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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Ruth Cheesley, MD, Virya Technologies Posted: 29th October 2012 Copyright Virya Technologies © 2012

If you haven't already heard, Google+ is the social network which is provided by the search engine giant Google. On the surface it's 'just another social network' but when you start to look at the deep integration with other Google products which are gradually being rolled out, alongside the way that Google+ 'Circles' (the containers into which you group your contacts) are influencing the content served up through Google search, it is rapidly becoming a social network that you cannot afford to ignore if you take search engine rankings seriously.

Noise Control
Google+ takes on board many of the concepts which were presented by the crowd-funded Diaspora, such as adding people to Circles (collections of people and pages) based on whatever factors you want to group people by—how you know them, what they do, what they talk about and so forth—as well as having the ability to control the 'noise' that certain people throw at you without removing them entirely from your network (by adding them to a 'Circle' and turning down how much it outputs to your stream), and selectively allowing on a granular basis who can access your shared content.

You can therefore choose who you want to listen to—for example, create a Circle for all Joomla! People and you can just view that stream, rather than distracting photos of cute kitties and the latest baby photos from your friends' sister.

Integration
Google+ also integrates with Google's other systems—Gmail, Calendar, Docs (now known as Drive), and much more, providing tight integration for people who use those services.

A recent announcement for Google Apps Enterprise customers now allows domain administrators to control posts by their users and restrict to domain-only (thereby resolving issues relating to sharing of sensitive content), view all staff profiles and even allow users to create a hangout (very powerful video conferencing allowing collaborative working) automatically whenever a calendar entry is created, or manually with one click in the calendar entry.

Even more clever is that you can now read your Gmail filtered by your Google+ Circles—so if you add people to the Circle you can then quickly find their emails and screen out other content.

Authorship
Google is now using your Google+ profile as a centralised means of identifying the author of content across the internet. That's not only for your content on Google+, but for all your content across the web. Blogs, forum posts, articles, reviews, videos, likes, shares, and so forth. 

When you create a Google+ profile you are prompted to add all websites that you contribute to—for example, if you are an author on the Joomla! Community Magazine you could add this as a resource to which you contribute. Perhaps you write a personal blog—add that too! Maybe you also contribute to a corporate blog or have written books on Amazon, another source to add.

You also are able to add all your social profiles, which will be hooked up with your author profile—think Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so forth.

Providing you have the correct microdata on your websites (this will be covered in a forthcoming article), you will quickly notice your Google+ profile being linked with your articles.

In search results they will begin to show as 'Written by' which links to your Google+ profile. In time you'll also see 'More from' which links to a filtered Google search, for all content authored by Ruth Cheesley (this currently displays on google.com but not on regional (e.g. google.co.uk) searches).

So what?
Google is building a trust-based network, whereby your social habits and connections inform your search results. If you search for something in Google when you're logged in, results which have been recommended (by '+1' or sharing) by your network (people in your Circles) will begin to be served up above those which haven't—the relevance algorithm won't be ignored completely, but precedence is beginning to be given to resources which people in your network think are useful.

This makes logical sense, in a way. If you were looking for some information about a topic, would you be more likely to trust information which comes from somebody you are already connected with, or a complete stranger (or something a company is paying to put in front of your face)? 

For companies ...
Take a step back and consider this from a corporate perspective—if you have a corporate page on Google+ and your potential clients follow your Google+ page, your results are naturally going to start ranking higher for those people. If you have a lot of people following your page, then a lot more people are going to have your links ranking higher. It's important to note, however, that you can't directly 'Circle' people from a page unless they have already 'Circled' your page—so some strategy is called for in order to gain followers.

For individuals...
Consider the implications from the perspective of an author, technical writer, trainer, speaker, one-man-band or any other position whereby building a reputation is important. If you have lots of people in your Circles, they too will be served over time with content you recommend (by sharing or recommending using +1). They will also be able to see when they search for a term which you have a reputation for, how many Circles you are in (hence your general popularity), and at a click see all the content you have contributed. Everything.

So, the question is, can you (and your clients) afford to ignore Google+ any more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gardner: Tell us about Comverge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gardner: Tell us about Design Within Reach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: 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: 14th June 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Gartner says IT budgets should be taken off the IT Department and given to the line-of-business departments. By 2015, they say 35% of IT spend will be outside the IT Department's control (largely thanks to Cloud) and Marketing Departments will become the new chief holder of IT budgets.

Is this really a good idea? Does the CMO really want to morph into a shadow IT Director? I think not. Smart CMOs see IT as a means to an ends. IT should enable marketing goals - sustainable revenue growth and customer retention and loyalty for example. No self-respecting CMO will take responsibility for big IT projects involving systems integration, IT project management, and user acceptance testing and training and so on unless they are completely mad and want a short career.

IT management should not be a required CMO skill. CMOs may be highly proficient on their iPhones and iPads, but this does not mean they should understand the technical complexities and vagaries of big data management.

The IT Department must continue to be involved with Marketing's procurement of IT - even if only as a gatekeeper in a 'check and balance' role. Although technology is now easier and less of 'a black box' in regards to usage, it's also becoming ever more complex to manage in many other ways. New versions of software become available every few weeks or months, new devices and screen sizes need to be supported, operating systems come and go (NB Nokia's Symbian and Linux's decline), and new apps are launched on an almost daily basis. It's chaos out there, and someone qualified in IT needs to manage the underlying technical aspects of marketing automation.

Marketing needs help from the IT Department so it can reach its customers digitally across multiple devices and channels, and introduce new innovative technologies for the Marketing Department's own use. Sure, Marketing has experts who can execute email campaigns or review web site analytics, but when things go wrong, as they will, it's the IT Department they run to. Marketers love funky new apps and cool user graphical interfaces, but don't expect them to write or debug a piece of code.

In fact, Marketing will be more reliant on IT involvement going forward, rather than less. Marketing Departments are full of a myriad of cheap and open source marketing apps which don't scale, integrate, or have a common user interface. Many are heavily customised. This has created over-reliance on a few marketing individuals who can work these systems, and after an initial burst of progress, productivity can easily stagnate.

Yes it's true, some marketing systems have been purchased without the blessing of the IT Department. Ever-optimistic marketers have been lured by a promise that systems didn't need IT involvement ("IT's involvement will just slow everything down..." vendors say) but the reality has turned out somewhat different. Cloud solutions are easier to manage and deploy, but they are not always an IT-free panacea.

Digital marketers need multiple databases and multiple feeds to create a single view of the customer, and address customers' real and implied needs. However, many marketers have struggled with even extracting base legacy CRM systems data and integrating it with marketing data. As Gartner might say, somewhat deliciously, "the trough of disillusionment follows . . ."

To summarise, CMOs should seek to collaborate with the CIO and the IT Department to achieve its goals, rather than circumvent them, encouraged by salespeople in search of a quick deal. 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.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 9th May 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

As the financial climate cooled, Quocirca came across more and more organisations that sang the same song – do more with less, and batten down the hatches of expenditure to ride out the crisis.

Part of the response back from IT on this was to keep assets for longer that they would normally do; “sweating” them to try and gain more value from them before assigning them to the great scrapheap in the sky.

However, older assets can have multiple problems.  They may lack the raw power to meet the needs of the business’ workload requirements.  There may be more failures at the equipment level and a lack of spares with which to replace the failed parts.  Energy usage may be many times more than modern equipment.

Yet, the cost of forklift upgrading hardware is still perceived as being too high – and then there is the cost of equipment disposal to take into account as well.  Securely disposing of IT equipment can be a complex task.  Most pieces of IT equipment – from servers and storage systems, through networking routers and edge of network appliances to individual end points, as well as printers and multi-function devices – will have some form of data storage built in.  This may be via nicely accessibly disk drives, may be in reasonably easily identifiable flash storage cards, or could be hidden within the systems as flash or on-chip memory stores.  Ensuring that all the data stored on different types of devices is securely disposed of can be a task that seems overwhelming and so puts off replacement.  Even when a device has reached a complete end of life, many organisations do a bad job of ensuring that what is thrown out (or disposed of via the waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) directive) is truly done in a secure manner.

To the rescue comes IT lifecycle management, or ITLM.  Although this has been talked about in the past, the main thrust has just been on managing the lifecycle of IT equipment from acquisition through to end of life on a provide and disposal basis.  Now, however, there is a different way of looking at ITLM, taking into account that IT equipment has a curve of inherent value that can be used to an organisation’s benefit.

For example, for the sake of argument, assume that a piece of IT equipment costs £10,000 brand new.  The organisation may write the piece of equipment off over 4 years, using a straight line model.  Therefore, after 12 months, it will have a book value of £7,500, after two year, £5,000 and so on down to zero after 5 years.

But this does not reflect the real actual value of the equipment.  Taking it out of the box, putting it back in the box and selling it on as second hand would probably lower the “inherent value” to, say, £7,000.  As the equipment ages, the inherent value will then drop away in a curve similar to many other goods, such as a car.  In the early days, it is likely to see a relatively fast drop in inherent value which then begins to level out over time.  However, the introduction of new models of the equipment may introduce step changes in the value of the equipment as buyers stop looking to buy this equipment, instead looking to the new model.

As can be seen, this more realistic inherent value model is completely at odds with the book value model.

Now look at this in relation to trying to sweat assets.  The longer you hold an asset, the less its value will be – both at the book and inherent levels.  By being able to intelligently identify the moment at which the inherent value and the incremental business value of new equipment cross over, the costs of maintaining an optimised business IT platform are lowered to the best possible point.

A good ITLM partner should be able to identify this sweet spot for your organisation.  Not only this, but they should also be able to optimise the inherent value through helping to identify the best options for disposal – this may be to hold them for further use, or it could be to directly repurpose the item for resale, or to strip down for parts.  The partner should also be able to offer a range of services for secure data disposal – from over-writing through to maceration of disk drives to the point where data restoration is impossible.  Even where this is carried out, the cost of such secure disposal should be able to be offset somewhat through the scrap value of macerated disk drives – each contains a fair amount of precious and rare earth metals that have considerable value in the market.

A full and proper ITLM approach allows a business to manage its total IT platform to provide the best platform for the business’ use.  It is not about sweating assets, but it is about ensuring that the right equipment is in the right place at the right time – and at the right cost.

Quocirca has a free report that provides a model for organisations to adopt when looking at applying ITLM for their business.  The report can be downloaded free of charge here.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 2nd May 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

For most organisations, the lifecycle of IT equipment is straightforward: buy it, provision it, run it, deprovision it and dispose of it. Simple and reasonably effective.

However, unless it’s handled carefully, it’s an approach that could be doing organisations a major disservice. Starting with purchasing, for example - just how good a deal is your business getting? 

Assuming your organisation is a mid-sized one—or even a large one buying a few hundred to a few thousand servers per year—then the costs will be considerably lower than the list price. But is the organisation getting the same deal as one that buys tens of thousands of servers per year? 

Doubtful - and, when this is taken across the whole IT estate - servers, storage, networking equipment, desktops, laptops, printers, multi-function devices, maybe even smartphones and other devices - the cost differential can be significant. One option here is to use a managed IT lifecycle management partner to bring economies of scale. 

In the running of the equipment, again there are economies of scale from provisioning equipment before delivering to site. Maintenance, repair and operation costs can be driven down through shared resources and cheaper spares, again driven by the scale of purchasing. 

But it’s at disposal that you can see the real savings. Most organisations run their IT equipment until it’s relatively useless to the business. The equipment will have been written off at the book-value level, and in Europe the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEE) directive means the equipment cannot just be dumped, so there’s generally a hefty cost involved in its disposal. 

For those with a discrete equipment disposal process, the costs associated with getting rid of storage securely can be significant. 

Funds from hardware disposal
However, if the disposal is linked with the overall lifecycle management process, expense can not only be minimised, but the equipment may have a value that can be used to offset costs - and even, in many cases, provide additional funds for new equipment.

Each item of equipment has some inherent value. That value is affected by various factors - for example, obviously over time it will progressively fall. The launch of a new model will also push down the value because organisations won’t want the old version, which others will also be dropping, causing a glut on the second-hand market. 

A change of technology - for example, the greater adoption of 100GB Ethernet - can force down the value of equipment that cannot support the new standards. 

A good managed IT lifecycle management partner should be aware of the timings of these variables and advise on the optimal inherent value of a specific piece of equipment. By deprovisioning it and disposing of it in a secure manner and then selling it on as a working piece of equipment, as a bare-bones system or for parts, the money can go towards replacing it with new equipment. 

Intelligence on future releases
Managing this set of variables effectively is not easy. The IT lifecycle management partner requires solid ongoing relationships with technology vendors to know what’s coming down the line. 

They need good purchasing agreements to secure the best acquisition costs. They also must understand the legal aspects of equipment disposal and of secure data destruction. They also require solid technical skills in provisioning and running equipment. 

Choosing the right IT lifecycle management partner can ensure the organisation always has the optimal IT platform through the replacement of equipment at the right time with the best overall cost equation in place. Having an optimal IT platform available means the organisation should not be constrained by IT - and allows it to compete more effectively. 

Lifecycle management should not be regarded as a nice optional extra. For those organisations that see IT as core to their business, it should be a necessity. 

You can download Quocirca’s free lifecycle management report on the various stages of an IT maturity model and what is involved in putting in place a full management approach.

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: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 20th July 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

WSO2 today announced the debut of the WSO2 StratosLive platform as a service (PaaS) and the launch of WSO2 Stratos 1.5, the newest release of WSO2’s open-source cloud middleware platform software. Together, they provide comprehensive cloud middleware solutions for enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite application development and deployment in the cloud.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company offers a complete PaaS both as on-premise software and as a hosted service, running the same production-ready code wherever it best suits customers’ privacy, service-level agreement (SLA), and deployment requirements. [Disclosure: WSO2 is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

StratosLive provides a complete enterprise deployment and integration platform, including application server, enterprise service bus (ESB), database, identity server, governance registry, business process manager, portal server and more.

Stratos provides the same capabilities to organizations that want the benefits of a PaaS running on their own premises. It builds on and extends WSO2's Carbon enterprise middleware platform by taking the Carbon code and adding cloud functionality for self-service provisioning, multi-tenancy, metering, and elastic scaling, among others.

All Carbon products, including the latest features from the recent Carbon 3.2 platform release, are available both as part of the Stratos cloud middleware platform and as cloud-hosted versions with instant provisioning on the StratosLive public PaaS. WSO2's approach enables developers to migrate their applications and services between on-premise servers, a private PaaS, a public PaaS, and hybrid cloud environments, providing deployment flexibility.

“The cloud is a compelling platform for enabling enterprises to combine the agility they’ve gained by employing SOAs and composite applications with an extended reach and greater cost efficiencies,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “At WSO2, we’re delivering on this promise by providing the only truly open and complete PaaS available today with our WSO2 StratosLive middleware PaaS and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 cloud middleware platform.”

Four new products
The launch of StratosLive and Stratos 1.5, adds four new cloud middleware products:

• Data as a Service provides both SQL and NoSQL databases to users based on both MySQL and Apache Cassandra. This allows users to self-provision a database in the cloud and to choose the right model for their applications.
• Complex Event Processing as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of CEP Server, which launched in June 2011 and supports multiple CEP engines, including Drools Fusion and Esper, to enable complex event processing and event stream analysis.
• Message Broker as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of Message Broker, which launched in June 2011 and supports message queuing and publish-subscribe to enable message-driven and event-driven solutions in the enterprise. It uses Apache Qpid as the core messaging engine to implement the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard.
• Cloud Services Gateway (CSG), first launched as a separate single-tenant product, is now a fully multi-tenant product within Stratos and StratosLive.

With StratosLive and Stratos, central cloud features are built directly into the core platform—including multi-tenancy, automatic metering and monitoring, auto-scaling, centralized governance and identity management, and single sign-on. The Cloud Manager in StratosLive and Stratos offers point-and-click simplicity for configuring and provisioning middleware services, so developers can get started immediately and focus on the business logic, rather than configuring and deploying software systems.

Additionally, the Stratos cloud middleware platform features an integration layer that allows it to install onto any existing cloud infrastructure such as Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), and VMware ESX. Enterprises are never locked into a specific infrastructure provider or platform.

The availability of StratosLive and Stratos 1.5 brings several new core platform enhancements:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) Web application support
• Google Apps integration
• Metering and usage throttling
• Billing
• Multi-tenant logging

WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 are available today. Released under the Apache License 2.0, they do not carry any licensing fees. Production support for the Stratos starts at $24,000 per year. StratosLive middleware PaaS is available at three paid subscription levels: SMB, Professional, and Enterprise, as well as a free demo subscription. For details on subscription pricing, visit the WSO2 website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 27th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Data virtualisation is the latest technology to enjoy its moment in the hypelight and there has been some considerable debate within the blogosphere about what it actually is and what its relationship is to data federation, data integration and EII (enterprise information integration).

Rather than start from scratch I thought I would go back through my files and see what I had written about this in the past (if anything). I found the following definition of an EII platform (that is, what you need to support EII, which is, after all, about information rather than mere data). What I wrote, some three years ago, was that an EII platform needs to do four things:

1. “It virtualises your data – it makes all relevant data sources, including databases, application environments and other places where data may be sourced, appear as if they were in one place so that you can access that data as such.
2. “It abstracts your data – that is to say, it conforms your data so that it is in a consistent format regardless of any native structure and syntax that may be in use in the underlying data sources.
3. “It federates the data – it provides the connectivity that allows you to pull data together, from diverse, heterogeneous sources (which may contain either operational or historical data or both) so that it can be virtualised. It should also enable things like push-down optimisation so that query joins can be mastered in the optimal place.
4. “It presents the data in a consistent format to the front-end application (typically, but not always, a BI tool) either through relational views (via SQL) or by means of web/data services, or both.”

Actually, I didn’t quite write that: I have updated it somewhat but the gist is the same.

Clearly, data federation is not the same as data virtualisation. Moreover, federation is not necessary for virtualisation, depending on why you are doing the virtualisation. If you want to link a number of data marts together so that you can query across them then clearly the query optimisation capabilities of a federation engine will be necessary. On the other hand, if you want to create Mashups or other applications that have relatively lightweight access requirements, or you want to use virtualisation to support MDM-like capabilities, then such functions may not be necessary. Instead you can use data services. Data services may also be more appropriate in environments where less of the data is relational and more of it comes from a variety of unstructured sources or from the web. Indeed, there is a whole new discussion to be had about the distinctions between data virtualisation for unstructured data and structured data (or a combination of the two) but that’s a subject for another day.

The other question that arises is whether parts 1, 2 and 4 are all actually parts of the same thing. I think 2 and 4 probably are or, at least, the differences are so slight that there is no point in making a distinction.

Parts 1 and 2 are another issue. If data virtualisation is about having a virtual data source that does not necessarily mean that it is easy to work with. It is certainly easy to imagine a huge hybrid database that contains relational and non-relational data, pdf documents and a whole bunch of other things, but that would not necessarily mean that the data was all in a common format and, therefore, easy to work with. So, I think both 1 and 2 are required and are different. It is certainly true that it does not make much sense to implement data virtualisation without an abstraction layer but that doesn’t mean they are the same thing.

Finally, I haven’t talked about data integration at all. Well, the fact is that leading data integration products support data services so you should certainly be able to virtualise data sources even if you can’t federate them (they won’t typically have the sort of distributed query optimiser you would want from a data federation product). The question will be how easy it is to build the abstraction layer with a data integration tool. Of course, you can create all the transformations and mappings necessary for this purpose but what you would really like is something that automates a lot of this abstraction rather than requiring you to build it for yourself. It is in these two areas—federation and automated abstraction—that the pure players in the market, especially Composite Software and Denodo, have a significant advantage over the data integration vendors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 26th November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

In November 2010 I attended two separate user conferences, both at the same venue (The Mayfair Hotel in Central London) and hosted by two different enterprise solutions companies with a common heredity.

Both were innovative entrepreneurial start-ups offering disruptive technologies; both have c. 500 employees; both have recently been acquired at an attractive premium price (c. $1.8Bn) by a larger software supplier. The companies? Omniture (acquired by Adobe) and Netezza (acquired by IBM).

Two years ago the Omniture conference in London was electric. Their CEO, Josh James, was buzzing around with great vigour, and preached the gospel of web site analytics to an adoring audience. There wasn’t a dry eye or a free seat in the place. Youthful exuberance, funky beards and hair gel were everywhere. Stand-out presentations included ‘how BT uses web site behavioural targeting’.

Not this time. In Omniture’s recent ‘Clicks to Cliques’ conference there were no customer presentations. Content was thin and presenters relied mostly on jokes to enthuse the audience. At lunch the attendees I talked to felt little had been learned, and there were few action points. “I am not sure why we are all here” said one. Earlier this year Josh James abruptly left Omniture with no explanation and his life-blood, and the drive and innovation that made Omniture so successful seems to be lacking.

At Netezza’s ‘datawarehousing appliance’ conference both the audience and the presenters seemed to be having a jolly good time. An IBM manager articulated the attraction of Netezza to IBM. Netezza’s SVP for Strategy & Marketing presented the Netezza product technology road map providing a clear sense of direction using Netezza’s core values: speed, simplicity, smartness, and trustworthiness.

Three enthusiastic and personable Netezza customers presented why they had bought and how they use Netezza product(s). The man from BSkyB used BSkyB’s own tag line ‘believe in better’ to describe Netezza. “The more I use Netezza, the less I need integration tools” he said. There were lots of questions from the floor. The compere kept everything moving at a brisk pace and no-one had time to get bored. Everyone stayed for drinks afterwards, because they genuinely wanted to.

The bottom line for customers: smaller, high growth innovative vendors that are acquired by bigger beasts can work well if the senior management team is left intact, autonomy and continuity are maintained, and the culture remains relatively untouched. Synergistic co-existence is the desired goal—meaning customers get more of the same, but with more resource backing and global reach. For example, if Netezza can leverage the IBM customer base it might turn its 400 customers into 4,000 customers by 2015.

Paradoxically, those acquirers that try to assimilate innovative company cultures into their larger entities are taking the bigger risk. IBM’s decimation of Tivoli is the stuff of legend, but also other big players have destroyed shareholder value with an insensitive approach to acquisitions. A balanced, emotionally intelligent, approach is required rather than looking for immediate cost savings and ROI. IBM certainly seems to have taken this onboard in its approach towards Netezza and Cognos.

Customers are advised to observe behaviour rather than listen to the rhetoric when evaluating whether to stay with an acquired software vendor. If it becomes clear that a dynamic entrepreneurial culture is being consumed into a larger role-based bureaucratic culture, customers should review their sourcing options.

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

Three megatrends are shaping the next generation of successful businesses and governments. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications, highly responsive cloud-computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration.

Indeed, by the year 2020, The Economist newspaper predicts there will be two trillion devices connected to the Internet. And taking a look at where we are right now, McKinsey Quarterly reported in August that in 2010 some four billion people have cell phones, and 450 million have access to a full web experience.

Moreover, Jupiter Research reports that by 2014 there will be 130 million enterprise users involved with mobile cloud activities. Not only is access pervasive, but the amount of information available is also exploding. The Economist again reports that in 2005 mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data … and in 2010 we will create fully eight times more data.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

As these trends literally rearrange business ecosystems, a gap will surely emerge between the companies that master change -- and exploit enabling technologies -- and those that fall ever further behind.

For those that do step up to the challenge -- expect a relentless emphasis on rapidly recurring innovation to meet dynamic customer and citizen demands.

Our latest BriefingsDirect podcast therefore focuses on how these trends -- and rapidly evolving customer, citizen, and user expectations -- are newly impacting the enterprise. We also examine how technology advancements are making it possible to drive innovation to meet these new demands for instant gratification.

Please join HP executive Dave Shirk, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business, as we explore how HP is working to make headway, so that the next few years bring about a generational opportunity -- and not a downward complexity spiral. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Shirk: We're seeing a lot of shift going on in the marketplace right now. When we look at where consumers are driving business or where citizens are driving government, it's fundamentally changing the way they operate. We've seen three core things come out.

The business models are all starting to change the way in which people approach markets across the globe. That's having to really rethink the ways in which they've approached them versus traditional methods.

The second thing we see is this whole shift in mobile computing meeting cloud computing and the enterprise trying to figure out exactly how to take best advantage of that to create this competitive advantage. Then, the overall demographic piece weighs into that.

We've seen the rise of the millennials, as they're being referred to. All of these things are forcing business and government to stop and say, "You know what, if we're going to grow or we're going to create a service differentiation, we're really going to need to do things differently and we're going to have to do it way faster than we've ever done it before."

According to the Society for Engineers, you now have over 800,000 graduates in China, over 300,000 graduates in India, 100,000 some in Japan, etc. It's over the last 10 to 12 years that each of those graduation rates has occurred. They are part of the workforce now.

When they went through that process, they were always connected and they always were involved in a social network-based environment. They have a level of their lifestyle that is all tied to this always-connected environment. When you think about the ubiquitous computing that that has brought to them, as they enter the workforce, they are looking at things a lot differently than ever before.

They bring new ideas. They bring new ways to that. They're looking for businesses that will support that kind of methodology and structure. ... So, when we think about that Gen X group that's out there, we see them driving an enormous part of this change.

The last statistic I saw was that they are now over 50 percent of the workforce. The analogy that's always used is that, to them, being connected and always involved in some type of networking-based collaboration or information sharing of some sort is about the same as it is for you and me to pick up our remote controls and turn on our television sets. That's already having a very profound effect on how business and government are changing and the expectations that are out there in the marketplace.

It's this [demand for] immediate or instant gratification: "If I can't get what I want in the following way, I’ll find the business or government environment where I can." While the government piece maybe a bit harder to change, the business piece isn't, and so the competitive pressure to serve this audience, both as the consumer and also as employees, is a big part of that shift.

We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

We call that the "Now Problem." They want this, they want it done now, and they want it to work a certain way. We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

This is probably best represented in the words of Professor Gary Hamel, who is the foremost business visionary person out there in the marketplace. In his book, Future of Management, he described it as "whiplash change."

That's very much the case when I speak with our clients both on the business side and the government side. That's exactly what they're sitting there and thinking and working through right now.

Role of technology

We look at the technology piece of [the change] and say that you really can't [react] any other way -- the pace of it, the speed of it, and some of the complexity associated with it. For a long time, business has tried to use labor as an arbitrage to try to work their way through this and just throw bodies at it. That's quickly dissipating. The speed and the connectedness that we see, and the confidence level that all of these types of services require make it no longer possible to go through that.

What we see is IT completely embedded in the business. Over the next couple of years, that's going to continue to be the trend and the strategy that will play out in the way in which business and government work this. Ultimately, that's going to be the differentiator that drives an ability not only to serve these constituencies but to out-serve them, and that's going to be the name of the game.

[The solution] starts with a desire to change and to drive innovation in a different way. We sit and we think about the fundamental change in this. We talked for years that the business was focused on business processes and business process reengineering. While that’s still very important, it isn't going to go away any time soon.

It's becoming obvious that the bigger driver and the more significant trend is the information process, understanding the segments of business or government that need to be addressed. What their needs are, what they want, what they want to talk about, the ways in which they want to interact is all part of this change that’s taking place.

Closing the gap

So, as we start to pull back and step back from this, we look at that and we look at this vision that we have for the Instant-On Enterprise and how we’re enabling end-users to become a part of that, how we’re enabling businesses and governments to provide that type of capability. It really is about closing the gap between what IT can provide and what the business needs to be able to serve each of those audiences.

What we’ve launched with this vision is to put the foundations in place to make that possible and take a journey with our clients both from the business side and government side and help them move down that particular path, find ways to navigate these challenges and these trends, and to out-serve and to over-serve all the audiences that they need to meet the needs of.

[This change] is inevitable. Different businesses and governments will have, at different times, one of these four elements be more important or more significant to them at different points. All of them share the innovation requirement. We see that in all things.

Our view is that the innovation has to take place throughout that information process. It doesn’t matter whether it happens back at the data center or at every touch point. Innovation has to take place throughout for the business to meet the needs of those segments I’ve referred to earlier -- how it services it, how it conducts itself, and ultimately how it meets our needs or exceeds the needs of the audiences.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used.

Agility, optimization, and risk all vary in and out with innovation in terms of their need and their level of importance.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used. A big part of technology’s trouble in the past was that we created all of these things and we never had a plan for ending their lifecycle or turning them down slightly, so that we could turn up other activities or other possibilities in an instant-on environment and an instant-on enterprise. A core part of the vision that we see is being able to drive that agility to meet those changing business needs.

When HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense. There are some things that are much easier to focus on first and then, over time, to gain more and more of an Instant-On nature.

Critical success factors

Flexibility, security, speed, automation, and insight, those absolutely are attributes that we look for. We see them as the critical success factors in the way in which every part of the environment that IT leverages, drives, and embeds in the business has to come forward.

And yet, everybody is stuck in this mode of an enormous legacy that they have to deal with, and that gets in the way of being able to provide some of these new capabilities.

We’ve spent a lot of time and gotten a lot of expertise over the years trying to figure out the best ways to address these albatrosses that are keeping IT from being able to deal with the needs of the business. In the Instant-On Enterprise journey, that's a big part of the set of steps that we have to work through and work with our clients to make sure that they understand where to prioritize.

In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

Our view is that we work with our clients and figure out ways that they can, as we say, shift that equation. How do you shift from 70 percent of that equation being focused on operational management, and 30 percent, if you are lucky, being spent on new and innovation-based capabilities to help or assist the business and its growth versus shifting it the other way? How do you get to 30 percent operational mode, and move forward with 70 percent focused on the business?

Changing business models

When I spend time with clients and listen to them, a big part of what they're asking for is, "We’ve got these pressures. We're seeing the business models change and we're experimenting with some things. We're seeing the mobile and the cloud computing pieces coming at us like a freight train. At the same time, we're seeing the demographic shift both on the end-user consumer side and on our employee side. We need strategic partners to help us with this. How do we navigate this? What is the way in which we should do that? HP, do you have a point of view?"

We're in a unique position, because we're the only company in the marketplace that has a full suite of consumer products, and yet we stretch all the way back through to the data center. All the capability, all the offerings, that are in between, all the services that are necessary to address each of those pieces, are contained inside the portfolio capability that HP has of hardware, software, and services.

We looked at this and said, "How do we take the best combination of that breadth of portfolio and bring those together in a set of solutions to best address what we are hearing over-and-over from some of the research that we’ve done and listening that we’ve done with our clients?"

They need to figure out how to modernize their applications. We want to make sure that we are there and we’ve got a set of solutions for that. They’ve got huge data-center issues in terms of how they're going to transform their data centers and deal with more virtualization-based techniques and capabilities and bring networking and storage and compute power together in some fashion.

They’ve got this issue of enterprise security. They need to figure out how to secure the enterprise. I don’t mean desktops, but all points, all touch points of the enterprise -- how they build applications, how this information is accessed inside and outside of the organization, and then fundamentally optimizing that information, the ways in which you store it, the way in which you deliver it, the way in which you print it for that matter, all those pieces.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

Then, they need to underpin that by the best way to figure out how to deliver it. Do we do it for them? Do they build it themselves with our architecture, and our capability set, and our consulting expertise? What combination of ways makes the most sense to set that up?

... We help our clients work their way through that with a series of workshops that we do to get in and investigate. We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

There’s an enormous amount of talk about cloud in the marketplace today. HP has been at the forefront of that, but we have a little different position. We think it’s unique and we think we're the only ones out there that are really positioned to do this, which is the concept of hybrid IT, where you’ve got a mix. You’ve got a mix of traditional on-premises-based capabilities, but then you figure out what private cloud or public cloud-based capabilities best serve your business on a global basis.

HP comes in and, unlike other companies that try to force you into a one-size-fits-all structure, we sit down with the client. Our unique IP in this area is that we have an incredible depth of intellectual capital in this particular area, which is helping the clients figure out the best balance or mix of the delivery methods.

We can help them build it. They can host it or we can host it for them. We can provide those services from our public cloud-based capabilities or from our private cloud based capabilities. We really don’t care, if that blend changes over time. That’s the beauty to the journey to this Instant-On Enterprise.

Starting small

Our data says that most customers still start with a small private cloud implementation to really understand the value of the cloud and demystify it. We’ve said that there is going to be something after cloud. We don’t know what that level or that style of computing is going to be, but our architecture is built such that we’ll be ready for that. For our clients, we’ll help navigate them through each of these pieces, and that’s the important thing for us.

We have our new HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service, which is a place for a client to start, get a basic orientation, sit down and understand kind of where we think they might consider beginning that journey. So that, along with a number of other capabilities that we have to help them through these various workshops, I think is really the best place for them to start.

There are a whole series of workshops globally that our teams are set up to do, everything from a small couple-of-hour based interaction to a full suite of in-depth analysis and consulting engagements to work with a client. ... We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

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

The rapidly changing and fast-growing opportunity for more businesses to reach their customers and deliver their services via mobile applications is at a crossroads.

Over just the past two years, the demand for mobile applications on more capable classes of devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has skyrocketed. Now businesses need to figure out how they can get into the action.

Small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) especially need to reevaluate their application development and end-user access strategies to be able to deliver low-cost yet impactful applications to these newer devices. This goes for reaching employees, as well as partners, users, and customers.

Hopefully, there's a shift in the skills required to put these applications on these devices and distribute them. The emphasis on capabilities is moving from hardcore coders -- with mastery of embedded platforms and tools -- to more mainstream graphical and scripting-skilled workers, more power-users than developers.

This sponsored podcast explores how mobile application development and the market opportunity are shifting, and how more businesses can quickly get into the mobile applications game and build out new revenue, share more data, and provide better direct customer access in the process.

Our panel consists of Roger Entner, Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Insights in the Telecom Practice at the Nielsen Co., and Wayne Parrott, Vice President for Product Development at Genuitec. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Entner: About 50 percent of all devices being sold in the US right now are smartphones. We expect smartphone penetration to be at about 50 percent by the end of next year. Almost 60 percent of smartphone owners are actually using applications. That’s a huge percentage.

We're now at that sweet spot where it makes a lot of sense for businesses to have applications both for their consumers and their employees alike, because there is enough of an addressable base there.

We just launched our second edition of our Mobile Apps Playbook. But to quote numbers from there, year-over-year second quarter '09 to second quarter '10, smartphone penetration in the US went from 16 percent to 25 percent.

Now, we have 3- and 4-inch screens that are actually readable. We're not just merely replicating a desktop experience, but actually tailoring it to the device and working with the strengths of the device rather than with the weaknesses.

The devices that we call now smartphones are little computers that today are as powerful as laptops a few years ago. I always say that this little thing you have in your hands, a smartphone, has far more computing power than was used by NASA to put men safely on the moon and bring them back alive.

Applications becoming easier

And now Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the others, have software development kits (SDKs) out there that make app development a lot easier than it has ever been.

If you have a talented developer or a talented person in your department, he might be able to build that internally. Or, there are now myriad development shops out there that have the capabilities to build applications and charge only a few thousand dollars -- and that's single digit thousand dollars -- to have a capable, usable application.

There are a lot more people who know how to program these things, and have good ideas of applications. There is a really good market out there to put the two together.

Parrott: We’re seeing a big move toward interest in mobile at the development side. What are the factors that’s really led to the explosion of mobile apps? It's not only the smartphones and their capabilities, but we also look at the social changes in terms of behavior.

People more and more have a higher reliance on their smartphone and how they run their lives, whether they are at work or on the move. The idea is that they are always connected. They can always get to the data that they need.

Basically, we're taking their lifestyle away from their desktop and putting it in their pocket as they move around. More and more, we see companies wanting to reach out and provide a mobile presence for their own workforce and for their customers.

The question they ask is, "How do we do that? We already have a web presence. People have learned about our brand, but they can't access this through their smartphones, or the experience is inferior to what they’ve come to expect on the smartphone."

We're seeing a big growth of interest in terms of just getting on to the mobile -- having a mobile presence for the SMBs.

Still a great deal of complexity

If you take a look at the current state of native mobile app development, it's really not much better than it was five years ago. You still see a strong fragmented programming model base, different operating systems, and different hardware capability. It's still a mess. You pretty much have to pick a subset of devices that you want to focus on.

Entner: If we take one little step back, one of the genius things that Apple has done is turn the bookmarks into an application. About 60-70 percent of all applications on the iPhone or an Android are actually glorified HTML ports. So, it's not that difficult or that demanding on the application side.

One new trend is HTML5, which is slowly but surely approaching. There has been no finalized HTML5 standard [from the W3C], but a lot of web browsers, and even mobile web browsers, have now some HTML5 capabilities. And, it will really help in the development cycle for basic applications.

Where HTML5 will not to be able to help us, at least right now, is when we try to take advantage of location-based services because there is no standard yet. They're still arguing about this one, and especially high performance graphics. But, on the standard application, HTML5 will take us miles forward and diminish the difference between the desktop and the mobile environment.

... At the same time, all of the SDKs are getting more powerful and more user-friendly. So, it's moving toward a more harmonized and more rapid development environment.

Parrott: Prior to HTML5 talking about mobile web was pretty much a joke. Mobile web was an afterthought in the phone market. You had these small, dinky displays. Most of them couldn't even render most standard HTML. What's new?

You still see a strong fragmented programming model base, different operating systems, and different hardware capability. It's still a mess. With the advent of the smartphone what you really saw was pretty much the Internet, as you experience it on your desktop, now on to your smartphone, but with even more capability.

Part of it is because HTML5 has stepped back and looked at what the future needed to be for a web programming model. To become more of a common run-time, they had to address some of the key gaps between native hardware, APIs, and web. Much of those have really centered on one of the biggest digs that mobile web had in the old days, when you were doing something, were connected, and then you lost your connectivity.

Out of the box

HTML5, right out of the box, has a specification for how to operate in an online, offline, or disconnected type mode. Another thing was a rendering model, beyond just what you see on your desktop, that actually provides a high-end graphics type capability -- 2D, 3D types of programming. These are things that more advanced programs can take advantage of, but you can build very rich desktop type of experiences on the laptop.

Then, they went beyond what you're used to seeing on your desktop and took advantage of some of the sensors that these phones have now -- accelerometers, location capability, or geolocation. APIs are now emerging as a companion to HTML5, which is a spec that will span across your desktop to the mobile phone. It's a very capable specification.

In addition, there is the movement in terms of the standards body, especially the W3C, to address mobile device API. You will eventually program in a standard way and talk to your contacts list, your cameras, video, recording devices, and things like that. That will soon be available to us in a web programming model.

What used to be exclusively the demand of the hardware API guys to do really low level, high performance bit twiddling is now going to be available to the general web programming masses. That opens up the future for a lot more innovation than what we’ve seen in past.

There is enough HTML5 core already emerging that we could start to program to a subset of that spec and treat it as kind of a common run-time that you would program across pretty much all of the new emerging smartphones as we look forward.

Entner: It's only a matter of when ... HTML5 will come. Apple and Google are at the forefront and are already launching websites and services in it. You can get HTML5 YouTube, HTML5 Google, and even Yahoo mail access. You can have the Apple website in HTML5. It just depends on what is fully supported right now.

Some browsers support it, and some don't yet. On the mobile side, it also fully depends on what is supported. If you have the WebKit engine at the core of the browser that your device is using, HTML5 is pretty widely supported.

Parrott: As we've talked to more-and-more of our SMBs, one thing that stands out is that they don't have a lot of resources. They don't have a huge web department. Their personnel wear a number of hats. Web development is just one of n things that one of the individuals may do in one of these organizations.

At Genuitec, we developed a product called MobiOne Studio. The target user is anyone who has an idea or an vision for a mobile web application or website. MobiOne is geared to provide a whole new intuitive type of experience, in which you just draw what you want. If you can develop PowerPoint presentations, you can create a mobile web application using MobiOne.

You lay out your screens, you pane them all up, and then you wire them together with different types of transitions. From there, you can then immediately generate mobile web code and begin to test it either in the MobiOne test environment, that's an emulated type of HTML5 environment, or you can immediately deploy it through MobiOne to your phone and test it directly on a real device.

If you can develop PowerPoint presentations, you can create a mobile web application using MobiOne.

With MobiOne Studio we recognized that the first thing that most companies want to do is just mobilize, just get a mobile presence, mobilize their websites, and have that capability. As Roger said a while ago, a lot of the apps you see out there are really glorified mobile websites and are packaged up in a binary format.

Second Studio phase

In MobiOne Studio's second phase, once you design and you like what you have, you have a progressive step that you can go from a very portable form to compile it down -- or cross-compile -- from HTML5 to whatever the native requirements are of that particular target app store. So, Google will have their app store, and Apple and RIM each has their own model. They are all fairly different models.

But with HTML5, you can go directly to your customers now. You can market to them directly. It depends on your way of interacting with your customers, but we have seen a number of novel approaches already from some of our customers. When any customer is in your store, you make it very easy for them to access your site, to make them aware of your mobile capabilities, lure them in, and get them connected that way.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Genuitec. Learn more.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The lives of IT admins in Windows environments should get a little easier with the launch of rPath's rBuilder 5.8 for "push-button" deployment of Windows Server instances.

The Raleigh, N.C. company's rBuilder 5.8 introduces release automation to the world of Windows Server applications. With the new software, rBuilder 5.8 earns bragging rights as a first commercial solution to address deployment automation for Windows instances and apps. [Disclosure: rPath is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The deployment challenge

For most IT organizations, deploying Windows apps into production is complex, cumbersome, and time-consuming. That complexity can lead to long delays in full deployments that leave a dark cloud hanging over service levels and business agility.

The rise of public cloud services such as Amazon EC2 has further motivated IT to become more responsive to business lines.

With its automation approach, rBuilder 5.8 is wrestling that challenge to the ground with what it calls “push-button deployment” of Windows apps. This software helps to automatically resolve dependencies to virtually eliminate deployment-time failures, automatically generate standard MSI packages that are ready to deploy, apply version control to all packaged elements, and eliminate drift between dev, test, and production release stages, says rPath.

rBuilder 5.8 also generates image output on demand for rapid deployment or retargeting between physical, virtual, and cloud environments, makes way for targeted changes for low-overhead, conflict-free maintenance, and provides a single enterprise solution for automated deployment of any application, running any platform, deployed to any execution environment -- physical, virtual, or cloud, said rPath.

There are some more resources available on the capabilities and new release: Attend a free, live webinar Nov. 16; watch a short video; read a whitepaper, and learn more.

The need for deployment speed

Deployment dysfunction is a primary source of delay in delivering IT services in response to business demand. The rPath solution also works to complement Microsoft development and operating environments, including Team Foundation Server and System Center Configuration Manager.

With some 70 to 80 percent of IT spending due to operating expenses, nearly half is attributable to deployment-related tasks. This is particularly true for Microsoft Windows environments, which constitute 74 percent of the data-center server market. If rBuilder 5.8 lives up to its promises, it could find a home in many Windows-based IT departments. And it lends a hand in migration and hybrid deployments, too.

rPath has also joined the Microsoft System Center Alliance, a partner community in support of the System Center ecosystem. The System Center Alliance provides an online community that aims to help partners collaborate on the creation of solutions for the System Center and deliver an information resource about these new solutions for customers and sales channel partners.

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 11th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

How do IT architectures at software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers provide significant advantages over traditional enterprise IT architectures?

We answer that "Architecture is Destiny" question by looking at how one human resources management (HRM), financial management and payroll SaaS provider, Workday, has from the very beginning moved beyond relational databases and distributed architectures that date to the mid-1990s.

Instead, Workday has designed its architecture to provide secure transactions, wider integrations, and deep analysis off of the same optimized data source—all to better serve business needs. The advantages of these modern services-based architecture can be passed on to the end users—and across the ecosystem of business process partners—at significantly lower cost than conventional IT.

Joining us here is a technology executive from Workday, Petros Dermetzis, Vice President of Development there, to explore how architecting properly provides the means to adapt and extend how businesses need to operate, and not be limited by how IT has to operate. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dermetzis: We have a unique opportunity to stand back and see what history and evolution provided over the past 20 years and say, "Okay, how can we provide one technology stack that starts addressing all those individual problems that started appearing over time?"

If you think of the majority of the systems out there, the way we describe them is that they were built from the ground up as islands. It was really very data-centric. The whole idea was that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system gave all the solutions, which in reality isn't true.

What we tried to do at Workday was start from a completely white sheet of paper. The reality around ERP systems is actually making all this work together. You want your transactions, you want your validations, you want to secure your data, and at the same time you want access to that data and to be able to analyze it. So, that’s the problem we set out to do.

What drove our technology architecture was first, we have a very simple mentality. You have a central system that stores transactions, and you make sure that it's safe, secure, encrypted, and all these great words. At the same time, we appreciate that systems, as well as humans, interact with this central transactional system. So we treat them not as an afterthought, but as equal citizens.

If you go back in time to when mainframes started appearing, it was about transactions, capturing transactions, and safeguarding those transactions. IT was the center of the universe and they called the shots. As it evolved over time, IT began to realize that departments wanted their own solutions. They try to extract the data and take them into areas, such as spreadsheets and what have you, for further analysis.

ERP solutions evolved over time and started adding technology solutions as problems occurred. They started with a need to report data and very quickly realized it was like climbing a ladder of hierarchic needs. When you get your basic reporting right, you need to start analyzing data.

The technologies at the time, around the relational models, don’t actually address that very well. Then, you find other industries, like business intelligence (BI) vendors, appeared who tried to solve those problems.

The way things evolved, you started with an application, and integrations were an afterthought; they got bolted on. ... They kept on adding more and more and more layers of vendors, and the more the poor enterprise IT customers are trying to peel it, the more they start crying—crying in terms of maintenance and maintenance dollars.

Old approach won't scale
Right now, the state of the art is hard-wiring most of these central solutions to these third-party solutions, and that basically doesn't scale. That’s where technology kicks in and you have to adopt new open standard and web services standards.

What we try to do at Workday is understand holistically what the current problems are today, and say, "This is a golden opportunity." This is opposed to finding all existing technologies, cobbling them all together, and trying to solve the problems exactly the same way.

If you're managing any system with HRM systems, you need to communicate with other systems, be it for background checks, for providing information to benefit providers, connecting to third-party payrolls, or what have you.

Obviously, [traditional ERP vendors] were solving the problem incrementally, as they were going along. What we tried to do was address it all in the same place. Where we are right now is what I would describe as very business transaction-centric in what I define as legacy applications. Then, we want to take it more to an area which is business interactions, and interactions can happen from humans or machines.

We're creating a revolution in the ERP industry. As always, you have early adopters. At the other end of the bell-shaped curve, you've got the laggards. When you're talking to forward thinking, modern thinking, profit-oriented, innovative companies, they very quickly appreciate that the way to go is SaaS.

Now, they've got a bunch of questions, and most of the questions are around security—"Is my data safe?" We have a huge variety of ways of assuring our customers that these are actually probably safer in our environment than on-premise.

Some customers wait, and some will just jump in the pool with everyone else. We are in our fifth year of existence, and it’s very interesting to see how our customers are scaling from the small, lower end, to huge companies and corporations that are running on Workday.

A blast from the past
Applications are built on top of relational databases today, and then they are being designed thinking about the end-user, sitting in front of a browser, interacting with the system. But, really they were designed around capturing the transaction and being able to report straight-off that transaction.

The idea of integrating with third parties was an afterthought. Being an afterthought, what happened was that you find this new industry emerging, which is around extract, transform and load (ETL) tools and integration tools. It was a realization that we have to coexist within the many systems.

What happened was that they bolted on these integration third-party systems straight onto the database. That sounds very good. However, all the business logic, all the security, and the whole data structure that hangs together is known by the application—and not by the database. When you bolt-on an integration technology on the side, you lose all that. You have to recreate it in the third-party technology.

Similarly, when it comes to reporting, relational technology does a phenomenal job with the use of SQL and producing reports, which I will define as two-dimensional reports, for producing lists, matrix reports, and summary reports. But, eventually, as business evolves, you need to analyze data and you have to create this idea of dimensionality. Well, yet another industry was created—and it was bolted back onto the database level, which is the [BI] analytics, and this created cubes.

In fact, what they used were object-oriented technologies and in-memory solutions for reasons of performance to be able to analyze data. This is currently the state of the art.

The same treatment
Conversely, any request that comes into our system, be it from a UI or from a third-party system by integrations, we treat exactly the same way. They go through exactly the same functional application security. It knows exactly what the structure of your object model is. It gets evaluated exactly the same way and then it serves back the answer. So that fundamental principle solves most of our integration problems.

On the integration side, we just work off open standards. The only way that you can talk with a third-party system with Workday is through web services, and those services are contracts that we spec to the outside world. We may change things internally, but that’s our problem.

That’s the point where we have a technology around our enterprise service plus our integration server that actually talks the language that we do, standards web service based. At the same time, it's able to transform any bit of that information to whatever the receiving component wants, whether it’s banking, the various formats, or whatever is out there.

We put the technology into the hands of our customers to be able to ratchet down the latest technology to whatever other file structures that they currently have. We provide that to our customers, so they can connect them to the card-scanning systems, security systems, badging systems, or even their own financial systems that they may have in house.

We're a SaaS vendor, and we do modify things and we add things, but those external contracts, which are the Web services talking to third-party systems, we respect and we don’t change. So, in effect, we do not break the integrations.

Best way to access data
The next architectural benefit is about analyzing data. As I said, there are a lot of technologies out there that do a very good job at lists and matrix reporting. Eventually, most of these things end up in spreadsheets, where people do further analysis.

But the dream that we are aiming for continuously is: When you are looking at a screen, you see a number. That number could be an accumulation of counts that you'd be really interested in clicking on and finding out what those counts are—name of applicants, name of positions, number of assets that you have. Or, it's an accumulation. You look at the balance sheet. You look at the big number. You want to click and figure out what comprises that number.

To do that, you have to have that analytical component and your transactional component all in the same place. You can't afford what I call I/Os. It's a huge penalty to go back and forth through a relational database on a disk. So, that forces you to bring everything into memory, because people expect to click something and within earth time get a response.

The technology solutions that we opted for was this totally in-memory object model that allows us to do the basic embedded analytics, taking action on everything you see on the screen.When you are traversing, you come to a number in a balance sheet, and as you're drilling around, what you are really doing in effect is traversing an object model underneath, and you should be able to get that for nothing.

So the persistence layer is really forced by the analytical components. When you're analyzing information, it has to perform extremely fast. You only have one option, and that is memory. So, you have to bring everything up in-memory.

We do use a relational component, but not as a relational database. We use a relational database, which is really good at securing your data, encrypting your data, backing up your data, restoring it, replicating it, and all these great utilities the database gives you, but we don’t use a relational model. We use an object model, which is all in-memory.

But, you need to store things somewhere. In fact, we have a belief at Workday that the disk, which is more the relational component, is the future tape. What you used to use in legacy systems was putting things on tape for safety and archiving reasons. We use disk, and we actually believe, if you look at the future, that nearly everything will be done exclusively in-memory.

Make way for metadata
And, there is another bit of technology that you add to that. We're a totally metadata-driven technology stack. Right now, we put out what we describe as updates three times a year. You put new applications, new features, and new innovations into the hands of your customers, and being in only one central place, we get immediate feedback on the usage, which we can enhance. And, we just keep on going on and keep on adding and adding more and more and more.

This is something that was an absolute luxury in your legacy stack, to take a complete release. You have to live through all the breakages that we mentioned before around integrations and the analytical component.

As soon as you can have the luxury of maintaining one system, let's call it one code line, and you're hanging our customers, our tenants, off that one single code line, it allows you to do very, very frequent upgrades or updates or new releases, if you wish, to that central code line, because you only have to maintain one thing.

Multi-tenancy is also one of the core ingredients, if you want to become a SaaS vendor. Now, I'm not an advocate of saying multi-tenancy A is better than multi-tenancy B. There are different ways you can solve the multi-tenancy problems. You can do it at the database level, the application level, or the hardware level. There’s no right or wrong one. The main difference is, what does it cost?

All we're looking at is one single code line that we have to maintain and secure continuously. We believe in one single code line, and multiple tenants are sharing that single code line. That reduces all our efforts around revving it and updating it. That does result in cost savings for the vendor, in other words, ourselves.

And as far back as I can remember, when humans realized that you take time and material, package that for a profit, and send it to your end-market, as soon as you can reduce your cost of the time or the material, you can either pocket the difference, or move that cost saving onto your customers.

We believe that multi-tenancy is one of the key ingredients of reducing the cost of maintenance that we have internally. At the same time, it allows us to rev new innovative applications out to the market very quickly, get feedback for it, and pass that cost savings on to our customers, which then they can take that and invest in whatever they do—making carpets, yogurt, or electric motors.

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

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

WSO2 recently announced the debut of WSO2 Carbon Studio, an Eclipse-based integrated developer environment (IDE) for WSO2 Carbon.

The new offering allows users to build service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite applications based on WSO2 Carbon. [Disclaimer: WSO2 is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Highlights of WSO2 Carbon Studio include the ability to:

• Organize artifacts that span the multiple runtimes common to composite applications into a single project—a Carbon Application (CApp).
• Develop applications using tools designed for WSO2 Carbon-based products including the WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSO2 WSAS), WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS), WSO2 Governance Registry, and more.
• Test and debug WSO2 Carbon-based applications directly within the IDE.
• Export Carbon Applications in the new Carbon Archive format.

“We have found that many of our customers are developing sophisticated applications that span the WSO2 Carbon product family, and they are taking advantage of the unique strengths of our platform when used as a whole,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder and CEO of WSO2. “We’re now revving up our tooling support with WSO2 Carbon Studio—helping developers to organize, develop, test, and deploy these composite applications with greater ease than ever before.”

Middleware platform
The WSO2 Carbon Studio IDE is designed to take advantage of the open source WSO2 Carbon middleware platform. The Eclipse-based offering includes graphical editors for XML configuration files, an enhanced Eclipse BPEL editor, and easy integration of Carbon-based applications with the WSO2 Governance Registry. Additionally, Carbon Studio offers a rich set of third-party Eclipse plug-ins, including Maven and the OpenSocial Gadget Editor.

Carbon Studio supports SOA projects that often combine multiple application types into a single composite application or service. Developers also have single-click function for testing Java-based applications and services—without leaving the IDE. Debugging tools support Axis2-based services, Apache Synapse mediators, registry handlers, and data validators.

Tools to support SOA development include Apache Axis2 and JAX-WS, Data Service, BPEL, ESB, and ESB Tooling, as well as a gadget editor.

WSO2 Carbon Studio, available now as a set of Eclipse plug-ins, is a fully open-source solution released under Eclipse and Apache Licenses and does not carry any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of service and support options for Carbon Studio, including development support and production support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

What if you could buy and sell cloud-computing capacity the same way people book hotel rooms on Priceline or Hotwire? Startup SpotCloud, the brainchild of Toronto-based Enomaly, aims to find out.

Acting as an online clearing house, SpotCloud will allow cloud providers to offer unused capacity to keep servers busy and will allow cloud users to buy spot cloud capacity at bargain prices.

SpotCloud uses the concept of Random Access Compute Capacity, similar to cloud bursting or the dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.

However, unlike cloud bursting, which refers strictly to expanding the application to an external cloud to handle spikes in demand, SpotCloud's cloud spanning includes scenarios in which applications components are continuously distributed across multiple localized cloud providers.

The capacity itself is provided via a global pool of regional cloud providers. SpotCloud treats providers as a nameless, faceless, and possibly unsecured group of providers of raw, localized computing capability. While buyers can purchase capacity based on performance and price and the location of the provider, the name of the provider remains hidden until after the purchase is made. This is to prevent undercutting the provider's retail sales of capacity.

Wasted capacity
According to Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technologist of Enomaly, the idea came about because of numerous cloud providers whose companies—often the first such enterprise in their respective countries—weren't well known and had excess capacity. With no way to make themselves known to potential buyers on a broad scale, they were watching that capacity go to waste.

At the same time, cost-conscious buyers would benefit from being able to make quick purchases of capacity, as well as location, at favorable prices. Selecting a provider becomes easier with the clearing house, because potential buyers don't need to scour the Internet looking for potential providers. Also, buyers can continually monitor the site and determine the best price at which to buy computing resources.

The process becomes easier for both sides because SpotCloud will provide the invoicing and billing. Providers avoid the hassle of trying to bill customers for small spot jobs, and buyers, who may spread their cloud use among several providers, will have to deal with only one payment. SpotCloud will make its money by charging a fee to the seller.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 1st November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

A long time ago a whale lived in the IT sea called Big Blue. But Big Blue was no ordinary whale, it was the biggest killer whale ever. As the biggest creature in the IT sea (with 80%+ market share), all the other creatures relied on Big Blue to set the rules, which were its proprietary interfaces. If Big Blue changed its interfaces so a little fish (vendor) couldn’t interface with its mainframes, the little fish died, and Big Blue ate up its customers, thus becoming even bigger.

Eventually the sea god Neptune (the US government) lost its patience with Big Blue and threatened to break up its monopoly so the rules of normal competition could be observed. Then the IT sea began to grow healthily again, like other seas (markets). A long and expensive court case ensued and Big Blue was never quite the same again. Until now.

Today, IBM is no longer an aggressive tin-shifter nor the services company envisaged by Lou Gerstner, but a dynamic software vendor. In the last decade IBM has acquired 100+ software companies and has software revenues of c. $23Bn and 70,000 employees in its Software Group (it is almost exactly the same size as Oracle).

Just a few years ago Oracle boasted of being the biggest venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Not anymore. In a thinly disguised reference to Oracle, IBM’s annual report says: “Today, many of our competitors are emulating our moves. For instance, several have gone on an acquisition binge to get into new spaces . . . largely to compensate for rapidly commoditizing business models”.

So why software? The 86% margin IBM gets on software is double what they achieve elsewhere. In addition, as McKinsey points out: “By pushing their products through a global sales force, IBM estimates it increased their revenues by almost 50% in the first two years after each acquisition and an average of more than 10% in the next three years”.

Analytics is the main thrust. In four years IBM has invested $12Bn in 23 analytics-related acquisitions including Cognos, Netezza, SPSS, and OpenPages. IBM’s resulting Business Analytics and Optimization (BAO) practice has 6,000 consultants and “enables clients to get far more value from their information . . . advanced analytics allow clients to see patterns in data they could not see before, understand their exposure to risk and pre­dict the outcomes of business decisions with greater certainty”. IBM plans to grow its BAO business by $7Bn to $16Bn by 2015. These are big numbers.

Customers should consider IBM for their acquired analytics competencies, depth and breadth of product set, and services capabilities. However, customers should be mindful that IBM (as is Microsoft) is a product-centric organisation. IBM sees its differentials and value as being its size and power, and a $6Bn annual investment in R&D. Customer-centricity and market orientation do not appear central. Hence ‘customer delight’, ‘customer intimacy’, and ‘customer satisfaction and loyalty’ are likely to result from paid-for consulting rather than a deliberate strategy.

Oracle describes itself as: “the world’s biggest business software company ... and seeks to be an industry leader in each of the specific product categories in which it competes and to expand into new and emerging markets”. This is a virtually identical strategy to IBM’s. And IBM also has a database (DB2) to counter Oracle’s strong position in the enterprise RDBMS market.

So an almighty clash of the titans is developing. IBM is saying to Oracle: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” Is Oracle made of straw, of wood, or of stone? Larry Ellison might have something to say about that. Let battle commence.

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has that line changed? Not yet.

Let’s review it again in a years time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 6th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

You can tell that complex event processing (CEP) was not initially developed by a company because no marketing man would ever have allowed a technology to be referred to as complex. In fact, the man generally regarded as the father of CEP, David Luckham, is a professor at Stamford University and he invented the term to describe the processing of complex events, as opposed to any idea that event processing is, in itself, particularly complex. He defines a complex event as “an event that could only happen if lots of other events happen”. For example, to use CEP (or any other technology for that matter) to recognise fraud means recognising the pattern of events that indicates that type of fraud: so this pattern consists of the “lots of other events”. To take a more prosaic example, the completion of an online shopping basket is a complex event that is dependent on a whole series of preceding steps.

Also, bear in mind that events are not limited to a single environment: for example, the availability of hotel rooms represents a complex event that will be influenced by such diverse individual events as the weather, time of year, whether there are any conferences in town and how many, the state of the economy and so on.

So, CEP is essentially about monitoring those individual steps or (micro)events or, in some cases, transactions, and then looking to see if they make up the complex event you are looking for. Or, of course, you might be looking for any one of a number of different complex events so there are multiple patterns against which the incoming event data must be tested against.

That’s it, basically. Of course there are bells and whistles that you can add to make the software faster or easier to use or look prettier but, essentially, CEP is about two things: monitoring events and then looking to see if those events fit into patterns that you are looking for or, sometimes, looking for events that don’t fit an expected pattern (anomaly detection). If you think about what the intelligence communities do, those responsible for squashing terrorist threats before anyone is affected, they are looking for a series of events to establish and identify a complex event that might be a threat. That’s the type of things they’ve been doing for years and businesses can leverage the same approach.

So, the question, naturally, is what can CEP do for your business? And the answers are as diverse as industry and commerce. Two generic examples are a) any environment in which you might want to prevent and/or detect fraud or criminal behaviour or any sort of unwanted behaviour (even if it is not actually illegal but is, perhaps, against corporate governance policies); and b) any network that you need to monitor, whether that be a road, rail, pipeline, computer or utility network. In its broadest sense you can even think of a shop-floor production line as a sort of network and certainly CEP has been employed on the shop-floor as it has in airports and by airlines.

An even more generic example is when you want to link events to a process of some sort. It is often the case that many business processes, for example, are embedded within application software while other processes have been formally modelled and are managed within a BPM (business process management) environment. And then, of course, informal processes abound. One of the issues that arises is how to link these together, and one answer to that is to use CEP, treating each step in a business process and each transaction as an event in its own right. However, this is not limited to business processes per se but any sort of environment where processes are involved, including process manufacturing (the shop-floor again), communications processes (not necessarily within communications companies), integration processes (witness Informatica’s acquisition of AgentLogic) and so on.

Finally, there lots of specific use cases: monitoring PC fleets for carbon emissions, monitoring stock ticks within capital markets, monitoring automated number plate recognition systems, monitoring patient heart rates and so on and so forth.

The bottom line is that if you need something monitored then you may need CEP. It might be because you need to detect a problem (typically, something anomalous has happened); or because there is an opportunity to buy stock or up-sell or cross-sell to an existing customer because you have recognised a particular pattern of events that predicts a higher than usual success rate (using CEP in conjunction with predictive analytics); or because you need to prevent, or at least detect, unwanted behaviour such as a security breach or potential fraud. But whatever your requirement is don’t get put off because it is called complex: it isn’t or, at least, it doesn’t have to be (with the right vendor).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 2 PLM Functionality Source:  PLM Technology Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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