By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 30th September 2008 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2008

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Citrix Systems has announced Citrix XenServer 5, the latest version of its server virtualization product line that is powered by the Xen hypervisor, and a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, a comprehensive datacenter-to-desktop system that targets organizations wishing to transform their traditional static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers.” This latest offering adds 100+ virtualization management features including what the company states utilizes the industry’s most advanced High Availability, auto-restart, failover, and disaster recovery technologies that can be upgraded to full fault tolerance for the most mission-critical applications. This is achieved in part by XenServer’s distributed management architecture, support for replication and remote mirroring architectures, and built-in replication for virtual machine metadata information to provide easy and reliable virtual machine and application recovery for site failure scenarios. According to Citrix, XenServer 5 is the first server virtualization platform to be validated for both AMD and Intel 32-bit and 64-bit systems through Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validated Program, which validates vendor’s virtualization software to run Windows Server 2008 and previous versions.

XenServer 5 features an open architecture that helps organizations leverage their existing storage and datacenter management investments. The open storage APIs allow organizations to access directly from within the XenServer management console advanced functions such as snapshotting, cloning, replication, de-duplication and provisioning in storage systems from vendors including EqualLogic and NetApp. The XenServer 5 management console supports most storage environments including NAS, DAS, and SAN implemented through fiber channel and iSCSI as well as support for 8GB HBAs from QLogic and Emulex.

XenServer 5 includes new configuration wizards, intuitive interfaces, and easy point-and-click conversion of physical servers into virtual machines. New enhancements include a Web 2.0-style tagging and searching capability which allows IT professionals to track and locate virtual machines through powerful searching and sorting capabilities based on application type, QoS requirements, department, cost center, location, etc. There are also enhanced performance monitoring, reporting, and alerting dashboards that assist IT professionals through realtime and historical views of virtual machines and physical host performance.

Pricing and Availability
Citrix XenServer 5 is available immediately through Citrix’s worldwide network of Solutions Advisors and channel partners. XenServer 5 pricing begins with a SRP of $900/server, and there are no additional CPU or socket fees. Pricing includes XenCenter management technologies and a one-year Citrix Subscription Advantage membership. XenServer Express, a production-ready, single-server version of XenServer with unlimited virtual machine and memory support capabilities, is also available for free download at www.citrix.com.

Net/Net
This announcement is interesting as it represents more than just the latest version of a virtualization offering; it illustrates the potential for transforming application delivery environment that we posited last year when Citrix acquired XenSource. With XenServer 5, Citrix has signaled its desire to achieve a more strategic position in its customers’ datacenters by delivering a solution that potentially will allow organizations to fundamentally transform how they view their datacenters. Despite the considerable marketplace infatuation with virtualization, for the most part it remains viewed in a rather narrow fashion focused on simply reducing the number of servers supporting an organization’s workloads. Although the stereotype has progressed beyond that of generic white-box x86 servers running Linux, the reality is that most organizations are barely making their first steps towards a strategic virtualization path, one that would transform legacy data centers from static bastions of siloed applications and information into a dynamic, flexible, and much simpler application delivery infrastructure.

The acquisition of XenSource by Citrix was much more than a land grab for ownership of the virtualization hypervisor. The combination of Citrix’s existing technology and the virtualization potential of XenSource broadens virtualization beyond the relatively simple task of server consolidation to include a much more holistic view of network application delivery and its associated impact on storage, networking, and client consumption devices. In effect, Citrix is offering a new view of the future datacenter. This new view is one in which most all physical aspects of servers, applications, and network functions are largely transcended by a virtual service bureau through which needed IT resources are delivered to users largely without concern as to their physical or even virtual location within the infrastructure. The operational distinction between a physical server and a virtual one has increasingly become cosmetic and there are few reasons why IT professionals who are tasked with application and information delivery should even be concerned.

By building upon its existing live migration resource pooling and workload provisioning capabilities Citrix is seeking to transform assumptions about how datacenters are configured, deployed, and managed. This completely virtual view is one that will potentially yield benefits with respect to space requirements, cooling, energy efficiency, and the requisite IT personnel. The ability of the XenServer Management Console to directly interact with the common storage environments permits organizations to continue using existing data center tools and skill sets just as they have with physical servers. Hence, sophisticated storage technologies should be as easy to access from either physical or virtual servers, without mandating two skill sets to support it. Further, XenServer 5’s workload provisioning makes it possible for administrators to boot servers and deliver multiple workloads from a single image to target servers, even servers that lack any local storage or hypervisor. This could be of considerable interest to power constrained data centers or those who are investing in highly consolidated blade-centric server solutions. These storage centric capabilities illustrate how Citrix is looking to provide much more than simple server virtualization in addition to its application delivery technologies.

While this latest release of XenServer will not change its customer’s datacenters overnight, it does offer a data center strategy that seeks to remove most dependencies on physical IT attributes and shifts the focus onto applications and information. This increased abstraction of physical elements from applications is well positioned to assist organizations in their quest to deliver dynamic applications to increasing numbers of local and remote users while simultaneously improving the efficiency and cost effectiveness of IT investments. Although there is still much work to be done, the scope of virtualization and application delivery finesse being offered by Citrix places the company in a leading, if not unique, position in the marketplace that bodes well for the company, and more importantly, its customers.

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 30th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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A chance to talk with Danny Sabbah (General Manager, Rational Software) at the London Rational Software Developers Conference (RSDC) is not to be missed—but more of that anon.

First, I was impressed at the conference by the sense of "life" in Rational these days—well, in the Rational brand as a whole—with acquisitions like Telelogic and BuildForge, Rational has come a long way from the 400 employee Rational pre-IBM. I think IBM's Rational brand may be about to surprise us with its agility—rumour has it that the next version of RUP (Rational Universal Process), for example, will be based on OUP (Open Universal Process). OUP isn't a cut-down RUP but a rethink on RUP, by some of its original architects, to provide something more open and lower-ceremony—more Agile. Not before time, in my opinion, as having a vendor's brand on what should be a universal, intellectually-rigorous and abstracted process behind a tool vendor implementation seems all wrong to me (see my article here).

Jazz itself really impresses me—and Sabbah seems to have a strong roadmap vision for it. I've heard people claim that Team Concert (the first Jazz tool released) is currently a bit lacking in "heavy-lifting" capabilities compared to more established tools such as ClearCase but that's not really the point. If other non-IBM tool vendors find that they can't easily deploy on the Jazz platform, that would be a serious issue, of course—it's Jazz the platform that's important—but Team Concert's light "just enough ceremony" approach is different to that of more established tools and that may be important in itself.

Jazz already uses OUP, not RUP; and BPMI modelling instead of UML (much easier for some developers, and end users, to get into); just a couple of signs that Jazz is a ground-up revisit of the developer tool environment.

According to Sabbah, he's seeing "viral" adoption of Jazz, even though the enterprise edition won't be available until next year (and he looks at emerging scalability from two points of view: the number of projects/users it can support; and also the number of different tools it can support). Sabbah really doesn't see the Eclipse-style Open Source model as at all appropriate for Jazz, which is a globally deployable web-centric infrastructure, not just a desktop-oriented framework, but he does see Jazz as an open platform supporting many non-IBM tools (using Jazz the other way round, as a "service" for other frameworks, would be harder, he admits).

Interestingly, Sabbah says that the Telelogic people that IBM acquired are adopting Jazz enthusiastically as an enabler for their own ideas about a web-centric architecture for developer tools, which they bought with them to IBM.

Sabbah seems very aware of the need to keep the 80% of his customers who aren't into "pretty awesome new stuff" happy while not blocking them off from moving to the new ideas in their own time. This seems to be a pretty mature approach, to me—although it might make IBM look staid compared to small start-ups without legacy customers to support.

I did ask Sabbah about offering governance for end-user business mashups and he seemed to say that this was on the Jazz roadmap although it wasn't being pushed explicitly yet. I think that some form of (transparent) configuration management, at the least, around Business Mashups is essential if we are to avoid replaying the end-user spreadsheet chaos of the 1990s. However, we have a little time as I don't see widespread adoption of business mashups for anything "mission-critical" yet (but remember that the widespread adoption of spreadsheets for mission-critical stuff rather crept up on the IT department from nowhere in the 1990s).

Serena (by no means small start-up but nothing like as big as IBM Rational) seems to be taking the lead here but, while Sabbah is concentrating on the 80% plus who (for the moment) have no intention of using something as potentially uncontrolled as "web 2.0" business mashups for anything important, Serena seems to be targeting the top slice of innovators and early adopters. And, by the way, after a period of stressing innovation over governance, I'm glad to see Serena's Business Mashups website now stresses its undoubted governance capabilities too. We shall have to see which approach to delivering industrial-strength end user computing works better in the long term.

Finally, I had a "user experience" thing with Second Life at RSDC. Grady Booch was present in Avatar form—and, frankly, I wouldn't want to share the stage with an avatar (even if it does have a smart "sergeant major stance", shoulders back, chest out, as Avatar Grady did. Grady lost connection at one point, which rather spoiled the build-up to Erich Gamma's keynote, and we wasted a fair bit of time watching an avatar in confusion, looking for its life-support system. As Sabbah admitted afterwards, Second Life isn't capable of supporting a sustainable collaborative development environment—yet…

Nevertheless, I think it will in the not-too-distant future (although face to face meetings will always be an important part of building trust relationships maintained in Cyberspace, I think). Just like the use of end-user business mashups for integrating IT into the business, virtual collaboration is nowhere near mainstream yet—but it is something that companies should be aware of and allow for in long-term strategic planning.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 29th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Oracle has just announced the Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine as its answer to the likes of Netezza and other appliance vendors. The project went under the codename of Sage and, while Oracle didn’t tell me more than that, I am guessing that this actually relates to the Marvel character of the same name, pictured right, a member of the X-Men and X-treme X-Men. She is described on the official Marvel site as “a mutant who possesses a cyberpathic mind that functions like a computer with unlimited storage capacity. Sage is able to record and analyze vast amounts of data… and can also calculate complex statistics in mere seconds… like a computer, Sage is able to perform multiple tasks at once by allocating a partition of her brain to each task.”

Anyway, down to the serious stuff. Briefly, the Database Machine is the data warehouse offering and the Exadata Storage Server provides massively parallel capabilities that back-end onto your conventional Oracle database to enable the Database Machine. What happens is that when a query is processed, data is read from disk, unwanted rows and columns are filtered out by the Storage Server and the remaining data is passed to the database for processing. This will provide significantly better performance for queries where you retrieve a lot of extraneous data from disk but will have less impact where that is not the case.

Oracle is claiming up to 10x performance benefits and this seems reasonable. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Oracle will be able to compete effectively with other products. Take a query where you need a full table scan and suppose that that table has 1 million rows each consisting of 60 columns and suppose that you only need to retrieve data from 3 of those columns. Then a column-based database such as Sybase IQ or Vertica only reads those 3 columns so it has 20x less work to do than Oracle. And that doesn’t mean that Oracle will be only half as slow (assuming 10x performance enhancement) because the filtering process (unnecessary if using columns) is still required.

To take another example, Netezza doesn’t just filter the data close to the disk but processes it there too—it is only collation that is done centrally—so you would still expect appliance vendors to outperform the HP Oracle Database Machine.

The margin of performance benefit from appliance vendors will be reduced in some instances but you also have to consider the impact of the Oracle environment as a whole. The key to getting good performance out of Oracle is defined indexes, materialised views and so on. It is when you have unplanned queries or complex analytics where no such structures have been defined that you can run into a performance black hole when using Oracle and which appliance vendors are particularly good at. You may get some benefits from using the Database Machine in these environments but I expect them to pale in comparison to what the appliances offer.

It is noteworthy that no benchmarks have been presented by Oracle in terms of performance: I suspect that this is because, while it is much better than it was before, it still can’t compete across the board with all the new boys on the block. It could probably have put out good benchmarks against IBM and Microsoft but everybody would have spotted the absence of Greenplum, Netezza, ParAccel and the rest, so it wouldn’t have worked as a marketing tool.

Also worth bearing in mind is that while the database may have been pre-installed it will still require administration, and Oracle doesn’t have a reputation as the database requiring the most DBA attention for nothing. If you think that low/minimal administration is a feature of an appliance then this isn’t it.

Leaving that aside, this is certainly a significant step forward but it isn’t ground-breaking. It will encourage existing Oracle shops but I would recommend a proof of concept. In addition, I expect it to hurt IBM and Microsoft (because Oracle should now have clear performance advantages over these vendors in appropriate situations) more than it does the specialist data warehousing vendors. The latter may suffer where it is a close call between staying with Oracle or going elsewhere, but otherwise the appliance and column-based suppliers should still be able to beat Oracle hands down, at least where performance is a major issue.

Which only leaves one question: if the data warehouse is Sage who does that make Larry? Dr Xavier or Magneto?

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By: Gerry Brown, Associate Analyst - BI and CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 26th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The ad:tech conference and exhibition is ‘the event for interactive marketers' according to the show guide. ‘Interactive marketers' in essence means the young, ambitious advertising agency types, who came in their droves.

I have never seen such a long queue to get into an exhibition. It snaked virtually the whole length of the Olympia exhibition centre—maybe 100m long with 250 people in the queue. And this was the ‘pre-registered fast track'! Dot-com boom times must be here again. Interactive marketing must be hot.

Maybe it was the aggressive promotional campaign that accompanied the show that got the people there—I was "pushed" at least 10 email and text reminder messages leading up to the show. Ironically this is the opposite of what good digital marketing is, which is all about listening to, and being "pulled" by customer needs, and giving them what they want.

In the exhibition hall it was bedlam. People everywhere with noisy presentations and music bellowing from every angle (I must be getting old… ). Eye candy cavorted seductively—the blondes with short skirts from White Label Dating and dotMailer were on every red-blooded man's ‘must see' list. For the ladies there were Roman soldiers (visualise Russell Crowe in the film Gladiator) and American Football players in helmets and padding. Well—this is the advertising industry I suppose.

Many were at ad:tech to catch the free vendor seminar presentations on Online Marketing / Ad networks, Email Marketing / Video, Search / Web Analytics, Social Media / Targeting, and Mobile Marketing. The ardour for attending these subsided as the day went on as audiences tired of these 30 minute races to impress listeners and gather up business cards. Maybe the really good stuff was reserved for the pay-for conference.

An interactive marketer for an online retailer (who should therefore know what he is talking about) commented to me "the show is confusing isn't it? I am definitely the target audience and I don't know what to look for and who to talk to". So true. All the stands were jumbled up rather than being clustered by category, so it was difficult to work out who did what.

But mostly both the vendors and the attendees were happy. Lots of buzz, and lots of good quality punters. At last year's show many bosses sent their junior executives to find out what digital marketing was all about. This year they came themselves, and seemed to be talking with vendors on the stands, rather than just slipping in and out of educational seminars.

The digital marketing space is very exciting and offers lots of opportunities for end customers and advertising agencies. Digital marketing allows all companies the ability to identify, target and track potential customers on the Internet, so they can offer their products and services in a personalised, relevant, and timely manner. In other words, the promise is of better sales engagement and customer experience, especially on company web sites. And measurable too.

Every single company needs to improve in the digital marketing area, so I forecast lots of market growth as marketing budgets are switched out of traditional print adverting and into digital marketing. The vendors' own marketing and messaging also needs to improve, especially in terms of selling customer solutions rather than undifferentiated products and services.

The best-of-breed category champions will emerge and market consolidation will start to take place over the next couple of years. The big players such as Microsoft, Google and AOL will undoubtedly make more acquisitions (they are already well represented in this market, albeit through some non-branded acquisitions). Google has thrown down the gauntlet and made advertising a key strategic battleground for software vendors and media companies alike.

Lou Gerstner once likened new dot-com companies to "fireflies before the storm". This statement has resonance with the latent emergence of the big players in the digital marketing arena. ‘The best is yet to come' in other words.

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By: Michael Warrilow, Director, Hydrasight Posted: 25th September 2008 Copyright Hydrasight © 2008

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Hydrasight research, conducted in early 2008, showed generally low levels of adoption and maturity for information leakage prevention (ILP) in Australia and New Zealand. Moreover, we note that any planned adoption of ILP is expected to leverage built-in functionality within existing technology infrastructure (e.g., email).

Hydrasight research also highlights several key characteristics in regard to the current state of ILP within Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ). Namely:

• Adoption: Limited adoption is planned for specific/further ILP technology in 2008+. This finding is consistent with previous Hydrasight research. On average, slightly more than half of the respondents either did not know or had no plans to adopt technologies associated with ILP.
• Maturity: While most respondents considered their (self-assessed) level of ILP maturity to be low, they did indicate moderate levels of importance for the topic when prompted. Given the limited adoption plans highlighted above, this suggests that maturity will remain low through at least 2010.
• Implementation: While the activation of in-built ILP functionality is somewhat common (e.g., 47% filtering outgoing email, assumedly based on keywords or regular expressions), the adoption rate for installing client-side ILP software agents is low.
• Vendor support: We note that the market across Asia Pacific is influenced, and impacted, by the maturity and status of ILP vendors—many of whom are relatively young companies without extensive/complete geographic coverage and/or comprehensive ILP solutions.
• Drivers: Few, if any, formal legislative / regulatory requirements currently mandate the disclosure of unauthorised use / modification / disclosure of sensitive data-either commercial or personal-within A/NZ. In contrast to the USA, A/NZ organisations tend to operate in a more punitive compliance environment. In other words, this environment lacks a strong, broadly-applicable regulatory/legislative driver to mandate further adoption of information leakage prevention. We do however note significant increase in hype within Australia surrounding revised/amended electronic privacy legislation. Furthermore, the low adoption rates for ILP in A/NZ indicate that business risks are, in general, not considered sufficiently compelling enough to drive adoption without further regulatory/legislative triggers.

We note that organisations recognise that further attention to ILP will be required in order to prevent common (electronic) causes of information leakage. While Hydrasight research shows that email filtering is the most widely-deployed ILP technology at present, 67% of respondents acknowledged that filtering email traffic affords insufficient protection against the leakage of sensitive data.

As the number of use cases for information access continues to expand, we believe the interest in ILP is only likely to increase. Nonetheless, Hydrasight notes that prior, cyclic interest in information leakage has rarely translated into significant technology spending. In most cases, a significant leakage event has been treated with a review of IT policies, enhanced communications and employee training programs rather than investment in technology. Hydrasight has therefore previously recommended that IT organisations continue to assess key environmental risks and business drivers so as to determine the appropriate technology investments related to information leakage. This advice remains unchanged in light of these survey results.

Hydrasight maintains that while ILP is an important business need, use of technology driven solutions must be targeted. As a result, we believe that adoption of ILP technology will remain highly selective and therefore largely immature within Australia and New Zealand through at least 2010.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 24th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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I recently wrote (see "IBM, BEP and CEP") about IBM's release of InfoSphere Streams. I reported that rather than referring to this as a complex event processing (CEP) product they are instead calling it a "stream computing engine used for CEP deployments". However, I did not discuss this further in that article because that piece was factual whereas here I intend to be fanciful.

The question is: why this distinction? If InfoSphere is "used for CEP deployments" then does that not imply that it might be used for other purposes? If so, what might these be?

Well, what is the product doing? Put simply, InfoSphere Streams is processing streams of data very quickly. Where else might you wish to do that where CEP is not the right solution? Now, there may be esoteric applications where this would be relevant but I can only think of one mainstream environment where this would be useful.

But before I go into that, it is pertinent to remind you that InfoSphere Streams is hardware agnostic. Now, in my previous article I referred to the fact that it might be deployed on IBM supercomputers for very large scale, low latency requirements. However, hardware agnosticism also means that it should be deployable on a low-end Intel processor or PowerPC, for example.

Which brings me to Netezza. Netezza is built around multiple parallel nodes processing data that is streamed off disk, and then the results are collated by the central database management system which, of course, also despatched the queries in the first place.

You see the similarity? If IBM was to implement InfoSphere Streams in parallel at the node level, and then link that to DB2 then you would have an MPP (massively parallel processing) version of DB2.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. Certainly they'd be a lot of work to do but Dataupia has already proved that you can deploy MPP-based architectures underneath DB2 (and Oracle and SQL Server) so it's not of the question?

Anyway, that's my little confabulation. I haven't put it to IBM because if they said it was true I'd be put under non-disclosure and if they denied it, it wouldn't mean anything. Time will tell.

And talking about time telling, it's shortly time for Larry's big data warehousing announcement that we've been waiting for since last August. My spy is lukewarm about it (but then he would be, given that he's at another data warehousing company) telling me that it is good for some types of queries but otherwise not spectacular.

But the big question is this: what does this announcement have to do with the X-Men? The answer, along with views on Oracle's announcement, will follow in due course.

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By: Simon Perry, Principal Associate Analyst - Sustainability, Quocirca Posted: 23rd September 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

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HP recently hosted its EMEA Analyst briefings in order to update Quocirca and other industry watchers on its current capabilities, and its current and future strategies. The message was pretty clear: that HP is placing a high importance on blade architecture for hardware; that it wishes to dominate the storage market; that it places a relatively high importance on a “green” message; and that it expects significant revenue to come from its “mainframe alternative” programme. Clearly the EDS acquisition is no small thing in terms of how it will shape the company’s path and modus operandi in the years ahead. However, next to nothing was given up on that topic—not for lack of probing—and it remained the unacknowledged elephant in the room.

Of all these topics, first amongst equals was the Mainframe Alternative Program, which HP went to significant effort to talk up. To ensure that there was no mistaking the level of importance HP is placing on the programme, it went as far as hosting the actual briefing sessions in Madrid so that all assembled could bask in the atmosphere of the mainframe alternative “Centre of Excellence”, which is located just outside the city. HP points to a proven and honed delivery methodology, executed through this centre, as being the reason for its successful conversion project track record. So perhaps it is fair to say that those staffing it deserve their day in the spotlight.

HP labels the programme as offering a low cost, “open” systems alternative to what the vendor labels IBM’s “closed” and “legacy” mainframe platform and claims a flawlessly delivered record of forty customer conversions in EMEA. Sometimes briefing sessions are an exercise in the “tell them enough times and they’ll eventually believe us” style of persuasion. Hence the emphasis here of the words “closed”, “legacy”, and “open”, as these labels were oft repeated. So much so that they deserve examination, for behind those labels everything isn’t necessarily all that it seems.

The main targets of the conversion efforts are IBM zOS and VSE-based workloads, though other vendors such as Unisys and Bull are also on the hit list. HP does have a point when it labels vendors such as Unisys and Bull as “legacy” and it would be a rare CIO who would argue that those vendors are committed to supporting a viable and innovative processor strategy. Meanwhile, since the demise of Amdahl and the withdrawal of Hitachi from the IBM clone market, it is true that IBM is the only stable in town for those wishing to run VSE or MVS derived operating systems. Whether that is a good thing or not for the average CIO is another matter; what is relevant here is that when HP uses the word “closed” in referring to IBM it really means “single vendor”.

The use of “closed” as a synonym for “single vendor” is an important one, because HP also describes it's mainframe swap-out programme as “unique”. It regards that uniqueness as a market differentiator that provides key competitive advantage over other open systems vendors. Therein lies the problem. You can’t have it both ways and label the choice of a single vendor as being closed in one breath, and open the next. CIOs who strip their jockeys off the horse supplied by the IBM stable and take them over to the unique vendor “open” alternative will quickly find themselves saddled to a similarly narrow field of hardware and software choices.

Of course, every IBM mainframe is also running a wide assortment of ISV software too and that will need to be swapped out for an “open systems” alternative. While Oracle and Microsoft get a look in as replacements for DB2, and Oracle/BEA’s Tuxedo is the HP recommendation for replacing CICS/IMS; HP software stands first in line for everything else. HP recommends HP software as the replacement for any Compuware, BMC, CA or other systems management software you might currently run, and backs that up with the expected price breaks.

The notable exception to that selection strategy will be an open systems alternative to IBM’s RACF, or CA’s ACF2 or TopSecret, because with the end-of-lifing of HP’s Openview Select Access product, HP doesn’t offer a host-based access control solution. Both the assembled set of HP Mainframe Alternative experts, and the reference customer who took us through his experiences, assured us that “open systems don’t need anything like RACF”. According to HP, none of the forty customers who have already swapped out their legacy mainframe for some new HP kit even asked for an alternative. In Quocirca’s opinion HP Hubris v1.0 should not be solely relied upon to be a functional equivalent of RACF or its ISV alternatives. In fact, there are a number of open system RACF alternatives that might be considered: CA’s Access Control product and Tivoli Access Manager For Operating Systems being the two closest contenders for equivalent functionality. There are others too, but at least considering those products gives the advantage of being able to compare like with like, given that you’ll be running either vendor’s security software already on your IBM mainframe. Quocirca recommends that security considerations be placed at the forefront of any mainframe workload migration consideration and proposed architecture.

Looking at the financial case for the move is also enlightening. HP uses a spreadsheet-based ROI calculator to support its claim that HP’s hardware and software costs will be substantially less than your current mainframe costs. Even factoring in the conversion costs themselves, ROI is claimed in the third year. If nothing else, these numbers are worth looking at and then waved in the direction of your mainframe ISV and HW provider to see if the wheels of negotiation are greased. But again, there is more to it than first meets the eye.

HP claims that almost all mainframe workload can be migrated to its platform. Easily and fully transportable workload includes off-the-shelf packages such as SAP, which is of course available on either platform. CICS or IMS transaction workloads move fairly easily to Tuxedo. In order to reduce end-user retraining efforts you can even retain the 3270 look and feel, including a recommended ISPF emulator. Batch can also be fairly easily moved to shell scripts, while JCL gets converted to a syntactically similar open systems alternative. COBOL is similarly supported these days on UNIX. The further you go down that stack though, the more difficult, expensive, time consuming and risky the conversion effort will become. Any undocumented COBOL programs will probably need to be scrapped and their functionality rewritten. That also applies to any Assembler programs you have today, none of which can be flipped to the new platform.

The HP alternative might indeed be cheaper then; if you can manage to actually decommission the mainframe completely that is. If you can’t, and you probably can’t unless all you run on your mainframe is a fully transportable workload, then you’re going to end up running both systems in parallel. Unfortunately one potential pesky side effect of having to run both the legacy mainframe and the new HP kit is that your energy bill, and therefore your data centre emissions, will go up. Indeed HP’s own calculator showed that such an outcome was indeed to be expected. It goes almost without saying that this is not a good strategy.

In short, the staff of HP’s Mainframe Alternative Centre of Excellence deserve an “A” for managing to deliver forty successful mainframe swap-outs. However the vendor gets a “D” for grammar due to its confused use of the word “open” in describing the benefits of the alternative. It also gets a “E+” for driving up a data centre’s energy usage. Lastly, it gets an off-the-scale “G” for its dismissive stance on security, mainly because the word “gobsmacked” comes to mind when thinking about it.

Migrating some of your current mainframe workload to the HP alternative may make sense for you, if for no other reason than to avoid an impending MIPS expansion by freeing up headroom through offloading some work. Some CIOs find themselves with mainframe skills shortages too. Although at an industry level, it is worth asking whether the scope of that problem is somewhat overstated by those with a vested interest. In a world of ever changing technology alternatives, Quocirca recommends that CIOs continue to measure the performance of the status quo. However, any potential changes should be given thorough consideration that goes beyond vendor positioning.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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IBM has just held its first annual analyst's conference on what it calls Business Event Processing (BEP). Now, followers of the complex event processing (CEP) market will know that IBM has renamed its acquisition of AptSoft (a CEP product) as WebSphere Business Events so you could be forgiven for thinking that IBM was simply redefining CEP as BEP. However, that is by no means the case: the company defines business event processing much more widely than just CEP.

To give you an idea of where IBM's thinking is, there were three sets of presentations: on how you use WebSphere Business Events in conjunction with business process management; on how Tivoli uses event monitoring across both IT and other asset environments; and on the introduction of IBM's own (new) CEP engine, InfoSphere Streams. This actually made the conference sort of confusing because these areas tend to be covered by different analysts, each of whom was only interested in a part of the proceedings. However, leaving that aside, the point is that IBM sees BEP much more broadly than CEP and, indeed, it claims to be the market leader in BEP with more than 3,700 customers. I have no way of disputing, or even checking, this.

As regular readers will appreciate my main interest here was on InfoSphere Streams, which the company is actually positioning as a "stream computing engine used for CEP deployments". Quite why the company is making this distinction is not clear to me (though I will speculate about it in a separate article). In any case, my information is limited at present but I can give you a flavour. The first thing is that the product has been designed for very high throughput, low latency, highly complex environments. In particular, it is hardware agnostic which means that not only will it run on your average server but it will also run on IBM's supercomputers. This means that you can really get extreme performance out of it: for example, IBM claims that it is running at 2 million transactions per second but that one of its early adopters expects to have it running at 5 million transactions per second with a sub-millisecond latency. That is seriously impressive, Streambase and Progress: eat your hearts out!

InfoSphere Streams comes with a development language (and compiler) called SPADE (stream processing application declarative engine) that has been specifically developed for processing streams. However, it could equally well be described as an ADE (application development environment—and it was, at the conference) as it includes tools for things like debugging as well as the language itself.

This raises an interesting issue with respect to other IBM approaches to CEP. For example, WebSphere Business Events uses a more 4GL-like approach with no coding, while the company is also involved in the formulisation of StreamSQL as a standard, along with Streambase, Oracle, Coral8 and Truviso. Quite how all of these might pan out remains to be seen but clearly IBM wants to keep its options open in the event of any agreed standard appearing.

Anyway, back to SPADE. While IBM has plans to add graphical application composition features that could be used by business analysts in the future, at present SPADE is purely for developers. This is unusual as most CEP vendors offer both. Initial comments from early adopters suggest that it is an easy environment to work in so this may not be too much of an issue but I haven't seen it yet so I can't comment. One possibility that IBM has been exploring is to front-end InfoSphere Streams with WebSphere Business Events (which is more focused at the business level), using the former to determine the events that are actionable or to do deep analysis and the latter to determine the relevant processing by applying relevant business rules.

This raises another point, which is the integration across IBM's portfolio in support of events. This is across a broad front and, in keeping with its general view of the importance of events it is event-enabling various existing products. So, for example, it is going to release a (free) support pack for CICS that will generate events from CICS transactions that can then be processed using one or other of its event processing technologies.

IBM has announced various new products and extensions to products and there will be more to come. IBM clearly sees event-driven architectures becoming pervasive and it wants to be able to play in all areas of this market, with systems running on laptops up to those on supercomputers. While its entrance into this sector will be heralded by the likes of Streambase and Progress as validating the market, and should give them some temporary momentum, it is quite clear that IBM is aiming to dominate this market: it has put a stake in the ground and it is a big (blue) stake.

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By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 22nd September 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

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Many organisations unknowingly overspend on software license agreements and maintenance. This is typically a result of organisations struggling to understand and manage complex licensing and pricing models, across multiple vendors. Technology changes also complicate licensing and are difficult to predict. For example, the growing popularity of virtualisation and increasing employee mobility mean IT departments are under further pressure to keep up to date with the different types of software licensing and patterns of usage.

At the same time, the issue of compliance is ever more present as audits by third party firms such as the Business Software Alliance and the Software and Information Industry Association are becoming more and more frequent, in response to the large amount of unlicensed software being used globally. However, despite the high financial costs associated with non-compliance, not to mention the potential negative publicity, most organisations today struggle to adequately track and manage software licence usage.

The end result is that few organisations today accurately know what software they are running, how much they have paid for it, who and how it is used—and, in fact, if it is ever used at all.

This lack of visibility into licensing has significant implications on software purchasing decisions and can lead to compliance problems. Some organisations, in order to contain software costs, may purchase too few licences, leading to users not having access to the applications they need or using them without a licence. Other organisations may overcompensate and buy extra licences—which they don't need—to make sure they are covered. All this can lead to unnecessary support and software update fees.

A high proportion of organisations use manual techniques to track software licences, which are prone to error as well as being costly in terms of resources. This also only tells half the story—manual records may report what software is deployed but not if it is under- or over-utilised, for instance.

Using effective software licence management tools is essential for centralising licensing operations and obtaining accurate, granular usage data to properly track and report on licence usage. This not only puts organisations in a stronger position when renegotiating software contracts but also reduces the management burden on IT.

To manage software licences, some organisations have invested in software asset management (SAM) tools from companies such as BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM. However, while traditional SAM solutions can look at what software is installed, where and by whom, they may fall short on determining how software applications are being used.

The 'how' dimension is addressed by compliance monitoring tools from companies such as Acresso (formerly part of Macrovision) and Safenet, which supply technology to software publishers. Such tools continually monitor software usage and, in some cases, this technology can be used by publishers to enforce licensing.

Products such as Acresso's FLEXnet Compliance Monitor use a non-intrusive agent to collect data from applications, and can be configured to support a wide range of license models. This enables publishers to proactively manage entitlements as well as create flexible licensing models for their customers based on usage.

Meanwhile, end-user organisations can also use licence-monitoring solutions to reconcile application usage with entitlements, thereby potentially minimising time-consuming physical audits, preventing over-deployment of software and gaining an accurate view of their application usage. For organisations to gain the most value from such compliance monitoring tools, their software suppliers should already have enabled their products with third-party licensing technology.

The legal and financial risks, as well as the negative publicity of non-compliance, cannot be ignored. Because of this software licence management is an issue that should be a priority for board-level executives as well as IT managers. To stay ahead of the game and avoid the extra work and costs associated with compliance testing, Quocirca recommends organisations should move to centralised software purchasing to gain a better handle on their software assets.

As a first step to ensuring compliance, they should then identify the software applications which are the highest value to the organisation and aim to understand how this software is actually being used. By using a compliance monitoring system, organisations can gain an ongoing insight into usage and then use this information to optimise software spending and negotiate favourable terms with software vendors.

Finally, organisations should self-audit periodically to ensure that software purchasing and licensing policies are being adhered to. Ultimately, conducting such proactive audits means organisations can demonstrate and maintain compliance in the event of an external software audit.

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By: Andy Hayler, CEO, The Information Difference Posted: 19th September 2008 Copyright The Information Difference © 2008

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Business Intelligence is often lumped together as a single market, but in fact there are rather different communities of business users. Many people require some fairly basic information on a regular basis e.g. "what is the sales forecast this month", or "what was last quarter's profitability by product". Despite some BI vendors' fevered fantasies, most people working in large companies do not require a full-blown analytical environment, because analysing data is not their job. However there is a clear subset of business users with job titles like "marketing analyst" or "business analyst" whose job it is to do genuine analysis of data. Whilst they may get some of their data from an enterprise data warehouse, in real life they will tend to also need to combine this with data from a variety of specialist systems e.g. external data feeds or some other applications.

Such analysts tend to have a love-hate relationship with the IT department. They rely on IT to give them access to some of the data that they need, but resent having to wait in line for IT to get around to granting them this access. IT people in turn are nervous of granting broad access to their systems to analysts, who are often very IT-literate but know "just enough to be dangerous" when it comes to data; they suspect that analysts will kick off some wild, uncontrolled trawl through the corporate systems and cause the lights in the data centre to go dim.

Consequently, analysts typically deal with the IT groups as rarely as they are able to, and grab the data they need on an occasional basis before doing what they really need to do using the most widespread BI tool of all: Excel. Excel's great flexibility comes at the price of allowing uncontrolled copies of data to move around the organisation, often without it being clear where the data originally came from and under what assumptions it is based: was this spreadsheet based on data from last month's sales figures, or the one before, and which other data was it combined with? Exactly what definition of "margin" is it using? Philip Howard has written extensively about this problem.

One vendor hoping to address this market of frustrated analysts is Lyzasoft, who, in late September, launch a desktop analysis product (Lyza) following a beta program with over one hundred analysts. This product comes out of nine years of working with analysts through the company's prior venture, Eyeris, a hosted data warehouse offering, which has carved out a small but very profitable niche amongst a number of large corporations. Lyza has a columnar storage system well suited to analytic needs, with a graphical environment allowing analysts to build up analysis iteratively. It has OBDC and JDBC connectors allowing access to most data sources, and keeps careful track of the various steps of analysis that take place, giving auditability. When a user shares results with another Lyza user, all the metadata associated with the result set goes with the results, minimising the problem of how to understand the assumptions behind the data.

The company has a nice series of video demos on their website, allowing prospective customers to get a good idea as to their value proposition. Their challenge will be in overcoming the resistance of IT departments to the introduction of yet another analytic tool (many companies have invested significant effort on reducing BI tool proliferation in recent years). If they can, in a future version, demonstrate a collaborative environment that allows better control of data sharing, then this problem could be turned on its head, and may actually represent an opportunity for hard-pressed IT departments. For now they need to build up a good reputation amongst their target community, and demonstrate that Lyza's intuitive interface is enough to wean analysts off their beloved Excel pivot tables.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 19th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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In May 2006 I wrote an article complaining about the lack of accessibility features in the iPod. I have been talking to Apple recently about accessibility across the product line and lo and behold Apple announce an accessible iPod Nano that answers all my criticisms. I am sure this is a coincidence, but I hope my original article may have had some influence.

The main new accessibility feature is Spoken Menus which does even more than its name implies. Most menus can now be read to you so it is possible to navigate around the menu structure without having to look at the screen. But what is more important is this is extended to all the metadata, such as artist, track name and playlist, so it is possible to find the specific track of interest without looking at the screen. Finally, warning messages, such as battery low, are verbalised.

The spoken menu feature is implemented by using the text to speech technology on the PC or Mac running iTunes. All the relevant snippets of text are converted into sound files and loaded on to the iPod. This obviously takes a little time and memory when first loaded up but on subsequent synchronisations the extra time is negligible.

Besides the spoken menus there is also an option to size text, so people with mild vision impairments will be able to read the screens more comfortably.

Among the other improvements is an enhanced audio recording feature. Many people with vision impairments now use audio recording as convenient way of making notes to themselves. Having this included on the Nano may mean that the number of devices they carry around will not increase.

The serial number is still white 6 point numbers and characters on the back of the Nano but it is now also available via one of the on-screen menus, so I can now read it.

These features are of great benefit to users who are blind or have a severe vision impairment. However, the features could be of great interest to users who have adequate or even 20/20 vision. There are many situations where looking at the screen is inconvenient, difficult or potentially dangerous; examples include standing in a train with your iPod in your pocket, lying in bed with your glasses off, sitting on the beach with sun glasses on, or driving your car. In all of these situations being able to control the iPod without looking at it would be beneficial.

So my one remaining criticism of Apple is that this information is not more widely disseminated. Go to the iPod Nano web site page and you will find nothing and not even a link. Go to the Apple shop and ask and no one will know about it and will not be able to demonstrate it. The only way to find out is to go to the Apple Accessibility page which has recently been greatly improved.

And my one suggestion is that Apple investigate further how the accelerometer could be used to navigate the menus. The scroll wheel is still a barrier to people with limited hand coordination whereas tilting maybe much easier.

I congratulate Apple on these new features and look forward ot further functions in the future.

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By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 19th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Watching the turmoil in the international banking community I can't help but wonder what the implications are for data security in such difficult times.

We are used to banks being pretty good at security. For decades they have been held up as the leaders in security as safeguarding financial assets has been their stock in trade. Physical and technical security are prerequisites of operating a bank, and those that failed to keep the confidence of their customers soon saw investors running away.

But how does a collapsing bank still preserve the integrity of their systems when staff are being laid off and institutions are bankrupt? Who is left managing the systems when the lights are turned off? What threat vectors are going to be on the up following this banking crisis?

Internal Threats
Hearing that your employer has finally gone bang after months of struggling to keep itself going will do little to motivate most of an institution's staff. In the past they may have felt a high degree of loyalty to a place they have worked for many years but this changes when next month's mortgage cannot be paid.

In these circumstances attitudes to company assets change and some people feel obliged to take a laptop, server or memory stick in lieu of payment. Despite being illegal, who is going to police the anarchy that may ensue prior to the arrival of the administrators? Forget the contract security staff, they have already been withdrawn as their invoice won't get paid.

I dread to think of the amount of data that will be leaving in cardboard boxes, or their virtual equivalent, from these collapsing institutions. No doubt it will be customer lists, account data, email files, proposals, project files and everything else you can think of.

As staff feel fed up and embittered they become easy prey to criminal gangs looking at hiring key players in an attempt to bolster up their operations. Far fetched? Well I am sure it is an opportunity not to be missed. The chance to become an "IT consultant" is appealing to many, and when you need to pay a mortgage your choice of customer base may be less picky than otherwise.

My previous papers concerning the people threat had the competent and malicious inside threat down as a very small percentage of a typical employee base. In some financial institutions I am sure this percentage will rocket as people look to preserving their own situation.

Important tasks such as computer account provisioning will come under strain as people are made redundant or redeployed. In all likelihood there will be hundreds of old accounts sitting and still active despite their owners moving on. If these accounts allow remote access then ex-employees can have system access for months to come. This is difficult to manage at the best of times—compound this with today's issues and you have another huge security problem.

IT security managers, one hopes, will realise this and ensure systems are extra protected. But that is assuming the IT security managers feel sufficiently safe themselves. After all who is going to police the police?

Phishing Attempts
Of course the criminal fraternity will see the banking turmoil as a great opportunity to phish for new victims. Emails supposedly coming from defunct or almost defunct banks will urge the general public to change their banks as soon as possible for fear of losing their deposits.

People will panic and feel obliged to move money, even if it is simply spreading the risk amongst different institutions to keep under the £35,000 guarantee limit on deposits from the UK government. Other gangs will tempt those wanting to move money into other commodities such as gold and no doubt offer tremendous deals on too-good-to-be-true investments.

IT Security Mashups
Previously stable IT security systems will be messed around with as services are quickly brought together under huge pressure to support a merger, leaving a trail of holes in the security infrastructure.

As institutions merge there will be bun fights as people strive to keep their jobs. Talented individuals are already circulating their CVs ready to go quickly if or when their post is threatened. Unfortunately in my experience it is often the brightest and the best that go first as they have the gumption to try and resolve their situation. This creates a vicious circle as less experienced people are left to mash together ever more complex systems.

IT Security Spend
It will be interesting to monitor IT budgets and spending on IT security over the coming months. Undoubtedly budgets will come under scrutiny, and new projects cancelled or put on hold. Upgrades to security defences will probably be delayed as they have to be justified all over again. Unfortunately this reduction in spend will probably coincide with an increase in threats as the bad people look to exploit weaknesses within the banking community.

IT security vendors will be looking to their traditional early adopter customer base, the financial institutions, and be wondering what is going to happen. Hopefully the smarter ones will try and see this as an opportunity but it is still going to hurt at some point.

Am I painting a too gloomy picture?

I don't think so, instead I think this is a realistic sketch of the IT security issues we are now facing. And you know what? I already have it on good authority that ex-employees of a now defunct bank have been out to buy a caddy for a newly acquired hard disk.

I bet I know where the disk came from.

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By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 18th September 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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On the face of it, many of you like me would probably answer with a big "No" The 2 words SAP and SME don't fit together. This view is understandable because many people associate SAP with ERP and large enterprises like Cadbury Schweppes, Unilever, Airbus, and also with a price and implementation cost associated with that sort of customer. Well, at Heathrow on September 9th 2008, SAP SME EMEA ran a customer panel chaired by Hans-Peter Klaey, SAP's Global President SME with six European SME customers; this resulted in a change of mind for me. You can't argue with an SME client base of 38,000, SAP and SME do go together!!

SAP's opening remarks
Klaey opened the forum by talking about the importance of SMEs to SAP. With 38,000 customers, SMEs account for 75% of SAP's customer base, so they need to listen and to provide the right tools. Eighteen months ago, Klaey shared with the audience, there were only 26,000 customers. In Q2 2008 SMEs represented 27% of overall EMEA order entries. Klaey explained that 84% of that SME customer base had come through SAP's partner ecosystem. SAP's SME strategy was Klaey explained based around 3 pillars:

• SAP is for all sizes of businesses;
• To help SMEs, SAP has developed 3 different solution portfolios, which allow the organisation to find one that suits their business sceanrio; and
• SAP uses a multi-channel approach; in other words it works with partners to sel and implement these solutions.

SAP Business One provides a single solution to manage an entire business providing support for customer relationship management (CRM), purchasing, inventory, operations, financials, and HR. The business information is captured in a single system. There are over 450 industry-specific solutions that have been added over the top of the base system by SAP's partners.

SAP Business All-in-One includes:

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) - manages financials, human resources, operations, and corporate services.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) - manages all aspects of customer relationships from marketing, to sales, to service.
• Business analytics - tools and reports for financial and operational reporting.
• SAP Best Practices - industry-specific configuration and business processes based on SAP's experience.
• SAP NetWeaver technology platform

SAP Business ByDesign is SAP's SaaS offering. It provides services that the user can select as appropriate to their needs from financials, CRM, SCM, human resource management, project management and supplier relationship management.

The Customer Panel

The customer panel consisted of:

• Yury Makarov, Sales Manager for Mettler-Toledo Vostok is the Russian subsidiary of the well known Swiss industrial instruments company. The subsidiary is responsible for sales in 12 of the former Soviet countries with 3 sales offices. The business is very B2B with sales to any organisation wanting measuring instruments. Their business strategy is based on keeping sales growth whilst keeping costs down. The subsidiary is using SAP to consolidate business processes and give users access to the necessary data without delays.
• Ignacio Simon, the IT and Quality Manager of Axima who are a Spanish leader in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and maintenance in Building and Industrial market fields. They implemented SAP's Business All In One about a year ago to improve profitability and improve client competitiveness. The company uses SAP to control the process from tender to completion and then into maintenance. There are around about 300 users; some of whom are mobile and need access on client sites. Simon stated that he saw "SAP as a Process tool". During their implementation they didn't change any of the underlying processes in SAP but did some customization of the user interface. Their IT department consists of 2 people: one of whom looks after SAP, whilst the other looks after PCs!
• Jonathan Schaffer, Managing Director of Plum Products who are a UK garden furniture wholesaler. The business started some 200 years ago and has now reached a turnover of £12m with 40 staff. The company deals with all the major retailers in the UK as well as major garden centres and certain specialized retailers. In 2005, the company decided to buy its own warehouse space rather using contracted logistics. They quickly realized that they needed their own WMS software and also that this was going to work with their current financial package, so they made the decision to implement an ERP solution. The company since that time has also expanded sales operations into the Southern hemisphere to counter UK seasonality. They implemented SAP's Business One in January 2007 to support their expansion plans. Schaffer explained that that system had come into own during the current economic downturn when stockists didn't want to carry stock, they were still able to deliver electronic orders the next day and that this included working with their logistics carrier to even deliver to the actual home of the final buyer.
• Nicholas Lindrop, the General Manager of Pentagon: a UK chemicals specialist was established in 2002 from a management buy-out from Dow Chemicals. They have a turnover of around £40m with 200 employees in the UK. They have a joint venture in Saudi and are following an acquisition strategy with the aim of doubling profitability by 2010. The business exports a high proportion of its products to the European market with sales also going to the US and Asia. They have been able to establish 3–5 year supply contracts, which has not only helped to ride out the economic downturn but makes it easier for them to plan their supply chain and get the best price. Pentagon are implementing SAP's Business ByDesign so they can better manage and control costs
• Chris Robinson, CIO and Partner in charge of Property Procurement for Davis Langdon, a UK construction and property consultancy company. The company was founded some 100 years ago and now has some 93 offices around the world, employing some 6,000 employees. The period between 2005 and 2007 saw substantial growth in the company in terms of revenue and this caused the drive to make changes in the way they used IT. Robinson joined the company to help them select an ERP solution. The project started in 2007 and went live with Business All-in-One in February 2008. Their business strategy has meant that they need to present a more regional and sector specialization to their customers and SAP has enabled them to integrate more tightly with customer and supplier systems, thus supporting this change.
• Allan Dowie, the Financial Director of Clyde Pumps: a UK specialist pump manufacturer established some 135 years ago. They have a turnover of £100m with around 650 employees. They manufacture not only in the UK but also in China and India. Clyde made the choice to go SAP after some 15 years of no real investment in IT and it aligned with their acquisition business strategy where they saw the need to have a common single platform across the business to "provide one version of the truth", as well as supporting the drive for operational efficiencies. They are due to go live with SAP's Business All-in-One in 5 weeks time having kicked off the implementation process in February 2008.

The Questions and Answers

Has SAP's acquisition of Business Objects had any effect on you?

Robinson expressed an interest after seeing the product at the last Sapphire conference. No one else seemed to have an interest. Klaey expressed the view that SAP saw this as an opportunity to work with their customers to bring further opportunities around business intelligence. SAP is working with their partners to make the introduction of Business Objects into the standard SAP offerings as seamless as possible. Klaey said that currently the SME market was one that hadn't been a large market for Business Objects before.

How important is measuring the payback (ROI) from your investment in SAP?

Lindrop stated that they had selected SAP based on functionality and the ability to take IT cost out and that ROI had not been a driver. Schaffer explained that had not spent a lot of time working on ROI, their approach could be seen as seat of the pants. He then expanded on this by illustrating how the introduction of SAP had lead to an ability to take an order and pick for it faster. He did say that this speed had led to other issues in that it was harder for customers to change their orders! Makov described how they had set up a discount authorization system in SAP and had analyzed how this had worked to find that they had made quite an impact on the bottom line. Dowie answered the question by stating that it was important for them to get free flow of information. Robinson's response really got to the heart of the matter about ROI in SMEs, in that you could use formulas as large enterprises do but their sophistication was far less. The key was that management was closer to the business and that therefore you got a handle of what was working and what wasn't far quicker. Simon explained that they had set up measurements and this had allowed him to compare the cost of IT support in his company to another company in the group providing similar services but not using SAP. The results showed that his cost were half of the other companies.

Did you consider fixed price contracts with implementation partners?

Most of the customers either looked at or wanted to take this option, however all but Simon and Lindrop ended up with some sort of times and materials based on the need for customisation.

Other than Pentagon, did any others of you consider Business ByDesign?

Dowie stated that it hadn't come into consideration; they went for the template available from their implementation partner that sat on top of Business One. One of the reasons was that Business ByDesign didn't fit their needs. Robinson explained at the time of their selection—2006—Business ByDesign was in its early release and they hadn't considered it. When asked what he might do now, he replied that he would certainly consider it as an option.

What did the SAP brand mean to the decision to select?

Robinson stated that it had meant a fair bit, even to the point that other partners in the company made the suggestion as why look at anything else! Schafer said one of their key selection criteria was the need for the chosen company to be at the forefront of application development and like to stay in the game as they wanted to be future proof. He also remarked that the majority of their clients were running SAP. Lindrop made a very telling point in that he felt that the choice of SAP had increased the valuation of the company. Dowie added that with his company having a very aggressive acquisition strategy, they had looked at what systems potential targets had to find that the highest proportion had SAP.

What was your biggest challenge during implementation?

Lindrop stated that they had made a conscious decision for the project team to appear to make the decision having given them 3 months to assess the fit. This, in addition to involving employees in being able to input their requirements, meant that they had buy-in. The real big issue had been in the availability of their own resources during the implementation phase particularly during July and August—with tongue in cheek he added that they even had considered stopping holidays! Robinson described the issue of a package taking away what had appeared to many partners and employees their personalised way of doing things. They had implemented SAP in a fairly vanilla fashion, and the biggest complaint was the regimentation of the UI. Schaffer concurred that getting staff buy-in was very important, so therefore getting them involved in putting their suggestions for requirements was key to their success. They also didn't customize, but rather changed their processes to fit the package. The real big issue for them was transferring their old data to the new system. Makrov expounded on this theme of people hate change, but key for the success of their project was having a good working relationship with the partner so that there was always a win-win approach. Simon talked about their first hurdle being price, in terms of finding a partner who was willing to offer rates appropriate to working in the SME space. Then, like all the other panel members, they had to overcome resistance to change and their final hurdle was training. They used video and were able to reduce training to 2 days with a test at the end in which, with his quality manager's hat on, he insisted on 9 out of 10 mark!

How well do SAP's solutions understand business processes?

All the panel members expressed the view that the standard business processes in SAP meant that they could implement without any customization. It was where either there were special regulations due to country—for instance financial report