By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 25th November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Nearly every enterprise – including commercial businesses, educational institutions and government organisations – relies on printing to support essential business processes, whether it is back-office operations such as accounting or payroll or front-office activities such as sales and marketing.

Regardless of how dependent an organisation is on printing, IT departments struggle with similar management challenges: providing reliable print services that meet organisational expectations while containing operational costs.

Too often, organisations own a broad range of print, copier, scanner and fax equipment, often from different vendors, requiring different software, consumables and supplies. Devices may often be outdated and inefficient, and few organisations know how many assets they have, how they are being used, and how much it costs to own, maintain and operate them.

This makes it increasingly difficult to optimise efficiency and control costs, and creates a huge IT and administration headache. Organisations facing staff shortages or lacking the correct technology expertise do not have the resources and skills to keep on top of print management issues, leaving them exposed to spiralling print costs, reduced productivity and increased risk due to unprotected devices.

This has prompted many businesses to move to a managed print service (MPS) to ensure more efficient and effective print infrastructure operation and management, from the office to the print room.

A managed print environment can deliver strategic business advantage, supporting cost reduction imperatives and environmental demands along with improved compliance and reduced risk. Today, the strongest uptake of MPS has been among large enterprises (1000+ employees). Our recent research suggests that half of European large enterprises have implemented or are piloting MPS.

The emergence of independent MPS providers that offer vendor-agnostic, best-of-breed technology, software and services is promising to expand the penetration of MPS beyond the exclusive domain of large enterprises.

This channel provides an important role in delivering impartial assessment services and unbiased MPS recommendations. Services such as multivendor break-fix, support and supplies replenishment enable organisations to protect existing hardware investments rather than moving immediately to a standardised print environment.

By retaining the flexibility to add devices from multiple vendors, independent MPS providers can innovate with the latest technology and introduce new capabilities independently of any single incumbent printer or copier supplier.

While hardware vendors will have a vested interest in moving the customer to a standardised environment, most of the major MPS vendors are able to support and manage a multivendor environment at the initial stages of an MPS engagement, sweating the assets as needed.

Not many organisations operate a standardised fleet at the outset. It is therefore vital to select an MPS provider that can provide an impartial assessment of the print environment.

However, if an organisation is planning to move to a standardised environment, a hardware-centric MPS may be the best approach. This can be supplied by a hardware vendor, SI or independent MPS provider. Many hardware vendors will use channel partners to deliver MPS midmarket.

Vendor-neutral providers can often negotiate the best prices on equipment and supplies, delivering quality at lower cost.

It is in the interest of an independent MPS provider to offer the right device for the purpose, regardless of brand. While a single-vendor strategy forces an enterprise to settle for a single vendor's offer for each area of the enterprise, a multivendor strategy enables a true best-of-breed approach across the organisation.

Pricing for traditional MPS contracts is often based on minimum volumes. We have found that is the top inhibitor of MPS adoption. Independent MPS providers often use different pricing models such as pay-per-print, so customers do not pay for pages they have not printed.

Although hardware vendors have been the predominant MPS suppliers for decades, the market is at a tipping point, evolving to encompass a wider range of providers. Independent firms should take advantage, particularly if they have the resources and infrastructure to design and deploy MPS.

This window of opportunity is limited, though: the technology that enables independent MPS providers to move up the MPS stack is also available to competitors such as SIs, managed services providers and hardware vendors, which are using the same or similar technology to move down the stack.

As MPS providers look to gain further mid-market traction, we expect further consolidation in the market. Specifically, we expect hardware vendors to acquire more independent providers to strengthen their multivendor MPS delivery and service capabilities. A report is here.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 14th November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Two recent events with rather different audiences reveal that not everyone is convinced that the benefits of technology adoption will be evenly shared. In particular, what was highlighted were some disconnects between organisational gain and personal risk.

At a gathering of senior IT executives at a CBR dining club dinner sponsored by Riverbed and Dimension Data, a number of CIOs voiced their thoughts regarding the IT industry’s current apparently all-enveloping rising star—‘cloud’. While there was widespread appreciation of the possibilities and potential for the deployment of IT resources into the cloud, there were some significant reservations about the reality.

Vendors and service providers have been keen to promote the benefits of cloud, but they need to appreciate how implementation will affect their customers, in particular one part of the decision making process; the CIO, IT director or individual IT manager most directly responsible. This is the person that gets it in the neck when something goes wrong—irrespective of who in the external cloud ecosystem is really to blame.

The selling job elsewhere in the organisation is slightly less daunting. Those involved directly on the financial side recognise the cost savings of pushing (human and/or IT asset) resource demands into a virtual infrastructure provider, especially if they can cut precious capital expenditure at a time when borrowing is difficult. Many users recognise the flexibility of ‘on demand’ access to IT, storage and services, especially while on the move. Mobile and remote access, fuelled by consumer behaviours and social media, have become a regular expectation and a perceived necessity.

However, IT managers, whose jobs depend on the reliability, fidelity and robustness of the services being delivered, see risk. And who can blame them when recent downtime and outages from what seemed unshakeable cloud service providers—Google, RIM, Amazon, Microsoft—demonstrate that even large and well planned IT systems can fail?

Quocirca regularly advocates the use of a total value proposition to understand the wider benefits and drawbacks of technology adoption. This goes beyond a simple ROI or TCO financial proposition, to encompass the less tangible positive and negative impact on the organisation, its competitive positioning and, crucially, on the individual or individuals making a technology implementation decision. In this context the total value proposition also considers an element often missed out by those looking at technology change in an organisation—a “total liability proposition”, perhaps—to understand the potential negative consequences, as these weigh most heavily on those making the decision, as it is their neck on the line.

The second event indicated where a respectful approach to risk might emanate where other critical players in the value chain discussed where they might contribute and benefit from cloud adoption. This was a gathering of diverse telecoms companies and service providers at the NetEvents, Italy conference. Here the interest in cloud as potential new sources of revenue and enterprise influence was strong, but it was dosed with a heavy realisation that significant credibility would be at stake if something went wrong.

Telecoms providers, unlike some of the IT industry, have a healthy respect for Murphy’s Law (if something can go wrong, it will), in addition to the more famous ones that are attributed to the value and growth of Moore’s Law of transistor numbers doubling every eighteen months and Metcalfe’s Law of the increasing value of connectedness. They know that their survival is dependent on fundamental attributes that some vendors in the IT industry like to portray as differentiated marketing benefits, like security, availability, interoperability and predictability.

The telecoms industry’s measured approach and involvement in the blossoming cloud market is to be welcomed, and should, over time, start to allay the understandable fears of those within enterprise who are responsible for delivering IT services. As well as trusting them to provide resilient networks, CIOs and IT directors might look to their telecoms providers to supply computer power. Then maybe Sun Microsystems (and Oracle, through its acquisition) was right after all, the network really is the computer?

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 3rd November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

In the old days, those tasked with ensuring their organisation’s networks were secure, reliable and sufficient for their needs were dealing with known resources and predictable usage. Network equipment was confined to the organisation’s various premises, the larger of which were linked via dedicated leased lines; smaller locations were often deemed unworthy of network access. The applications that ran over the network were nearly all planned and provisioned by the IT department. That has all changed in the last twenty years as the internet has become a fundamental business resource and employees have become far more mobile.

Today, ensuring the performance, reliability and security of network usage requires that a holistic view is taken of internal network resources, the internet and mobile network services. Only when this is the case can the impact the network has on the end-to-end user experience be understood and a minimum acceptable service level aspired to.

The problem is exacerbated by unpredictable workloads. IT departments themselves have been loading networks with ever more resource hungry applications, for example voice and video conferencing. They have also been cramming more and more processing power in to data centres through the use of virtualisation, which means more network resource is required per physical server. They are also using online resources to supplement internal infrastructure which requires a reliable and suitably “broad” interface to the internet.

On-demand services also make it easy for lines of business to provision their own applications and IT resources. Employees can do this too; accessing social media sites and firing up mobile apps at will, sometimes for good business reasons, but more likely for personal use. Such unplanned use makes ensuring network performance and security problematic, to say the least.

Data from Plan B Disaster recovery reported in Quocirca’s recent report, “Don’t forget the network”, shows that the most common reason for application failure is a network communications breakdown of some sort. In other words the network is the soft under belly of most organisations’ IT infrastructure. To get on top of this requires that the user experience is constantly monitored and that when that experience is not good enough, the impact that the network is having is understood.

Mitigation may require upgrades to network services or equipment, but it may be sufficient in some cases to simply adjust and optimise usage of the existing network. A port assessment by Networks First, a network management company (who sponsored Quocirca’s recent report), shows that in many cases network equipment is actually underutilised. With intelligent application it should be possible to drive more performance out of existing resources.

For many it makes sense to hand the complexities of ensuring minimum network service levels to a third party management company. The initial stage of any such assignment is discovery. What equipment and services are in place and how do they map together to form the total network. It may seem surprising that a given organisation does not already know this; however, most networks have been cobbled together over a number of years by a succession of network managers and contractors, often dealing with tactical issues without regard for an overall long term network strategy.

Once the network components are understood, the network’s current base performance and loading can be assessed. Whether this is good or bad, it is a necessary measure to provide a benchmark for measuring how the management company improves service levels going forward. The user experience needs to be measured on an on-going basis and ensuring it does not regularly drop below a target baseline and that when it does this the reasons why are understood, and if necessary, remedied.

The tools required for monitoring and managing network performance tend to be sophisticated and expensive. Open source ones are available but need good technical skills to make effective use of. Smaller organisation may not have access to any such tools and larger organisations may lack the time or wherewithal to get the most out of them. Network management companies will have developed the expertise to use such tools and can share their cost over a number of customers, making them available to their customers, whatever their size.

Whatever steps are taken to ensure the on-going performance, availability and security of a network, the cost of doing so must be justified by three factors. First, it must be possible to reduce running costs, or at least ensure better on-going performance, without excessive short to medium term investments in new equipment and/or services. Second, the business risks posed by the network and problems with its performance and security must be mitigated and minimum service levels guaranteed. Third, a stable network that performs well and has excess capacity should be able to be relied upon to provide new business value as and when required.

The majority of businesses will not have the in depth understanding of their networks to be sure of achieving many of these goals. Most will not even have had a recent network assessment. If they did, they may well be surprised at how poorly it is serving them and how much may be gained from addressing this. A functional network is imperative for a 21st century business. A well-managed high-availability, high-performance and secure network can be a distinct competitive advantage; a poorly managed one a fundamental business risk.

Quocirca’s report, sponsored by Networks First, “Don’t forget the network”, is freely available here: http://www.networksfirst.com/dontforgetthenetwork.aspx

By: Andy Jones, Director and General Manager, Europe, Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Posted: 31st October 2011 Copyright Xerox Global Document Outsourcing © 2011

The term “sustainability” used to be a buzzword heard in company meetings. Today it’s an essential concern in the boardroom.

In a global survey  of 766 CEOs conducted last year, 93 percent said sustainability is critical to the future success of their companies. Their responses support what we’ve heard from Xerox customers for years: sustainability is no longer just “nice to have” but a fundamental part of business.

Long before going green was popular and sustainability entered our daily vocabulary, Xerox put sustainability practices into place across the company. We know (based on decades of experience) the challenge organisations face in bringing their sustainability vision to life, especially when it comes to daily practices in the office.

Taking the first step
One of the first places to start is taking stock of how office equipment currently is used. The printer you can’t live without at work may be your biggest green offender. Older printers often take up a lot of energy and a single-function device is rarely as efficient as one that also copies and scans.

Small changes to everyday habits can reduce an office’s carbon footprint, like these fast, inexpensive ways to reduce the amount of power used:

1. Unplug devices that aren’t frequently used: Devices consume phantom power even while in standby mode. If there are scanners, printers, or guest computers that aren’t needed every day, unplug them in between use.
2. Purchase ENERGY STAR-qualified equipment: When purchasing new office equipment, consider the cost and features and how it will impact your energy use. Arm yourself with a list of products that are ENERGY STAR qualified to make a smart purchasing decision.
3. Make use of energy-saving settings: Enable the built-in energy-saving settings found on current technology products. These are like the low-power mode on your printer and the hibernation mode on your computer.

Document and printer Management
Over the years Xerox has seen a number of common practices that hinder efforts to reduce an organisation’s carbon footprint. One of the most common is the tendency to support far more devices than necessary, including old, energy-inefficient machines.

Other challenges to sustainability include:

• Lack of departmental control over how / what people print.
• Devices not placed in an optimal position, so they are either under- or over-utilised by staff. Energy can be spent unnecessarily if staff don't make the most of available devices.
• Ordering and storing more consumables than needed. This takes up valuable office space.
• Unconnected network-enabled devices aren’t remotely monitored or proactively fixed, leading to an excess of printer-related calls to the IT helpdesk and more engineer site visits.

Organisation-wide print policies to restrict print volumes can help with many of these challenges. The policy could include:

• Mandatory double-sided printing.
• Limiting job sizes.
• Developing rules to ensure certain document sizes and types are printed only on certain devices.

As simple as these steps are, we’ve found many businesses don’t implement these well.

And there are other areas for improvement. Innovations in printer hardware and software, such as new energy-saving printers which include sleep, can help significantly. And some devices feature green-friendly parts made from recyclable plastics. There's also new imaging technology like Xerox’s proprietary solid ink  which has substantial sustainability benefits. A solid ink printer or multifunction printer uses solid sticks (or blocks) of no-mess, non-toxic ink instead of toner or inkjet cartridges. It is easy to use, produces great colour print quality, is cost-effective, and very good for the environment.

These innovations, combined with an organisation’s proactive approach to managing its own unique printing environment in a more sustainable way can go a long way toward ‘greening’ a business.

Seeking assistance
Many organisations outsource print management to address these issues. Our customers have realised cost savings of up to 30 percent whilst also reducing energy usage, solid waste and carbon footprint by at least 20 percent (and in many cases significantly more) across the lifecycle of devices.

We do this by introducing a managed print service (MPS), which gives an organisation visibility into its document output costs. This environment is then managed on an ongoing basis whilst delivering against mutually agreed KPIs and SLAs. At Xerox, we’ve seen this approach deliver impressive results for a number of different clients – from the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council to defence provider Selex Galileo.

Like the CEOs questioned in the survey, these organisations see sustainability as critical to future success and have sought help in changing what was once just a vision into reality.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 29th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

The overarching message of Xerox's recent analyst briefing was about being  "services-led, technology-driven". Xerox is certainly a company in the midst of  transformation. Its total revenue has grown from $15.2bn in 2009 to  approximately $23bn in 2011.

Services now represent about half its business, up from 25 per cent two years  ago. Already an established player in the document management/processing  outsourcing market, its acquisition of ACS last year, a BPO firm, means it is  now a leading player in the services market, with an estimated value of $500bn  that combines document outsourcing, business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT  outsourcing.

While the ACS integration promises to expand Xerox's penetration into the  enterprise, it is also actively pushing its managed print services (MPS) capabilities to the SMB and mid-market sectors. Globally, Xerox is working to  accelerate the transition of its global partner network to a services-led  model.

Xerox now has more than 2,500 partners offering some form of MPS. In addition  to its traditional channel partners, its global MPS partner network also  includes a range of managed IT services, technology and software partners,  including Cisco and Computacenter.

In an increasingly commoditised hardware market, MPS is a reseller opportunity  to increase revenue through providing customers with a contractual approach to  purchasing or leasing hardware together with service and supplies.

Central to Xerox's channel MPS initiative is Xerox Partner Print Services,  which sits between its basic equipment service packages, such as eClick and  PagePack, and its direct enterprise MPS offerings.

Xerox XPPS is a cloud-based platform hosted by Xerox and offers a range of  standardised components to support a multivendor environment, such as assessment  and optimisation, device discovery and monitoring, sales contract management,  business intelligence (BI) reporting, service management and delivery, and a  customer service portal. Its recent acquisition of NewField IT and its AssetDB technology has been key  to partner enablement providing the backbone for assessment and proposal  generation architecture for XPPS, as well as an ongoing optimisation of customer  contracts.

Xerox has built a comprehensive certification and accreditation process for  XPPS salespeople and partners to support their MPS sales efforts. Accredited  XPPS partners must be able to demonstrate successful delivery for a client's  managed print service. In Europe, Xerox has approximately 170 XPPS partners,  having grown from 90 at the end of 2010. Almost 80 per cent of these partners  are fully accredited XPPS partners. One of the key strengths of Xerox's  XPPS offering is its multivendor device support, which will appeal to multibrand  resellers and also offers opportunities for Xerox's concessionaires.

In particular, the managed IT services market represents an opportunity for  multivendor MPS platforms such as XPPS, as it enables managed service providers  (MSPs) to integrate MPS with their existing managed service platforms. Although so far printing is not typically an integrated  component of managed IT services, Quocirca believes MSPs will be the next  development in expanding the opportunity for MPS among SMB and midmarket  businesses.

Xerox has certainly set a stake in the channel MPS ground, and many of its  competitors are seeking to emulate its actions. The vendor has already  successfully remodelled its Enterprise MPS tools and technologies for the SMB  and midmarket. And, as such, Xerox is positioned well to support its partners'  transition from box-shifting to a services-led approach.

Its XPPS offering appeals to a wide range of resellers, in our view particularly those strategically focused on MPS. Xerox, of course, recognises that not all its resellers will transition to  XPPS. There will always be some that are reluctant to use a vendor-hosted  infrastructure to manage their multibrand base, which may have concerns about  where and how their customer data is hosted. It should be noted, though, that Xerox has extensive ISO 27,001 security  standardisation and proper contractual terms in place to mitigate such concerns.  In such cases, resellers may consider independent third-party management tools backed up by their own networks of service engineers.

Nevertheless, for those resellers ready to develop their MPS capabilities,  using a flexible and robust hosted platform such as XPPS is a viable approach,  for both Xerox-only and multibrand resellers. Not only does this limit the risk when investing in building a MPS platform,  it also gives resellers access to Xerox global supply chain and delivery  centres. This should appeal particularly to resellers that want to expand their MPS  delivery across regions.

For now Xerox is ahead of the game when it comes to its channel MPS  initiatives, but competitors are following fast and competition will not only  come from its traditional competitors but also from those in the managed IT  services market with which Xerox, wisely, has already engaged.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 5th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

A snippet in Private Eye earlier this year (8 July, 2011) showed how touchy companies can get about the use of their brand names. Following the unfortunate death of a festival goer in a toilet at Glastonbury (who also happened to be a political activist and friend of the UK’s Prime Minister), a number of publications reported that the body has been found in a Portaloo®. Apparently, this was not true; it was not a Portaloo®, but some other brand of “mobile toilet”. Portakabin, who owns the Portaloo® brand, had written to the publications in question complaining at this misrepresentation. This seems an unnecessary quibble, there was no suggestion the toilet had contributed to the death and no maligning of the brand per se. However, other misuses of brand names are not so innocuous.

A growing concern over the past decade or so has been the abuse of brand names online. This includes both the misleading use of domain names and misrepresentation and/or illegal use of brands in other ways. Back in 2000, the UK rock band Jethro Tull won a case against a cyber-squatter who had registered a number of domains including www.jethrotull.com and was trying to sell them on to those with an obvious interest. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) found in the band’s favour; ruling that the squatter “had set up the addresses in bad faith and failed to show a legitimate interest in them”.

While most well-known organisations now have control of the high-level domains associated with their brand, the growing number of available domains still makes it relatively easy for someone to mislead through the use of a slightly more obscure domain. This might mean that cyber-squatting is less prevalent but it does mean brand-jacking is easier. There are two reasons for doing this; to benefit by association and, more seriously, to perpetrate fraud. The later involves either selling fake branded products or convincing someone to give up personal information thinking they are visiting a legitimate branded web site, for example, that of a bank (usually attracting them in the first place with phishing emails or messages on social media sites). "It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you"

Of course, the selling a fake branded goods does not need a spoofed web site, this can just as easily be done via markets such as eBay. So, the need to monitor and protect brands is a far-reaching exercise. To that end, a number of services have been developed to help organisations achieve just that from vendors such as MarkMonitor, Envisional and PICA. Their services range through domain name monitoring, identifying online brand name misuse, spotting sales of counterfeit goods and getting rogue sites associated with phishing campaigns shut down.

MarkMonitor publishes a freely available Brandjacking Index report, which shows the prevalence of brand abuse over the years and focuses in on specific issues, such as diverting genuine enquiries for hotel bookings (spring 2011 edition).  Its customers include manufacturers like Epson and Deckers, where it has helped stem the sale of counterfeit goods, and pharmaceutical giant Novartis, where it consolidated and protected its wide range of domain names.

A strong recognisable brand is an invaluable asset for any organisation; however, misuse can see strong brands rapidly devalued. The exploitation of brands has become much easier as the world has moved online over the last few decades. It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you. Failing to ensure this will lead to a loss of business and may cause rapid deterioration of your brand's value.

By: Andy Jones, Director and General Manager, Europe, Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Posted: 26th August 2011 Copyright Xerox Global Document Outsourcing © 2011

The saying is probably as old as the marketing business: It costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Many companies today focus the bulk of their marketing budgets on acquiring new customers. But what happens after that? Once prospects become customers, they typically receive an ongoing series of routine communications that do little to deepen the relationship or build the brand. Statements and invoices, policy notifications and updates—these “transactional” documents convey important information. But that’s about it.

In a world where competition is intensifying and long-term customer loyalty is increasingly viewed as a prize corporate asset, the failure to maximise the impact of these valuable touchpoints represents a missed opportunity to improve the bottom line.

This customer opportunity can be most commonly seen within the financial services industry. If a bank has a 20 percent customer attrition rate on average, the firm must acquire 20 percent net new clients each year just to remain in the black. The cost of customer acquisition averages 200 euros per retail account.  So it’s easy to see why using marketing spend effectively to maintain customer loyalty is essential to revenue stability and, ultimately, growth. Not only this, customer experience will be a key competitive battleground for financial institutions going forward; customers will join for a superior experience and customers will leave over a poor one.

We offer the following tips to financial services institutions to make the most of customer communications:

1. Strike early: Most cross-selling opportunities occur during the first few months of a customer relationship. Research shows that banks that communicate with customers early and often in the relationship improve cross-selling results and lower attrition rates. Customer welcome packs are a common means of building on the initial relationship; they need to be crafted carefully and tailored to the customer and product needs.

2. Be responsive: By scanning and electronically storing the documents needed to open an account, banks can provide a faster, more efficient account-opening process, obtain information for more personalised communications, ensure greater data accuracy and increase compliance. Looking through paper records or shunting them off to storage facilities will not be deemed adequate in the future. Start thinking now about back file conversions, information repositories and comprehensive workflow capabilities to make servicing the customer a natural and seamless act for your customer service agents.

3. Take inventory: Any communication with a customer—by phone, web or face-to-face—is an opportunity to acquire data about their life stages, attitudes, needs and preferences. The information can then be centralised and integrated into the bank’s inventory of brochures, catalogues, fulfilment literature, direct mail and statements so that details about individual customers or targeted segments can be placed in a bank’s own document templates to deliver greater impact. Analytics will be crucial; banks can take a page from what retailers do in this regard, in order to know your customer well enough to both sell and service him.

4. Get personal: While most information from banks today appeals generically to a mass audience, they are more likely to generate sales if they personalise every document, e-mail, etc. Incorporating variables in documents such as the customer’s name, product type or life event is the key to generating response rates that far outstrip the typical 0.5–2 percent expected from direct-mail campaigns. Of course you also need to know if your customer will welcome personalised communication or if it will be considered an invasion of privacy. 

For example, getting personal can go hi-tech with quick response codes (QR codes), modules that marketers print on communications for customers to scan with smartphones, directing them to a personalised landing page with tailored information about products and services, case studies, helpful tools, etc. In order for QR codes to be effective, marketers should stay true to the basic principles of marketing. People will only engage and interact with the content if it is relevant to them. The content on the initial communications piece must be relevant in order for the person to be interested in navigating to the landing page, and the content on the site must be relevant in order for the person to spend a meaningful amount of time there.  

5. Keep it simple: Keep product information—including rates and fees—as simple as possible (and feasible given regulatory requirements) so bank staff can explain them and customers can understand them.

6. Be creative: Customers say they would be more responsive to more informal and creative communications from their financial institution; get the marketing and legal departments to work together to produce understandable and compliant communication.

7. Change the channel: Different customers prefer different communications channels (direct mail, e-mail, online, text messages, etc.), so ask early in the relationship which method the customer prefers and stick with it. Communicate offers in terms that customers or prospects will readily understand, through the channel they prefer, and at a time when they are open to receiving it.

8. Embrace social media: Don’t be afraid. In the modern communications landscape, customers are increasingly expecting their service providers to communicate with them via social media. Bank executives must ask themselves: What are our consumers’ expectations and requirements around social media? What information do they want shared via social media, and what conversations do they want to participate in? To address these questions, banks have begun to create social media teams charged with transforming traditional methods of doing business. Beyond social channels, however, banks must decide whether to build the infrastructure and processes to manage the social media communications, or to “borrow” the infrastructure and process instead (meaning: outsource it). Social media channels are fabulous opportunities to learn what your customers are thinking about.

Personalising customer communications promises to be an effective way to maintain customer loyalty and win new customers when done efficiently. The document supply chain is crucial to this end: In many cases banks keep a large marketing inventory, employ multiple service providers, and duplicate many processes—slowing down the document supply chain and incurring unnecessary costs. To be able to reap the benefits of personalised communications knowing when to engage a third-party solution provider who specialises in optimising business processes is becoming more important.

Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s largest retail bank, understands that a strong business process outsourcing partner can automate workflow, consolidate vendors and improve touch points with their customers. Working with Xerox, the bank has transformed its document supply chain and is now supporting its excellent customer service with high-quality, targeted marketing materials while at the same time streamlining business processes and realising savings in cost and time. Suppliers can bring innovation, use technology and process enhancements in customer care, transaction processing as well as document and digital asset management capabilities to improve efficiencies.

Power is changing hands in the industry, slowly but inexorably. Power is moving to the customer. Customers will insist on dealing with their financial institution when and where they choose, with their preferred channel and on their terms. Customers will want to be in control and know that their financial institution consciously put them in control with their needs first. Improving the customer communications process is a vitally important step for attracting and retaining the right customers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the white paper:

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

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

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 19th July 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

It is hard to believe that, in the 21st century digital age, one of the most business-critical documents—the invoice—is still created and sent mostly in paper format. In 2010, of the 30 billion invoices sent in Europe, only 10% were done so electronically. In a global economy where many other processes are being automated, a reliance on any paper-based business process seems archaic. But so far, attempts to move to true 100% electronic invoicing have been hindered by market fragmentation, cost and concerns around legal standards and interoperability. However, the emergence of managed services which provide a hybrid approach to total invoice management promise to help businesses make a gradual transition to electronic invoicing, by processing both paper and electronic invoices based on buyer and supplier preferences.

A recent Ricoh study [1] shows that, on average, 42.5 per cent of all business critical information is still in hard copy format. There is no doubt that invoicing contributes to this figure, as it remains one of the last bastions of manual processing and is labour-intensive, inefficient, costly and error prone. Quocirca estimates that the cost of processing paper invoices through manual means can range anywhere from €8 to €10 per invoice, which is significant when applied across the mountain of paper such that many businesses process on a daily basis.

Manual processes can also result in slow invoice reconciliation making it difficult to secure early-payment discounts, which in turn can result in poor supplier relationships. Furthermore, companies that continue to rely on paper-based invoicing methods may have difficulty preparing audit trails for closing books and meeting the requirements for European VAT audits. Ricoh’s study also indicates that only 39% of companies have the ability to follow an audit trail for all their business critical documents. A high reliance on paper also comes at an environmental cost—not only in paper waste but also in the associated energy costs of transporting the physical invoices.

It is unsurprising therefore that more businesses want to implement electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) to remove manual processes, speed up invoicing cycles and eliminate non-value add activities for accounts departments. Benefits of e-invoicing are far-reaching. Quocirca estimates that e-invoicing can enhance business efficiency through reducing the costs of handling invoices by up to 70%. The most obvious benefits are the direct cost savings for sending the invoice (paper, postage and printing) and in processing (accepting the invoice, processing and approving it) for the recipient.

These compelling drivers are now set to broaden e-invoicing adoption, enabling more organisations to begin the transition to electronic invoicing. In 2011, approximately 5 million European businesses are expected to send or receive electronic invoices. Initiatives such as the European Commission’s plans to revise the E-Signatures Directive in 2011 are a bid to encourage businesses to make more use of electronic invoices. Electronic invoicing is also part of the European Commission’s flagship “A Digital Agenda for Europe” which wants to see e-invoicing to be the predominant form of invoicing by 2020.

 Today the market is categorised by a mix of software products deployed on-premise and hosted services, most of which offer integration to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, compliance with varying country regulations and supplier on-boarding. E-invoicing networks are becoming more popular as invoices, regardless of data standards, are interchanged via a third party service providers or invoice portals. Once enrolled in a network, which may charge an upfront fee as well as an on-going fee, a supplier can send electronic invoices to any customer on the network. However such networks rely on full supplier and buyer participation, and generally appeal to larger businesses. Smaller suppliers may have little incentive to participate in networks and may not be able to justify the joining fee. But in a competitive environment they can feel under pressure to comply in order to retain the business. Meanwhile, as businesses move to electronic invoicing at a different pace, they will find themselves operating disparate processes for handling paper and electronic invoices. Poor integration of these processes is costly and inefficient.

As full e-invoicing requires buy-in along the whole supply chain, a big-bang approach to e-invoicing is not realistic. Consequently, some leading businesses are adopting a hybrid approach which provides a phased transition to e-invoicing, whilst enabling them to retain paper-processes for some suppliers and buyers where appropriate. A managed service provider (MSP) takes full control of the invoice process—including the manual capture of paper invoices and document scanning, the handling of a diverse range of invoice receipt formats (e.g. xml, CSV, EDI, fax, email or paper) and the sending of invoices in a buyer’s preferred format. Software is developed, maintained and operated by the MSP, with customers paying a “fee per transaction”, enabling lower costs.

Those businesses in the e-invoicing vanguard are already reaping the benefits. Ricoh, an MSP that provides such services, cites the example of a sportswear manufacturer who operated an expensive and inefficient invoicing process. Mailing 4.5 million paper invoices and statements a year, they outsourced their entire invoice process, planning to transition from paper to electronic invoicing over three years. Using Ricoh’s i-Invoicing service, according to customer preference, invoices are either uploaded to a web portal for online viewing, or printed and dispatched by conventional means. Customers are able to download and pay bills by logging on to the secure web portal. The number of paper-based transactional documents distributed by Ricoh on the manufacturer’s behalf is expected to reduce by 3.6 million per annum, saving €3 million.

By not restricting the format of invoices, a managed service ensures that the benefits of e-invoicing are not limited to just large enterprises, but also extended to SMEs who will gain access to a wider market of potential customers and suppliers, especially larger organisations who may prefer working with e-capable trading partners. E-invoicing will be a major factor in making business process more efficient for many businesses in the future. Those that start now will be ahead of the game as the e-invoicing market steadily builds towards critical mass.

Read Quocirca's report at: Electronic Invoicing: Ready for Prime Time

[1] Ricoh Process Efficiency Index, June 2011. www.ricoh-europe.com/thoughtleadership

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 27th June 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Many organisations are reducing the complexity, cost and risk of operating an unmanaged print environment by adopting a managed print service (MPS). However, while cost reduction has long been the primary objective for MPS, sustainability is also working its way up the agenda.

At Kyocera's recent European analyst briefing, sustainability was a key theme for its Managed Document Services (MDS) offering. Certainly, the environmental impact of unmanaged printing should not be ignored. Poor print management results in wasteful printing and the use of out-dated or redundant devices can also lead to high energy consumption. Implementing responsible printing practices can therefore go a long way to improving an organisation's environmental credentials as well as significantly reducing costs.

As paper remains an important part of many a business's workflows, the focus must be on the "less paper office" rather than the utopian ideal of the paperless office. The nature of printing may be changing—rather than outsourcing high-quality printing, it is conducted in-house and rather than printing and distributing reports, information is distributed electronically and printed only when the recipient feels it is necessary. Meanwhile, the increase in mobile working is creating demand for printing on the move. MPS seeks to address these new requirements for printing in the 21st Century, while ensuring the print environment operates cost effectively and securely with a minimal environmental impact.

Of course there are many simple steps to reducing the environmental impact of printing. These include using recycled paper, enforcing duplex printing and implementing company-wide print policies that encourage employees to print responsibly. But to make real savings—both financial and environmental—businesses need to have a complete visibility on printing volumes and overall costs. This requires a true picture of how many devices there are in an organisation and what is being printed where and by whom.

MPS addresses these needs in three main stages—the assessment, optimisation and ongoing management of the print environment. Most of the MPS measures to reduce printing costs also have an environmental benefit. Device consolidation brings order to the printer chaos that characterises a typical unmanaged print environment. Replacing single function outdated inefficient devices with modern energy efficient multi-function ones (MFPs) reduces energy usage and also enables enforced policies such as duplex printing to be enforced.

But probably one of the most important factors in eliminating paper waste is through the use of "follow-me printing", which eliminates the common occurrence of "print and forget". When a printer job is sent to a network-enabled MFP, the document is only released when an employee authenticates at the device using either a password or swipe card. Documents within individual print queues not printed after a certain amount of time are automatically deleted.

The added bonus of "follow-me printing" is that documents can be released at any location within a corporate network, promoting user mobility. This not only reduces paper waste by eliminating uncollected output, it promotes document security and mobile working. Quocirca believes these will be the driving factors for the adoption of MPS over the coming year.

Kyocera shared details of its MPS engagement with the Royal Sun Alliance (RSA) in the UK. Over five years, Project SPEC (Simplifying Print through Enhancement and Consolidation) aims to reduce RSA's fleet of more than 3,000 printers, managed by a number of vendors, to just 282 high-performance devices, operated through a centralised system. After one year, RSA has reduced print volume by 13 per cent, paper consumption by 21 per cent and energy consumption by 55 per cent. These milestones are showcased in RSA's Corporate Social Responsibility report highlighting the quantifiable cost and environmental benefits of operating a managed print environment.

Green IT should no longer be a nice-to-have afterthought behind cost reduction. More businesses now consider sustainability as a key priority due to combined customer demands, new regulations on carbon trading and constrained financial circumstances. More suppliers are expected to meet environmental criteria—according to Kyocera, sustainability is a key part of almost 80 per cent of MPS tenders with a typical weighting of 35 per cent, from about 10 per cent a few years ago. As sustainability rises up the CIO agenda, they will expect the capability to quantify the environmental impact of their print environment to meet reporting requirements.

Vendors such as HP and Xerox already address such needs through the provision of carbon calculators to assess energy consumption and associated carbon output. Quocirca believes that more MPS vendors will need to provide such analysis as part of their MPS arsenal to demonstrate how MPS can boost cost savings and environmental credentials. With a broader product range planned for the coming year, and plans to unify its offerings across Europe, Kyocera's MDS initiatives show it is catching up with the main players in the market.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 13th April 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

One thing is guaranteed at InfoSec this year—there will be plenty of people talking about the cloud. However, they will not all be talking about the same thing. When it comes to IT security they will be taking one of three angles; securing the cloud, using the cloud securely and using the cloud to deliver security. If you can establish early on which of these any given discussion alludes to you then you may proceed with a little more clarity.

Having said that, many discussions involving the cloud tend be a bit vague. So you would also be well advised to establish what sort of cloud is being alluded to, as Quocirca will in this article. If it is a public cloud service, is it regarding the provision of infrastructure or applications? – i.e. infrastructure as a service/IaaS or software as a service/SaaS. If it is not a discussion about public cloud services then it must about the private cloud, which is just an efficient way of configuring and using private data centre resources using technology that has been developed to build a public cloud infrastructure.

Let’s take the first of those security issues mentioned above—securing the cloud or, to be precise, helping IaaS and PaaS providers secure their services. These service providers need firewalls, intrusion protection, content security etc. just as those configuring private IT infrastructure do. There are some differences, mainly around scalability; the fast growing number of users of public cloud services means providers need highly scalable and reliable products to be able to keep growing and maintain service levels. There are also some specific issues with regard to virtualised infrastructure and multi-tenancy platforms that they need to address. However, on the whole, one should expect, given the stakes and the effort put in, that public cloud services will in many cases be more secure than privately owned and run IT infrastructure.

The second issue is secure use of the cloud. This involves making sure the communication between an organisation’s users and the cloud services they are expected to use is secure. This is really no different to making sure remote users can safely access privately owned IT applications and infrastructure. Cloud service providers know what they are doing here too; for them everyone is an outsider, so the default is to authenticate access and communicate securely. It also involves making sure the use of cloud based services employees invoke themselves is secure (social networks, web mail, collaboration tools etc.) Much of this is about content filtering, preventing bad stuff coming in and good stuff getting into the wrong hands.

The final issue is using the cloud to deliver security. This is an established and growing practice. One of the first use cases was to deliver anti-virus updates over the internet rather than distributing them on diskettes. Perhaps the largest cloud based service is Microsoft update, delivering patches to hundreds of millions of PCs on a regular basis to try and keep them secure from the latest exploits. Email filtering, web content filtering, security management and a range of other requirements are being delivered as on-demand service by security vendors and the managed security service providers (MSSP) they partner with. They also rely of the cloud to gather most of the information they have on known threats through their protection networks.

Enjoy InfoSec; you won’t be able to avoid discussions about the cloud, but you can get more out of them if you establish the angle a given vendor is taking. Don’t cloud over—but be cloud aware.

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: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 29th March 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Recognizing broad integration as an essential ingredient to modern business agility, Workday today delivered a set of cloud-based integration capabilities to its partner ecosystem and growing stable of software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP users.

The Workday Integration Cloud Platform is joined by a graphical tools suite designed to broaden the use of integration by more types of workers so they—as well as IT—can build and deploy the desired integrations that best support processes among and between businesses.

Workday is using its SaaS-based enterprise solutions for human resources, payroll, and financial management as a beachhead for popularizing integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The goal is to allow for complex, custom integrations to be built using Workday tools and then be deployed and managed in the Workday Cloud. [Disclosure: Workday is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Opening up integration functions to more users on the front lines of business-to-business requirements empowers those workers. But providing those integration capabilities on a common enterprise cloud environment—one that exploits enterprise service bus (ESB) technology and SOA benefits—gives the users freedom without risk of chaos or lack of control and management.

Incidentally, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

Early advocacy of iPaaS
An early advocate for the "integration as a service" concept, Workday is delivering on that vision in a way that could rapidly broaden its appeal beyond human resources management (HRM) and enterprise ERP and into more general cloud services. The strong integration capabilities bolsters the appeal of Workday's applications services, draws in more service partners, and sets the stage for providing wider integration capabilities.

While business-to-business integration is a key requirement for how companies support their employees—with complex interactions across suppliers for payroll, benefits, and recruitment—the data and access control in human resources systems proves an essential ingredient for making general integrations become more automated and safe. The new cloud integration services and tools allow customers and partners to build, deploy, run and manage custom integrations for the numerous systems and applications that connect to and from Workday.

But Workday executives say that "the sky is the limit" on where cloud-based integration—that is part and parcel with applications services—can go. And the timing is pretty hot. That's because we’re seeing that companies are focused on the business process level more, and that the resources, assets, participants and interfaces that support those processes are more varied and distributed than ever.

The challenge, then, is not just middleware integrations amid a more complex and dynamic environment, but of integrating more types of services and resources from more places by more people. The bottleneck of IT-administered integrations based on installed integration platforms does not seem up to this task. The integration requirements need to shift right along with the elements that support “boundaryless” processes.

Beat the complexity
Additionally, the historic separations of data integration, application integration and web services interoperability and access need to come together better. Those tasked with crafting and adapting business processes need to architect across the domains of integration, not be hobbled by the complexity and incompatibility among and between them. Logic and data need to play well together regardless of where they reside or how their underlying technology behaves.

In order to accomplish these new requirements, an uber integration capability that can be leveraged by various IT constituents amid an ecosystem—not installed by any or all those IT environments—appears the best and fastest approach. An integration platform in the cloud that can be leveraged and managed with enterprise-caliber security and access control at the process level can solve these vexing problems for data, process, workflow, collaboration and traditional integration methods.

Embedding the integrations as core features of the common applications architecture also frees up the lock-in from the database integration hairball that often builds around on-premises n-tier architectures. The brittle nature of such custom integrations has also driven up the cost of computing significantly, while holding back companies from adopting new technology at a business pace, rather than an integrations pace.

That's why iPaaS and a multi-tenancy cloud environment can be a powerful productivity enhancer: businesses can far better create relationships between their organizations and pursue process innovations without the need to adjust a vast hairball of legacy software. Cloud-based integration can turn IT into a rapid enabler of process innovation, rather than a costly bottleneck.

Furthermore, the need to address people, process and technology concerns is cliche for all IT activities, but perhaps most important for how process integrations really work. Who gets to integrate what and how, and who can give permissions for cross-organizational interactions has been a thorny issue. Workday's approach to cloud integration building leverages permissions and policy-driven access and governance to make integration crafting a more mainstream corporate competency.

Benefits of multi-tenancy
Because Workday's SaaS offerings are architected on multi-tenancy operational model, whereby all users and partners to the Workday services and applications are in synch on versions and updates, integrations can be made and amended with far less complexity. A major deterrent for legacy-based EAI and middleware integrations is in the risk and complexity of making integrations that break when its time to upgrade apps or platforms.

And while APIs and lightweight connectors have been a huge benefit in recent years, the APIs interactions are not always enough for enterprise-level process integrations. There's also the problem of API sprawl, and the need to manage the interactions holistically and comprehensively.

In a nutshell, Workday is working to break the integration-platform-database-applications vise that can hinder and bind enterprises and governments. The relations need to go deeper than APIs. Solving this is no small feat, but it may be one of the greatest long-term benefits of the cloud computing model, both in terms of cost and agility. It's the processes, after all, that count most and should be easy to safely make, remake and iterate on.

It's time that agile integration become a feature of more applications, rather than a hand-crafted after-market exercise at the complex database and middleware tiers. And if that can happen quicker and better as a cloud-based iPaaS model, I'm all for it.

Collaboration moves to services level
The need to effectively cobble together services, data, participants and logic and management in business processes needs to go beyond the over-burdened IT team. Social media trends show us that productivity comes from allowing individuals to reach out and craft new and better ways of doing things, of being collaborative wherever and however they can to support their goals.

Already we’re seeing self-motivated users integrate through outside entities, Facebook and Google apps being a prime examples. They are also accessing their own apps and data via web and mobile apps and via app stores. More data is being generated and stored in a variety of clouds and/or partners, and so the need to integrate the data from and amid third parties is an imperative, especially to gain comprehensive analytics. We need to both manage and examine Big Data as well as Far-Flung Data. Integration is a huge part of that.

As I mentioned, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 28th March 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

The IT distribution channel has always been considered a major influence on the adoption of new products, services and ideas by end-user organisations. So as the IT industry seems set on moving relentlessly forwards with the message that the cloud is the future, how important is the channel in helping the delivery of that technology?

The relationship between IT vendors and the resellers that ultimately shift many of their products has always been like that between the proverbial chicken and egg. Resellers need products to sell and vendors need resellers to sell their products, at least at high volume with a low cost of sale. But does the cloud change this?

At one level, it has the potential to do so. Some vendors, such as Microsoft, that have been stalwart supporters of the channel in the past have wavered. Microsoft now offers some of its cloud-based products for sales direct to customers as well as via partners—for example, Microsoft Office 365, or BPOS as it was previously known.

Furthermore, the further up the cloud stack a customer buys, the less there is for a reseller to offer. For example, an infrastructure-as-a-service offering still needs some systems and application software licences to make it functional, whereas software as a service includes all that, and so just needs user-access devices and connectivity.

However, a reseller that maintains strong relationships with its customers may not have too much to worry about for two reasons. First, no vendor, not even Microsoft, can offer a full range of cloud services and second, cloud-based services will never be the be-all and end-all. IT delivery will always be an appropriate mix of on-premise and on-demand services for a given organisation.

Resellers need to help their customers strike a balance between on-premise delivery and on-demand services and, in doing so, maintain their value-add. To achieve this balance, they must identify appropriate cloud offerings to add to their portfolio so they can offer these to customers alongside on-premise alternatives.

Requirements can be reviewed case by case, with the reseller being impartial and suggesting the most suitable approach for each customer.

A customer that is growing fast might need rapid access to more processing power. Is this best provided by buying more servers and renting the datacentre space to deploy them or buying commodity virtual servers from a managed hosting provider? Is content security best deployed at the network edge or in the cloud? A range of factors will provide the answers to these questions and help the reseller make its recommendation.

When a cloud-based service seems to be the best option, it still needs to be integrated with on-premise infrastructure. Some would argue smaller organisations could source all their IT needs from the cloud but that can never be true if you look at all the IT infrastructure requirements.

There will always be a need for user end-points—PCs, laptops and smartphones—as well as routers and printers. A true value-added reseller with strong client relationships must operate at this level, providing services to manage and secure IT across this entire infrastructure, integrating cloud-based services as appropriate.

At this stage, it is worth mentioning another aspect of the cloud that resellers should remind their customers about. Making sure the use of IT is secure and compliant is not just about selecting when best to use cloud services, it is also recognising that end users will make use of such services anyway.

Whether it is social networking for business or personal use, collaboration tools, online office tools or even on-demand server-storage utility services, users can choose to invoke these directly for themselves. Resellers need to help their customers control or monitor the use of such services.

How does a reseller go about assembling an on-demand portfolio? Some providers of on-demand services are more channel-friendly than others—some are indifferent. Amazon may not have much of a reseller program for Amazon Web Services but this does not stop a reseller from building EC2 servers or S3 storage into their propositions.

However, it may make more sense to work with a provider such as Rackspace, which has an active partner programme and prides itself on support, as this choice will allow a reseller to back its own service guarantees with those from its supplier. Salesforce.com has always seen the channel as a second to direct sales whereas for NetSuite it is seen as the primary route to market. That attitude is reflected in the way both organisations incentivise partners.

All that said, selecting cloud services is just one of the challenges. Making sure they appear as unified, coherent and seamless set offerings, with a single billing and an integrated management portal is too much to ask of most resellers. There is help at hand from some distributors, who also have to work out how to exploit the cloud and stay in the game.

For example, COMPUTERLINKS has recently launched a range of cloud services under a new brand name called Alvea. This brand includes on-demand servers and storage, data backup, security and collaboration services. Unified billing and management are built into the offerings and resellers can white-label the whole thing to appear as their own.

Being a well-established distributor, COMPUTERLINKS knows a thing or two about incentivising resellers and, for the same reasons, has chosen to work with channel-friendly suppliers, plugging gaps with its own offerings as appropriate.

Ingram Micro assembled a set of cloud services branded Seismic, perhaps an indication the Earth really is shifting under the channel or at least the clouds above it. Certain other distributors look ready to follow the lead of COMPUTERLINKS and Ingram Micro and build out cloud-service portfolios of their own.

Cloud-based services will continue to grow as a proportion of overall IT spending for the foreseeable future. Resellers and distributors that fail to recognise this fact and extend their portfolios accordingly will be failing their customers and themselves.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 16th February 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

There are two basic ways to prevent employees getting up to no good on the web and keeping web-based threats at bay; you can do it at the a network edge, or you can force all access via an on-demand proxy service (web security-as-a-service). In general terms, the first approach suits on-premise users (i.e. those behind the firewall) and the latter suits mobile users. Of course, most businesses have to support both types of users. So, a hybrid approach using a combination of both delivery methods can make sense.

The approach taken by a given vendor depends on its heritage. So, Blue Coat, a long-established vendor of web security appliances, has always been firmly in the network edge camp—but not for much longer. This week it has announced the Blue Coat Cloud Service. Blue Coat customers will now have a choice of approaches. However, initially, it will not be possible to integrate the new on-demand service at the management and policy level with existing Blue Coat Proxy SG appliances, although this is planned for a later date. So, at this stage, Blue Coat’s announcement is more about making its technology available to new customers who want an on-demand service than extending the protection it provides for existing customers.

Blue Coat will not be alone in having both offerings but not fully integrating them. Other vendors already have the same problem. Ever since its acquisition of MessageLabs, Symantec has been building out its on-demand service to bolster its on-premise ones. Initially, Symantec was focused mainly on email but its acquisitions of MI5 (2009) and Rulespace (2010) allowed it to expand its offering to include the web, although with four products involved its policy engines are yet to be fully integrated.

McAfee should, in principle, with its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), be able to provide a coherent approach to defining policy across both its on-premise and on-demand security services, but in practice it has yet to fully integrate the latter and ePO does not cover its cloud-based services. Cisco too, which acquired the market-leading on-demand web security firm ScanSafe in 2010, is still to integrate policy with its IronPort on-premise appliances (IronPort was originally purely for email security, but Cisco is adding web security).

The most integrated approach to both on-premise and on-demand web security is available from a veteran in the space; Websense. Its TRITON Security Gateway Anywhere has offered a hybrid approach for over a year now, allowing customers to define policy for both web and email security in one place to deliver on-premise or on-demand.

Other vendors, such as Webroot, which focuses on the small and mid-sized business market, where on-demand services fit well, says it sees a future where 90% of all its business services are delivered online. However, it is hedging its bets by partnering with Palo Alto Networks, whose next-generation firewalls sit firmly at the network edge and include URL filtering based on Webroot’s BrightCloud technology (Palo Alto Networks does support remote users by forcing access back via its firewall, it calls this Global Connect). Trend Micro has a hybrid offering for email security but not currently for web activity; its InterScan Web Security is available only as an appliance.

So, the Blue Coat announcement will be good news for those who have always wanted to benefit from its technology but think such security is best delivered on-demand, but unless its customers want to manage policy and other aspects of web security in two places, they will not be able to extend their on-premise security to the cloud just yet. Furthermore, Blue Coat is yet to add email security services to any of its products. As many of its competitors already offer both, this is another limitation that may hold some new prospects back.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 26th January 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

CIOs have long been focusing on making IT a driver for growth, using strategies such as IT consolidation and simplification to create business value with limited spend. Frequently, printing is an afterthought when it comes to controlling and managing IT costs. Despite the abundance of printed communications across businesses of all sizes, few CIOs are aware of the cost, complexity or risk of operating an unmanaged print environment—all of which can be mitigated through using a managed print service (MPS).

The reality that faces many businesses is a print environment that is out of control. A patchwork of devices from different manufacturers requiring different supplies, service contracts and software means that it is almost impossible to have a single view of what is being printed, by whom and where.  Whilst today’s multifunction peripherals (MFPs) are sophisticated document processing hubs which can capture, print, copy and store with speed and convenience, their network connectivity and ability to store data on hard drives brings inherent security risks. Failure to protect and manage these devices can leave an organisation exposed to both spiralling costs as well as security risks.

Some enterprises are now turning to MPS to reduce the cost, complexity and risk associated with an unmanaged print infrastructure. It is estimated that up to 30% can be saved on printing costs through the use of MPS—but the value can extend well beyond the basic cost. MPS can create business value by using existing resources more productively, allowing a business to focus on core competencies while outsourcing non-core printing functions such as service and support. As well as providing flexibility, skills and technology, MPS can also improve the predictability of expenditure on an Opex basis—while removing the hardware costs from the Capex budget.

MPS provides an assessment of the existing device fleet, analysing print usage and then determining a consolidation and on-going management strategy that aims to maximise productivity while reducing costs. Sharing fewer devices amongst more users, replacing out-dated single function printers with MFPs and implementing workflow solutions can all help reduce both financial and environmental costs, tighten document security and boost utilisation rates. Centralised management tools offer reporting and auditing capabilities which provide enterprises with the visibility they need to understand print costs.  

Quocirca estimates that around 20% of enterprises have adopted some level of MPS, with more businesses beginning to evaluate it. Today the market is highly competitive and dominated by Xerox and HP. Both companies continue to expand their offerings in a bid to capture enterprise mindshare. But despite the clear benefits of MPS, it has yet to reach the radar of priorities for the majority of CIOs, for whom printing is often the poor relation, sitting on the periphery of the IT infrastructure.

This could be about to change as CIOs are increasingly focused on technologies and modular services which can be deployed cheaply, scaled quickly and easily adapted. Quocirca believes the following three CIO priorities can be achieved through MPS:

1. Reducing costs: Technologies such as virtualisation, cloud computing and managed services all allow businesses to adjust costs and resources quickly, as required. As a core part of a managed services strategy, MPS can deliver high performance whilst helping to control costs and allow companies to benefit from an optimised print infrastructure with minimal (or often no) capital investment. MPS can be scalable and benefits companies of all sizes. 
2. Reducing risk: Information security is high on the agenda for every CIO, yet few appreciate the risks that today’s advanced MFPs bring. Without taking the correct control of the print environment, businesses are leaving themselves wide open to confidential or sensitive data being lost or hijacked. These risks can be easily mitigated by implementing solutions such as ‘pull printing’ which ensures documents are only released on authentication, encrypting hard drives of MFPs and auditing usage of features such as scan to email, print or copy.
3. Enterprise mobility: Mobility solutions should become a key component of MPS, as an estimated 60 to 80% of employees are mobile workers—whether on the road or working from home. Solutions such as pull printing and universal print drivers enable employees to access documents from any location within a managed print environment. Meanwhile, solutions such as ePrint from HP provide direct mobile printing capabilities. These types of solutions can be wrapped up within MPS, and enable enterprises to provide their employees with the highest level of print productivity.

Businesses now have a growing choice of MPS offerings from vendors such as Canon, HP, Lexmark, Ricoh and Xerox. When evaluating providers businesses need to be aware that cost is only one issue, with risk mitigation and value creation being just as important.  Therefore, enterprises should pay close consideration to the skills, performance, SLA flexibility and customisation capabilities of any potential provider.

Read Quocirca’s latest report on the MPS market: MPS Comes of Age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 24th January 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Ricoh’s first global press event was held on 20 January 2011, where it announced its plans to invest $300 million over three years in its global managed document services (MDS) infrastructure. It has set an annual revenue target for MDS of $3.3 billion by 2013.

For a company that has stayed fairly quiet about its managed print service credentials so far, this is an ambitious target—if achieved, Ricoh expects to capture a third of the flourishing managed print services (MPS) market.

The need for managed print services
With many businesses failing to understand the true cost of their print infrastructure, some are turning to MPS, which Quocirca defines as the use of an external provider to assess, optimise and manage the print infrastructure. MPS provides a way to consolidate the patchwork of brands, devices and consumables that characterise a typical unmanaged print environment. Although it may seem paradoxical that MPS supports a “print less” approach, the revenue opportunity for a hardware vendor, such as Ricoh, comes from capturing pages from competitor devices, higher value colour output and longer term service contracts.

The MPS market opportunity is significant; Quocirca estimates that just 20% of large enterprises have adopted MPS, although more are beginning to evaluate the benefits. Through use of centralised management tools and usage-based pricing, businesses gain predictable and reduced costs, improved productivity through better workflow, and lower their environmental impact through using more energy efficient devices and less consumables.

A strategic approach to information management
Ricoh delivers MDS through its direct business, with its strategy moving beyond traditional hardware driven MPS engagements, to cover all elements of the document lifecycle—encompassing document capture, processing, storage and output.  Ricoh is positioning MDS around managing “information capital”, this being one of a CIO’s primary imperatives. This objective is clearly far-reaching as it focuses on increasing business productivity by looking at people, processes and technologies across an organisation. This approach acknowledges that printing continues to play a significant role in business processes and that through better use of multifunction peripherals (MFPs), printers and document workflow tools, costs can be contained whilst also driving productivity.

Gaining market share
Quocirca’s recent “MPS Comes of Age” report identified Ricoh as having made significant strides in the development of its portfolio. In October 2010 it established global competency centres to standardise its offerings and ensure consistency across its global network, which operates in more than 180 countries. Its acquisition of IKON Office Solutions, a provider of office equipment and document services, has particularly enhanced its MDS capabilities and resources. Ricoh certainly now has the product and service portfolio to encroach on the market share of its main competitors in the MPS market—Xerox and HP.

Ricoh should be careful not to complicate its MDS offering, moving beyond the fundamentals of MPS at a time where many organisations are just getting started. With any large outsourcing engagement, starting small and thinking big is crucial. Ricoh should not ignore the fact that many enterprises may be looking for less complex MPS projects that integrate easily with existing IT infrastructure and applications. These projects can, of course, be a first step to a wider and larger engagement.

Unique differentiators?
Ricoh claims two of its main differentiators are change management and vendor-agnostic infrastructure management. Ricoh’s global change management approach is based upon Prosci’s ADKAR® change management methodology. Change management is certainly a critical component of any large MPS engagement, as replacing desktop printers with shared MFPs and implementing secure print solutions, for instance, necessitates changes in in printing, copying and faxing habits. However, Ricoh is far from alone in offering change management for MPS—this is also a key offering from other vendors, particularly Xerox and HP. 

When it comes to multi-vendor management, Ricoh’s capabilities to manage devices, irrespective of brand, is not particularly unique as vendors such as Xerox, HP and Lexmark all do this to varying degrees. Certainly at the initial stages of any MPS engagement, this capability is necessary to ensure that devices are not unnecessarily swapped out, and third party devices can continue to be used, monitored and serviced where necessary. Naturally, most vendors are eventually looking to persuade their customers to standardise on their own equipment and a standardised environment is always going to be easier to manage and use from both an IT and end-user perspective.

Challenges ahead
Ricoh’s announcement to accelerate its global managed document services expansion comes at a time when its main competitors are prolific in the market. Quocirca believes that 2011 will be a critical year for Ricoh, and the breadth and depth of its portfolio is certainly strong enough to challenge Xerox at the top end of the market. Ricoh is squarely focusing its efforts on the CIO, many of whom do not have an insight into their escalating print costs.  However, these CIOs will be familiar with outsourcing, and couching MPS in these terms can demonstrate how MPS can bringing the same benefits of economies of scale, access to expertise as well as reduced financial and environmental costs.

The key challenge remains for Ricoh—and all other MPS providers—to educate the CIO on the impact of operating an unmanaged print environment. While MDS certainly is a broader offering, it must start with a diligent assessment of the print environment. The basic premise not only behind MPS but of any investment—is being able to manage and measure usage and costs. Only then can the next step be taken to build innovation into broader engagements.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 24th January 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Any IT device, be it physical or virtual, that sits at the end of a network connection is an end point. From the point of view of security these can be grouped into two categories: those behind the firewall, including datacentre equipment, printers, desktop PCs and so on; and those that are, or can be used, outside the firewall.

This second group includes mobile end-user devices, such as notebooks, netbooks, tablets and smartphones, as well as other devices located in public places such a ticket readers, video displays and so on. For IT security staff, it is the mobile end-user devices that are the real nightmare as they need to have wide ranging network access, can be used to store data and are easily lost or stolen. 

Not so many years ago, for most organisations, the problem of securing mobile devices was confined to notebook PCs running Windows. That situation has change completely, driven by the rapid take-up of smartphones and, in the past 12 months, tablet computers. Mobile devices present a challenge because they run a much broader range of operating systems from Apple, Google, RIM, Nokia/Symbian and HP/Palm. Microsoft is still there, but currently trailing badly in both categories. At the moment no one player looks set to dominate. Those tasked with securing the mobile user must cope with heterogeneity.

The problem presented by all this variety is further exacerbated by the growing impracticality of imposing corporate standards. The trend towards consumerisation, that is users wanting to use a device of their choice for their interface to IT, means that many organisations now face having to secure and manage any or all of the above operating systems.

There are three main security challenges:

1. Ensuring the devices attach to the network securely and that their use is authenticated
2. Keeping malware off of devices
3. Ensuring any confidential data stored on the devices is secure

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to achieving the required level of security. Rather than being viewed as alternatives, these should be considered as two ends of a spectrum of choices that security managers must make to provide the level of security that suits their organisation. There also needs to be enough flexibility to provide differing levels of security for different users depending on their role, location and the type of transactions involved.

At one end of the spectrum is device self-sufficiency. Here the device can be used to store data and access the internet via any connection—in effect it must be configured to operate and survive in the wild. This means having anti-malware software on the device, ensuring all confidential data is encrypted (which probably means full disk encryption) and other measures including on-device firewalls, remote disablement, SIM recognition and geolocation. All this can be achieved, but it is tricky to manage and the software involved consumes resources on the device.

At the other end of the spectrum is fully centralised security. Here the device is reduced to a network access point, no confidential data is allowed to be stored on the device, and internet access is via centralised proxies that have firewall and anti-malware capabilities built in. The technologies that help enable this include SSL-VPNs, virtual desktops, next generation firewalls, web-proxies and cloud-based content filtering services. The problem with this approach is that you can end up with choke points and the very benefits of the mobile user experience can become considerably reduced.

Wherever a given organisation places itself on this spectrum the devices need managing. This requires management tools to ensure security, system and application software is kept up to date and that compliance measures extend beyond the firewall to all devices provided corporate IT access. Managed service providers are increasingly offering such services, for those organisations that see the challenge of end point management security as one they cannot take on in house. Quocirca’s freely available report, “The total MSP”, provides more detail.

One final thought; consumerisation may be one of the reasons that security managers have to cope with such a diversity of end points to manage, but it has one advantage: users will take better care of their own device than one imposed on them by their employer. An employee’s love of their device may be one of the biggest contributors to better user end-point security.

A presentation by Quocirca entitled “End point security; the right protection in the right place” can be viewed here.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 11th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

In December 2010 the British standards Institute (BSi) published "Web accessibility - Code of practice (BS 8878:2010)" http://shop.bsigroup.com/en/ProductDetail/?pid=000000000030180388; this document is based on, and replaces, "PAS 78: Guide to good practices in commissioning accessible websites". It extends, updates and improves on its predecessor and is therefore essential reading for anyone intending to create or update a web product.

This new document, like its predecessor, concentrates on the processes, procedures and practices required to create an accessible web product; it does not discuss coding or technical issues but does provide references to relevant standards, guidelines and practices; so there is no conflict between this standard and the guidelines produced by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Jonathan Hassell, from the BBC, who lead the development of the standard says "Most web product managers know accessibility is important, but need a guide to the decisions they make during product development which can impact disabled and elderly users of the types of multi-platform, interaction-rich products they are creating. BS8878 is that guide, and encompasses the best advice and experience from many experts from all round the world on how to make products that include these people.".

Firstly it describes the policies and structures that an organisation needs to have in place to support accessibility.

Secondly it describes a series of steps required to create an accessible web product. The steps are summarised in the document as follows:

• Research and understand the requirements for the web product;
• Make strategic choices based on that research;
• Decide whether to create or procure the web product in-house or contract out externally;
• Produce the web product;
• Evaluate the web product;
• Launch the new product;
• Post-launch maintenance.

The document describes the specific accessibility issues that should be considered at each step. At first sight this may look like a lot of new work but in reality nearly all of the steps are considered good practice for any web product development.

This is followed by an introduction to the existing guidelines for developing accessible web products as well as discussion of accessibility of non-browser interfaces and special consideration when developing for older users.

Finally there is a detailed section on "Assuring Accessibility throughout the web product's lifecycle", which identifies and discusses the various methods of accessibility validation.

Graeme Whippy, of Lloyds Banking Group, one of the authors of the standard, said "Lloyds Banking Group is committed to best practice in accessibility and sees significant business benefits in making our websites as accessible as possible".

The standard is about 90 pages long and the second half is made up of fifteen extremely useful annexes. These cover areas such as definitions, laws, standards, responsibilities, challenges, examples of web accessibility policies and statements, guides to testing and a comprehensive bibliography.

I have read the standard and found the information in it clear, concise, insightful and pragmatic. It is laid out in such a way that it can be read in small chunks as required by different audiences and steps of a project. It provides all the parties involved in the creation of web products the information they need to understand the issues, decide how to proceed towards an accessible product and, importantly, how to deal with real world conflicts between ultimate accessibility and other market forces.

It provides a single source for accessibility best practice and information on the law and standards regarding accessibility.

The only criticism I have is that it does not discuss in sufficient detail the importance of ensuring that new content added to the web product after launch is accessible. It hints and implies that this is essential but does not highlight the issue.

Having seen the document, Gail Bradbrook of Fix the Web, an organisation set up to help people with disabilities report web accessibility issues and get them fixed, said "if every web product used the standard then we would not be needed and could close down; unfortunately that is not the case yet and we are very busy and need more volunteers (see http://www.fixtheweb.net )."

To ensure the maximum benefit is obtained from the standard there is a need for a community to be built up around the standard that can add to and refine the standard based on new experiences, technologies and opportunities and I expect some organisation will step up provide the platform for this community.

The standard is an essential purchase for anyone creating web products, as it provides:

• Pre-digested research into accessibility and best practice;
• A roadmap showing how to ensure accessibility is built into web products;
• A template for recording the decisions made about accessibility which will help to show good intentions if complaints are made.

Its cost should be recouped within a few days of starting any significant web product development and it will continue paying dividends throughout the whole life-cycle. It should be used by all commissioners and developers of web products.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 7th January 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

While most pundits seem to view the likelihood of a double dip recession as low, few expect 2011 to be an easy year as the austerity measures to correct the overspending of a decade-long boom start to bite. This is a challenge for all businesses in all sectors, but if the Economist’s views, outlined in its The World in 2011, are to be believed, the IT industry faces better prospects than many others. In its outlook rating for a wide range of industries, only IT and entertainment fall on the “sunny” side of “fair”.
 
The Economist predicts that overall growth in global IT spending will be about 4.6 per cent, taking it to $1.5 trillion. So plenty of new and old money on the table, it is just a case of having the right proposition in place. Much of the growth is expected to be driven by sales of new user end points. Australia, it is predicted, will join Canada, Hong Kong, Japan and Sweden in having more PCs than people and, while the number of PCs per head in emerging markets is way below this figure, the rate of growth is expected to be strong.
 
In the more mature markets growth in user end point sales will be boosted by the uptake of tablet devices. The Economist reports UBS figures for Apple iPad sales of 28 million in 2011, representing 70 per cent market share, although new products from HP, Samsung and RIM will keep Apple on its toes. In the smartphone market that is already happening—separate figures from Gartner, published by Information Age in Oct 2010, show that Apple iOS already trails Google Android, which it predicts will catch up with Nokia Symbian by 2014, with iOS market share dropping slightly.
 
All this growth in the number and diversity of user end points signals opportunity elsewhere. While a fair chunk of it will come from direct business investment, much of it will come from consumers. However, the growing acceptance of consumerisation of IT in the workplace means the boundaries are no longer clear and there is a need to manage access to a business’s IT resources from both corporate and privately owned devices. Either way, managing end points is a headache many will consider best outsourced.
 
Herein lays an opportunity for managed service providers. To date many have been predominantly focused on managing datacentre IT infrastructure. This requirement is not going to disappear, but many businesses will find the proposition of a single provider for both datacentre and end point management attractive, enabling a coherent security, compliance and licencing regime to be established across the total IT estate. Quocirca’s free report, The Total MSP, outlines one way MSPs can get to the head of the IT spending queue in 2011 by adding end point management services to their portfolio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 20th December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

It is time of year when we are expected to make predictions about the following year. My predictions for next year are, in no particular order:

1. We won’t see any less hype next year. Probably more.
2. Confusion will continue to spread, mostly because of 1.
3. Cloud computing won’t take over the world.
4. The advocates of cloud computing will say that it is taking over the world (see 1).
5. Most people won’t be much clearer about what cloud computing is and what it isn’t and what the different types of cloud computing are (see 2). For example, it needs to be understood that XaaS (something as a service) is not the same thing as cloud computing and that there are (maybe) 3 types of cloud computing: public, private and hosted, where the last of these is effectively a private cloud that it is run for you by someone else. But what is the difference between a flexible on-premise infrastructure and a private cloud? And what is the difference between an outsourced infrastructure and a hosted cloud? Beats me.
6. We will run out of letters to put before aaS (see 2). Just kidding. I wonder how many have actually been used up?
7. Virtualisation will continue to be the next greatest buzz word; at the latest count applying to at least four different technologies (see 1 and 2). Currently we have desktop virtualisation, server virtualisation, data virtualisation (which refers to having a virtual data model and is therefore completely different) and we are about to see the emergence of the polar opposite of server virtualisation (making one big system look like a lot of small ones) whereby you make a cluster of small systems look like one big one, which will also use the v word.
8. We will hear lots more about big data (see 1). From the amount of noise about it (see 1) you would think big data was the number one issue in data management. It isn’t. It is certainly important for some companies but those companies are a relatively small fraction of the total. Most companies are more concerned with mundane issues like performance and meeting user demands for new reports than they are with big data. But big data means big bucks, particularly if you are a disk manufacturer, so expect more 1.
9. In order to meet the demands of big data there will be more sets of initials: SQL, NoSQL and NOSQL aren’t nearly enough: someone will certainly invent some more (see 1 and 2).
10. The number of proprietary data warehousing vendors will fall though not enough to compensate for the growth in NoSQL, NOSQL and other initial-based open source database vendors claiming to address the big data problem.
11. It won’t get any better in 2012 so you might as well enjoy 2011 while you can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I enclose some short excerpts from her letter below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extract from Martha's Letter:

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

Summary of Key Recommendations

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

By: 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.

You may also be interested in:

• Shoemaker on how HP CSA Aids Total Visibility in Services Management Lifecycle for Cloud Computing
• HP Business Service Automation portfolio gives IT the tools it needs to compete with clouds
• HP eyes automated apps deployment, 'standardized' private cloud creation with integrated CloudStart package
• HP adds new consulting services to smooth the enterprise path to cloud adoption

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.

You may also be interested in:

• rPath brings data center automation to Windows environments
  
• Trio of cloud companies collaborate on new private cloud platform offerings
  
• rPath offers free management tool for applications aspiring to the cloud

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 12th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Businesses are increasingly using cloud and e-commerce to improve how they do sales, marketing, and online transactions.

One smaller company, Tampa-based MarkMaster, has quickly moved to nearly all-paperless sales transactions, found new customers via online networks, and increased the amount of product it sells to its existing clients. This was accomplished without a lot of additional IT or business-process spending by using cloud-based collaborative business commerce solutions.

To learn more about how MarkMaster is conducting its business better, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, recently interviewed Kevin Govin, the CEO at MarkMaster.

Here are some excerpts:

Govin: E-commerce has definitely changed our reach, which is national and international. We have a plant in Birmingham, England, that we fulfill from as well for our American-based companies. We service nine of the top 10 banks in United States. We do eight of the top 10 insurance companies. Without cloud computing, there's just no way we would have even considered doing that. ... This all has been just a godsend for us.

It's totally changed our business. I laughed a little bit at your intro, when you talked about going "paperless." One of our main product lines is rubber stamps, and it seems counter-productive to go paperless with what we do.

Yet we have changed a lot. Now, 95 percent of our orders come electronically. We have one location in the United States that services all of the US and Europe. How could we do that without some kind of cloud transacting? It just makes the most sense. Over the last 10 years, I think 99 percent of our new customers have been coming through those kinds of systems.

Most of our products are considered office supplies. So, I have to look like the big Office Maxes, Office Depots, and that kind of thing. That’s how we present ourselves. Even though we're the biggest in our industry, we're still a small company.

We deal mostly with Fortune 500 companies. We sell rubber stamps, name badges, name plates, and interior/exterior signage. It's a unique field, kind of a niche market, as rubber stamps are a mature market. But, we seem to be gaining market share, so that’s been great for us.

Top-line, our sales are growing at least 10 to 15 percent a year for the last 10 years, and that’s the same time-frame that we’ve been on e-commerce and now cloud computing. So we have to believe that that’s a lot of it. Our industry is shrinking as well. There were 1,200 rubber stamp makers, now there are 400.

Quick turnaround from cloud
We definitely use the cloud-computing models to go out and sell. There is nothing jazzy about a rubber stamp. Name badges are pretty much specified by the customers. So, we are not out there selling anything new or exciting as far as that’s concerned.

But we have changed our model, and our salespeople don’t travel with the product. They travel with the computer and they show what we can do online and what kinds of services we can provide.

The investment in hardware has actually come down over time, but we do like to keep up today with the current technologies.

We can turn around on a customer in two days, because it's just all uploading something. There are no ports to connect or anything highly technical at all.

Because both on the buyer and the supplier supply side we are having hosted solutions or in the cloud it makes it a lot easier. There used to be a real reluctance from the customers to want to put us on board, because I might only be $100,000 year in spend, and they were going to outlay a lot of IT to connect me.

Now, with cloud solutions, there is very little IT on either end. I'd imagine that it's even easier now than it was with the paper system before, because we can communicate to their end-users that we’re out here, and we’re ready to be bought from.

We work heavily within the Ariba network, and because of that, now we are an Ariba Silver supplier. So, there's a lot of pluses that go with that, and we use a lot of banner ads and things like that.

We’re posted out on Ariba’s Discovery area, so they can find us very easily, and when they look at that, they see number of connections, and we get instant credibility on top of that. Then, of course, we even use the Ariba LIVE event. That’s huge for us, because it puts us in front of all those users that are looking for somebody like us.

One of the larger banks that we deal with, when we originally started with them, weren’t even considering us as a supplier, but they found us on the Ariba Discovery network. They called us and said, "Can you really do all of this. You're a small supplier?"

We showed them our list of what we have, where we’d already made Silver. So they knew we were vetted already by the supplier and we ended up with the business. It wasn't necessarily in a RFQ kind of environment either. It was "Wow. You can do this, and you’re the supplier we want and, in our case, you’re a minority supplier." So, it was just having that all together.

Can't always be there
But, they found us on Ariba. We didn’t solicit them. I mean, we had been soliciting them, and they knew of us, but we can't always be there when the customers need these products now. It's just too hard, because our products are needed everyday. So, that came out very well for us.

Bottom-line, we have had year-over-year growth, and our customer service department has not grown, or added anybody to that staff. How does that work, because we've grown exponentially? The reality is online systems.

We proactively give them the information as to the status of their order, and they can actually see it go through our plan step-by-step. Does everybody need that information? No, but it does keep them from calling customer service. So it’s definitely changed.

Now, 10 years ago, we were 95 percent paper, and it's just totally flipped. So, you can count on your hand the overhead that this gets rid of.

We’re always talking about transacting in the cloud and getting orders and billing. The billing part is where we want our customers to go next, because it seems like the front-end integration is great, but on the back end there are 100,000 different ways that people want us to bill them and get paid—EDIs or ACH or whatever.

We see it coming. People are migrating to the pay element, so that everything is integrated, and that’s great for us. It turns money faster. I don’t deal with credit cards as much, all of which cost me a lot of overhead.

Remember, my products are $5 or $6. People buy one at a time. So, handling invoices is just a nightmare. I get 20,000 invoices every day. We need to upload them, link them, and know the bill is okay.

My clients are not the kind of clients that aren’t paying me because they don’t have the money. They're the kind of clients that aren’t paying because I didn’t do the paperwork correctly. So having that end-to-end order-to-pay integration is where we see it's coming next for us in integrating the whole cycle. Some of my larger banks have definitely gotten on-board with that and it's great, and for a small company, it changed my cash-flow as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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