristics, the more likely you are to detect legitimate software as a "virus". A false positive can be as, or more, destructive to the business than a real virus if it stops something important running (and it is very hard to show that you've eliminated a threat that isn't really there, so work is disrupted for a long time while you try to do this).

I think I have to run AV software - but I got an infection last year that 2 lots of AV software couldn't cope with and I only got rid of by corrupting and rebuilding Windows - which at least got rid of a "free" (but apparently legitimate) AV component that was proving as hard to uninstall as any virus.

Now I have a paid-for Kaspersky installation, which is OEM'd in the engine behind many AV products and has quite rich functionality and a decent UI. I'm wondering if my marriage swill survive installing it on my wife's laptop. And then its tech support tells me that I need to stop running automated backups with a Windows 7 utility and instigate an onerous and error prone manual backup process, in order to protect my oh-so-important AV software!

Yet AV is only a small part of security as a whole and not having proper backups is probably a bigger risk than corruption of my AV engine. Surely Kaspersky could, and should, recognise and harden itself against anything a standard Windows 7 utility can legitimately do - and, if it is stopping backups running, it should generate useful error messages explaining what it is doing and why (and explain this feature to potential purchasers, so they can buy something else) before people waste time looking for other issues. Or perhaps Kaspersky Tech Support just told it wrong...

Am I alone in thinking that an AV engine discouraging regular backups is a joke in rather poor taste? Probably not, and as I don't think that's the only problem with AV software by a long way, I asked around about better approaches to end-point security. For instance, "there are many AV programs that annoy their users and cause enormous performance issues", says Fran Howarth, one of the security specialists at Bloor Research. "So, there's a move towards virtual desktop software, primarily developed because of the BYOD phenomenon, that means users do not have to have security software installed on their device, but instead connect to a secured environment where the controls are policed. And cloud-based solutions might be another way to go. They use global threat feeds and more advanced detection techniques than software-based tools, thus leaving a smaller footprint on the device so that performance issues are minimised, as well as interference with other programs that are running".

Since I've told Kaspersky I'm blogging this, I await its response with interest. Back in the old days, some 30 years ago, when I started in IT, after first explaining that "it's not a bug, its a feature, dammit", the next reaction of tech support was often "well, it's a wonderful system, working exactly as designed; shame about the users". I wonder if things have changed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 30th March 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Software development is increasing in complexity, and not just because the business being automated is getting more complicated. A significant, additional issue is that we are seeing the end of the Von Neumann model, which basically resulted in a mindset around serial processing, single streaming through a single processor. I'm not sure that this is an intrinsic feature of the Von Neumann model itself (although the somewhat related Von Neumann bottleneck, between memory and CPU, is), but it tends to make people think of things happening one-thing-at-a-time as you step through a program.

With modern multicore chips, however, processing should be in parallel, on many processors - cores - inside the processor chip, with many things happening at the same time. Then, with cloud computing, we are are starting to build business systems out of loosely-coupled distributed services, some (possibly all) of which we don't own and have little control over - and these may be hard to force to run serially. Basically, we need to build systems in a service-based environment where several things can happen at the same time; the real world has been like this for ever; mainframes were working like this 40 years ago but it's a rather new concept in the PC world.

There are various ways to make things look like they are exploiting parallel processing in the small scale in modern environments but these don't scale well. You may have four cores in your PC and you may break up your program into modules that can potentially run on all 4 cores but you usually find that, most of the time, 3 of them are idle, waiting for some critical operation to finish on the 4th - and, since the power in your new PC comes from additional cores rather than faster cores, you may find that buying a more powerful PC doesn't speed things up.

What we really need are different approaches specifically expecting modern computing architectures, not serial approaches bent to fit it. One example of such an approach is Pervasive Datarush which exploits something called dataflow programming for processing large amounts of data in a highly parallel way. Another approach uses something called functional programming.

However, even if programming models such as those behind conventional enterprise development environments like Java (and even Ruby), and their frameworks, aren't coping well with the new environments at large scale, being practical, you will want to protect your investments in Java programmers and training if at all possible; and, ideally, run your parallel-aware code in a standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

So, Datarush, for example, is invoked from Java and the main subject of this piece, Scala is a purpose-designed language that extends Java to deal with these new environments using a hybrid functional programming approach (and it has even been noticed by business-oriented magazines like Forbes).

Scala is sometimes thought of as just a new language, but it's more than that. It was designed by Martin Odersky and his book, Programming in Scala, is here. Martin wrote Oracle's Java compiler, and Scala has a strong and Java-aware development team behind it. However, it is really a "software stack", all the parts of which, at several levels, aim at simplifying the development of systems that operate with high concurrency (that is, with processes running in parallel), at scale. It uses concepts from functional-programming languages like LISP and Erlang that make it easy to avoid the deadlock and race-condition issues associated with "shared state" (which appear as program bugs when processes running at the same time on different processors interfere with each other).

The rest of the Scala stack includes Akka middleware, which is an event-driven framework for large-scale distributed cloud applications; Play, which is a web framework with a Railsdeveloper experience for the JVM but which scales better than Rails, using the Akka framework's functionality. Scala provides all this in an Eclipse developer's environment and provides a "simple build tool" for linking modules into applications.

Scala compiles into Java bytecode for a conventional JVM, so it fits well into a conventional enterprise Java-based environment, but it exploits the Java platform even better than Java does: it's more productive (often only half of the source code or better) whilst still retaining Java's current performance. Akka and Play have both Java and Scala APIs, so you can write in Java instead of Scala if you want to, which makes it easy to adopt and protects an investment in Java libraries, tools, and programming skills (although it does mean that you'll probably need to actively persuade programmers to adopt the new approaches).

Scala and Akka are being developed by Typesafeand were first released together in May 2011; in 2012, they're available together with Play and the management console (and Typesafe is working on a new framework for database connectivity, which should be available later in 2012). You can find the Scala stack here; it's developed with a "commercial open-source model" (of the sort used by Apache, RedHat and JBoss) and the Scala community is here. A paid subscription, which adds support, maintenance and the management tools and console needed for enterprise use, is available.

Scala is being used today by several well-known applications with extreme scalability issues, such as Twitter (it found that Ruby didn't really scale far enough); and LinkedIn (using it to cope with with 400 million plus transactions a day). There are other large commercial applications and Scala is becoming accepted as a powerful and innovative development environment that extends Java with functional-programming concepts. Perhaps Microsoft's F# functional programming language for .NET is a competitor - but most enterprises already develop core business applications (as opposed to, perhaps, user desktop interfaces) in Java.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 31st January 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

In my recent article "The Game of Process Improvement", I referred to a book called "Innovation Games". The book is packed with details on how any of us can leverage Innovation Games to gain greater insight into our customers and users. Something that is critical to the success of BPM and Process projects, but also can be applied to the vendors of these, and other products too. Last week I spend some time talking with Luke, the author, about the book, the games and his company.

When it comes to the use of games in business I am a firm believer that they should enable people to learn. As I mentioned in my previous article, we learn more by play than by analysis. Luke, though, is concerned about making sure people understand that his games are not seen as simply a learning tool, but a business tool directed towards delivering specific outcomes. Of course he still believes that they can and should be fun!

Luke has undertaken a lot of research into the linkages between the brain and productivity. In his words: "Productivity Games are not simply 'more fun' - they are literally more effective. This is due to the fact that the concept of play is deeply integrated into human beings' mental development."

"Studies tell us that there are parts of the brain that we do not access when we are simply discussing our views, or trying to think through a complicated situation. However, when we play a well structured game with other interested players, our actions, interactions with other players, and explanations of our behaviour can provide a better, more comprehensive view of how and why we make certain decisions."

Innovation Games, although a relatively young company, boasts an extremely impressive customer list. Companies, including Adobe, SAP, Aladdin, Wyse, Google and Qualcomm, have all leveraged Innovation Games to to improve holistic design thinking, discover new business opportunities, drive strategy and product road map decisions, improve the effectiveness of sales and service organisations, fine tune marketing messages, and create more intimate, durable relationships with customers.

One of the challenges that Luke has faced over the years is the stigma associated with the idea of using games in business. In part this is due to the mistaken understanding that games do not equate to work. This has led to him and others using the term "serious games", although he (and I) prefer the term that he also uses - "Productivity Games" - to try and overcome these obstacles.

I agree totally with Luke that the objective has to be to deliver objective, useable business outcomes, and Innovation Games amply delivers on this front. I also come from the perspective that, for effective change to take hold, then people need not just outcomes but the learning. The ability to come to their own "Aha!" or "Light Bulb" moment. So for me it is also about going back and seeing how people learn most effectively and, as we say, this is through structured play.

What I can see is that there is a need for people to be able to understand how to differentiate between unstructured and structured play. I can also see that even the most boring of analysis tasks can be made to be more fun through games. So perhaps we could use terms like "Strategy Games" or "Objective Gaming" to make it clear that in board game terms it is more like 'Risk' or 'Diplomacy' rather than 'Ludo' or 'Snakes & Ladders' - e.g. it is a game, should be fun, but is directed toward a targeted outcome. As mentioned in the previous article, there are many business leaders who have successfully grown businesses using their love of, and skill at, the game of chess to succeed.

Truly successful games need to deliver both concrete outcomes and learning. The outcomes ensure that you are making good use of your time and getting business value, while the learning ensures that your people continue to grow and develop. The great thing about the Innovation Games concept, as developed and promoted by Luke, is that it delivers on both counts. One only has to take a look in more depth at the success stories to see how much has been saved/made/changed to understand that the results are definitely there. If you take the time to talk with people who have been involved in those projects, you will hear them enthuse about learning things that they did not even realise were important.

Next month, during my trip to California, I hope to meet with Luke and learn first hand more about the way he and the team leverage Innovation games.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 27th January 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

When I first wrote the RFID market overview, one of the key things I identified was that RFID hardware couldn't exist without RFID middleware and applications, and neither could RFID middleware and applications exist without RFID hardware. What has also become clear is that no longer are organisations just looking at passive or active tags, what they want is for their RFID middleware and applications to be able to work with a mix of different tags, both active and passive, and even at different frequencies. It is a case of choosing the right horse for the course!

On January 12th, Zebra announced they have entered into a "cooperative relationship and licensing agreement" with Checkpoint Systems. This relationship brings together Zebra's active location solutions with the passive RFID, auto-ID, Wi-Fi and sensor capabilities of Checkpoint division OATSystems' OATxpress middleware. The objective is to provide increased visibility of assets across an enterprise. The agreement is a non-exclusive contract and provides Zebra with an OEM software license for OATxpress

A reminder for those of you who are not sure about the two organisations involved. Zebra is one of the leading suppliers of bar code, receipt, card, kiosk and RFID printers and supplies, as well as real-time location solutions. Over the last year or so they have also developed a real-time location solution (RTLS), WhereNet ISO/IEC 24730-2. This provides robust location performance both indoors and outdoors with a long tag to sensor range. WhereLAN III RTLS tag delivers 1 meter locating accuracy, lower deployment and ownership costs, lower power consumption, and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi backhaul.

Checkpoint Systems is a leader in shrink management, merchandise visibility, apparel labeling and asset tracking solutions. Checkpoint has some 40 years of experience of RF technology and shrink management requirements. In 2008, Checkpoint Systems acquired one of the leading RFID middleware companies, OATSystems (see OATSystems acquired by Checkpoint). This strengthened their RF capability and RFID customer base and has allowed OATSystems, as a division of Checkpoint, to further develop supply chain, manufacturing and inventory management applications on top of their RFID middleware for a number of verticals ranging from Apparel to Aerospace.

So what we have with this agreement is that Zebra can now offer Checkpoint's OATxpress device and data management capabilities in conjunction with their WhereNet RTLS solution. This makes it easier for a potential customer to purchase a complete solution from one point. From Checkpoint's viewpoint it gives access to Zebra customers and to the Zebra partner network thus providing further global access. From Zebra's viewpoint it can be summed up by a quote from Phil Gerskovich, senior vice president, new growth platforms at Zebra Technologies, "The addition of OAT's passive RFID and other auto-ID technologies capabilities will enable Zebra to play a larger and more meaningful role in helping organizations to make smarter decisions in managing their operations." Zebra has stated that they will announce details around its first product with the capability to implement applications that combine both active and passive RFID in the coming months, so watch this space!

In my view this relationship makes perfect sense to everyone and, most importantly, to potential and existing customers of Zebra and Checkpoint Systems.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 22nd December 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Marketing and IT have never been a match made in heaven. Extrovert creative communicators and geeky analytical techies rarely choose to passionately embrace. However, corporate needs, rather than partner choices, will take precedence in 2012.

Corporate confidence has been rocked by the ferocity and intensity of competition encountered during the current global economic downturn. Key clients and deals have been lost, salespeople are omitted from the early stages of procurements as customers research possible solutions online, and many products increasingly look undifferentiated and 'me-too'.

Many highly profitable companies are now 'looking down the gun barrel' of commoditisation and low margins caused by global competition. Senior management wants Marketing to make their companies more presentable, attractive, and relevant in order to restore premium pricing.

Marketing is now expected to take a central user role in selecting new customer-centric technologies. These include creating a Single Customer View (SCV) and involvement in customer-oriented uses and applications for 'big data'. Marketing needs to report on customer insights and analytics, better manage the customer experience, and to embrace new social media and mobility. Even 75% of marketers identify these latter elements as 'important' says a recent Marketing Week / SAS study. Little wonder then that 'familiarity with marketing technologies' is the most desirable attribute for new hires in marketing, according to an eConsultancy / Eloqua report.

To date, many digital marketing technology investments have been piecemeal and low cost, and funded out of general discretionary marketing budgets. Often marketers outsource digital marketing to ESPs (Email Service Providers) and creative agencies to manage customer and sales prospect databases, email campaign execution, search and online advertising, and web site management.

In 2012 marketers will take back some control of digital assets from external agencies. Digital marketing will emerge as an enterprise mission-critical core competence, managed in-house and supplemented with specialist agency skills, not the other way around. More techie analyst / statistician types will be recruited into marketing. Digital marketing investment will need to ratchet up a gear in 2012 as data-driven Marketing takes centre stage.

"So what has this got to do with the IT Department?" you might ask. Well, Marketing mostly will not have the line-item budget to support the level of digital marketing investment required. Secondly, marketers may be gaining desktop IT skills, but have a limited understanding of enterprise IT architectures and the constraints and complexities associated with managing and controlling enterprise data. Marketers rarely have the attention to detail, the numerical and statistical disciplines, and the procedural rigour that is commonplace in the IT Department.

Marketing needs financial help and technical support from the IT Department to make digital marketing happen in the all-embracing manner envisioned by corporate management. New scalable digital marketing technologies, common platforms, and open standards will be required to ensure interoperability with cloud services. Legacy digital marketing systems will be migrated or replaced. 'Proper' IT management and support is required from the IT Department. Marketers need to get on with the day job of being professional marketers, rather than tactical amateur technologists with the resultant risks to data integrity, security, and compliance, as has been happening recently.

In summary, IT and Marketing will need to create a close and harmonious relationship to produce the customer-centric end-result demanded by corporate management. The passionate embrace required may take some humbleness from both sides. However, such a business-IT partnership has a great opportunity to deliver against corporate goals, and enhance the image of two much-maligned departments that often suffer from a lack of corporate credence and credibility.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 15th November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Most companies have not fully 'got' social media yet. Sure, they have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a LinkedIn presence, but then what? Wait for the world to beat a path to your door? Run a few promotional campaigns and see few results? Wait for the CEO to ask "why have we only got X number of Facebook followers?"

Many brands have a somewhat passive, reactive approach to social media marketing. EngageSciences is an interesting UK start-up with a pro-active social media formula for businesses and brands wishing to attract new social media followers, and then to monetize that presence.

Firstly, you need to sign up a critical mass of fans. EngageSciences encourages its clients to create viral campaigns on Facebook and Twitter that give away something for free. Digital marketers might run prize draws, online sweepstakes, contests and quizzes, or offer exclusive premium downloadable content, such as a white paper, for example.

These incentives can prove surprisingly effective. For example, Unilever (Pot Noodles) increased their Facebook fans from 3,000 to 25,000 and Play.com increased from 40,000 to 80,000 Facebook fans within 8 weeks of using EngageSciences.

Sign-up requires an opt-in email address to be provided, so that the prize winners can be notified. Email addresses are critical pieces of digital marketing data. For digitally-savvy vendors, this contact data can then be cross-correlated with other databases and company web site visits; so that a pattern of personal behaviour can be detected that triggers further more personalised marketing communications.

Secondly, you need your fans to spend money with you. The best incentives are those that can easily 'go viral' i.e. are forwarded to friends, family and other followers. Typically these include redeemable coupons and 'flash deals' (time-constrained discount offers), such as the '2 for 1' deals used by Café Rouge and Strada restaurants, that have proved so effective. Exclusive ("offers only for you, dear fan") web page offers also work well.

As a recent IBM CRM survey proved, contra to conventional wisdom, for the most part, consumers don't really want 'relationships', and 'connection' and 'dialogue' with corporates. Consumers want offers, discounts and the ecommerce ability to purchase online. ExactTarget research reveals that Facebook consumers who are promiscuous (who "Like" a lot of brands) and those a little older (age 27+) want something of value in return for their "Like".

The EngageSciences Fan Relationship Marketing Platform provides all the technology required to push attractive offers into the key social media channels i.e. Facebook and Twitter, and capture followers' contact details for segmentation and online re-marketing.

EngageSciences' SaaS-based hosted solution is a relatively low-cost method of quickly creating a cloud-based social marketing database as a repository for follower demographic details, social behaviour, and engagement with online social media marketing campaigns. A 'test' campaign or a monthly subscription costs c. £1,000.

EngageSciences is an invaluable short-cut to market for marketers wanting to get started with executing social media marketing campaigns. Many marketers are fumbling with DIY approaches or 'big ticket' solutions that take too long to develop.

Consumers are receptive to creative online promotions now. ExactTarget research reveals that 45% of Facebook customers currently "Like" a company at least once monthly. Already the average US Facebook user "Likes" an average of 14 companies / brands. Consumer fatigue will set in over time, and fan or follower acquisition will become increasingly more difficult and expensive.

To date EngageSciences has managed to attract some impressive high calibre brands as users - Nokia, TNT and Forbes for example. One fact is clear. EngageSciences can help to re-energise a lethargic social media presence - and there are plenty of companies out there in that broad category.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 1st November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Chief Marketing Officers' (CMOs) main role is to serve as 'brand custodians' on behalf of their employers today. They know that what their customers buy today is not so much product features, functions and form; but more 'the brand promise' - the image of the brand, what it stands for, and how the brand makes them feel.

Hence CMOs obsess about keeping the brand's integrity intact and ensuring that creative images and messages they use are globally consistent, and are mutually supportive of the brand promise. This has always been tricky. Local country operations often employ their own agencies to build local language versions of promotional materials, and different and often contradictory logos and messages appear, serving to confuse the customer and dilute carefully woven corporate marketing stories.

What CMOs need is a central brand control system to ensure global discipline of its troops. The solution is Brand Asset Management (BAM) which is a mix of Digital Asset Management (DAM) and its parent category, Marketing Resource Management (MRM), where Aprimo (acquired by Teradata earlier this year) is perhaps the best-known supplier.

Less well-known is the UK-based company VYRE, which is making waves in the Brand Asset Management market. Over 400 brands use VYRE's Unify BAM platform. Its clients include Diageo (owners of drinks brands like Guinness, Smirnoff and Baileys) and Shell.

Typically, brand managers use Unify as a central access point and portal for brand guidelines, creative display pieces, video, pictures, blog content etc. VYRE's larger customers have many thousands of Brand Managers globally accessing up to 100,000 brand assets as part of their daily work. These assets are then combined by local marketers into finished content, brochures, flyers, advertising etc. for their marketing promotional campaigns.

This finished content is then loaded into an Approvals workflow module so that the necessary management authorisation and sign-off can be obtained. This means local language versions can be tightly controlled by Corporate, so that brand integrity can be maintained. In addition, wasteful 're-inventing the wheel' is avoided as content can be created once and re-purposed for many different promotional uses. Such systems make simultaneous global promotional product launches a reality, maximising impact and product availability. Apple and Microsoft do this effectively.

VYRE's Unify is ideal for a large company like Shell or Diageo - it allows for a high degree of flexibility and customisation so that established working practices can be simulated within the software. Now VYRE has launched a midmarket, more packaged solution called On Brand. This is only available as a SaaS version, and starts at £2,500 per month. This means for roughly the cost of a marketing executive, a brand can deploy a fully featured BAM system. This has to be tempting, as the ROI is potentially around 3x to 5x.

The On Brand price will be attractive to marketing and advertising agencies too. The global agency, Lowe + Partners, is already a big VYRE user. Marketing agencies typically provide much of the creative content for the big brands (for example Lowe serves Microsoft, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson) and can better manage the logistics and workflow between themselves and their clients in an extranet configuration using shared systems such as On Brand.

Traditionally, many brand marketing organisations have used generic IT systems such as OpenText as databases for their brand assets. These multi-level filing systems are not that easy to use, especially for marketing folk not known for their computer-savvy skills. A system like On Brand, designed for use by Brand Managers, is preferable and offers the potential for fast global SaaS deployment (typically 6-8 weeks).

VYRE is an established 20-year industry veteran that has quietly been building clients and competencies around BAM. It has plans to grow its presence in the US and recent contracts there bode well. On Brand may just provide the vehicle to accelerate their growth and provide a stronger global presence as a leader in the BAM market.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 25th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

For many years it seemed as though the domain of modelling in an SAP environment was the preserve of only one tool. IDS-Scheer, with their ARIS tool, was the undisputed dominant player. Whether this was because of both companies being German, whether it was to do with the cross shareholding, or simply great sales and marketing by IDS-Scheer, other vendors fought shy of fighting the ARIS dominance. But now it seems that is changing.

Ever since the acquisition of IDS-Scheer by Software AG, there has been a sense of opportunity among other vendors. The last 18 months have seen several vendors talk about that opportunity and consider entering the fray. I know from my own experience that, in some cases, senior management within vendors has been split on whether to enter the market or not.

Historically, vendors such as MEGA International and Nimbus Partners have dabbled, but not really appeared to make great headway. Casewise, too, has in the past attempted, without great success, to address the SAP market, but did announce last year that they were planning to re-enter the fray with their Casewise4ERP offering.

Today though, things have changed. IBM, iGrafx and QPR are addressing the needs of the SAP community head on. QPR originally partnered with Nobultec Ltd to provide the interfacing between the company's modelling offering and SAP, and then they purchased the company.

Meanwhile, IBM turned to UK-based Silwood Associates to provide the required interfaces for their System Architect product. iGrafx, meanwhile, chose to partner with the German vendor Transware.

While the opportunity to tray and service more than 100,000 organizations using SAP in more than 120 countries is obviously a factor, vendors also have their eye on other prizes - with Oracle and other Software AG competitors as targets, as well as SAP themselves. Most vendors believe that Oracle and the others will increasingly be looking at alternative business modelling solutions for their own practices and systems, so the prize of an illusive major OEM contract is also driving them forward.

The acquisition of Nobultec by QPR was definitely a smart move and surely increases the market value of both Transware and Silwood. Some years ago another company aimed to act as a bridge between tools. That vendor, Software One, was quickly snapped up by Oracle and thus others were prevented from easy interfacing between tools. It remains to be seen whether history might yet repeat itself in this space.

One thing we can be sure of is that SAP customers have never had such choice before and, for them at least, the opportunities to reduce the cost of the modelling aspects of implementation will be pleasing.

At the time of writing, no particular SAP-related deals had been announced although IBM is understood to have closed some SAP/System Architect deals within 7 days of their announcement! IBM, iGrafx and QPR all have products being demonstrated and shown; as yet I am not aware of Casewise having a commercial product, but rumour has it the company may well have recently closed a $1m deal as a result of their Casewise4ERP offering.

It remains to be seen which, if any, of these vendors may take over the mantle of "dominance" in the SAP space, but having cost effective, easy to use options and, most of all, choice, has to be a good thing.

SAP customers should, for the most part though, remain cautious, as many of these offerings come as a result of partner technology, which may or may not be available in the market on a longer term basis. As has been stated, even IBM are offering via partner technology.

By: Matthew Wailling, Director, Cordless Consultants Posted: 17th October 2011 Copyright Cordless Consultants © 2011

In reality the 3D screens we see today aren’t ‘real’ 3D; they’re stereoscopic displays, the origins of which can be traced back to Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838. With the first patent for 3D cinema applied for almost 100 years after Sir Charles produced his first stereoscopic image, it took a further 73 years for Avatar to arrive at the Odeon. But while technically not 3D, “a new, groundbreaking stereoscopic movie from director James Cameron” definitely doesn’t sound as good.

Screens today create a perception of 3D by presenting offset images that are displayed separately to each eye; the human brain combines them and perceives three-dimensional depth. Although the term ‘3D’ has become ubiquitous, dual 2D images are very different from displaying an image in three full dimensions. The only display capable of this is a holographic one. The main distinction is that with a stereoscopic screen, even if the viewer moves, no additional information about the 3D object is seen; you can’t look round the back.

The challenges associated with stereoscopic?  Well, the obvious one is the need to carry (and be seen wearing) special specs—it’s not a great look. Then there’s the hassle and cost for IT professionals as glasses are just another thing for staff to lose or break. At a time when workers are more mobile, personal devices lighter and people want to carry less, I just can’t see widespread adoption by the typical worker. There are, of course, exceptions for particular work use: stereoscopic displays have clear applications in complex modelling and undeniable business benefit in immersive environments, but wider application to the desktop still feels clunky to me.

There is a second type of 3D screen available—autostereoscopic, which has optics built into the display, splitting the images directionally into the viewer's eyes, removing the need for glasses. This provides the opportunity for incidental viewing; product advertising through autostereoscopic signage could instantly become almost unavoidably eye-catching. But what of the commercial workplace? This year’s Consumer Electronics Show saw the launch of autostereoscopic laptops, including products from Toshiba and Sony. Initially, these will probably be bought by consumers for gaming and film-watching; most businesses will wait for the likes of MS Office to become 3D to justify the extra expense.

An issue with many autostereoscopic screens is the need to stand at a specific distance or angle to get the optimum 3D effect. While this presents a challenge for digital signage or point of sale use, where a target audience of multiple, moving people would need to see the screen at any one time, it’s less of an issue for laptop use. To improve the effect, many laptop screens now track a user’s eye position, adjusting the image constantly. As eye-controlled laptops are now reaching the market, also using eye-tracking cameras, it won’t be long before the two systems are combined to provide eye-controlled 3D laptops. 

An issue with both stereoscopic and autostereoscopic is accessibility. A significant proportion of people are stereo blind—they cannot see 3D images. The Eye Care Trust estimates that could include up to 12% of the population—some six million in the UK. So the potential market is smaller than for other display evolutions such as HDTV.

While the ‘how’ 3D is an easier question to answer, the ‘why’, for the workplace at any rate, is less so. When examining new workplace technology there’s always the danger of being wowed by new features and forgetting to look for the benefits. Gesture control, as seen on the Xbox and Wii, is being explored as a control interface for business-driven applications (although this hasn’t got much further than turning a bathroom tap on without touching it in many workplaces). Outside of scientific research, manufacturing and specialist modelling, business and user benefits are harder to quantify.

The logical use is as part of digital signage and branding strategy for high-impact areas. But a word of warning: while digital signage can add value, it has to be owned and its content kept fresh. Few things look worse than digital signage that’s turned off or showing a screensaver or tired PowerPoint deck—even if the company logo does magically protrude a foot from the screen.

As the adage goes, “content is king”. Avatar remains the highest grossing film ever, with a global box office taking of $2.8bn. I suspect 3D played no small part in this, and after the initial awe subsided, many people commented that the story was rather, well, one-dimensional. Avatar 2 is scheduled for 2014 and I’ll wager at least one of those 2.8bn dollars that the sequel won’t create anything like the same impact. With audiovisual the commercial sector tends to follow the consumer market and 3D hasn’t yet had the consumer impact many expected (perhaps people are just easily bored?). Herein lies the problem. Some market analysts predict 85% of us will have had a 3D screen for over a year by the time Avatar 2 bursts out of cinema screens. So if anything, it will be old hat.

In choosing to adopt 3D therefore, as with any new technology, remember this simple checklist: purpose, cost, benefit, ease of adoption, longevity.  Can you satisfy these criteria?

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 18th August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

I wrote an article about new accessibility features in Apple OSX 10.7, Lion, just before it was available, I have been running Lion on both my iMac and Mac Book Air and all my comments hold.

The new feature of Lion that has really impressed me is Mail, the email engine. Apple have really researched how people would like to use mail and made significant changes to the usability of the interface. When I read about the changes and even when I saw them demonstrated I was not that excited, it is only since I have started using them for real that I realised how good they are.

The layout of the window has changed to take advantage of the standard wide screen format, which means you can see more of the email you are reading or writing. A sensible but not surprising change.

The facility to search all my emails has been made more intelligent and easier to use. For example if I am looking for an email I sent to a specific person:

• I start typing in the name and it will give me a list of suggestions.
• I choose the relevant suggestion and it places a token in the search field.
• The token gives me options to narrow the search by emails with the person's name in the from, to, or entire email.
• In my example I would choose 'to' and I will get a list of emails that I have sent.
• This list can be narrowed down further by creating other search tokens, for example having a phrase in the subject field.

This is saving me considerable time and reducing the stress I suffered when I could not find the email I was looking for. Really a big boon.

But my real favourite is conversations. This feature takes an email that has a long conversation in it, with many replies and forwards in it, and re-formats it to remove all the indentations and repetitions and just shows each step as a separate block. This makes it much easier to follow the threads and it just looks much better.

However, for me the real excitement is the massive difference to round robin replies and daily emails.

I organise a rota of volunteers. To do this I send out an email to all the volunteers asking for availability. The answers arrive over several days. With the old Mail I had to gather them altogether to process them, the new Mail does that automatically. I click on the latest reply and all the other replies are visible in the same pane, just like steps of a conversation. I can see them all at the same time, deal with them and then delete or file them as a whole. It is faster and I am less likely to miss one.

My inbox always has several daily emails, for example one from Bloor with the new articles on the site. I do not always have time to look at them on the day. I have to say they tended to get lost. But with the new conversations they are all brought together, I can skim through several days worth, pick out the few interesting bits and then delete all of them at one go. This is helping to clean up my inbox.

Usability and accessibility are close cousins; the extra usability in Mail should improve the accessibility as well. The new Mail is a great example of User Centred Design.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 26th July 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

A lot has been written over the years about the way processes work within organisations. However, when one really looks under the covers what we find is that every process is driven by an event. Once the event occurs, decisions are taken by an "Identity", that can be an actual person or an automated device that has knowledge about the way the business reacts to this particular type of event. This "decision" is a rule. Once the rule has analysed the data surrounding the event, it makes a decision about which process should be started.

Let me illustrate this thinking. I am currently responsible for the administration of grass hockey elite squads in my county and this moment in time is one of the busiest, as parents respond to the invitations to join the county training squads and pay their children's fees. My event is the arrival of post each day. First decision on hearing the post come through the door, is do I collect now or a bit later? Once I collect, I hit the next event of "sorting the post". I have basically a decision on what sort of post has arrived:

1. If it is hand written or has the words "Director of Coaching" or "JDC", then the letter is of immediate interest and goes into the right pile on my desk;
2. If it is a business letter such as bank or credit card company communication, then it goes onto a pile on top of my printer;
3. If it is addressed to another member of my family, it goes into a pile on the left side of my desk, which, at the end of sorting, I take out to the kitchen for distribution;
4. If it is a magazine then it goes into another pile to be taken into the lounge for reading later.

So I have now applied my sorting "rule", which results in 4 different processes being kicked off; all of which can occur simultaneously, or near enough! Let's follow the post that is affected by decision 1 above. My next event is to open the letters and skim read the contents. Now comes the next set of decisions (rules):

1. If the letter is concerned with the Summer Camps I am running it goes into a pile on the left side of my desk;
2. If the letter is concerned with registration for the County JDC, then I check to see if a cheque is attached or not:
   1. If there is a cheque it goes into a pile on the right of my desk;
   2. If there is no cheque, then I write "No Money received and the date" on the form and put it on a pile on top of my printer.

For those letters about Summer Camps, I now start the process of registering the form. This process involves opening the right spreadsheet at the right tab, checking if the player involved is registered on the County database or not, entering all the necessary details of the form and finally banking the cheque.

For those letters about the County JDC that have a cheque, I now start the process of completing the registration of the player on the database and, for the double entry book keeping, updating the entry on the fee registration tab of a spreadsheet. The form is then filed in the completed box file store. For those County JDC letter with no cheques, I check to see if there has been a request to pay electronically and if so mark the form 'electronic payment' for latter checking with my bank records. If there is no information, then I email the primary address and ask how payment will be made.

What you can see is a pattern of Event followed by Decision (Rule) followed by Process and so on until you reach the final event-the end of the process!

My events, decisions and process are analogous to those that many organisations deal with every day in terms of customer orders, complaints, claims.

But what if, when the event occurs, all that you know is what the final outcome has to be and nothing about how you get from the starting event to the end event-what people refer to a "dynamic case management?". Well, if you look at BPM tools that support this capability, they are actual driven by the same pattern of event - decision - process; the difference is that the decision is more complex and will, in all probability, involve collaborative working with more experienced colleagues and other parties involved.

What I am seeing therefore is that the future of management of process in an organisation is no longer about just the workflow that connects all the current components that have been identified from the application portfolio, but also the identification of the events that trigger each major process and the rules that control what happens. However in today's mobile world there is one other piece to the jigsaw that has to be taken into consideration and that is the "identity" that triggers the event and those that are involved. This is all about the location and the device used to trigger the device or that will be used to receive information to make decisions.

By: David Norris, Practice Leader - Analytics, Bloor Research Posted: 14th July 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

As I try to understand the current trends in Business Intelligence solutions and, in particular at present, try to get to grips with what is meant by many of the marketing labels-like Agile BI-I have come across a number of really interesting products. Last week I had a phone briefing about Oryx and learnt a lot about the background that led to its development, and had an overview of what it could do. I was very interested and took the opportunity to go along and see them and have a demo of the software. What I have seen is a very polished and accomplished solution to a problem that I have seen occurs over and over again.

We have all worked in companies where, despite of all of the efforts of the IT department, demand for reports and analysis is never met, and that gap is usually filled by a series of Excel spreadsheets that provide answers but are far from a polished reliable source of enterprise data. Oryx is designed to enable business experts to obtain answers for themselves in a robust and reliable fashion.

Whereas most traditional approaches involve several steps with different tools to extract, to validate, to format and then to present data, and require a number of specialist skills such as an ability to write SQL, Oryx, in a single tool, and with an interface that is a point and click standard Microsoft desktop style screen, all of the functions are invoked to complete the job. From a very accessible interface a series of functions are invoked that will obtain data, validate it, format it and present it back with various tools, including drill through, and pivot and export functionality, and all of the other features that an enterprise solution should have, but delivered at the desktop of the business user with speed and elegance. In addition, all outputs satisfy the needs of enterprise solutions; they clearly identify when they were produced, there is a clear trail to identify where the data came from and how it has been manipulated.

I am not suggesting that Oryx is a complete replacement for the standard BI tool kit , but I see it as a valuable addition, enabling the backlog of demand to be satisfied without resorting to dubious DIY solutions. I have not actually seen another tool with all of these features delivered in this way before. Although designed to be sold as a Departmental solution to help Finance, Marketing etc to handle their demand for analysis without requiring constant IT intervention, this is a tool that should be seen as a proper enterprise level solution. It is very robust when things go wrong, it fails elegantly giving all of the information needed to correct the situation and fails safe rather than leaving a trail of files in uncertain states for IT to sort out. Once a report or cube is proven to satisfy the need, the solution can be turned into a production job with, again, just changes made via the interface to change the values and set up the required libraries.

This is a powerful desktop tool, capable of addressing a business need that exists in most companies. I have been impressed by the company and the product and think they succeed in satisfying the business need for flexible rapid answers, and IT's need to see the total cost of providing solutions remain controlled and not introduce a debt to be tackled in future years.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 15th April 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Pitney Bowes has long been a goliath in the metered postage market with around an 80% share in the US and 65% internationally. The need to diversify beyond the stagnant postage market has seen it venture into the software world. This venture has been far from smooth as it continues to try and carve out a niche beyond its traditional dominance in the mailroom. 

The company has spent over $2.5 billion on software acquisitions since 2000 – including MapInfo (location intelligence), Group 1 Software (data management and customer communications) and most recently Portrait Software (customer analytics). These are managed by Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI), which was formed in 2007 from the merger of the Group 1 Software and MapInfo businesses. However, the various acquisitions have created a patchwork product portfolio and a complex set of offerings. PBBI is now competing with far more competitors than it is used to, so must simplify its messaging and focus on the core capabilities across its product range.

PBBI’s strategy is to help its customers enable lifetime customer relationships through the application of Customer Communication Management (CCM). PBBI’s CCM comprises a set of core capabilities—data, insights, strategy and communications that help businesses acquire, serve and grow the lifetime value of their customer base. CCM particularly focuses on creating and delivering cost-effective multi-channel communications—including print, email, web, SMS and call centre interactions. 

A complex product range
PBBI’s products for CCM include solutions for document composition, archive and compliance, web self-service and interactive communications for customer service representatives. PBBI’s MapInfo has long been widely regarded as the leading product for location intelligence and geographical information systems (GIS) while its latest acquisition, Portrait Software, fills a gap in PBBI’s customer and data analytic capabilities—which include data integration and data profiling, along with analytics products such as demographic and psychographic data. 

PBBI now certainly has a range of products to enable businesses to gain real customer insight, particularly through geo-demographic and psychographic analysis. PBBI’s advantages over some of its competitors are the ability to go beyond traditional analytic segmentation using either geo-demographics or advanced predictive modelling as provided with Portrait Software. At one end of the scale, PBBI is competing against standard CCM vendors such as HP Exstream, Thunderhead and GMC, while at the other end is also competing in the business intelligence space with many smaller analytics companies and the large players, many of who have made acquisitions in the last few years (e.g. IBM/Cognos, Oracle/Hyperion, SAP/Business Objects). If PBBI can simplify its messaging, it can certainly be a real contender in these markets.

Exploiting the convergence of digital and print communications
As the communications landscape continues to become more complex, as online and offline channels converge and the use of social media grows, businesses must find a way to manage business processes across all these channels. Many of its customers are undoubtedly operating print and digital communication processes in silos and are probably using some elements of PBBI’s CCM suite—either for document composition, data quality, production or archival. PBBI must now encourage these customers to move to a single enterprise CCM platform, and thereby reduce the waste and inefficiency associated with decentralised communications processes.

But, ultimately, the biggest opportunity for PBBI is to pull together its wide and somewhat disjointed portfolio, and provide a unified CCM enterprise platform that can identify the “hot pockets” of customers by both geography and buying habits. Such highly targeted capabilities can lead to far higher conversion of prospects to customers, so reducing the cost of sale and also “buyer fatigue” caused by over marketing of different approaches to people who have no interest. Such an approach avoids the need to sell to multiple different groups within the organisation, as it provides a single approach that can be used directly by sales and by marketing, yet provides all the analytic and reporting capabilities as needed throughout the rest of the business.

PBBI certainly has the technology and the breadth and scale of products to enable businesses to create personalised multichannel communications but it cannot ignore that other players are snapping at its heels, particularly HP and GMC who both offer end-to-end CCM platforms. Along with the many vendors in the customer interaction space, PBBI has certainly got its work cut out in establishing a strong position in the market.

By: Julian Holmes, Co-founder, UPMentors Posted: 18th March 2011 Copyright UPMentors © 2011

A change is taking place in the IT Industry that has a major impact on the way organisations should now look to recruit software development people. The so-called ‘hard skills’—such as an applicant’s technology skills, qualifications, and certifications—should simply be an entry requirement and a greater focus should be placed on the ‘softer skills’.

The core competencies that a recruiter should now be looking for are the behavioural skills. Whilst these are sometimes difficult to extract, a skilled recruiter with a competency-based recruitment method should be able to identify applicants who will not only suit new ways of working but also enhance the team. 

What are the competencies organisations should now be looking for?
Competencies such as a team-player, excellent communication and collaboration skills, results orientated, the ability to pick up new skills quickly, to see the ‘big picture', flexibility, someone who embraces change and a ‘can do’ attitude, to name just a few. Some organisations may already feature these as part of their profiles for candidates, however these should now be a prominent part of the recruitment process, with new employees required to perform each to a high level on a daily basis. 

What is driving the change in focus?
The growing adoption of agile software development practices has significantly changed the way project teams work. No longer are they required to work as technical specialists in silos but are now expected to work in cross-functional teams, often with direct customer contact, to understand the business challenges and to enable them to deliver the right solution.

The success of these agile teams is directly related to the ability of the team to ‘gel’ together to deliver high quality software. This way of working is a significant departure from the traditional approaches to software development. The challenge for HR departments is to strategically align their recruitment policy and practices to support software teams and deliver candidates who will not only fit with the new ways of working, but enhance and develop it further to the benefit of the team, organisation and the customer.

About UPMentors
UPMentors helps organisations to successfully deliver and cope with complex software projects by transforming people’s capabilities. Using a combination of consultancy and specific practices such as knowledge transfer, leading by example, mentoring on-the-ground and various training techniques, UPMentors gives software professionals the capability to work more effectively as part of a team and prevent project failure.

As a trusted external resource, UPMentors challenges the mindset of how training is delivered across the business; it removes unnecessary overheads, company politics and bureaucracy while streamlining the entire software development process. The company specialises in several software development processes, including Agile and Unified Process variations.

Founded in 2007, UPMentors works with large enterprises across a wide range of industry sectors; clients include Capgemini, ING Direct and HM Revenue & Customs.  For further information, please visit www.upmentors.com

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd March 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

In my article on identity resolution in January I stated that “I only know one vendor that specialises in this second type of identity resolution and that is IBM.” What I was referring to was the sort of identity resolution that understands criminals who have multiple aliases and, further, can figure out that this suspect lived in the same house as xyz two years ago, who is now engaged to be married to abc, who is the sister of known terrorist lmn, and so on and so forth.

Well, my mistake. It turns out that I was wrong: Infoglide (www.infoglide.com) also provides this sort of software. Truth to tell, I had always put Infoglide into the same camp as Identity Systems (part of Informatica) for conventional identity resolution, which is more closely related to data quality. Indeed, Infoglide does sometimes compete in this market (they do overlap). However, its customer base is primarily in federal and state government and financial services, which tells its own story, although it does have a presence in the retail and healthcare markets also.

Also worth noting is that, while the company has historically been focused primarily on North America, it is now forming partnerships elsewhere. For example, the Westminster Group is a UK-based partner. Infloglide has several existing UK-based customers.

There are a couple of interesting things to be aware of in Infloglide’s solution. The first is that it uses a federated approach. In other words, all data stays in the source system. More particularly, this approach lends itself to addressing external data sources as well as those that are internal to an organisation. For example, you can query Facebook or LexisNexis at the same time as internal databases.

Like IBM, Infoglide supports anonymous resolution. This is used when you want to make enquiries about an individual but data privacy laws get in the way of providing such information, for example between a bank in Switzerland and one in the United States. IBM’s approach is that the data is shipped but anonymised (masked, if you will) whereas Infoglide’s is that the data is not actually shipped at all. Nevertheless, both answer the question.

These approaches are both fine if used within a single banking corporation. You need the software installed at both ends of the connection but that’s fine in a single organisation. However, it isn’t fine if two different banks want to communicate with one another. With both IBM and Infoglide having implementations in this market this will likely mean that banks will have to have both sets of software in order to handle information requests from different sources. No doubt both of these vendors would love this, but it’s not good for the banks, or anyone else wanting to use this software.

The market for anonymous resolution has not yet reached critical mass but it will. At that point we are going to have a problem. IBM and Infoglide need to sit down together sooner rather than later to discuss coming to some sort of agreement about standards for interfacing between the two product sets.

By: Natalie Newman, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 25th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

I am not referring to Cloud Computing but rather the cloud of confusion prevailing over geographic information amongst the general public. The confusion over this type of information; the confusion over the many terms used for information that can be linked to the earth's surface; and the confusion over maps.

Watching a TV program the other evening called, ‘The Beauty of Maps' highlighted the subjectivity of maps. The map maker has cartographic licence to create a map display which projects his interpretation of the subject; whether it is to visualise the topography correctly and read the labels easily, or to project an image that might not be true. This program described William Morgan's 1682 Map of London. He created a map of a city after it was destroyed by The Great Fire. His map illustrated the city he envisaged London would become. St Paul's Cathedral was well illustrated on the map even though it was totally destroyed and had yet to be rebuilt. Maps project what the creator intends.

There is a book written by Allan and Barbara Pease called ‘Why men don't listen and women can't read maps'.The theory goes that "due to their different roles in evolution, men had to hunt and stalk their prey, so became skilled at navigation, while women foraged for food and so became good at spotting fruits and nuts close by" [The Telegraph website]. I am not sure that explains it and, if one can generalise quite so simply, women should then be the bigger enthusiast about SatNavs. Maybe the ‘don't listen' bit prevents men from asking for or listening to directions :)

Returning to the subject—there is a great lack of understanding amongst laymen about location and geographic information systems (GIS)—as my previous article described the need to increase aWhereness. Location information—or whatever we want to call it—is simply the position on the earth's surface to the accuracy that is possible, and/or the accuracy that is required.

Initially Google Maps and Google Earth provided much needed publicity for geographic information. Google Maps, or similar, is used by most people I know to find their destination and obtain directions to reach it. Google Earth stirred an interest in places we might not visit but can view. So much good has emanated from those two applications to raise the profile of location.

The downside is that there is still not enough understanding or appreciation of the implications of geographic information and the systems. The associated costs are now even harder to sell as ‘Google is free'.

The Google application, Latitude, enables a mobile phone user to allow certain people to view their current location. I assume that these locations include both the longitude and latitude measurement; just the distance from the equator would not really help anyone.

Another term to increase the confusion, or is Google taking latitude with Latitude?

In addition, according to the latest Apollo survey table measuring the media coverage per technology company, Google came 1st in Europe and in USA, and 3rd in UK!  With that much media exposure, we should not underestimate the influence of Google!

We will have to tell a convincing story about the necessary investment to add location to your business systems. We will have to ensure that the longitude accompanies the latitude and makes good sense.

That means we, geographic professionals will have to work that much harder to tell—and sell—our story.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 31st December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

For a variety of reasons geographic and geospatial considerations have been in my mind recently. To begin with, Natalie Newman will, provided all things go smoothly, shortly be joining the Information Management group here at Bloor Research, specialising in exactly these areas. She has 25 years of experience of working in this space, especially in government (local and national), defence and in the telecommunications sector, both here and in her native South Africa. Most recently she was working with BT Global Services. So Natalie is welcome addition to our team.

Then, earlier this week, I received an email from Capscan, announcing its support for CACI’s ACORN. ACORN (a classification of residential neighbourhoods) enriches UK address data with a whole load of demographic data. If you go to the CACI site you can try it for yourself. Put simply, you put in a postcode and then the software classifies that post code as being in one of a number of categories, groups and types. For example, my post code comes into category 1: “wealthy achievers”, group A: “wealthy executives” and type 3: “villages with wealthy commuters”. Not that I’m a commuter. Or very wealthy for that matter. You can then analyse this type by a variety of lifestyle and demographic attributes to see how type 3 communities compare. For example, the average household in a type 3 community is 1.76 times more likely to have 2 or more cars compared to the country as a whole. It’s really quite cool. Capscan is suggesting using ACORN in conjunction with name and address cleansing and you can see how this would make sense or even, for that matter, using it independently of data quality.

Now, this demographic data is based on locations and we’ve all heard a lot about location-based services and the like, which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is why GIS (geographic information systems), in particular, is not as popular as it might be?

What I have been wondering is whether it’s because of the name. It seems to me that GIS systems are not really about geography at all: they are really about locations. And, for that matter, spatial analytics is not really about spaces but about topography. Perhaps if they actually said on the tin what they are about then people might use them more.

Here are some examples:

• GIS systems are often used to help decide where to put new store or depot locations. Yes, locations.
• GIS systems can be used to identify hotspots for benefit fraud. That is, where (locations) this is happening.
• I remember a particularly neat example from Information Builders: one of its clients had done a location-based analysis of its suppliers and found that 90% of them were on the other side of a major river, meaning that if the bridge was out for some reason, then their whole JIT (just in time) manufacturing would go out the window.
• The most common application of spatial analytics is in the insurance sector, for determining things like flood risk. This is essentially worked by how close you are to a flood plain or coast and how high your property is relative to the water source. Which sounds to me like topography.

Long-time readers know that I like to call a spade a spade and this is no exception. Normally, I would say that we are stuck with these terms but that may not be the case with GIS. With the huge growth in location-based services and location analytics there is the possibility that GIS could re-brand itself and finally prove as successful and as widespread as it ought to be. Hopefully, Natalie will help to make that happen.