By: Craig Sears-Black, Managing Director, Manhattan Associates Posted: 9th November 2012 Copyright Manhattan Associates © 2012

Online buying has really started to take off in the UK, as evidenced by Capgemini figures that reveal how online sales hit their highest growth this year, recording a huge 17% jump on July 2011 and a 9% increase month-on-month from June 2012. This equated to an estimated £6.5bn spent online (an average of £128 per person), a significant rise on the £5.8bn spent during July 2011. Total growth for the year to date stands at approximately 13%—in line with previous forecasts.

The advent of the multi-channel retailing era has led to increasingly complex interactions with customers. Now savvy shoppers can not just shop in stores, but also browse online, price check using a mobile device, place a ‘click-and-collect’ order or give customer feedback via Facebook. Multi-channel retailers are getting used to consumers doing their research online before appearing in the store to make the actual purchases or vice versa. In many cases, a sale may span several channels before it closes.

This places tremendous pressure on the retailer to support integrated, cross-channel selling. The value proposition for multi-channel sales is to capture the sale that would not occur otherwise because a customer no longer relies exclusively on shopping at a brick and mortar store.

In perhaps a more global context, as retailers move to multi-channel selling and grow to a broader geographic customer base, the natural tendency is to increase inventory levels close to the point of demand. Retailers often gravitate to opening regional distribution centres to minimise stock-outs and satisfy their geographically dispersed customers. They add new layers of software and inventory systems to deal with each new retail channel and track each channel through separate divisions and warehouse systems. 

Controlling inventory, being ready to ship on-time and handling a diverse customer base are all far more difficult when using discrete systems for different retail channels. Depending on how resources have been allocated within the company, this can create unanticipated supply chain bottlenecks, resulting in late shipments and customer complaints or supply chain blind-spots where poor inventory visibility results in missed sales opportunities.

Just as customers have no patience for order delays or non-availability, shareholders have no patience for reduced inventory turns, increased inventory investment, and higher working capital costs. Because of these dynamics, the traditional, static way of fulfilling a customer’s order out of the geographically closest warehouse is becoming outdated and traditional inventory systems, not up to the task of effectively and accurately supplying products through the mixed modes of modern retailing, are putting companies at a competitive disadvantage.

Today’s retailers—as well as distributors and manufacturers—need to adapt to the new multi-channel retailing era or face being marginalised or bankrupted. To adapt they need to harness the power of inventory across their enterprise and involve suppliers and logistics partners in direct customer order fulfilment. They must strive to reduce costs across the supply chain without sacrific­ing order quality and on-time delivery.

Distributed Order Management to the rescue
The answer is to integrate supply chains for multiple retail channels to efficiently meet growing demand. This has been challenging despite promises of integration tools, standards and web services. Today, software solutions have matured significantly and have been deployed to help companies accomplish this by weaving the varied strands of their distribution systems into a cohesive, effective network. The promise is rapidly becoming reality as retailers, solution vendors, and the marketplace gain experience in deploying these solutions.

For example, Distributed Order Management solutions allow managers to combine existing inventory systems and coordinate multiple retail channels by sourcing products from warehouses throughout the world. Effective solutions provide system-wide inventory visibility, sourcing, allocation and delivery scheduling at each stage of the fulfilment process in real time. Using configurable rules, Distributed Order Management solutions can aggregate orders as they are placed, evaluate global inventory and then match demand to supply. An effective solution can provide precise understanding of product demand and backlog for all markets—not just single channels.

Distributed Order Management solutions build on traditional inventory systems such as Warehouse Management solutions that determine the fastest and most efficient ways of shipping a particular order whether they be ‘singles’ for web, mobile and call centre orders or bulk consignments for store orders.

Whilst Warehouse Management solutions enable companies to fulfil orders from a specific facility, Distributed Order Management allows companies to connect their Warehouse Management solution, which manages the supply side of the equation, to equally sophisticated instruments such as planning and replenishment solutions on the demand side. This allows companies to manage the diverse ways customers now have of ordering, while orchestrating higher service levels.

By using Distributed Order Management solutions, companies gain a global view of inventory and an equally broad view of the pathways their customers use. These solutions help companies recognise that not all customers are created equal, and that the end user has many choices about where to shop for a product and where to buy it.

Distributed Order Management solutions take into account the fact that different channels demand different levels of service. Some channels need product faster, while others are less time-sensitive. Failure to meet a “just in time” commitment has different consequences depending on how close it is to the final customer transaction.

Tightly focusing the supply chain on that final transaction should be the goal of every effective retail operation. Distributed Order Management solutions allow managers to do just that by optimising supply and demand without building yet another inventory system. When used effectively, Distributed Order Management solutions become the “nervous system” of the entire retail supply equation.

Ultimately, all customer channels—e-commerce, m-commerce, f-commerce, s-commerce and v-commerce plus and the more traditional channels of physical stores, catalogues and call centres—must be brought together into a fully integrated order and distribution loop through coordinated inventory management, instantaneous communication and rapid response to spikes in demand. While few companies can take on such a monumental project all at once, Distributed Order Management solutions offer a cost-effective alternative to gain most of the benefits full integration can achieve.

Order fulfilment execution will always be the gold standard by which successful companies are measured. Distributed Order Management can help them get there, and stay there—whatever new challenges come along.

Recommendations for Action

1. Cultural Re-Alignment
It is critical to understand that improved inventory management and fulfilment process­es must be preceded by appropriate corporate cultural shifts. Before designing, buying, or implementing any Distributed Order Management system, ensure your organisation has been realigned to support overall brand prosperity, rather than the health of any one channel. Corporate incentives and measurements should be driven from brand, rather than channel, profitability.

Once the organisation has been brought together, a cross-channel, cross-functional team must be formed to select and shepherd the implementation of a Distributed Order Management System.

2. Next, Pilot a Subset of Products and Geographic Areas
The importance of pilot programmes as a means of fleshing out gaps in workflow, system parameters, or user expectations prior to full system rollout can never be over-stated. Select a narrow set of products across a narrow geographic area for the first 90 days of implementation and experimentation. If appropriate, let your customers and suppliers opt into this pilot programme, with the understanding that they will be receiving the benefits that have been discussed, such as greater fill rates or multi-channel order status visibility. An end-to-end coalition of the willing will be a key contributor to project success, and involving your customers will demonstrate the win-win results that Distributed Order Management promises.

3. Finally, Move to Full Rollout
With incentives and metrics in place, customers on board, and a successful 90-day pilot complete, it is time to move on to full rollout. Start with requests to product and logistics suppliers to participate in the new program. Brand the initiative to the customer base 90 days after full rollout, to be sure that all kinks have been worked out of business processes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Natalie Newman, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 24th March 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

What will the 2011 Census tell us? Not much without geographic information technology! Demographic information guides the planning for all sectors. Whether for the provision of public services, the supply of power and water, or the marketing and selling of products and services, the where factor will be critical!

On March 27th everyone in England and Wales will be expected to complete the 2011 Census form. We lose an hour during the night before and hopefully that will not cause late submissions. This is the first census that can be completed on line. One hopes that this will not adversely affect an accurate information collection—the last census had an alleged 25% undercounting.

Reading an article in the local Compass Wessex magazine started a train of thoughts of what this new information can mean to public and private sector organisations.

The focus on socio and economic trends opens the usefulness of this information to countless opportunities. Is there anything that is not affected in some way? It is vital to understand where—the location—to which the statistics relate.  

Comparison with the first census in 1801 reveals great change and we all know that the speed of change is increasing. In 1801, the 2 million households averaged 5.6 people compared with 2001 where an average of 2.4 people were recorded in 26 million households. The escalation curve would be very interesting to understand how the rate of change has increased. The geographic illustration of where these changes take place will provide invaluable guidance to so many facets of planning and provision.

New questions about residents include passports held, nationality, year of entry to UK and intended length of stay for recent arrivals, main language and second residence. These statistics would reveal interesting trends, showing where employment is impacted, where transitional populations reside, where different languages should be accommodated, and where homes are not permanently occupied.

Frighteningly, apparently, 1 in 6 homes in the UK fall within a flood plain and the Environment Agency's flood testing centre at HR Wallingford in Oxfordshire is investing in experiments to withstand these wet onslaughts. The 2011 Census will reveal how many people are impacted. That could be a very pessimistic picture? Insurance risk cannot be managed without evaluating where and to what extent the risk exists. This is impossible without geographic technology.

The increasing population densities are essential for network planning organisations—water, gas & electricity, telecommunications. Without geographic visualisation, they will not know where the change in demand is taking place.

The first summary results are expected in September 2012 with more details emerging in 2013 and 2014.  That does seem like a while to wait, but maybe we should already be putting on our thinking hats and start planning how to use this information.

If geographic technology is not part of your solution, think again. Without knowing where change is taking place, the statistics are meaningless.

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

The relentless increase in the use of cloud-based services presents both an opportunity and a challenge for resellers of IT products and services. It's an opportunity because they have the chance to help their customers adapt to the new landscape and identify when a cloud-based service is the best option for delivering a particular requirement. The challenge they face, though, is how to create a portfolio of cloud-based offerings—from reseller friendly suppliers—that sits alongside traditional on-premise products, so they can offer their customers a choice.

The problem is identifying such services and doing due diligence on suppliers takes time. Even harder is integrating services together to provide a federated look and feel. Here distributors are starting to take a lead. Quocirca recently spoke at the launch of COMPUTERLINKS's Alvea platform. (The presentation can be viewed here.) 

Alvea is a range of cloud-based security services including on-demand servers and storage, data backup, security and collaboration services. Unified billing and management are built in to the offerings and resellers can white-label the whole thing to appear as their own. Being a well-established distributor, COMPUTERLINKS has chosen to work with channel-friendly suppliers, plugging gaps with its own offerings as appropriate.

Ingram Micro, meanwhile, has assembled a set of cloud services it has branded 'Seismic'—perhaps an indication the earth really is shifting under the channel, or at least the clouds above it! Certain other distributors, for example Avnet, look set to follow the lead of COMPUTERLINKS and Ingram Micro and build cloud service portfolios of their own.

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

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 23rd February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

In the last 12 months technology shares on the NASDAQ exchange have appreciated by 28%. Apple’s have appreciated by c. +80%, Oracle’s by +40%, IBM’s by +30%. Microsoft’s haven’t: they have gone in reverse by -3.5%. Apple is now valued at c. $100bn more than Microsoft.

It’s not that Microsoft’s results have been so bad. Their accounts would have a finance man purring like a stroked kitten. Microsoft’s tech industry leading 30% net margin on revenue of $62.5bn created $18.7bn of net profit in 2010. Nice.

But these impressive figures hide a break from the past. Bill Gates was always obsessed with winning market share and beating the competition. Nowadays Microsoft is more interested in making loads of money and retaining the status quo. The decline of the Roman empire was exactly the same. This is what the stock market is picking up on.

While rivals such as Larry Ellison at Oracle are still hungry for scalps (for example, he said recently that he was ‘going after’ HP at the top end of the server market, ‘and then we’ll take on IBM’ with his new Sun servers and Exadata), Microsoft has been focusing much of its effort on internal wrangling and re-structuring.

Four of CEO Steve Ballmer's direct reports have departed since May 2010, including Stephen Elop who left to run Nokia, and Robbie Bach who ran Microsoft’s entertainment division. Three Divisional Heads have now gone (out of 5 Divisions), the most notable being the President of the $15bn Servers and Tools Business (STB), Bob Muglia.

Ballmer’s email to Microsoft employees on January 10th said “I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB. This is simply recognition that all businesses go through cycles and need new and different talent to manage through those cycles”. This doesn’t quite square with Ballmer’s letter to shareholders last September that reported ‘outstanding momentum across all our businesses’. The ‘new and different talent’ to run STB is Satya Nadella, a 20 year veteran at Microsoft. He ran the Bing search engine division. A chance to blood new talent has been missed.

The Microsoft mission statement: “to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential” lacks real teeth. Previously, one key objective was ‘to take on difficult challenges and see them through to the end’. When Microsoft entered a market it would never let go. It offered a low price point with continually increasing product functionality, the marketing machine kicking in with slick promotions and resellers everywhere. Microsoft’s goal was to become market leader no matter how long it took, and it was a compelling proposition.

Imagine my surprise when they retreated from the performance management market: “we've made it clear in the public domain that we're shifting back, or pulling back… (from) where we were essentially in a competition with the Cognos and Business Objects of the world“ they said. What? Pulling back? Microsoft? Unheard of.

Microsoft’s aura of invincibility has been punctured. Once upon a time, if Microsoft entered a market, existing suppliers knew they were in trouble and clamoured to sell up and get out. Not anymore. Now they fancy their chances of winning against Microsoft and tucking into that soft underbelly of late-to-market indecisiveness that has bedevilled the company in recent years.

The lion needs to wake itself from its gentle slumber, put its teeth back in, get up from its soft bed of grass and go and kill something if it’s going to restore its lost pride of place in the industry. However, a change of leadership may be required at the very top of Microsoft for this goal to be achieved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Role of technology

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

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

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

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

Closing the gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical success factors

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

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

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

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

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

Changing business models

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting small

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

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

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

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

You may also be interested in:

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 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: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 5th November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

I recently contributed to a virtual conference run by InfoSecurity Magazine US  

The topic was data breaches and here is a summary of my presentation.

Data loss is a real issue for many organisations, but what is the real cost and how can we try and prevent these incidents from happening?

Unfortunately, even the best intentioned and well motivated member of staff can make mistakes resulting in the loss of organisational data. In fact, the majority of data loss incidents are the result of this incompetent and non-malicious act rather than a pre-meditated competent and malicious theft of data. The fact that we can all make such mistakes often acts to motivate company security to put protections in place to prevent these events and changes the organisational reaction from one of a wish to punish to one of empathy.

As data proliferates and, more importantly, becomes fragmented across organisations on a variety of media, the control of data has rapidly become one of the most important challenges facing information security professionals and businesses alike.

I recently completed some research on behalf of McAfee, the security company, available here. We interviewed 1100 mid-sized organisations (these are companies that that employ between 50 and 1000 employees) across the world and the results were interesting:

• 40% have had data breaches in the past year, an increase of 13% from last year. So, for these companies, data breaches and data losses are a real problem. As these are generally smaller businesses they don't have the resources of bigger companies to survive a data breach. In fact 75% said that there is a chance that a serious data breach could force them out of business, up from 70% in last year's survey. 5% reported that they had suffered a data loss that had cost them more than $25,000. Of these 25% were from China, 14% from France and 11% from India.
• 47% of all reported intellectual property losses were from mid-sized organisations based in Europe. This is a real problem as for many smaller businesses, intellectual property makes up a significant part of their company valuation. Often, smaller businesses may only have one or two pieces of intellectual property, such as the designs of a key product, so any loss of this data could be significant.

The bottom line is that the real cost of a data breach to these companies can be the loss of their business.

So what about real data loss incidents?

In March 2010, Zurich Insurance announced that it was going to improve its information security after losing personal financial information on 46,000 British clients through careless handling of unencrypted backup tapes. The back-up tape, which also contained personal details of 1,800 third party insurance claimants from the UK, was lost by Zurich's South African sister company during what was described as a routine transfer to a data storage facility in South Africa in August 2008.

In total, 51,000 British records were on the tape, along with a much larger number of details about Zurich customers in South Africa (550,000) and Botswana (40,000). Zurich's UK arm wasn't informed about the problem until a year later. They were fined the equivalent of $5m by the Financial Services Authority, the highest fine levied in the UK on a single firm for data security failings.

There are also a number of scare stories relating to data loss.

In this very recent example, headlines screamed that nuclear data had been lost from a plant in the UK. In fact the memory stick that was found in a hotel room by a coach driver contained less exciting data relating to the transfer of staff from one plant to another, but few people will bother with the detail, instead it is the headline that most will remember. 

For the company that owns the data it is too late, their reputation has been tarnished and the damage done. This has further political implications, as losses associated with politically sensitive industries or projects may run and run, being blown out of all proportion and used to fulfil other objectives. All because data was left, unencrypted, on a memory stick.

Another example from my archives comes from 2008.

A UK company called PA Consulting lost a memory stick containing the details of 84,000 prisoners. As a direct result of this it had its 3 year contract, worth $3m, terminated and further contracts worth $15m placed under review. It is believed that the unprotected memory stick was placed into an insecure desk drawer over a weekend.

If you lose a laptop, USB stick or CD it can be fairly obvious that the data has gone missing. Voice data is very different, as a successful interception can leave no physical trace so there is little chance of realising your data has actually been intercepted until it is too late. For many, this realisation may be when they have been undercut by a competitor or see their products copied in another country. This makes the promotion of voice security more of a challenge, as a direct link to an incident is often difficult to make.

Of course this lack of detection and traceability is a real bonus for the eavesdropper. When a victim realises the loss of data the attacker is long gone, hiding their trail as they go.

In order to understand the cost of lost voice data the Ponemon Institute, in collaboration with Cellcrypt, recently undertook a study called The Security of Voice Data. 

The study reveals that 67% of those 75 organisations surveyed were not confident that the information passed during a cell phone conversation was adequately secured and only 14% use technologies to secure mobile phone calls when travelling to sensitive areas. The cost to the organisation each time a corporate secret is revealed to competitors or their agents has been averaged at $1.3 million.

There are a number of ways in which mobile phone voice data can be intercepted:

Spyware can be loaded onto a phone.
This, in turn, can activate the phone as a bugging device with full remote control available to an eavesdropper. Advanced spyware has a number of features, including voice-activated microphones to save on battery life and the ability to auto forward SMS messages and the contact list on a phone.

GSM encryption can be hacked
A number of attacks have been demonstrated and, in theory, given suitable resources, mobile phone encryption could be compromised. This is a passive attack and is undetectable as the signals are received using a specialised radio, which is both portable and easy to hide.

Inside threat
Threats to information security systems often emanate from inside an organisation. These can take the form of knowledgeable insiders being bribed or bullied into supplying relevant cell phone data and can even be an employee planted by a security agency. In June 2010, a technician who worked in a Lebanese mobile phone operator was arrested for being an Israeli spy and giving access to phone calls for 14 years. Because of the man's role on the technical side of the cell phone network's operations, it was assumed that the entire national network had been compromised.

It could be argued that data protection is a key role for information security people. As organisational data is dispersed throughout a business keeping a secure track on it is very difficult, but necessary. This is a tough call, as the needs of the business to have access to this data lie contrary to the desire for information security people to lock it up and prevent anyone getting to it. Clearly a compromise is important.

New and emerging threats will only lead to new ways in which data can be obtained, and keeping on top of this ball is now vital, especially when we are dealing with systems that may transfer huge amounts of data around the world in fractions of a second. The increasing use of "i" devices, online social networks and other sharing tools brings about a culture of sharing what many in older generations would consider private or personal data.

It's only by bringing together decent security policies, user education and supporting tools that we can hope to keep on top of the cost of data loss incidents.  

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 7th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

The process associated with securing a commercial lease or loan, commonly referred to as asset finance originations, is getting more and more complex and therefore the need to automate has grown. Leasing capital assets is just one way companies are moving expenditures from CAPEX to OPEX budgets. Leasing is a process by which a firm can obtain the use of a certain fixed asset for which it must pay a series of contractual, periodic, tax deductible payments. Other companies opt to secure commercial loans in order to meet their operational and cash flow needs. The asset finance organisations who handle these lease or loan applications are operating in a cut-throat market and are finding they need to differentiate themselves. Yet, until recently, they were limited in their ability to perform risk assessments because of internal technology hurdles. They often support multiple back-office processing systems which could not share customer information, needed a great deal of individual customised programming, and often required expensive upgrades to maintain over time. But this situation is changing. Rapport360 from International Decision Systems is the first front-office asset finance solution Bloor has come across to provide seamless integration with multiple back-office processing systems. In doing so, decision-makers get full visibility into customer risk across system platforms so they can make better credit decisions and gain a competitive advantage.

International Decision Systems (IDS) was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN with sales offices in the UK, Australia and Singapore and a development centre in Bangalore, India. The company specialises in the asset finance software market, providing solutions which support the full lifecycle covering both front and back office operations (see Figure 1 below). For back office portfolio management, IDS provides:

• InfoLease, which provides support for leasing operations, covering functionality for loans, reporting and regulatory compliance; and
• ProFinia, which manages lease and loan portfolios along with their underlying assets and collateral.

For the front office, IDS provides:

• InfoAnalysis, which is a solution for transaction quoting including tracking of critical sales data for salespeople; and
• Rapport, which enables contract origination including credit applications, product pricing, partner relations and booking.

Figure 1: Full Asset Finance Management Lifecycle

IDS has over 250 customers in 34 countries including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, GE Capitol, John Deere, Dell, RBS Asset Finance, Olympus, Xerox, CAT, Volvo and Daimler.

Terry Welty, Chief Marketing Officer at IDS, explains “The main challenges in managing the current asset financing process are high cost, low productivity, and limited visibility of customer risk data. Often there is a large amount of re-keying which results in poor data quality and a lack of synchronisation between back-office applications. This process also slows response time and potentially results in lost sales. Perhaps one of the biggest problems, however, is that because different back-office systems do not share information, decision makers are unable to see the “big picture” of customer risk across different business units and geographic locations which can lead to difficult decision-making.”

October 2010 sees the launch of a new version of the IDS Rapport solution called Rapport 360™. Rapport has always provided support for the management of workflow, screens and rules to enable organisations to provide best practices. It contains a pricing engine that supports matrix, rate card pricing, as well as asset and risk-based scenarios. Information from CRM systems, credit bureaus, and other financial and asset information resources is able to be incorporated into the system to provide a single view. Rapport supports the creation, distribution, and management of origination documents as well as bid, quote, and proposal letters.

Figure 2: Rapport 360 Coverage

So what is different about this release? Katie Emmel, Director of Product Management at IDS, told me that IDS has now added the ability to support simultaneous integration with multiple back office servicing systems through a feature called Smart Synchronization. Emmel said, “Customer records can now be updated instantly in all applicable systems. Rapport 360 provides a single, consolidated view of customer risk by capturing delinquency and exposure information.” The other key differential I identified was that administrators in user organisations are able to manage workflow, screens and rules to regulate and establish best practices across an organisation without having to use IT resources or the vendor. Rapport 360 provides support for the complete origination process from quotation through decisioning to final booking.

But what does this mean to you? The support for multiple back-office and smart synchronisation means that costs can be lowered and valuable staff resources can be refocused. Customers also gain by receiving faster response time. One of the biggest improvements, however, is that, by seeing the complete picture associated with customer exposure, finance companies can make better decisions, reduce risk and therefore improve profitability and ROA.    

Bloor recommends any organisation involved in leasing to take a serious look at this new product from IDS. From what we have seen, it fills in many of the gaps that were previously missing from solutions in this marketplace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 2 PLM Functionality Source:  PLM Technology Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If ERP is all about managing and controlling resources, Sales and Operations Planning is the brains behind the process and can be the difference between profit and loss.

 Andrew Kinder, Solutions Director at Infor told me, “As Europe moves out of recession, many business leaders are reflecting on the lessons they have learnt. Thankfully the phrase: ‘if only we had known how the credit crunch was going to hit us’ has been joined by ‘what can we do to make sure this never happens again?’. Businesses are now examining the systems and processes that offer not just growth but protection and resilience.”

At the top of this list of options is S&OP. In a recent Supply Chain Management survey for Infor conducted by AMR Research, 88% of respondents said they are already using or planning to deploy an S&OP solution in the next 12 months. The report also found that the number one area of S&OP businesses want more support in, is in its ability to provide “what-if” simulation capability—such simulation is a critical tool in dealing with the volatility present in today’s businesses. But has S&OP changed with the times and is it applicable in today’s global agile world? Does it apply to both large and small organisations? These and a number of other questions are key to success in today’s collaborative world.

So what is it?
S&OP is a business planning process that aligns the traditional demand/supply view of the world, with the financial and business goals of the organization. S&OP is a response to the accusation that the operational plan and the business plan are often seriously mis-aligned.

Supporting this cross-functional business process is information. And that means integrating a number of different pieces of planning data around sales, production, inventory, finance and HR to provide the executive with focus, alignment and synchronisation about the company. Plan frequency and planning horizon depend on the specifics of the industry. A properly implemented S&OP process routinely reviews customer demand and supply resources and “re-plans” quantitatively across an agreed rolling horizon. The re-planning process focuses on changes from the previously agreed sales and operations plan.

Figure 1: Putting S&OP into Context (Source: Hitachi Consulting[1])

As John Dougherty[2] said, “Its ultimate goal is to always keep the detailed sales, manufacturing, purchasing and capacity planning systems in synchronization with the latest high level plans of management (the business plan).” Or you might prefer Chuck Poirier’s view[3], “it’s about balancing supply and demand in a way that overcomes the deficiencies of weak forecasting and results in more optimum performance—from the initial suppliers to the satisfied customers.” Kinder explained that there are many different definitions that have evolved over time. At Infor, they defined S&OP for the purposes of driving their new product design as “enabling decision makers to achieve consensus on a single operating plan that profitably matches supply and demand.”

The Association for Operations Management (APICS) defines S&OP as the "function of setting the overall level of manufacturing output (production plan) and other activities to best satisfy the current planned levels of sales (sales plan and/or forecasts), while meeting general business objectives of profitability, productivity, competitive customer lead times, etc., as expressed in the overall business plan. One of its primary purposes is to establish production rates that will achieve management’s objective of maintaining, raising, or lowering inventories or backlogs, while usually attempting to keep the workforce relatively stable. It must extend through a planning horizon sufficient to plan the labor, equipment, facilities, material, and finances required to accomplish the production plan. As this plan affects many company functions, it is normally prepared with information from marketing, manufacturing, engineering, finance, materials, etc."

What is involved?
The S&OP process brings together many areas of the business to determine anticipated demand volume and how the company plans to supply product to meet that demand and best serve the customer within the financial goals of the company. The S&OP processes is characterized by:

• A top-down and bottoms up approach, linking the company’s business plan with the current demand and supply plans
• A cross-functional, collaborative process that focuses on improving business performance
• A structured, formal set of consensus business processes based on a set time period, usually a month

Figure 2: The Sales and Operational Planning Process (Source: Chuck Poirier, CSC)

The process starts with gathering the projected demand information and compiling it in a common format. From this information, a demand forecast is generated, typically beginning with the sales forecast originally used for planning purposes, but augmented with inputs from key customers and amended by knowledge of current operating and market conditions. The next step is to match the demand forecast against any known or anticipated manufacturing and logistics constraints. Any issues identified are then resolved; this often includes looking at alternative strategies. The final step is to monitor progress versus the altered demand and supply plans.

So what we have is different functions or business processes operating with different buckets of information granularity. Information flows both bottom up (sales, customer, VMI and co-managed programs, POS data, supply chain capacities) and top down (budget, business plan, category or customer plans, market share objectives, NPI plans). It is the reconciliation of these information flows to provide actionable planning that is the key to successful S&OP. The planning component and iterative feedback loops require common business language.

Figure 3: Sales and Operations Planning Benefits (Source: Hitachi Consulting0

So what had changed?
Hitachi Consulting [4] sees the following as the key changes that have occurred that affect S&OP:

• Globalization: Diverse and distant supply base for components and finished goods assembly increases complexity and supply lead times. There is a need for accurate, longer forecasting horizons and reduced near term flexibility.
• Contract Manufacturing (CM): While the approaches can vary from full turn key to consignment CM, the common requirement is cross organizational communication for lead time and supply commitment. This means there is a need for better planning to collaborate with CMs and longer forecast (5–9 months) horizons.
• Technology and Market Evolution: Changing consumer tastes and evolving technology mean there is a need for integrated, holistic decision-making to plan, adjust, and adapt while maintaining profitable operations.
• S&OP Supporting Technologies: Workflows can now model both decision making and optimization processes while integrating with disparate functional systems, breaking the demand planning, supply planning, BI technology silos. Therefore there is a requirement for the ability to reduce organizational effort and time needed to develop robust S&OP processes.
• Customer and Channel Focus: Conflict among direct, indirect and key customer channels means there is a need for coordinated channel and profitability management.
• Mergers: 43% of companies note M&A activity has resulted in need to connect merged operations and manage business plan impacts. S&OP therefore needs to support established, robust planning to assist in assimilation.
• Changing Operating Constraints and Costs: new product introductions, changing supply base, new customers, and fluctuating supply chain costs, all mean that there is a need for adaptive S&OP processes.
• Trial and Error: 15+ years of siloed S&OP attempts, Demand Planning and APS implementations, and ERP initiatives have led to “silo optimized” plans or led to domination by one functional group. Enterprise data is more available but not intelligently used for planning. So there is an increased desire for decision making transparency and cohesive planning.

What is happening next?
What we have is an evolution of what we expect from S&OP. Initially it was simply matching demand and supply; balancing supply with the best expectation of demand. This is the coordination of an inventory, production and procurement plan to meet demand, balancing supply with demand at the stock keeping unit (SKU) level. This remains an essential component of any planning process, but lacks a financial view of the plan. Does the plan meet with the financial goals of the business in terms of matching forecast to sales revenue expectations? Is the supply plan affordable in a way that delivers the expected margins of the business?

The next evolution was to allow the user to manipulate both demand and supply. It also included the ability to incorporate events such as new product introduction and product changes. This evolution is sometimes called scenario management. Kinder sees that this is where most organisations are, or strive to be, in their S&OP maturity curve. Planning is more strategic—12–24 months out—and operational plans are expressed in financial terms: revenue, costs and margins.

The latest evolution is to make the planning process even more agile and flexible as well as robust. Kinder explained that practitioners at this level sometimes prefer to use the term “Integrated Business Planning”—elevating the process to a higher level than “sales and operations”. The goal is an executive planning process that seeks to define the total strategic plan for the business and completely align strategy with execution. Kinder gave this example, “For example, a business may incorporate product portfolio planning into their S&OP processes, scrutinising when products are retired and when new ones are brought on-stream. Other considerations will include pricing options, channels to market, expansion and consolidation plans, mergers and acquisitions, and network design changes.”

Who is involved?
As S&OP is a major part of a manufacturing planning process, then, as you would expect, all the major ERP packages would provide modules in their ERP solution that support S&OP. Yet, this is not always the case and an Aberdeen survey revealed 85% of organizations resorting to spreadsheets to support their S&OP processes. However, the usual players such as SAP, Oracle, Sage, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, Epicor, IFS claim to provide solutions.

The specialist supply chain management solutions such as I2 Technologies, ICON-SCM, Kinaxis, Logility and TXT e-solutions, similarly provide support but their solutions are very supply chain focused, as one would expect, and don’t support the complete picture that many organisations now need.

IBM position Cognos as a solution for S&OP. Cognos is well-known and well-used business intelligence product and therefore to use for S&OP one would need to configure the product to do the job. However IBM provide for their customers—free of charge—a set of frameworks called the IBM Cognos Performance Blueprints which provide a set of preconfigured solutions. However, the BI family of products do not provide detailed demand planning or constrained supply planning that is an important aspect of simulation within the S&OP process.

There are also a number of specialist niche players such as:

• Demand Solutions S&OP is fully integrated with Demand Solutions Forecast Management and Demand Solutions Requirements Planning and imports data through the Forecast Management database. The user-defined Import/Export utility within Demand Solutions products makes it easy to interface with other business systems.
• JDA’s Executive S&OP Workbench has been developed to take account of the Integrated Business Planning concepts I have described earlier. It utilizes key-metric graphs and charts to visually present the aggregated state of your business for informed decision making.
• Steelwedge’s Sales Planning & Performance Management (SPPM) suite leverages four modules (executive, sales, operations and collaborative) and S&OP platform that incorporate best-practice S&OP collaborative technologies with business workflows and performance management capabilities that help companies take enterprise-wide top-down (and bottom-up, middle-out) control over the revenue planning process.

Conclusions
So what does such a successful implementation of S&OP actually deliver to the business? According to research from Aberdeen Group, S&OP leaders report healthier financial results in terms of customer service levels, forecast accuracy, profitability and cash-to-cash cycle times—key measures for any business.

Simon Pollard, VP Manufacturing Operations and Execution for SAP EMEA, in a recent discussion with me gave me this scenario, “Most companies do S&OP on a weekly or monthly basis. Once the plan is done the ‘Real World’ takes over, destabilising the plan. If you join plant floors to ERP you can monitor those operations up from the shop floor to business goals. However the problem now is that currently the information at the lower levels can only be picked up quarterly and only key stakeholders are involved.”

In a recently published IDC report[5], it states, “Inaccurate forecasts can make planning and allocation of resources and servicing new projects very challenging and it can make adequately servicing customers difficult if orders come in all at once. With strained economic conditions in 2009 and 2010, planning was harder as previous year’s revenues provide little indication of future sales.” IDC concludes by recommending discrete manufacturers to adopt S&OP which synchronizes the demand forecasting process with production and customer fulfilment planning.

Kinder feels that, “S&OP has become an essential business process in de-risking the supply chain. The reality is that in any operational planning process there are multiple ways to meet customer demand. But which is the best plan? Best for customers? Best for the business? S&OP—and the modern technologies that support it—deliver confidence that a business has explored the alternatives and hit upon that elusive best plan.”

So it would seem that although S&OP is such a key element in manufacturing today, it means different things to different people depending on where they are on the evolutionary road. But if you want to move to the nirvana of Integrated Business Planning, then you are looking at joining on one side the shop floor data from Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) with data from your supply chain partners (certainly for your Tier 1’s if not your Tier 2’s) with your HR data, Capacity data and Sales data to produce a plan which may now need to be refined more often than monthly. So we are talking about integration and collaboration not only at a technical level but also at a business process level.

[1] Trends in Sales and Operations Planning, Hitachi Consulting

[2] Getting Started With Sales & Operations Planning, John R. Dougherty

[3] Sales and Operations Planning – A Key Element of Supply Chain Success, Chuck Poirier, CSC

[4] Hitachi Consulting, AMR Research 2005 S&OP Study, Aberdeen Group 2006 Study

[5] Beating complexity, achieving operational excellence, IDC Manufacturing Insight, Pierfrancesco Manenti and Megan Dahlgren, July 2010

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 27th September 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Technology innovation is often hard to demonstrate to those in senior decision-making roles in most organisations, and generally for very straightforward reasons. Many vendors pitch their products or services as being full of benefits, but often these are simply features dressed up with a few marketing buzzwords ending in ‘ability’. The answer to the question ‘what will it do?’ is generally ‘anything’ as those flogging the idea, either from outside or with the help of internal IT champions typically ignore the unspoken part of the question ‘...for me, our company, against the competition, etc’.

It is an issue of putting the innovation into specific context.

In October 1993 the then Anderson Consulting created a dramatic way of doing this for their retail prospects in Europe, through a ‘blue sky thinking’ experience called ‘Smart Store’, built at its office in Windsor, which aimed to transport senior retail executives into the distant future of 2010. The multi-room showcased the impact of technology in a context that would grab and sometimes shock retail executives into action. Many of the concepts, such as self scanning, logistics tagging and tracking, are now pretty much the norm, so it must have been a successful, if rather expensive investment.

While Smart Store showcased other company’s technology innovation to help Anderson Consulting sell services, other centres of innovation and executive briefing centres have been built by technology companies keen to show off their thought leadership. Both IBM and Sun Microsystems developed these sorts of facilities and have tried as hard as possible to justify the generally hidden back end ‘big tin’ with applications and services set in the context of real business.

Although the theatrics rarely meet the impressive standards of Anderson Consulting, some effort still goes into filling the demonstrations with props. It might seem trivial, but there is merit in demonstrating real world examples and doing some sort of scene setting. After all, how many business leaders or managers seeking solutions to specific business problems want to be faced simply by banks of (expensive) IBM and Sun servers?

From a recent visit to Motorola’s innovation centre in Basingstoke it is clear that money had not been frittered away on superfluous theatrics. The markets being targeted and applications shown address down-to-earth everyday business needs, not blue sky concepts. The main room is filled with many diverse communications devices from simple two way radios to smart consoles for forklift trucks; all great examples of Motorola’s innovation and technical prowess, but how do they connect to business?

Rather than looking for props or theatrics, the clues come from Motorola’s recent changes in corporate structure, in particular the decision to spin off the phones division earlier in 2010 and the acquisition of Symbol in 2006.

As the spinoff of the consumer oriented mobile phone part of the company concludes in 2011, what remains is business and public sector organisation focused, covering wireless LAN, drop in cellular networks and mobile devices. Rather than having the generic devices that might be picked up as consumer friendly phones by the average office worker, the new Motorola has large ranges of more specialised devices, some offering voice communications, some mobile data, others converging both. Why? It allows Motorola to provide different devices to target the specific working needs of different groups of workers, with tools that are sometimes rugged, often just robust, but always designed and dedicated to do a particular job—hence the reason there are so many in the innovation centre.

That is all well and good and, to be honest, what you might expect from a large technically driven company with over seventy years of innovation, but while the hiving off is bringing much needed focus, it is the acquisition and subsequent slow absorption of Symbol that turns that focus into revenue. Symbol not only brought smart small IT devices to the radio company, it also introduced an ecosystem of applications, application developers and channel partners.

This has become the driver for much activity and is where the business innovation is happening; developing a mobile application to meet the business process need of an individual worker, blending small robust hardware with the right interface options to fit their role and adding the spice of well engineered radio technology.

If Motorola can stay partner friendly and avoid the arrogance that so often surrounds long term industry players who think they can do it all themselves, this sounds like a recipe for success for all parties involved.

Mobile applications that address business needs rather than massage egos or satisfy gadget lovers will appeal to the business decision makers. That should put Motorola’s mobile innovation into context, and while its innovation centre is not overly theatrical in its presentation, this is not an issue for the practical business needs being addressed.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 19th August 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Companies today need to be able to collect information on a number of indicators to gauge their performance against their own and external targets. These key performance indicators can vary from number of units produced in a selected time period, to number of orders received through certain channels, to the availability of skilled personnel and particular plant. This is on top of and in addition to the usual financial analytics. So the role of Business Intelligence is changing; as Andrew Stevens, Sage’s Enterprise Development Manager, explained, “We are seeing the requirements for Business Intelligence to become part of the natural workflow of business processes, rather than an adjunct to ERP applications.”

So what does this mean for manufacturing organisations in today’s economic climate? What should they be expecting from business intelligence software?

What does BI really mean?
Well, to start with is to understand what the term “Business Intelligence” really means. Wikipedia gives a very broad definition, “Business Intelligence (BI) refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making.” Perhaps a better definition is that Business Intelligence represents the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making. Generally these systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few.

So we collect data and turn it into intelligence. How do we do that? US Department of Defense[1] sees that this process consists of six interrelated intelligence operations: planning and direction, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and production, dissemination and integration, and evaluation and feedback. So therefore our software must support these capabilities.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, and business performance. Phillip Howard, Research Director, Data Management at Bloor Research has stated, “You can use any database as a data warehouse or to support business intelligence management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics. However, if there is any substantial re­quirement for analytics then general purpose databases without specialised facilities will fail to give adequate performance.”

Randy Flam, President of IQMS, commented, “Business Intelligence is becoming more and more important. It used to be that all you needed was a static report writer to extract and report on data, but now you have to be able to provide the ability to dashboard and drive down to more detailed information as well as deliver on multiple user platforms from PCs to mobile phones!” Marge Breya, executive vice president and general manager, Intelligence Platform Group and SAP NetWeaver Solution Management, SAP supports this view, “Customers want to work with their data their way – whether it’s behind a firewall, on the Web, or on their local computer in spreadsheets. With access to data at their fingertips, customers can make more confident decisions, share their insights with others and react quickly to any changes in their business.”

So Business Intelligence is more than just being able to extract data and report on it. It is also more than just financial analytics or even key performance indicators. And it requires more than just standard reports, but alerts and graphs and traffic lights. One other question we need to ask ourselves is in what context was the data collected.

Relevance to manufacturing today
We have all heard about the problems at Toyota that have led them to recall so many of their models. Teradata have been working with a number of automotive vendors looking at the problems with warranty. Duncan Ross, Director Advanced Analytics at Teradata explained, “Warranty data comes from 2 different sources. One is off the production line and is well defined and consistent in nature. The other comes from the dealers’ workshops and is of variable quality. This can lead to the same problem being reported a multitude of different ways. This means big problems can get hidden!” Ross went on to describe how Teradata, working with SAS Institute, have developed a solution using statistical methods to allow the dealer warranty information to be able to be grouped and analysed more effectively. This results in the detection to rectification cycle being shortened. So here is Business Intelligence being used as part of a warranty system (A service management component) to analyse the data received.

Ross saw this as just one business intelligence application in the automotive sector. “A car is now a computer on wheels! Data is being collected continually that the driver is unaware off. As warranty schemes increase in length, we could reach a time when the OEM actually owns the car for its whole life and we, the driver, lease it. Data collected by the computer in the car can stream this data back to a central point, which allow problems to be identified and reported before the driver is even aware of them.”

Real-time BI disseminates information about a business in a range from milliseconds to a few seconds after the business event. While traditional business intelligence gives users only historical information, real time business intelligence provides a comparison of present business events with historical events, which helps in identifying a range of issues, thereby allowing them to resolve it on time. The primary aim of real-time BI is to enable corrective actions to be initiated and business rules to be attuned to optimize business processes.

Rick Whitting[2] stated that real-time information was no longer a competitive differentiator that produced more timely and relevant business decisions. Decision makers in SMEs can communicate and collaborate over broadband networks as if they were in the same office. He sees that it is the ability to forecast where events are heading, and then make informed decisions based on that assessment. Termed Predictive analytics, it involves running historical data through mathematical algorithms such as neural networks, decision trees, Bayesian networks, to identify trends and patterns and predict future outcomes: questions like “Will product demand surge?”, “Will a customer take his business elsewhere?” An organisation’s ability to make such educated guesses is key to improving service, cutting costs, and exploiting new market opportunities.

But do I want to run BI in house? Could I use the cloud? The answer to these questions is yes. February this year saw SAP announcing the SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand solution. This is targeted at casual BI users and will deliver a complete BI toolset which requires no prior experience or training. The interesting piece of this announcement was that a user would be able to interrogate data not held in SAP, with a specific interface to saleforce.com included.

So what?
Business Intelligence tools have empowered every business person to make better decisions on their own, without relying on IT or power analysts to prepare and interpret results for them. BI applications have become as commonplace as spreadsheet applications within large organizations and this will extend to all within a few years.

Stevens sees the BI market as, “We have seen a noticeable shift in the motives for firms investing in BI. Historically, BI provided information at a management level only, but businesses are now placing emphasis on utilising BI as a means of transforming data into actionable insights across their organisation. It enables companies to unlock the intrinsic value of data held within their business systems. Indeed, we believe that BI should never be seen as an additional IT layer or standalone platform, but as an integral business tool that can ensure everyone is pulling in the right direction.”

A 2009 Gartner paper[3] predicted these developments in business intelligence market:

• Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.
• By 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for business intelligence.
• By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.
• In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.
• By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mash-ups.

I think the key to the future in BI is something Ross shared with me and that is more automatic collection. Manufacturing decision makers don’t have the time to spend on collecting and formatting the data so that they can report on it. As we get more and more data available to us to analyse, that comes not only from with in our own organisations boundaries but also our customers and suppliers and even from other external sources, how do we sort the wheat from the chaff? For a business user’s viewpoint, the software has to allow easier definitions of what needs to be collected and provide interaction during the build process. This will include the ability to define different views and collections for different user interfaces. Then we will have the agility that we need.

This article first appeared in the Manufacturer earlier this year.

[1] Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. US Department of Defense, 2005.
[2] Predictive Analytics: Business Intelligence's Next Step, Rick Whiting, ChannelWeb, 12:02 AM EDT Mon. May. 29, 2006
[3] "Gartner Reveals Five Business Intelligence Predictions for 2009 and Beyond", http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=856714

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

We've assembled a panel to examine the business impact of cloud computing, to explore practical implementations of cloud models, and to move beyond the hype and into gaining business paybacks from successful cloud adoption.

Coming to you from The Open Group’s Cloud Practitioners Conference in Boston on July 21, the panel tackles such issues as what stands in the way of cloud use, safe and low-risk cloud computing, and working around inhibitors to cloud use. We also delve into a compelling example of successful cloud practices at the Harvard Medical School.

Learn more about cloud best practices and produced practical business improvements from guests Pam Isom, Senior Certified Executive IT Architect at IBM; Mark Skilton, Global Director, Applications Outsourcing at Capgemini; Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Director of Research Information Technology for Harvard Medical School, and Henry Peyret, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Athanasoulis: The business of Harvard Medical School is research. ... Similar to many industries, there is a culture that requires that, for IT to be successful, it has to be meeting the needs of the users.

We have a particularly interesting situation. I call Harvard Medical School the land of a thousand CIOs, because, in essence, we cannot mandate that anyone use central IT services, cloud services, or other things. So that sets a higher standard for us, because people have to want to use it. It has to be cost-effective and it has to meet their business, research objectives.

We set out about five years ago to start thinking about how to provide infrastructure. Over time, we've evolved into creating a cloud that's a private cloud at the medical school.

User participation

We've been able to put in place a cloud that, number one, has user participation. This means that the faculty have and the researchers have skin in the game.

They can use the resources that are made available and subsidized by the school, but if they need additional resources, additional computing power, they're able to buy it. They actually purchase nodes that go into the cloud and they own those nodes, but when those notes are idle, other people's work can run on it. So they buy into the cloud.

These folks are not very trusting of central IT organizations. Many of them want to do their own thing. In order to get them to be convinced that they ought to participate, we told them, "You buy equipment and, if it doesn't work out for you, you can take that equipment and put it under the bench in your lab and set it up how you want." That made them more comfortable. But, not a single time has anyone ever actually come back and said they were going to take back the equipment.

In essence, it's building the trust of the researchers or the business clients, if you're in more of a business environment, getting them engaged in their requirements, and making sure it will meet their needs.

... Personal relationship is a part of what it's about. We had to make sure that we weren't seen as just a black box that they had absolutely no control over. That was step number one.

Then we also had to make sure that it was very much of an iterative process. We would start with one folk's needs and then realize there were certain other needs.

... We started out with a relatively small cloud initially. Once people saw the value, they began to adopt it more, and it's really starting to have a snowball effect, where we are growing by orders of magnitude.

... People are moving from the giant project, two- to three-year implementation cycles to, "Let's take a chunk, see how it works, and then iterate and moderate along the way."

Skilton: What's illustrated [at Harvard Medical School] is this need to move to more continuous-release or continuous-improvement type of life cycle. This is a transformation for IT, which may be typically more project-cycle based. It's a subtle difference, but it's one that is fundamentally changing the way you would offer an incrementalized service as opposed to more of a clunky, project-based, traditional waterfall approach.

We're seeing software as a service (SaaS), due to the economic conditions, taken quite seriously now, particularly targeted at specific business processes, but also starting to become potentially more mainstream. Clearly, with Salesforce.com and others like that, we are seeing that starting to accelerate.

... We're starting to see utility computing becoming much more common mainstream, so that it’s no longer a fad or an alternative to mainstream. We're seeing that sort of consistency.

Demonstrate success early

Athanasoulis: It's always easier to show someone something that's already working and say, "Do you want to hop onto this bus" than to say, "We're going to build this great new giant infrastructure, and just trust us, it's going to work great. So, hop on board now, before anyone has even seen it or tried it out." It's having the ability to let people walk before they run. Come on and try it out. If it doesn’t work for you, so be it, but you also have demonstrated successes that people can point to.

... The CIO at Harvard Medical School, John Halamka, had the vision to start this. It started with his initial vision and going to bat to move from everyone from doing their own thing and setting up their own infrastructure, to creating a cloud that will actually work for people.

He had the foresight to say, "Let's try this out." He went to his leadership, the dean and others and said, "Yes, we're taking a chance. We're going to spend some money. We're not going to spend a huge amount of money until we prove the model, but we're going to have to put some money in and see how this works." It was a very interesting communication game.

Peyret: From an enterprise architect (EA) point of view, we should ... determine what are the elements that can migrate to the cloud, different types of cloud. Then, we should try to evangelize. The EA should be in between business and IT. That’s a good place to make a right choice and mitigate risks and choices.

... The EA should participate to establish and negotiate what I call the business service catalog, something that will be an extension of the ITIL service catalog, which is very IT-based and IT-defined.

Something that is missing currently within ITIL V3 is how to deal with the business to define the service and define also the contract in terms of cost and of service level agreement (SLA). But, it's not only the SLA. It's broader than that. That's something that's missing at the moment. Most of the EAs are not participating in that.

... The business service catalog is the next step. We have heard in enterprise architecture about business capabilities. We talked about that business capabilities to help develop business architecture.

A missing link

We have also heard SOA. There is a missing link in between -- the business service catalog. It's a way we will contractualize. I like very much the fact that you said, we are contractualizing, but with flexibility. We should manage that flexibility. We should predict what that flexibility means in terms of impact. Perhaps that service is not valuable for other parts of the company.

That's where I think that EA and the next step for EA will take place. SOA is not an end, and the next step will be the business service catalog, which we will develop to link to the business capabilities.

Isom: The catalog of services would be great. I think we need to be careful about that catalog of services, so that it doesn’t become too standardized.

We need to be careful with the catalog of services that we offer, but I definitely think that it is a new way of thinking, when it comes to the role and capacity of IT.

As I mentioned earlier today in one of my presentations, you want to be careful with that standardization, because you do want to give people some flexibility, but you need to manage that flexibility. So, you need to be careful. We need to be careful with the catalog of services that we offer, but I definitely think that it is a new way of thinking, when it comes to the role and capacity of IT.

It’s a new way of thinking, because along with that comes service management. You can't just think about offering the services. Can you really back up what you offer? So, it does introduce more thinking along those lines.

... The enterprise architect would be the one who would provide that enterprise view and make sure that anything that we do is thought out from a holistic perspective, even though we may actually start practicing on a smaller scale or for a smaller domain.

A good practice would be to involve the enterprise architect, even though we may start with a specific domain for implementing the cloud, because you've got to keep your eye on the strategic vision of the company.

... As far as what’s driving cloud as a solutions strategy is the need to improve business performance. If we can get solutions that will help drive business performance and business sustainability, the cloud is a good place for that.

... You can’t produce cloud solutions in a vacuum. You won’t get any consumers. So, it’s a great venue for cloud providers to work with business stakeholders to explain and explore opportunities for valuable services.

Athanasoulis: Defining the service with the users is the first clear step, and obviously getting the requirements from the users, particularly in an organization like our medical school, where they have choices and they don’t have to use the systems.

We have people who want to just come in and put in systems, buy a rack of stuff and put it under the lab bench, and then they are surprised when the power and cooling isn’t there to meet the requirement.

... As IT leaders, we all know that there is now a marketplace. The public cloud is available to folks. People can get on Amazon EC2. They can get on to these various clouds and they can start to use them. That forces us to have compelling cloud offerings that are more cost effective than what they can go get out in the public sector.

... We view the public cloud as an extension of the private cloud to the degree that there is consistency of virtual machine definitions and to the degree that we can make a node on the public cloud look exactly like a node on the private cloud and make the same databases available there.

If someone has the money, they want the capabilities, say 10,000 processor hours or 100,000 processor hours, whatever it might be, between now and this deadline three weeks from now, and they are willing to spend the money, wouldn’t it be great if transparent to them, they just spend up to $100,000, $200,000, whatever their budget is, and let this stuff go from our private cloud out to the public cloud. What a great solution that would be for folks.

... So, having this balance of bringing in an IT specialist, the enterprise architect, to define the requirements in joint-step -- back to the dance with the customers -- was really what allowed us to be successful.

A new question

Skilton: The portfolio needs to be put in place, but it also needs another set of service management investment tools to control data distribution, compliance, or access and security control, and things like that.

I detect a worry about whether I can outsource that. Do I need to do something in-house? What do I need to spend money on? Because that's a block, and people need to understand that.

... What we are seeing with clients now is that they are over the initial infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), SaaS, and business process as a service-sort of conversation. They're now asking, "What cloud services do you do?"

What they mean by that is that they need to see your cloud security reference model. They need to see your cloud services model. They need to understand the type of services that you can offer into a portfolio and then the types of service catalogs that you can interact with them.

They then make a decision. Does that need to be on-premise, can it be out in the cloud, or is there something as a hybrid? They're on that page now, and there is a strategic planning process starting to evolve around that.

Flexible vision

Athanasoulis: You want to iterate and you have to have a vision of where you are going.

If you're taking a car trip and you're going to drive from here to Ohio tomorrow, we know where we're going, we have our map, we start to drive, but we might along the way find, that the highway is clogged with traffic. So, we're going to go around over here, or we are going to take a detour.

Perhaps, somewhere along the way you say, "You know what, now that we have been learning more, Ohio isn't really where we wanted to go. We actually want to keep on going. We're heading right out to Colorado, wherever it may be." But, you have to have a vision of where you are going.

Then, to keep things from spinning out of control along the way, it's really important to know the potential factors that might lead to things starting to fall apart or fray at the edges. How do you monitor that you have the right capacity in place? You don't want to sell something to everyone and then find six months into it that you're way oversubscribed and everyone is bitter and unhappy, because there isn't the capability that they expected.

Isom: The IT department should be more focused now on providing information technology as a service. It’s not just a cloud figure of speech. They are truly looking at providing their capabilities as a service and looking at it from an end-to-end perspective.

That includes that service catalog and includes some of the things you were talking about, how to make it easier for consumers to actually consume the services, and also making sure that the services that they do provide will perform, knowing that the business consumers will go somewhere else if we don't. The services are just that available now. You really have to think about that. That shouldn’t be the driving force for us, providing IT as a service, but it should be a consideration.

The IT department should be more focused now on providing information technology as a service. It’s not just a cloud figure of speech.

Peyret: What I wanted to recommend is that you should evangelize your IT person to act as an IT service. What does that mean? That means that you should recommend to them to contractualize their service, to express and establish, through the business service catalog, including some pricing aspects. Within the enterprise, where you have some funding and no problem about funding, you should contractualize. That’s absolutely key to make the adoption of cloud, any type of cloud, easier. That would be more or less transparent.

Risk mitigation

Isom: The cloud can be a risk mitigator. ... We talked about how we can help mitigate the risk of losses in product, sales and services, because capabilities are now made faster. There is also that infrastructure to try things out. If you don’t like it, try something else, but that infrastructure is more readily adaptable with cloud.

Also, there's the fact that there is the mitigation of the proliferation of licenses and excess inventory that you have with respect to products, software, and things like that. We can help mitigate that with the cloud, with the pooling of licensing and things like that, so you can reach cloud from that respect.

Skilton: From the business side, I would recommend to go out and look at best practices. Go and look at examples of where SaaS is already being used.

The number of case studies are growing by the month. So, for businesses, go out and learn about what's out there, because it is real. It’s not a cloud.

It constantly amazes me how many blue-chip Fortune 500 companies are already doing this.

From an IT point of view, as we have heard from Marcos, go and learn. Try it, pilot it in your organization. I'll go further and say, practice what you preach. Test it out on one of your own business processes.

From my own experience in my own company, we do use what we preach in the cloud. That way, you learn what it means internally to yourself to transform, and you can take that learning and build on it. You can't get it in a book. You can’t just read it. You have to do it.

Athanasoulis: I will think of four words that begin with P to describe where I would emphasize. One, pilot, as we have already been saying. Two, participation. You have to get buy-in and participation across the entire group. Three, obviously produce results. If you don’t produce results, then it’s not going anywhere. And then, promotion. At the end of the day, you also have to be out there promoting this service, being an advocate and an evangelist for it, and then, once the snowball gets going, there is no stopping it.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

You may also be interested in:

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

History has many examples of invaders wielding steel swords, repeating rifles, or whatever the latest weapon may be, driving out people who are less well-equipped. Corporate IT departments are starting to go the same way, at the hands of people equipped with cloud computing.

Last week I was at The Open Group conference in Boston. The Open Group is neutral territory with a good view of the IT landscape: An ideal place to watch the conflict develop.

The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group has been focused on the business reasons why companies should use cloud computing. The Work Group released three free white papers at the Boston conference, which I think are worth a closer look: “Strengthening your Business Case for Using Cloud,” “Cloud Buyers Requirements Questionnaire,” and “Cloud Buyers Decision Tree.” Three Work Group members, Penelope Gordon of 1Plug, Pam Isom of IBM, and Mark Skilton of Capgemini, presented the ideas from these papers in the conference’s Cloud Computing stream.

"Strengthening your Business Case for Using Cloud" features business use cases based on real-world experience that exemplify the situations, where companies are turning to cloud computing to meet their own needs. This is followed by an analysis intended to equip you with the necessary business insights to justify your path for using cloud.

The “Cloud Buyers' Decision Tree” can help you discover where cloud opportunities and solutions might fit in your organization. And the "Cloud Buyers' Requirements Questionnaire" will help you identify your requirements for cloud computing in a structured way, so that you can more easily reach the best solution. These two papers contain ideas that will help you assess the potential the cloud has for your organization, and they will be refined as practical decision tools through use out in the field.

Deciding whether, and where, to use cloud computing can be difficult. Trying it out is easy. You can set up a small-scale trial quickly, and the cost is low. You can probably pay by credit card.

Assessing the financial implications for a particular application is relatively straightforward, although there can be unseen pitfalls. But, assessing the risks is more of a problem, particularly because cloud is so new, and the dangers—where they are known—may not be understood. And, integrating cloud solutions with each other and with in-house systems can present significant problems. Best practices in these areas are still evolving.

The white papers will help you reach these decisions, and understand where cloud is a good fit for businesses. Today, it is often a good fit, but there are many situations where it is not the best solution. These situations will become less common as cloud computing matures and enterprise architectures evolve to be more cloud-compatible. But there will always be cases where computer capacity should be retained in-house.

So perhaps the data center isn't quite dead, but cloud computing is certainly making headway. My prediction: Over time, cloud will be able to occupy the fertile valleys, and corporate IT will be forced to take to the hills.

This guest blog comes courtesy of Dr. Chris Harding, who leads the Cloud Computing Working Group at The Open Group. He can be reached at c.harding@opengroup.org.

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

Coming to you from The Open Group’s Security Practitioners Conference in Boston, we’ve assembled a panel this week to delve into the advancing role and powerful potential for enterprise architecture (EA).

The economy’s grip on IT budgets, and the fast changing sourcing models like cloud computing, are pointing to a reckoning for EA—of now defining a vast new promise for IT business alignment improvement or, conversely, a potentially costly lost opportunity.

The need for EA seems to be more pressing than ever, yet efforts to professionalize EA do not necessarily lead to increased credibility and adoption, at least not yet.

We’ll examine the shift of IT from mysterious art to more engineered science and how enterprise architects face the unique opportunity to usher in the concept of business architecture and increased business agility.

Here to help us better understanding the dynamic role of EA, we're joined by Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research and noted author; Dave Hornford, an architecture practice principal at Integritas Solutions, as well as the Chairman of The Open Group Architecture Forum, and Len Fehskens, Vice President for Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Fehskens: [Enterprise architecture] is really just a gleam in many people’s eye at this point. If you look at the discipline of EA and compare it to mature professions like law and medicine, we’re back 200–300 years ago. We’ve been doing a lot of research recently into the professionalization of other disciplines.

Most of the people studying the subject come up with a fairly short list of characteristics of professions. They usually include things like a well-defined body of knowledge, and well-defined educational program and particular degree programs, often offered by schools that are specifically focused on the discipline, not just the department within a larger organization.

There's some kind of professional certification or vetting process and often even some kind of legal sanction, a right to practice or right to bear the title. We don’t have any of those things right now for EA.

The body of knowledge is widely distributed and is largely proprietary. We’re at a state similar to going to a lawyer, and the lawyers try to sell themselves based on secret processes that only they had that would allow you to get a fair shake before a judge. Or similar thing with a doctor, who would say, "Come to this hospital, because we’re the only people who know how to do this particular kind of procedure."

So, we’ve got a long way to go. The big thing we’ve got going for us is that, as Jeanne pointed out, the stakes are high and so many organizations are becoming dependent upon the competent practice of EA as a discipline.

There's a lot of energy in the system to move forward very quickly on the professionalization of the discipline, and in addition to take advantage of what we’ve learned from watching the professionalization of disciplines like law, medicine, engineering, civil architecture, etc. We’ve got long ways to go, but we are running really hard to make some progress.

Ross: The stakes are high, because organizations are becoming more digital out of necessity. It’s a more digital economy. Thus, IT is more strategic. I think people see that, but outside of people who have already embraced architecture, there is some reluctance to think that the way we get more value from IT is basically by taming it, by establishing a vision and building to standards and understanding how that relates back to new ways of doing business, and actually developing standards around business processes and around data.

... The architect’s role is to make sure that there is a vision. You may have to help provide that vision as to what that process is, and how it fits into a bigger vision. So there is a lot of negotiation and envisioning that becomes part of an architect’s role that is above and beyond just the technology piece and the methodology that we’ve worked so hard at in terms of developing the discipline.

... We’ve learned a lot about methodologies, disciplines, and tools, but there is an art to be able to take the long-term vision for an organization and not just say, "It’ll come guys, be patient," but rather, "I understand that starting tomorrow, we need to begin generating value from more disciplined processes."

... There is a piece of it that’s just not appealing [across the organization]. Besides, we feel like this should all be about innovation, which should be all exciting stuff. Architecture just doesn’t have the right feel for a lot of businesspeople.

Hornford: The stakes are high in the sense that should someone in your industry figure this out, they will change the game on you, and you will now be in serious trouble. As long as all of your competition is struggling as long as you are, you’re okay. It’s when someone figures it out that they will change the game.

Where people are doing it well is where they are focused on business value. The question of what is business value is highly dependent. People will mention a term, “agility.” I work with a mining company. They define agility as the ability to disassemble their business. They have a mine. Someone buys the mine. We need to remove the mine from the business. A different organization will define agility a different way, but underpinning all of that is what is the business trying to achieve? What is their vision and what is their goal?

Practitioners who are pursuing this have to be very clear on what is the end state, what is the goal, what is the business transformation, and how will the digital assets of the corporation—the IT asset—actually enable where they’re going, so that they’re able to move themselves to a target more effectively than their competition.

... The fundamental with leadership in EA is that architects don’t own things. They are not responsible for the business processes. They are not responsible for the sales results. They are responsible for leading a group of people to that transformation, to that happy place, or to the end-state that you're trying to achieve.

If you don't have good leadership skills, the rest of the fundamentally doesn’t matter. You’ll be sitting back and saying, "Well, if I only had a hammer. If I only had authority, I could make people do things." Well, if you have that authority, you would be the general manager. You’d be the COO. They're looking for someone to assist them in areas of the business at times that they can't be there.

... If you do not lead and do not take the risk to lead, the transformation won’t occur. One of the barriers for the profession today is that many architects are not prepared to take the risk of leadership.

Fehskens: A phrase that you’ll hear architects use a lot is "compelling value proposition." The authority of an architect ultimately comes from their ability to articulate a compelling value proposition for architecture in general, for specific architecture in a specific situation. Even if you have a compelling value proposition and it falls on deaf ears, for whatever reason, that’s the end of the road.

There isn’t any place you can go, because the only leverage an architect has is the ability to articulate a compelling value proposition that says, "I’ve recognized this. I acknowledge this is promise, but here’s why you have reason to believe that I can actually deliver on this and that when I have delivered on this, this thing itself will deliver these promised benefits."

But, you have to be able to make that argument and you have to be able to do it in the language of the audience that you're speaking to. This is probably one of the biggest problems that architects coming from a technical background have. They'll tell you about features and functions but never get around talking about benefits.

... Architects are ultimately charged with making sure that whatever it is that they're architecting is fit for purpose. Fitness for purpose involves not doing any more than you absolutely have to. ... The architect’s approach to dealing with the architectural way of problem solving means that agility and cost cutting sort of are not short-term focuses. They are just built into the idea of why we do architecture in the first place.

... My experience with businesspeople is they don’t really care how you do something. All they care is what results you're going to produce. What you do is just a black box. All they care about is whether or not the black box delivers all the promises that it made.

To convince somebody that you can actually do this, that the black box will actually solve this problem without going into the details of the intricacies and sort of trying to prove that if I just show you how it works then you’ll obviously come to the conclusion that it will do what I promise, you can’t do that that. For most audiences that just doesn’t work. That’s probably one of the most fundamental skills that architects need in order to work through this problem—getting people to buy into what they are trying to sell.

Ross: The thing to recognize about business agility is that it’s a journey. You don’t want to start making your compelling business values something you can't deliver for three years. Many times the path to agility is through risk management, where you can demonstrate the ability of the IT unit to reduce downtime to increase security or lower cost. The IT unit can often find ways to lower IT cost or to lower operational cost through IT.

So, many times, the compelling value proposition for agility is down the road. We've already learned how to save money. Then, it’s an easier sell to say, "Oh, you know, we haven’t used IT all that well in the past, but now we can make you more agile." I just don’t think anybody is going to buy it.

It’s a matter of taking it a step at a time, showing the organization what IT can help them do, and then, over time, there's this natural transition. In fact, I'm guessing a lot of organizations say, "Look, we're more agile than we used to be." It wasn’t because they said they were going to be agile, but rather because they said they were going to keep doing things better day after day.

Hornford: If we're going to look at our sourcing options, using the word "component" as opposed to "platform," I can acquire a benefit. I can acquire a benefits engine as a service or I can build my own and manage my own processes, whether fully manual or digitized. Those choices come down to my value in the business.

Different organizations will have different things that matter to them. They will structure and compose their businesses for a different value chain for a different value proposition to their customers.

If we get back to the core of what an architect has to deliver, it’s understanding what is the business’s value, where are we delivering value to my customers?

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: 22nd July 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Welcome to a panel discussion that examines the need for improved common defenses—including advancing cooperation between enterprise architects and chief security officers—to jointly defend against burgeoning cyber security threats. The risks are coming from inside enterprises, as well as myriad external sources.

From the panel, at The Open Group’s Security Practitioners Conference this week in Boston, we’ll learn more about the nature of these borderless, external, cyber security threats, as they emerge from criminal enterprises, globally competitive business sources, even state-based threats, and sometimes a combination of these. We’ll also hear recommendations on developing smarter processes for cyber security based on proven methods and pervasive policies.

To help broaden the scope of enterprise architecture, and to develop a leverage point for "mission architecture"-levels of security and defenses, we're joined by retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Harry D. Raduege Jr., chairman of the Deloitte Center for Cyber Innovation, and who co-chairs a cybersecurity commission under President Obama; Jim Hietala, Vice President of Security at the Open Group, and Usman Sindhu, researcher at Forrester Research. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Raduege: With openness come these new threats. The vulnerabilities that we have of operating in cyberspace are magnified by identity theft, information manipulation, information theft, cyber crime, and insider threats that are prevalent in many of our organizations and companies today. Also, the threat of espionage, of losing lots of intellectual property from our businesses, and the cyber attacks that are taking place, the denial-of-service (DOS), and also the threat that we see on the horizon—cyberterrorism.

There's now a tremendous opportunity for us to gain the benefits of being able to communicate, not only nationally, but also internationally, and across all borders, in the area of cyber security. This is an international problem, and so an opportunity for us to take advantage of it. We’re all in this together.

Many people are bringing best practices to the table. We’re learning from each other’s experiences. The international cooperation and the opportunity to meet and discuss these areas are very valuable to all of us individually, and to our companies and to our nations.

This is the significance of this type of a gathering, to talk about the real benefits of cyberspace, but also to talk about the issues of cyber security that are facing us all. The importance of the underlying foundational aspects of having a great enterprise architecture is pointing more toward a mission architecture for business success.

Organizations like The Open Group are working on the common standards that are so important for the international community to comply with and to have as guiding factors. Education is very important, developing a cyber mindset across all people of the world, not only in the government organizations, but for industry, and also the individual users at home.

The aspects of education and training and awareness of what’s going on there in cyber space is paramount for proper operation, but also for the protection of your critical information.

Sindhu: Traditionally, security has been a point technology. Even in the government space, there has been a lot of focus around just technologies. We have seen saw how the importance of point technologies has been overemphasized, rather than risk analysis and process.

Today, many organizations, including the public and private sector, are waking up to the fact that technology alone is not the answer. It’s the process and people as well. That’s where deriving these best practices would be a key in collaborating with the private and public sector and bringing in an architecture.

As far as this interconnectivity is concerned, you'll see lot of different business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions. It happens today. Today, business partners and distributors do business on the go, on social media, either Twitter feeds or Facebook, or something I call ad-hoc communication through their mobile devices. This is the nature of today’s interaction. This is the nature of B2C and B2B interactions.

... And in the 21st Century we'll have a lot more innovations and more technology adoption in a much more accelerated fashion.

That’s where the smart concept comes in. This entails smartening our physical infrastructure, our critical infrastructures like utility, healthcare, financial services, transportation, public safety, and also city administrations, down to the IT system itself.

It will use of lot of IT enablement from either the cloud or communication infrastructure, things like RFID technologies, 4G technologies, and solar technologies, to embed lot of situational awareness, analytics, and locationing into the systems.

This is a smart kind of a concept that embeds itself into smart city infrastructure where all the different components embed all the IT technologies together. There are other initiatives like smart grid or smart healthcare that are embedding these IT technologies as well.

That's a great way to start the 21st Century with this innovation, but the need for security arises at the same time. As Gen. Raduege mentioned, cyberspace is a new frontier, or information security in the cyber world, is a new frontier.

That’s where we have to address lots of different issues and problems around policy, architecture, and best practices. It’s only going to get more serious, as we connect a lot of different systems that were not connected in the past.

One of the key aspects of smartness is cross-industry and cross-team collaboration. Today, when we start to look at some of the smart deployments, either in the vertical sectors like utilities, healthcare, or even other private-sector industries, we see more and more that security is getting attention from the board-level and C-level executive.

Similarly, enterprise architecture is getting its attention as well. Going forward, we see a great emphasis on combining these two initiatives, even though it’s still a very nascent stage at the board-level talks and C-level talks. We're not seeing a huge focus on cyber security in some instances, but of course it’s changing. It’s increasing.

It's fair to say that the security and enterprise architecture will play a key role, as both concepts mingle together to bring about best practices in architecture in the early phases into planning, deployment, and delivery of the smart services.

Hietala: It’s still early in the process of really bringing enhanced security into the professional enterprise architecture. So, in The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), in three of the nine iterations of it, we've added significant security information and content that enterprise architecture need to bear in mind in developing architectures.

But that work is ongoing. We have a couple of projects both to enhance the security of TOGAF, and also to work to collaborate with the Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA) folks, another security architecture development methodology, to harmonize those two approaches.

There's a lot of work ongoing there, and there's a lot of work needed in developing reference architectures outside of purely IT. We have a document that we are updating called Enterprise Security Architecture. It will be published this fall, and updates some work that was done five or six years ago, sort of an IT reference architecture.

From an enterprise perspective, looking at mission success and thinking about cyber security really is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) role inside a given enterprise. That probably is most relevant to address the issues. The interesting thing is that many of the new developments that we’re looking at—whether it's smarter hospitals, smarter medical devices, smarter electrical grid—are industry specific and they require a lot of cooperation between organizations in an industry.

There's a role for standards and industry organizations to pull together and come up with some common standards to facilitate better security, maybe better frameworks or things like that, that can be leveraged across an entire industry.

We see a need, as you start to look at cyber security and the different kinds of architectures, to develop new reference architectures to address some of these new applications of IT technology to everyday life. If you think about networks in cars or networks of smart devices comprising the power grid, what does security look like for those things? Our membership is starting to look at some of those and trying to determine where we can add some value for the industry.

Raduege: The Internet has changed our world, and the way we operate. For years, we've had enterprise architects who have been working down the hall or in the basements of organizations, and who have been trying to figure out the best way of technically aligning the Internet and all of the interconnected networks to make it work as best it could.

Now that this world of cyber has really come upon us, it has really elevated the importance of the enterprise architect into the higher levels of an organization, just because of the threats that are constantly coming upon us in our business operations and our mission success.

The enterprise architect has now gotten the attention of the C-suite executives and organization leadership. But, they don’t like to think as much about enterprise architecture, because it really has that technical connotation as my colleagues here have mentioned, we're really talking and focusing more now on the people and the process aspects of running the business properly.

The front-office people, the C-suite executives and leaders of organizations, instead of thinking about enterprise architecture from a technical aspect, are becoming much more interested in a mission architecture.

In other words, what's the architecture needed to complete my mission so that I can have success—whatever your mission is, if it’s government activity or whether it’s industry. Mission architecture has taken on new meaning that takes into account the technical architecture, but also adds the workforce domain and the process elements of the organization.

So, mission architecture is really pointing toward business success, whatever your business is, whether it’s government operations or industry.

Sindhu: Architecture is important, but there is no silver bullet to it. Since the smart concept is industry-wide and is global, there could be many references to architectures that could go in. Some things have started to happen.

For example, the Department of Homeland Security came over to IT risk baseline about a year-and-a-half ago. It collaborated with the IT vendors and IT sector in general and started to create this risk baseline, which comes about in the earlier phases of architecture.

As you develop a framework, you take feeds from the various industry standards and regulatory compliance mandates and you start to create a risk baseline, a risk profile that touches every single silo of people, process, and technology. Over the time, you do the collaboration, internally, but externally as well.

Hietala: Definitely there is a need for increased public-sector and private-industry cooperation. We have an initiative here, The Open Group's Acquisition Cybersecurity (ACS) Initiative. It was brought to us by the Department of Defense as a consulting effort. They wanted an organization to pull together private industry and try to drive some standards looking at the supply chains to the major IT suppliers. That work is ongoing and that would be a good reference of an initiative like that.

Sindhu: The role of the architecture and security has to be involved right from the planning phase, where you manifest the value of security being built in, either to the products or in general to the architecture? That has to be the first step—that we acknowledge the need to embed that into the overall process.

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: 8th July 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

You may have seen or read an article I wrote recently (ERP: What does it mean to us today?). I posed a number of questions about ERP in today’s agile and changeable world. What I did not look at was what it still can do for organisations. To answer this question, we first of all have to understand what an ERP package is.

I have spent the last few months  analysing ERP packages for a market update using the Bloor standard RFI approach to gather information about different types of software. It is based on a scientific approach to valuation of criteria in the production of a “Bullseye” comparison of products. So the first thing to say about evaluating ERPs is that it isn’t just about the support for business functionality, it is also now about the platform on which the business functionality is delivered, because this is where the required agility and flexibility will come from. In addition, it is important to know about the support and services that surround the applications. Here we are looking at not only the maintenance services available, but also the implementation support through both a vendor’s own consultancy services but also through system integrators and lastly the training and education made available. There are other criteria but these 3 are the most important.

Figure 1: The Bloor Research High Level ERP Selection Criteria Weightings

Now when it comes to business functionality, what my recent research has shown is that there are certain packages which are better suited for different types of manufacturing such as process, project, make to order, repetitive or repair. So make sure that the packages you consider understand the sort of business you are in.

In the previous article I showed a picture of the common functionality; what my research has shown is that there are a number of ERP packages on the market that still don’t have Financial and HR modules. The other modules not always present are Plant Maintenance, Service management and Laboratory Information Management. So if these latter 3 are important to you then check that the packages you are looking support this functionality. The other thing I have noted is that analysis around pricing and competition is not always supported and here I think vendors really need to step up to the mark because these capabilities are very important to companies in today’s world.

One further word of warning to those of looking at choosing a package at this moment—a lot of the information you want is not on the vendor’s web sites or it is hidden deep down! What a surprise! I would always recommend that an organisation puts together a formal RFI of some sort as this allows you to understand what is important to you and allows you to collect the necessary information to be able to ask intelligent questions when you go and take a look at the product through a sales presentation. You can shorten the time to produce an RFI by using criteria used by industry analyst such as Bloor, if they are put into the public domain.

So what should you expect from an ERP solution today? Well, firstly a rapid implementation that will lead to a rapid ROI. This will mean you might have to change some of your processes to fit the best breed processes that are in the packages. This is all about don't configure just because you can. Only make configuration changes to the package where the process is what really differentiates you from your competitors. In one selection I did, the key differentiator was the company’s discounting process and in another it was the supply chain in terms of bin management and transportation. So it was here that we did our configuration and left the financials as they were—what a pity the UK does have a standard chart of account as France and Spain so!

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd June 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington, D.C.

We have a customer case study focusing on Delta Air Lines and the use of quality assurance tools for requirements management as well as mapping the test cases and moving into full production quickly.

We're joined by David Moses, Manager of Quality Assurance for Delta.com and its self-service apps efforts, and John Bell, a Senior Test Engineer at Delta. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Moses: Generally, the airline industry, along with the lot of other industries I'm sure, is highly competitive. We have a very, very quick, fast-to-market type environment, where we've got to get products out to our customers. We have a lot of innovation that's being worked on in the industry and a lot of competing channels outside the airline industry that would also like to get at the same customer set. So, it's very important to be able to deliver the best products you can as quickly as possible. "Speed Wins" is our motto.

It goes back to speed to market with new functionality and making the customer's experience better. In all of our self-service products, it's very important that we test from the customers’ point of view.

We deliver those products that make it easier for them to use our services. That's one of the things that always sticks in my mind, when I'm at an airport, and I'm watching people use the kiosk. That's one of the things we do. We bring our people out to the airports and we watch our customers use our products, so we get that inside view of what's going on with them.

I'll see people hesitantly reaching out to hit a button. Their hand may be shaking. It could be an elderly person. It could be a person with a lot on the line. Say it’s somebody taking their family on vacation. It's the only vacation they can afford to go on, and they’ve got a lot of investment into that flight to get there and also to get back home. Really there's a lot on the line for them.

A lot of people don’t know a lot about the airline industry and they don’t realize that it's okay if they hit the wrong button. It's really easy to start over. But, sometimes they would be literally shaking, when they reach out to hit the button. We want to make sure that they have a good comfort level. We want to make sure they have the best experience they could possibly have. And, the faster we can deliver products to them, that make that experience real for them, the better.

By offering these types of products to the customers, you give them the best of both worlds. You give them a fast pass to check in. You give them a fast pass book. But, you can also give the less-experienced customer an easy-to-understand path to do what they need as well.

Bell: One thing that we've found to be very beneficial with HP Quality Center is that it shows the development organization that this just isn't a QA tool that a QA team uses. What we've been able to do by bringing the requirements piece into it and by bringing the defects and other parts of it together, is bring the whole team on board to using a common tool.

In the past, a lot of people have always thought of Quality Centers as a tool that the QA people use in the corner and nobody else needs to be aware of. Now, we have our business analysts, project managers, and developers, as well as the QA team and even managers on it, because each person can get a different view of different information.

From Dashboard, your managers can look at your trends and what type of overall development lifecycle is coming through. Your project managers can be very involved in pulling the number of defects and see which ones are still outstanding and what the criticality of that is. The developers can be involved via entering information in on defects when those issues have been resolved.

We've found that Quality Center is actually a tool that has drawn together all of the teams. They're all using a common interface, and they all start to recognize the importance of tying all of this together, so that everyone can get a view as to what's going on throughout the whole lifecycle.

Moses: We've realized the importance of automating, and we've realized the importance of having multiple groups using the same tool.

It's not just a tool. There are people there too. There are processes. There are concepts you're going to have to get in your head to get this to work, but you have to be willing to buy-in by having the people resources dedicated to building the test scripts. Then, you're not done. You've got to maintain them. That's where most people fall short and that's where we fell short for quite some time.

Once we were able to finally dedicate the people to the maintenance of these scripts to keep them active and running, that's where we got a win. If you look at a web site these days, it's following one of two models. You either have a release schedule, that’s a more static site, or you have a highly dynamic site that's always changing and always throwing out improvements.

We fit into that "Speed Wins," when we get the product out for the customers’ trading, and improve the experience as often as possible. So, we’re a highly dynamic site. We'll break up to 20 percent of all of our test scripts, all of our automated test scripts, every week. That's a lot of maintenance, even though we're using a lot of reusable code. You have to have those resources dedicated to keep that going.

Bell: One thing that we've been able to do with HP Quality Center is connect it with Quick Test Pro, and we do have Quality Center 10, as well as Quick Test Pro 10. We've been able to build our automation and store those in the Test Plan tab of Quality Center.

It's very nice that Quality Center has it all tied into one unit. So, as we go through our processes, we're able to go from tab to tab and we know that all of that information is interconnected. We can ultimately trace a defect back to a specific cycle or a specific test case, all the way back to our requirement. So, the tool is very helpful in keeping all of the information in one area, while still maintaining the consistent process.

This has really been beneficial for us, when we go into our test labs and build our test set. We're able to take all of these automated pieces and combine them into test set. What this has allowed us to do is run all of our automation as one test set. We've been able to run those on a remote box. It's taken our regression test time from one person for five days, down to zero people and approximately an hour and 45 minutes.

So, that's a unique way that we've used Quality Center to help manage that and to reduce our testing times by over 50 percent.

I look back to metrics we pulled for 2008. We were doing fewer than 70 projects. By 2009, after we had fully integrated Quality Center, we did over 129 projects. That also included a lot of extra work, which you may have heard about us doing related to a merger.

Moses: The one thing I really like about the HP Quality Center suite especially is that your entire software development cycle can live within that tool. Whenever you're using different tools to do different things, it becomes a little bit more difficult to get the data from one point to another. It becomes a little bit more difficult to pull reports and figure out where you can improve.

What you really want to do is get all your data in one place and Quality Center allows you to do that. We put our requirements in in the beginning. By having those in the system, we can then map to those with our test cases, after we build those in the testing phase.

Not only do we have the QA engineers working on it in Quality Center, we also have the business analysts working on it, whenever they're doing the requirements. That also helps the two groups work together a bit more closely.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 21st June 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast, an interview with Bill Veghte, Executive Vice President of the HP Software & Solutions group, conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

The one-on-one discussion comes to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C., held last week, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

Here are some excerpts:

Veghte: I spend a lot of time out there with CIOs and IT professionals, and we're at two remarkable inflection points in our industry.

The first is in terms of how businesses are delivering IT, and that's on three dimensions. The first is virtualization. There's a lot of not only conversation, but moving workloads of application services to a virtualized environment. Look at the numbers. People say that over 25 percent of x86 server workloads are now virtualized, and that number looks like it's going to accelerate over the next couple of years.

Correspondingly, there's a heck of a lot of conversation around cloud. People wrap a lot up in that word, but many of the customers tell me they think of it as just another way of delivering experiences to their end-customers. And, in cloud there's platform, applications, and private versus public, but it's another choice point for CIOs and IT folks.

The final piece in terms of IT delivery is that there are a heck of a lot of mobile devices, over a billion mobile devices, accessing the Internet. With the advent of smartphones, a very rich viewing and consuming medium, people expect to have that information.

Those things are incredible tools and opportunities, whether you characterize it in a balance sheet, and moving from capital expenditure to operating expense, or whether you characterize it in anytime/anywhere information on your mobile device. But with that, it does bring more choice points and more complexity.

The other inflection point that I'd highlight, Dana, is the breadth and depth of data that’s being generated. You and I both know that digital information is doubling globally every 12 to 18 months. In the midst of all the digital photos or whatever, sometimes people lose track of the fact that 85 percent of that data resides in businesses. And the fastest growing part of that is in unstructured data.

Now, the most precious resource is your ability to take that data and translate it into actionable information. The companies and businesses that are able to do that have a real competitive advantage.

You can put that in the context of a specific business operation. If you're a pharmaceutical, how quickly can you bring a drug to market? You can characterize that in a financial services organization. Do you have better, quicker data and market movements?

You can characterize it in IT. There's an enormous amount of IT information and data, but how do I parse it out to the things that are going to represent a service desk ticket, and can I automate that so I am not putting people in the middle?

When I think about it in a historic context, I'd highlight a couple of things. One is that we're going through the biggest change in IT delivery since client-server, because of the three delivery vehicle changes that I highlighted. That, in turn, is going to generate a very significant refresh in applications and services.

You don't have the time deadline in the same way that we did with Y2K, but the CIOs and IT and apps folks that I know, as the economy is recovering, are looking at their application and service portfolios and saying, "How am I going to refresh this to take advantage of these new and different delivery vehicles?"

... As I looked across the marketplace and at this inflection point, there are a couple of things that attracted me to HP. One, I think HP is uniquely positioned in the marketplace, because it has a great portfolio as a company, across not only services, but also hardware and software.

On the software side, there is a remarkable portfolio of assets within HP, across application development and quality to the operations side. Yet, given the complexity that I just characterized, there's a real opportunity to bring more of a portfolio approach to delivering those solutions to customers.

The final piece that I would highlight is that I worked for many years with HP as a partner. Whether it be Todd Bradley, who I worked with around the Windows business, or Mark [Hurd], as the executive sponsor for the HP Partnership, when I was on the Microsoft side, they're a great group of people doing some remarkable things.

If you look at what that executive leadership team has done over the last couple of years with and for HP customers, it’s exciting to think what we can do over the next five or six years.

... It's been a great Software Universe for us. Compared with years past, there is a degree of energy and optimism in customers that's very invigorating. I've been in back-to-back meetings. You walk in, and they are excited about the innovations that we're bringing into market.

We've had a variety of very exciting announcements, such as Business Service Management 9.0. Some of the announcements were around the ability to automate how you take a production environment and apply it into a text script.

I think that they're constructively challenging us to make sure that we have a set of tools that are effectively scaling into the most complex operating environments in IT in the world.

The areas that customers are highlighting are: "You've got a great portfolio. You're heading in the right direction. Keep that pedal down. Take advantage of the fact that you've got not only fantastic best-of-breed capabilities in individual areas, but that you've got this breadth of offerings. I'm going to evaluate you against my entire solution set."

It starts with the strategy. In fact, there was a great customer meeting this morning. The customer said, "Look, I use you in a bunch of different ways, and I think you've got a great product. Now, what I need you to do is step up and make sure that from strategy, to application, to operation you're delivering that cohesion for me. I see good steps, but I want to see you keep doing it."

I think that they're constructively challenging us to make sure that we have a set of tools that are effectively scaling into the most complex operating environments in IT in the world, and making sure that, as the additional complexity in delivery vehicles that I just highlighted come online, that we continue to make sure that we are scaling effectively to deliver for the customers.

For example, at Software Universe 2010, in the Service Manager case we announced, not only will we be providing a near real-time dynamic view of IT, but we are doing it across virtualized and cloud implementations. I just came from the session, where we were demoing to 3,500 people the ability to display that information on a smartphone across a variety of platforms—from BlackBerry to iPhone to a Sprint device.

... Think about the fact that the role of IT continues to evolve. First, as an IT organization, I have more choices in terms of how I am delivering my application service for and with business. I increasingly become a service broker, because I'm looking across my applications and services and deciding with the business what’s the most cost effective and best way of delivering those experiences for the businesses.

Second is, and we've talked about this as an industry for a long time, the continuing blending of business and IT. A customer from a Fortune 5 company was in a meeting with me earlier this week. He's been in the industry for 25 years, a very sharp guy, and in a deep partnership with HP.

He said that this year there are more people from business operations coming to Software Universe than there are from IT operations. He said, the reality is that whether you talk about it in the context of PPM or application and service requirements, those two functions are intermingling. Given the software footprint and portfolio we have, it’s a wonderful opportunity, but that continues to accelerate.

The final piece that I would highlight is not a change, but a continuity. Even as IT has a broader set of choices, and the relationship with the businesses continue to intertwine more and more, they're not off the hook, when it comes to security or compliance or the availability and performance of the solutions that they are responsible for supporting and delivering for the business. So, it’s important to factor that even as we look ahead.

This has been illustrated time and time again. The most successful businesses have figured out how to constructively apply IT to run a business.

IT tools are at such a maturity and the experiences of IT with the customer experience are so intermingled. The CIO at Delta Air Lines was talking yesterday about her utilization of HP technologies and some of the remarkable projects that she's been through. You listen to that talk and you realize that the reservation system, the way I check in, and my experience with Delta Air Lines is commingled with what you and I would characterize as the IT experience.

It was a remarkable story about that interrelationship with the business, as they were not only dealing with the broad adversity of the business climate, but also were trying to merge with Northwest Airlines.

... IT means many different things to many people. The thing I would highlight is that IT has the ability to continue to outsource a variety of baseline capabilities. With that outsourcing capability, as an industry, IT providers, are going to be able to provide more and more. And that gives IT the ability to move up the stack in terms of higher value-add applications and services, and then the business runs through and with IT.

... The intersection between [business and IT]—and the resulting customer experience—continues to accelerate. We look forward, as part of HP Software & Solutions, to playing a great role in helping customers deliver those solutions and those experiences.

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: 15th June 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Washington - The HP Software Universe 2010 conference is in full swing here this week, highlighted by a slew of HP products and services focused on giving IT leaders the means to view and control their rapidly escalating complexity.

Among the most significant announcements Tuesday is the next iteration of the HP Business Service Management (BSM) software suite. HP BSM 9.0 works on automating comprehensive management across applications lifecycles, with new means to bring a common approach to hybrid-sourced app delivery models. Whether apps are supported from virtualized infrastructures, on-premises stacks, private clouds, public clouds, software as a service (SaaS) sources, or outsourced IT—they need to managed with commonality. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"Our customers are dealing with some of the most significant combination of changes in IT technologies and paradigm that I have ever seen," said Robin Purohit, Vice President and General Manager of HP Software Products. "So whether it's a whole new way of developing applications like Agile, the real acceleration of virtualization, test environments moving into production workloads, and all of the evaluations of where the cloud and SaaS fits—and then how they support all the enterprise applications."

HP’s core message around the BSM 9.0 is clear: To help companies automate apps and services management amid complexity so they can reinvest in innovation. The economics of innovation—of being able to do more in terms of results without the luxury of spending a lot more—has to be factored into the management matrix.

“We did a study last October that showed our clients believe innovation is going to help them even through uncertain economic times—and they see technology as central to their ability to succeed in a changing environment,” said Paul Muller, vice president of Strategic Marketing, Software Products, HP Software & Solutions. “There is some skepticism within the business community that IT is ready to make those changes.”

HP’s view of the hybrid world
HP wants to help IT combat that skepticism by equipping them with HP BSM 9.0. The solutions not only address hybrid delivery models, but also what Muller calls the “consumerization of IT,” referring to people who use non-company-owned devices on a company network. As Muller sees it, employees expect to have the same dependable experience while working from home as they do at work.

“We believe organizations will struggle to deliver the quality outcomes expected of them unless they are able to deal with the increase rate of change that occurs when you deploy virtualization or cloud technologies,” Muller said. “It’s a change that allows for innovation, but it’s also a change that creates opportunity for something to go wrong.”

Indeed, Bill Veghte, HP Executive Vice President for HP Software and Solutions, said that three major trends—all game changers on their own—are converging around IT: virtualization, cloud, and mobile.

"We need to continuously simplify management to head off rapid complexity acceleration aroud this confluence of trends". He pointed to the need for gaining a comprehensive view into hybrid IT operations, automation for management and remediation, and "simply expressing" the views on what is going on it IT, regardless of the location or types of services.

"Users want a unified view in a visually compelling way, and they want to be able to take action on it," said Veghte.

At the center of Wednesday’s announcement is what HP proposes as the solution to this challenge: HP BSM 9.0. The software offers several features that should cause companies that work with hybrid IT environments to take a closer look. One of those features is automated operations that work to reduce troubleshooting costs and hasten repair time. BSM 9.0 also offers cloud-ready and virtualized operations that aim to reduce security risks with strategic management services.

"The active interest of our clients in cloud computing has just exploded," said Purohit. "I think last year was a curiosity for many senior IT executives—something on the horizon—but this year it's really an active evaluation. I think most customers are looking initially at something a little safer, meaning a private cloud approach, where there is either new stack of infrastructure and applications are run for them by somebody else on their site, or at some off-site operation. So that seems to be the predominant new paradigm."

Purohit described BSM 9 as "a breakthrough" for coming to grips with the "hybrid data center."

It’s the great trap because if you don’t know what infrastructure your application is depending on from one minute to the next, you can’t troubleshoot it when something goes wrong.

Indeed, integration is a running theme with HP BSM 9.0. The solution offers a single, integrated view for IT to manage enterprise services in hybrid environments, while new collaborative operations promise to boost efficiency with an integrated view for service operations management. Every IT operations user receives contextual and role-based information through mobile devices and other access points for faster resolution.

"BSM 9 is our solution for end-to-end monitoring of services in the data center. It's been a great business for us, and we now have a break-through release that we revealed to our customers today, that’s anchored around what we call the Runtime Service Model," said Purohit.

"So a service model is basically a real-time map of everything from the business transactions of the businesses running, to all of the software that makes up that composite applications for the service, and all of the infrastructure whether it be physical or virtual or on-premise or off-premise that supports all of that application," said Purohit.

"So all of that together—knowing how it's connected, what the health of it is, what's changing in it so, you can actually make sure it's all running exactly the way the business expects—is really critical," he said.

The run-time service model works to save time by improving organizational service impact analysis and troubleshooting processing times, said HP. The HP Business Availability Center (BAC) 9.0 offers an integrated user experience as well as applications monitoring and diagnostics with HP’s twist on the run-time service model.

“The rate of change in the way infrastructure elements relate to each other—or even where they are from one minute to the next—means we’ve moved from an environment where you could scan your infrastructure weekly and still be quite accurate to workloads shifting minute by minute,” Muller said. “It’s the great trap because if you don’t know what infrastructure your application is depending on from one minute to the next, you can’t troubleshoot it when something goes wrong.”

Other elements of BPM 9.0 include the BAC Anywhere service that lets organizations monitor external web apps from anywhere, even outside the firewall, from a single integrated console. HP Operations Manager i 9.0 promises to improve IT service performance by way of “smart plug-ins” that automatically discover application changes and updates them in the run-time service model. Finally, HP Network Management Center 9.0 gives aims to give companies better network visibility by connecting virtual services, physical networks and public cloud services together.

HP’s expanded universe
In other HP news, the company announced software that aims to accelerate application testing while reducing the risks associated with new delivery models. Dubbed HP Test Data Management, HP also promises the new solution lowers costs associated with application testing and ensures sensitive data doesn’t violate compliance regulations.

The improvement helps simplify and accelerate testing data preparation, an important factor in making tests and quality more integral to applications development and deployment, again, across a variety of infrastructure models.

Along with HP Test Data Management, HP launched new integrations between HP Quality Center and the Collabnet TeamForge with the goal of improving communication and collaboration among business analysts, project managers, developers and quality assurance teams.

The integration with CollabNet, built largely on Subversion, will help further bind the "devops" process, said Purohit. "The result is better apps," he said.

And as part of its work to help clients maximize software investments, HP also rolled HP Solution Management Services. This offering is a converged portfolio of software support and consulting services that offers a single point of accountability to manage enterprise software investments.

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: 10th June 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Security breaches and the cost of repairing and patching enterprise applications hang like a cloud over every company doing business today. HP is taking direct aim at that problem today with release of a security service that aims to prevent vulnerabilities and to bake security and reliability in at the earliest stages of application design and architecture.

Part of HP's Secure Advantage, the Comprehensive Applications Threat Analysis (CATA) service provides architectural and design guidance alongside recommendations for security controls and best practices. By addressing and eliminating application vulnerabilities as early in the lifecycle as possible, companies stand to gain incredible returns on investment (ROI) and drastically lower total cost of ownership (TCO) across the "devOps" process, according to HP. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"Customers are under increasing pressure from threats that exploit security weaknesses that were either missed or insufficiently addressed during the early lifecycle phases," said Chris Whitener, chief security strategist of Secure Advantage. Whitener added that he believes HP is the first company to come to market with such a service.

HP has been using this service internally for more than six years and, according to Whitener, has seen a return of 5- 20-times on the cost of implementation. And this, he says, is just on things that can be measured. The service has freed up a lot of schedule time formerly spent in finding and fixing application vulnerabilities.

Two problems
Many other risk-analysis programs come later in the development process, meaning that developers often miss vulnerabilities at the earliest stages of design. That brings up two problems, according to John Diamant, HP's Secure Product Development strategist, the risks associated with the vulnerabilities and the cost of patching the software.

"By addressing these vulnerabilities early in the process," Diamant said, "we're able to reduce the risk and eliminate the cost of repair."

The new service offers two main thrusts for increased security:

• A gap analysis to examine applications and identify often-missed technical security requirements imposed by laws, regulations, or best practices.
• An architectural threat analysis, which identifies changes in application architecture to reduce the risk of latent security defects. This also eliminates or lowers costs from security scans, penetration tests, and other vulnerability investigations.

While lowering development costs, using a security service early in the lifecycle can also lower the threat of security breaches, which can cost in the millions of dollars in fines and penalties, as well as the fallout in a loss of customer confidence.

Security and proper applications development, of course, come into particular focus when cloud computing models and virtualization are employed, and where an application is expected to scale dramatically and dynamically.

Although HP plans to develop a training program sometime in the future, right now, this is offered as a service using HP personnel who have been schooled in the processes and who have been using it inside HP for years. For more information, go to http://h10134.www1.hp.com/services/applications-security-analysis/.

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 10th June 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

I have had a significant problem with the dash to the cloud ever since it became fashionable to devolve all responsibility to this amorphous lump, based on the notion that it would somehow magically solve all of our computer issues and costs.

Fuelled by a perfect storm of available technology and massive fiscal pressures, cloud based solutions have sucked in the unwary and spat them out alongside their disgruntled customers and suppliers. Unfortunately I felt as if I was pointing out that the emperor's new clothes were somehow missing as everyone else appeared to "get the cloud" and I was a lone voice in the wilderness.

Well, now I am glad to say that I have finally found a solution that leverages the huge benefits of cloud based computing whilst at the same time delivering more secure applications.

Having run a software development business for many years I am only too aware of the pressure on development teams to quickly produce features and fancy screens for the client. It can be tough to convince clients to spend money on producing secure code, even more so if you need to bring in external expertise to review developer's code for security flaws.

These flaws can be significant.

For example, if an application is made to mismanage the way it handles computer memory the resultant confusion can end up opening security backdoors for hackers to exploit. In another case, applications that rely on databases can be fooled into releasing their innermost configuration details to hackers who bypass security systems by typing technical commands into a website login page.

So why is application code security now so important? In short because, as attacks on Google and financial companies have shown, the so-called "threat landscape" has never been more threatening. Software applications are what stand between those attackers and vital information and business processes. The way applications are now developed and the traditional means by which developers are asked to test them for security errors make the job of securing software even harder.

Outsourced software code development is all the rage, as developing countries have increased their programming skills to the point at which it is often cheaper to get an application written overseas than it is in the UK. Whilst this may make the accountants smile this commoditisation of software development makes it easier for hackers to plant malware in code that has not undergone security verification than bother with infecting systems with viruses. How many clients undertake a thorough due diligence of their software supplier? How many will actually visit a development team and find out how they really work? Very few if this development is off-shored thousands of miles away. Even those that do can't be certain that what they see is what they get because by the time that final product is delivered a lot could have changed in the constitution of the application code.

Software these days is no longer monolithic lines of code boxed up in one single executable file. Instead, software comprises thousands of objects and lumps of code all brought together to make a final working solution. Many of these components are brought in from third parties and may be used across multiple solutions, with the ability to cause mayhem if they contain security flaws.

Ideally, in both these cases the software code should be examined by a group of experts looking for flaws and errors that could produce security issues. The reality is that this is too time consuming and expensive. Many pieces of code from third parties aren't even supplied with the source codeyou simply get the computer software equivalent of a black box and are told to get on with it.

The good news is that there is now an alternative to manual security code reviews, and that is the use of automated scanning tools. I produced a market update that introduced this area in October 2008. Since then the sector has undergone some interesting changes, especially when it comes to the delivery of a secure code checking service.

Of course we are seeing security flaws multiply each day as new and innovative ways emerge for the bad people to plant malware or abuse software code. This constant evolution of new threats, coupled with a need to bring together a way to learn about new flaws lends itself really well to a hosted solution in my much maligned cloud.

Veracode has been in the business of application security risk since 2006 and have recently announced the integration of their cloud based binary scanning service with on-premise Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) tools. Developers log into a secure website and upload their binary files, byte code PHP or ColdFusion files into the Veracode scanning service. The code being submitted is not source codeit is the same file that would be sent to a customer buying the software. Source code is never sent across the web as it is not needed by the Veracode system, a real positive for those worried about losing control over their intellectual property.

The Veracode engine processes the submitted file looking for a range of security flaws. This security checking is informed by a huge amount of backend data gleaned from a number of sources and includes all of the latest threats that software code faces. Based on a 24 hour service level agreement a report is created that details any and every security flaw that has been found in the code.

The interface resembles a report card and the development team can proudly display their compliance with secure coding practices or know what they need to do to get there in the most efficient manner. These results are derived from base data that assigns a severity rating between 1 and 5 to each flaw, corresponding to the impact of the error and its applicability to a particular type of application. For example if you were submitting code for an online banking application you will receive a different level of impact analysis compared to a simple intranet solution. Customers can tune their own security policies and acceptability thresholds based on internal requirements.

For an application to achieve "VerAfied" status it must meet a set criteria that is standardised across all applications. A VerAfied High Assurance status offers complete OWASP Top 10 and CWE/SANS 25 certification but the code needs to be further checked manually which attracts an additional charge.

The cost of unlimited access to this code scanning system is around $5,000 per application per year, which apparently reduces dramatically based on volume with attractive unlimited application packages for companies wishing to standardise on their security platform for internal, third-party or mobile applications.

Clients also have access to a neat system called "SecurityInsights" that enables them to compare their performance with that of their peers. Using the anonymous data collected by the backend, a business intelligence interface can be used to search for other clients in a specific sector with similar applications to see how levels of code security compare. All client information is kept annonymised and comparisons are made against aggregated statistics.

The next step is full integration with the IDE (integrated development environment) such as Eclipse, as well as bug tracking and build management systems so developers don't need to leave the tools they use every day. This is available now, via a set of APIs, but later this year expect to see the code scanning results and workflow incorporated into the IDE properly. This will enable a developer to receive very specific feedback as to the nature of the security flaw, highlighted against the specific line of code in the IDE, making the debug process a whole lot easier.

It’s only by using a cloud based solution that such a critical mass of useful security data, used to check code files, can be accrued. This is a far more effective way of ensuring secure code than each development team using their own on-premise solution in isolation. This inherent learning and sharing of knowledge is a massive benefit of a cloud based solution.

In lots of respects the people at Veracode may be responsible for changing the way in which we manage application security. The perfect storm of available technology, lower cost and a demand for increased application security might just be what we have been waiting for. In this case the cloud is the future.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 25th May 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Our latest BriefingsDirect interview is with an executive from HP to look at proper planning and execution for massive application-consolidation projects, specifically by examining an HP project itself.

By unpacking this multi-year application consolidation project across global supply chains, we learn about best practices and execution accelerators for such projects, which often involve hundreds of applications and impact thousands of people.

These are by no means trivial projects, and often involve every aspect of IT, as well as require a backing of the business leadership and the users to be done well. The goal through these complex undertakings is to radically improve how applications are developed, managed, and governed across their lifecycle to better support dynamic business environments. The stakes, therefore, are potentially huge for both IT and the business.

The telling case-study, the Global Part Supply Chain project at HP, was initially undertaken in 2006 but typically became bogged down by sheer scale and complexity. After some changes in management approach and governance, however, the project quickly became hugely successful.

We learn how and why from Paul Evans, Worldwide Marketing Lead on Applications Transformation at HP. The interview is conducted by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: We have always said that the experiences we gain from our own work we would share openly, and sometimes we’re quite happy to say where we did go wrong. In this instance, we’ve written up a case study to give people an insight in more detail than I could possibly provide today. We're going to post that on our portal. If people want to go there, it’s relatively simple: HP's Application Consolidation case study.

There are so many lessons learned here, addressing what people have in terms of portfolio and then also delivering new, contemporary, revised types of applications and/or infrastructure. They’ll find videos and other materials of other customers who have embarked on these journeys, whether they’ve been driving that from the top down, from an application’s nature, or whether it’s people who are coming in from the infrastructure.

As you can imagine, HP is an extremely large organization. It makes products, as well as sells services, etc. In terms of product, just imagine your average PC, or your average server, and think of the number of components that are made up inside of that device. It runs into hundreds of thousands, whether it's memory chips, disk drives, screens, keyboards, or whatever.

For a company like HP, in the event that someone needs a spare part for whatever reason, they don't expect to wait a significant period of time for it to turn up. They want it delivered 24 hours later by whatever means that suits them.

So, it's essential for us to have that global supply chain of spare parts tailored toward the ones that we believe we need more—rather than less—and that we can supply those parts quickly and easily and, at the same time, cost effectively. That's important for any organization that is dealing in physical components or in the provision of a service. You want to maintain customer satisfaction or increased customer satisfaction.

Customer centric
For us, it was essential that a massive global supply chain organization was extremely customer-centric, but at the same time, very cost-effective. We were doing our utmost to reduce costs, increase the agility of the applications to service the customers, and fuel growth, as our organization and our business grows. The organization has got to respond to that.

So the primary reasoning here was that this is a large organization, dealing with multiple components with pressures on it both from the business and the IT sides.

One of the primary reasons we had to do this is that HP has been an amalgam of companies like Hewlett-Packard, originally, Compaq, Tandem, DEC. All of these organizations had their own bills of materials, their own skills, and basically this thing has just grown like Topsy.

What we were trying to do here was to say that we just couldn't continue to treat these systems as un-integrated. We had a lot of legacy environments that were expensive to run, a lot of redundancy, and a lot of overlap.

The goal here clearly was to produce one integrated solution that treated the HP customer as an individual, and in the back-end consolidated the applications—the ones we really needed to move forward. And also, a goal was to retire those applications that were no longer necessary to support the business processes.

The whole notion of this coming about through mergers and acquisitions is very common in the marketplace. It's not unique just to HP. The question of whether you just live with everybody’s apps or you begin to consolidate and rationalize is a major question that customers are asking themselves.

From the IT side, there was clearly a view from the top down that said living with 300 applications in the supply-chain world was unacceptable. But also from the business side, the real push was that we had to improve certain metrics. We have this metric called Spend-to-Revenue ratio which is, in fact, what are we spending for parts as opposed to what we are getting in terms of revenue? We were clearly below par in those spaces.

We had some business imperatives that were driving this project that said we needed to save money, we needed to be able to deliver faster, and we needed to be able to do it more reliably. If we tell a customer they're going to get the part within 24 hours, we deliver in 24 hours—not 36 or 48, because we weren't quite sure where it was. We had to maintain the business acumen.

The rationalization that has taken place inside HP around its IT organization and technology is that because we are human beings, most people think in a very siloed way.

They see their suite of applications supporting their business. They like them. They love them. They’ve grown up with them, and they want to continue using them. Their view is, "Mine is perfect to suit my business requirement. Why would I need anything else?"

That's okay, when you're very close to the coalface. You can always make decisions and always deem to the fact that the applications you use are strategic—an interesting word that a lot of people use. But, as you zoom out from that environment and begin to get a more holistic view of the silos, you can begin to see that the duplication and replication is grossly inefficient and grossly expensive.

So, our whole goal here was to align business and IT in terms of a technological response to a business driver.

When we submitted the project, we were basically driving it by committee. Individual business units were saying, "I need applications x, y, z." Another group says, "Actually, we need a, b, c." There was virtually no ability to get to any consensus. The goal here is to go from 300 apps to 30 apps. We’re never going to do it, if you could all self-justify the applications you need.

What we did was discard the committee approach. We took the approach, basically led by one person from the business side, who had supply chain experience, and one from the IT side who had supply chain experience, but both had their specialist areas. These two people were the drivers. The buck stopped with these people. They had to make the big decisions.

To support them, they had a sponsorship committee of senior executives, to which they could always escalate, if there was a problem making a final decision about what was necessary.

Randy Mott, the HP CIO, has the direct support of Mark Hurd, the HP chairman and CEO. In my experience, that's absolutely essential in any project a customer undertakes. They have to have executive sponsorship from the top.

If you don't, any time you get to an impasse, there's no way out. It just distills into argument and bickering. You need somebody who's going to make the decision and says, "We're going this way and we're not going that way."

Getting on track
So for us, setting up this whole governance team of two people to make the hard decisions, and their being supported by a project management team who are there to go off and enact the decisions that were made was the way we really began to move this project forward, get it on track, get it on time, and get it in on budget.

When we started by saying let's have a big committee to help my decisions, it was the wrong approach. We were going nowhere. We had to rationalize and say "no."

Two respected individuals, one from the IT side and one from the business side, who were totally aligned on what they were doing, shared the same vision in what they were trying to achieve. By virtue of that, we could enforce throughout decisions, which were sometimes unpopular.

We had to focus on driving this both from business and IT. As I said in this example, we went from 300 apps to 30 apps. We had a 39 percent reduction in our inventory dollars. We reduced our supply chain expenses. We reduced the cost of doing next day delivery. We're heading toward reducing our CO2 emissions by 40 percent on those next-day deliveries.

But overall, the global supply chain, this measure of spent revenue, we drove down by 19 percent. We're running a better, faster, cheaper organization that is more agile. As you said, it positions us better to exploit situations as they change and feel that they’ve become more of an opportunity rather than a threat.

We'd like to think that those organizations that are out there with a supply chain challenge could now look at this and say, "Maybe we could do the same thing." Definitely the alignment between business and IT is probably one of the most paramount of facets. Let me do with which platform, which network, which disk drive, or which operating system. You can have a lot of fun with that. But, in this instance, a lot of the success was driven by setting up the right governance and decision-making structure with the right sponsorship.

Over the last 12 months what people have realized that it is now time for those organizations that want to remain competitive and innovative. Unfortunately, I still see a lot of companies that believe that doing nothing is the thing to do and will just wait for the economy to rebound. I don't believe it's going to rebound to the same place. It may come back and it may be stronger, but it may end up on a different place.

The organizations that are not waiting, but are trying to be innovative, competitive, move away from the competition, and give themselves some breathing space are the ones who are going to sustain themselves.

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: 14th May 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Increasingly, sellers of IT are finding it harder to win large software and hardware capital purchases contracts, which traditionally followed three- to seven-year obsolescence and refresh cycles. The shifts in technology and business models accelerated by the recession are forcing these vendors in particular to adopt more of a professional services revenue model.

Buyers of technology, on the other hand, are moving to IT shared services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models to get off of the capital outlays roller coaster. They want smoother and more predictable operating and charging models, beginning with long-term professional services and outsourcing engagements.

Both the buyer and seller of services therefore need to focus on the implementation and integration of solutions, placing a complex burden on the services delivery personnel themselves, as well as those who managing the services providers.

We’re here to find out some new, best ways of managing and automating these intellectual resources that support the professional services lifecycle. We’ll see how recent research shows that more of a just-in-time (JIT) methodology is required to keep the skills in balance with myriad project requirements and obligations.

To learn more about resource utilization and management in the global services economy, we're joined by Lori Ellsworth, Vice President of Changepoint Solutions at Compuware, the sponsor of this podcast, and by Mark Sloan, Chief Operating Officer of RTM Consulting. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Ellsworth: The change and the focus on professional services is moving from something that was nice to have, to something that is necessary to have to be successful.

Software companies are a great example. Historically, companies in that sector may have done mostly product business and less service. Services are now necessary to deliver success, and the services business is a very healthy part of the software business and is contributing significantly to the bottom-line.

Now, organizations have to understand how to get a handle on the people they have working for them, how best utilize them, and how to make sure that your employees, those assets, are challenged and happy, but that you are delivering that service to provide value to your customers.

There needs to be more discipline, more information, and a better process for decision-making and forward planning, so that the organization can scale and scale in a financially successful way.

So, the stakes are higher, in terms of the discipline and the approach that we need to take to manage that professional services part of the business.

Sloan: At RTM Consulting, one of our core areas of focus is in this area of resource management. How can you get the right person in the right place at the right time and drive up utilization, but at the same time, make sure that you're delivering value to your end customers and leaving them satisfied and coming back for more?

When a software company shows up with its professional services arm, the client is expecting that each and every one of the people who show up is an expert in the software, the technology, and the implementation process. The days of people learning on the job and coming up to speed are long gone.

The challenge today is for companies to get visibility into the type of work that’s coming down the pike, so that they can proactively train their internal resources and be prepared for that work, so that when they do show up, they are the experts.

We’ve actually taken the principles of JIT manufacturing and directed them to the professional services organization [via in new service definitions of JIT.]

Just as 30 years ago, any manufacturing company had big inventories of supplies, finished products, sitting in their warehouse. Ten or 15 years ago, the big services organizations were able to have excess resources on the bench, in the office, waiting for that next project to arrive.

What we’ve done is taken those same principles -- forecasting what the future scenarios look like, what the demands look like, and then translating that back into how many resources you are going to need, the types of resources, the skills those resources need to have.

You can, at that right moment, bring on a new employee, go to a third-party contractor to fulfill that demand, or give yourself enough advanced notice to cross-train your existing resources on new technologies, new products, so that they can work across your portfolio and not just focus on one particular area.

Getting to the solution

Ellsworth: There are four critical success factors, but also the building-block approach. In other words, you need to start with the fundamental. You need to understand your people and their skills and get that view of your business. Then, you can start to add levels of maturity, look at forecasting, look at different models for resource allocation, and bring in project management.

As organizations start to put the buildings blocks in place, and adopt the disciplines and build the processes that work in their business, [they can have trouble] scaling that.

You can make that work within a small team or across a couple of small teams, but ... you need visibility ... to scale that to your entire services organization, including management. [But] you can't scale and reinforce that discipline without automation.

The two really have to go together. One won’t be successful without the other in a large professional services organization. Automation brings the scale factor.

The ability to measure and monitoring is something that Mark also highlights as critical success factors. Again, you’ve got a large group of people with a lot of activity going on. There's lots of data, but you have to roll that up to the management level to make it valuable to help drive decisions in the business.

... Our focus has been on driving that view as a professional services organization, but importantly driving that view inside the context of the broader company.

It starts with those building blocks around who are your resources, what are their capabilities, and where are they being utilized. It brings you to the next level of maturity in terms of being able to look at forecasts and do some demand and capacity planning.

And then it goes even further from a resource perspective to that professional development side. Let's look at the gaps in the next six to nine months. Where can we identify resources and put them on a development plan to fill those gaps?

We're managing the day-to-day business of a professional services organization and going beyond that to deal with project management, engagement management, and right through to billing for a professional services organization and for technology companies that also have a strong product side of a business.

The paybacks can be, and are, significant. First and foremost, is really speed to revenue and cash flow.

The Changepoint solution has been active and working with customers in their professional services organization for many years, going back to the late 1990’s. We also deliver a project portfolio management capability to allow them to manage products and manage delivery of those product applications.

Sloan: The paybacks can be, and are, significant. First and foremost, is really speed to revenue and cash flow. Lori mentioned that doing this in a large services organization is critical and an enabling technology is required to make that happen.

I’d argue the same for small professional services organizations. Having the information that tools like Changepoint can put at your fingertips, you can quickly identify people in your organization that have the right skills, that off the top of your head you might not think of, and staff projects quickly with the appropriate resources, ultimately enabling you to get that revenue.

Billable utilization

Secondly, you start to see a significant lift in overall billable utilization. This is for the professional services organization. Again, by getting better visibility into the skills that different resources have, you realize you have many more people in the organization that can do work than you think of.

For more information on resource utilization, read RTM's whitepaper "The ROI of Resource Utilization -- Measuring and Capturing the Real Business Value of Your People."

Learn more about Compuware Changepoint.

Other research points to the fact that companies who do this development of staff and get projects started on time are significantly more likely to finish their projects on budget and on time and drive significantly positive customer satisfaction.

Companies that aren’t able to do this -- take an extra five, 10, or 15 days to fill some of the slots on a project -- tend to go over-budget, don’t get it done on time, and, as a result, have poor customer satisfaction. If you think about it, it's back to that mantra, "Do it right the first time." This process helps you do that.

Ellsworth: As you're adding discipline and increasing maturity, there is participation from the practitioner, if you can position the value to them in terms of increased opportunity or an ability for them to better manage their schedule and not be burnt out. They have access to different opportunities. It's very valuable and can help them actively participate in moving the business forward and not kind of fight against it.

A broader pool of resources comes there to help you respond to customers which just increases the need to understand who those resources are and what they can bring to the table to support these services.

Customers of mine, in Europe for example, are quoting that on a year-over-year basis, they are able to reduce non-productive time -- and therefore the cost of that non-productive time -- by 16 percent.

Other customers will articulate the value of this entire solution in terms of revenue increase, the focus of getting control over their resources, who they have and how they can most effectively deploy them. Another customer of mine in Europe talks about a 30 percent increase in revenue, linked directly to implementing some of these practices in getting that control over their resources.

Sloan: The same lessons apply to shared services organizations, such as internal, large IT departments managing multiple projects per year to deploy technology.

They can leverage the technology that Changepoint offers to keep track of the people, where they are deployed, what skills they have, what new projects are coming in, and achieve a similar increase in productive utilization of those resources. But to your point, in terms of creative organizations, this would apply to any organization that is focused on moving people with particular skill sets to a unique project.

When we architect a solution for clients, it’s a unique solution taking into account the various constraints and the environment of that client.

That includes engineering services organizations, creative agencies that are moving talent from one project to the next -- anyone who relies on definite skills and knowledge that aren’t just easily interchangeable. This helps forecast where you can get the biggest bang for the buck with those people.

In terms of getting started, when we typically work with clients, we come in and do a quick assess and architect phase where we’ll take a look at how resource management is being done today, compare that to the best practices that we’ve defined for JIT Resourcing, and identify areas where you are strong and areas where there is an opportunity for change and improvement. When we architect a solution for clients, it’s a unique solution taking into account the various constraints and the environment of that client.

JIT Resourcing is a defined approach. We have recognized that there are unique aspects to every business, and can tailor the solution to fit there.

By deploying these processes now, you can start to learn the continuous improvement that’s needed, but be enabled as more and more of your clients go to SaaS, but you’ve got to have to deploy people with the moment’s notice.

You're going to get much better at predicting and forecasting what your future needs are, enabling you to align your resources and capabilities accordingly. You want to achieve the benefits we talked about -- speed to revenue, speed to cash-flow, and zero idle resources.

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

For more information on resource utilization, read RTM's whitepaper "The ROI of Resource Utilization -- Measuring and Capturing the Real Business Value of Your People."

Learn more about Compuware Changepoint.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 13th May 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Gut-wrenching recessions have a way of changing things ... for people, families, and companies. They can also, perhaps like no other event, provoke change in large IT vendors like HP, IBM, TIBCO and Oracle.

Based on this week's HP announcements and last week's IBM Impact conference, these two of the very largest, full-service, global IT vendors are betting -- now that the recession has, at the least, bottomed out -- that the extent of change now upon us is more than just another business cycle come full circle.

Far more, these vendors see that the recession has provided a catalyst for a much larger shift in how IT is done and delivered. It's no coincidence that the interest in cloud computing and innovative IT sourcing options, for example, peaked when the recession was at its deepest.

The idea garnering wide attention in the darkest days was not just to save money by downsizing, but to also to start doing things very differently -- to truly innovate, to change the very economics of IT. But now that the worst is over, simply saving money via old IT methods, I'll wager, will prove a lot more expensive in real terms than rapidly investing in new ways of providing IT value as services.

That doesn't mean that some enterprise IT organizations won't try to go right back to business as usual. And some of the IT vendors, with their license auditors in tow, are counting on it.

It does mean that the enterprises that can actually change how they do and pay for IT in the post-recession economy may have an escalating advantage over those that do not.

Not the same old song and dance

HP this week announced the equivalent of a Swiss Army knife for IT transformation, with about as many blades and instruments as there are ways to attack the data center transformation gordian knot. The HP services, software, and sourcing offerings are designed to guide enterprises -- from the starting points of their choosing -- through a seismic transition from cost containment to IT innovation. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Last week, IBM boldly scooped up Cast Iron Systems, a cloud-to-IT integration engine maker, and further polished its view that the way to a smarter planet is via better business processes and a deep understanding of vertical industries, automation and how IT (with professional services) can bring them together. My colleague Tony Baer at Ovum delves into IBM's recasting of the definition of business applications and acceptance of the partly cloudy future.

TIBCO this week at its annual user conference delivered a dozen major announcements and stepped even more boldly into cloud models, too. TIBCO's "Enterprise 3.0" vision emphasizes the importance of real-time and massive scale processing, an integrated development-to-deployment to business process management capability, and now the option of building out an enterprise private cloud to public cloud synergy using partners like Amazon Web Services. TIBCO is also embedding BI capabilities deeply across the portfolio. [Disclosure: TIBCO is a past-sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Oracle, for its part, made good on its "software, hardware, complete" vision via a cameo (and somewhat buffoon-like) appearance by Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison in the debut of the movie Iron Man 2 last week. Perhaps we should expect a fist-sized "arc reactor" for database appliances in the near future? Yet Oracle is also recently drinking deeply from the cloud well, given some its recent speeches by executives as it digests the Sun Microsystems acquisition.

The point is that these vendors know something big is up in IT, beyond business as usual. We're seeing bold moves by them all, from acquisitions to restructuring to Hollywood-delivered group-think and not-so-subliminal brand imagery.

HP tackles the IT funding conundrum

HP is looking to actually help enterprises fund these transformative times. HP's economic rationale for moving to innovation now goes beyond the need for swift and verifiable ROI in IT investments. Additionally, HP is banking on the high and painful costs of not being able to move well in dynamic markets, of incurring costs from inertia, rather than from investing for advancement.

Most urgently, IT cannot miss out in supporting businesses as they face rapid growth and savvy competitors across global markets, says HP.

More succinctly, HP's message from this week's announcements comes as a warning that going back to the old IT ways, of sliding back to the economics of expensive waste as a proxy for brittle peak reliability, risks missing the lessons of the recession.

HP is therefore taking a three-pronged approach to making adoption of innovations the new mantra of IT. The first approach finds way to deliver self-funding projects. The second leverages modern architecture and methodologies so IT organizations can quickly and easily add new functionality, making change the constant. The third approach shows how to freeing up funds trapped in on-going IT operations based on older IT economics.

As enterprises are faced with transformation from old to more modern IT, many are caught in an inertia of avoidance -- frozen by the complexity and scale of the task, according to new research supported by HP. What's needed is incremental change that pays for itself along the way, but which remains aligned with the strategic transformation and direction.

The HP focus on self-funding projects, therefore, includes offering qualified clients a complimentary, hands-on HP Applications Modernization Transformation Experience session that illustrates IT modernization and its benefits. The goal: By retiring legacy applications and eliminating complexity in technology environments, organizations are able to self-fund their modernization journeys.

Cost of lost opportunity

“The phrase ‘time is money’ rings true here, as 99 percent of organizations say that innovation gridlock cost them in lost time,” said Thomas E. Hogan, executive vice president of sales, marketing and strategy for HP Enterprise Business, in a release. “By breaking the innovation gridlock, organizations can regain time to market and capitalize on new opportunities.” More at www.hp.com/go/breakthegridlock2010.

According to research conducted on behalf of HP by Coleman Parkes Research:

• Some 95 percent of business and technology executives said innovation gridlock resulted in lost opportunities for their organizations.

• And 91 percent felt that innovation gridlock cost their organizations in lost effort (from resources). More data is available at www.hp.com/go/HPEnterpriseResearch2010.

Together the promise of cloud, the constraints of the recession, and the quick-paced requirements of modern business agility have conspired to expose the weaknesses of plain old IT ... stack upon stack, brittle apps astride brittle apps, and rack by rack of under-utilized workloads alienated from their fit-for-purpose potential.

HP says the cost of doing nothing to transform IT is too great to ignore. IBM is transforming the very definition of business services and applications with plant-wide efficiencies in mind. TIBCO is refining software delivery that steps up to the cloud challenge. Oracle is enclosing its software in an optimized "iron" support infrastructure to improve performance to cost ratios dramatically.

All these vendors will still sell you the good old IT systems the good old ways. But they are also coming up with some big new tricks. Who will take them up on their hedge against a truly transformative IT future?

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 14th April 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Despite the homogenisation of many high streets and growth of national and international retailers, stores, service levels and customer experiences vary widely. Small, independent or chain, some appear to ‘get it', some do not. In the UK, shopping guru, Mary Portas (distinguished in her early career for window displays at Harrods and Harvey Nichols) has presented TV shows and writes regular columns where she assesses the customer experience offered by a particular store and provides recommendations for change.

If only there was something similar on offer for online.

While online retailing is significant and still growing strongly, especially for some top brands, today the gap between great online commerce and the average site is vast. Over the years, some glaring errors came from the initial thought that ‘internet commerce' was somehow separate from ‘real' commerce. A catalogue company famous for its vast range and quick service launched an online shop with only a handful of products and long delivery times. Airlines and electrical goods suppliers failed to link their web page offer prices to the ‘real' data in their core systems, resulting in customer frustration, reputational damage and in some cases an official rap on the knuckles. The lack of consistent product presentation across was a significant issue then that too often recurs today.

The results then? Well, many were fortunate that the internet was embryonic, some growth pains were tolerated and that communication between those connected to the internet was more related to computer networking than social networking. Now a viral frenzy of tweets, pokes, blogs and links would ensure the social recommendation engines issuing a widely communicated ‘thumbs down'. Since online and tele-sales means many sellers rarely see customers face to face, they have to work even harder at establishing a relevant and valuable relationship with them - service and experience is key.

All retailers are affected by the technology shifts that give potential customers many ways to shop - physical stores, telephone ordering, websites etc - but the issue is more pronounced where the goods or services on offer are becoming commoditised. This is particularly apparent in the field of telecoms where operators have already tried the ‘confusopoly' approach coined by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, the multi-service bundling of triple, quad and more-play, and are now having to deal with ‘left field' competitors from California in the form of internet crossovers like Google and Apple.

Margins are tight and falling, services are becoming more complex and increasing support costs, and the infrastructure needs further investment, so how should operators deal with the opportunity and threat of online commerce?

Mainly, by not regarding it as new, separate or different.

Externally, this means integrating their approach to all modes of customer interaction, rather than treating them as separate stovepipes. For some, such as mobile operators with high street stores run as franchises, this might be a little harder to start with, but it is worth the while. It should not matter whether a customer calls in a store - any store - accesses a website, or calls or emails into a contact centre, the response, whether to a sales enquiry or support need should be dealt with simply and consistently.

There also needs to be ‘persistence' in the relationship between operator and customer, so that the customer is recognised and treated as the individual they are, with service and product offering tailored to their needs. This should also extend to allow a customer to use different media as and when they need throughout the sales or support lifecycle. In this way for example, the sales process could start in store, involve phone calls to clarify details, have the transaction confirmed online for customer pickup at yet another physical premises. This gives customer freedom, but also ensures the operator is aware of the whole process.

This awareness needs to translate into a consistent and coherent internal understanding of the relationship across all internal departments. It is pointless having a great sales website and in store experience if the first call for support gets answered with a ‘who are you?'. Internal departments need to be working with a common view of each customer. Not only does this ease the customer experience, it also keeps costs down. For some operators this will be quite a shift, from being product, bearer or network centric to being completely oriented around the customer.

This orientation needs to stretch further too, as existing and potential customers have a vast array of information sources and relationships at their fingertips; news of good and bad experience travels fast across online social networks. Operators need to recognise the social element of commerce and up their game to ensure they are not only a positive part of the online background buzz and conversations, but that they are somehow sufficiently engaged to be influencing them. A quick look over their shoulder to Google or Apple will remind them that the ‘left field' is not only a very inviting place to play, but closer than they think. Whether online, in the high street, via a contact centre or social network, customer experience is key to successful commerce.

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

Data protection has grown significantly more complex in recent years as workers have gravitated to notebook computers and the mobility they enable. The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion looks at protecting PC-based data in an increasingly mobile world.

We'll look at a use case -- at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY -- for HP Data Protector Notebook Extension (DPNE) software and examine how backup and recovery software has evolved to become more transparent, reliable, and fundamentally user-driven.

Using that continuous back-up principle, the latest notebook and PC backup software captures every saved version of a file, efficiently transfers it all in batches to a central storage location, and then makes it easily and safely accessible for recovery by user from anywhere. That's inside or outside of the corporate firewall.

We'll look at how DPNE slashes IT recovery chores, allows for managed policies and governance to reduce data risks systemically, while also downsizing backups, the use of bandwidth, and storage.

The economies are compelling. The cost of data lost can be more than $400,000 annually for an average-sized business with 5,000 users. Getting a handle on recovery cost, therefore, helps reduce the total cost of operating and supporting mobile PCs, both in terms of operations and in the cost of lost or poorly recovered assets.

To help us better understand the state of the art remote in mobile PC data protection, we're joined by an HP executive and a user of HP DPNE software, Shari Cravens, Product Marketing Manager for HP Data Protection, and a user of DPNE, John Ferguson, Network Systems Specialist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Cravens: We started hearing from our customers a couple of years ago that PC backup was becoming increasingly important in their lives. Part of that's because the workforce is increasingly mobile and flexibility for the workforce is at an all-time high. In fact, we found that 25 percent of staff in some industries operates remotely and that number is growing pretty rapidly.

In fact, in 2008, shipments of laptops overtook desktops for the very first time. What that really means for the end user or for IT staff is that vast amounts of data now live outside the corporate network. We found that the average PC holds about 55,000 files. Of those 55,000, about 4,000 are unique to that user on that PC. And, those files are largely unprotected.

The economics of PC backup are really changing. We're finding that the average data loss incident costs about $2,900, and that's for both IT staff time and lost end user productivity. Take that $2,900 figure and extrapolate that for an average company of about 5,000 PCs. Then, look at hard drive failures alone. There will be about 150 incidents of hard drive failure for that company every year.

If you look at the cost to IT staff to recover that data and the loss in employee productivity, the annual cost to that organization will be over $440,000 a year.

If you look at the cost to IT staff to recover that data and the loss in employee productivity, the annual cost to that organization will be over $440,000 a year. If that data can't be recovered, then the user has to reconstruct it, and that means additional productivity loss for that employee. We also have legal compliance issues to consider now. So if that data is lost, that's an increased risk to the organization.

We all have very sensitive files on our laptops, whether it's competitive information or your personal annual review. One of the things that's been a suggestion in the past was, "Well, we'll just save it to the corporate network." The challenge with that is that people are really concerned about saving these very sensitive files to the corporate network.

What we really need is a solution that's going to encrypt those files, both in transit and at rest, so that people can feel secure that their data is protected.

Historical evolution

The concept behind HP Data Protector Notebook Extension is that we're trying to minimize the risk of that PC data loss, but we're also trying to minimize the burden to IT staff. The solution is to extend some of the robust backup policies from the enterprise to the client environment.

We’re protecting data no matter where the user is -- the home, the coffee shop, the airport.

DPNE does three things. One, it's always protecting data, and it's transparent to the user. It's happening continuously, not on a fixed schedule, so there is no backup window that's popping up.

We’re protecting data no matter where the user is -- the home, the coffee shop, the airport. Whether they are online or offline, their data is being protected, and it's happening immediately. The instant that files are created or changed, data is being protected.

Continuous file protection is number one. Backup policies are centralized and automated by the IT staff. That means that data is always protected, and the IT staff can configure those policies to support their organization's particular data protection goals.

Number two, no matter where they are, users can easily recover their own data. This is a really important point. Getting back to the concept of minimizing the burden to IT staff, DPNE has a simple, single-click menu. Users can recover multiple versions of a file without ever involving IT. They don't ever have to pick up the phone and call the Help Desk. That helps keep IT costs low.

Then, also by optimizing performance, we're eliminating that desire to opt out of your scheduled backup. The process is transparent to the user. It doesn’t impact their day, because DPNE saves and transmits only the changed data. So, the impact to performance is really minimized.

DPNE has a local repository on each client and we established that to store active files. Whether you're connected to the network or not, data is captured and backed up locally to this local repository. This is important for accidental deletions or changes or even managing multiple versions of a file. You're able to go to the menu, click, and restore a file from a previous version at any point in time, without ever having to call IT.

Each client is then assigned to a network repository or data vault inside the network. That holds the backup files that are transferred from the client, and that data vault uses essentially any Windows file share.

The third element is a policy server that allows IT staff to administer the overall system management from just a single web interface, and the centralized administration allows them to do file protection policies and set encryption policies, data vault policies, to their particular specifications.

Finding the cure

Ferguson: Roswell Park Cancer Institute is the oldest cancer research center in the United States. We're focused on understanding, preventing, and eventually finding the cure for cancer. We're located in downtown Buffalo, NY. We have research, scientific, and educational facilities, and we also have a 125-bed hospital here.

Our researchers and scientists are frequently published in major studies, reported globally, for various types of cancers, and with related research studies. A number of breakthroughs in cancer prevention and treatment have been developed here. For example, the PSA test, which is used for detecting prostate cancer, was invented here.

The real challenge is that data is moving around. When you are dealing with researchers and scientists, they work at different schedules than the rest of us. When they are working, they are focused and that might be here, off campus, at home, whatever.

They've got their notebook PCs, their data is with them and they're running around and doing their work and finding their answers. With that data moving around and not always being on the network, the potential for the data loss of something that could be the cure for cancer is something that we take very seriously and very important to deal with

One of the big things was transparency to the user and being simple to use if they do need to use it. We were already in the process of making a decision to replace our existing overall backup solution with HP's Data Protector. So, it was just a natural thing to look at DPNE and it really fits the need terrifically.

There's total transparency to the user. Users don't even have to do anything. They're just going along, doing their work, and everything is going on in the background. And, if they need to use it, it's very intuitive and simple to use.

When people are working on something, they don't think to “save it,” until they're actually done with it. And, DPNE provides us that versioning saving. You can get old versions of documents. You can keep track of them. That's the type of thing that's not really done, but it's really important, and they don't want to lose it.

In terms of the overall Data Protector implementation, we're probably about 40 percent complete. The DPNE implementation will immediately follow that.

A good test run

We anticipate initially just getting our IT staff using the application and giving it a good test run. Then we'll focus on key individuals throughout the organization, researchers, the scientists, the CEO, CIO, the people with all the nice initials after their name, and get them taken care of. We'll get a full roll-out after that.

When it comes to federal regulations, it always is a rising tide, but we've got a good solution that we are now implementing and I think it puts us ahead of the curve.

Cravens: Information is continuing to explode and that's not going to stop. In addition to that, the workforce is only going to get more mobile. This problem definitely isn’t going to go away, and we need solutions that can address the flexibility and mobility of the workforce and be able to manage, as John mentioned, the increase in regulations.

HP Data Protector is very simple to implement. It snaps into your existing infrastructure. You don’t need any specialized hardware. All you need is a Windows machine for the policy server and some disk space for the data vault. You can download a 60-day trial version from hp.com. It's a full-featured version, and you can work with that.

If you have a highly complex multi-site organization, then you might want to employ the services of HP’s Backup and Recovery Fast Track Services for Data Protector. They can help get a more complex solution up and running quickly and reduce the impact on your IT staff just that much sooner.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download the transcript. Sponsor: HP. Gain more information on HP Data protection Notebook Extension. Follow on Twitter.

Access a Webcast with IDC's Laura DuBois on Avoiding Risk and Improving Productivity on PCs and Laptops.

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