By: Shitali Malviya, Consultant, Sigma Infosolutions Posted: 2nd April 2013 Copyright Sigma Infosolutions © 2013

Introduction
As the internet and the World Wide Web got increasingly popular and powerful in the last 20 years, so did web applications. The landscape has evolved from simple CGI and scripting applications to powerful B2B and B2B applications, encompassing techniques such as Web 2.0, SaaS, cloud deployed applications and platforms such as mobile phones.

With this evolution also comes increasing risks posed by human and non-human actors to application users. Insecure software is already undermining the financial, healthcare, defense, energy, and other critical infrastructures of nations and businesses. The digital infrastructure has become increasingly complex and interconnected, resulting in increased difficulty of ensuring adequate application security.

Secure web applications, defined simply, means that the information exchange between authorized users and the system is handled with utmost care for security concerns. These concerns can be classified at high level in 3 categories:

1. Confidentiality:
   Ensure only system permitted authorized users interact and exchange data.
2. Integrity: 
   Ensure that data is not compromised by users not authorized to use data.
3. Availability:
   Ensure systems are available for use when authorized users need them.

Web Application Security Architecture
The best system architecture designs and detailed design documents contain security discussions in each and every feature, how the risks are going to be mitigated, and what was actually done during coding. Security architecture starts on the day the business requirements are modeled, and are never finished until the last copy of your application is decommissioned.

This article aims at how one can build a rapid web application using Grails rapid application framework on the Java platform. Before we get into how Grails helps in developing a secure web application, let us briefly look at the details of common risks to web application security.

Web Application Security Threats
As per Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) information, there are 10 most important security threats for web applications. This 2010 list enumerates the following most important risk categories:

Injection
Injection attacks, such as SQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an application backend as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing unauthorized data.

Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
XSS flaws occur whenever an application takes untrusted data and sends it to a web browser without proper validation and escaping for threats such as JavaScript code. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites.

Broken Authentication and Session Management
Application functions related to authentication and session management are often not implemented correctly, allowing attackers to steal passwords, keys, session tokens, or exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities.

Insecure Direct Object References
A direct object reference occurs when a developer exposes a reference to an internal implementation object, such as a file, directory, or database key. Without an access control check or other protection, attackers can manipulate these references to access unauthorized data.

Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF)
A CSRF attack forces a logged-on victim’s browser to send a forged HTTP request, including the victim’s session cookie and any other automatically included authentication information, to a vulnerable web application. This allows the attacker to force the victim’s browser to generate requests the vulnerable application thinks are legitimate requests from the victim.

Security Misconfiguration
Good security requires having a secure configuration defined and deployed for the application, frameworks, application server, web server, database server, and platform. All these settings should be defined, implemented, and maintained as many are not shipped with secure defaults. This includes keeping all software up to date, including all code libraries used by the application.

Insecure cryptographic storage
Many web applications do not properly protect user sensitive data, such as credit cards, user PINs and authentication credentials, with appropriate encryption or hashing. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct identity theft, credit card fraud, or other crimes.

Failure to restrict secure URL access
Many web applications check URL access rights before rendering protected links and buttons. However, applications need to perform similar access control checks each time these pages are accessed, or attackers will be able to forge URLs to access these hidden pages anyway.

Insufficient Transport Layer Protection
Applications frequently fail to authenticate, encrypt, and protect the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive network traffic. When they do, they sometimes support weak algorithms, use expired or invalid security certificates, or do not use them correctly.

Invalid URL redirects and forwards
Web applications frequently redirect and forward users to other pages and websites, and use untrusted data to determine the destination pages. Without proper validation, attackers can redirect victims to phishing or malware sites, or use forwards to access unauthorized pages.

Grails Approach to Secure Application Development
As stated earlier in the first section, several non-trivial business web applications these days are developed using modern application frameworks designed for rapid application development using Agile methods and principles such as 'Do not repeat yourself' (DRY). These frameworks are available pretty much in all the widely used programming languages and platforms such as .NET, Java/JEE, PHP, Python, Ruby etc. Grails is one such platform designed for those principles using a modern approach to Model View Controller architecture.

Let us look at what Grails offer in securing and building a secure web application.

What does Grails framework provide out of the box?

Overview
Grails is no more or less secure than traditional web applications written using Java Servlets as controllers. However Java servlets (and hence Grails) are extremely secure and largely immune to common buffer overrun and malformed URL exploits due to the default security sandbox provisions of the JVM.

Web security problems typically occur due to developer naivety or mistakes, and there is a little Grails can do to avoid common mistakes and make writing secure applications easier to write.

Default Support
Grails has a few built in safety mechanisms by default for the OWASP top 10 risks listed above. The support gets better with the maturity of the Grails platform and as adoption grows each day.

Injection Risk

• All standard database access via GORM (Grails Object Relational Mapping) domain objects is automatically SQL escaped to prevent SQL injection attacks
• The default scaffolding HTML templates HTML all data fields when displayed.
• Grails link creating tags support such, g:link, g:form, g:createLink g:createLinkTo and others. All use appropriate escaping mechanisms to prevent code injection risk.
• Grails provides codecs to allow you to trivially escape data when rendered as HTML, JavaScript and URLs to prevent injection attacks here.
• Hibernate, which is the technology underlying GORM domain classes, automatically escapes data when committing to database so this is not an issue. However it is still possible to write bad dynamic HQL code that uses unchecked request parameters.

Authentication Risk
Currently Grails does not supply any implementation for this. There are multiple security plugins, including Spring Security, Shiro, and Authentication, and if your needs are very simple you can guard your application with Grails filters.

Cross-site Scripting Risk (XSS)
It is important that your application verifies as much as possible that incoming requests were originated from your application and not from another site. Ticketing and page flow systems can help. Grails has a plug in that supports Spring Web flow component for flow based web applications.

It is also important to ensure that all data values rendered into views are escaped correctly. For example when rendering to HTML or XHTML, one can use Grails controller API encodeAsHTML() on every object to ensure that people cannot maliciously inject JavaScript or other HTML into data or tags viewed by others. Grails supplies several Dynamic Encoding Methods for this purpose and if a particular output escaping format is not supported, it is easy to write your own using a custom codec.

As a practice, one must also avoid the use of request parameters or data fields for determining the next URL to redirect the user to. If you use a successURL parameter, for example, to determine where to redirect a user to after a successful login, attackers can imitate your login procedure using your own site, and then redirect the user back to their own site once logged in, potentially allowing JS code to then exploit the logged-in account on the site.

Insecure URL access risk
This is where bad data is supplied such that when it is later used to create a link in a page, clicking it will not cause the expected behaviour, and may redirect to another site or alter request parameters. A safe bet is to assume that every unprotected URL is publicly accessible one way or another to help think about securing the URL access. HTML/URL injection is easily handled with codecs already built in Grails.

Denial of service
Load balancers, proxy servers and other appliances are more likely to be useful here, but there are also issues relating to excessive queries for example where a link is created by an attacker to set max=1000000 so that a query could exceed the memory limits of the server or slow the system down. The solution here is to always sanitize request parameters before passing them to dynamic finders or other GORM query methods:

Guessable IDs
Many applications use the last part of the URL as an "id" of some object to retrieve from GORM or elsewhere. Especially in the case of GORM these are easily guessable as they are typically sequential integers. Therefore you must assert that the requesting user is authenticated and authorized to view the details before returning the response to the user.

Other risks and application specific risks
For other security risks explicitly not handled by Grails, one can use OWASP enterprise security API for Java to handle them. Grails, being a Java compatible language, can easily interoperate with this API. For further reference, please refer the link https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Enterprise_Security_API

Summary
In this article, we have looked at the security aspects of web application, the typical risks a web application faces and high level overview of how a modern web development framework on the Java platform, GRAILS, helps you meet the goals of agile development without comprising web security.

By: Shitali Malviya, Consultant, Sigma Infosolutions Posted: 11th January 2013 Copyright Sigma Infosolutions © 2013

BI turns data into actionable information which support business in strategic decision making. A Business Intelligence (BI) project assumes to be integrated with a data warehouse (DW) or other reporting solution like a data repository or reporting from legacy systems. Therefore BI should be considered as DW/BI project.

So what is business intelligence, and how should your company get started with it? From the vendors’ perspective, business intelligence means software and services that they can sell to you to help you get more information from your existing data. But from the business perspective, business intelligence is more than just software; it is a strategy with specific supporting management processes. Prior to implementing a business intelligence initiative, organizations need to have an understanding of the following five elements.

1) Understand the need of Business Intelligence
It is important to have a fundamental understanding of business intelligence (BI) & how to adopt it to become useful for business. In short, you need to define the organization’s BI philosophy with strategic goals & translate strategy into action. The communication of strategic goals and data collection is critical to successful BI. The organization needs to have an answer to the question: ”What will we accomplish with this initiative". Business units can cut significant costs while creating additional value through better coordination, integration, quality of data and analytical functionality. A strategy for implementing BI projects can greatly upswing returns. Starting small (POC/section) is a good way to understand BI benefits.

2) Analyze internal requirements
It is critical that you carefully analyze your current business methods and practices to determine specific objectives for BI implementation. The user requirements drive decisions about the data to incorporate in the data warehouse, how to organize (dimension) the data and how often to refresh the data. "Garbage in, garbage out" means requirements should be precisely defined to align with the business needs. BI analysts often focus on the technical questions associated with the analysis. However, a more business-oriented approach could yield better results. 

3) Key stakeholder involvement
Top banagement, business users, operations etc. are the key stakeholders. The sooner you involve them the better you know about your requirements. Most BI projects are considered to be an internal project that should meet the company’s internal requirements. However it should reflect the needs of customers and deal with external issues like market situation or customer behavior. A BI project is an organization-wide project; it should involve members from each department, especially from marketing and sales, who appear to be the end-users with knowledge bound for the BI system. One should not consider just internal requirements, but the market and customer requirements as well. Stakeholder involvement ensures full knowledge and understanding of the benefits, impacts and risks associated with BI implementation. Effective stakeholder engagement is a key ingredient in the success of BI implementation projects.

4) Key data accessibility for analysis and presentation
We know that an organization's data is a major asset, and we are well aware of the importance of data quality. Develop & implement a data strategy in such a way that it should not frustrate users. Formulate an overall data strategy by asking, "What data do we need to run/analyze/present—how long, integration with sources, level of detail, data privacy and security etc. BI typically involves the analysis, presentation and delivery of information to business users via accessing repositories where data is brought together from many different systems across the organization. Business intelligence software promises better decision-making and insight into company data, but both are possible with unbridled access to the information stored in a database. If you want to increase competitiveness, you need to improve access to data across all levels of the company.

5) Choose the right technology partner
The most important part to make sure your BI initiative is a success is being evaluated and you have chosen the right technology partner. BI initiatives are vastly different from many past IT initiatives in which outside services have been retained. So it’s important to consider proven capability, reputation and track record of success, more than just cost and/or staff augmentation abilities, while evaluating a partner. The partner should be able to understand and align with your strategy, take a business-driven approach and support the execution of specific initiatives to meet your business vision. Business should understand what to be aware of and how to select the best software while sifting through the marketing buzz of BI trends. POC is a formal initiative to prove the viability of the technology as well as partner capability to meet a business defined requirement. Be aware of technology lock-in and know the cost of "getting out".

By: Shitali Malviya, Consultant, Sigma Infosolutions Posted: 9th January 2013 Copyright Sigma Infosolutions © 2013

Reporting on iPhones/iPads is an interesting area that has a lot of potential. Yes there is an easy possibility of rendering HTML-based reports on an iPhone or similar devices. But those are still in a way the default browser content on which there’s no control of an iPhone’s inbuilt capability to recognize objects and present it in a manner easy for the user to view.

It requires some adjustments before we can see it in action. The open source reporting tool, Pentaho, offers a great help in this area. Pentaho provides a plugin which can sit in the server and dynamically render the pages based on whether it is viewed from a typical desktop/laptop or through an iPhone device, for the entire reporting application. This might also be applicable if the results are embedded inside a page of another application through frames, etc. 

Here is how it works
Firstly, some interceptors are created to detect iPhone requests and re-route those requests to the correct iPhone view. Secondly, an extension is created to allow the parameter forms to render correctly on the iPhone. The user interface can still be designed to suite the branding requirements. The typical interfacing framework can be anything like iUI (User Interface Framework for Mobile Web Devices) and you can build a custom login page and Home page. You can then:

• Create navigational menus and iPhone-style interfaces from standard HTML
• Create modern mobile web pages
• Handle phone orientation changes
• Provide a more 'iPhone-like' experience in your Web apps

Similarly, the code is available for Android.

Other than Login, Navigation, and Parameter Forms, no changes are actually necessary for Pentaho Platform. This is due to the combination of Pentaho rendering in standard formats, and the iPhone being able to render standard HTML and PDF pages.

By: Shitali Malviya, Consultant, Sigma Infosolutions Posted: 8th January 2013 Copyright Sigma Infosolutions © 2013

BI turns data into actionable information which supports business in strategic decision making. A strategic deployment of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution can have a major impact on the growth and profitability of a company. BI has become quite the ‘buzzword’ in the software industry in the last few years. Many small business owners still relegate BI the domain of only large companies. When a BI solution is built specifically for SMBs, there’s no business too small. Business should understand what to be aware of and how to select the best software while sifting through the marketing buzz of BI trends. As we move towards the information edge, SMBs are now starting to realize that BI can benefit them too. Vendors are getting better at making software that’s easy to use and affordable. Technologies such as open source, cloud, in-memory and visualization technology are making BI tools much more friendly to SMBs.

Here are 5 real advantages that BI can deliver to SMBs:

1) Information at your fingertips
In order to move towards any goal, you first need to know where you are. Manually monitoring your business just isn’t an option, you need the right information at the right time. BI software can collect data from a number of sources for different purposes like trend analysis, monitor performance, track the marketplace, adjust business direction and plan for future changes. In short, your data would be available at your fingertips so that you can take strategic decisions in time to be ahead of your competitors. It can also help to answer ‘what if’ questions with a click of a button for better forecasting. 

2) Boost business productivity
Small businesses, by nature, need to get more done with fewer people. One of the key benefits of BI is that it will automate reporting in your business, saving time and money in the process and ultimately increasing productivity. It can also reduce resources and labor costs used for the collation, analysis & distribution of vital business data. It can pull data in a format known by the business user to manipulate and distribute meaningful information in a familiar way. Traditionally taking days every month to compile, BI can provide real-time automated reports, executable at the click of a button, which draws up-to-date trusted data directly from existing sources and deliver a single version of the truth. By providing on-demand real-time reports, BI plays a significant role in creating time-savings and increased productivity and allows you to start using the information in your system to more effectively manage the business.

3) Effective decision making
The right information can give a complete picture of the performance of your organization. Key performance indicators (KPI) helps in effective decision making and an identification of chances and risks. The most popular use of business intelligence is in decision making by monitoring the current performance and forecasting future phenomena, such as customer behavior, demand, and inventory levels. Business intelligence provides you with solid, effective actions you can take to yield measurable results. BI techniques are already helping SMBs to make smarter, better-informed business decisions. Opportunity, costs and risks can be evaluated up front.

4) Immediate ROI
BI will bring down a company's operational costs immediate by improving operational efficiency, minimizing total cost of ownership and optimizing business processes in the long run. A good business intelligence solution will not only create, but also enforce processes to follow from day one. Different types of ROI an organization can benefit from a BI solution include revenue enhancement, margin protection, cost reduction, cost avoidance, capital cost avoidance, etc. Also an organisation can see some intangible (qualitative) benefits of strategic value, such as faster reporting, better management information, better decision making, more productive users, efficiency, customer satisfaction, reducing risk and strategic attractiveness.

5) Get what you aim for
BI can help to get answers of all your 'W's' such as what, when, where, why etc. to get what you aim for. Get key business metrics reports when and where you need them. You can also access reports and dashboards on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, Android or BlackBerry, giving sales and marketing people access to critical business information on the fly. Information is available with security and control across platforms and devices when & where, in a format as per need, with a single click or as an automated alerts for action. The right information to the right people at the right time using facts-based analysis. Competitive, legal and regulatory requirements can more easily be assessed and planned. In short Business Intelligence implementation will help you in achieving “what you aim for” your business. 

Are you seeing this as a good deal or something more? Connect to us & we will be most happy to assist you companywide BI implementation. Write to bi@sigmainfo.net for a free BI consultation.

By: Shitali Malviya, Consultant, Sigma Infosolutions Posted: 7th January 2013 Copyright Sigma Infosolutions © 2013

Big Data is the buzzword these days. Gartner has listed Big Data as one of the top 10 technology trends for the year 2013 and beyond.

Big Data is an industry trend that has several characteristics such as size of data such as Terabytes, Petabyte, Exabyte and higher. To put it simply, the volume of data is several magnitudes larger than traditional small data such as single enterprise data in the past. The other important aspects of big data are velocity; the near real-time data that an organization collects formally and informally via various data sources. Big data velocity is due to data coming in from data sources across geography, time zones and in quite a few cases twenty fours a day. The 3rd aspect of the Big Data collection is the variety that results in increased velocity of data acquisition. Data variety includes the popular ones, such as social data, through formal channels such as blogs, feedback forms, data coming in via social data platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. All this data, when collected, aggregated and analyzed constitute the big explosion of data in Big Data.

With Big Data comes the challenge of data security and privacy for organizations that deal with this data and try to make sense of the information in the data. The following will uncover security and big data challenges organizations face in Big Data, with particular emphasis on organizations using the cloud infrastructure to power their business applications.

Big Data Security
Data security and data privacy are extremely important aspects to consider for any organization in the increasingly boundary-less, social and networked world. Big data poses additional challenges in the scale of data it presents to the enterprise. 

Data that an organization collects can be classified based on the business objectives of different data. Data that is essential for providing services to the customer needs to be handled differently to social data that the organization collects formally or informally (such as monitoring Tweets and Facebook messages). Customer data is typically data the customer creates directly by using a certain application or service that an organization provides. Organizations typically use and store data on behalf of the customer; for example, financial data and tax records are examples of customer data. This data can be shared with the organization that uses the data on behalf of the customer fully or partially, or this data is private to the user but an organization indirectly uses this data to provide some valuable service to the customers. The variations are many. 

The social data is used more for data mining and analysis of user provided data for getting insights in user behavior, buying or measuring user trends to mention the important ones.

Secure Data Infrastructure
With the advent of public cloud service providers (CSP), the data security takes another dimension. How do CSPs secure data in their cloud infrastructure? The CSP needs to secure data and the application that handles data at the network level, at the host level and at the application level. 

Network level security and host level security are part of SLAs that govern the data security agreement between an enterprise and the CSP. The CSP also needs to conform to various industry compliance standards such as ISO 27001/27002 and audit compliances such as SAS70 and others.

Host level security needs to take into account the operating system versions, patches and known security vulnerabilities, as published by the OS vendor. In addition, virtualization software and documented risks in virtual machines (Java VM, .NET etc.) need to be factored in as well.

Application level security compliance can be engineering into web applications conforming to web security principles such as being compliant with the foundations and guidelines laid down by The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)

Secure Data Handling
Data also needs to be handled securely in the data life cycle depending on the priorities of how data is collected, stored, used, archived and disposed. The data security lifecycle needs to handle security at various stages:

• Data transmission using secure transmission protocols
• Data storage
• Data processing, ensuring data while being processed in an unencrypted state is securely processed.
• Data lineage – to ensure that audit trail is captured in the life cycle
• Data provenance – data is not only secure but is also correct at any time.

All the above security measures are a must for data stored in 3rd party environment such as public cloud or CSP.

Data Access Identity Management
In a typical organization, where applications are deployed internally or in private data centers, the security is based on the organization's trust boundary. The trust boundary encompasses the network, systems, and applications hosted in a private data center managed by the IT department (sometimes third-party providers under IT supervision). Access to the network, systems, and applications is secured via network security controls including virtual private networks (VPNs), intrusion detection systems (IDSs), intrusion prevention systems (IPSs), and multifactor authentication.

However, in the cloud environment, the organization’s trust boundary moves to the realm of the cloud service provider. This may already be the case for most large enterprises engaged in e-commerce, supply chain management, outsourcing, and collaboration with partners and communities. It is imperative on the part of the organization to identify the identity management services offered by the cloud provider to ensure data access is controlled as per the organization defined access roles.

Privacy Issues
Data privacy is an often widely discussed and debated topic in any data collected by enterprises, formally or informally. There is no universal agreement across nations and cultures on what data is private and what is not private. Privacy laws and rights govern how private data is collected, used, stored, interpreted and disposed as there are a lot of ambiguities in what constitutes a PII (Private Identifiable Information). Data collected through user-contributed data and social media contains private data that can be traced back to the particular identify of the individual. Securing such data is part of data governance policy measures such as removal of personal data related to race, gender, age, contact, credit rating, and loan and credit card details. Data mining techniques aggregate personal data for meaningful analysis for the purpose of predicting user behavior and testing hypothesis. At the same time data that is proscribed by users to be used and shared needs to be strictly adhered to. The fine line between what is private and public in user-contributed data is difficult to ascertain easily.

Strictly safeguarding the privacy of data is virtually impossible when the data needs to be shared with government agencies such as surveillance, taxation authorities and other government agencies that need access to private data. The problem takes a larger dimension with the size and scope of the virtual data, as the channels of data collection varies by each source and is not easily manageable, as the lowest level of data comes from an individual, who may or not agree with an organization's views of what constitutes data privacy.

Summary
We have looked at the challenges of securing data as part of Big Data collection and the various dimensions of security measures an organization needs to consider for using Big Data applications meaningfully.

By: Shitali Malviya, Consultant, Sigma Infosolutions Posted: 7th December 2012 Copyright Sigma Infosolutions © 2012

Grails is a rapid web application development framework inspired by the popular Ruby on Rails framework (RoR). Groovy is a dynamic programming language for Java’s Virtual Machine (JVM) and Java Development Kit (JDK) and is used as a primary programming language in Grails. A compelling feature of Groovy is that it can be used in place of Java, or used alongside Java, as per the needs of the development. 

Note: Groovy is an open source language licensed under Apache 2.0 and Grails is built on proven Operational Support Systems (OSS) framework which includes a combination of Spring, Hibernate and Jetty.

Groovy and Grails favors convention over configuration with modern web application best practices like: 

• Convention over configuration 
• Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)
• Agile Software Development
• Ajax
• Web services (REST, SOAP etc)
• Built-in Unit testing support

Some of the reasons for using Groovy and Grails in Web Application Development include:

Faster to kickstart a new project: While using traditional Java web application platforms for projects, developers have to spend weeks creating the initial code for the infrastructure. But with the help of Groovy and Grails, a prototype working web application can be engineered with web user interface and database access support in a couple of hours. This enhances the productivity of the developers and they can concentrate on improving the overall quality of the project.

Utilization of Java platform: Java offers tremendous scope for developers in creating ground-breaking web applications. Groovy and Grails can easily be integrated with Java applications. Grails offers an industrious web application framework which reduces the steps in Java Development Framework. It is very easy for the developers to utilize Java library in an easier and faster way with Groovy. The use of Groovy and Grails reduces the development cycle phases and saves precious time. 

Do Not Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle: With the help of Grail’s DRY principle, developers can easily accommodate changes in their code. Since the code is not repeated, developers can concentrate on improving the quality of the project. Grail also assists developers in easily documenting their code. This enables them in getting quick resolution to the problems and helps the novice Grails developers in their team.

Nowadays, it has become a trend in the information technology industry to use various forms of agile development process. However it is extremely difficult for inexperienced developers to take advantage of the Java framework using traditional Java methods to practice Agile methods. Hence, it is important for developers to use Groovy and Grails to exploit the benefits of Java in developing web applications.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 2nd February 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Nuance is a company with a plethora of products that cover the gamut of voice recognition, document capture and print management. Nuance has largely grown through acquisition (about 50 in the last ten years) so it is probably better known by its product names which include established brands such as PaperPort (desktop productivity), OmniPage (OCR), Dragon Dictate (voice recognition), eCopy (document capture and workflow) and Equitrac (print management) – its most recent acquisition. Overall, Nuance’s 2011 revenue reached $1.318 billion in 2011 with 2012 sales expected to reach $1.6 billion.  Boosted by its eCopy and Equitrac acquisitions, its imaging division growth has been strong, revenue reaching $177m in 2011 and expected to exceed $200m in 2012.

At its first European analyst event in London, Nuance discussed its strategic priorities for 2012, which include integration of its scan and print products and expansion of mobile and cloud delivery platforms. Nuance’s goal is to become the “MFP software standard” through delivering integrated cross-platform document capture and print management products – eCopy and Equitrac. Today, both products are well established, and Equitrac is already widely used to control and monitor print usage and costs across many verticals, with a particularly strong presence in the legal market – Nuance estimates that, globally, over 3,000 law firms use Equitrac. Its strong MFP and printer partner alliances mean Equitrac has long been used by major printer and copier OEMs such as HP, Ricoh and Xerox to provide enhanced multivendor print management capabilities for tracking, monitoring and reporting on scan, copy and print usage to their managed print services (MPS) customers.

This broadens the already strong OEM relationships on the eCopy side, including Canon, Konica Minolta and others.  With Equitrac, eCopy and its desktop products, Nuance has business relationships with nearly all major MFP, printer and scanner manufacturers worldwide.

Capturing the MPS opportunity
Nuance sees MPS as a key driver for its growth in the coming year and views the Equitrac and Nuance document imaging solutions as important components of helping MPS providers to succeed. Indeed there is rapid adoption - Quocirca research shows that around 45% of large corporates now have some form of MPS as they seek to reduce the cost and complexity of operating previously unmanaged printer fleets, typically characterised by a patchwork of devices from different manufacturers, with different consumables, paper, supplier and service requirements. Few organisations have the tools to track and monitor usage leading to spiralling print costs – both financial and environmental. Security is also an issue as all too often documents are left in output trays exposed to prying eyes.

MPS addresses these issues through three major phases – assessment, optimisation and on-going continuous management. Nuance’s Equitrac products have a strong part to play in all phases, helping organisations to not only reduce print wastage through tracking and reporting, but also enhance security, promote user mobility and reduce environmental impact. Key to this is Equitrac’s “Follow-You” or pull-printing which releases documents only upon user authentication – through either user PIN or smart card authentication. The results are compelling - Liverpool John Moores University discussed how they had saved £100,000 and reduced page volumes by 4.5 million per year through implementing Equitrac.

Nuance is also looking to address the largely untapped opportunity for MPS in the SMB market, via the reseller channel. Many resellers lack the resources or skills to deliver their own MPS, and are looking for a low-cost approach based on 3rd party platforms. Nuance intends to participate in this market which is seeing the emergence of cloud-based MPS offerings from vendors such as HP and Xerox. To capitalize on the emergence of cloud-based technologies and to support its partners’ Managed Services initiatives, Nuance will continue to expand its product portfolio (print management, capture and OCR) from on-premise deployments to off-premise (cloud) models. This will provide a set of cloud-based print management, document capture and OCR technology services to partners who wish to include them as part of their own managed services offerings. 

With the likes of HP and Xerox already having established cloud MPS platforms, Quocirca believes that Nuance will need to get these solutions to market quickly, particularly if it wishes to target the emerging ecosystem of independent MPS providers who will be looking for multivendor supported cloud-based services.

Quocirca believes that Nuance has product breadth, technical resources and channel reach to create a compelling set of enterprise cloud services around its eCopy and Equitrac products. However, given that both eCopy and Equitrac platforms have been gained through acquisition, Nuance still has some work to integrate them.

Talking to printers?
Given its heritage in speech recognition consumer technology, Nuance is uniquely positioned to apply this technology to enhance the printer and MFP user experience. The printer industry is far from immune from IT consumerisation, which continues to influence user expectations in the workplace. Whilst employees are used to the convenience, elegance and usability of tablets and smartphones, MFPs, in comparison, are in danger of becoming the elephant in the room.

Whilst most people are familiar with how to press print or copy, few users bother navigating complex nested menus to access finishing options or scan features. Businesses may therefore miss opportunities to minimise paper wastage through using features as duplex or booklet printing instead of single side printing. 

One technology that could improve the use of MFPs is voice recognition. Nuance has long been a leader in this field, and quietly provides back-end voice recognition functionality for Apple’s Siri. Could we in the future be telling our printers to print and staple 5 copies of a document – or scan and document and email it to a colleague? Yes - according to Nuance, the technology is already here to make it possible. It remains to be seen whether hardware vendors will embrace this opportunity to bring printers and MFPs into the 21st century.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 28th November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

There are many words now being written, especially in marketing circles, about the "gamification" of BPM and process improvement. However, there appears to be little consensus on what it might be and what it might mean.

The linkage of game theory with process technology has been occurring for some time. However the most successful company in the space historically did not make a lot of noise about it. Alan Trefeler of Pegasystems is a chess master and has been using the gaming principles of chess as the core of the company's software for many years. While TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadive believes that in applying the principles of how great game players succeed to business will provide greater competitive advantage.

As someone who has been using scenario and role play based training for some years it is interesting to see how the tide is turning. It used to be that people laughed or, worse still, resisted the idea that you were going to encourage their people to play games in order to learn. Now it seems that teaching and learning via games is highly fashionable.

Singularity, BizzDesign and 21apps all make use of and promote the idea of game play in order to extract requirements and motivate people for change in the process arena. In the case of the first two their focus is on ensuring that their customers deliver better applications faster. As we know, any vendor needs happy referenceable customers and ensuring that the systems built with their technology are more effective is important to Singularity and BizzDesign. Both of these companies use structured role/scenario play to speed up leaning and enable people to quickly discover problems for themselves.

My impression is that, while the structure is extremely effective as a learning and discovery tool, the challenge is that people may not always follow through with buying your technology afterwards.

In the case of 21apps it is more a case of using games as tools, so continuing to use traditional techniques like SWOT analysis or brainstorming, but using game ideas to make the sessions more effective.

Two recent books are driving much of the current interest, "Gamestorming" by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo and "Innovation Games" by Luke Hohmann. Both books are packed with ideas and games to help you in all sorts of different situations. Luke Hohmann also has his own web site where you can play many of the games online.

The rationale for playing games is grounded in good learning theory. We learn and retain information faster when playing. Cast your mind back to when you were 4 or 5 years old and think of the games you used to play, either on your own or with your friends. It might be that you were like me at that age and loved maths! Well actually I loved the games the teacher played and found that they helped me learn maths. At that age I found maths easy and fun - all because of the games we played. In my case, wind the clock forward 8 years to a bigger school where there were lectures and stern teachers and, surprise, surprise, I quickly learned to hate maths! And my skills failed to live up to the teacher's ideas of what they could or should be - how I wished they understood learning and games theory then. Your specific experiences will be different, but I suspect if you think hard enough you will find similar instances in your own past.

As an organisation looking to gain or build consensus, capture requirements, generate ideas, overcome resistance or any one of a hundred other things, the use of games via a skilled facilitator will speed up your results, increase motivation and overcome challenges. If you are not already applying games as a part of your process workshops then you are definitely missing an opportunity.

It is not all upside though; much role and game play success is down to the interactions among people and the dynamics of the group and this is an area of worry when it comes to vendors and tools.

There are online games, such as IBM's Innov8 and others, that make use of interactive worlds like Second Life. Their biggest appeal will always be to those who might normally play computer games, especially in an online community. This, for me, brings a high risk, for these situations might provide realistic business and process scenarios for us to work on, but fail to provide a great deal of real world interaction among people, thus diminishing some of the potential return.

In summary, all businesses should be looking at the latest developments in games and the application of games to learning. In order to leverage the techniques you will need to access or train good facilitators, measure success by the outcomes and not by the bulleted "you will learn lists", and be prepared for you and your teams to discover things about themselves and their work that they may not have ever thought of.

Lastly, do not be seduced by technology. The use of games theory, as applied by people like Trefler and Ranadive, has sound roots. They are helping to create systems that work more like we, as people, do. Others who take games and simply computerise them are not leveraging the underlying theory benefits and may, in fact, also destroy some of the interaction benefits they purport to support.

By: Ike Ononogbu, Managing Partner, InforData Consulting Posted: 8th July 2011 Copyright InforData Consulting © 2011

We have just gone past the half way mark of 2011 and several events—conferences, seminars, and webinars—have taken place. A number of them have one common denominator, Data Management. The 20th and 21st century has seen an increase in mergers and acquisitions as organisations pursue growth and wider customer base. Invariably this has led to the explosion of data held within an organisation. This trend seems to have shifted the focus on how best to manage this ubiquitous item.

What is it that makes data so important? The information that comes from data reveals the state of an organisation. Sales figures, financial status, revenue, forecasts are all derived from data. Information at the disposal of organisations, if accurate, can be used to strategize and gain competitive advantage. In reality, data is the engine that moves an organisation.

One way of understanding your data sets and managing it to gain a competitive edge is through Master Data Management (MDM). In recent times there has been a flurry of interest in MDM and recognition of its importance. It has been noted organisations that are interested in implementing MDM solutions often struggle to address the challenges that come with implementation. Gartner, in a published article titled ‘MDM 'Primer': How to Define Master Data and Related Data in Your Organization’, states that “MDM program managers and leaders need to ensure a shared understanding of what defines master data across the organisation. MDM programs will not go very far without this. If your organisation plans to adopt MDM, you need this “primer” to help define master data across business and IT”. The paper goes on to talk about key findings and recommendations.

While there are immense challenges in implementing a Master Data Management (MDM) solution, the benefits are overwhelming. It has been said that by 2013, Master Data Management (MDM) will reduce data redundancy in organizations. As a result will save 80% of the costs associated with managing this redundant data.

By: Dominic Monkhouse, Managing Director EMEA, PEER 1 Hosting Posted: 16th June 2011 Copyright PEER 1 Hosting © 2011

There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings that make finding the right provider very difficult. Questions that always arise are - how do you know you’re getting good service and value for money? What should you do if you suspect you’re not?

Here are the basic facts you need to know about hosting:

What goes on behind closed doors?
Many hosting providers do not make it a policy to notify customers when they experience downtime. What this means in reality is that your website was out of action and you didn’t even know. For e-commerce businesses, SMEs outsourcing software or white-label web services, this isn’t just an inconvenience, it can hit profits. Finding out revenue has taken a hit due to faulty web availability is never an easy thing to take—nor should it be accepted.

Make sure your hosting provider reports regularly on uptime—don’t take their ‘uptime guarantee’ as gospel. It should also live by its SLA (Service Level Agreement) and provide regular reports, rather than granting credits retrospectively for downtime. It’s also worth noting that large chunks of downtime are often excluded from credits under the guise of ‘trouble-shooting’. Have a conversation with your provider and agree how uptime will be proved, what the process is, and what the definition of ‘downtime’ actually is. This way you’ll know exactly what you’re entitled to and it’ll be difficult for your hosting provider to get away with poor service.

Know what you’re paying for
Many hosting providers will give you an all-in fee for set-up, hardware, operating system, support and bandwidth. This may seem like an easy option but the problem with these deals is you can’t see exactly where your money is going, and so can’t see if you’re paying for things you don’t need. The best way to ensure you’re not taken for a ride is to ask for a breakdown of services and individual quotes for support, bandwidth, additional hardware etc. It’s the only way to know what’s being delivered, what isn’t, and what is surplus to requirements.

Always ask about pricing for over-usage. What happens if you exceed your allotted monthly bandwidth? And how much more will it cost to add an extra Gig of RAM? Over-usage pricing can be horrendous and a sharp shock if you weren’t expecting it. You need to know what’s included and, more importantly, what isn’t. Ask for the extra cost of things like memory, hard-drive, bandwidth per Gig and back-up to be quoted separately, as they could come back to bite you.

Know who is really hosting you and do your own research
In some cases, a hosting provider will actually have a host itself. This means you may be paying a margin when you could get a better prince and SLA by going direct. The closer you are to the host, the faster the fault resolution so it pays to do a bit of research.

One of the best tools to discover your real host is the anti-phishing toolbar from netcraft.com. It allows you to see who is hosting your site and the other sites they are hosting. If you don’t want to ask your provider for a reference, but you do want to find and contact some of its customers, this is the perfect way to do it.

References are always good. One way to avoid being conned is the Alphabet Test. Ask for your provider’s references, ignore them, then choose any letter of the alphabet and ask for three references beginning with that letter. If you don’t get any, you know the initial references weren’t exactly robust.

Understand your contract and your exit options
Many hosting providers will offer a discount on longer term contracts which may sound like a good deal. But if the provider isn’t delivering within the SLA, you’re stuck with poor service or forced to pay a hefty exit fee. Instead, sign a month to month contract. You may pay a little more, but you will have the flexibility to leave or alter your hosting agreement at any point which will make life easier in the long-run.

If you are stuck in a long contract with a bad provider, it’s often worth paying the exit fee to switch to a month-to-month contract. Moving between hosting providers is not hard or difficult, there are many digital agencies that can handle migration projects without difficulty, so don’t be put off about changing things and never resign yourself to bad service.

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: Ike Ononogbu, Managing Partner, InforData Consulting Posted: 28th February 2011 Copyright InforData Consulting © 2011

Heading South
Is the cost of data management heading south? Have you had a discussion with a client considering moving away from inefficient data management processes or a client looking to implement a transformation project? If you have, my guess is that pricing must have been a thorny issue. One would then ask why such organisations stick to the 'tried and tested' procedures that are quite expensive.

Step in Open Source
In the past few years we have seen the rising interest in Open Source. This has been fuelled by the popular belief that you can possibly get value for money at a reduced cost. The idea of Open Source in relation to technology has long been in existence but the idea of Open Source in relation to data integration is a new concept. Open Source is not just about giving access to source code, it also involves free redistribution of applications. Some offer both free distribution and a licensing option.

I recently attended a dialogue session focused on Open Source and it is evident organisations are beginning to look at and explore the gains Open Source has to offer. Coming from industry chieftains, who constituted the panel at the session within the private and public sector, it certainly is a good sign for Open Source evangelists.

The Difficulty
So, why has it been difficult for Open Source to really take flight? During the dialogue session, the reasons were not in short supply. They ranged from contractual agreements between System Integrators and clients to risks involved in implementing integration projects using ‘non-mainstream’ applications. Members of the audience, of course, did counter the argument for, citing the government’s cost-saving drive as a big enough incentive. Some, also, did point out the superiority of some Open Source products, in terms of functionality, over closed applications.

Data Integration
Looking at Open Source within the data integration arena, Talend easily comes to mind. Talend, a Paris-based software house, offers an Open Source data integration tool with a free standard edition version and a subscription version. The company publishes the code of its core modules and offers the developer community the ability to improve the product. Nevertheless, Talend R&D drives the road map/strategy.

Talend seems to be succeeding in its awareness drive which has seen it sign-up a number of clients in the private and public sector. It must be added that their data integration tool is effective.

Pros and Cons
As with every evolving concept there are positives, to build on, and negatives, to address.

Negatives

• Intellectual Properties issues: Who owns what?
• Who reaps the financial gains from the sale or use of the product?

Positives

• Costs: The reduction in costs associated with Open Source weighs heavily in its favour.
• Easy access: Free versions are available on-line.

While the evangelists of Open Source proclaim the philosophy according to Open Source we have to remember it has to be judged based on its merits and not just on costs.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 10th February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

As the realisation comes to the software market that the new generation of workers need user interfaces that fit with the lifestyle of Facebook, Twitter and mobile phones with apps, we are starting to see how various software companies are meeting these changes. For the BPMS market, Appian have always been one of the companies leading the way and with the release of Appian 6.5, which includes a new interface called Appian Tempo, they have produced a release that is geared towards the end user of BPMS-driven solutions in terms of a mobile and social interface with cloud capabilities.

Malcolm Ross, Appian’s Director of Product Management, told me “The release delivers a revolutionary way to extend process visibility and participation through native mobile device access, real-time collaboration, filtered and personalised views of key business events, integration to external systems, and the ability to take direct action in a familiar and intuitive social media interface.” So what does the new Appian interface deliver?

Mobility

Appian Tempo provides native client applications for the Apple iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone as well as RIM BlackBerry devices. Ross explained that mobile BPM allows employees to stay connected, allowing them to monitor, collaborate and take action on important business decisions regardless of where they are. It also extends BPM participation beyond pre-defined process participants to include all levels of the organisation. The iPhone and iPad applications are available for immediate download from the Apple App Store. The BlackBerry application is available now from the Appian Forum community site, and will be available shortly on the BlackBerry App World site. A native application for Google Android devices will be available shortly.

Figure 1: Appian Tempo user interface on BlackBerry, iPad and iPhone. (Source: Appian)

Social

There always seems to be a contradiction about incorporating social media into a business world. Social technologies are powerful communication and collaboration platforms, but they must be harnessed in a business context to have business value. Ross explained, “Appian utilises familiar social tools and interfaces to drive business collaboration across the enterprise through personalised, filtered views that allow easy collaboration with the ability to take action when needed.” Users can filter views by relevant application or process areas and subscribe to customised feeds to monitor the key events and information that is meaningful to them. As well, users can comment, pose questions and collaborate on business events through real-time message posts and ad hoc updates to targeted groups within and outside of pre-planned business processes. The last user capability is to “Take Action”; here a user can generate actions and complete tasks from inside the event feed or from a mobile device, using optimised web and mobile forms to capture data and route tasks.

Customer-Driven

Samir Gulati, Appian’s Vice President of Marketing, described how Appian 6.5, and in particular Appian Tempo, had been driven by their customers’ business needs. One example is Archstone, a leading apartment management company, headquartered in the USA. Archstone have a highly mobile and dispersed workforce which is supported by a system built on Appian. David Carpenter, Director of BPM, Archstone, stated that “Appian Tempo delivers a new level of value to our customer service associates through instant mobile access to our key enterprise processes and forms.”

Comment

I was very impressed with the demonstration of Appian 6.5 and the Appian Tempo interface. From an end user viewpoint it opens up the ability to make real-time decisions where and when they are needed by using collaborative technology. The product is definitely easy-to-use and intuitive. While all events and collaborations can be secured at a granular level, organisations that make use of the new Appian release will need to think about the security implications of the information that can be shared.

In addition to on-premise deployment, Appian has emerged as the BPM-in-the-cloud market leader. When you add the capabilities of Appian Tempo to those already in the Appian BPMS and Appian Anywhere, as well as Appian’s specific knowledge about industries such as government and financial services, you have a very compelling proposition.

By: Ike Ononogbu, Managing Partner, InforData Consulting Posted: 25th January 2011 Copyright InforData Consulting © 2011

We recently signed up to a CRM web-based application and so far it has proven to be a wise investment. Automating and simplifying some tasks previously carried out manually and more importantly we have avoided the drudgery of installing, configuring and subsequently maintaining the software. Our consultants can now log in from anywhere and use or input company-wide data without having to be at our office or logged into our machines. This is a pretty cool service.

Another significant occurrence, for me, that heralded the arrival of SaaS was when I had a need to share a 'live' document with a friend. As I was pondering how we could both access the document without having to save and send via email a former work-mate suggested we use a particular application on the cloud, this application allows for document-sharing on the 'cloud'.  Perfect!!

In The Beginning
Historically companies have been required to buy software, configure and deploy. But it seems there is change in the air. This apparent shift in paradigm from client-server desktop applications to web-based or cloud computing has its merits and, as some sceptics would like to dwell on, its down-side.

If I were a manager in a company would I rather have a client-server installation or opt for the seemingly easier option of SaaS. Some thought-provoking questions need to be answered before an appropriate decision can be made.

Some of the questions would possibly be:

• How safe is my data?
• Am I looking at short-term or long-term costs?
• If long term, will it be cost effective? Same question should be posed if short-term. 

Data Security
Back to what I would assume is the most important question companies looking to go the cloud route would ask, is my data safe? For all its ease-of-use and minimal, if not lack of, maintenance data security is key to making a decision whether to embark on this road. Managers will have at the back of their minds that their data will be stored in a data centre they have no control over and probably haven’t got a clue where it is located. Where does governance lie if your data is stored in a data centre in Alaska? Is the integrity of my data assured in the data centre?

SaaS 'Players'
Every technology shift has its forebears and followers. Salesforce, a CRM firm formed by an ex-Oracle executive and three software developers, leads the way in harnessing web-based capability. Others, notably Informatica (Data Integration software company), SAP (provides Enterprise software applications), Oracle and IBM Cognos, have all followed suit and now offer on-demand services which are all cloud based. Worth mentioning, Microsoft has just launched its CRM application, Dynamic CRM Online. No one wants to be left behind and there is good reason not to.

Conclusion
While awaiting assurance that data held in data centres will be safe, another question pops up. Are the features in on-demand products as 'rich' as client-server editions?

Having said that and posed some questions, earlier on, we must not lose sight of the benefits of SaaS or cloud computing. The positives are all too obvious for one to see and it certainly has a big part to play in the technology arena, now and in future.

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: 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: 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: Julian Stuhler, Director, Triton Consulting Ltd Posted: 22nd November 2010 Copyright Triton Consulting Ltd © 2010

Yes, and not just because I’m a database techie who is interested in new technology!  This release of DB2 for z/OS should make IT executives sit up and listen when their technical teams start coming to them with their upgrade justifications and this is why.... 

At the end of October 2010 IBM launched the latest version of its flagship database product – DB2 10 for z/OS.  A lot of work went into publicising the launch, and I was asked to present at the launch webcast which ended up attracting over 1300 registrations – a record attendance for an IBM software product launch.

Having been involved in the early beta testing and in my consultancy role working with large DB2 for z/OS users, I’ve been able to really get to grips with some of the great new technical features.  However, as innovative as these may be the bottom line is.....well....what difference is it going to make to the bottom line?  The business benefits of DB2 10 are what really matter to IT executives. Even in the most favourable economic climate, businesses need to control costs and increase efficiency in order to improve profits.  In today’s more challenging business environment this has become a key factor for the survival and success of enterprises of all sizes.

I’m pleased to report that DB2 10 delivers significant “out of the box” benefits that many customers will be able to exploit with little or no additional effort.  These include the most aggressive performance and CPU improvements of any DB2 release in the last 20 years, scalability enhancements to support ever-increasing workloads and productivity improvements to allow DB2 developers and support staff to respond more rapidly to the demands of the business.

Collectively, these features deliver real and quantifiable business benefit and I believe that customers will be considering upgrading to DB2 10 much more quickly than they may have done for previous releases.

DB2 10 delivers a number of significant business benefits, many of which require little or no database, application or system changes.  These can be summarised as follows: 

• CPU Reductions – DB2 includes a raft of enhancements aimed at improving application performance and reducing CPU usage.  Most customers can expect to see net CPU savings of 5-10% in their traditional DB2 workload when compared to DB2 9, without any application changes being required.  Significant additional savings are possible for other specific workloads and with some application changes.
• Scalability Improvements – DB2 10 delivers a spectacular increase in the number of threads that can be supported by a single subsystem – most customers will be able to achieve 5-10 times the number of concurrent connections compared to DB2 9.  This will allow many customers to reduce the number of DB2 members needed to support their workloads, resulting in net CPU and memory savings and improving application performance.
• Productivity Enhancements – New features such as temporal tables, automated statistics and improved dynamic schema change reduce the effort required by developers and support staff to deliver robust DB2 applications.

This version of DB2 also supports ”skip migration”, which means that those currently running the much older DB2 version 8 product can migrate directly to version 10.  Version 8 officially goes out of support on April 30th 2012, which gives version 8 users just 17 months to justify, plan and implement their next migration (this process can take 12-18 months for large DB2 sites). 

As with any migration project it’s worth making sure you get some good advice on the pros and cons and go in to the migration project with your eyes open.  Don’t underestimate the effort involved in a skip migration, or the “culture shock” for developers and support staff asked to take on two releases worth of new function in a single, large, indigestible lump. That being said, with most customers being on usage based pricing the lure of CPU reduction makes a migration to DB2 10 highly appealing.  Those customers that do decide to make the leap directly from Version 8 to Version 10 will benefit from the cumulative CPU reduction of both V9 and V10 in one hit.

With so many compelling business benefits, many customers are taking a much more aggressive approach to migrating to the new version. If you’re a DB2 site and haven’t made plans yet, be prepared for your technical staff to approach you with some pretty convincing arguments sooner rather than later.

See what the beta customers think http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/zos/testimonials.html

Read the DB2 10 business benefits white paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

Applications becoming easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still a great deal of complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of the box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Studio phase

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

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

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

You may also be interested in:

• Rise of WebKit Advances Mobile Web's Role, Opens Huge Opportunity for Enterprise Developers on Devices
• Genuitec Marks Progress with Two Milestone Releases of MyEclipse 6.5 Products
• Genuitec Expands Pulse Provisioning System Beyond Tools to Eclipse Distros, Eyes Larger Software Management Role

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights of WSO2 Carbon Studio include the ability to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 4th October 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Xerox is on a mission: to reinvent itself as a leading business process and document management company, disrupting the legacy perception of a brand which is synonymous with photocopiers. Its acquisition of the services company ACS in 2009 for $6.4 billion was a bold move in this transformation aiming to combine the Xerox brand, global reach and innovation with ACS's established IT outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) business. 

Indeed, ACS's heritage in business process management and information technology services means Xerox is already processing 37 billion public transport fares annually, processing 900 million healthcare claims annually and handling 1.5 million phone calls daily in 150 call centres. Consequently, thanks to the ACS acquisition, Xerox services revenue has climbed to 50% of its total sales in 2010, from 23% in 2009. The market opportunity is real. According to figures quoted by Xerox, it has now moved from focusing on a $132 billion global market, which included office and production hardware and document outsourcing, to a $500+ billion market, which now also includes the thriving BPO and ITO segments.

Ready for real business
The ACS acquisition has signalled a new era for Xerox, and catalysed significant investment in the Xerox brand. Its global "Ready for real business" campaign demonstrates how businesses can outsource areas such as document management, business process management or IT services to Xerox, enabling them to focus on their core business. Its microsite http://www.realbusiness.com/ highlights its work with companies such as Marriott Hotels & Resorts, Target, Procter & Gamble, The New York Mets, Ducati and the University of Notre Dame. These case studies highlight Xerox's capabilities beyond the printed page, demonstrating its credentials across IT outsourcing, customer care, finance and accounting and human resource support, as well as its breadth of reach across many verticals—all areas where many do not realise Xerox is participating in.

Traditional equipment sales not forgotten
With a business rooted in the printed page, Xerox is not giving up on its traditional printing, copying and document management businesses which now accounts for 44% of annual revenue. However, the highest revenue opportunities are in colour print, where adoption is still low, representing only 30% of its installed base. For all vendors in this market, the key to broadening the reach of colour products is to drive down the cost of colour printing. Xerox is banking on its latest ColorQube printer, which uses solid ink rather than ink cartridges, to achieve this. Xerox claims ColorQube printers can reduce the cost of colour printing by 62% and produce 90% less waste than comparable color laser devices.

With SMB customers accounting for approximately 60% of revenues from its mid-range business, Xerox must continue to capture further sales through the IT sales channel. One way it is aiming to differentiate here is through its partner led managed print service, Xerox Partner Print Services (XPPS). With over 150 partners engaged, this service, which also supports multivendor products, promises to help garner Xerox more services revenue through the channel. Nevertheless the IT-centric reseller channel is a hard nut to crack when it comes to print services due to the need to incorporate cost per page printing, break/fix and supplies replenishment. In response to the need for simple service packages in this area, other vendors, such as HP, are also coming to market with value print services, which aim to increase service revenue for channel partners.

Leadership in enterprise managed print services (MPS)
For some time now, the burgeoning managed print services market has helped printer and copier companies to move from a mature, low margin hardware business to one which offers long term customer relationships and recurring revenue opportunities. With contracts 5 years long, MPS enables vendors to manage the complete print environment of a customer, and gain predictable revenue streams from printed pages, often across a heterogeneous printer fleet.

According to Xerox it has retained 100% of its enterprise MPS clients who have signed a contract since 2001, it manages around 1.5 million devices through its MPS contracts, over 50% of which are manufactured by competitors. Its most recent addition to its MPS suite—mobile print—was a result of the Xerox and P&G Innovation Council, enabling employees to print directly from smart phones.

Due to its long established heritage in delivering managed print services (now part of its Global Document Outsourcing division) and its broad service portfolio, which encompasses the office environment to the print room, Quocirca considers Xerox a leader in the MPS market. However its closest rival HP is performing well, boosted by is dominance in the office print environment, its acquisition of EDS and its strategic alliance with Canon.

Expanding market reach
The ACS acquisition means that the combined company can now pursue opportunities across the document outsourcing, ITO and BPO segments, exploiting the respective customer bases of Xerox and ACS. Xerox already has signed managed print services (MPS) deals for companies that were existing ACS customers, such as Ingersoll Rand. According to Xerox, such cross selling initiatives are taking place in more than one hundred accounts across all regions, which have generated over 10 ACS signings to date and a $2.5 billion pipeline.

With only 8 months having passed since the ACS acquisition closed, Xerox still has some way to go to before it can offer an integrated Xerox/ACS offering. This is likely to be more challenging in Europe where the profile of ACS is lower than North America—currently 90% of ACS revenue comes from the US. Nevertheless, Xerox recognises that a global company still needs localised presence and offerings, especially in a diverse region such as Europe, and is working to develop a consistent global approach which is complimented by local and regional delivery capabilities.

Conclusion
The ACS acquisition certainly promises to set Xerox apart from its competitors, and success in Europe will require Xerox to truly integrate its offerings, build out a European service organisation and demonstrate the pedigree of ACS in Europe. Particularly in the document outsourcing market, Xerox should remain watchful of companies such as Canon and Ricoh who are expanding their capabilities. Meanwhile HP's IT and networking heritage positions it well for companies looking to outsource both the desktop and print infrastructure.

Certainly ITO and BPO bring added value to the Xerox Enterprise Print Service portfolio, but Xerox will face challenges developing an integrated sales strategy given the different stakeholders across MPS, ITO and BPO engagements. As with any acquisition, success will rely on the investment in staff and training but probably most fundamental is whether Xerox will retain ACS as a separate brand.

Quocirca believes that although the European market presence of Xerox may do well to push the ACS brand, ultimately the best approach would to be recast ACS as Xerox Enterprise Services or similar, to avoid confusion and support a cohesive go to market approach. For now, Quocirca expects that the majority of synergistic opportunities will reside in the US region. Mindful of this, Quocirca will be watching closely how Xerox approaches and executes on its promises to the European market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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