By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 21st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The change of season and, of course, the weather from snow to sunshine here in the UK seems to have coincided with the production of 2 reports on ERP from 2 of the major Magazines aimed at the manufacturing vertical. Logistics Manager article[i] looked at whether ERP has kept time with the changes in supply chains. Manufacturing and Logistics IT article[ii] was a review of ERP with particular emphasis on the views of vendors on mobility and the cloud. Having read these articles, I thought it appropriate to pull the thoughts and views contained in these articles with my own thoughts.

What has changed in the business side of manufacturing? Logistics Manager made a very important point that supply chains depend on the IT systems that support them, in fact it is a critical dependency. Supply chain management has changed considerably over the last decade with networks replacing chains, internationalisation leading transport distance becoming an issue, particularly now in this energy aware and green conscious world. Additionally the collaboration between a company and its suppliers, customers and partners has become much tighter and closer whilst at the same time having to be agile and flexible to changes in the market. The key to supply chains is that they are process and event driven. Now if ERP packages have moved in the way I suggested in 2010 then they should be able to cope with the changed world. What has happened, mostly due to the recession, is that investment in IT has been pretty stagnant and this is particularly true in North America and Western Europe, where budget constraints and legacy systems are more expensive to maintain. However, in the areas of IT infrastructure immaturity, such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia/Pacific, there is an increase in software spend. If ERP is still seen as the price of entry for companies, then this means, as I see it, that the SME market (where the future large enterprises are likely to come from) is the area where ERP vendors have to win their footholds. The other key point that comes out of this Logistics manager article is that with geographical dispersal of supply chains, executives need to be able to access information from anywhere, on lots of different devices, so mobility access is the key and that means security associated with this has to be there.

All the major ERP vendors see that it is very important to provide mobile support for the business functions of customer relationship management, call management, transport and route management and inventory management. Mobility is changing the way people work and utilise business information in the field. There is a great quote in the report from Phil Lewis, Business Consulting Director for Infor, "Today's approach to Mobility is aiming for information without boundaries. The ability to work from a mobile device, be it a laptop, tablet or even a smartphone, should not be compromised." Innovation surrounding mobility is set to continue, especially as vendors see more user interfaces converting to HTML5. However a word of warning here; standards on devices are great for application vendors but as far as device vendors are concerned, they restrict their ability to differentiate.

What about the cloud? The introduction of cloud (SaaS) ERP solutions provides a further degree of choice as to how to implement and, as well, opens up opportunities for SMEs to exploit the benefits business control given by ERP. What is interesting to note is that the view of the importance of the cloud by vendors is directly related to whether or not they have the capability! Let me say that cloud is not the right solution for everyone, you have to be able to offset its advantages against a more rigid adherence to the solution provided by the vendor (though they are getting better) as being really assured about availability and security of your data over the ether. In The Manufacturing and Logistics article, it was interesting to note that some vendors had seen a tendency for certain ERP modules to be more likely implemented over the cloud - one of those mentioned was CRM. I think this suggests that what is likely in the future is a hybrid where some modules of the ERP are run in-house whilst other are run in the cloud. An interesting dilemma then for the ERP vendors as to how to make this seamless! The statistics on adoption show that it is still slow, certainly for the manufacturing sector. One thing the cloud does do is offer a really good way to carry out a proof of concept.

The next big issue is big data (didn't really mean that as a pun!). The Manufacturing and Logistics report made a very interesting comment that big data had been heard about by IT but not by manufacturing business users. Anyone who has been involved in the implementation of sensory devices such as bar-codes or RFID knows that the data collected by these devices can be enormous and one of the issue is what do you do with it? Back in the early 2000's I presented a paper at a BI conference on the issue of RFID data positing that the value of data could increase over time rather than decrease and how is it to be handled?. So there is a large amount of data in manufacturing collected in real time coming from sensory devices on the shop floor, in the warehouses and even from customer and supplier locations so there is a need for big data technology to analyse this. I see big data becoming an important issue to manufacturers and retailers as the economy picks up. There is a need to be able to seamlessly integrate internal and external data whilst maintaining that you are comparing apples with apples. To do this requires an effective metadata repository with business rules to decide how to do the comparisons.

What then about social networking? I like this comment that I found in The Manufacturing and Logistics article that social networking is about bringing the consumer IT world into the workforce. Although I would replace the word workforce by business community, as I see it this is being driven by new entrants into the workforce of organisations, who are very computer literate and used to 'Tweeting' and 'Facebooking' information to their friends and associates. Social networking is, in my view, heavily associated with today's mobile never off-line workforce. I see the first key use of social networking in business is to enable multimedia communications within and without an organisation to get assistance on solving an issue. From a marketing viewpoint, social networking also would appear to be an effective broadcasting media for certain types of blanket marketing campaign. The big challenge that I see for ERP vendors is do they create their own social networking capability or do they create secure interfaces to work with the major social networking vendors?

So, why should an organisation consider ERP as a solution in this decade? ERP solutions still solve their original aims of providing a seamless integrated environment between application modules that support the business so that you only have to input the information once - this is particular true as they relate to finance and resource planning. So if you are thinking of purchasing for the first time, or of upgrading or switching to an alternative, the reason and rationale has to be a business one, which will solve specific measurable issues in your business, not an IT one. When you evaluate the different products what you will find is, with a few exceptions, not a lot of difference in functional support. The solutions in the marketplace support al the major functions of Finance, Human Resources, Production Planning, Product and Service management, Inventory Management, Customer and Supplier Management. In addition there is a heavy verticalisation available from all the major solutions to support verticals from machinery to mining, from oil production to aerospace. So where should you look for difference? My suggestions would be:

1. The underling infrastructure - as this is what makes the product agile, flexible and easy to use.
2. Business Intelligence - not just data warehousing and analytics, but also the ability to incorporate contextual information about the data in terms of the process instance that created it.
3. Ability to build a long term relationship with the vendor - selecting an ERP is not a short term arrangement, we are talking of anything up to 20+ years of association. When I am involved in a selection process I always incorporate a chance for the selecting organisation to visit and meet the vendor people (i.e. more than just the sales team) and also to meet or talk to some current customers.
4. My final suggestion for looking for differences is to look at how the ERP vendor supports mobility and the cloud. This is all about being not necessarily at the bleeding edge but at the forefront of the peloton.

[i] Too old to work. Logistics Manager, April 2013

[ii] ERP spreads its wings. Manufacturing and Logistics IT , March 2013

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 16th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Readers will know that our last survey into the data migration market, along with the best practices we recommended, was published in 2011. The big result from this survey was the extent to which the adoption of technology increased the chance of success compared to our previous survey in 2007. We concluded that relevant lessons had largely been learned. We might reasonably conclude, therefore, that the best practices recommended in our 2011 paper have been similarly heeded.

The question therefore becomes: what next? What additional technologies or tools or approaches can further increase the likelihood of successful migrations? Some pointers to this were included in our 2011 survey - the use of tools for archival and data masking for example - but we didn't go into the use of these in any detail. Also, some new tools - for what we might call quality assurance - have appeared since 2011. We haven't any further survey information on these tools and techniques but that doesn't mean that they aren't important going forward.

Anyway, I'm going to be discussing all this in a webinar with Informatica on Monday 22nd May. It should be fun: it's not going to be a formal presentation, more of a chat with Q&A, so I hope you'll listen in.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 15th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I've been thinking for some time that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big technology disruption - what we're doing now may simply not scale easily to this new world. Nothing new there but I was listening to an Analyst teleconference yesterday around the innovations presented at IBM's recent Impact conference in Las Vegas, and someone from IBM commented that he was now seeing real traction for IoT amongst IBM's customers. It is, apparently, not just an Analyst thing any more....

Then, this morning, I saw an announcement from ARM and LogMeIn: they're collaborating on the 'Xively Jumpstart Kit' for the Internet of Things. This combines a public cloud platform-as-a-service for IoT with ARM's platform for building connected devices using ARM-designed micro-controllers. According to the press people, what this means is that "developers and businesses can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure and platforms, and as a result can progress from prototyping to volume deployment much faster" - which sounds about right to me.

Just a heads-up and a sign of the times. But don't overlook ARM and its importance in the embedded market. Embedded chips are what make 'things' intelligent and they power the IoT. It may be "Intel Inside" on the TV - but when you actually look inside an intelligent device that isn't a PC, it's often ARM (although ARM Holdings itself doesn't make chips, it simply licenses its designs to chip builders, itself an interesting IP-based business model).

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 14th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Often lost amid the talk of cloud deployment models and hybrid hosting efficiencies is the actual task of properly deploying enterprise applications. Deploying applications touches so many aspects of IT systems and business processes, and requires ongoing updates and management, that only the enterprise IT staffs can really do the job.

So if cloud is a way of doing an end-run around IT—yet IT is integral to proper applications deployment and care—how exactly do these disparate propositions co-exist?

Not too well, it turns out, especially as the pace that apps development and deployment—and the skyrocketing need to bring more mobile apps into production—complicates the already tough task of overall applications management.

HP Software today announced four products that aim to tackle this thorny reality—that traditional apps deployment was already broken, and that the new requirements make automation and comprehensive management an inescapable necessity. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingDirect podcasts.]

HP is also banking on the role it can play as a neutral party to better orchestrate the apps lifecycle because—unlike most other large enterprise software vendors—it doesn't have a legacy applications, operating system, hypervisor, database and/or middleware heritage (and cash cows) to favor and protect. That means supporting heterogeneity in total is the imperative, not the exception, for HP.

The next generation of HP's datacenter automation, orchestration, and cloud management software scales in terms of volume, supports all the installed enterprise kit, and allows for unprecedented simplicity, so that IT can get control before its too late, said Manoj Raisinghani, Senior Director of Worldwide Product Marketing for Cloud Automation Software and SaaS at HP Software.

It's not enough to solve parts of the enterprise IT complexity problem, said Raisinghani. The management of the server deployment and management has an impact on the database and middleware management, which then need to be orchestrated as a whole, which then needs to apply to the cloud services deployment options. So, server, data, middleware, cloud and orchestration all need to be part of the management solution for the scale, simplicity and automation to be impactful and practical, he said.

And that's why HP has bundled these four major products under a common release, with a common version number: 10.

Key to cloud
"Server automation is key to the cloud path," said Raisinghani. He said the announcements were a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10 for HP Software.

Managing complex distributed systems and heterogeneous environments is so time-consuming and complex—hindering business agility and innovation—that IT has relied on systems integrators, and is now being tempted to hand over more process orchestration to the cloud providers. But the trends around mobility, big data and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services mean that IT need to be more in control, not less. And IT needs the means to deploy the answer themselves, and rely on the software orchestration they control to move the workloads and date to where the model works best, said Raisinghani.

Therefore, whether it's routine data center maintenance to the delivery of extended enterprise business processes, automation and cloud management software reduces automating repetitive, manual and time-consuming operations, and makes the entire approach more secure and more easily tracked for intrusions, according to HP.

Even deploying the HP Server Automation (SA) 10 product itself is being streamlined via a virtual appliance, said Raisinghani. IT users can do it themselves, he said. Thanks to the virtual appliance model, the suite is "customer installable," said Raisinghani.

HP Database and Middleware Automation (DMA) 10 further automates manual database management tasks. HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 provides service life cycle automation and IT assets management capabilities to scale to cloud services safely. HP Operations Orchestration (OO) 10 automates up to 15,000 simultaneous operations to track all of the above products, processes, and services.

HP SA 10, the life cycle management platform, enables IT to manage more than 100,000 physical and virtual servers from a single pane of glass, as well as improves operational economics by reducing the administrator-to-server ratio by up to 60 percent, said Raisinghani.

This HP Software approach has been long in the making—from the acquisition of Mercury and Opsware, to the business service management emphasis to the early recognition that hybrid cloud was the long-term IT model.

And while the total management approach—supporting all the major OSes, hypervisors, RDBs, apps, and clouds—makes HP a services management Switzerland, there are some advantages too for HP. By focusing on the automation and orchestration, they are building a default capability to the HP public cloud for those organizations seeing an integrated advantage over the more manual efforts require for other public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, said Raisinghani.

"You can go agile, to where the applications can be best deployed," said Raisinghani. "But this is seamless to the user. It just gets deployed. IT can automate how the services are prepackaged and cloud-burst."

Up and running
And HP is determined to make the HP public cloud the best way to get those services up and running, although the customer will have choice on which cloud or clouds to target, said Raisinghani. "The user gets choice—but the default is the HP Cloud," he said. "HP on HP is going to work better. We'll be making them an offer that's very attractive."

So think about it. Would you as a vendor rather be in a race to the bottom on hypervisor price? On public cloud price? On database price? On storage price? Or would you rather be building a market at being best at enabling the automation, speed and security of the workloads and processes that IT needs to navigate the new IT landscape?

Management, orchestration and automation may well be the killer apps of the cloud era. Management, orchestration and automation from apps and data cradle to grave is the sticky value that locks-in based on productivity, not technology. HP has clearly got its eyes on this prize, and the latest releases this week are a major salvo in the cloud enablement as a function of IT—not outside of IT. Because, like it or not, enterprise IT is the ultimate cloud broker to win over.

In other cloud applications automation news, ServiceNow on Monday announced its ServiceNow App Creator, designed to enabling "citizen developers" to rapidly create enterprise and mobile applications on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform.

Originally targeting the ITSM function, ServiceNow is broadening the use of its tools and platform for apps outside the IT management domain, but with IT as the driver as to what platforms the developers will use. The App Creator technology itself is now included in the platform.

"This arms IT to provide developers with a rich RAD platform and puts those apps on a single platform in a single place," said Arne Josefsberg, CTO at ServiceNow.

Leveraging a forms-based workflow on making and deploying apps and process flows, App Creator ensures "best practice" development of custom applications without requiring coding or technology expertise, said Josefsberg.

Applications that the enterprise builds on the platform are then separately licensed on a per user basis. The ServiceNow App Creator is available today to all current ServiceNow customers.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 13th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

The next BriefingsDirect IT leadership discussion focuses on how leading Australian IT services provider Thomas Duryea Consulting made a successful journey to cloud computing as a business.

We'll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers.

The first part of our series addressed the rationale and business opportunity for TD's cloud-services portfolio, which is built on VMware software.

The latest discussion continues a three-part series on how Thomas Duryea, or TD, designed, built and commercialized an adaptive cloud infrastructure. This second installment focuses on how a variety of risks associated with cloud adoption and cloud use have been identified and managed by actual users of cloud services.

Learn more about how adopters of cloud computing have effectively reduced the risks of implementing cloud models from Adam Beavis, General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea in Melbourne, Australia. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Adam, we've been talking about cloud computing for years now, and I think it's pretty well established that we can do cloud computing quite well technically. The question that many organizations keep coming back with is whether they should do cloud computing. If there are certain risks, how do they know what risks are important? How do they get through that? What are you in learning so far at TD about risk and how your customers face that?

Beavis: People are becoming more comfortable with the cloud concept as we see cloud becoming more mainstream, but we're seeing two sides to the risks. One is the technical risks, how the applications actually run in the cloud.

What we're also seeing—more at a business level—are concerns like privacy, security, and maintaining service levels. We're seeing that pop up more and more, where the technical validation of the solution gets signed off from the technical team, but then the concerns begin to move up to board level.

We're seeing intense interest in the availability of the data. How do they control that, now that it's been handed off to a service provider? We're starting to see some of those risks coming more and more from the business side.

Gardner: I've categorized some of these risks over the past few years, and I've put them into four basic buckets. One is the legal side, where there are licenses and service-level agreements (SLAs), issues of ownership, and permissions.

The second would be longevity. That is to say, will the service provider be there for the long term? Will they be a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants organization? Are they are going to get bought and maybe merged into something else? Those concerns.

The third bucket I put them in is complexity, and that has to do with the actual software, the technology, and the infrastructure. Is it mature? If it's open source, is there a risk for forking? Is there a risk about who owns that software and is that stable?

And then last, the long-term concern, which always comes back, is portability. You mentioned that about the data and the applications. We're thinking now, as we move toward more software-defined data centers, that portability would become less of an issue, but it's still top of mind for many of the people I speak with.

So let's go through these, Adam. Let's start with that legal concern. Do you have any organizations that you can reflect on and say, here is how they did it, here is how they have figured out how to manage these licenses and control of the IP risks?

Beavis: The legal one is interesting. As a case study, there's a not-for-profit organization for which we were doing some initial assessment work, where we validated the technical risk and evaluated how we were going to access the data once the information was in a cloud. We went through that process, and that went fine, but obviously it then went up to the legal team.

One of the big things that the legal team was concerned about was what the service level agreeement was going to be, and how they could capture that in a contract. Obviously, we have standard SLAs, and being a smaller provider, we're flexible with some of those service levels to meet their needs.

But the one that they really started to get concerned about was data availability… if something were to go wrong with the organization. It probably jumps into longevity a little bit there. What if something went wrong and the organization vanished overnight? What would happen with their data?

That's where we see legal teams getting involved and starting to put in things like the escrow clause, similar to what we had with software as a service (SaaS) for a long time. We're starting to see organizations' legal firms focus on doing these, and not just for SaaS—but infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as well. It provides a way for user organizations to access their data if provider organizations like TD were to go down.

So that's one that we're seeing at the legal level. Around the terms and conditions, once again being a small service provider, we have a little more flexibility in what we can provide to the organizations on those.

Once our legal team sits down and agrees on what they're looking for and what we can do for them, we're able to make changes. With larger organizations, where SLAs are often set in stone, there's no flexibility about making modifications to those contracts to suit the customer.

Gardner: Tell us about your organization, how big you are, and who your customers are, and then we'll get back into some of these risks issues and how they have been managed.

Beavis: Traditionally, we came from a system-integrator background, based on the east coast of Australia—Melbourne and Sydney. The organization has been around for 12 years and had a huge amount of success in that infrastructure services arena, initially with VMware.

Other companies heavily expanded into the enterprise information systems area. We still have a large focus on infrastructure, and more recently, cloud. We've had a lot of success with the cloud, mainly because we can combine that with a managed services.

We go to market with cloud. It's not just a platform where people come and dump data or an application. A lot of the customers that come into our cloud have some sort of managed service on top of that, and that's where we're starting to have a lot of success.

As we spoke about in part one, our customers drove us to start building a cloud platform. They can see the benefits of cloud, but they also wanted to ensure that for the cloud they were moving to, they had an organization that could support them beyond the infrastructure.

That might be looking after their operating systems, looking after some of their applications such as Citrix, etc. that we specialize in, looking after their Microsoft Exchange servers, once they move it to the cloud and then attaching those applications. That's where we are. That's the cloud at the moment.

Gardner: Is there something about the platform and industry-standard decisions that you've made that helps your customers feel more comfortable? Do they see less risk because, even though your organization is one organization, the infrastructure is broader and there's some stability about that that comes to the table?

Beavis: Definitely. Partnering with VMware was one of our core decisions, because their platform everywhere is end-to-end standard VMware. It really gives us an advantage when addressing that risk if organizations ask what happens if our company doesn't run or they're not happy with the service.

The great thing is that within our environment—and it's one part of VMware’s vision—you can then pick up those applications, and move them to another VMware cloud provider. Thank heaven, we haven't had that happen, and we intend it not to happen. But, for organizations to understand that, if something were to go wrong, they can move that to another service provider without having to re-architect those applications or make any major changes. This is one area where we're well getting around that longevity risk discussion.

Gardner: Is there a confluence between portability and what organizations are doing with disaster recovery (DR)? Maybe they're mirroring data and/or infrastructure and applications for purposes of business continuity and then are able to say, "This reduces our risk, because not only do we have better DR and business continuity benefits, but we’re also setting the stage for us to be able to move this where we want, when we want."

They can create a hybrid model, where they can pick and choose on-premises, versus a variety of other cloud providers, and even decide on those geographic or compliance issues as to where they actually physically place the data. That's a big question, but the issue is business continuity, as part of this movement toward a lower risk, how does that pan out?

Beavis: That's actually one of the biggest movements that we’re seeing at the moment. Organizations, when they refresh their infrastructure, don’t see the the value refreshing DR on-premise. Let the first step cloud be "let's move the DR out to the cloud, and replicate from on-premises out into our cloud."

Then, as you said, we have the advantage to start to do things like IaaS testing, understanding how those applications are going to work in the cloud, tweak them, get the performance right, and do that with little risk to the business. Obviously, the production machine will continue to run on-premises, while we're testing snapshots.

It's a good way to put a live snapshot of that environment, and how it’s going to perform in the cloud, how your users are going to access it, bandwidth, and all that type of stuff that you need to do before starting to run up. DR is still the number one use case that we’re seeing people move to the cloud.

Gardner: As we go through each of these risks, and I hear you relating how your customers and TD, your own organization, have reacted to them, it seems to me that, as we move toward this software-defined data center, where we can move from the physical hardware and the physical facilities, and move things around in functional blocks, this really solves a lot of these risk issues.

You can manage your legal, your SLAs, and your licenses better when you know that you can pick and choose the location. That longevity issue is solved, when you know you can move the entire block, even if it's under escrow, or whatever. Complexity and fear about forking or immaturity of the infrastructure itself can be mitigated, when you know that you can pick and choose, and that it's highly portable.

It's a round-about way of getting to the point of this whole notion of software-defined data center. Is that really at heart a risk reduction, a future direction, that will mitigate a lot of these issues that are holding people back from adopting cloud more aggressively?

Beavis: From a service provider's perspective it certainly does. The single-pane management window that you can do now, where you can control everything from your network—the compute and the storage—certainly reduces risk, rather than needing several tools to do that.

And the other area where the venders are starting to work together is the integration of things like backup and, as we spoke about earlier, DR. Tools are now sitting natively within that VMware stack around the software-defined data center, written to the vSphere API, as we're trying to retrofit products to achieve file-level backups within a virtual data center, within vCloud. Pretty much every day, you wake up there's a new tool that's now supported within that.

From a service provider's perspective it's really reducing the risk and time to market for the new offerings, but from a customer's perspective it's really getting in that experience that they used to. On-premise over a TD cloud, from their perspective, makes it a lot easier for them to start to adopt and consume the cloud.

Gardner: I suppose this is a good segue into this notion of how to make your data, applications, and the configuration metadata portable across different organizations, based on some kind of a standard or definition. How does that work? What are the ways in which organizations are asking for and getting risk reduction around this concept of portability?

Beavis: Once again, it's about having a common way that the data can move across. The basics come into that hybrid-cloud model initially, like how people are getting things out. One of the things that we see more and more is that it's not as simple as people moving legacy applications and things up to the cloud.

To reduce that risk, we're doing a cloud-readiness assessment, where we come in and assess what the organization has, what their environment looks like, and what's happening within the environment, running things like the vCenter Operations tools from VMware to right-size those environments to be ready for the cloud.

Gardner: Now the flip-side of that would be that some of your customers who have been dabbling in cloud infrastructure, perhaps open-source frameworks of some kind, or maybe they have been integrating their own components of open-source available software, licensed software. What have you found when it comes to their sense of risk, and how does that compare to what we just described in terms of having stability and longevity?

Beavis: Especially in Australia, we probably have 85 percent to 90 percent of organizations with some sort of VMware in their data center. They no doubt seem to be more comfortable gravitating to some providers that are running familiar platforms, with teams familiar with VMware. They're more comfortable that we, as a service provider, are running a platform that they're used to.

We'll probably talk about the hybrid cloud a bit later on, but that ability for them to still maintain control in a familiar environment, while running some applications across in the TD cloud, is something that is becoming quite welcoming within organizations. So there's no doubt that choosing a common platform that they're used to working on is giving them confidence to start to move to the cloud.

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

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 11th May 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

In my previous post, Is Big Data Relevant for SMBs?, I looked at the underlying trends driving the buzz around big data, and why big data is relevant for SMBs. I also discussed why 'big' is a relative term—relative to the amount of information that your organization needs to sift through to find the insights you need, when you need them, and the widening performance gap between businesses that can find the right needles in the data haystack, and those that can’t.

But, charting the course from information overload to actionable business insights isn’t easy, especially for resource-constrained SMBs. In this post, I’ll draw on my conversations with three IBM business partners to discuss what they are seeing, and how they are helping SMB analytics novices chart a course to a successful big data landing. They include:

• FYI Solutions is an IT consultancy based in Parisppany, NJ. FYI specializes in business analytics solutions for financial services, insurance, life sciences, media & publishing, and automotive companies. In business for 29 years, FYI Solutions takes pride in creating lasting value through lasting relationships—the average FYI Solutions client relationship is 15 years.

• LPA Systems, Inc. is a business analytics and business intelligence company with deep roots in the healthcare, hospitality, finance and insurance industries. Founded in 2001, LPA’s main office is in Rochester, New York, with additional offices in Houston, Dallas and Cleveland.

• Waypoint Consulting is a business analytics and financial performance management consultancy based in Newton Square, PA and a 2012 Philly 100 company. Waypoint combines proprietary methodologies, partner products and certified consultants to help customers deliver analytic solutions.  Waypoint’s Project Management process provides clients with full transparency into a project while ensuring solutions are delivered on time and under budget.

Houston (or Parsippany, Rochester, Newtown Square), We Have A Problem
SMBs rarely seek out big data solutions. Instead, they’re looking to solve a business problem. They may need guidance to understand what data they need to solve the problem, where the data is that they need to use and how to capture and use the data to address challenges and meet business goals.

Trying to solve business problems is nothing new. What’s changed is that they are dealing with more data, located in more places, and created in different formats. The other big thing that’s changed is that they need to get information and insights faster.

As Joe Rodriguez, Software Practice Leader, FYI Solutions states, “They can be coming at from different angles. They may have delivery people in the field telling them that it’s too slow to do queries to check on inventory—they are waiting too long and losing money. Or their information is stuck in different silos, and it’s a time-consuming, laborious process to try to pull it into an enterprise wide view.” Or as Brendan McGuire, Managing Partner, WayPoint Consulting puts it, “With more external and internal data available, companies can no longer effectively leverage and use the data with the tools they’ve been using.”

The Right Stuff for Successful Outcomes
Most SMBs that come to these solution providers are just getting started down the analytics path. They come in frustrated with ever-more complicated Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables that take too much energy to create and update, and that propagate too many errors to trust.

Some are also coming from industries, such as healthcare, that have undergone a rapid transition to digital records due to new regulatory requirements. All of a sudden, they are swamped with data.

Few have in-house experts that are well-versed in analytic best practices and approaches, and many don’t even have business analysts. As Joe Rodriguez puts it, “We often have a brand new customer who will come to us because they have a problem to tackle. They may have limited knowledge about analytics, and need us to help them understand it and how it can help them.”

So what does it take for these novices to successfully navigate up the curve? The solution providers I spoke with shared common views on the essentials for good outcomes.

1. Start with smarter decision-making, not tools. Start with a close examination of the business drivers for a more advanced analytics approach—not with the tools. As Brendan McGuire noted, “The first and most important part of the conversation is working with the client to understand what processes do they have and what decisions do they need to make, and how can better data insights support this? Or as Barbara Schiffman, Director of Technology Solutions, FYI Solutions says, “We don’t start out by talking about the tools. In fact, the tools are incidental. We start with what business problems are you experiencing? Where do you really want to be instead of where you are today?”
2. Get on the right entrance ramp. As mentioned above, many SMBs are just getting started up the analytics curve. With so many bright and shiny objects under the big data umbrella, it can be tempting to bite off more than you can chew. Jesse McNulty, Account Manager, LPA Systems summed it this way: “Most SMBs are just getting started and have enough to do with getting good basic functional reporting in place. They can get enormous benefits just from getting the foundation in place, then build on their analytics competency from there. But some are already farther along, and ready to move into location analytics, forecasting, predictive analytics or other more advanced things—like prescriptive analytics.” On the flip side, they may not have given much thought to mobile analytics right out the gate, but could benefit from it. According to Brendan McGuire, “Most SMBs don’t initially think about it. But once we end up talking about it, many of them realize that their executives and business users are using tablets and smartphones, and that mobile needs to be part of the plan upfront.”
3. Create the right roadmap for your business.  I know I just said to stay focused, but at the same time, you also need to create a roadmap that will serve your needs as things evolve in your business, the market and with the competition. As Barbara Schiffman advises, “You shouldn’t just put a tactical band-aid on the problem. You need enough detail to figure out the real problems, solve for those today, but also look ahead to the future, and the types of problems that could arise.” Keep in mind that this is your roadmap, for your business. Just as there are many different entry points, the roadmap for each business will be different. “At the end of the day, it’s all about what will deliver the best business ROI for your company,” notes Shiffman.
4. Decode data requirements. Take time up front to think through what data your business needs to enable better decision-making. What data are you drawing on today for decision-making and business processes? Where is the data, and how can you make it more accurate and usable? What data are you missing that you need, and how can you get it? Once you have a clear picture of the key data sources you need to pull from, you can start to figure out which tools you’ll need for the job. If you’re like many SMBs, you probably have data in different silos, such as an internal financials application and a cloud-based HR or CRM solution. Integrating these data sources is likely an investment you’ll need to make. As Brendan McGuire advises, “Data silos are inconsistent, expensive to support, cause errors. When you have an integrated data store, and you use that for analytics, it doesn’t impact your transactional systems. You use that to do any level of reporting, build dashboards, create mobile interfaces.”
5. Evaluate industry-specific solutions. While horizontal solutions may fit the bill in some cases, tailor-made, industry-specific solutions and a solution provider with expertise in your industry can often save time, money and a lot of aggravation. As Jesse McNulty explained, “There is tremendous change occurring in the healthcare industry as payment models shift from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance or full risk. There are many nuances, for instance, to areas such as managing chronic disease populations, and healthcare organizations have very specific metrics that they need to monitor to improve business performance against them.” Having a pre-configured solution that integrates the internal and external data, structured and unstructured, into one location, and addresses specific healthcare needs with healthcare terminology and business practices helps save clients time and money. According to McNulty, “This enables us to get a client’s electronic medical records (EMR) system connected to and running on our Chronic Disease Management analytics in as little as two weeks.”
6. Find a partner that provides comprehensive services. Because most SMBs will take an incremental approach, it’s important to seek out comprehensive services in this rapidly evolving area. Look for solution providers that offer consulting, and implementation and support services, and demonstrate a deep commitment to establishing ongoing relationships with their customers. However, since no one provider is ever likely to be able to do it all, in this volatile space, selecting a vendor that’s part of a strong ecosystem is also important. Being part of a bigger ecosystem gives solution providers the knowledge and training they need to stay ahead of the big data learning curve, and improve the offerings and services they provide to you.

Perspective
As all investment literature warns, past performance in not a guarantee of future success. Just ask Blockbuster, which was blindsided by consumers’ shifting preferences for renting movies; RIM BlackBerry, which underestimated how much the bring your own device (BYOD) trend would impact its smartphone sales to businesses; or Energizer, which missed the boat on how fast the sales of single-use, disposable batteries was dropping.

For most SMBs, being able to mine untapped data for business benefits is still at the aspirational stage. But now is the time to seriously consider what impact big data and analytics will have for your business, your customers and your industry. Think about trends you see taking shape—and even about the ones that you can now only imagine. What information and insights would help you capitalize on these trends? Likewise, what information are you missing that puts the business at risk?

Clearly, the perfect storm is taking shape as data volume, variety and velocity continue soar ahead, almost guaranteeing that the businesses that can harness it to their advantage will benefit, and those that don’t will be blindsided.

This is the second of a three-part blog series by SMB Group and sponsored by IBM that examines big data and its implications for SMBs. The first post, Is Big Data Relevant for SMBs?, parses through the underlying trends and hype surrounding big data, and what is important and relevant for SMBs. In my next and final post in this series, I’ll talk about ways that you can get the conversation going and the questions you need to ask to help your business move ahead.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 10th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Ariba, an SAP Company, and Discover Financial Services today unveiled Ariba Pay. The new service, to be offered by Ariba, is expected to transform B2B payments by eliminating paper transactions, providing better visibility into cash flow, and producing rich remittance information that improves reconciliation processes for buyers and sellers.

The cloud-based service. announced at the Ariba LIVE conference, will combine the applications and insights embedded in the Ariba Network and deliver them through a trusted and secure global payments infrastructure to streamline and enhance settlement and reconciliation of business commerce. The service is expected to be generally available in 2014. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“It’s the classic joke: The check is in the mail. But few companies find it funny,” said Kevin Costello, president, Ariba. “Buyers are drowning in paper, and sellers have no idea when—or how much—they will be paid. AribaPay will effectively eliminate these issues.”

AribaPay will provide a way for buyers to create purchase orders, receive invoices, and send payments, while sellers receive more-detailed remittance information in a fast, secure, electronic environment.

Improving commerce
"Ariba and Discover are seizing the opportunity to digitize a share of the estimated $30 trillion in B2B payments that are still mostly made with paper checks,” said Roger Hochschild, president and chief operating officer for Discover. “Discover is broadening its network capabilities and infrastructure and choosing diverse business partners like Ariba to move beyond facilitating payments to enabling and improving business commerce.”

For buyers and sellers connected to the Ariba Network, AribaPay will deliver data that shows what payments represent at the invoice and line-item level, fueling faster, more accurate reconciliation on both sides.

Other benefits include:

• Lower processing cost
• Richer remittance advice
• Reduced fraud risk
• Elimination of paper checks and invoices
• Fewer payments lost to escheatment
• Ability to track and trace transactions
• Faster reconciliation and dispute resolution

To learn more about AribaPay and the benefits it is expected to deliver, visit: www.aribapay.com

By: Stuart Coetzee, Business Development Manager, TISSL Posted: 9th May 2013 Copyright TISSL © 2013

TISSL’s Stuart Coetzee is convinced more and more people are trying to eat healthier while dining out. He recommends that restaurants use their EPoS solution to shed pounds off their clients’ waistline and put pounds onto their balance sheet.

While the drastic weight loss resolutions we all make from time to time may be short-lived, the overall shift towards healthier eating is here to stay. More and more people say healthy menu options are important when deciding where to eat out. So, with better weather just around the corner (the eternal optimist!), it’s a great time for restaurants to position themselves as an alternative to a fridge full of packaged meals, diet milkshakes and lettuce.

Add healthy alternatives
Using your EPoS system, you can easily modify your menu by adding new items or by creating a separate ‘health-conscious’ menu. For example, with a Menu Maintenance function, restaurant owners can customise and manage multiple menus and then easily access them from a button on their terminals. And, by clearly identifying healthier alternatives on your menu, diners will have an easier time placing their orders and sticking to their goals.

Provide nutritional information
Technology has made it much easier for restaurants to have dynamic menus, allowing them to adapt their products to changing consumer trends. For instance, fast food outlets can use digital menu boards to highlight updated menus and detail calorie and fat content. Even if some of your menu items aren't exactly heart-healthy, you'll be doing your customers a favour by letting them know up-front. If these digital displays aren't appropriate in your restaurant, consider incorporating nutritional content into your printed menus, or make it clear that this information is available on request.

If you’re using your EPoS system for online or mobile ordering, then these platforms can be used as a supplement to your in-house menu. Why not give users access to nutritional information on your online ordering site and, if you have a mobile ordering app, use the item description area to list dish contents and identify healthy choices?

Inform your customers
Taking steps to add healthier alternatives to your menu is only half the battle. You can add as many low-calorie dishes as you want, but if no one knows about them, don't expect to see results. So, use your EPoS database to email customers about your new and improved menu offerings. You could even provide helpful tips that direct them on how to dine out healthily at your restaurant. To make the experience a bit less painful, why not run a wellness promotion, such as offering a coupon or discount when diners order a certain number of items off of your low-calorie menu? Then use your EPoS system to track spend.

Track your progress
Whilst you want your customers to get leaner and fitter, you still need to remain profitable, and that means making sure your efforts are generating sales. Use your EPoS reporting functions to measure the results of your promotions and menu additions, and then use that data to determine if you want to follow-up with a similar campaign next year.

As an example, you can use your ‘Sales by Range’ report to view daily and weekly sales totals for healthy starters. This report can be run for any time and date criteria you specify, making it easy to keep track of revenues. If you want to focus on certain menu items in a department, you could also use our Movement Report to observe sales statistics by minute, hour, day, week, month or year.

Be flexible
It can be a bit trying for waiting staff and kitchen staff when customers try to customise dishes. However, with the multi-column modifiers that your EPoS solution provides, it’s easy to make order adjustments without having to switch from one screen to another. Staff can add or remove condiments and side orders and enter special prep instructions, allowing for more accurate order entry and happier customers.

Do you agree with Stuart’s views on using your EPoS system in this way? Do you have experiences to share? Leave a comment below.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 8th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Every year, I search for a common theme at Infosec Europe, but this year it was not so immediately obvious. There were no large clouds hanging above the exhibition hall and many of the largest vendors were absent, their places taken by innovative start-ups.

Yet, under the covers, there were two major themes that many of the vendors that I spoke to talked about—APTs (Advanced Persistant Threats) and the need for continuous monitoring. In fact, these two things go hand in hand.

First, we need to be clear what an APT is, and what it is not. What it is not is a super virus. That is not what the 'A', or advanced, in APT refers to. Whilst it is true that the word advanced does apply in terms of the use of a blended threat with many moving parts, it is rather better applied to those groups with advanced capabilities that are behind such exploits, which is being seen in ever larger numbers. And it is not only government agencies, defence contractors or large organisations with significant volumes of sensitive information that need to be worried. Rather, many victims of such attacks are not the final target, but rather the conduit into a larger organisation such as a business partner that they supply to. Anyone can be a victim.

The actors behind APTs tend to be highly organised, with significant resources at their disposal that rival those of many sizeable organisations. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant recently published a report regarding the resources and modus operandi of a group that it calls APT1, which is just one of more than 20 APT groups that it knows of with their origins in China. It states that the APT1 organisation has been conducting a cyber espionage campaign since 2006 in which nearly 150 organisations have been targeted, spanning 20 different industries. APT1 has a well-established attack methodology that has been refined over the years and which is designed to steal large volumes of intellectual property from targeted organisations. According to Mandiant, it is staffed by hundreds, if not thousands, of operators, with staff required to be proficient in IT security, computer network operations and English. Its widespread presence can be seen in the fact that it has established a minimum of 937 command and control servers hosted on 849 distinct IP addresses in 13 countries.

The 'P' in APT refers to persistent as criminal organisations behind APTs look to establish and maintain a presence on the networks they target, attempting to hide their tracks to avoid being detected. On average, APT1 maintains access to victim networks for 365 days, although the longest period of time that has been observed was four years and ten months. Many of its attacks successfully stole large volumes of intellectual property. From Mandiant's observations, just one organisation alone suffered the loss of 6.5 terabytes of compressed data over a ten-month period. The sort of information that has been taken in such attacks includes technology blueprints, proprietary manufacturing processes, test results, business plans, pricing documents, partnership agreements, and emails and contact lists from executives at the victim organisations.

Shortly after Infosec, I discussed issues surrounding APTs with Adrian Culley, global technical consultant for technology vendor Damballa and formerly a detective in the computer crime division of Scotland Yard. Culley states that APTs are not a new phenomenon, but have actually been around since 1993, when the number of personal computers in use began to soar and the first networks other than those designed for academia or the ARPANET network came into widespread use. He states that nation states and criminal organisations around the world are seriously studying, if not investing heavily in APT techniques.

So how do organisations respond to the threat? There are only three states in which data can exist—data can be at rest, where it is in storage; it can be in use, where it is active and can be constantly changed; and it can be in motion, which is data that is moving around a network. Forensics around data at rest is used to look for patterns in stored data that aim to retrace paths to see how something occurred, but criminals deploying APTs are well versed in forensic techniques and go to a lot of trouble to cover their tracks so that they cannot be traced. Investigating data in use is tricky owing to the constant changes made and is difficult to track at enterprise scale.

So that only leaves data in motion, which is easier to track as all communications can be intercepted. APTs are characterised by their need to 'phone home' to a command and control centre housed on a server. Therefore, it makes sense to continuously monitor all network communications in real time, looking for all violations of policy, such as when an advanced threat is trying to phone home, and to block all such exploits as they occur. Culley likens such capabilities to a fire sprinkler system for the network, whereby a sprinkler is deployed for each node in the network, putting out fires locally as they occur.

Proactive capabilities such as continuous monitoring will greatly add to an organisation's detection capabilities, using techniques such as behavioural profiling that can detect more advanced threats that those using signatures for known threats alone. According to Culley, APTs represent a paradigm shift in the way we need to view security. These advanced attacks and the new threat vectors, such as mobile device usage and ever-more interactive web applications, mean that security controls placed at the perimeter based on static rule sets are no longer sufficient as sophisticated attackers will go out of their way to circumvent such controls. Rather, we need to be looking at everything that is moving around the network, actively looking for anything that constitutes abnormal behaviour to prevent APTs from communicating out and stealing valuable information.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 8th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

One of the largest IT and security technology vendors in the market, McAfee is finally looking to take its place in the identity and access management (IAM) market. However, as a newcomer to this market, its products already provide some robust capabilities. This is because they were developed and previously sold by Intel, which completed its acquisition of McAfee in early 2011. It is now providing cohesion around its products, rebranding those from Intel under the McAfee brand. There will be more to come.

McAfee is not trying to reinvent the wheel by developing another on-premise offering as there are plenty of those to choose from. Rather, it is embracing the need of organisations to ensure that IAM capabilities are extended out to external applications and users, interfacing with corporate directories and on-premise IAM systems from other vendors. In the first public announcement in April 2013, McAfee introduced two products in this area—McAfee One Time Password and McAfee Cloud Single Sign On—as well as a centre of excellence devoted to identity that aims to provide customers, prospects and partners with the latest information and the ability to interact with McAfee on issues related to IAM.

Stating that "identity is an integral component of an enterprise security strategy," McAfee's IAM capabilities are being positioned as a core enabling part of its Security Connected framework, which is designed to provide organisations with a centralised mechanism for risk mitigation and for better aligning security with business initiatives. With capabilities covering network security, information security, security management, endpoint security, and solutions from its partner community, the Security Connected framework covers needs from protecting the data centre to enabling social media and the consumerisation of the workforce. It runs the gamut from securing critical infrastructure, through fixed-function devices, to mobile devices. It covers business needs from protecting resources from internal threats to neutralising advanced malware.

McAfee states that its strategy is to build trusted networks of identifiable people and services and its strengths lie in the integration with a wide range of security controls, as well as its ePolicy Orchestrator central management platform. By establishing itself as a player in the IAM market, it is a big step closer towards achieving that ambition.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 7th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Dell Software has delivered Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition to extend the depth and breadth of managing and optimizing server virtualization as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and their joint impact on such IT resources as storage.

Building on the formerly named Quest vFoglight Pro virtualization management solution, Dell re-branded vFoglight to Foglight for Virtualization to make it the core platform to the Foglight family. Foglight is not sitting still either. Improvements this year move beyond monitoring support for VMware View VDI, to later support for VMware vCloud Director, OpenStack, and Citrix Xen VDI. [Disclosure: Dell Software and WMware are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The higher value from such ecosystem and heterogeneous management support is the ability for virtualization server and system administrators to comprehensively optimize various flavors of data-center server virtualization, as well as the major VDI types, with added capabilities to track and analyze performance from the application level all the way to the server and storage hardware level. This week's announcements have also shown a spotlight on the recently updated Foglight for Storage Management 2.5.

“With Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition, Dell is showing its commitment to offering a  solution that encompasses all aspects of virtual infrastructure performance monitoring and management, built on a platform that can scale as the infrastructure grows,” said Steve Rosenberg, general manager for Performance Monitoring, Dell. “This new release expands Foglight’s ability not only to monitor the additional infrastructure area of VDI, but also to correlate metrics from VDI with performance for applications, the virtual layer, the network, and underlying servers and storage.”

Dell Software also last week released a series of BYOD-targeted products and services, which are related to the better VDI management capabilities. That's because many enterprises and mid-market firms that are tasked with moving quickly to BYOD are using VDI to do it.

With the increasing adoption of VMware View in virtualized data centers (including for MSPs), VDI support is fast becoming a mainstay for today’s IT departments and managed service providers. VDI and server virtual machines (VMs) often utilize the same hardware components. Yet, both of these virtualized infrastructures serve different users and have separate requirements and resource demands, explained John Maxwell, vice president of product management for performance monitoring for virtualization, networking,storage and hardware at Dell Software.

Single-source solution
As a result, VDI and server VMs require dedicated performance monitoring systems. However, these systems must also be connected, because so many underlying resources are often shared. Agent-based Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition offers virtualization administrators a more single-source solution that not only identifies and fixes performance issues within VMware View, but continues to run all features available in vOPS Server Enterprise with no effect on overall vCenter performance.

Foglight for Storage Management 2.5 has been released as an optional "cartridge" to Foglight for Virtualization. Foglight for Storage Management now offers physical storage performance reporting in addition to virtual reporting, providing customers with complete "VM to physical LUN" visibility. 

Additional enhancements in this release include LUN latency reporting, NPIV support, and the ability for customers to purchase the product either as a stand-alone cartridge, or as an optional cartridge to Foglight for Virtualization.

Additionally, Foglight is a unified performance monitoring platform that allows individual product solutions, delivered as sets of pluggable “cartridges,” to run stand-alone or to interoperate. Each individual product delivers best-of-breed functionality to the admin for that area, while simultaneously integrating with other cartridges to deliver true end-to-end monitoring from end-user experience to the underlying storage and server hardware layers, and everything in between, said Maxwell.

Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition 6.8 is available now for a 45-day trial from www.quest.com. Pricing starts at $799 per socket. Foglight for Storage Management 2.5 is also available now for a 45-day trial from www.quest.com.  Pricing starts at $499 per socket.

Because Foglight is built on a common architecture to support the cartridges, it seems likely that it will move from an on-premises only offering to a SaaS-based version too, especially to support cloud- and MSP-based VDI offerings, and also to manage hybrid VDI implementations.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

In order to be effective, a security analytics system needs to integrate relevant information from multiple sources, be able to determine the relative importance of different events seen in the information, and project the state of the system based on those events. The model must be accurate and must be updated regularly and in real time to reflect current events so that an organisation can gauge the status of all systems and devices on the network in real time, and thus gain a better awareness of what the current situation is to aid in better decision making.

Security analytics platforms should be based on a data-centric architecture. All systems should contribute data to a central collection point, with the data normalised so that it appears to be from a single source. The central collection point should be a centralised database, which all applications required can access, regardless of the distributed nature of the system. The central collection point should deploy data-centric middleware that aggregates, correlates, cleanses and processes all sensor data in real time as situational awareness is dependent on the real time nature of the information collected.

Event processing technology provides a way of tracking and analysing information sent from sensors to the central database regarding events that occur so that actions can be taken when an event indicates that there is a problem, such as a sensor broadcasting information that a temperature threshold has been exceeded. For distributed systems such as sensors, a fairly new technology is complex event processing, which can collect event feeds from multiple sources and can analyse large volumes of data in real time to provide a fast response when problems are encountered.

Complex event processing technologies not only perform traditional database and data mining processes such as data validation, cleaning, enrichment and analysis, but can also query, filter and transform data from multiple sensors to enable events to be detected in real time. They provide the ability to automate pattern monitoring, which allows events to be correlated so that event response mechanisms can be developed and critical events can be isolated so that efficient remediation can be taken. This will allow such events to be prioritised according to their criticality so that those with the highest impact can be given top priority, while at the same time automating many of the tasks to reduce the burden on human operators.

In order that those events are understandable to human operators, the technology should provide visualisation capabilities that provides comprehensive visibility over all events that occur and that provides the option of observing specific events of interest in greater detail, as well as presenting data at a high level for overall awareness of the situation. It should give an aggregated view of all events from all sources in the network and should provide added context to events, such as time and location.

For providing context to information, metadata is as important as the data itself and should be captured by the system as this provides a far richer source of context for the data than merely the data itself. It will also allow data to be compared directly across heterogeneous networks, allowing like to be compared with like. Not only should the system capture all associated metadata, but it should also include this information in its analysis of the data.

One further requirement of security analytics platforms is that, although they should collect event data in real time, they should also store historical data in an easily retrievable form. An example of why both real time event information should be correlated with historical information can be seen in the use of such data for predictive maintenance for equipment on which sensors have been mounted. Continuous real time monitoring will show the current status of the equipment, but only through correlation with historical information can an operator determine whether or not it is operating within normal bounds. For example, a sensor displaying a high temperature may indicate that the equipment is malfunctioning, but historic trends may indicate that the temperature tends to increase when the output of that equipment is increased to meet spikes in demand. This will help operators to take better informed decisions as to when maintenance is actually required or other action needs to be taken. Correlating historic and real time information will also enable the organisation to prevent unexpected equipment failure by spotting long-term trends in usage, aiding in asset utilisation and even extending the lifetime of the equipment by ensuring that it is in good working order.

By correlating historic and real time information, the data can show trends that can be used to check against best practice policies and security controls so that refinements can be made to the system and compliance with regulatory requirements can be seen over time, rather than just as a snapshot in time. Operators will also be better able to detect and respond to security incidents, with all information cross-correlated for early breach detection and notification, and historic information will also allow for forensic investigation of incidents that have occurred so that the organisation can learn from them and take steps to remedy such situations.

Security analytics platforms that collect, monitor, analyse and report on information from throughout the organisation will be a great aid in providing the visibility that organisations need across extended networks in order to make more informed decisions and better manage the overall risks that they face. 

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Collaboration will take center stage next week when Ariba, an SAP company, holds its Ariba LIVE conference in Washington, DC. In an effort to fuel greater collaboration between companies through new capabilities and network-derived intelligence, Ariba will announce an enhanced set of tools, as well as a joint offering with Dell Boomi.

Leading the list of enhanced Ariba tools are:

• Ariba Spot Buy. With the integration of Ariba Procure-to-Pay and Ariba Discovery, buyers can quickly discover and qualify new sources of supply for one-off, time-sensitive, or hard-to-find purchases.
• Ariba Recommendations. Through new services that push network-derived intelligence and community-generated content directly into the context of specific business processes and use cases, companies can make more informed decisions at the point of transaction or activity. “Suppliers You May Like,” for example, helps guide buyers to qualified suppliers based on a host of inputs, including buyer requirements, supplier capabilities and performance ratings, and how often other buyers on the network have awarded business to them.

“Just as consumers tap into personal networks like Facebook, Twitter and Amazon.com to connect with friends and family, share and shop, companies are leveraging digital networks to more efficiently engage with their trading partners and collaborate across the entire commerce process,” said Sanish Mondkar, Ariba Chief Product Officer. “This new, more social and connected way of operating is redefining the way business is done. But it demands a new set of tools and processes that are only possible at scale in a truly networked environment. Ariba is delivering these tools today.”

Spot buys—or unplanned purchases of unique items—account for more than 40 percent of a company’s total spend. Spot buys are challenging because they require quick turnaround, and buyers generally lack efficient or effective methods to source them. [Disclosure: Ariba and Dell are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Selective leveraging
According to independent research firm The Hackett Group, “by selectively leveraging software tools in areas like supplier discovery and online bidding, organizations can reduce the time it takes to find the right suppliers from weeks to days or even hours and drive cost reductions of between two percent and five percent on average.”

Nearly one million selling organizations across more than 20,000 product categories are connected to the Ariba Network. And they have access to the more than 13 million leads worth over $5 billion that are posted each year by more than half of the Global 2000 who are connected to the network as well.

New features added to Ariba Discovery allow selling organizations to get the right messages to the right audience and convert these leads into sales.

• Profile Pitch. Sellers can create highly targeted profiles and messaging based on industry, commodity, territory and other factors to promote themselves to active buyers. 
• Badges and Social Sharing. Selling organizations can further raise their visibility by adding Ariba badges to their company websites and/or email signatures, defining vanity URLs for their company profiles and sharing their public URLs and postings on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Pre-packaged integration
Ariba and Dell Boomi will announce that they are teaming to deliver pre-packaged integration as a service offerings to help selling organizations drive new levels of efficiency and effectiveness across their operations.

Designed to simplify and speed integration to the Ariba Network, the Ariba Integration Connector, powered by Dell Boomi Integration Packs, enables companies to collaborate more efficiently and drive game-changing improvements in productivity and performance.  The first connector integrates with Intuit QuickBooks. Additional connectors to enable sellers who own Microsoft Dynamics AX, Netsuite and Sage Peachtree solutions to quickly and easily integrate with the Ariba Network are planned to be released later this year.

“From the beginning, the Ariba Network has been built to be an open platform to connect all companies using any system to foster more efficient business-to-business collaboration,” said Tim Minahan, senior vice president, network strategy, Ariba. “With these new connectors, we are making it even easier for sales organizations of all sizes to fully automate their customer transactions and collaborations over the Ariba Network—directly from their preferred CRM, ERP and accounting systems.”

The Ariba Integration Connector removes the barriers to system-to-network integration by eliminating complexity. An out-of-the-box solution delivered as a service, the connector provides a fast, easy and affordable way for companies to connect to the Ariba Network—regardless of the back-end systems they use. The connector currently supports integration with Intuit QuickBooks Desktop 2009-2013, Premier and Enterprise for US, UK, and CA Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

The connector is available and in use today. To learn more about Ariba’s Connection solutions and the benefits they can deliver to your organization, visit http://www.ariba.com/services/connection-solutions.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

MapR has been very busy recently. Since closing a new round of funding in mid-March it has announced a partnership with Onepoint IQ to provide certified MapR training across Europe, it has opened an office in France (with executives to populate it) to add to the ones it already had in the UK and Germany, it has partnered with Canonical to make the MapR distribution of Hadoop available on Ubuntu, it has made its source code available via GitHub, it has announced the availability of MapR M7 and, finally, it has stated that it will be distributing (this is currently in beta) LucidWorks Search (which effectively does for Lucene/Solr what MapR does for Hadoop, which is to say that it provides enterprise grade security, user management and so forth). As a part of its latest funding round the company has also stated its intention to expand into the Asia-Pacific region.

It is clear that MapR is expanding outwards (perhaps I should say scaling out?) rapidly. That seems like good strategy to me. I think there's no question that MapR has established itself as the leading independent provider of Hadoop distributions for the enterprise and that's fine if you think of Hadoop as an emerging market. However, I think we have now got to the point where Hadoop has emerged from its chrysalis and there are growing numbers of serious deployments rather than just people trying it out. This creates a different market dynamic.

What we've seen recently is IBM launch its PureData System for Hadoop and EMC launch HAWQ (Hadoop with [SQL] query), just to mention a couple of things, and the message is clear: the big boys are getting serious about Hadoop. Well, they were always serious but now they are walking the walk. This has important implications for MapR: it has to establish itself as a serious competitor to the likes of IBM if it is not to fade away and dwindle. The sort of activity it has recently been busy with is exactly the sort of development, not to mention marketing noise, which it needs to get into this position. Of course, it may get acquired anyway in the end but that could be counted as a success story as far as MapR is concerned.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Salesforce.com is about a lot more than customer relationship management these days. Perhaps one of the most interesting facets of the product is salesforce.com as a trusted platform for enterprise cloud computing; together with Salesforce AppExchange, which it describes as "the world's leading business apps marketplace". Although, as I think that most businesses still run on in-premises hardware behind the firewall even now, I'm not sure how much real competition there is for that title (unless Apple and Android see themselves as supporting business apps, as they almost certainly do).

Anyway, whatever the status quo now, I really do think that a switch has clicked over and most people are prepared to consider, at least, trusting cloud apps these days - which makes developing them an interesting career choice for developers.

To stimulate this opportunity further Salesforce announced a 5 million Euro challenge to start-up developers at its Customer Company Tour in London this week. Start-ups will get the chance to approach investors with their ideas for apps at a series of Innovation Challenge events throughout Europe (September to November 2013), negotiate investment funding - and then the winners will be able to build, package and sell their apps on the Salesforce AppExchange.

This idea apparently even attracts the endorsement of Boris Johnson, hardly my first idea of a tech guru: "London is brimming with tech talent which is breeding a wave of innovative start-ups with the potential to grow fast", he says. "Salesforce.com's Innovation Challenge presents a fantastic opportunity for London's silicon entrepreneurs to take their business to the next level of success". That is probably true - although, in my opinion, London's developers may face stiff competition from elsewhere in Europe (or even just from elsewhere in the UK)...

Of course, to share in this investment pot, the apps will have to be developed on or ported to the Saleforce.com cloud platform. I guess Saleforce.com is a success story, so that won't worry developers too much, much as being a Microsoft developer never worried anyone much, but in these days of cross-platform development for Android and Apple, I guess I wouldn't want my apps to be only on Salesforce AppExchange.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Talking with Michael Madden, General Manager, and David Hodgson of CA's Mainframe group, I was touched by their infectious (and, in my opinion, justified) enthusiasm. It's also a good sign that if Mike Gregoire (CA Technologies' new CEO) is teaching CA Technologies about SaaS, CA Technologies is returning the favour with some interesting education on the future of the mainframe

Big news, for me, is the port of CA AppLogic, an application virtualisation tool, to z mainframes. What Application Virtualisation means is the encapsulation of a software application so that it runs independently of the underlying operating system - the virtualised application isn't installed, in the usual sense, but it executes (and appears to the user) as though it is. The application thinks it is writing to or reading from physical hardware but, in fact, it is writing to the encapsulating software layer. This aids provisioning and can reduce the complexity of supporting different platform variations.

As well as CA AppLogic, some varieties of Windows offer limited application virtualisation. Other competing products include Citrix XenApp, Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization, Microsoft Application Virtualization, and VMware ThinApp.

Now that CA Applogic runs on zEnterprise under Linux, you go a step further in the hardware abstraction story of the sort put forward by IBM with PureSystems. I like the PureSystems story - buy a cloud application platform in a box, never mind the technology - but the hardware underneath has to be rock solid and I have always wondered why IBM didn't put z under PureSystems (well, marketing, I suspect).

With CA AppLogic for z, you can make something that looks very like PureSystems from the business' point of view (the underlying technology/architecture is entirely different, of course) and sell virtualised application services on an ultra-reliable, ultra-resilient manageable z box - which may be in a cloud somewhere and provisioned using DevOps techniques. That's a pretty cool (resilient) platform and, shared in a cloud (remember, z is architected for multi-tenenting), it could be cheap too.

Now, I wonder if anyone is looking at actually marketing anything like that?

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 1st May 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

There’s little doubt that big data is the latest 'big thing' in the IT industry. But for many small and medium business (SMB) decision-makers, big data is a somewhat fuzzy term. Ask any number of them what big data means, and you’re likely to get different definitions. Making matters worse, the “big” in big data, along with endless discussions of petabytes and zettabytes, make many SMBs skeptical that big data is relevant for their businesses.

So it’s not hard to make the case that big data has become an over-hyped and poorly understood catch-all phrase. So what does big data really mean, and what are the implications for SMBs? When we parse through the underlying trends and hype surrounding data, what’s left that is really important and relevant for SMBs?

The realities driving big data buzz

The big part of big data is easy to understand. Basically, the volume and variety of digitized data is increasing exponentially. Think about how much and how many kinds of information have moved from physical to digital form just over the last several years. Doctors have moved from paper charts to electronic medical records; merchants have moved from paper credit card imprinters to POS terminals to virtual terminals to mobile payment devices. Movies have moved from Blockbuster to Netflix; and photos have moved from Kodak to Facebook and Instagram. 'Smart' machines—from traffic sensors to seismographs—are creating entirely new digital data streams as well.

As a result, researchers report that we have already created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and that 90% of it has been generated in the last two years alone. While quintillions are hard to wrap your head around, these facts make the concept more accessible:

• 150,000 new URLs are created each day.
• Twitter sees roughly 58 million tweets every day, and has more than 554 million accounts.
• 160 million emails are sent every 60 seconds.
• Over 20 billion credit card payments are processed annually in the U.S.
• Power companies are moving from physical meters to digital smart meter readings, and going from monthly reading to gathering meter information every 15 minutes. This adds up to 96 million reads per day for every million meters—or a 3,000-fold increase in data.

The term "big data" refers to having the ability to dig in to this growing data avalanche more effectively and quickly with tools that make it easier to store, manage, analyze and act on information.

Big is relative when it comes to big data

According to findings from the IBM Institute for Business Value and Said Business School, University of Oxford, most large enterprises define the "big" in big data as databases with more than 100 terabytes, while most mid-market companies (less than 1,000 employees) consider anything more than 1 terabyte as big.

The fact of the matter is, big is a relative term—relative to the amount of information that your organization needs to sift through to find the insights you need to operate the business more proactively and profitably. Basically, if the data set is too big for your company to effectively manage and get insights from, then you’re facing a big data challenge.

This isn’t just a large enterprise problem. In SMB Group studies, SMB decision-makers repeatedly cite "getting better insights from the data we already have" as a top business challenge. SMBs may not be dealing with terabytes of data, but many are finding that tools that used to suffice—such as Excel spreadsheets—fall short even when it comes to analyzing internal transactional databases.

Welcome to the insight economy

With the amount and variety of digitized growing exponentially, these challenges and requirements will only increase.

Business that can find the right needles in the data haystack more quickly, easily and reliably than competitors can reap enormous market advantages. SMB Group’s 2012 Routes to Market Study shows that SMBs that have deployed business intelligence and analytics solutions are 51% more likely than peers to expect revenues to rise. Likewise, in the IBM/Oxford University study, three out of five mid-market respondents using business and analytics solutions reported that they are realizing significant advantages, most notably to "identify new opportunities in the marketplace" and to "understand and respond to customers better."

Take the example of the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. With one of the lowest public subsidies in the U.S., the zoo needed to increase attendance and boost food and retail sales to operate profitably. But the zoo was unable to easily access the data—which resided on different systems—so it could plan how to do this. The zoo implemented a business intelligence solution to get better insight into customer trends and its own operations, and answer questions such as, "How many people spend money outside of admissions costs?" and "What time of day do ice cream sales peak?" By answering these questions and others, the zoo was able to increase retail and food sales by 35%, save more than $140,000 per year in marketing dollars through more targeted, successful campaigns, and increase overall zoo attendance by 50,000 in one year.

Unfortunately, many SMBs are lagging large enterprises in this area. The IBM/Oxford Study revealed that the gap between large enterprises and the mid-market is increasing, and the SMB Group 2012 Routes to Market Study shows that the smaller the company, the less likely they are to use or plan to use BI solutions.

Perspective
Businesses have always needed the ability to measure critical success metrics and make sound business decisions. Big data solutions are designed to help businesses to do this in a world where the volume and variety of data is growing at breakneck speed.

When you look at the realities that are driving the big data bandwagon, its clear that, long after the buzz fades, these realities will have a long-lasting impact on how businesses of all sizes operate. Over time, the performance gap will widen between businesses that can readily get the insights they need, when they need them, and those that can’t.

That said, figuring out where and how to start isn’t easy, especially for SMBs who are often resource-constrained. The good news, however, is that this is definitely an area where you want to take small steps first. In the next blog of this series, we’ll draw on conversations with IBM business partners to learn how they are helping SMBs to chart the big data journey.

This is the first of a three-part blog series by SMB Group and sponsored by IBM that examines big data and its implications for SMBs. In the next post, I’ll discuss how IBM business partners are helping SMBs take practical steps to put big data to work for their businesses.

By: Helena Schwenk, Principal Analyst, MWD Advisors Posted: 1st May 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

In an effort to cement its position in the social marketing space, Adobe recently announced some key enhancements to its Adobe Social product suite during its Digital Marketing Summit in London. In particular the company has incorporated predictive analytics into its social publishing product to help marketers get visibility into what content, keywords and post timings will lead to a better level of engagement, for example in terms of Facebook likes and comments.

Behind the scenes the new enhancements use sentiment analysis and predictive text mining algorithms to analyse the types of words, images, links and ad formats that work best with an audience and uses them to build a model that predicts the estimated range for the amount of likes, comments and shares a post will receive. This rather helpful feature will make it easier for marketers to optimise their content since many fly blind when trying to assess how impactful a post may be. Having visibility into the predicted ‘performance’ of a post adds some much needed visibility, as it enables social marketers to tweak, adjust and hopefully optimise their social marketing content before it goes live.

In addition, the tool can track and predict other marketing metrics if instructed to, as well as give recommendations about the time of a post; for example by shifting the scheduled slot if, for instance, a similar post has just been published. Similarly the tool includes a degree of self-learning since it can learn from previous actions and refine its predicted recommendations based on the results of previous posts.

In our view social publishing is becoming a necessary discipline for many marketers as they grapple with creating and automating the delivery of content across multiple social networks sites such as Facebook and Twitter at a time when usage continues to rise. As we all know, social remains a key channel for marketers in support of activities such as creating brand awareness, generating demand, increasing engagement, improving targeting and building advocacy. And while Adobe Social isn’t a one-stop-shop for social marketing—it hasn’t, for instance, got an all-round social campaign management component—its ability to steer marketers towards publishing the right social content at the right time nonetheless helps streamline part of this social marketing process.

The new Facebook predictive publishing enhancements are in beta and are due to be released later this summer as part of Adobe Social; other social platforms will follow in due course.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 1st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I've just had a hands-on demo of Huddle (which describes itself as an "enterprise content collaboration platform") with Jonathan Howell (its CTO) and James Pipe (one of its product managers, focused on mobile and desktop). As I've said before, there are limitations to this, as I'm not working on a real collaboration issue at my workplace, but I have used Huddle before (at the BCS) and I do think its redesigned interface is "cool" and supportive. Huddle's promise to provide its users with "just enough" information to let them get their work done seems a reasonable, and achievable, objective.

Huddle provides cross-platform support, which is good. Somebody can make an update on their desktop and the updated content appears on peoples' iPads and iPhones in real time. The permissions and so on needed to make this work seem reasonably flexible and sufficiently powerful - this is an important aspect of collaboration software. People must be able to collaborate on sensitive information and control who sees what - without obtrusive controls that disincentivise collaboration. Huddle seems to do a reasonable job but this is an area in which any purchaser of collaboration software needs to do its own due diligence; with his own staff, collaborating on tasks they are familiar with.

This is where Huddle's "start small and grow success" approach is good (it isn't unique to Huddle, but that doesn't make it any less worthwhile). The conventional approach to implementing collaboration software, often adopted by vendors of licensed software and driven by the IT group, is to install as many licenses as you can afford (often promoted by bulk discounts) and then look for problems to solve with them. Often a lot of these licenses remain as shelfware. In contrast, Huddle's subscription model means that there's an incentive to only buy as much Huddle as you need and get rid of any subscriptions no-one is using. That's a good start, although an organisation can still choose to mess up a subscription model. However, Huddle (according to Chris Boorman, CMO) is adopting an incremental marketing approach - it encourages a customer to install Huddle for a small group with a real need for collaboration and then supplies experienced mentors to help the initial group make this a success. It aims at 'skills transfer' to its customer and to educate 'champions' amongst its initial customers. It then hopes that its initial deployment will grow, with more subscriptions, as the early adopters demonstrate success. If that is what really happens in practice, it should overcome any prejudices about collaboration shelfware.

Another risk-reduction feature of Huddle is its security certifications - if you understand what these mean and don't see them just as a check-box delivering mindless comfort. Huddle has achieved ISO 27001 certification (part of a range of ISO 27000 standards), which does not guarantee security but does provide a framework for a company to implement security around Huddle and gives all stakeholders a common, defined, vocabulary for discussing security issues. Of course, if you understand certification, you'll now be asking about the scope of assessment and when Huddle was last assessed - there's a starting point for this here.

Moreover, Huddle is Pan Government Accredited (PGA) at Impact Level 2 (IL2), which means "based on good commercial standards, centred around a suitably scoped ISO27001 certification", and claims that it is used by 80 per cent of central UK government departments, including the Cabinet Office, Ministry of Justice, Defra and Department for Business Innovation and Skills. This does not mean that "the government says Huddle is totally secure" or anything like that; but it does give users confidence that it is secure enough to accommodate serious work - although you'd want to do more due diligence (especially around physical access on your premises) if you were using it for, say, personal data or anything else where security is critical.

I'm also impressed that Huddle has what it says is a usable and well-documented RESTful API ("this time around, we got our developers to write the documentation first and then produce the API, so we have confidence in the documentation", says Howell). This should allow customers to integrate Huddle collaboration with other software-supported processes - a useful success factor and will allow a Huddle community to develop, sharing third party Huddle utilities and customisations. Huddle is more likely to succeed as part of a larger community including third parties - better a small slice of a large pie than all of a small pie, perhaps. There isn't a formal AppStore for Huddle yet - but who knows?

I think that Huddle sees its main opportunity as failing or less-than-popular SharePoint installations - and it seems to address many of the issues that SharePoint customers report, including the shelfware issue. Nevertheless, SharePoint is a moving target and Microsoft has a history of reinventing its products without necessarily changing their name. I wonder what Microsoft collaboration around Office365 will look like in 2014? I do think the conventional licensing model, especially for collaboration software, is dying (although I'm not stupid enough to predict the actual death-date - in anything to do with IT, a better model co-exists with the old ways for ages).

Unfortunately, I think that some people who failed with SharePoint will also fail with Huddle (and other collaboration solutions) - and for similar reasons, around blame cultures, egos and politics - and will blame the software instead of their organisational/management failings. To end on an optimistic note, however, this is the sort of customer maturity issue Huddle's "start small and grow with success" model might help with - as long as top management buys into and understands collaboration.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 1st May 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

CA is a company with a somewhat chequered past. Two of its CEOs (along with other senior staff) have been accused concerning financial irregularities, and the repercussions around these issues are only just quietening down. The other big challenge for CA is that its name is often extended into "CA, the mainframe software company".

The last but one CEO, John Swainson, did everything he could to put CA on more of an even keel. He uncovered and fixed the majority of the issues around the financial problems, and also oversaw the acquisition of companies that would help CA better position itself in a heterogeneous world of mainframe and distributed computing, with an aim of being just as attractive to those who do not have any mainframe computing in their organisation as those who do.

Swainson moved on, and a stint was carried out as CEO by Bill McCracken, a 'safe pair of hands' who was unlikely to ever set the world on fire.

Now, a new CEO is on board—and it looks like he means to move CA along as fast as he can. Michael Gregoire comes with experience from a line of other technology companies, having been at EDS, PeopleSoft and, latterly, Taleo. His first major appearance in front of the public was at this year's CA World, held in Las Vegas, where he presented his vision in front of several thousand customers, prospects, partners and media, along with being streamed to several thousand more people watching remotely.

Gregoire had to make sure that what he said engaged with prospects while not scaring the existing customers. On the whole, I would say that he probably managed this. His view seems to be that CA has to become not only more cloud-friendly, but to become one of the largest cloud companies around. Further speakers covered how CA was not going to be an infrastructure or platform as a service (I/PaaS) company as such—it would provide tooling that would be used by others who were providing such services. However, when it comes to software as a service (SaaS), then CA's aim is to be there—as fast as possible.

A 'cloud first' strategy will be balanced with providing on-premise solutions to keep the faithful customers happy and also to provide a pathway for these customers to move to cloud as and when it makes sense to them. Over time, CA will offer as much of its portfolio as possible as cloud services.

Under Swainson's tenure, the foundations were laid for CA to acquire a group of companies that positioned it well to deal with cloud computing. 3Tera provided a means of designing and automating the build of functions and applications; Nimsoft provided a means of monitoring and measuring how applications were performing. Wily gave application performance monitoring, and existing software such as Unicenter and Clarity provided additional means of managing what was happening in the cloud—or across a hybrid environment of physical, on-premise systems and different private and public cloud systems. Other acquisitions filled in gaps in CA's portfolio.

On top of these, CA has now acquired Layer 7 Technologies and Nolio, bringing API management and application release management to the game.

The problem for Gregoire could well be one which faced Swainson and McCracken. Yes, CA now has a portfolio of tools that provide it with the capabilities to be a world-leader in hybrid cloud management. Yes, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to pull everything together in a way that gets rid of all the redundant functionality that exists between all the acquired systems. The biggest problem, though, is more prosaic: how to make enough money from an overall offering?

A full, soup-to-nuts offering would use the capabilities of 3Tera to enable a business user to define what they need as a business process and have the basic technical components mapped out. Clarity would provide a timeline and resource management layer to create a 'project' for the work. Layer 7 would then be used to manage the various APIs between the internal and external functions identified by 3Tera and pull the overall composite application together. Nolio would be used to roll out the application as required. Nimsoft and Wily would be used to monitor and self-remediate any issues seen in the running of the application in real time.

Six enterprise systems all working nicely together. But, would you pay the full cost for all six systems? Highly doubtful. 

It is far more likely that, in this case, six times one adds up to no more that around 2.5. Can CA present a solution to the market that is at the right price point, but also keeps its shareholders and Wall Street happy? It is more likely that Gregoire will have to be bull-headed around the issue and face down the shareholders and Wall Street based on the fact that if CA does not meet the issue head-on, then there may be no CA further on down the track.

As it lies, the mainframe still accounts for around 60% of CA's revenues and more than that in profit. The mainframe side of the business cannot be left to fade, but new revenue streams will come through cloud computing.

CA has the arsenal of software to be a leading player in the cloud world. As always, the devil is in the detail: CA has to be able to move this collection of disparate software built up through acquisitions into meaningful packages of function at price points that are attractive to the markets.

Only time will tell if Gregoire is up to this task.

By: Martin Banks, Proprietor, Lian-James Consultancy Posted: 30th April 2013 Copyright Lian-James Consultancy © 2013

An interesting—and arguably important—example of a favourite hobby horse of mine emerged at the recent Intel Software Development conference in Chantilly, France. That hobby horse is the way that technologists get so carried away with the undoubted cleverness of their developments that they sometimes miss the point that, ultimately, it is technology’s application in the real world that is the important factor.

The Intel conference is an annual spring-time event focussing on programming and applications development in the world of parallel computing. To be fair, you can’t get much more technical than that, for parallel processing is largely the domain of supercomputers processing esoteric meteorological, scientific and engineering problems at PetaFLOPS processing speeds (that’s quadrillions of calculations per second).

Except that this now is a 'used to be' scenario. Parallel processing has been creeping into the upper echelons of mainstream computing for a while, but with the advent of cloud computing that creep is getting much faster. Now add in the advent of mainstream big data analytics and the need for parallel processing is fast changing from 'nice to have' to 'essential'.

The combination of big data analytics and the cloud is also happening—it is only a matter of months, and more likely a couple of weeks, before SAP announces that its in-memory analytics engine, HANA, is available as a SaaS delivered service. When that happens, the need for parallel processing power in the cloud will be the only sensible option.

So, here then is Intel, developer of x86, the leading parallel processing architecture. This is also at the heart of most commodity servers used as the basis of cloud infrastructures, where packaged applications and service development environments are commonly found. Despite this congruity, it became clear at the conference that the company sees no need to now move in the direction of building automated development tools for parallel processing applications. This is despite acknowledging that application areas such as big data analytics really do need them.

The argument put forward by the company’s Chief Evangelist for software products, James Reinders, is understandable. Basically, it is that automating development leaves open the possibility of building in processing and operational inaccuracies to code that could spawn and go viral in a parallelised cloud environment. On the face of it that is a very good argument and something certainly to be avoided.

But on the other hand, one of the parallel development tools Intel has produced allows developers to bit-flip—change the state of a single bit in a single byte of code. That would seem to put a good deal of trust into the developer’s hands to get it right.

And on another hand, the company has just released such a packaged-up development solution for a specific problem. This is the new HTML5 Development Environment, for developing apps across a range of different devices. This is aimed to help with issues such as working with different architectures for cross-platform applications, developing for different aspect ratio displays and different user interfaces.

It supports development for iOS, Android, Nook, Amazon, Windows 8 and deployment in the following stores—Apple App Store, Google Play, Nook Store, Amazon Apstore for Android, and Windows Store. It also supports delivery of HTML 5 web applications for Facebook, and Google amongst other environments.

Reinders sees the HTML5 Development Environment as a one-off special case. Personally, I see it as the first of many similar tools, which can then be linked together to build richer, more comprehensive applications and services. For example, the HTML5 tool would make the obvious output/delivery component of a big data analytics service development and orchestration suite for cloud environments. That would appeal to not only big enterprise end users but also every Cloud Service Provider business looking to offer richer levels of customer service and engagement.

I am sure some company will do just this in the not too distant future. But Intel sits here with the skills, the knowledge and the capability to do it right now, yet it seems strangely reluctant. Maybe it is scared of some future anti-trust case for creating and owning the dominant development environment?

If that is the case I’d just suggest they do it and be damned. The need is about to get much more important than the legal implications. And sometimes the law just has to play catch up.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 26th April 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Travel—what once was exotic and exciting has now become a feature of many business people's nightmares. An example is my latest trip—two weeks in Las Vegas covering two different events.

Company number 1 said I should book my own travel. So, on to Virgin Atlantic's website and book the tickets. Easy enough, particularly as I have used the site many times in the past. Next, hotels; I have to book for the first event through the company's agent. However, I have to book for the second event through company number 2. So, I have to wait until I have enough information from both companies to see if I need to change hotels on the Saturday or the Sunday. Still not too much of a problem.

Next, getting to the airport. It's Gatwick, so I need to book a train. Yet another site, but everything is beginning to take shape. Taxis from the airport to the hotel, between hotels and back to the airport? I'll risk it and do that as and when.

Various steps that many of us have to do on a pretty regular basis—and then forget to print out all the bits of paper required for the many different parts of the trip. Plus, standing in line to pick up tickets, to show tickets, to check in, to check out—well, it's all a bit of a bore, really.

In this case, company number 1 was Concur, an on-line provider of expense management software. Its aim is to move towards what it calls "The Perfect Trip"—and it is taking steps that are really helping.

The first step has been in its acquisition of TripIt some time back. TripIt uses what Concur calls "automagical" capabilities to deal with travel—or what I prefer to call "magic elves". As soon as you have an email of any details to do with a trip—flights, hotel or restaurant bookings, whatever—you just forward them on to TripIt's email account and within less than a minute, those details are added to a trip record. It is impressive seeing this happening—for me, I had the train journey, flights and the two hotel reservations all in one record in the cloud so that I had all details to hand throughout the trip.

But, Concur does not want to stop there. In the US, it already has several partnerships that also help in making travel easier. For example, it has an investment in a company called TaxiMagic. If you need a taxi, click on a button on your smartphone, and it will automatically find the nearest taxis to you—and which ones are on your organisation's preferred list. You can then choose which to use and when you leave the taxi, click on another button to automatically pay for the taxi ride along with a tip and then have it put directly onto your expense claim.

Concur also wants to work with travel management companies (TMCs) such as American Express Travel and Carlson in capturing what it calls "open bookings". These are bookings that are made directly by the traveller, missing out the corporate preferred TMC, which can lead to issues when trying to analyse and optimise travel spend. By capturing open bookings, such analysis can still be made. The TMCs can also take on the role of dealing with a duty of care. For example, through another acquisition, Concur captured ConTgo, which enables messages to be sent to travellers based on events that may impact them specifically. For example, let's say that an airline has an unexpected strike. Concur's records know all the corporate travellers who were hoping to be using that airline, and ConTgo can send specific messages to each person with alternative flights or overnight accommodation. With natural or man-made disasters, ConTgo enables fast and effective communication to each traveller giving them the sort of information they will need to deal with the situation.

What else? Concur wants to take as much of the available information around a trip and use it to smooth out processes. It would like to hold all travel tickets as eTickets within its system, so that paperwork becomes less of an issue.

Not only this, but Concur wants to push the use of the smartphone as the centre of the traveller's life. By using wireless (Wi-Fi or near field communication (NFC)), Concur wants to be able to side-step as much of the standing in queues as possible—for example, walk into a hotel and you are already booked in. Get to your room and the phone acts as the room key. Walk into the room and lights, TV, radio and so on are already set to your preferences. Check out by clicking a single button when you are ready. And see everything set out as a formal expense claim that at a click of a button is automatically submitted for you.

Lose the phone? No problem as all the data is in the cloud; get a new phone and everything is back to where it should be again.

The real key for Concur is that it does not aim to 'own' the traveller. It wants to have access to as much data as possible and then make this data available to others so that they can add further value through additional services, such as is happens with TaxiMagic. By data aggregation from the original sources of travel information and open APIs, Concur is providing a good platform for dealing with the many issues a traveller has to contend with. 

Backed with Concur's travel and expense management engine, the future for travellers could be far more smooth. Will it ever be back to being exotic and exciting? After two weeks in Las Vegas, I'm the wrong person to ask. 

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 26th April 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

BLU Acceleration has been introduced with the latest version of IBM DB2 (10.5), for Linux, UNIX and Windows and some elements of the technology have also been included in the Informix Data Warehouse Accelerator.

It is based on a combination of parallel vector processing, dynamic in-memory caching, columnar storage, a query technique known as data skipping and extended compression. It eliminates the need for indexes and aggregation (therefore removing the tuning necessary for these artifacts) and without requiring any change to existing SQL or the schema. It operates on the data while it's still compressed thus saving the CPU time that would otherwise be needed for decompression. Not only does BLU acceleration perform predicates on compressed data, but joins, grouping, in-lists and LIKE predicates as well. IBM claims the technology is "better than in-memory" since whatever data resides in the cache is in-memory optimised, but like a traditional database the data can be larger than cache and pre-fetched on-demand while queries run. That helps for large marts and warehouses where the most active part of the data is small enough to fit in memory (such as the most recent year), but a larger data volume (perhaps 10 years) needs to be available for occasional access.

IBM is reporting some big speedups with significantly reduced DBA tuning. Database memory, workload management, and other configuration details adapt to your server automatically. At their launch event on April 3 IBM reported typical performance gains of 8x–25x, with multiple reference customers and partners standing up with even larger numbers (25x–74x) though they admit that this will vary.

Basically, what this all means is that the relational storage engine in DB2 (as opposed to the XML and graph storage engines) will now be able to store data in either of two types of tables: a conventional row-based relational table or in a compressed, encoded columnar table. Of course, row-based tables are also compressed but you would expect better compression on columns because all data in a single column has the same datatype and you can therefore optimise your compression algorithms more efficiently. As noted, you do not have to change your schema to implement column-based storage.

The advantages of columns have been well rehearsed: they reduce the need for indexes, and often mean reading far less data. However, they are not a panacea: there are some types of queries for which it may still make sense to have indexes even when using columnar storage. Just look at Sybase IQ, which supports a variety of index types despite being exclusively columnar. In the case of DB2 you will have a choice: row-based data with indexes or column-based data without indexes - what this implies is that you will need to think carefully about what data to store in columns and what data in rows. Queries, incidentally, can span both row and column-based storage and IBM claims that it is easy to migrate tables from rows to columns. However, you only get BLU Acceleration for the columnar data.

Data skipping is similar, in theory, to Netezza's zonemaps. That is, it allows queries to skip over data that is not required to answer the query in hand. However, remember that this data is in cache and on disk where it would be in the case of Netezza-based appliances (PureData System for Analytics). The BLU Acceleration technology provides data skipping regardless of whether the data is coming from disk or memory.

The parallelism I mentioned is actually what I would call cross-core parallelism (because I think that's easier to understand - you can parallelise across the cores within a single CPU as well as across sockets). Columnar processing and operating on compressed data in memory are useful tricks, but with workload speedups in the 8x–74x range there is probably more to the technology as well. IBM claims one of their strengths is the efficiency of the parallelism made possible by some deep engineering to reduce "memory access latency", in other words the time it takes to get data from RAM into the CPU where it can be processed. Most systems have a fair bit of memory access latency, but it gets disruptive across sockets. BLU Acceleration is doing something special to keep those latencies low.

The first big question is how this will stack up in performance terms with things such as SAP HANA and other purely in-memory approaches. Certainly, IBM's approach should mean that you need less memory for the same tasks and, other things being equal, this would mean a lower cost offering because there's no need to buy enough memory for all the data to fit there. The question will be about how performance compares. IBM's quoted figures are that things like cube loads and query performance should improve by an order of magnitude and I understand that, for some queries, performance may improve considerably more than this. At their product launch on April 3, IBM quoted some individual query speedups of over 1000x.

The second big question surrounds what used to be Netezza. With these features DB2 is starting to look like something that can compete directly with the PureData System for Analytics for analytic workloads. Of course this has hardware acceleration (FPGAs) that DB2 doesn't have but what is memory if not a hardware accelerator? On the other hand I daresay that the developers working on the Netezza platform will also be looking to see how they can leverage memory (and SSDs) so that they can stay ahead of the DB2 game.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 25th April 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Actian, previously Ingres, is beginning to act like its erstwhile parent CA. Or, at least, how CA was acting back in the 90s, when it was acquiring everything in sight. Back in December, Actian acquired Versant, this month it finalised its acquisition of Pervasive Software and today (April 25th) it has announced the immediate acquisition of ParAccel.

In other words the company has gone from owning two database management systems (Ingres and Vectorwise) four months ago to now owning five (adding Versant, PSQL - more popularly known, at least to old fogeys like me - as Btrieve, and ParAccel). The question must be why on earth would it want so many?

Of course, PSQL and Ingres are cash cows. Moreover, having Ingres allows Actian to claim that it has tens of thousands of users (even before the Pervasive acquisition) - which it does - even when promoting its Vectorwise product - which doesn't. And, of course, there's plenty of synergy between Actian's database products and Pervasive's data integration and data governance portfolio.

You can also sort of see why Actian might want Versant: because it wants to exploit its technology in the big data space for unstructured data. And what used to TurboRush for Hive also fits into this picture. In fact, Actian's web site makes lots of play about solving big data problems, though as far I can see it has a bunch of parts rather than anything integrated yet: there's is some work to do in pulling everything together but you can see that the potential is there.

But why ParAccel? After all, Actian's marketing is all about the "fact" that Vectorwise is the "the world's fastest analytical database". In which case, why would it need to acquire a (slower) competitor? Of course, the truth is that it is "the world's fastest non-clustered analytical database, according to TPC-H, for capacities up to 1TB, of those companies that have bothered to do a test" and, as it happens, ParAccel (which is clustered) is faster than Vectorwise according to TPC-H.

So, what has ParAccel going for it? As far as I can see: first-class optimisation technology, a (small) cash cow in Amazon which has embedded ParAccel technology into Amazon Redshift (its cloud-based data warehouse offering) and a not very substantial user base. The marketing blurb on the takeover states that ParAccel is a market leader in the big data space. Well, I suppose it depends on what you call a "leader" but, however good ParAccel is from a technical point of view, my understanding of the word leader is clearly not the same as that of Actian's marketing department.

When I first heard about this acquisition I figured that there was one of two conclusions to draw: either Actian was having trouble scaling Vectorwise and needed a different platform to move up-market with or Actian sees the acquisition as a way of acquiring some pieces of useful technology plus increasing its market share. In turns out that it is the former that is the case: the company is talking about Vectorwise up to around 20TB and ParAccel thereafter.

Given that this is the case what is the likely future for both Vectorwise and ParAccel? It cannot conceivably be right to have two such products. Either one will die or they will be merged. The latter would make sense: both products are columnar and while ParAccel has done some clever stuff with the optimiser Actian has focused on vector processing: I see no reason why you shouldn't combine the two.

Of course that poses the question of whether Actian will hoover up any more of the smaller companies in the warehousing marketplace that have clever technology? Infobright would be the obvious target: decent customer base, not directly competitive (tends to target ISVs: and Actian knows very well how to market in that space), columnar, and it has some very clever technology in its Knowledge Grid. We shall watch and see.

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 25th April 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

The rapid rise of mobile in the consumer space is accelerating the explosive growth of mobile solutions in the business world. Businesses recognize that mobile solutions can empower employees to be more productive and responsive to customers. Likewise, they realize that providing mobile solutions to customers, partners and suppliers is vital to improving customer experiences and fueling business growth.

So it comes as no surprise that 91% of SMBs already use mobile solutions in their businesses, according to 2013 SMB Mobile Solutions Study—and 67% of SMBs indicate that “mobile solutions are now critical for our business,” as shown on Figure 1. In addition, 70% see mobile apps as a “complement to current business applications”, and 55% think that mobile will replace some of their existing business applications.

As SMBs turn to mobile solutions to help grow business, improve productivity and streamline workflow, they are beefing up mobile capabilities both for employees, and for external customers, partners and suppliers.

Figure 1: SMB Attitudes About Mobile Solutions

But the rapid and explosive growth of and reliance on mobile solutions has caught many SMBs off-guard, resulting in some key challenges, as revealed on Figure 2.

Figure 2:  Top Challenges to Using Mobile Solutions

Cost Concerns

As shown in Figure 3, SMBs currently spend the bulk of their mobile budgets on voice and data services and devices. But SMBs are also opening their wallets wider for mobile consulting, management, security and apps.

Figure 3: SMBs Mobile Budget Allocation

As a result, mobile solutions are gobbling up a growing share of SMBs' technology budgets. Our study reveals that SMBs currently spend about 11% to 20% of their technology budgets in the mobile space, and 68% expect they will need to spend more on mobile solutions next year.

Management Headaches

SMB use of mobile apps for employees, both for collaboration apps, such as email and calendars, as well as for business apps, such as CRM, order processing, expense management, etc. have risen overall by approximately 20% since 2012.

Concurrently, SMB adoption of 'bring your own device' (BYOD) policies for employees has doubled over the past year to 62%. SMBs are also ramping up use of customer-facing mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites to enable customers to do things such as schedule appointments, make payments, and access customer service.

As the number of mobile apps and the diversity of mobile devices continues to grow, SMBs want more control and management requirements increase. This is driving increasing adoption of mobile management solutions. Overall adoption in this area is up 15% when compared to our 2012 study. SMBs top 3 management requirements include being able to:

1. Remotely install, update and remove managed apps from devices
2. Track and view installed/approved/blacklisted apps at the user/device level
3. Authenticate, manage and deploy apps based on user groups/roles and restrict content access

Security Worries

Much of the mobile management challenge revolves around security. Security concerns rise to the top both for the internal apps that employees use, as well as for the mobile websites and external apps that SMBs provide out to customers, partners and suppliers.

On the employee side, the top security management capabilities that SMBs are looking for are to:

• Lock devices when devices are lost or stolen, or the employee leaves the company
• Provide data encryption on devices
• Partition/separate business-related data apps from personal data and apps

Meanwhile, SMBs rising adoption of mobile payments and other apps that collect personal information is spiking security concerns on the external app side as well.

Looking Ahead

SMBs look at mobile solutions and like the value that see from them. Consequently, they plan to increase investments both for employee apps, and for external-facing mobile websites and mobile apps for customers, suppliers and partners.

In addition, the BYOD trend shows no signs of abating. Employees want to use the devices that they’re most comfortable with. In addition, some SMBs view BYOD as a way to trim voice and data service costs, which, as explained, are viewed as a top obstacle to using mobile solutions more broadly in their companies. However, BYOD adoption ushers in additional security and management challenges that may result in added costs that cause some SMBs to rethink the BYOD equation.

Mobile management, security, and consulting services spending categories will see significant spending increases as SMBs endeavor to reap more value from and do a better job managing an increasingly complex assortment mobile devices, services and solutions. Today, most SMBs are performing mobile management tasks themselves, with internal resources. However, given that many lack adequate IT resources and mobile expertise, we expect that SMBs will increasingly turn to external solutions providers to get the management job done—particularly as they increase their business reliance on mobile, and requirements for security, integration with traditional business applications grow.

More Information About the Study

The recently completed SMB Group 2013 SMB Mobile Solutions Study provides a detailed examination of mobile devices, services and solutions that SMBs use. Based on over 700 SMB (small business is 1–99 employees; medium business is 100–999 employees) decision-maker respondents, the study provides a comprehensive analysis of SMB:

• Mobile attitudes, adoption and use
• Mobile drivers and inhibitors
• Information sources and decision-making for mobile solutions
• Penetration of mobile devices and services
• Types of mobile devices used and who uses them
• Policies and governance for mobile solutions (including BYOD)
• Mobile applications for internal users (employees)
• Mobile applications for external users (customers, partners, suppliers, etc.)
• Budgets for mobile solutions
• Mobile management

Two focused reports are also available to use for education and thought leadership. More information can be found on the links below.

• Considerations for SMB Mobile Management

The Yin and Yang of Mobile Applications

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 25th April 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The trouble with collaboration software is that it is really hard to assess without using it in a real community - with real pain points that collaboration can help with. However, a good demo can give you a feel for a product and the attitude of those developing it - which is why this is about 'impressions of Huddle', based on talking with Chris Boorman (Huddle's CMO), James Pipe (one of its product managers, focused on mobile and desktop) and Jonathan Howell (its CTO) and not a review.

My meeting confirmed my original impression that Huddle was very much targeting the Enterprise (i.e., collaboration at scale) - although its approach is to start small, with experienced mentors, and grow on the basis of demonstrable success. I think this is an excellent approach, especially as there seem to be a lot of anecdotal reports around the failure of collaboration initiatives, so you need to achieve confidence and buy-in at the grass-roots level, as well as convincing top management. Personally, although there are real differences in collaboration software, I don't believe that failure is usually due to problems with the software tools (at least, as a primary effect). Building a collaborative culture implies changing company culture and, possibly, treading on the toes of vested interests who may have engineered personal power out of exploiting silos and distrust. I suspect that many failures are due to lack of investment in managing cultural change; mismanaged politics; and the belief that buying and installing the right collaboration tool is all you need to worry about in order to achieve a collaboration culture. In other words, I think that a company that fails to install and get benefit from, say, SharePoint may well also fail with Huddle - for similar reasons - unless it learns from the previous failure and changes its approach.

Which leads me to possible pain points that Huddle might encounter. After a lack of maturity in its customers, and the consequent political and people issues (which its 'start small and grow with success' approach may well be addressing), I think that the difficulty in measuring success could be a real issue. Companies like to look at ROI, but Roger Whitehead (with a great deal of experience in this area) has commented that concentration on ROI too early can stifle a collaboration culture. So, given that good management includes tracking and managing investment in collaboration, what is 'success'? You can measure collaboration using surveys, but collaboration is not really an end in itself: it should deliver business outcomes. But one can fail to achieve these for other reasons besides poor collaboration; and if one does succeed (in business and monetary terms) after a collaboration initiative, how much of this can be allocated to the collaboration initiative and how much to the workers who were able to exploit what collaboration made possible? At the beginning, morale; use of collaboration software; and so on is probably a good-enough metric; but, longer time, I'd expect (on average) that firms with an effective collaboration culture would succeed in business more than other firms - but that might be hard to measure.

Personally, I've suggested that Huddle sets up an externally-facing Analyst community in Huddle, to communicate with us all. The analyst community has sufficient egos and politics to make this a useful proof of concept for us, I'd think.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th April 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Welcome to the latest edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. Our next discussion examines how TTNET, the largest internet service provider in Turkey, with six million subscribers, significantly improved applications deployment while cutting costs and time to delivery.

We'll hear how TTNET deployed advanced Service Virtualization (SV) solutions to automate end-to-end test cases, gaining a path to integrated Unified Functional Testing (UFT).

To learn how, we're joined by Hasan Yükselten, Test and Release Manager at TTNET, which is a subsidiary of Türk Telekom, based in Istanbul. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of this and other BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What was the situation there before you became more automated, before you started to use more software tools?

Yükselten: We're the leading ISP in Turkey. We deploy more than 200 applications per year, and we have to provide better and faster services to our customers every week, every month. Before HP SV, we had to use the other test infrastructures in our test cases.

We mostly had problems on issues such as the accessibility, authorization, downtime, and private data for reaching the other third-party’s infrastructures. So, we needed virtualization on our test systems, and we needed automation for getting fast deployment to make the release time shorter. And of course, we needed to reduce our cost. So, we decided to solve the problems by implementing SV.

Gardner: How did you move from where you were to where you wanted to be?

Yükselten: Before SV, we couldn’t do automation, since the other parties are in discrete locations and it was difficult to reach the other systems. We could automate functional test cases, but for end-to-end test cases, it was impossible to do automation.

First, we implemented SV for virtualizing the other systems, and we put SV between our infrastructure and the third-party infrastructure. We learned the requests and responses and then could use SV instead of the other party infrastructure.

After this, we could also use automation tools. We managed to use automation tools via integrating Unified Functional Testing (UFT) and SV tools, and now we can run automation test cases and end-to-end test cases on SV.

We started to use SV in our test systems first. When we saw the success, we decided to implement SV for the development systems also.

Gardner: Give me a sense of the type of applications we’re talking about.

Yükselten: We are mostly working on customer relationship management (CRM) applications. We deploy more than 200 applications per year and we have more than six million customers. We have to offer new campaigns and make some transformations for new customers, etc.

We have to save all the informations, and while saving the information, we also interact the other systems, for example the National Identity System, through telecom systems, public switched telephone network (PSTN) systems.

We have to ask informations and we need make some requests to the other systems. So, we need to use all the other systems in our CRM systems. And we also have internet protocol television (IPTV) products, value added services products, and the company products. But basically, we’re using CRM systems for our development and for our systems.

Gardner: So clearly, these are mission-critical applications essential to your business, your growth, and your ability to compete in your market.

Yükselten: If there is a mistake, a big error in our system, the next day, we cannot sell anything. We cannot do anything all over Turkey.

Gardner: Let's talk a bit about the adoption of SV. What you actually have in place so far?

Yükselten: Actually, it was very easy to adopt these products into our system, because including proof of concept (PoC), we could use this tool in six weeks. We spent first two weeks for the PoC and after four weeks, we managed to use the tool.

For the first six weeks, we could use SV for 45 percent of end-to-end test cases. In 10 weeks, 95 percent of our test cases could be run on SV. It was very easy to implement. After that, we also implemented two other SVs in our other systems. So, we're now using three SV systems. One is for development, one is just for the campaigns, and one is for the E2E tests.

HP Software helped us so much, especially R&D. HP Turkey helped us, because we were also using application lifecycle management (ALM) tools before SV. We were using QTP LoadRunners, Quality Center, etc., so we had a good relation with HP Software.

Since SV is a new tool, we needed a lot of customization for our needs, and HP Software was always with us. They were very quick to answer our questions and to return for our development needs. We managed to use the tool in six weeks, because of HP’s Rapid Solutions.

Gardner: My understanding is that you have something on the order of 150 services. You use 50 regularly, but you're able to then spin up and use others on a more ad-hoc basis. Why is it important for you to have that kind of flexibility and agility?

Yükselten: We virtualized more than 150 services, but we use 48 of them actively. We use these portions of the service because we virtualized our third-party infrastructures for our needs. For example, we virtualized all the other CRM systems, but we don’t need all of them. In gateway remote, you can simulate all the other web services totally. So, we virtualized all the web services, but we use just what we need in our test cases.

In three months we got the investment back actually, maybe shorter than three months. It could have been two and half months. For example, for the campaign test cases, we gained 100 percent of efficiency. Before HP, we could run just seven campaigns in a month, but after HP, we managed to run 14 campaigns in a month.

We gained 100 percent efficiency and three man-months in this way, because three test engineers were working on campaigns like this. For another example, last month we got the metrics and we saw that we had a total blockage for seven days, so that was 21 working days for March. We saved 33 percent of our manpower with SV and there are 20 test engineers working on it. We gained 140 man-months last month.

For our basic test scenarios, we could run all test cases in 112 hours. After SV, we managed to run it in 54 hours. So we gained 100 percent efficiency in that area and also managed to do automation for the campaign test cases. We managed to automate 52 percent of our campaign test cases, and this meant a very big efficiency for us. Totally, we saved more than $50,000 per month.

Gardner: Do you expect now to be able to take this to a larger set of applications across Türk Telekom?

Yükselten: Yes. Türk Telekom licenses these tools and started to use these tools in their test service to get this efficiency for those systems. We have a branch company called AVEA, and they also want to use this tool. After our getting this efficiency, many companies want to use this virtualization. Eight companies visited us in Turkey to get our experiences on this tool. Many companies want this and want to use this tool in their test systems.

Gardner: Do you have any advice for other organizations like those you've been describing, now that you have done this? Any recommendations on what you would advise others that might help them improve on how they do it?

Yükselten: Companies must know their needs first. For example, in our company, we have three blockage systems for third parties and the other systems don't change everyday. So it was easy to implement SV in our systems and virtualize the other systems. We don’t need to do virtualization day by day, because the other systems don't change every day.

Once a month, we consult and change our systems, update our web services on SV, and this is enough for us. But if the other party's systems changes day by day or frequently, it may be difficult to do virtualization every day.

This is an important point. Companies should think automation besides virtualization. This is also a very efficient aspect, so this must be also considered while making virtualization.

We started to use UFT with integrating SV. As I told you, we managed to automate 52 percent of our campaign test cases so far. So we would like to go on and try to automate more test cases, our end-to-end test cases, the basic scenarios, and other systems.

Our first goal is doing more automation with SV and UFT and the other is using SV in development sites. We plan to find early defects in development sites and getting more quality products into the test.

Of course, in this way, we get rapid deployment and we make shorter release times because the product will have more quality. Using performance test and SV also helps us on performance. We use HP LoadRunner for our performance test cases. We have three goals now, and the last one is using SV with integrating LoadRunner.

Gardner: Well, it's really impressive. It sounds as if you put in place the technologies that will allow you to move very rapidly, to even a larger payback. So congratulations on that. Gain more insights and information on the best of IT Performance Management at www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance.

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

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 24th April 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I'm at CA-2013 and CA Technologies is telling a good joined-up story around advanced technology and mobile solutions. It has feedback loops around the user experience and so on. The devil may be in the detail but it really is sounding good.

Unfortunately, I can't take part in the interactive demo, because neither my phone nor my netbook can see the CA wireless network reliably. Perhaps I'm in a dead spot; perhaps I need to reconfigure something (but it works in the hotel room) but the effect is that I'm not listening to the excellent presentation because I'm frustrated and annoyed and trying to debug my connection. Of course, I should just give up, but people don't. And no-one is monitoring my horrible user experience with their lovely network performance monitoring tools - because I can't get on the soddin' network.

OK, in the greater scheme of things who cares. But if I was a sales rep, going in to make an important sale in a rotten frame of mind, my company might. And that's my point; however good your technology, some - a lot, possibly - of the time it will be operating in failure mode; and the impact on the users' performance may be important.

New Development needs to go beyond mobile technology and the 'light path' of working wherever you are and look at the business process it enables and how that is impacted by technology failure-the dark path - even if that failure is outside your control. The New Developer needs to worry about people issues and the psychology of their interaction with technology. For instance, one of the benefits from mobility CA noted was that a manager could make decisions wherever they were, at any hour of the day or night. That's cool and, managed properly, even useful for the manager concerned. However, looked at another way, it might mean that manager is on call 24x7, working a 7 day week and under constant stress of broadband slowdowns, dead phone batteries and lost signal. How will his/her spouse and family like that? How reliable will his/her decisions be after a blazing row with his/her spouse? Could this mobility solution actually fail even if the technology the new developer built doesn't, and shouldn't the developer of mobile solutions - or somebody - be thinking about this dark path and what to do about it?

When I was a very old-technology developer I was always told that what really mattered was how a system performed in failure mode, because that's where it'd mostly be. Does that apply to mobile development however? Surely no-one ever gets slowwww connections, loses signal, tries to work in a crowded bar... Surely not...

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd April 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Both enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs) know the software-development game has changed. Not only do they need to rapidly develop and deploy more mobile apps across multiple interfaces and device platforms, but they need to really rethink all of their client development—and even try and come up with a singular approach to most of them.

Fast to their rescue, the suppliers of development tools and testing systems are tripping over each other to appeal to them in this new game. And, as in the past with other deployment advances, we're seeing a major philosophical split between the 'nativists' (running directly on the device hardware) and the 'virtualizers' (with their scripting and interpretive layers and containers).

First, the nativists. Embarcadero Technologies, with its RAD Studio and former Borland CodeGear assets, is not surprisingly catering to its skills base—the hard core developers at home in Delphi and C++Builder, as well as C and Objective-C. Embarcadero therefore today delivered RAD Studio XE4, with an attractive offer to those seeking native—what Embarcadero calls "multi-device, true native"—apps development, but across most mobile devices from a singular code base and a single core skills set. RAD Studio XE4 has a single application framework for iOS, Windows, and Mac OSX, with support for Android coming soon.

RAD Studio XE4 allows developers to gain more control over the development lifecycle and deliver apps with tighter security, a better user experience, lightning quick performance, and a small footprint. Those that want to target iOS devices, as well as OSX and Windows PCs, can write once and run anywhere, so to speak, says Embarcadero. The key is FireMonkey, a cross-platform GUI framework developed by Embarcadero to provide Delphi and C++Builders with a single framework. This is the same lineage of the graphical language tools that sprung from native (fat) PC development.

But native development for mobile (nee PCs) isn't the only game in town, nor the only way to seek the 'run anywhere' nirvana. The other approaches to the mobile and cross-platform development complexity problem are more aligned with open source, HTML5, and scripting, all with roots in the web.

And so HP, last month, threw it's weight from the IT management perspective behind "a hybrid approach" for mobile. HP Anywhere, as HP calls it, aids in the distributing and consuming of IT management information to mobile devices. But this may well be a model for far broader enterprise-to-mobile process alignment.

Especially where BYOD is the goal, the hybrid approach works best, says Genefa Murphy, Director of Mobile Product Management and User Experience at HP Software. [Disclosure: Both Embarcadero and HP are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Under this 'virtualizers' vision, the HP Anywhere server connects IT management systems to the HP Anywhere Client on Android or iOS devices, forming the basic client app or container on the end-point devices. Then so-called Mini-Apps are downloadable to that container to provide the access and interface to specific IT management tasks or modules.

Two best ends
These two examples of mobile enablement to me represent the two best ends of the enterprise mobile needs spectrum. And, chances are, enterprises are going to need both, especially for existing applications and processes. For example, the Embarcadero approach can swiftly take existing full-client applications and deliver them to the needed mobile tier devices with strong performance and security, and no need to rewrite for each client and OS, said John Thomas (JT), Director of Product Management at Embarcadero.

For more on my views of how cloud, mobile and enterprise IT intersect, see my two-part interview on the Gathering Clouds blog.

The question yet to be answered is what combination of native, scripting, or hybrid container-type models will fit best for entirely new 'mobile first' applications. This is a work in progress, and will also vary greatly from company to company, based on a maze of variables for each. Looks for a lot more blogs on that greenfield apps trend in the future.

For now, however, a lot of the pain for IT in going mobile is in getting existing PC applications via code reuse—as well as business processes on back-end systems—out to where they can be used… on the modern mobile landscape and in the hands of newly empowered mobile users. Incidentally, the new Embarcadero tools and framework allows .NET apps to be driven out to iOS devices in a pretty snappy fashion. That's assuming, of course, Windows CE won't be your preferred client environment after all. You know who you are.

Currently, RAD Studio XE4 delivers multi-device development for ARM and Intel devices, including Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Mac OSX, Windows PCs, Slates, and Surface Pro tablets, said JT. And RAD Studio XE4 allows developers to take advantage of the full range of capabilities available on each of those devices to deliver the best user experience, he added. The full Android support should come mid-year.

The Embarcadero tools allow developers or designers to also quickly create no-code, visual mockups with live or simulated data and deploy to actual target devices (like PCs, phones, or tablets), or simulate on Windows or Mac, so that the requirements and app role can be best defined and tuned.

RAD Studio XE4 is available immediately. To download a free trial, visit http://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/downloads. Pricing starts at $1,799. Delphi and C++Builder pricing starts at $149 for Starter edition and $999 and up for full commercial development licenses. Upgrade discounts are available for users of recent earlier versions. An introductory 10 percent discount is available on most RAD Studio XE4 family products through May 22.

As for HP Anywhere, it manages the cross-platform device client issue using HMTL5 and Javascipt, and we'll be seeing a lot of that too from many 'virtualizers.' HP also boats RAD via an emulator that allows quick switching between device views. HP is taking its HP Anywhere story to both the test and QA people as well as developers as they seek ways to bring more business functions to the mobile enterprise worker corps.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd April 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

In the first part of this piece, I raised some issues around data protection legislation and Big Data. Now I want to get some expert advice - as anyone starting a Big Data initiative should.

I asked Philip Howard of Bloor whether he'd encountered such issues in his Big Data practice and he noted that Facebook data was being made available for mining by third parties (see here) and he wondered whether Facebook or its prospective customers had considered the compliance and reputation risk associated with the latest EU data directive proposals (you can find a overview guide to these from Robert Bond, Partner; Alexia Zuber, Solicitor; Dominika Kupczyk, Data Protection Executive; from Speechly Bircham's IP, Technology and Commercial Group, here; registration details needed).

I guess that the answer, for Facebook, is "yes" - and that it didn't much like what it found - because it suggests changing the law here. As for its prospective customers, who knows?

I've been raising questions in these pieces so far and avoiding giving answers. If these questions might concern you, you should seek your own answers, in the context of your specific circumstances. This doesn't mean finding someone on the web who endorses whatever your current practice is or promises you a "get out of gaol free card" (gaol? let's not go there); nor does it involve asking your local database support technician about data protection. Neither "what the blogoshere knows" nor the opinions of DBAs or web techies on compliance law rate very highly in the courts. You need to actually read the directives and so on yourself, talk to your compliance people and get input from your legal advisers.

In that spirit, I talked to Bloor's compliance specialist, Peter Howes of Rite-Choice Ltd. He warns that the Article 29 working group issued a report earlier this month which definitely references big data - see "Annex 2: Big data and open data" on page 45 of the report here. He also suggests taking proper legal advice but says, "my take on this (as another person who is not legally qualified) is that, whilst there is an issue when you get to the Business Analytics and Intelligence, it is also a problem when the data is initially captured; even if the full scope of the details of analysis and intelligence inference are not fully defined at the time of capture". And, he confirms that, "as you point out, this is not a widely understood problem yet".

Peter also expands on the Facebook issue which arises, in part, from the fact that, when the Data Subject (i.e. the Facebook customer) is in Europe, Facebook (et al) will in future have to comply with the European legislation wherever their data centres are located. "The main reason why the American companies are so worried is because of the provisions in the expected replacement legislation that are broadly referred to as the "Right to be Forgotten"", he says.

"This 'Right to be Forgotten'," he says, "will have a major bearing on "Big Data" inside EU as well as for US based service providers with the replacement Data Protection legislation and should be considered now and accommodated in the solution design (unless the organisation deploying a "Big Data" scheme including personal data intends that the solution to only have a 2 or 3 year life)".

Ah - another exemption! So that's all right then? Well, no, as I implied before, relying on EU data protection exemptions is not really recommended - it is often cheaper and easier (and safer) to just comply anyway. This one is particularly risky: how do you prove that personal data will only be kept for 2-3 years and do you have tested policies and procedures to ensure that its retention isn't extended, that none of it is copied to other systems with different policies, that none of it is kept on local hard-drives or that "useful reports" on paper aren't kept past the limit? And what about backups and data retained for long periods for compliance purposes? As Peter points out: "no way would anyone today plan for that short a life or reasonably expect such a quick termination. And, if they did, they should expect the content to be somewhere in the organisation afterwards (not just the unauthorised retention, but also the normally retained backup)".

Luckily, I know some lawyers too. Robert Bond is a Partner and Notary Public for Speechly Bircham LLP and a noted data protection expert. He says that "data protection laws apply to personal data in storage as well as in other uses such as analysis, research, sharing and transfer. An individual may impliedly consent to the use of personal data for purposes for which they reasonably anticipated use but not for unanticipated uses particularly profiling. In any event, if any personal data contains sensitive information such as health then consent needs to be more expressed than implied."

So, what that all means is that if you are starting a Big Data project you need to think about what data you are collecting, what uses you might want to put it to; and, if it is collected from or about people, whether you need their consent (either implicit or complied) before storing it, let alone using it. You need to become familiar with data protection legislation (both as it is now and as it is expected to evolve) and, probably, pay for legal advice on whether it impacts you, and how. Think about the cost of not complying, if you are caught - not only fines, but reputation risk; and the regulators may see you as a likely "useful example" when the law next changes or a different regulation becomes high-profile. Then you have to estimate the cost of complying with data protection law (not complying shouldn't be considered as an option) - including the cost of finding out about it - and make sure this is included in the ROI estimates for your Big Data project.

But look on the bright side. If you are thinking of collecting and storing vast amounts of data, using new and comparatively untested technology, with no very clear idea of what you'll use it for, or when, or for how long - isn't that looking like a very risky project? A bit of due diligence now, spurred on by some of the data protection issues discussed in my two papers, may focus you on why you are jumping on the big data bandwagon at all, what resources it is using and what the business outcomes are, that might justify the Big Data adventure. And that must be a good thing.