By: Albert Pang, President, APPS RUN THE WORLD Posted: 5th September 2011 Copyright APPS RUN THE WORLD © 2011

With growing signs of leading one of the most important segments of the enterprise applications market, Salesforce.com embodies the disruptive power of Cloud-based delivery of sales, marketing and customer service software.

At the same time, Salesforce.com is increasingly using its scalable platform to reach beyond its core competency of selling customer relationship management (CRM) applications by unleashing a floodgate of applications developed by its ISV partners to help customers build the next-generation Social Enterprise, a movement that is designed to engage more users, allow for easy and real-time collaboration across different roles, and ultimately yield tangible results to their bottom line.

Social Enterprise Soars Into Space
The power of Salesforce.com was evident at the Dreamforce event where it is pushing into new Social Enterprise frontiers in a series of announcements including an equity investment in ERP vendor Infor in order to help drive back-office data to the new era of real-time collaboration among salespeople, customers as well as those involved in non-sales functions like finance, production and supply chain management.

Similarly Salesforce.com has invested in startup Kenandy, a Cloud-based ERP vendor founded by Sandra Kurtzig, a guru in manufacturing applications who is expected to be instrumental in helping Salesforce.com reach not just regular salespeople, but also production supervisors and quality managers of asset-intensive companies from Siemens to Toyota.

In addition to the investments, Salesforce.com introduced a new portfolio of Social Media-infused tools and services including Chatter Now for instant messaging, Chatter Service for self-service knowledge gathering and Data.com for enhanced crowd-sourcing with Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary business data. All these new offerings will start leveraging HTML5 to bedazzle users with an attractive frontend ideal for mobile device viewing.

During the week-long Dreamforce, the common catch-all phrase from Salesforce.com executives was that Social Enterprise has become the rocket ship "that will propel the business of anyone associated with the vendor’s platform and applications strategies to stratospheric levels". However the sunny outlook is clouded by a host of issues that Salesforce.com needs to address in order to fulfill its vision of taking its stakeholders along for the rocket ship journey.

There lies the paradox of one of the most successful software companies that has transformed the CRM applications market for more than a decade. Yet it has failed to make a profit consistently, while its recurring revenues from its existing customers appear to have stalled.

Salesforce.com Dethrones Siebel
During that period, Salesforce.com dethroned the former champion of CRM software, Siebel, by reinventing the market segment with the innovative use of the on-demand delivery model, or for that matter redefining how customers should be served in the new era.

For its part, Siebel scored a series of home runs with its integrated sales force, marketing and customer service automation applications until it was weakened by tumbling sales following the Dot Com bust. Finally Oracle acquired Siebel in a $5.8 billion deal in 2005. Unmistakably Salesforce.com is in a stronger position than Siebel at any point in its history. When Siebel was acquired by Oracle, it only had fewer than 5,000 customers. Today Salesforce.com has more than 100,400 customers. And there are thousands more from its recent acquisitions of Heroku and Radian6 that have shored up its capabilities in Web development in multiple programming languages and social media applications.

As the following table shows, Salesforce.com was the No. 1 CRM applications vendor worldwide in 2010, edging past Oracle and SAP and others still reeling from the last recession. Salesforce.com, which led the $15.8 billion market with nearly 10% share last year, never skipped a beat even in the depth of the recession by picking up more customers and recurring revenues than its competitors.

In a survey of more than 1,000 IT managers, executives and CIOs conducted by APPS RUN THE WORLD this summer, Salesforce.com was found to be the primary Sales Force Automation system at more than 12% of the surveyed companies—consisting of mostly enterprises with more than $500 million in revenues. In many cases these companies have positioned their Salesforce.com system as the primary CRM engine, displacing Siebel that has laid dormant after years of under-utilization or failed implementations. For example, Salesforce.com stands side by side with Siebel at a 6000-person media company acting as a customer-facing engine that sits between its ad servers and the back-end Oracle ERP to support its online advertising business.

Additionally Salesfore.com is on a $2.2 billion annual revenue run rate after posting a 38% jump in sales to $546 million in its latest quarter. During that period, Salesforce.com signed more than 60 deals with each yielding at least $1 million in subscription revenues over the length of the contract. It also signed three $10 million+ deals, plus another $10 million+ transaction following the end of the quarter.

Salesforce.com Faces Considerable Challenges
However, such success stories mask a host of problems with Salesforce.com. By one measure, Salesforce.com gets less subscription revenue per customer than some of Social CRM applications vendors as if they were beating Salesforce.com at its own game because the pervasive nature of their Cloud-based services has translated into bigger subscription sales.

As the following chart shows, Salesforce.com received $1,631 in average monthly subscription revenue per customer in its latest quarter. By comparison, Eloqua, which sells Cloud-based marketing automation applications and is also an ISV partner of Salesforce.com, saw its monthly subscription revenues from its more than 1,000 customers reaching $4,966 in the second quarter of 2011, according to its S1 filing in advance of its initial public offering.

Social business applications vendor Jive, which is also planning its own IPO, did even better with monthly subscription revenues averaging $7,874 from its 635 customers during the same period, according to its S1 filing. Despite a steep rise in its early years, Salesforce.com’s monthly subscription revenue per customer has been stuck at $1,400 level over the past few years.

What that suggests is that Salesforce.com’s continuous growth in subscriber base has not translated into bigger wallet share among its customers. The lingering recession could have played a role behind some companies reducing their Salesforce.com expenditures as part of their overall cost-cutting moves. In addition, new services like Chatter have been bundled into its CRM sales without incurring additional revenues. Another reason is that the new wave of social CRM apps vendors are beginning to undermine Salesforce.com’s mind share and market positioning because the newcomers are considered easier and more affordable to use on a large scale.

Jive, for one, is said to have more than 15 million users running its products. Cloud-based vendors from Cornerstone OnDemand to SuccessFactors are touting six million and 15 million subscribers, respectively. Salesforce.com, which has not publicly revealed the number of users in recent years, is estimated to have fewer than three million users.

Salesforce.com will face stiffer challenges than ever in getting its products into the hands of potential users. In the same survey that we conducted this summer, one of the biggest electronics makers has decided to adopt Eloqua as its primary marketing automation system, despite the fact that it also uses Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Siebel to automate its sales function in different parts of the organization.

To boost utilization of its software throughout an organization, Salesforce.com introduced a new social enterprise license agreement that allows every employee within its customers to have unrestricted use of its products.

It is not clear whether such a program would help address another big problem, which has to do with the inability of Salesforce.com to make a decent profit even though its products have been on the market for more than 10 years.

The cumulative earnings (net income after tax) for Salesforce.com since its founding in 1999 amounted to $173.4 million, or 2.7% of its aggregated subscription revenues of $6.4 billion. In the first half of its fiscal 2012, it lost $3.7 million following a series of acquisitions. By comparison Oracle posted $3.2 billion in earnings, or 30% of $10.7 billion in total revenues in its last quarter of fiscal 2011. SAP posted $851 million in profit after tax, or 23% of its product sales of $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2011.

One of the reasons behind Salesforce.com’s spotty earnings track record has to do with its heavy sales and marketing spending, which represented half of its revenues in its latest quarter. Oracle spends 20% of its revenues on sales and marketing. Intuit, which sells both packaged and on-demand ERP and business management applications and is twice the size of Salesforce.com, spends only 29% on sales and marketing in its latest fiscal year. There are signs that Salesforce.com is making an effort to address its high sales and marketing expense ratio by working closely with its ISV, reseller and systems integration partners.

At last week’s event, Salesforce.com announced a $50 million fund to help its consulting partners expand their capacity, thereby lowering the costs for the vendor to sell and service its customers. However these new programs will take time before they can have a positive impact on its financial results.

Salesforce.com To Shift Strategies
In the meantime, there are near-term measures that it can do to remedy the situation, while positioning itself to become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Social Enterprise movement. For one thing, sales force automation has become a losing proposition when much of the selling is done over online commerce and end-to-end order management.

The rise of social media points to the fact that its future is tied not to salespeople using Salesforce.com to better connect with their customers, but rather harnessing the collaborative power of all employees (sales, marketing, R&D and support), partners and even customers themselves working with tools like Chatter Now to address specific customer requirements.

That’s why Oracle has spent $1 billion on its recent acquisition of ATG as well as additional resources to promote the Distributed Order Orchestration strategy that is at the heart of its Fusion Applications. While Oracle may have lost many Sales Force Automation deals to Salesforce.com in the past, the real value of the Siebel assets lies in hard-to-replicate expertise in such verticals as pharmaceuticals, financial services and communications. Again Salesforce.com is acknowledging that its future will be based on how relevant its solutions will be in the eyes of these vertical industry users and it’s working closely with its channel to address that.

The last thing, or perhaps the most important move, is for Salesforce.com to turn Chatter into a full-blown open social network, broadly expanding its reach to tens of millions of users. Currently Chatter, which is being run as a private social network for businesses, has been adopted by 100,000 organizations. However it is not clear how defensible is the positioning of Chatter when formidable players from FaceBook to Google allow segments of their hundreds of millions users to create business-class private social networks.

If it fails to thwart such threats, Salesforce.com may need to consider the unthinkable by buying a complementary social network like LinkedIn. At a market cap of more than $8 billion, it would be an expensive purchase.

Still the window of opportunity is narrowing and Salesforce.com may need every rocket ship component that it can find in order to sustain its leadership in the CRM applications market and become the biggest Cloud service provider behind the making of the new Social Enterprise.

Let us help you better understand the positioning and market shares of CRM and Social Enterprise vendors like Salesforce.com by emailing us at info@appsruntheworld.com.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 30th May 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Xerox’s acquisition of NewField IT, a UK based print consultancy and software solution provider follows hot on the heels of HP’s acquisition of Printelligent, a US-based managed print services (MPS) provider. With both HP and Xerox looking to expand the penetration of MPS to SMBs and midmarket organisations, the acquisition of these companies provides the additional capabilities that both companies need to ensure higher penetration rates. This market remains a largely untapped opportunity for channel partners to capture on-going service revenue opportunities in an increasingly commoditised hardware market – the acquisitions enable both vendors to approach SMBs via the channel with a services-led model that provides distinct business value to the customer.

Xerox and NewField IT

Xerox’s acquisition of NewField IT cements a long-established relationship between the two companies. NewField’s flagship AssetDB technology already underpins the assessment and optimisation capabilities for the Xerox Partner Print Services (XPPS) platform. NewField’s pedigree as a print assessment provider is well recognised across the industry with most printer and copier vendors having used Asset DB in varying degrees to support assessment of print environments and optimised MPS designs. Asset DB covers the complete gamut from graphical floor-plan based data collection to future state design of an optimised print environment.  Although Xerox’s purchase of NewField IT could be dismissed as a small acquisition, it certainly has the potential to make a significant impact of Xerox’s channel-led MPS revenue.

Xerox is keen to replicate its success in the enterprise MPS market across the SMB and midmarket, which currently has a relatively low penetration of MPS. However, success in these channel-led markets is highly reliant on resellers’ resources and skills to sell and deliver MPS quickly and effectively. The Xerox Print Partner Services (XPPS) hosted MPS infrastructure was developed over a year ago to provide channel partners with a set of tools to manage every element of an MPS contract – including sales pursuit, device discovery, optimisation and service delivery. Quocirca believes that the acquisition of Newfield IT will enhance Xerox’s credentials to deliver a comprehensive set of MPS tools for multivendor resellers far beyond the basic MPS packages currently on offer from its competitors.

While the technology benefits of the acquisition for Xerox are clear, less clear is how NewField IT will continue to operate as a vendor-neutral provider of software and services. Its existing relationship as an assessment provider for HP and Ricoh, for instance, must surely be at risk – and even more so given HP’s acquisition of Printelligent. Meanwhile, NewField IT intends to continue providing independent consultancy services to end-users, abiding by its established code of conduct which states that it will remain objective and not supply or promote the products of those hardware vendors that license its technology. Vendor-agnostic assessments are a critical part of any MPS engagement and NewField IT has long been offering these as an independent provider. However, it remains to be seen how effectively it can continue to preserve its independence when delivering vendor-neutral recommendations for MPS device optimisation.

HP and Printelligent

HP’s almost simultaneous announcement to acquire Printelligent has levelled the playing field between the two vendors. Although XPPS had recently been the only cloud MPS platform available to multi-brand resellers enabling them to manage a multivendor environment, HP’s latest acquisition of Printelligent will now provide HP channel partners a wealth of scalable multivendor MPS capabilities.

With Printelligent, HP has acquired an established MPS provider which has been offering MPS since 1993 through a network of MPS channel partners across the US. Printelligent assets will enhance HP’s assessment and optimisation capabilities and its MPS sales and services expertise infrastructure, along with HP’s cloud-based InCommand platform will enable HP to now deliver a set of differentiated MPS solutions and services via the channel.  Whilst the acquisition of Printelligent will certainly bolster HP’s channel MPS capabilities in the US, it may take some time to provide a similar set of services to its European channel, particularly given Xerox’s strong MPS presence in this region.

Market outlook

The majority of SMBs and midmarket organisations currently purchase printer hardware and consumables on a transactional basis which creates a huge opportunity for hardware vendors to encourage customers to adopt a contractual approach to buying “printing” rather than “printers”.  Consequently the market for MPS in the SMB and midmarket is moving beyond the simple single brand, basic service which essentially wraps hardware with supplies, maintenance and support. Whilst HP and Xerox will continue to offer these basic services for businesses that need it, the real cost saving – both financial and environmental – comes from a detailed assessment and optimisaton of the printer environment – from both a hardware and workflow perspective. Channel partners therefore need simple and flexible tools and an infrastructure that they can tap into to sell, deliver and manage MPS on an on-going basis. 

The market to sell MPS to SMBs and midmarket organisations is still wide open and vendors must provide their channel with a simple and effective MPS cloud platform that can deliver remote monitoring, consolidated billing, supplies and service and reporting across a multi-vendor environment. For now SMBs are most likely to be more receptive to basic services, whilst the midmarket organisations stand to benefit most from more complex and value-based MPS propositions.

Although Xerox had a head start in providing an MPS infrastructure for its channel partners, HP has made a smart acquisition which will help it catch up and strengthen its presence in this market, particularly as it can exploit its strong relationship with the IT channel. Now that both vendors have the infrastructure and tools to provide their channel partners, success will ultimately be linked to how well these vendors engage and train their channel to deliver MPS to their customers.

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

Some of you have been following my articles may remember an article I wrote about Convergent Software (A demonstrator for the new standards for RFID in Libraries) in February 2009. Well this week, Paul Chartier, their Managing Director, let me know that the company was launching a range of software products for the library community.  These meet the new conformance requirements recently announced on the RFID for Libraries Support website (http://biblstandard.dk/rfid/).

There are two products in the initial offering designed to help stakeholders to future-proof their investment in ISO 28560-2:

• ISO 28560-2 Planning and Modelling software:  This software allows libraries and other stakeholders to experiment with the encoding options of ISO 28560-2 by selecting and arranging data elements and encoding these on a simulated tag.  The main advantage of this software is that it can be used as part of a pre-investment process without requiring any RFID hardware or tags. This product incorporates their Template Builder and Data Builder tools that I reviewed in February 2009.
• ISO 28560-2 Quality Control software: This software combines the functionality of a fully compliant decoder with the additional powerful function of diagnostic software that identifies encoding errors and points to possible causes of those encoding errors. This product incorporates our Template Builder, Data Decoder and Data Doctor tools.

The announcement also contained details of 2 other products that are to follow shortly; namely:  

• ISO 28560-2 Comprehensive software: This software combines the functionality of the planning software and the quality control software products with their Data Editor tool. Chartier stated that this will provide the most comprehensive support for ISO 28560-2.  
• An interface module that enables the various software-only products to be linked to specific RFID encoding/decoding devices. This version of the software will take the simulation one stage further and allow prototype tags to be produced for testing purposes. It also can read tags claiming compliance with ISO 28560-2 and report any errors in a comprehensive diagnostic report.

All the products meet the requirements of the recently published Guidelines for ISO 28560-2 Conformant Devices and Processes.  A Compliance Statement is available on their website which explains in detail how the software products achieve this.

Convergent Software Limited is still offering its two software development schemes to help RFID vendors in the library sector to rapidly develop their support for the new ISO standard:

• The Benchmark scheme provides software and support to those companies developing their own bespoke system to support ISO 28560-2.
• The Integration scheme enables software developed by Convergent Software Limited to be embedded in vendors' software as an OEM component.

Convergent Software Limited develops and markets software and tools to support the encoding and decoding of data on RFID tags. The company also has products to support IATA RP1740C baggage handling (see article: Bagging Handling Applications get an RFID Simulator and Diagnostic tool).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

Applications becoming easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still a great deal of complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of the box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Studio phase

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

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

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

You may also be interested in:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 1st November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

A long time ago a whale lived in the IT sea called Big Blue. But Big Blue was no ordinary whale, it was the biggest killer whale ever. As the biggest creature in the IT sea (with 80%+ market share), all the other creatures relied on Big Blue to set the rules, which were its proprietary interfaces. If Big Blue changed its interfaces so a little fish (vendor) couldn’t interface with its mainframes, the little fish died, and Big Blue ate up its customers, thus becoming even bigger.

Eventually the sea god Neptune (the US government) lost its patience with Big Blue and threatened to break up its monopoly so the rules of normal competition could be observed. Then the IT sea began to grow healthily again, like other seas (markets). A long and expensive court case ensued and Big Blue was never quite the same again. Until now.

Today, IBM is no longer an aggressive tin-shifter nor the services company envisaged by Lou Gerstner, but a dynamic software vendor. In the last decade IBM has acquired 100+ software companies and has software revenues of c. $23Bn and 70,000 employees in its Software Group (it is almost exactly the same size as Oracle).

Just a few years ago Oracle boasted of being the biggest venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Not anymore. In a thinly disguised reference to Oracle, IBM’s annual report says: “Today, many of our competitors are emulating our moves. For instance, several have gone on an acquisition binge to get into new spaces . . . largely to compensate for rapidly commoditizing business models”.

So why software? The 86% margin IBM gets on software is double what they achieve elsewhere. In addition, as McKinsey points out: “By pushing their products through a global sales force, IBM estimates it increased their revenues by almost 50% in the first two years after each acquisition and an average of more than 10% in the next three years”.

Analytics is the main thrust. In four years IBM has invested $12Bn in 23 analytics-related acquisitions including Cognos, Netezza, SPSS, and OpenPages. IBM’s resulting Business Analytics and Optimization (BAO) practice has 6,000 consultants and “enables clients to get far more value from their information . . . advanced analytics allow clients to see patterns in data they could not see before, understand their exposure to risk and pre­dict the outcomes of business decisions with greater certainty”. IBM plans to grow its BAO business by $7Bn to $16Bn by 2015. These are big numbers.

Customers should consider IBM for their acquired analytics competencies, depth and breadth of product set, and services capabilities. However, customers should be mindful that IBM (as is Microsoft) is a product-centric organisation. IBM sees its differentials and value as being its size and power, and a $6Bn annual investment in R&D. Customer-centricity and market orientation do not appear central. Hence ‘customer delight’, ‘customer intimacy’, and ‘customer satisfaction and loyalty’ are likely to result from paid-for consulting rather than a deliberate strategy.

Oracle describes itself as: “the world’s biggest business software company ... and seeks to be an industry leader in each of the specific product categories in which it competes and to expand into new and emerging markets”. This is a virtually identical strategy to IBM’s. And IBM also has a database (DB2) to counter Oracle’s strong position in the enterprise RDBMS market.

So an almighty clash of the titans is developing. IBM is saying to Oracle: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” Is Oracle made of straw, of wood, or of stone? Larry Ellison might have something to say about that. Let battle commence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 29th September 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

ICT Accessibility is important today. But will it be important in 5 years time and what will it look like? What should organisations that are involved, interested or dependent on ICT Accessibility be planning for over the next 5 years?

Firstly, a short definition of ICT Accessibility to ensure that we are all on the same page. The international standard ISO 9241-171:2008 (Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 171: Guidance on software accessibility) defines accessibility as:

"Usability of a product, service, environment or facility by people with the widest range of capabilities"

The term "widest range of capabilities" is really a politically correct way of saying "including people with disabilities".

This article will use a slightly more limited definition:

"ICT for people with disabilities including: vision, hearing, speech, muscular-skeletal, learning and ageing".

Ageing is included not because it is a disability in its own right but because as we age we will tend to become less able through diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or failing eyesight or hearing.

To try and answer the questions this article will look back 5 years, look at the present and then extrapolates 5 years in to the future.

ICT Accessibility is complex intertwined area so the discussion will be based around the following questions:

• How important is it for an individual to access digital information?
• What is the impact of laws, legislation and standards?
• Are decision makers aware of the requirements and benefits?
• Do the various professionals have the implementation skills?
• How does technology help or hinder?

How important is it for an individual to access digital information?

This is the key question that influences changing views on accessibility.

2005

Primary sources of information and services were offline: paper, telephone or face-to-face. In some cases alternative formats were offered, for example Braille or large print. Some basic information (brochureware) and some bleeding edge services were available on-line.

The majority of the population were not regular users of the Internet. People with disabilities had access to the information and services they needed off-line and access to digital information was not that important. However, there was an awakening to the potential benefits of access to digital information, especially amongst those with vision impairments who could access such information through screen-readers rather than being dependent on the information being transformed into another format.

2010

Digital is the preferred channel for most providers: how often do you hear/see "for more information go to our website"? This implies that the information is on the web but not available in any off-line format. Better service is now provided via online shopping, banking and travel than is available face-to-face or via the telephone. In particular there is a strong push in the public sector towards e-government as a way of providing better services more efficiently; hardcopy documents and forms will continue to be provided but only grudgingly.

Some providers have gone the next step with information and services only available on-line: Amazon, iTunes, EasyJet, comparison web sites etc. Where possible the product has also gone digital: music and electronic books. We are seeing the slow death of printed books; for example Amazon now sell more electronic than paper versions of some titles and the Oxford University Press has announced that it is not going to produce another printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is now only be available on-line.

The other major area of push towards the need to access on-line is the meteoric rise of social networks of all sorts.

Lack of access to digital information, services and products is now serious enough to have a name, 'the Digital Divide'. Those on the wrong side of the divide are now disadvantaged but can still survive.

According to the Office for National Statistics about 1 in 5 UK adults are not on-line. This group includes people who are old, poor, or lack the necessary skills and also a small group who who wish to remain off-line.

The British Computer Society (BCS) has just published a report that shows access to IT makes people happier; not only does it enable people to do things better but it also improves their view of their quality of life.

Unfortunately some people with disabilities find themselves on the wrong side of the divide, even though they are keen to be on the right side, because the information, services and products are not provided in an accessible form.

2015

By 2015 the trend from off-line to digital information, services and products will be complete. Anything that can be provided digitally will be digital by default and will only be available in other formats by request, if at all, and probably at a premium.

By this date anyone on the wrong side of the divide will find it very difficult to carry on as a member of society. They will lack access to basic government-supplied services, most commercial services such as insurance, banking, many retail outlets, and all electronic social networks.

There will be pressure from a new group, "the recently old". This group will have been using digital channels for some years and will be furious if they cannot continue to do so because of illnesses of old age.

As the digital divide closes down it is essential that people with disabilities are not left on the wrong side through no fault of their own and therefore everything digital needs to be accessible.

It would not be overstating it to say that by 2015 access to digital information will be considered a basic human right.

What is the impact of laws, legislation and standards?

2005

Legislation existed in many countries relating to disability, including the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the the US Rehabilitation Act 1973 (and in particular Section 508 1998). These laws were either limited in relation to ICT or only relevant to government, they also seemed to lack teeth. They did not have a major impact on the accessibility of most ICT systems.

The W3C developed guidelines for web accessibility—the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) 1999.

The British Standards Institute (BSI) published PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites in 2006.

At this time it was not clear if the legislation applied to ICT and, if it did, whether it only applied to specific parts of ICT: did it apply to websites, did it just apply to public sector organisations?

Because of this confusion the guidelines and guides were not enforced by legislation. This meant that most webmasters and their organisations were either unaware of them or ignored them.

2010

In the last year, or two, case law has made it clear that all areas of ICT are covered. Probably the most publicised example is the case against Target (a large US retail chain). An individual sued Target because its web site was not accessible and therefore he was getting a poorer service than members of the able-bodied community. It took a least two years to go through the courts. In the end it was agreed that the website had to be accessible, Target had to pay out compensation to the individual and also to a group who took out a class action, and Target had to fix the site within a given timescale. The total cost came to more that $10M.

There is still a lack of awareness amongst many business decision-makers and plaintiffs are still put off pursuing claims because of the effort involved and potentially small returns.

In 2010 eBay announced changes to their systems to support users of screen readers. There were good moral and financial reasons for implementing the changes, but it can be assumed that the possibility of legal action also encouraged their implementation.

There are still cases going through courts, for example Donna Jodhan v the Canadian Government. The number of cases going to court is likely to decrease as organisations cry 'mea culpa' rather than spend money on legal support for a case they are likely to loose.

2015

In 2010 several acts are going through the US Senate, Mandate 376 Phase 2 is progressing through the EU, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been ratified by most member states, rules and regulations are being passed through many other governments. All of these will have had a major impact by 2015.

By 2015 legislation across the world should be clear and have sufficient teeth so that it cannot be ignored. As it cannot be ignored, any relevant person (manager, procurer, technician, user) will be aware of the legislation and the importance of accessibility.

Are decision makers aware of the requirements and benefits?

ICT systems will only be fully accessible if accessibility is built in during all phases of implementation. This will happen if the decision makers dictate that it should. Ideally the edict should come from top management but it could be at the level of procurement or a highly motivated development manager.

2005

By 2005 most decision makers were aware of the need to provide physical access to people with disabilities, most obviously users of wheelchairs. This was certainly true in the UK and North America but may not have been so common in some other parts of Europe and the World. The decision makers were aware because the laws were clear and because the problem was easy to understand: a client in a wheelchair at the bottom of a flight of stairs leading to their building was not a photo-call that a CEO wanted to deal with.

The same could not be said about ICT accessibility. Firstly the law was not clear and had not been tested. But also the issue was not so easy to understand or even be aware of. If the issue was raised the initial reaction was "how can blind people use computers" not "what has to be done to our systems to make them easy to use by people who are blind?".

The users were only beginning to push for ICT accessibility because access to ICT was less important and because alternative formats such as braille and large print were the main requirement.

2010

Today the situation is not so different to 2005, with most decision makers still not being aware of the need for accessible ICT. The biggest improvement has been in the public sector where legislation has made the requirement clear. In the US, Section 508 makes it mandatory for government organisations and in the UK the push to e-government and the Disability Equality Duty have raised the awareness significantly.

The commercial sector is only just beginning to understand and be aware through court cases such as Target and by major organisations, most recently eBay, realising the importance of accessibility and going public with the changes they have made and the benefits to their clients and to their organisations.

The decision makers are also becoming more aware because of the noise being generated by disabled users. People are complaining when systems are not accessible and these complaints are beginning to percolate up to those who can instigate the changes.

2015

By 2015 most decision makers will be aware of the need for accessible ICT, this greater awareness will be driven by:

• Legislation will have been extended, given more power and written to explicit include ICT.
• Disabled Users will become more vocal.
• The ageing population will include users who expect to be able to access digital information and who will not accept that age related illnesses have removed that ability.
• The economic imperative to move towards digital information will highlight the need to make that information available to all.

The only question is, will this increased awareness always ensure that the systems are made accessible? There will still be a conflict between using the latest whizzy technology and the need to ensure accessibility.

Do the various professionals have the implementation skills?

Even if the decision makers decided that all ICT systems should be accessible it would not be possible if the professionals who were implementing it lacked the necessary skills. The professionals include the designers, coders, content creators, and testers.

2005

A small cohort of dedicated professionals were available to implement accessible systems, but they were the exception. Most professionals knew nothing about accessibility and were not interested in finding out. Professional education ignored accessibility with tutors not understanding why it should be included.

2010

In 2010 the number of skilled professionals has grown significantly but is still a small minority of those involved in implementing and developing ICT. If there was a sudden drive to improve the accessibility of ICT then skills would become a real issue.

The only way to know if an system is accessible is to test it. Testing needs to be done throughout the project and should use automated checking tools and user testing. There are an increasing number of professional testers who have the necessary skills to run the automated and user tests.

There are some good signs in the education field:

• Accessibility and user-centred design are now included as modules in many ICT courses, but they still tend to be add-ons delivered quite late in the schedule. Accessibility is still not built-in as an inherent part of implementation.
• The BCS is reviewing accessibility across the whole of the organisation. One aspect is to look at the inclusion of accessibility in SFIAPlus, the IT skills, training and development standard. Inclusion of accessibility in the right places in SFIAPlus will have a significant long term impact on the development of accessibility skills.
• Middlesex University now offers a MSc in Digital Inclusion.

This trend in education should ensure that accessibility becomes business as usual in the next few years.

2015

By 2015 skilled implementers should be available and should be willing to keep their skills honed because of demands for such skills from aware decision-makers.

Technology—Will Assistive Technology keep up?

There are two areas of technology that need to be considered:

• Assistive Technology: covers hardware and software that helps people who cannot see the screen well, or find it difficult to use a standard keyboard or mouse.
• The interface between the system and the user: drives screens, keyboards and pointing devices directly and needs to be accessible to the widest possible population, but it also needs to communicate with Assistive Technologies so that users of these technologies can access all the functions of the system.

2005

Speech recognition and text to speech were both available but without being too disparaging they were both fairly clunky and were only used by those who had no option. If you were blind, text-to-speech was the main way you could get access to digital information. If you could not use a keyboard, voice recognition software did enable you to input text and control the computer.

Predictive text was originally developed as an Assistive Technology, users who could only type very slowly only had to type a few letters rather than a whole word or phrase.

There were a variety of alternatives to the standard mouse, ranging from bigger mice, to rollerballs, through to controlling the mouse through winking an eye.

2010

The increase in processing power and significant advances in the software now mean that solutions that were clunky in 2005 are now so good that they are being used by people without any disability as they become a natural and efficient way to interact with ICT. This has led to some assistive technologies being built in to standard products. Examples include Voiceover text-to-speech on Apple products, and voice control in new cars; saying 'call home' whilst driving is much easier and safer than fiddling with any buttons.

Built-in touch technology has provided solutions for many people, for example those suffering from rheumatism or RSI, who cannot use a standard mouse.

Other alternatives to standard keyboards and mice are available but due to limited demand they are expensive.

2015

There will be new forms of AT, direct brain connections, wearable devices that will enable certain people to more easily control and access their ICT environment.

There will be a continuing improvement in the power available to AT: for example text to speech today tends to be fairly flat, with more power it will be possible to include emotions and clearer pronunciation and intonation.

Technology—Will the User Interface be accessible?

2005

In 2005 most of the input and output was text and that meant that it was fairly easy for the Assistive Technologies to interact. Some ancillary technologies were causing problems; probably the biggest examples were Flash and PDF, which did not always interface well to the Assistive Technologies.

There were also some web development tools that produced HTML that did not follow the W3C guidelines and was, by definition, not fully accessible. In fact it was difficult to find a tool that made it easy to produce accessible HTML

2010

Significant strides have been made since 2005. Most development tools can now produce websites that are accessible, the issue now is that it is still up to the creator to use the tools in the right way as the tools give very little assistance or guidance on how to create accessible sites. Adobe now provides PDF and Flash products that can be made accessible and has worked with the Assistive Technology vendors to ensure that the interface works.

Unfortunately there are other new technologies that have been developed that are not accessible, for example the standard YouTube screens are not accessible; so if YouTube clips are included in a website the site is not fully accessible to users of screen readers or users who cannot use a mouse. However YouTube now supports closed captioning to support people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Developers of other widgets have not been aware of the accessibility issues and have created solutions that are not accessible.

Vendors are recognising the need for solutions in specific niches, for example Xenos Axxess is a tool to create accessible transaction reports (e.g. bank statements) from non-accessible print streams.

2015

It is impossible to predict all the new user interfaces that will be used in five years time but 3D, interactive gestures and emotions will be three areas that will be commonplace. Emotions will be supported with the Emotion Markup Language (EML) that is currently being developed by the W3C. The EML will be added to text and then a text-to-speech engine will be able to vocalise the text with the right intonation or an avatar could make a suitable gesture or facial expression. The question with all of these interfaces is will the system be able to interface to the user, directly or via a suitable Assistive Technology, so that it is accessible?

New and exciting interfaces will always be attractive to the marketing departments, as a way of being ahead of the competition. It will be an uphill struggle to stop them being used if they are not accessible.

The likelihood is that new interfaces will be developed to include accessibility features built-in, however there will be a need for continuous vigilance by the accessibility community to ensure that this is the case. The community will have to recognise the new interfaces early and put pressure on the developers, standards bodies and users of the technology to ensure that it is accessible from first delivery.

Summary

By 2015:

• Accessibility will not be optional: everyone who provides digital content, services or products will need to make sure that they are accessible.
• There will be moral, legal and financial imperatives for this to happen. In particular there will pressure from users to be on the right side of the digital divide as a human right.
• Awareness will be much higher both at the user and the supplier end.
• Skill levels will have increased and should be sufficient for the demand.
• New user interface technologies will need to be accessible. Ensuring this happens will be the major challenge to the accessibility community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 25th August 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Accessibility does not just mean access by everybody to Information and Communication Technologies, it also means access to everything available through ICT. It is not sufficient that applications and websites are accessible, it is important that tools, widgets and add-ons are also accessible. The importance of tools being accessible has been highlighted by AVAST Software's recent announcement that it has upgraded its avast! anti-virus program to be fully accessible to the vision-impaired.

Many users of screen-readers, such as JAWS®, had been attracted to avast! because it included an audible alarm when a virus was detected, in addition to the pop-up window. In this way users were made aware of the alert, without JAWS losing focus on their current task, allowing them to deal with the virus alert at a time convenient to them, in just the same way that a sighted user could.

Essentially this meant that the day-to-day use of avast! was accessible. The problem was that the installation, configuration and operation was not accessible and the user of a screen-reader was dependent on the help of a sighted user for installation, configuration and any special operations (e.g. requesting an immediate scan). People with vision impairments want to be as independent as possible and not impose on their friends or colleagues when it is not essential.

The push for this development came from vision-impaired IT geeks who wanted to use avast! Antivirus 5.0. "For the blind, the computer is an absolutely fantastic invention. And for some, it's even their hobby to adjust it," said Radek Seifert, work-team leader at the TEREZA Center, a support centre for the sight-impaired at the Czech Technical University in Prague.

These volunteers fine-tuned avast! so it worked with JAWS. "They said, ‘give us the beta' so we did," remembers Ondrej Vlcek, AVAST Chief Technical Officer. "It was also a complicated issue on our side as avast! does not use the standard Windows controls."

The user interface for avast! needed to be changed in two ways:

• All functions had to be accessible using the keyboard, this is a prerequisite to being able to use JAWS. It has a beneficial side-effect that users who cannot, or prefer not, to use a pointing device have full access as well.
• All the textual information had to be provided to JAWS in an accessible, logical and consistent manner.

AVAST developed a new framework for the user interface which means that other products and new versions will automatically be JAWS friendly.

All through the development the new functions were tested and improved by the vision-impaired geeks thus ensuring that it was not just accessible using JAWS but that it was easy to use with JAWS.

avast! 5.0 was generally available in January 2010 and the new functions came in an update in August 2010; with the new framework the next version of avast!, planned for January 2011, will be accessible at GA.

It is great to see a company reacting quickly to user pressure for accessibility. It is also good to see that the vision-impaired community was actively involved in the development and testing of the new product.

The products should now be accessible to all disabled users, including those with hearing impairments and muscular-skeletal impairments. It is also available in 11 languages so making it easily accessible to users who prefer not to use English.

I hope that other developers of tools, widgets, add-ons and applications will take note and produce fully accessible versions of their products.

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

The bombshell that Oracle is suing Google over Java intellectual property in mobile platform powerhouse Android came as a surprise, but in hindsight it shouldn't have.

We must look at the world through the lens that all guns are pointed at Google, and that means that any means to temper its interests and blunt it's potential influence are in play and will be used.

By going for Google's second of only two fiscal jugular veins in Android (the other being paid search ads), Oracle has mightily disrupted the entire mobile world—and potentially the full computing client market. By asking for an injunction against Android based on Java patent and copyright violations, Oracle has caused a huge and immediate customer, carrier and handset channel storm for Google. Talk about FUD!

Could Oracle extend its injunctions requests to handset makers and more disruptively for mobile carriers, developers, or even end users? Don't know, but the uncertainty means a ticking bomb for the entire Android community. Oracle's suits therefore can't linger. Time is on Oracle's side right now. Even Google counter-suing does not stop the market pain and uncertainty from escalating.

We saw how that pain works when RIM suffered intellectual property claims against its BlackBerrys, when RIM was up against a court-ordered injunction wall. Fair or not, right or not, they had to settle and pay to keep the product and their market cap in the right motion. And speed was essential because investors are watching, wondering, worrying. Indeed, RIM should have caved sooner. That's the market-driven, short-term "time is not on our side" of Google's dilemma with Oracle's Java.

When Microsoft had to settle with Sun Microsystems over similar Java purity and license complaints a decade back, it was a long and drawn out affair, but the legal tide seemed to be turning against Microsoft. So Microsoft settled. That's the legal-driven, long-term "time is not on our side" of Google's dilemma with Oracle's Java.

Google is clearly in a tough spot. And so we need to know: What does Oracle really want with Android?

Not about the money
RIM's aggressors wanted money and got it. Sun also needed money (snarky smugness aside) too, and so took the loot from Microsoft and made it through yet another fiscal quarter. But Oracle doesn't need the money. Oracle will want quite something else in order for the legal Java cloud over Android to go away.

Oracle will probably want a piece of the action. But will Oracle be an Android spoiler ... and just work to sabotage Android for license fees as HP's WebOS and Apple's iOS and Microsoft's mobile efforts continue to gain in the next huge global computing market; that is for mobile and thin PC clients?

Or, will Oracle instead fall deeply, compulsively in love with Android ... Sort of a Phantom of the Opera (you can see Larry with the little mask already, no?), swooping down on the sweet music Google has been making with Android, intent on making that music its own, controlled from its own nether chambers, albeit with a darker enterprise pitch and tone. Bring in heavy organ music, please.

Chances are that Oracle covets Android, believes its teachings through Java technology (the angel of class libraries) entitles it to a significant if not controlling interest, and will hold dear Christine ... err, Android, hostage unless the opera goes on the way Oracle wants it to (with license payments all along the way). Bring in organ music again, please.

Trouble is, this phantom will not let his love interest be swept safely back into the arms of Verizon, HTC, Motorola and Samsung. Google will probably have to find a way make to make music with Oracle on Android for a long time. And they will need to do the deal quickly and quietly, just like Salesforce.com and Microsoft recently did.

What, me worry?
How did Google let this happen? It's not just a talented young girl dreaming of nightly rose-strewn encores, is it?

Google's mistake is it has acted like a runaway dog in a nightime meat factory, with its fangs into everything but with very little fully ingested (apologies to Steve Mills for usurping his analogy). In stepping on every conceivable competitors' (and partners') toes with hubristic zeal—yet only having solid success and market domination in a very few areas—Google has made itself vulnerable with its newest and extremely important success with Android.

Did Google do all the legal blocking and tackling? Maybe it was a beta legal review? Did the Oracle buy of Sun catch it off-guard? Will that matter when market perceptions and disruption are the real leverage? And who are Google's friends now when it needs them? They are probably enjoying the opera from the 5th box.

Android is clearly Google's next new big business, with prospects of app stores, and legions of devoted developers, myriad partners on the software and devices side, globally pervasive channels though the mobile carriers, and the potential to extend same into the tablets and even "fit" PCs arena. Wow, sounds a lot like what Java could have been, what iOS is, and what WebOS wants to be.

And so this tragic and ironic double-cross—Java coming back to stab Google in the heart—delivers like an aria, one that is sweet music mostly to HP, Apple, and Microsoft. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 29th June 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

This is the first of two articles about storage optimisation. In this article I will discuss what the issue is and in the second I will consider how vendors are (or, mostly, are not) addressing the real problems that users are facing.

Take a simple scenario in which you have three applications running against three separate databases, each of which has its own 1Tb disk. Suppose further that the databases require 700Gb, 150Gb and 600Gb respectively. The 150Gb database used to be a lot bigger but you’ve recently introduced an archival product that has allowed you to significantly reduce its space requirements. It isn’t hard to see that you could move that application to one of the other two disks and so free up one of the disks for some other purpose.

Now multiply these three disks by the thousands of such disks that are likely to be in place in any large organisation. The question becomes, how do you keep track of all the spare capacity you have whenever archival is implemented or data is deleted as no longer being relevant or you de-fragment a disk or you gain spare disk space for any of a number of other reasons?

To answer this question you have to bear in mind that new applications may be being added, that databases are growing and that virtualisation means that resources are being re-used on a regular basis.

Now we need to ask another question, which is why you would need to know about your spare capacity in the first place? The answer is that you want to be able to optimise the capacity you have so that it can be used to best advantage.

That’s only a part of the problem. Knowing about spare capacity and acting on it are two different things. Typically, you need to plan data migration across storage devices: you can’t just move stuff willy-nilly. But, and here is the rub, the process of planning such migrations is usually a manual one, and the process of making such plans can take weeks. By which time all the information you had about your disk usage is out-of-date, so your plans will be only partially useful at best, or obsolete at worst.

However, we are putting the cart before the horse. We are assuming that the information you can gather about your current storage usage is itself up-to-date and the fact is that it almost certainly isn’t. This is because (unless you are a very rare exception) you will undoubtedly have storage devices from multiple vendors and, while each of those vendors probably has pretty decent capabilities for discovery and investigating details pertaining to its own hardware devices, it equally probably has pretty lousy capabilities when it comes to finding out anything useful about competitive hardware. All of which means that you have multiple discovery products, none of which work together, so you end up producing a bunch of reports which you have to collate by manually entering the data from each separate report into (probably) a spreadsheet. Given the amount of data, this can take weeks and is notoriously error-prone; and even if, by some miracle, it was all correct, it would still be out-of-date given the dynamic nature of storage environments.

What’s needed is another way. What’s needed is heterogeneous discovery that will find out about your storage usage regardless of who provided it, so that collation of that data is automatic and timely. Secondly, to take a leaf out of the database world, you will need autonomics that will analyse your existing environment for you, make recommendations as to how you might optimise it and then, once you have selected your preferred option, action it (with, of course, appropriate scheduling and so forth) for you. Put those two things together—heterogeneous discovery with autonomics—and you have the beginnings of a solution to the storage optimisation problem.

However, that’s just a baseline: any such solution would need to be able to be aware of not just storage devices but servers and any virtualisation software that was in place and how it was being used. In other words, it needs to be able to understand the entire environment and how it pertains to storage. Further, you don’t just implement storage optimisation against a blank sheet of paper: there will be corporate policies and governance principles in place, as well as service level agreements and the like, so you will need a solution that is aware of, and can cater for, these aspects of operations management. What’s more, you need a solution that can execute your chosen recommendation, which means automatically migrating data across heterogeneous devices and servers. In other words, you need heterogeneity at the front-end and the back-end as well as some clever analytics in the middle.

Nor is this the end of the matter because this isn’t a one-off process. You don’t just optimise your assets once and say that’s job done. Optimisation is an on-going process. Fortunately, it’s easier to manage in that way: once you start from an optimised status you monitor changes as they occur and iteratively tune the environment to ensure it remains in an optimised state.

So, that’s the issue with storage optimisation and that’s what you would like to be able to do and some of the major considerations that would apply to any solution. I’ll discuss the market landscape in my next article.

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

“Green” is a big issue now in business. But it means different things to different people. If you talk to a politician, you will hear their party’s views on how the UK is doing against the Kyoto agreement and what they think of what happened in Copenhagen. If you talk to a manufacturer, then you will hear the words “carbon index” or even “green supply chain”. Then you talk to an IT manager and they will talk about “Green IT” which, when you look behind it, is all about hardware and netware.

But how can you tell where best to invest your green pounds to gain advantage from being “greener” that your competitor? (Because in the end that’s what it is really about—playing the “Green” card to gain competitive advantage). Cynical aren’t I, but realistic too.

From a manufacturing business viewpoint then the measure you need is a carbon index rating. How do you derive this? There are a number of different ways carbon indexes can be derived. For instance Pro Enviro (http://networks.proenviro.co.uk/What-is-Carbon-Index.aspx) have developed a Carbon Index for SMEs, which is calculated by collating information on a range of the resources used by a company and normalising carbon emission against Gross Value Added. In the construction industry, there is the SAP (Standard Assessment Procedure) index; this is based on the annual energy costs for space and water heating and on the annual CO2 emissions associated with space and water heating. So, even here, for the manufacturer we don’t have a clear 'this is what you should do'.

Organisations like the Carbon Trust, which is a not-for-profit company, provide specialist support to help business and the public sector cut carbon emissions, save energy and commercialise low carbon technologies. Companies like Green Oak Solutions (http://www.carbonfootprintsoftware.com) and PE International (http://www.pe-international.com) are starting to provide software to measure carbon emissions/footprints and as well as consultancy checklist to understand where a company is in its carbon management.

There are a number of approaches to Green IT. These include: virtualisation, power management, energy efficient display options, operating systems, data storage and search algorithms. Slightly more obtuse are issues such as telecommuting and materials recycling. So here too, a company needs to produce its “Green IT Strategy” that is right to meet its goals and objectives.

Now the good news, according to the ICT Sustainability Index, launched in December 2009, the UK was placed joint third with Brazil, France and Germany based on those whose economy, infrastructure and laws put them in the best place to realise the biggest cuts. How did we get there you may ask?

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th June 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 14th June 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Today's headlines point to more sophisticated and large-scale and malicious online activities. For some folks, therefore, the consensus seems to be that the cloud computing model and vision are not up to the task when it comes to security.

But at the RSA Conference earlier this year, a panel came together to talk about security and cloud computing, to examine the intersection of cloud computing, security, Internet services, and Internet-based security practices to uncover differences between perceptions and reality.

The result is a special BriefingsDirect podcast that takes stock of cloud-focused security—not just as a risk, but also as an amelioration of risk across all aspects of IT.

Join panelists Chris Hoff, Director of Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at Cisco Systems; Jeremiah Grossman, the founder and Chief Technology Officer at WhiteHat Security, and Andy Ellis, the Chief Security Architect at Akamai Technologies. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Grossman: An interesting paradigm shift is happening. When you look at website attacks, things haven't changed much. An application that exists in the enterprise is the same application that exists in the cloud. For us, when we are attacking websites and assessing their security, it doesn't really matter what infrastructure it's actually on. We break into it just the same as everything else.

Our job, in the website vulnerability management business, is to find those vulnerabilities ahead of time and help our customers fix those issues before they become larger problems. And if you look at any security report on the Web right now, as far as security goes, it's a web security world.

What's different [with cloud] among our customer base is that they can't run to their comfort zone. They can't run to secure their enterprise with firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption. They have to focus on the application. That's what's really different about cloud, when it comes to web security. You have to focus on the apps, because you have nothing else to go on.

Ellis: The first thing you have to do is to understand your own business. That's often the first mistake that security practitioners may make. They try to apply a common model of security thinking to very unique businesses. Even in one industry, everybody has a slightly different business model.

You have to understand what risks are acceptable to your business. Every business is in the practice of taking risk. That's how you make money. If you don't take any risk, you're not going to make money. So, understand that first. What are the risks that are acceptable to the business, and what are the ones that are unacceptable?

Security often lives in that gray area in between. How do we take risks that are neither fully acceptable nor fully unacceptable, and how do we manage them in a fashion to make them one or the other? If they're not acceptable, we don't take them, and if they are acceptable, we do. Hopefully we find a way to increase our revenue stream by taking those risks.

... There's a huge gap in what people think is secure and what people are doing today in trusting in the security in the cloud. When we look at our customer base, over 90 of the top 100 retailers on the Internet are using our cloud-based solutions to accelerate their applications—and what's more mission-critical than expecting money from your customers?

At Akamai, we see that where people are saying, "The cloud is not secure, we can't trust the cloud." At the same time, business decision makers are evaluating the risk and moving forward in the cloud.

A lot of that is working with their vendors to understand their security practices and comparing that to what they would do themselves. Sometimes, there are shifts. Cloud gives you different capabilities that you might be able to take advantage of, once you're out in the cloud.

Hoff: I like to say that if your security stinks before you move to the cloud, you will be pleasantly unsurprised by change, because it’s not going to get any better—or probably not even necessarily any worse—when you move to cloud computing.

What we're learning today is that if we secure our information and applications properly and the infrastructure is able to deal with the dynamism, you will, by default, start to see derivative impacts and benefits on security, because our models will change. At least, our thinking about security models will change.

We in the security industry in some way try to hold the cloud providers to a higher standard. I'm not sure that the consumer, who actually uses these services, sees much of a difference in terms of what they expect, other than it should be up, it should be available, and it should be just as secure as any other Internet-based service they use.

Those cloud providers—cloud service and cloud computing providers—are in the business of making sure that they can offer you really robust delivery. At this time, they focus there. We have a challenge to take everything we have done previously, in all these other different models, still do that, and deal with some of the implementation and operational elements that cloud computing, elasticity, dynamism, and all this fantastic set of capabilities bring.

So we get wrapped around the axle many times in discussions about cloud, where a lot of what we are talking about still needs to be taken care of from an infrastructure and application standpoint.

Ellis: That’s the challenge for people who are moving out to the cloud. That area may be in the purview of the provider. While they may trust the provider, and the provider has done the best they can do in that arena, when they still see risks, they can no longer say, "I'll just put in a firewall. I'll just do this." Now, they have to tackle a really sticky wicket. Do you have a safe application wherever it lives?

That’s where people run into a challenge: "It’s cloud. Let me make the provider responsible." But, at the end of day, the overall risk structure is still the responsibility of the business. Ultimately, the data owner, the business who is actually using whatever the compute cycles are.

Grossman: To piggyback on what Andy said, something has been lost. When you host an application internally, you can build it, you can deploy it, and you can test it. Now, all of a sudden, you've brought in a cloud provider, on somebody else’s infrastructure, and you have to get permission to test it. It’s not yours anymore.

Actually, one of the big things [to attend to] out there is a right to test. You have no right to test these infrastructure systems. If you do so without permission, it's illegal. So, you have lost visibility. You've lost technical visibility and security of the application.

When the cloud provider changes the app, it changes the risk profile of the application, too, but you don’t know when that happens and you don’t know what the end result is. There's a disconnect between the consumer, the business, and the cloud computing provider or whatever the system is.

Hoff: Cloud computing has become a fantastic forcing function, because what its done to the business and to IT. We talked about paradigm shifts and how important this is in the overall advancement of computing.

The reality is that cloud causes people to say, "If the thing that’s most important to me is information and protecting that information, and applications are conduits to it, and the infrastructure allows it to flow, then maybe what I ought to do is take a big picture view of this. I ought to focus on protecting my information, content, and data, which is now even more interestingly a mixture of traditional data, but also voice and video and mixed media applications, social networks, and mashups."

The complexity comes about because, with collaboration, we have enabled all sorts of fantastic interconnectivity between what was previously disparate, little mini-islands, with mini-perimeters that we could secure relatively well.

The application security and the information security, tied in and tightly coupled with an awareness of the infrastructure that powers it, even though it’s supposed to be abstracted in cloud computing, is really where people have a difficult time grasping the concepts between where we are today and what cloud computing offers them or doesn’t, and what that means for the security models.

Ellis: There's a great initiative going on right now called CloudAudit, which is aimed at helping people think through this security of a process and how you share controls between two disparate entities, so we can make those decisions at a higher level.

If I am trusting my cloud provider to provider some level of security, I should get some insight into what they're doing, so that I can make my decisions as a business unit. I can see changes there, the changes I am taking advantage of, and how that fits my entire software development life cycle.

Cloud computing, depending on who you talk to, encompasses almost everything; your kitchen blender, any element that you happen to connect to your enterprise and your home life.

It’s still nascent. People are still changing their mindset to think through that whole architecture, but we're starting to see that more and more—certainly within our customer base—as people think, "I'm out in the cloud. How is that different? What can I take advantage of that’s there that wasn’t there in my enterprise? What are the things that aren’t there that I am used to that now I have to shift and adapt to that change?"

Hoff: What's interesting about cloud computing as a derivative set of activities that you might have focused on from a governance perspective, with outsourcing, or any sort of thing where you have essentially given over control of the operation and administration of your assets and applications, is that you can outsource responsibility, but not necessarily accountability. That's something we need to remember.

Think about the notion of risk and risk management. I was on a panel the other day and somebody said, "You can't say risk management, because everyone says risk management." But, that's actually the answer. If I understand what's different and what is the same about cloud computing or the cloud computing implementation I am looking at, then I can make decisions on whether or not that information, that application, that data, ought to be put in the hands of somebody else.

In some cases, it can't be, for lots of real, valid reasons. There's no one-size-fits-all for cloud. Those issues force people to think about what is the same and what is different in cloud computing.

Previously, you introduced the discussion about the CSA. The thing we really worked on initially were 15 areas of concerns, and they're now consolidated to 13 areas of concern. What's different? What's the same? How do I need to focus on this? How can I map my compliance efforts? How can I assess, even if there are technical elements that are different in cloud computing? How can I assess the operational and cultural impacts?

Grossman: What I've seen in the last couple of years is that what drives security awareness is break-ins. Whether the bad guys are nation- or state-sponsored actors or whether they are organized criminals after credit card numbers, breaches happen. They're happening in record numbers, and they're stealing everything they can get their hands on.

Fortunately or unfortunately, from a cloud computing standpoint, all the attacks are largely the same, whether one application is here or in the cloud. You attack it directly, and all the methodologies to attack a website are the same. You have things like cross-site scripting, SQL injection, cross-site request forgery. They are all the same. That’s one way to access the data that you are after.

The other way is to get on the other half of web security. That’s the browser. You infect a website, the user runs into it, and they get infected. You email them a link. They click something. You infect them that way. Once you get on to the host machine, the client side of the connection, then you can leverage those credentials and then get into the cloud, the back-end way, the right way, and no one sees you.

Breaches make headlines. Headlines make people nervous, whether it's businesses or consumers. When a business outsources things to the cloud or a SaaS provider, they still have this nervous reaction about security, because their customers have this nervous reaction about security. So they start asking about security. "What are you doing to protect my data?"

All of a sudden, if that cloud provider, that vendor, takes security seriously and can prove it, demonstrate it, and get the market to accept it, security becomes a differentiating factor. It becomes an enabler of the top line, rather than a cost on the bottom line.

Ellis: I like to look at security as being a business-enabler in three areas. The obvious one, we all think, is risk reduction. How can I reduce my risk with cloud-based security services? Are there ways which I can get out there and do things safer? I'm not necessarily going to change anything else about my business. That's great and that's our normal model.

Security can also be a revenue-enabler and it can also be a protection of revenue. Web application firewalls is a great example of fraud mitigation services. There are a lot of services available through the cloud that can be used to protect your brand and your revenue against loss, but also help you grow revenue. As you just said, it's all about trust. People go back to brands that they trust, and security can be a key component of that.

It doesn't always have to be visible to the end user, but as you noted with the car industry, people build the perception around incidents. If you can be incident-free compared to your competition, that's a huge differentiator, as you go down into more and deeper activities that require deep trust with your end users.

A lot of what we try to do is build a wrapper in a sandbox around each customer to give them the same, consistent level of security. A big challenge in the enterprise model is that for every application that you stand up, you have to build that security stack from the ground up.

One advantage cloud does give you is that, if you are working with somebody who has thought about this is, you can take advantages of practices that they have already instituted. So, you get some level of commonality. Then, if a customer sees something and says, "You should improve this," that improvement can affect an entire customer base. Cloud has a benefit there to match some of the weaknesses it may have elsewhere.

Historically, in the enterprise model, we think about data in terms of being tied to a given application. That’s not really accurate. The data still moves around inside an enterprise. As Jeremiah noted, the weak point is often the browser. Compromise the client, and you get access to the data.

As people move to cloud, they start to change their risk thinking. Now, they think about the data and everywhere it lives and that gives them an opportunity to change their own risk model and think about how they're protecting the data and not just a specific application it used to live in.

As we noted earlier, a large fraction of the Internet retailers are using cloud for their most mission-critical things, their financial data, coming through every time somebody buys something.

If you are willing to trust that level of data to the cloud, you are making some knee-jerk reaction about an internal web conference between 12 people and a presentation about something that frankly most people aren’t going to care about, and you are saying, "That’s too sensitive to be in the cloud." But your revenue stream could be in the cloud. Sometimes it shows that we think parochially about security in some places.

Grossman: What's interesting about security spending versus infrastructure spending or just general IT spending is that it seems security is diametrically opposed to the business. We spend the most money on applications and our data, but the least amount of security risk spend. We spend the least on infrastructure relative to applications, but that's where we spend the most of our security dollars. So you seem to be diametrically opposed.

What cloud computing does, and the reason for this talk, is that it flattens the world. It abstracts the cloud below and forces us to realign with the business. That's what cloud will bring in a good way. It's just that you have to do it commensurate with the business.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 9th June 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 52, focuses on client-side architectures and the prospect of heightened disruption in the PC and device software arenas.

Such trends as cloud computing, service oriented architecture (SOA), social media, software as a service (SaaS), and virtualization are combining and overlapping to upset the client landscape. If more of what more users are doing with their clients involves services, then shouldn't the client be more services ready? Should we expect one client to do it all very well, or do we need to think more about specialized clients that might be configured on the fly?

Today's clients are more tied to the past than the future, where one size fits all. Most clients consist of a handful of entrenched PC platforms, a handful of established web browsers, and a handful of PC-like smartphones. But what has become popular on the server—virtualization—is taken to its full potential on these edge devices. New types of dynamic and task-specific client types might emerge. We'll take a look at what they might look like.

Also, just as Windows 7 for Microsoft is quickly entering the global PC market, cloud providers are in an increasingly strong position to potentially favor certain client types or data and configuration synchronization approaches. Will the client lead the cloud or vice versa? We'll talk about that too.

Either way, the new emphasis seems to be on full-media, webby activities, where standards and technologies are vying anew for some sort of a de-facto dominance across both rich applications as well as media presentation capabilities.

We look at the future of the client with a panel of analysts and guests: Chad Jones, Vice President for Product Management at Neocleus; Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints; Jim Kobielus, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research; Michael Dortch, Director of Research at Focus; JP Morgenthal, Chief Architect, Merlin International, and Dave Linthicum, CTO, Bick Group. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Jones: In the client market, it's time for disruption. Looking at the general PC architectures, we have seen that since pretty much the inception of the computer, you really still have one operating system (OS) that's bound to one machine, and that machine, according to a number of analysts, is less than 10 percent utilized.

Normally, that's because you can't share that resource and really take advantage of everything that modern hardware can offer you. Dual cores and all the gigabytes of RAM that are available on the client are all great things, but if you can't have an architecture that can take advantage of that in a big way, then you get more of the same.

On the client side, virtualization is moving into all forms of computing. We've seen that with applications, storage, networks, and certainly the revolution that happened with VMware and the hypervisors on the server side. But, the benefits from the server virtualization side were not only the ability to run multiple OSs side-by-side and consolidate servers, which is great, but definitely not as relevant to the client side. It’s really the ability to manage the machine at the machine level and be able to take OSs and move them as individual blocks of functionality in those workloads.

The same thing for the client can become possible when you start virtualizing that endpoint and stop doing management of the OS as management of the PC, and be able to manage that PC at the root level.

Imagine that you have your own personal Windows OS, that maybe you have signed up for Microsoft’s new Intune service to manage that from the cloud standpoint. Then, you have another Google OS that comes down with applications that are specific from that Google service, and that desktop is running in parallel with Windows, because it’s fully controlled from a cloud provider like Google. Something like Chrome OS is truly a cloud-based OS, where everything is supposed to be stored up in the cloud.

Those kinds of services, in turn, can converge into the PC, and virtualization can take that to the next level on the endpoint, so that those two things don’t overlap with each other, and a level of service, which is important for the cloud, certainly for service level agreements (SLAs), can truly be attained. There will be a lot of flexibility there.

Virtualization is a key enabler into that, and is going to open up PC architectures to a whole brave new world of management and security. And, at a platform level, there will be things that we're not even seeing yet, things that developers can think of, because they have options to now run applications and agents and not be bound to just Windows itself. I think it’s going to be very interesting.

With virtualization, you have a whole new area where cloud providers can tie in at the PC level. They'll be able to bundle desktop services and deliver them in a number of unique ways.

Linthicum: Cloud providers will eventually get into desktop virtualization. It just seems to be the logical conclusion of where we're heading right now.

In other words, we're providing all these very heavy-duty IT services, such as database, OSs, and application servers on demand. It just makes sense that eventually we're going to provide complete desktop virtualization offerings that pop out of the cloud.

The beauty of that is that a small business, instead of having to maintain an IT staff, will just have to maintain a few clients. They log into a cloud account and the virtualized desktops come down.

It provides disaster recovery based on the architecture. It provides great scalability, because basically you're paying for each desktop instance and you're not paying for more or less than you need. So, you're not buying a data center or an inventory of computers and having to administer the users.

That said, it needs a lot more cooking to occur before we actually get the public clouds on that bandwagon. Over the next few years, it's primarily going to be an enterprise concept and it's going to be growing, but eventually it's going to reach the cloud.

There are going to be larger companies. Google and Microsoft are going to jump on this. Microsoft is a prime candidate for making this thing work, as long as they can provide something as a service, which is going to have the price point that the small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are going to accept, because they are the early adopters.

Rowley: When we talk about the client, we're mostly thinking about the web-browser based client as opposed to the client as an entire virtualized OS. When you're using a business process management system (BPMS) and you involve people, at some point somebody is going to need to pull work off of a work list and work on it and then eventually complete it and go and get the next piece of work.

That’s done in a web-based environment, which isn’t particularly unusual. It's a fairly rich environment, which is something that a lot of applications are going to. Web-based applications are going to a rich Internet application (RIA) style.

We have tried to take it even a step further and have taken advantage of the fact that by moving to some of these real infrastructures, you can do not just some of the presentation tier of an application on the client. You can do the entire presentation tier on the web browser client and have its communication to the server, instead of being traditional HTML, have the entire presentation on the browser. Its communication uses more of a web-service approach and going directly into the services tier on the server. That server can be in a private cloud or, potentially, a public cloud.

What's interesting is that by not having to install anything on the client, as with any of these discussions we are talking about, that's an advantage, but also on the server, not having to have a different presentation tier that's separate from your services tier.

You go directly from your browser client into the services tier on the server, and it just decreases the overall complexity of the entire system. That's possible, because we base it on AJAX, with JavaScript that uses a library that's becoming a de-facto standard called jQuery. jQuery has the power to communicate with the server and then do all of the presentation logic locally.

... I believe that Apple, growing dominant in the client space with both the iPhone and now the iPad, and its lack of support for either Silverlight or Flash, will be a push toward the standard space, the HTML5 using JavaScript, as the way of doing client-based rich Internet apps. There will be more of a coalescing around these technologies, so that potentially all of your apps can come through the one browser-based client.

Dortch: ... There are going to continue to be proprietary approaches to solving these problems. As the Buddhists like to say, many paths, one mountain. That's always going to be true. But, we've got to keep our eyes on the ultimate goal here, and that is, how do you deliver the most compelling services to the largest number of users with the most efficient use of your development resources?

Until the debate shifts more in that direction and stops being so, I want to call it, religious about bits and bytes and speeds and feeds, progress is going to be hampered. But, there's good news in HTML5, Android, Chrome, and those things. At the end of the day, there's going to be a lot of choices to be made.

The real choices to be made right now are centered on what path developers should take, so that, as the technologies evolve, they have to do as little ripping and replacing as possible. This is especially a challenge for larger companies running critical proprietary applications.

Morgenthal: I like to watch patterns. Look at where more applications have been created in the past three years, on what platform, and in what delivery mechanism than in any other way. Have they been web apps or have they been iPhone/Android apps?

You've got to admit that the web is a great vehicle for pure dynamic content. But, at the end of the day, when there is a static portion of at least the framework and the way that the information is presented, nothing beats that client that’s already there going out and getting a small subset of information, bringing it back, and displaying it.

I see us moving back to that model. The web is great for a fully connected high-bandwidth environment.

I've been following a lot about economics, especially U.S. economics, how the economy is going, and how it impacts everything. I had a great conversation with somebody who is in finance and investing, and we joked about how people are claiming they are getting evicted out of their homes. Their houses and homes are being foreclosed on. They can barely afford to eat. But, everybody in the family has an iPhone with a data plan.

Look what necessity has become, at least in the U.S., and I know it's probably similar in Korea, Japan, and parts of Europe. Your medium for delivery of content and information is that device in the palm that's got about a 300x200 display.

On the desktop, you have Adobe doing the same thing with AIR and it's cross-platform, and it's a lot more interactive than some of the web stuff. JavaScript is great, but at some point, you do get degradation in functionality. At some point, you have to deliver too much data to make that really effective. That all goes away when you have a consistent user interface (UI) that is downloadable and updatable automatically.

I have got a Droid now. Everyday I see that little icon in the corner; I have got updates for you. I have updated my Seismic three times, and my USA Today. It tells me when to update. It automatically updates my client. It's a very neutral type of platform, and it works very, very well as the main source for me to deliver content.

Virtualization is on many fronts, but I think what we are seeing on the phone explosion is a very good point. I get most of my information through my phone.

Now, sometimes, is that medium too small to get something more? Yeah. So where do I go? I go to my secondary source, which is my laptop. I use my phone as my usual connectivity medium to get my Internet.

So, while we have tremendous broadband capability growing around the world, we're living in a wireless world and wireless is becoming the common denominator for a delivery vehicle. It's limiting and controlling what we can get down to the end user in the client format.

Kobielus: In fact, it's the whole notion of a PC being the paradigm here that's getting deconstructed. It has been deconstructed up the yin yang. If you look at what a PC is, and we often think about a desktop, it's actually simply a decomposition of services, rendering services, interaction services, connection and access, notifications, app execution, data processing, identity and authentication. These are all services that can and should be virtualized and abstracted to the cloud, private or public, because the clients themselves, the edges, are a losing battle, guys.

Try to pick winners here. This year, iPads are hot. Next year, it's something else. The year beyond, it's something else. What's going to happen is—and we already know it's happening—is that everything is getting hybridized like crazy.

All these different client or edge approaches are just going to continue to blur into each other. The important thing is that the PC becomes your personal cloud. It's all of these services that are available to you. The common denominator here for you as a user is that somehow your identity is abstracted across all the disparate services that you have access to.

All of these services are aware that you are Dave Linthicum, coming in through your iPad, or you are Dave Linthicum coming in through a standard laptop web browser, and so forth. Your identity and your content is all there and is all secure, in a sense, bringing process into there.

You don't normally think of a process as being a service that's specific to a client, but your hook into a process, any process, is your ability to log in. Then, have your credentials accepted and all of your privileges, permissions, and entitlements automatically provisioned to you.

Identity, in many ways, is the hook into this vast, personal cloud PC. That’s what’s happening.

Rowley: A lot of applications will really mix up the presentation of the work to be done by the people who are using the application, with the underlying business process that they are enabling.

If you can somehow tease those apart and get it so that the business process itself is represented, using something like a business process model, then have the work done by the person or people divided into a specific task that they are intended to do, you can have the task, at different times, be hosted by different kinds of clients.

Or, depending on the person, whether they're using a smartphone or a full PC, they might get a different rendering of the task, without changing the application from the perspective of the business person who is trying to understand what's going on. Where are we in this process? What has happened? What has to happen yet? Etc.

Then, for the rendering itself, it's really useful to have that be as dynamic as possible and not have it be based on downloading an application, whether it's an iPhone app or a PC app that needs to be updated, and you get a little sign that says you need to update this app or the other.

When you're using something like HTML5, you can get it so that you get a lot of the functionality of some of these apps that currently you have to download, including things, as somebody brought up before, the question of what happens when you aren't connected or are on partially connected computing?

Up until now, web-based apps very much needed to be connected in order to do anything. HTML5 is going to include some capabilities around much more functionality that's available, even when you're disconnected. That will take the technology of a web-based client to even more circumstances, where you would currently need to download one.

It's a little bit of a change in thinking for some people to separate out those two concepts, the process from the UI for the individual task. But, once you do, you get a lot of value for it.

Jones: I can see that as part of it as well. When you're able to start taking abstraction of management and security from outside of those platforms and be able to treat that platform as a service, those things become much greater possibilities.

I believe one of the gentlemen earlier commented that a lot of it needs some time to percolate and cook, and that’s absolutely the case. But, I see that within the next 10 years, the platform itself becomes a service, in which you can possibly choose which one you want. It’s delivered down from the cloud to you at a basic level.

That’s what you operate on, and then all of those other services come layered in on top of that as well, whether that’s partially through a concoction of virtualization and different OS platforms, coupled with cloud-based profiles, data access, applications and those things. That’s really the future that we're going to see here in the next 15 years or so.

... For the near-term, as the client space begins to shake out over the next couple of years, the immediate benefits are first around being able to take our deployment of at least the Windows platform, from a current state of, let's either have an image that's done at Dell or more the case, whenever I do a hardware refresh, every three to four years, that's when I deploy the OS. And, we take it to a point where you can actually get a PC and put it onto the network.

You take out all the complexity of what the deployment questions are and the installation that can cause so many different issues, combined with things like normalizing device driver models and those types of things, so that I can get that image and that computer out to the corporate standard very, very quickly, even if it's out in the middle of Timbuktu. That's one of the immediate benefits.

Plus, start looking at help desk and the whole concept of desktop visits. If Windows dies today, all of your agents and recovery and those types of things die with it. That means I've got to send back the PC or go through some lengthy process to try to talk the user through complicated procedures, and that's just an expensive proposition.

You're able to take remote-control capabilities outside of Windows into something that's hardened at the PC level and say, okay, if Windows goes down, I can actually still connect to the PC as if I was local and remote connect to it and control it. It's like what the IP-based KVMs did for the data center. You don’t even have to walk into the data center now. Imagine that on a grand scale for client computing.

Couple in a VPN with that. Someone is at a Starbucks, 20 minutes before a presentation, with a simple driver update that went awry and they can't fix it. With one call to the help desk, they're able to remote to that PC through the firewalls and take care of that issue to get them up and working.

Those are the areas that are the lowest hanging fruit, combined with amping up security in a completely new paradigm. Imagine an antivirus that works, looking inside of Windows, but operates in the same resource or collision domain, an execution environment where the virus is actually working, or trying to execute.

There is a whole level of security upgrades that you can do, where you catch the viruses on the space in between the network and actually getting to a compatible execution environment in Windows, where you quarantine it before it even gets to an OS instance. All those areas have huge potential.

You have got to keep that rich user experience of the PC, but yet change the architecture, so that it could become more highly manageable or become highly manageable, but also become flexible as well.

Imagine a world, just cutting very quickly in the utility sense, where I've got my call center of 5,000 seats and I'm doing an interactive process, but I have got a second cord dedicated to a headless virtual machine that’s doing mutual fund arbitrage apps or something like that in a grid, and feeding that back. You're having 5,000 PCs doing that for you now at a very low cost rate, as opposed to building a whole data center capacity to take care of that. Those are kind of the futures where this type of technology can take you as well.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript, or read a full copy.

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

Apprenda, a software as a service (SaaS) middleware provider, is now offering a free downloadable SaaS stack that provides much of the functionality of its flagship SaaSGrid, an application server for on-demand apps.

The Clifton Park, NY company says that SaaSGrid Express, announced recently, provides free access to a foundation with which to deliver .NET applications as mature SaaS offerings with a competitive cost-of-delivery profile.

The model appears simple. Use community and ISV economic imperatives to drive a de facto standard into the market, thereby seeding a strong business to the upgrade-path commercial version. The timing is great, as finding a way to enjoy cloud computing scale and economics is top of mind for ISVs and early-adopter enterprises.

All of the main features and functions of SaaSGrid application server have been ported to the self-installable Express edition. Apprenda says their product has drastically reduced time-to-market and capital requirements for independent software vendors (ISVs), SMBs and enterprises, with some customers experiencing 50 to 70 percent reductions in planned engineering time and associated costs.

I like to think of this as allowing for SaaS "stack bursting", which could easily augment cloud-bursting efforts, seeing as users of Apprenda SaaSGrid can run on Amazon EC2 as well as for on-premises virtualized workloads. The model might also work really well in migration efforts, for going from legacy apps to web and ultimately cloud deployments.

According to Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller some 93 percent of ISV-delivered applications have yet to make the transition to on-demand and SaaS-delivered. That's a lot of apps.

In addition to the complex architectural foundation afforded by SaaSGrid Express—such as low effort multi-tenancy and resilient grid-scalability—the product also provides some of the other “out of the box” application services found in the full-fledged commercial SaaSGrid offering, including:

• Metering
• Monetization
• Subscription Management
• Application lifecycle management
• Cloud control
• Billing
• Customer provisioning

This new edition enables developers to quickly build, deploy and onboard customers to their .NET applications, letting them build significant revenue streams without any license costs.

Full-licensed version
ISVs leveraging the full-production-licensed SaaSGrid edition pay a per-server, per-month license fee, and benefit from full customization and branding capabilities, as well as additional features. This licensing model, known as the SaaSGrid Monthly Server License, includes free access to maintenance and software upgrades and comprehensive customer service (based upon the number of licensed servers).

In April, Gartner analyst Yefim Natis profiled Apprenda as one of the "Cool Vendors" in the application platform as a service (APaaS) space. He said:

"Apprenda's support of ISV (or private cloud application project) requirements for developing and running SaaS-style offerings far exceed the functionality available with the recently delivered Windows Azure SDK. Apprenda's advanced support for fine-grained and adjustable use tracking and billing is particularly valuable for ISVs.

Apprenda achieves this breadth of capabilities largely unintrusively, in part by intercepting and extending the Web and the database communications of the application and in part by modifying the compiled application intermediate language code (adding value and some overhead in the process)".

However, Natis does offer one caution:

"Apprenda's current business is primarily focused on ISVs. Historically, the business opportunities of middleware providers servicing the ISV market have been limited. With time, the company must develop a product offering that targets enterprise IT cloud application projects as well in order to expand its business opportunities".

If the ISVs' needs and enterprise app migration efforts alone jump-start adoption of SaaSGrid Express it could make for a strong and clear path to clouds, from Amazon to Azure to the home-grown variety at an enterprise near you.

For more information on SaaSGrid Express and how to download it, visit the Apprenda web site: www.apprenda.com.

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

Aiming to meet the needs of enterprises building, testing and deploying web data services, Kapow Technologies last week released Web Data Server 7.2, the lastest iteration of its flagship software.

The update features a new design studio to develop, test, deploy and manage web data services. Developers can review collected data with any browser, and a Web-based scheduling interface allows for timing and automating data retrieval. Users can therefore easily develop and deploy automated processes, or "robots," said Kapow.

The value behind the updated version centers on real-time, actionable business intelligence (BI). Web Data Server 7.2 automates access to and integration with any Web data source, from Web applications inside the firewall to data stored in the cloud to data found across the Web. [Disclosure: Kapow is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Serving the needs of both IT and line-of-business users, Web Data Server 7.2 saves time and resources in the quest for actionable BI by significantly shortening application and data integration project timelines.

The web-based data explosion
“The proliferation of Web-based data, both inside and outside the company, continues to explode, providing enterprises with remarkable potential to leverage Web data services for market insights and analytics,” said Stefan Andreasen, CTO of Kapow Technologies.

Web Data Server 7.2 offers some interesting features that could turn the heads of BI and social media analytics and trends gathering practitioners looking for a user-friendly solution that provides quick results.

Sneak peak at Web Data Server 7.2
Among the new features in Web Data Server 7.2 Design Studio is a Data Viewer that lets users see collected data within the Design Studio and load it directly into Microsoft Excel, perhaps the predominant BI results delivery interface on the planet.

The proliferation of Web-based data, both inside and outside the company, continues to explode.

In other Kapow developments, the Palo Alto, Calif. firm was recently recognized as a Laureate by IDG's Computerworld Honors Program.

Web Data Server 7.2 also offers Native XML Support, FTP and File System Interaction, new converters to XML, JSON and CSV formats, improved database functionality, enhanced production monitoring and more than 50 other improvements that significantly enhance the robot development, deployment and management experience, said Kapow.

Building on Kapow's mashups strengths, Kapow Web Data Server 7.2 includes updates to Kapow’s browser and Javascript engine to handle complex, dynamic web sources driven by AJAX and Google Web Toolkit. Finally, improvements were included in the browser-based management and scheduling console, including production monitoring and notifications, and new logging functionality for databases, Log4J and e-mail.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 14th May 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to the solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billable utilization

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

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

Learn more about Compuware Changepoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about Compuware Changepoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not the same old song and dance

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

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

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

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

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

HP tackles the IT funding conundrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cost of lost opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The torrent of major IT acquisitions notched another milestone today when German business applications powerhouse SAP announced plans to buy fast-growing database and mobility vendor Sybase of California for $5.8 billion.

The news comes as the IT vendor space is witnessing an historic consolidation, via both acquisitions and partnerships. From HP buying Palm, to IBM buying Cast Iron, to EMC partnering with Cisco, to Oracle absorbing Sun Microsystems, the rush is on to present a new all-in-one face to the enterprise IT buying community.

As I said in my earlier post today -- in analyzing product news from HP, IBM and TIBCO -- the receding recession has provided a catalyst for a much larger shift in how IT is done and delivered. These tier-one vendors know something big is up in IT, beyond business as usual, beyond a typical turnaround in the business cycle.

SAP and Sybase are very complementary, from the business, technology and market penetration perspectives. But the price of $65 in cash for each Sybase share by SAP -- a 44 percent premium to Sybase's average price over the past three months -- shows that this is no marriage of convenience.

It's more like a shotgun wedding, and the shotgun is being aimed by a rapidly changing IT environment that favors scale, comprehensive products and services, and global delivery capabilities. A big war chest and a yen for cloud computing don't hurt either.

SAP needed to get back in the Big Game to remain a top-tier IT vendor. Sybase fills major gaps in SAP's portfolio, and gives it an instant chance to play in rapidly changing mobile market.

Sybase has not been ailing, but growing quite well, mostly from its core database and tools businesses. Sybase took a big departure a few years ago with a big swing into mobility infrastructure for enterprises. They have done well, but the stakes in the last year has grown higher as netbooks, smartphones, iPhones and iPads have made mobility the client-side growth markets.

Sybase would not likely grow organically into more aspects of IT, despite it's core strengths and large presence in Asia and on Wall Street. SAP gives to Sybase the larger business applications and sheer global scale to enter the tier-one vendor space faster than it could alone.

But this is no slam-dunk. It's risky. SAP acquisitions have been spotty in terms of numbers, size and success. These companies are very different culturally and geographically. Sybase has a strong engineering streaks, which is a good fit -- if the politics can be worked out.

The level of risk, like the price, indicates that there's a hint of desperation in the SAP-Sybase meld, if not in terms of survival at least in terms of the grasping to deal with an IT landscape that is rapidly turning into a handful of mega vendors.

Now that the flood gates on M&A mania have been opened, one has to wonder what will be next for Red Hat, TIBCO, BMC, Progress Software, Novell, Citrix and the dwindling number of larger tier-two IT infrastructure vendors.

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

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

If only there was something similar on offer for online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 12th March 2010 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2010

IBM has announced three new servers that are based on the fifth-generation IBM Enterprise X-Architecture chip (eX5). These are the four-processor IBM System x3850 X5, the BladeCenter HX5, and the System x3690 X5, which the company stated will be the most powerful two-processor server on the market. Each of these eX5 servers is equipped with a new independent memory-scaling technology, known as MAX 5, which allows processors on eX5 systems to access extended memory very quickly and enables these servers to offers six times more memory than comparable x86-based servers.

In addition to MAX5, IBM’s new eX5 systems offer additional features that seek to improve the performance, cost, and flexibility for x86 workloads:

• eXFlash, a next-generation flash-storage technology, replaces previous generation storage and can slash storage costs substantially as each eXFlash can replace 80 JBODs and associated hardware and cabling.
• FlexNode, a physical partitioning capability, allows organizations to change their systems configuration from one system to two distinct systems and back again as desired. This enables organizations to run infrastructure applications by day and larger batch jobs by night on the same system.

The eX5 systems take advantage of integration with IBM middleware to create a virtualized environment providing a flexible, highly scalable system that can reduce the number of physical servers needed to support a given workload. IBM's Systems Director management suite has been upgraded to support eX5 technology and will allow users to pre-configure servers, remotely re-purpose systems, and set up automatic updates and recoveries. The company stated that its new eX5 servers are the result of a three-year engineering effort to improve the economics of operating enterprise-sized, x86-based systems.

Pricing/Availability:
The IBM System x3850 X5, BladeCenter HX5, and System x3690 X5 are being previewed this week at the CeBIT trade show in Germany and will be officially available later this month and throughout the year. No pricing details were released.

Net/Net:
At times it is difficult to get excited about Industry Standard x86-based servers. The market is saturated with solutions that seem to universally benefit from ever-increasing CPU performance combined with a price/performance ratio that continues to rise towards the stratosphere. All told, more applications are finding their way onto this platform every year as legacy UNIX and other systems are retired in favor of this widely deployed low acquisition cost option. The platform offers choice of operating system and components from thousands of suppliers, and now with virtualization, utilization is going up, and acquisition price points are going down. Overall, it sounds like a commodity market. So why get all worked up about a vendor’s latest entry in this well populated market segment? The reasons are simple: this is NOT a commodity market, virtualization is here to stay, and disk drives are too darn slow.

While x86 processors as a component could easily be considered a commodity, a processor alone does not make a server. All of the components on the motherboard and rack/chassis along with various interconnections have a substantial impact on the performance and capability of the server. While one industry-standard server would be expected to execute the same software as another, the performance and scalability of the systems is not automatically the same. Commodity CPU yes, commodity and hence undifferentiated server, no.

The growth in x86 CPU performance is undeniable. Quad-core and higher systems with lightning-fast clock speeds have achieved an astonishing level of performance at very compelling price points. However, to effectively harness this performance, the system performance as a whole must be balanced across all of its component parts in order to cost-effectively support the application workload. As computational performance has risen, there has been a corresponding gap in overall system utilization as newer and faster systems are limited by the mundanity of relatively slow I/O access, memory swaps, disk reading and writing, network access, etc. To address this utilization gap, many have embraced virtualization to get more virtual servers out of the physical server. But this success in modestly raising CPU utilization has caused a new scaling constraint, one of limited memory.

Virtualization allows many more logical servers and workloads to be discretely serviced by a physical server. However, each of these workloads requires RAM, and the total amount of RAM is limited by the number of DIMMs and memory interconnects to the CPU that can be installed on a motherboard. Historically this has limited most x86 servers to 256GB or less, a shortcoming that MAX5 seeks to address. By increasing the amount of RAM available to the CPU up to a maximum of 1536GB, the server can support a larger virtual machine footprint and hence more workloads. This can help make use of computational resources that are otherwise idle or saturated with workloads that are more memory- than computation-intensive. Increasing the yield of virtual servers supported per physical server can reduce software licensing fees for organizations with per-socket licensing regimes. The number of users supported on a server can increase, but without an increase in socket count and hence corresponding license expense. To our way of thinking, this gives eX5-based systems a compelling advantage over traditional solutions, one that not only is technically crafty, but yields financial dividends as well.

Lastly, with increased computational prowess and sufficient memory in place, the last leg of the balancing trifecta becomes evident: access speed to out-of-memory storage. In the grand scheme of things, disk drives are just much slower than memory or CPU cache. Although many steps have been taken to improve spindle-based storage access speed, it still remains the turtle to the computational hare. Advances in flash technology have sought to address this reality, and this is where eXFlash plays its hand. Besides its higher IOP rating, each eXFlash can replace 80 JBODs, which translates into a substantial reduction in energy, floor space, and wiring requirements. Again, the performance improvement is notable, but the underlying acquisition and operational economics are the most compelling aspects of this technology.

So all told, we believe that eX5 illustrates once again that just because a server is based upon x86 processors it is not automatically a commodity solution. The unique scaling and performance technologies in these offerings serve notice that a holistic and balanced systems approach can yield very different results than a solution based simply upon assembling industry-standard technologies. We believe organizations that are turning to workload optimization and systems efficiency as part of their strategic IT course will likely find much to rejoice in with the latest eX5 servers. Likewise, for those who are merely seeking to achieve a higher degree of vertical scaling from x86 solutions, eX5 redefines the current limitations on single system scaling in a notable fashion, one which we believe will be well received.

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

On Wednesday 3 March 2010 I attended the inspiring launch of Apps for Good in Tulse Hill, Lambeth, South London.

Apps for Good is a project that will provide an environment for young people in the community to analyse issues that effect their lives and then design and develop digital applications to improve their reality.

The program is being run by CDI Europe based on techniques developed over the last 15 years. CDI started in deprived communities in Rio de Janeiro and now has hundreds of centres across South America, the Middle East, North Africa and now Europe, and is planning to expand into southern Africa and India.

The project is expected to have multiple beneficial effects:

• The availability of useful applications relevant to the needs of the local community.
• Increased understanding of the issues that effect young people and the wider community.
• Encourage the use of information technology within the community by demonstrating the benefits and thereby increase digital inclusion.
• The participants will gain transferable skills related to working in groups, working in projects, analysis, design, development and promotion of solutions.
• Improve the self awareness and motivation of the participants.
• Proof that the process works in the UK environment with the intent that it will be replicated in other centres across the UK and Europe.

I am excited by this project because I recognise the importance of digital technology to the UK and the need to ensure that young people are enthused and involved. On a personal level I realise that, as I move into retirement, the quality of my life will become dependent on both younger people around me and the innovative and effective use of technology.

As my regular readers will know my main interest is in accessibility: computing for people with disabilities. I see Apps for Good having the potential to address issues in this area in two ways. Either the young people will recognise the issue of digital exclusion of people with disabilities (along with the elderly, or people whose first language is not English) and create applications to help them. Or centres will be set up specifically for people with disabilities to create their own solutions. This has already happened in South America.

Congratulations and good luck to everyone involved in the instigation and running of this project:

• High Trees Development Trust in Tulse Hill, South London where the first UK centre is housed.
• CDI Europe who provide the knowledge and skills in running similar projects.
• Dell YouthConnect that supplied the computers and some professional support.

If this first pilot in High Trees goes welland I am convinced that it willthen there will be a demand and a desire to replicate it rapidly around the UK and other European countries. I urge everyone in the British ICT community to think how they could support this initiative: by providing equipment or volunteers to help with the project, but also thinking how they can provide support to the young people to build on the skills and solutions they have developed.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd March 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion comes in conjunction with The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference held earlier this month in Seattle.

We assembled a panel to examine service oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing—the relationships, the inter-reliance and the realities. Three years ago, the IT transformation poster child was SOA, and now we're well into the hype curve around cloud computing, but has one actually given way to the other? Are they linear in their relationship, or perhaps mutually dependent in some ways, and to what degree?

We’ll explore now whether SOA has found new value and relevance as a foundation and perhaps catalyst for cloud computing, especially for so-called private clouds. And, we'll see how the emergence of SOA and cloud may be happening in different places inside of enterprises. Shouldn’t one hand get to quickly know what the other is up to and perhaps even work together?

Here with us now, however, to plumb the depths of how SOA and cloud computing do or don’t come together, are Dr. Chris Harding, director of the SOA Work Group at The Open Group; Stephen G. Bennett, Senior Enterprise Architect at Oracle, and Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Search for Salesforce.com. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Harding: Five years ago, when we started getting into SOA, there was a huge amount of excitement and a great deal of buzz about it. Now, we can see that the hype cycle has run its course, but we're still seeing a great deal of technical interest in SOA and we're also seeing that companies are using it and are increasing their use of it. So, there is a steady uptake in the use of SOA, although the excitement about it has died down.

It’s very interesting that service orientation is very much a business concept, and SOA has been about the application of that business concept to the technology. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is very much a technical concept. It’s about what you can do with technology over the Internet.

It is a technical concept, but it has had a really big impact on the business structure. So you can see them as complementary. SOA has been the application of business principles into the technology. Cloud is a technical concept, which has had a huge impact on the business. So, yes, there probably are different parts of the organizations looking at cloud and looking at SOA, but there is a big dynamic that says they should be working together on both of them.

Coffee: I've been covering SOA for a long time. I'd say the people who adopted SOA in the previous decade got considerable upside, but those who did not didn’t really suffer any penalty for not doing so.

In the situation we're in now, where the economics of cloud computing are becoming quite compelling, the downside of not having a SOA is becoming quite apparent. If you don’t have a service environment, then your ability to extend your current assets and integrate them with cloud services is going to be somewhat hampered.

So, people are realizing now that the wait-and-see option is more perilous than it used to be. This is accelerating the actual adoption of what we would call SOA, except that’s no longer the label du jour.

It seems to me that SOA very quickly became a label of products that vendors wanted to sell. So, you saw a lot of things like enterprise service bus (ESB) products and so on.

It became dangerously easy to think that you were doing SOA, if you were buying the tools and failing to appreciate how much of a cultural and management achievement it was to get people to think of themselves not as owners of and the gatekeepers to an IT asset, but instead being publishers of and supporters of a service to other parts of the business.

It’s absolutely critical to understand that you can view SOA as simply a way of integrating the stuff you have, or you can move to the next level and start to think of it as the way you do your business. The way your business units interact with and support each other with the technology is just the enabler for that.

The same is true of the cloud. It's possible to take the existing IT model of isolated applications, each with their own data stores, and replicate that model in the cloud with elastic scalability of capacity. That would be the level of the cloud industry that’s typically called infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Or, it's possible to use the cloud as a much more interesting and fluid medium for interaction among much more granular and business-oriented services at the level that’s traditionally been called in the industry either platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS). It depends on the level at which you choose to consume other people’s application work, instead of doing new application development yourself.

It’s possible to do SOA without the cloud. It’s possible to do better SOA with it. It is also possible to do an isolated silo-oriented architecture locally and also to do that in a cloud environment. Neither one necessarily implies or impels the other.

Bennett: The majority of large enterprises today are doing SOA in one fashion or another at different levels of maturity, whether that’s from the quite immature approach of seeing it as a pure integration play all the way up to seeing it more as a business agility kind of play.

So, it's becoming a norm and, therefore, we don’t need to keep hyping it or pushing it. We need to use the characteristics it offers with other supporting technology strategies such as cloud.

I actually see recession as an opportunity within IT, because it gives you opportunity to reset thinking and reset IT's approach to actually delivering IT to the business.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well.

Coffee: The economics of being able to have elastically scalable capacity to be able to handle peak loads without needing to own the peak capacity and wind up with very low utilization rates on your capacity are becoming so compelling that people are asking how they're going to take advantage of this opportunity of this cloud environment.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well—providers of services and providers of expert assistance in using those services.

That’s a very important enabling ware, when your major system integration firms begin fully to understand how they can incorporate cloud services into the portfolio of technologies that they make available to their customers. When you put that all together, the downside of not moving to an SOA becomes an embarrassing lack of ability to take advantages of these incredible economies.

... The combination of SOA, which makes your various business units able to cooperate more effectively, with cloud environments, which allow you to handle very "bursty" workloads and conduct very cost-effective pilot projects and scale the ones that work very rapidly, increase the ROI of IT spending.

The IT budget, as a line item, is not conspicuously bigger. In fact, it may actually shrink, because the IT department now is a composer and integrator of stuff that may now be getting done with the operating budget by personnel, who are on the payroll as members of a business unit, instead of members of an IT organization.

Bennett: What people are talking about is the opportunity to redirect costs to area such as business architecture, and business architecture is part of enterprise architecture (EA). That's not purely IT focused, but the wider concern—investing stuff like business capability maps to understand exactly where I should utilize SOA and cloud with my organization—is going to be key.

This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

Harding: That certainly must be one of the factors that will enable cloud computing to make enterprises more efficient—the elasticity and the take-up effect. It also has a major effect on the risk that an enterprise needs to take on. But, there is a bigger factor, which is meant to drive down cost, and that is competition.

If you take service orientation and cloud in combination, you’re seeing the ability of people to buy services from different suppliers, for those suppliers to compete, and for those suppliers to concentrate on the services that they are particularly good at. This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

So, you don’t need to dissipate your efforts on running an inefficient IT department, which is not your core business. You can outsource that, get a specialist to do it much better, and concentrate on what you're good at. That is the real dynamic that will improve things economically.

Now, from an Open Group perspective, there is a danger that you may become locked into a particular supplier. Part of our role in promoting open systems is to push for the standards to be in place so that that doesn’t happen. Provided we can prevent that locking, it’s altogether a very healthy situation.

Coffee: The granularity of this marketplace is quite surprising to many people who haven’t looked at it closely. We see already people building applications, in which they have shopped the marketplace and found a cloud storage proposition from one provider, a cloud application development platform from another, social networking algorithms and facilities from yet a third provider and have built some really interesting strategic business solutions. It’s quite startling to many people to realize what a supermarket of services has already come into being.

Bennett: The combination of cloud and SOA obviously brings together kind of speed and modularity. Those basic principles are going to allow us to take evolutionary technologies and approaches and probably revolutionize the way that IT actually interacts with the business.

So, in terms of IT being siloed—"please develop and look after this application"—it’s going to be more a move toward collaboration of how we can actually deliver business solutions to the ever-changing business dynamics.

Coffee: Finally, we have an environment in which connectivity and real-time linkage and integration of data and function instead of being costly, brittle, and time-consuming are now nearly free, very resilient, and can be done almost more quickly than they can be described.

This means that people are going to be doing more challenging work and working more closely with business units instead of having their time consumed by arduous, necessary, but relatively low-value tests of infrastructure maintenance.

So the ROI will rise. The relevance to the business of IT will increase. The sophistication of the skills of the person who does IT for a living will be greater 10 years from now than it was 10 years ago or even today, but we’ll all be pretty happy with the results.

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

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

Nowadays, CIOs need to both cut costs and increase performance. Energy has never been more important in working toward this productivity advantage.

It's now time for IT leaders to gain control over energy use—and misuse—in enterprise data centers. More often than not, very little energy capacity analysis and planning is being done on data centers that are five years old or older. Even newer data centers don’t always gather and analyze the available energy data being created amid all of the components.

Finally, smarter, more comprehensive energy planning tools and processes are being directed at this problem. It requires a lifecycle approach from the data centers to more toward fuller automation.

And so automation software for capacity planning and monitoring has been newly designed and improved to best match long-term energy needs and resources in ways that cut total costs, while gaining the available capacity from old and new data centers.

Such data gathering, analysis and planning can break the inefficiency cycle that plagues many data centers where hotspots can mismatch cooling needs, and underused and under-needed servers are burning up energy needlessly. These so-called Smart Grid solutions jointly cut data center energy costs, reduce carbon emissions, and can dramatically free up capacity from overburdened or inefficient infrastructure.

By gaining far more control over energy use and misuse, solutions such as Hewlett Packard's (HP) Smart Grid for Data Center can increase capacity from existing facilities by 30–50 percent.

This podcast features two executives from HP to delve more deeply into the notion of Smart Grid for Data Center. Now join Doug Oathout, Vice President of Green IT Energy Servers and Storage at HP, and John Bennett, Worldwide Director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: Data center transformation (DCT) is focused on three core concepts, and energy is another key focus for that all to work. The drivers behind data center transformation are customers who are trying to reduce their overall IT spending, either flowing it to the bottom-line or, in most cases, trying to shift that spending away from management and maintenance and onto business projects.

We also see increasing mandates to improve sustainability. It might be expressed as energy efficiency in handling energy costs more effectively or addressing green IT.

DCT is really about helping customers build out a data center strategy and an infrastructure strategy. That is aligned to their business plans and goals and objectives. That infrastructure might be a traditional shared infrastructure model. It might be a fabric infrastructure model of which HP’s converged infrastructure is probably the best and most complete example of that in the marketplace today. And, it may indeed be moving to private cloud or, as I believe, some combination of the above for a lot of customers.

The secret is doing so through an integrated roadmap of data-center projects, like consolidation, business continuity, energy, and such technology initiatives as virtualization and automation.

Energy has definitely been a major issue for data-center customers over the past several years. The increased computing capability and demand has increased the power needed in the data center. Many data centers today weren’t designed for modern energy consumption requirements. Even data centers that were designed even five years ago are running out of power, as they move to these dense infrastructures. Of course, older facilities are even further challenged. So, customers can address energy by looking at their facilities.

Increasingly, we're finding that we need to look at management—managing the infrastructure and managing the facilities in order to address the energy cost issues and the increasing role of regulation and to manage energy related risk in the data center.

That brings us not only to energy as a key initiative in DCT, but on Smart Grid for Data Center as a key way of managing it effectively and dynamically.

Oathout: We're really talking about is a problem around energy capacity in data centers. Most IT professionals or IT managers never see an energy bill from the utility. It's usually handled by the facility. They never really concentrate on solving the energy consumption problem.

Where problems have arisen in the past is when a facility person says that they can’t deploy the next server or storage unit, because they're out of capacity to build that new infrastructure to support a line of business. They have to build a new data center. What we're seeing now is customers starting to peel the onion back a little bit, trying to find out where the energy is going, so they can increase the life of their data center.

To date, very few clients have deployed comprehensive software strategies or facility strategies to corral this energy consumption problem. Customers are turning their focus to how much energy is being absorbed by what and then, how do they get the capacity of the data center increase so they can support the new workloads.

What we're seeing today is that software, hardware, and people need to come together in a process that John described in DCT, an energy audit, or energy management.

All those things need to come together, so that customers can now start taking apart their data center, from an analysis perspective, to find out where they are either over-provisioned or under-provisioned, from a capacity standpoint, so they know where all the energy is going. Then, they can then take some steps to get more capability out of their current solution or get more capability out of their installed equipment by measuring and monitoring the whole environment.

The concept of converged infrastructure applies to data center energy management. You can deploy a particular workload onto an IT infrastructure that is optimally designed to run efficiently and optimally designed to continually run in an efficient way, so that you know you're getting the most productive work from the least energy and the more energy efficient equipment infrastructure sitting underneath it.

As workloads grow over time, you then have the auditing capability built into the software ... so that you can add more resources to that pool to run that application. You're not over-provisioning from the start and you're not under-provisioning, but you're getting the optimal settings over time. That's what's really important for energy, as well as efficiency, as well as operating within a data center environment.

You must have tools, software, and hardware that is not only efficient, but can be optimized and run in an optimized way over a long period of time.

The key to that is to understand where the power is going. One of the first things we recommend to a client is to look at how much power is being brought into a data center and then where is it going.

What you want to do is start collecting that information through software to find out how much power is being absorbed by the different pieces of IT equipment and associate that with the workloads that are running on them. Then, you have a better view of what you're doing and how much energy you're using.

Then, you can do some analysis and use some applications like HP SiteScope to do some performance analysis, to say, "Could I match that workload to some other platform in the infrastructure or am I running it in optimal way?"

Over time, what you can do is you can migrate some of your older legacy workloads to more efficient newer IT equipment, and therefore you are basically building up a buffer in your data center, so that you can then go deploy new workloads in that same data center.

You use that software to your benefit, so that you're freeing up capacity, so that you can support the new workload that the businesses need.

The energy curve today is growing at about 11 percent annually, and that's the amount IT is spending on energy in a data center.

Bennett: That's really key, Doug, as a concept, because the more you do at this infrastructure level, the less you need to change the facilities themselves. Of course, the issue with facilities-related work is that it can affect both quality of service and outages and may end up costing you a pretty penny, if you have to retrofit or design new data centers.

Oathout: Smart Grid for Data Centers gives a CIO or a data-center manager a blueprint to manage the energy being consumed within their infrastructure. The first thing that we do with a Data Center Smart Grid is map out what is hooked up to electricity in the data center, everything from PDUs, UPSs, and error handlers to the IT equipment servers, networking and storage. It's really understanding how that all works together and how the whole topology comes together.

The second thing we do is visualize all the data. It's very hard to say that this server, that server, or that piece of facilities equipment uses this much power and has this kind of capacity. You really need to see the holistic picture, so you know where the energy is being used and understand where the issues are within a data center.

It's really about visualizing that data, so you can take action on it. Then, it's about setting up policies and automating those procedures to reduce the energy consumption or to manage energy consumption that you have in the data center.

Today, our servers and our storage are much more efficient than the ones we had three or four years ago, but we also add the capability to power cap a lot of the IT equipment. Not only can you get an analysis that says, "Here is how much energy is being consumed," you can actually set caps on the IT equipment that says you can’t use more than this. Not only can you monitor and manage your power envelope, you can actually get a very predictable one by capping everything in your data center.

You know exactly, how much the max power is going to be for all that equipment. Therefore, you can do much better planning. You get much more efficiency out of your data center, and you get more predictable results, which is one of the things that IT really strives for, from an SLA to getting those predictable results, day in and day out.

So, really Data Center Smart Grid for the infrastructure is about mapping the infrastructure. It's about visualizing it to make decisions. Then, it's about automating and capping what you’ve got, so you have better predictable results and you're managing it, so that you are not having out wires, you're not having problems in your data centers, and you're meeting your SLA.

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

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

Improved data center productivity now appears to be a natural progression from converged infrastructure. Many enterprise data centers have embraced a shared service management model to some degree, and now converged infrastructure applies the shared service model more broadly to leverage modular system design and open standards, as well as to advance proven architectural frameworks.

The result is a realignment of traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by any application, as well as optimized and managed as ongoing services. Under this model, resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically, gaining more business results productivity. This also helps rebalance IT spending away from a majority of spend on operations and more toward investments, innovations, and business improvements.

This latest BriefingsDirect discussion explores the benefits of a converged infrastructure approach, and now how to better understand attaining a transformed data center environment. We'll see how converged infrastructure provides a stepping stone to private cloud initiatives. But, as with any convergence, there are a lot of moving parts, including people, skills, processes, services, outsourcing options, and partner ecosystems.

We're here with two executives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to delve deeply into converged infrastructure and to learn more about how to get started and deal with some of the complexity, as well as to know what to expect as payoff. Please welcome Doug Oathout, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking, and John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: I often think of many CIOs as being at the heart of a vise, where, on one side, they have the business pressures. ... They need to support growth. They need to do a faster job of creating acquisitions. They need to spend more on business projects and innovation. They need to exploit technology for business advantage. They need to reduce costs.

On the other side of the vise are the constraints that they have in the environment that get in the way of them successfully addressing the business needs—legacy infrastructure and applications and antiquated methods of managing the infrastructure that make it difficult to be responsive to change, or people with the skills that won’t serve modern technology's needs or environments.

Data-center transformation (DCT) helps enterprises implement a data center and infrastructure strategy that's aligned to their goals and objectives. The key here is that it's customer-driven, and it has to be built around the plans and directions of the targeted organization. This is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of environment.

For many organizations, those strategies for infrastructure can include traditional shared infrastructure solutions or servers using virtualization and automation with shared storage environments. Increasingly, we've seen a natural evolution into a tighter integration of the capabilities and assets of the data center in the fabric infrastructure.

HP's Converged Infrastructure represents a pretty significant step forward in terms of benefits and capabilities for customers looking at having infrastructure strategy aligned to their future needs. The neat thing is that converged infrastructure can be the foundation for private cloud architectures.

Oathout: About two-thirds, if not 70 percent, of the IT operations budget is spent on maintaining IT and the IT workload within the data center.

When you have a recession, like we just experienced, what happens is that 30 percent spent on innovation or new workload placement gets cut immediately to help manage the budget within an organization. Therefore, in the last 18 months, very little innovation and few new projects were taken on by IT to support new business growth.

Now we have customers who are starting to spend again and who are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want their IT environment to be more flexible in the future. So, they're looking at their server and storage upgrades, and how they can implement converged infrastructure, so that the new infrastructure is more flexible and can adapt more to the requirements of the business.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment. You can also use better and more efficient processes—virtualization, automation, and management. When you put those pools of resources in place, you put them in a virtual environment so they can be shared among applications or can be transferred among applications when needed.

You are in the process now of creating pools of resources, versus dedicated silo resources, like you had prior to the recession, which couldn’t be reused for some of the application, and therefore you couldn’t support business growth.

The opportunity now is to break down those silos, give our customers the ability to share resources in the same footprint they have today, and actually become more efficient, so that when business changes or business needs change, they can adapt to the requirements of the business.

In a converged infrastructure environment, you really don’t want to care about the infrastructure you are putting it on. What you want to care about is that it's resilient, it's optimized, and it's modular, so it can grow and shrink with the application's demand.

Let me give you an example. A server consolidation using virtualization and new server equipment will generally double or triple your capacity within your data center for the same footprint, just by getting the utilization of the servers up, better performance within the servers, and better capabilities within virtual environments. You can basically double or even triple the size of your capacity within your data center.

The same thing holds true for storage. Storage disk drives become twice as dense over a two- or three-year period. The performance of the drives gets better. So, for the same footprint in your data center you can actually fit twice as much storage.

... What you really have is a process change that's required between the IT application managers, the test and development people, and a team that actually runs the infrastructure. They need to talk more about standardization. They need to talk about how their IT comes together.

That's where the Data Center Transformation Workshop that John Bennett's team does helps. It gives you an architecture for future deployments, so that you have a converged infrastructure. You have pools of resources to put new applications down or revamp older applications onto a newer architecture, so it becomes more flexible.

You have to break down that silo or break down that fence between application deployments and what line of businesses are telling the application deployers and the people who run the infrastructure. Customers really do see that as a deployment barrier, but they're working through it, because there are significant benefits on the other side, just due to the fact that you increase agility, lower cost, and you have more money and more people to go do the innovation to support the workloads of future businesses.

Bennett: Good organizations are always rethinking IT. What are the organization's strategy, goals, and objectives? What is it going to take to realize those objectives? What capabilities do we need from IT in order to make those real? And then, how do we make them happen?

This is where the partnership between the technology team and the business team comes into play. The technology team will have more insights into how it can be exploited, and the key thing for the business is to make sure they specify their needs and not specify the answer.

... There's economic return to the organization from being able to roll out a new business service more quickly. There's an economic return to the business from being able to provision more resources when they are needed based on demand, so that demand doesn't disappear. There's a competitive business benefit, which is financial in nature, in being able to respond to competitive threats more quickly.

And a lot of the benefits of this are in the nature of direct cost savings—the consolidation, modernization, and virtualization that Doug spoke to—the savings from energy related projects and investments with Data Center Smart Grid, for example. All are easily quantifiable.

Oathout: A cloud-computing environment is really an application-rich environment that allows you to bring more users on quickly and expand your capabilities and shrink your capabilities as you need them.

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter. A converged infrastructure is the optimal deployment of IT to support any kind of application, because it's modular in nature.

It has the flexibility to have more storage, more memory, less CPUs or more CPUs, less storage, or less memory, but it's all modular, so you can put the pieces together as you need them. So, it is a base support for either a cloud environment or a traditional IT environment. It really doesn't matter. It's designed to support both.

A private cloud is the IT department saying, "I'm now going to create a service catalog for my lines of business to develop upfront." You're getting software as a service (SaaS) now sitting on top of either a converged infrastructure or legacy infrastructure. A converged infrastructure is a lot easy to put SaaS on. But, you make that service catalog available to line of businesses, so they can turn on applications as they need them, very quickly.

Then, you can put more users on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, an online application, or a Web 2.0 application. IT is there as a support service now, setting that up, taking it down, and optimizing it over time, depending on the business needs.

So, private cloud is kind of that SaaS that sits on either a converged infrastructure or a legacy infrastructure or uniquely designed infrastructures that you get from some of the public cloud providers. Converged infrastructure is the optimal way to develop and deploy that in a standard data-center environment, and it's in support of a private cloud.

When you start bringing a storage and server and networking platforms together through a flexible fabric, the economies of scale of a shared resources and open systems is going to drive down the cost of acquiring IT. Then, with the software and the services capabilities that companies bring to market, they're going to bring the efficiencies along with them.

So, it is inevitable, starting with the simplest of workloads, moving to some of the hardest of workloads, that you are going to have a converged infrastructure. You are going to have application as a service, whether it's internal or external from a cloud provider, just because the economies of scale are there, and the ability to deploy the stuff is so simple once you get it set up that the efficiencies are also there besides the economies of purchase.

For example, a customer, the Dallas Cowboys, built a new football stadium in the Dallas area. It's a $1.4 billion investment. In the bottom of the thing is their data center. They run 30 different businesses out of the data center in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

They have built it on a virtual environment. They have BladeSystems. They have the FlexFabric built into the environment. They went from over 500 servers down to 16 blades, with virtual machines running on them for the point of sale environment within the stadium. It drove a smaller footprint, but also the dynamics in the server and storage environment, so they can bring on new applications for the 30 businesses very quickly.

They changed their infrastructure to support their environment. ... They bring applications online and very reactive to the lines of businesses they are supporting. That's what a converged infrastructure really delivers, besides the lower economic cost that John and I have talked about. It's that efficiency to bring new opportunities to the lines of businesses, accelerate business growth, or increase customer satisfaction.

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

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 22nd February 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Mobile application development is full of hard choices. Although there is a seemingly insatiable appetite for ever-smarter handheld mobile devices and the applications these enable, developers have to decide which subset of the available mobile market they want to write applications for, in order to get a worthwhile and profitable return for their effort.

At one time it seemed like there might have been some uniformity and a common platform might emerge, but most attempts have faltered, and ultimately fallen short of the ideal they set out to achieve—SIM toolkit (too simple), WAP (too telco), Java (too fragmented), Symbian (too European?). None of these approaches were directly at fault. They simply satisfied a set of needs at a moment in time in the evolution of mobile devices that made the best of prevailing hardware and network limitations. The problem for each of them has been the speed of evolution of mobile capability.

True, handheld mobile devices are still limited by screen size and the lack of a ‘real' keyboard, and despite continual improvements in wireless data transmission technology, there will not be as much bandwidth radiated over air waves as that channelled down copper wires or glass pipes.

There are already plenty of handheld devices with bright readable screens capable of fast and watchable video, 3D graphics and the potential for 3DTV/video in the near future. Touch screens, haptics (buzz) feedback, accelerometers, compasses, GPS now augment the input options and user interfaces of increasing numbers of devices. Most have decent audio capability, many for music and ringtones, and of course they should all have decent enough audio for phone use (although this is not always the case as early BlackBerry and Apple users opined). The functionality is in place for some fantastic 'killer' applications and for smart developers to exploit.

However there is little uniformity as hardware manufacturers strive to get the best out of their devices and network operators do likewise with their networks and the tweaks they often demand from the handset providers. There is still, too, an industry propensity towards overly proprietary tendencies, something that was mostly beaten out of the IT industry in the 1990s as the internet and associated open protocols and standards took hold.

What many in the mobile industry fail to recognise is that real momentum stems from a wide swell of common interest, rather than the generally chaotic shoves of narrow vested interests. In spite of this, the mobile operator community are (again) having an attempt to pull things together through the Wholesale Applications Community initiative. A creditable concept, although it could appear a bit like a nervous reaction to Apple's success with its App Store, and the other efforts of hardware companies, from Nokia to BlackBerry and Samsung, rather than some groundbreaking idea.

The initiative has, on the face of it, a very significant group of operators lined up in support and, between them, they account for over 3 billion subscribers worldwide. These operators and their industry body, the GSMA, can help push towards common standards, closer links between fixed and mobile and perhaps common platforms for mobile applications. All good stuff, especially if the hardware manufacturers line up to standardise too, although some will see this as a loss of differentiation.

The real issue is, what do developers do in the meantime? Harmonisation towards a 'precious few' rather than an unwieldy handful of mobile platforms might help their long term cross platform and portability challenges, but, right now, developers needs to be able to create applications that will sell in large enough numbers to pay the bills. It is not simply a matter of being able to develop for a platform, or even an easy way to download and sell—there has to be user appeal, and in large enough numbers of them for developers to cost effectively reach.

That means technically taking advantage of the 'cool stuff' that users want—in whatever 'fruit'-named box it appears—across as many subscribers' handsets that are out there now, not just those that will be ready to ship 'in time for Christmas'. Also, from a commercial perspective, developers will need to be able to charge enough to recoup their effort—which is always greater if more platforms and differences have to be traversed—and not pay too great a 'tax' to online stores, whether these are operator led or not.

In short, the mobile industry, and the operator community in particular, needs to recognise that its success is dependent on the success of the broader ecosystem, and the big fish need to stop trying to eat up the food of the little ones. For more thoughts on stimulating the mobile applications market, download Quocirca's free paper regarding Mobile Application Momentum.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 19th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The next BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 49, hones in on the predictions for IT industry growth and impact, now that the recession appears to have bottomed out. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their top five predictions for IT growth through 2010 and beyond.

To help us gaze into the IT trends crystal ball we are joined by our panel: Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Dave Linthicum, CEO of Blue Mountain Labs; Dave Lounsbury, vice-president of collaboration services at The Open Group; Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink, and JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Shimmin: Mine are geared toward collaboration and conferencing. The first and most obvious is that clouds are going to become less cloudy. Vendors, particularly those in the collaboration space, are going to start to deliver solutions that are actually a blend of both cloud and on-premise.

We've seen Cisco take this approach already with front-ending some web conferencing to off-load bandwidth requirements at the edge and to speed internal communications. IBM, at least technically, is poised do the same with Foundations, their appliances line, and LotusLive, their cloud-based solution.

With vendors like these that are going to be pulling hybrid, premise/cloud, and appliance/service offerings, it's going to really let companies, particularly those in the small and medium business (SMB) space, work around IT constraints without sacrificing the control and ownership of key processes and data, which in my mind is the key, and has been one of the limiting factors of cloud this year.

Number two: I have "software licensing looks like you." As with the housing market, it's really a buyer's market right now for software. It's being reflected in how vendors are approaching selling their software. Customers have the power to demand software pricing that better reflects their needs, whether it's servers or users.

So, taking cues from both the cloud and the open-source licensing vendors out there, we will see some traditional software manufacturers really set up a "pick your poison" buffet. You can have purchase options that are like monthly or yearly subscriptions or flat perpetual licenses that are based on per seat, per server, per CPU, per request, per processor, or per value unit—with a shout out at IBM there—or any of the above.

You put those together in a way that is most beneficial to you as a customer to meet your use case. We saw last year with web conferencing software that you could pick between unlimited usage with a few seats or unlimited seats with limited usage. You can tailor what you pay to what you need.

Third for me is the mobile OS wars are going to heat up. I'm all done with the desktop. I'm really thinking that it's all about the Google Chrome/Android. I know there's a little bit of contention there, but Google Chrome/Android, Symbian, RIM, Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile, all those devices will be the new battle ground for enterprise users.

I think the weapons will be user facing enterprise apps that work in concert with line-of-business solutions on the back-end. We'll see the emergence of native applications, particularly within the collaboration space, that are capable of fully maximizing the underlying hardware of these devices, and that's really key. Capabilities like geo-positioning, simultaneous web invoice and, eventually, video, are really going to take off across all these platforms this year.

But, the true battle for this isn't going to be in these cool nifty apps. It's really going to be in how these vendors can hopefully turn these devices into desktops, in terms of provisioning, security, visibility, governance, etc. That, to me, is going to be where they're going to either win or lose this year.

Four is "The Grand Unification Theory"—the grand unification of collaboration. That's going to start this year. We're no longer going to talk about video conferencing, web conferencing, telepresence, and general collaboration software solutions as separate concerns. You're still going to have PBXs, video codecs, monitors, cameras, desk phones, and all that stuff being sold as point solutions to fill specific requirements, like desktop voice or room-based video conferencing and the like.

But, these solutions are really not going to operate in complete ignorance of one another as they have in the past. Vendors with capabilities or partnerships spanning these areas, in particular—I'm pointing out Cisco and Microsoft here—can bring, and will be bringing, facets of these together technically to enable users to really participate in collaboration efforts, using their available equipment.

And last but not least ... Google Wave is really going to kick in in 2010. I may be stating the obvious, or I maybe stating something that's going to be completely wrong, but I really feel that this is going to be the year that traditional enterprise collaboration players jump head long into this Google Wave pool in an effort to really cash in on what's already a super-strong mind share within the consumer ranks.

Even though they have a limited access to the beta right now, there are over a million users of it, that are chunking away at this writing code and using Wave.

Of course, Google hosted rendition will excel in supporting consumer tasks like collaborative apps and role playing games. That's going to be big.

Linthicum: My top five are going to be, number one, cloud computing goes mainstream. That's a top prediction, I'm just seeing the inflection point on that.

I know I'm going out on the edge on this one. Go to indeed.com and do a search on the cloud-computing jobs postings. As I posted on my InfoWorld blog few weeks ago, it's going up at an angle that I have never seen at any time in the history of IT. The amount of growth around cloud computing is just amazing. Of course, it's different aspects of cloud computing, not just architecture, with people who are cloud computing developers and things like that.

The Global 2000 and the government, the Global 1, really haven't yet accepted cloud computing, even though it's been politically correct for some time to do so. The reason is the lack of control, security concerns, and privacy issues, and, of course, all the times the cloud providers went down. The Google outages and the loss of stuff with T-Mobile, hasn't really helped, but ultimately people are gearing up, hiring up, and training up for cloud computing.

We are going to see a huge inflection point in cloud computing. This can be more mainstream in Global 2000 than it has been in the past. It's largely been the domain of SMBs, pilot projects, things like that. It's going to be a huge deal in 2010 and people are going to move into cloud computing in some way, shape, or form, if they are in an organization.

The next is privacy becomes important. Facebook late last year pulled a little trick, where they changed the privacy settings, and you had to go back and reset your privacy settings. So, in essence, if you weren’t diligent about looking at the privacy settings within your Facebook account and your friends list, your information was out on the Internet and people could see it.

The reason is that they're trying to monetize people who are using Facebook. They're trying to get at the information and put the information out there so it's searchable by the search engines. They get the ad revenue and all the things that are associated with having a big mega social media site.

People are going to move away from these social media sites that post their private information, and the social media sites are going to react to that. They're going to change their policies by the end of 2010, and there's going to be a big uproar at first.

Next, the cloud crashes make major new stories. We've got two things occurring right now. We've got a massive move into the cloud. That was my first prediction. We have the cloud providers trying to scale up, and perhaps they’ve never scaled up to the levels that they are going to be expected to scale to in 2010. That's ripe for disaster.

A lot of these cloud providers are going to over extend and over sell, and they're going to crash. Performance is going to go down—very analogous to AOL’s outage issues, when the Internet first took off.

We're going to see people moving to the cloud, and cloud providers not able to provide them with the service levels that they need. We're going to get a lot of stories in the press about cloud providers going away for hours at a time, data getting lost, all these sorts of things. It's just a matter of growth in a particular space. They're growing very quickly, they are not putting as much R&D into what these cloud systems should do, and ultimately that's going to result in some disasters.

Next, Microsoft becomes cloud relevant. Microsoft, up to now, has been the punch line of all cloud computing. It had the Azure platform out there. They've had a lot of web applications and things like that. They really have a bigger impact in the cloud than most people think, even though when we think of cloud, we think of Amazon, Google, and larger players out there.

With Azure coming into its own in the first quarter of next year in the rise of their office automation applications for the cloud, you are going to see a massive amount of people moving to the Microsoft platform for development, deployment, infrastructure, and the office automation application. The Global 2000 that are already Microsoft players and the government that has a big investment in Microsoft are going to move in that direction.

Suddenly, you're going to see Microsoft with a larger share of the cloud, and they're going to be relevant very quickly. In the small- and medium-sized business, it's still going to be the domain of Google, and state and local governments are still be going to be the domain of Google, but Microsoft is going to end up ruling the roost by the end of 2010.

Finally, the technology feeding frenzy, which is occurring right now. People see the market recovering. There is money being put back into the business. That was on the sidelines for a while. People are going to use that money to buy companies. I think there is going to be a big feeding frenzy in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world, in the business intelligence (BI) world, and definitely in the cloud-computing world.

Lots of these little companies that you may not have heard about, which may have some initial venture funding, are suddenly going to disappear. Google has been taking these guys out left and right. You just don’t hear about it. You could do a podcast just on the Google acquisitions that have occurred this week. That's going to continue and accelerate in 2010 to a point where it's almost going to be ridiculous.

Lounsbury: I'm going to jump on the cloud bandwagon initially. We’ve seen huge amounts of interest across the board in cloud and, particularly, increasing discussions about how people make sense of cloud at the line-of-business level.

Another bold prediction here is that the cloud market is going to continue to grow, and we'll see that inflection point that Dave Linthicum mentioned. But, I believe that we're going to see the segmentation of that into two overarching markets, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service market (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. So that's my number one prediction.

We'll see the continued growth in the acceptance by SMBs of the IaaS and PaaS for the cost and speed reasons. But, the public IaaS and PaaS are going to start to become the gateway drug for medium- to large-size enterprises. You're going to see them piloting in public or shared environments, but they are going to continue to move back toward that locus of controlling their own resources in order to manage risk and security, so that they can deliver their service levels that their customers expect.

My third prediction, again in cloud, is that SaaS will continue to gain mainstream acceptance at all levels in the enterprise, from small to large. What you’ll see there is a lot of work on interfaces and APIs and how people are going to mash up cloud services and bring them into their enterprise architectures.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues.

This is actually going to be another trend that Dave Linthicum has mentioned as a blurring of a line between SaaS and SOA at the enterprise level. You’ll see these well on the way to emerging as disciplines in 2010.

The fourth general area is that all of this interest in cloud and concern about uptake at the enterprise level is going to drive the development of cloud deployment and development skills as a recognized job function in the IT world, whether it's internal to the IT department or as a consultancy. Obviously, as a consultancy, we look to the cloud to provide elasticity of deployment and demand and that's going to demand an elastic workforce.

So the question will be how do you know you are getting a skilled person in that area. I think you'll see the rise of a lot of enterprise-level artifacts such as business use cases, enterprise architecture tools, and analytic tools. Potentially, what we'll see in 2010 is the beginning of the development of a body of knowledge: practitioners in cloud. We'll start to recognize that as a specialty the way we currently recognize SOA as a specialty.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues. I don’t know if this is a prediction or not, but I wonder whether we're going to see our cloud harbor in 2010 its first big crash and the first big breach.

We've already mentioned privacy here. That's going to become increasingly a public topic, both in terms of the attention in the mainstream press and increasing levels of government attention.

There have been some fits and starts at the White House level about the cyber czar and things like that, but every time you turn around in Washington now, you see people discussing cyber security. How we're going to grow our capability in cyber security and increasing recognition of cyber security risk in mainstream business are going to be emerging hot topics of 2010.

Kobielus: Number one: IT is increasingly going to in-source much of BI development of reports, queries, dashboards, and the like to the user through mash up self-service approaches, SaaS, flexible visualization, and so forth, simply because they have to.

IT is short staffed. We're still in a recession essentially. IT budgets are severely constrained. Manpower is severely constrained. Users are demanding mashups and self-service capabilities. It's coming along big time, not only in terms of enterprise deployment, but all the BI vendors are increasingly focused on self-service solution portfolios.

Number two: The users who do more of the analytics development are going to become developers in their own right. That may sound crazy based on the fact that traditionally data mining is done by a cadre of PhD statisticians and others who are highly specialized.

Question analysis, classification and segmentation, and predictive analytics is coming into the core BI stack in a major way. IBM’s acquisition of SPSS clearly shows that not only is IBM focusing there, but other vendors in this space, especially a lot of smaller players, already have some basic predictive analytics capabilities in their portfolios or plan to release them in 2010.

Basically, we're taking data mining out of the hands of the rocket scientists and giving it to the masses through very user-friendly tools. That's coming in 2010.

Number three: There will be an increasing convergence of analytics and transactional computing, and the data warehouse is the hub of all that. More-and-more transactional application logic will be pushed down to be executed inside of the data warehouse.

The data warehouse is a greater cloud, because that's where the data lives and that's where the CPU power is, the horse power. We see Exadata, Version 2 from Oracle. We see Aster Data, nCluster Version 4.0. And, other vendors are doing similar things, pointing ahead to the coming decade, when the data warehouse becomes a complete analytic application server in its own right—analytics plus transaction.

Number four: We're seeing, as I said, that predictive analytics is becoming ever more important and central to where enterprises are going with BI and the big pool of juicy data that will be brought into predictive model. Much of it is coming from the whole Web 2.0 sphere and from social networks—Twitters, Facebooks and the like, and blogs. That's all highly monetizable content, as Dave Linthicum indicated.

We're seeing that social network analysis has a core set of algorithms and approaches for advanced analytics that are coming in a big way to data mining tools, text analytics tools, and to BI. Companies are doing serious marketing campaign planning, optimization, and so forth, based on a lot of that information streaming in real-time. It's customer sentiment in many ways. You know pretty much immediately whether your new marketing campaign is a hit or a flop, because customers are tweeting all about it.

That's going to be a big theme in 2010 and beyond. Social network analysis really is a core business intelligence for marketing and maintaining and sustaining business in this new wave.

And, finally, number five: Analytics gets dirt cheap. Right now, we're in the middle of a price war for the enterprise data warehousing stack hardware and software. Servers and storage, plus the database licenses, query tools, loading tools, and BI are being packaged pretty much everywhere into appliances that are one-stop shopping, one throat to choke, quick-deploy solutions that are pre-built.

Increasingly, they'll be for specific vertical and horizontal applications and will be available to enterprises for a fraction of what it would traditionally cost them to acquire all those components separately and figure it out all themselves. The vendors in the analytics market are all going appliance. They're fighting with each other to provide the cheapest complete application on the market.

McKendrick: My number one trend is the impact of the economy. By all indications, 2010 is going to be a growth year in the economy. We're probably in this V shape.

See, I'm actually an optimist, not a pessimist. The world may end in 2012, but for 2010, we're going to have a great economy. It's going to move forward.

For this decade, we're looking forward to the rise of something called "social commerce," where the markets are user-driven and are conversations.

Number two: Cloud computing. We’ve all been talking about that. That's the big development, the big paradigm shift. Clouds will be the new "normal." From the SOA perspective, we're going to be seeing a convergence. When we talk about cloud, we're going to talk about SOA, and the two are going to be mapped very closely together.

Dave Linthicum talks a lot about this in his new book and in his blog work. Services are services. They need to be transparent. They need to be reusable and sharable. They need to cross enterprise boundaries. We're going to see a convergence of SOA and cloud. It’s a service-oriented culture.

Number three: Google is becoming what I call the Microsoft of the clouds. Google offers a browser and email. It has a backend app engine. It offers storage. They're talking about bringing out an OS. Google is essentially providing an entire stack from which you can build your IT infrastructure. You can actually build a company’s IT infrastructure on the back of this. So, Google is definitely the Microsoft of the cloud for the current time.

Microsoft is also getting into the act as well with cloud computing, and they are doing a great job there. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. By the way, Google also offers search as a capability.

Number four: We're going to see less of a distinction between service providers and service consumers over clouds, SOA, what have you. That's going to be blurring. Everybody will be providing and publishing services, and everybody will be consuming services.

You're going to see less of a distinction between providers and consumers. For example, I was talking to a reinsurance company a few months back. They offer a portal to their customers, the customers being insurance companies. They say that they offer a lot of analytics capabilities that their customers don’t have, and the customers are using their portal to do their own analytic work.

They don’t call it cloud. Cloud never entered the conversation, but this is a cloud. This is a company that’s offering cloud services to its consumers. We're going to see a lot of that, and it’s not necessarily going to be called cloud. You're not going to see companies saying, "We're offering clouds to our partners." It’s just going to be as the way it is.

Number five: In the enterprise application area, we've seen it already, but we're going to see more-and-more pushback against where money is being spent. As I said, the economy is growing, but there is going to be a lot of attention paid to where IT dollars are going.

I base this on a Harvard Medical School study that just came out last month. They studied 4,000 hospitals over a three-year period and found that, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being invested at IT, IT had no impact on hospital operations, patient care quality, or anything else.

Morgenthal: Number one: Cyber security. I am beginning to understand how little people actually understand about the differences between what security is and information assurance is, and how little people realize that their systems are compromised and how long it takes to eliminate threat within an organization.

Because of all of this connectedness, social networking, and cloud, a lot of stuff is going to start to bubble up. People who thought things were taken care of are going to learn that it wasn’t taken care of, and there will be a sense of urgency about responding to that. We're going to see that happen a lot in the first half of 2010.

Number two: Mobile. The mobile platforms are now the PC of yesterday, right? The real battle is for how we use these platforms effectively to integrate into people’s lives and allow them to leverage the platform for communications, for collaboration, and to stay in touch.

It seems everywhere I go, people are willing to spend a lot of money on their data plan. So, that’s a good sign for telecoms.

My personal belief is that it overkills information overlook, but that’s me. I know that everywhere I go, I see people using their iPhones and flicking through their apps. So, they hit upon a market segment, a very large market segment, that actually enjoys that. Whether small people like me end up in a cave somewhere, the majority of people are definitely going to be focused on the mobile platform. That also relates to the carriers. I think there still a carrier war here. We've yet to see AT&T and iPhone in the US break apart and open up its doors to other carriers.

Number three: Business intelligence and analytics, especially around complex event processing (CEP). CEP is still in an immature state. It does some really interesting things. It can aggregate and correlate. It really needs to go to that next step and help people understand how to build models for correlation. That’s going to be a difficult step.

As somebody was saying earlier, you had these little Poindexters sitting in the back room doing the stuff. There's a reason why the Poindexters were back there doing that. They understand math and the formulas that are under building these analytical models.

CEP and analytics—and the two tied together. You’ll see that the BI, and data aspects of the BI, side will integrate with the CEP modeling to not only report after the fact on a bunch of raw data, but almost be proactive, and try to, as I said in my blog entry, know when the spit hits the fan.

Number four is collaboration. We’ve crossed the threshold here. People want it. They're leveraging it.

The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.

I've been seeing some uptake on Google Wave. I think people are still a little confused by the environment, and the interaction model is not quite there yet to really turn it on its ear, but it clearly is an indication that people like large-scale interactions with large groups of people and to be able to control that information and make it usable. Google is somewhat there, and we'll see some more interesting models emerge out of that as well.

Number four is labor. We're at a point where the market is based on all these other things based on the cloud. We had a lot of disruptive technologies hit in the past five years—enterprise mashups, SOA, and cloud computing. The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.

I think that 2010 has to be a year for training, rebuilding, and getting some of those skills up. Today, you hear a lot of stories, but there is a large gap for any company to be able to jump into this. Skills are not there. The resources are not there and they are not trained. That's going to be a huge issue for us in 2010.

Bloomberg: I'm going to be a bit of the naysayer of the bunch. I just don't see cloud computing striking it big in 2010. When we talk to enterprise architects, we see a lot of curiosity and some dabbling. But, at the enterprise scale, we see too much resistance in terms of security and other issues to put a lot of investment into it. It's going to be gradually growing, but I don't see such a point coming as soon as you might like.

Small organizations are a different story. We see small organizations basing their whole business models on the cloud, but at the enterprise level, it's sort of a toe in the water, and we see that happening in the 2010.

Another thing we don't see really taking off in any big way is Enterprise 2.0. That is Web 2.0 collaborative technologies for the enterprise. You know, "Twitter On Steroids," and that kind of thing. Again, it's going to be more of a toe in the water thing. Collaborative technologies are maturing, but we don't see a huge paradigm shift in how collaboration is done in the enterprise. It's going to be more of a gradual process.

Another thing that we are not seeing happening in 2010 is CIOs and other executives really getting the connection between business process management (BPM) and SOA. We see those as two sides of the same coin. Architects are increasingly seeing that in order to do effective BPM you have to have the proper architecture in place. But, we don't see the executives getting that and putting money where it belongs in order to effect more flexible business process. So, this is another work in progress, and it's going to be a struggle for architects to make progress over the course of the year.

As far as the end of the recession, yeah, we're all hoping that the economy picks up, and I do see that there is going to be a lot of additional activity as a result of an improving economy, but I don't see a huge uptake in spending on software per se.

Spending in IT is going to go up, but in terms of what the executives going to invest in, they're going to be very careful about purchasing software. That's going to drive some money to cloud-based solutions, but that's still just a toe in the water as well.

Software vendors were hoping for a huge year, but they're going to be disappointed. It's going to be a growth year, but it's going to be moderate growth for the vendors.

Those are my first four. Those are the negatives. Not to be too negative, in terms of the positive, what we see happening in 2010 is increased focus on "MSW." You know what MSW is, right? Politely speaking it's "Make Stuff Work." Of course, you could put a different word in there for the S, but Make Stuff Work, that's what we see the architects really focusing on.

They have a good idea now of what SOA is all about. They have a good idea about how the technology fits in the story and the various technologies that have been mentioned on this call, whether it's analytics, data management, SaaS, and the cloud-based approaches. Now, it's time to get the stuff to work together, and that's the real challenge that we see.

The SOA story is no longer an isolated story. We're going to do SOA, let's go do SOA. But, it's SOA plus other things. So, we're going to do SOA, BPM, and the architecture driving that, despite the fact that the CIO may not quite connect the dots there.

SOA plus master data management (MDM)—it's not one or the other now. It's how we get those things to work together. SOA plus virtualization. That's another challenge. Previously, those conversations were separate parts of the organization. We see more and more conversations bringing those together.

SOA and SaaS—somebody already mentioned that SaaS is one segment of the cloud category. It's little more mature than the rest. We see more organizations understanding the connection between those two and trying to put them together. We'll do middleware and we'll do SOA, but we don't really see the connection where we confuse one for the other, and that was a big issue.

We're happy to call this services-oriented, even though the organization, as a whole, may call it variety of different things, depending on the perspective of the individual.

Baer: On cloud and virtualization, basically I agree with Jason, and I don't agree with David or with Joe. It’s not going to be the "new normal." We're going to see this year an uptake of all the management overhead of dealing with cloud and virtualization, the same way we saw with outsourcing years back, where we thought we'd just throw labor costs over the wall.

Secondly, JP, I very much believe that there is going to be convergence between BI and CEP this year. I agree with him that there's not going to be a surge of Albert Einsteins out there. On the other hand, I see this as a golden opportunity for vendors to package these analytics as applications or as services. That's where I really see the inflection curve happening.

Number three: Microsoft and Google. Microsoft will be struggling to stay relevant. Yes, people will buy Windows 7, because it's not Vista. That’s kind of a backhanded compliment to say, "We're buying this, because you didn't screw up as badly as last time." It doesn't speak well for the future.

Google meets a struggle for focus. I agree with Joe that they are aspiring to be the Microsoft of the cloud, but it may or may not be such a good thing for Google to follow that Microsoft model.

Finally, I agree with Jim that you are going to see a lot more business-oriented, whether it's BI, BPM, or IBM buying Lombardi. I hope they don't mess up Lombardi and especially I hope they don't mess up Blueprint. I've already blogged about that.

One other point—and I don't know if this fits into a top five or not—but I found what Joe was talking about very interesting in terms of the let-down on health-care investment in IT. There's going to be lot a of pushing in electronic medical records (EMR) this year. I very much believe in EMRs, but, on the other hand, they are no panacea. We're going to see a trough of disillusionment happen on that as well.

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

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

Security may be the hottest topic in IT. But it's also one of the least understood. So BriefingsDirect assembled a panel to examine the need for IT security to run more like a data-driven science, rather than a mysterious art form.

Rigorously applying data and metrics to security can dramatically improve IT results and reduce overall risk to the business. By employing and applying more metrics and standards to security, the protection of IT becomes better, and the known threats can become evaluated uniformly.

Standards like Information Security Management Maturity Model (SM3) are helping to not only gain greater visibility, but also allowing IT leaders to scale security best practices repeatably and reliably.

With standards and greater reliance on data, security practitioners can understand better what they are up against, perhaps gaining close to real-time responses. They can know what's working—or is not working—both inside and outside of their organization.

The security metrics panel and podcast discussion are coming to you from The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle on Feb. 2, 2010. The goal is to determine the strategic imperatives for security metrics, and to discuss how to use them to change the outcomes in terms of IT’s value to the business.

Our panel consists of a security executive from The Open Group, as well as two experts on security who are presenting at the consortium's Security Practitioners Conference: Jim Hietala, Vice President for Security at The Open Group; Adam Shostack, co-author of The New School of Information Security, and Vicente Aceituno, director of the ISM3 Consortium. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions

Here are some excerpts:

Hietala: We think there's a contribution to make from The Open Group, in terms of developing the ISM3 standard and getting it out there more widely. [Being a data-driven security organization means] using information to make decisions, as opposed to what vendors are pitching at you, or your gut reaction. It's getting a little more scientific about gathering data on the kinds of attacks you're seeing and the kinds of threats that you face, and using that data to inform the decisions around the right set of controls to put in place to effectively secure the organization.

A presentation we had today from an analyst firm talked about people being all over the map [on security practices]. I wouldn’t say there's a lot of rigor and standardization around the kinds of data that’s being collected to inform decisions, but there is some of that work going on in very large organizations. There, you typically see a little more mature metrics program. In smaller organizations, not so much. It's a little all over the map.

... The important outputs of a good metrics program can be that it gives you a different way to talk to your senior management about the progress that you're making against the business objectives and security objectives.

That’s been an area of enormous disconnect. Security professionals have tended to talk about viruses, worms, relatively technical things, but haven't been able to show a trend to senior management that justifies the kind of spending they have been doing and the kind of spending they need to do in the future. Business language around some of that is needed in this area.

Shostack: We have an opportunity to be a heck of a lot more effective than we have been. We can say, "This control that we all thought was a really good idea—well, everyone is doing it, and it's not having the impact that we would like." So, we can reassess how we're getting real, where we're putting our dollars.

The big change we've seen is that people have started to talk about the problems that they are having, as a result of laws passed in California and elsewhere that require them to say, "We made a mistake with data that we hold about you," and to tell their customers.

We've seen that a lot of the things we feared would happen haven't come to pass. We used to say that your company would go out of business and your customers would all flee. It's not happening that way. So, we're getting an opportunity today to share data in a way that’s never been possible before.

Aceituno: The top priority should be to make sure that the things you measure are things that are contributing positivity to the value that you're bringing to business as a information security management (ISM) practitioner. That’s the focus. Are you measuring things that are actually bringing value or are you measuring things that are fancy or look good?

Because metrics are all about controlling what you do and being able to manage the outputs that you produce and that contribute value to the business ... you can use metrics to manage internal factors.

I don’t think it brings a bigger return on investment (ROI) to collect metrics on external things that you can't control. It’s like hearing the news. What can you do about it? You're not the government or you're not directly involved. It's only the internal metrics that really make sense.

Basically, we link business goals, business objectives, and security objectives in a way that’s never been done before, because we are painfully detailed when we express the outcomes that you are supposed to get from your ISM system. That will make it far easier for practitioners to actually measure the things that matter.

Shostack: Vicente’s point about measuring the things you can control is critical. Oftentimes in security, we don’t like to admit that we've made mistakes and we conceal some of the issues that are happening. A metrics initiative gives you the opportunity to get out there and talk about what's going on, not in a finger pointing way, which has happened so often in the past, but in an objective and numerically centered way. That gives us opportunity to improve.

Hietala: There's some taxonomy work to be done. One of the real issues in security is that when I say "threat," do other people have the same understanding? Risk management is rife with different terms that mean different things to different people. So getting a common taxonomy is something that makes sense.

The kinds of metrics we're collecting can be all over the map, but generally they're the things that would guide the right kind of decision making within an IT security organization around the question, "Are we doing the right things?"

Today, Vicente used an example of looking at vulnerabilities that are found in web applications. A critical metric was how long those vulnerabilities are out there before they get fixed by different lines of business, by different parts of the business, looking at how the organization is responding to that. We're trying to drive that metric toward the vulnerabilities being open for less time and getting fixed quicker.

Shostack: We've seen over the last few years that those security programs that succeed are the ones that talk to the business needs and talk to the executive suite in language that the executives understand.

We've seen over the last few years that those security programs that succeed are the ones that talk to the business needs and talk to the executive suite in language that the executives understand.

The real success here and the real step with ISM3 is that it gives people a prescriptive way to get started on building those metrics.

You can pick it up and look at it and say, "Okay, I'm going to measure these things. I'm going to trend on them." And, I'm going to report on them."

As we get toward a place, where more people are talking about those things, we'll start to see an expectation that security is a little bit different. There is a risk environment that's very outside of people's control, but this gives people a way to get a handle on it.

Aceituno: The main task of the ISM3 Consortium so far was to manage the ISM3 standard. I'm very happy to say that The Open Group and ISM3 Consortium reached an agreement and, with this agreement, The Open Group will be managing ISM3 from here on in. We'll be devoting our time to other things, like teaching and consulting services in Spain, which is our main market. I can't think of anything better than for ISM3 to be managed from The Open Group.

Hietala: You have metrics and control approaches in various areas and you can pick a starting point. You can come at this top-down, if you're trying to implement a big program. Or, you come at it bottoms-up and pick a niche, where you know you are not doing well and want to establish some rigor around what you are doing. You can do a smaller implementation and get some benefit out of it. It's approachable either way.

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