Masked Intentions

How Enterprise Software Will Evolve in the Cloud

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:13:24 -0500

There's a lot of talk about the impact that cloud computing and software-as-a-service is going to have on enterprise software, but most of it is overly focused on the financial impact to the providers of such software.

It's become pretty apparent that the time has come to start understanding how enterprise software as we know it today is going to evolve across a federated set of private and public cloud services.

A great example of the direction that enterprise software is heading is strategic direction being taken by Epicor, a provider of ERP software for the mid-market. Instead of thinking about just hosting software in the cloud, Epicor is taking a more sophisticated approach that allows customers to host some components of the Epicor suite on premise, while other components are delivered as a service.

As a Microsoft software partner that subscribes to the Software Plus Services mantra, Epicor is moving to offer some elements of its software, such as the Web server and SQL server components, as an optional service that customers can invoke on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.

In essence, Epicor is going to allow customers to deploy software components where they make the most sense based on the needs of each individual customer, versus proclaiming that one model of software deliver is always better than another.

Just about every customer is going to require a mixed environment. Even customers that prefer on premise software will find that hosting some applications locally and in the cloud simultaneously will allow them to more easily run a 24 x 7 global operation.

At the end of the day, much of the argument over how software is delivered in the enterprise is going to soon fade away as customers begin to see that cloud as little more than an extension of their internal IT operations.

Synchronizing the Backup and Recovery Process

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:04:57 -0500

If you're goal is to speed the recovery process, then maybe it's time to rethink how you handle backup in the first place.

That's the reasoning behind a GoodSync Enterprise offering from Siber Systems that saves files and documents in their native format rather than compressing everything into a new format.

The folks at Siber point out that disk space has become so cheap that adding a lot of overhead to the backup process doesn't make a whole lot of sense for anything beyond archiving.

The Siber approach call for the deployment of synchronization software to backup critical files. Because the files are then stored in their native format, the recovery process is reduced to almost nil.

Siber isn't arguing that GoodSync will eliminate the need for traditional backup and recovery software. But because most of the files that end users want to recover are things they were using in the last week or so, it makes sense to introduce a layer of backup and recovery that instantly recover those files.

And with more end users relying on mobile devices to manipulate those files, the whole concept of synchronization is already being baked into the enterprise. So in some respects, it was only a matter of time before somebody applied this basic concept to backup and recovery.

Revenge of the Business Systems Analyst

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:42:13 -0500

One of the most frustrating things for anybody tasked with being in charge of integrating various systems is that they can pretty much easily see what needs to be done, but the amount of work that goes into making it happen means that very few of these projects are attempted.

And when they are attempted, they usually involve developers and application integration tools that are cumbersome to deploy, difficult to master and require expensive IT specialists.

Trying to change this equation by giving business systems analysts direct control over data integration in real time is a company called Jitterbit, which has launched version 3.0 of its open source data and application integration platform.

The key issue here is that Jitterbit not only maps the data structures of the environment so business systems analysts can easily identify sets of data, it allows business systems analysts, without the aid of developer, to integrate various sets of data.

Nine times out of 10 when an organization gets involved in an application integration project, what they are really trying to accomplish is the integration of data within the application. That means that rather than spend massive amounts of time and money on integrating applications, they would be better off if they had a tool that simply made it easier to integrate the data locked up in the applications.

Jitterbit is part of a new class of tools that allows systems analysts to more easily unlock the real value of all the data that IT organizations collect to finally give the business a low-cost way of correlating different sets of data in order to ultimately discover the greater truth about the business.

And perhaps more significantly for business analysts, instead of just drawing pretty pictures of what needs to be done by the development team; they can finally implement meaningful change on their own.

Gaining Virtual Visibility

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:01:58 -0500

One of the problems with virtualization these days, especially in large organizations, is that there is often a disconnect between the people overseeing the virtual machine environment and the folks tasked with running the physical servers.

As a result, tension between the two groups can ensue, especially when there are, as often is the case in IT, unexplained problems. The people running the physical servers are often quick to blame the virtual machine software because from their perspective, everything was fine before the arrival of the virtual machines.

Usually, that blame is cast about unfairly, Unfortunately, the people running the virtual machine environments don't really have the tools they need to not only effectively administer the environment, but also gain visibility into the physical servers where their virtual machines reside.

One company trying to bridge this divide is Tripwire, which has launched a vWire tool that monitors the overall virtual environment that can be searched and filtered to identify exactly where the problem with the virtual environment might be.

Figuring out where the problem with virtual machines is getting more difficult as IT organizations begin to embrace the flexibility inherent in technologies such as VMware's VMotion, which allow virtual machines to move across the physical infrastructure. That capability adds a lot of resiliency to the overall environment, but it also introduces more complexity that needs to be managed.

Virtual machines administrators clearly need better management tools to cope with technologies such as VMotion, in addition to having tools that allow them to troubleshoot their environments without have to always rely on the tender mercies of the people running the physical servers.

Over time, there will be more convergence between the management of physical and virtual machines. But right now, there are enough people out there struggling with managing virtual machines that need a little extra help.

Self-Service Can Leave Customers Feeling Empty

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:54:58 -0500

The thing about anything involving self-service is that it's not usually particularly gratifying. And yet, all over the Web we see companies trying to reduce their customer support costs by deploying self-service applications that are all basically designed to keep the customers from having to interact with anybody. In terms of selling customers additional products and services, not to mention building affinity, self-service applications are all too often a wasted opportunity.

That's what makes a new software-as-a-service offering called Helpstream pretty compelling idea. Instead of deploying a bunch of static content around a basic bulletin board system, Helpstream lets organizations create a full-fledged online community that not only allows customers representatives engage with customers, it lets the customers easily engage with each other.

The end result of this approach is not only can the company deliver better customer support at a relatively low cost; it can also dramatically increase affinity and more easily sell additional products.

It's been said that the phone is the worse thing that ever happened to customer service. The whole model of delivering service over the phone encourages companies to limit their interactions with customers to try and keep support costs down. The Web offers a new way of interacting with customers that allows companies to rethink how they engage with customers. Unfortunately, far too many of them still think they're running a call center rather than managing a community where people are looking to establish meaningful relationships.

Backup and Recovery Via the Cloud

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:16:50 -0500

When it comes to cloud computing in the enterprise, the first place this approach makes the most sense is the backup and recovery process.

After all, backup and recovery is a thankless task that requires a lot of additional infrastructure that more the most part sits idle. At a time when the finance department is screaming for ways to cut IT costs, moving the back up and recovery function into the cloud makes a lot of sense.

As a result, there are any number of storage vendors and IT service providers delivering backup and recovery services via the cloud. But the question that IT organizations need to ask is whether those services were specifically designed for the cloud or are have backup and recovery service providers simply taken older client/server approaches to backup and recovery and redeployed them on the Web.

Asigra argues that backup and recovery solutions that were not specifically designed for cloud computing are fundamentally flawed. Asigra maintains that the best approach to backup and recovery in the cloud requires a hybrid approach that relies on local backup and recovery software that is tightly coupled to a cloud service. That local piece of software is not only able to manage the process; it also handles de-duplication tasks and inventories the entire environment. As a result, the amount of data that needs to be actually shipped into the cloud service for backup is minimized and only the delta changes to the data itself need be backed up after the initial setup of the service.

All of this is accomplished without introducing agents into the environment because the local Asigra is able to manage the process by integrated with the existing backup capabilities already present in the environment, versus adding another layer of backup and recovery management software on every machine that needs to be backed up.

Asigra points out that other backup and recovery tools were designed in an ear where vendors wanted customers to eat up as much storage capacity as possible. Designed specifically as a service, Asigra says its approach minimizes the amount of data that needs to travel back and forth across the wide area network link to its service.

Furthermore, Asigra then indexes all that data to help speed the recovery process. Repurposing technology built for one style of computing into another era is never usually a good idea. It can usually be made to definitely work, but overhead associated with making it work usually means that it quickly becomes more trouble than it's worth.

Simplifying the Compliance Process

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:02:14 -0500

Everybody knows that compliance is something that needs to be dealt with, but nobody is exactly sure how to best go about it. Unfortunately, the pressure to do something about builds daily.

It's pretty clear by now that current administration under President Obama's leadership is going to be very aggressive when it comes to regulations. The trouble this creates is that there is still a pretty wide gap between what is required by proposed regulations and what internal IT organization can deliver in terms of complying with those regulations.

Right now, that gap is generally filled by hordes of consultants and auditors that manually identify every process and then check to see what the level of compliance is with the eventually documented process. What's clearly needed to lower the cost of compliance is an approach that allows a lot of these tasks to be automated.

That's the ambition behind a GateKeeper appliance from Xceedium that makes it easier to track the behavior of end users as they apply to any set of policies mandated by the company. GateKeeper basically consists of a set of applets that track, log and record end user activity anywhere they are deployed. The system then generates a series of reports that helps identify high risk behavior as it relates to corporate policies.

Ultimately, a map of all the company's business processes starts to emerge that not only helps with governance, but can also help speed the auditing process. And given the fact that most audits involve outside consultants that get paid by the hour, anything that can lower the cost of the audit can pay for itself pretty quickly.

Long term, we're going to see more offerings that create a suite of products around governance, risk management and compliance. But in the meantime, the first order of business might actually just be to find an easier way to figure out who had access to what exactly when.

Ken Olsen and the Rise of Cloud Computing

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:55:59 -0500

For those old enough to remember Ken Olsen, the iconic founder of Digital Equipment Corp, (DEC), these must seem like very odd times indeed.

One of the things that led to the demise of DEC was Olsen's insistence that the PC revolution was merely a fad. Olsen couldn't really understand why anybody needed processing power on their desktop when more processing power than anybody could ever need was readily available on a server that could be accessed over Ethernet via DECnet or TCP/IP protocols. As a result, DEC was late to the PC game as both Compaq and IBM went on to become the dominant PC systems vendors of the age. Compaq would eventually acquire DEC for the prowess of its services organization, while the concept of the minicomputer faded into history.

Today, however, blade servers look and feel a whole lot like minicomputers and we now talk a whole lot about accessing unlimited amounts of cloud computing horsepower over industry standard Internet protocols. Somewhere, Ken Olsen must be enjoying a good laugh.

What's even more ironic is how fervently Microsoft has embraced the whole concept of cloud computing. The one time fervent champion of the PC now argues that PC experience needs to be enhanced by the processing prowess of servers all running Microsoft's Azure software for cloud computing environments. What's a little sad about all that is the most popular device for accessing those services is a new class of client machines called netbooks that seem to function a lot more like a terminal than a traditional PC.

In some sense, cloud computing is a repudiation of the original Microsoft vision. It's an admission that computing remains too complex for customers to effectively run their own IT infrastructure. In essence, it is a tacit acknowledgment that the IT industry has failed to deliver on much of the original promise of the PC revolution. In fact, one of the folks influential in the development of Microsoft's Azure offering, code named Red Dog, was Dave Cutler, who originally lead the development of both the VMS operating system for DEC and the NT operating system for Microsoft.

For a lot of old-time IT people, including Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, cloud computing represents vindication of things they have been saying for years. But for a lot of the people that cut their teeth in this industry starting with the introduction of the PC, there is something sad about the rise of cloud computing because when all is said and done, it serves as a stark reminder of unfulfilled promise and things left undone.

Microsoft's Ozzie Damns Google Wave with Praise

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:15:44 -0500

The launch of Google Wave represents an admirable attempt to advance the state of collaboration on the Web, but as a complex application Google's latest attempt to move into the application space is so complex as to be "anti-Web."

So says Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie after speaking at an event hosted by the Churchill Club in Palo Alto. Ozzie said that at its core the Google Wave collaboration environment is little more than a Web-based version of the Groove collaboration software that Ozzie built when he founded Groove Networks after leaving IBM's Lotus business unit. Ozzie, after leading the development of Lotus Notes, has been championing new paradigms for collaboration for years and many now wonder if Google will assume the intellectual leadership for collaboration on the Web.

While he praised Google for attempting to build Google Wave, he said that his experience Groove taught him that collaboration on the Web will require a more modular approach in order to be sustainable across a large number of users. Microsoft is employing such an approach with its Live Mesh technology, which ultimately may not yield as rich a collaboration environment as Google Wave or Groove, but will prove to be more usable across millions of users.

Oddly enough, Microsoft and Google now seem to be routinely accusing each other of Being "anti-Web. Google, for example, says Microsoft Silverlight technology goes against the open spirit of the Web. Essentially, both companies have been reduced to the equivalent of political parties that accuse each other of being "un-American."

In the spirit of openness, Ozzie did say that people could expect Microsoft to do the right thing when it comes to support HTML 5 in a future version of its browser. But he declined to be specific about when that event might happen.

In the meantime, Ozzie said his focus will remain firmly on a "three screens in the cloud mode'" that focuses on how PCs, televisions and mobile phones all become integrated across a common set of federated cloud services. How long that all might take, however, is still anybody's guess.

Time to Overhaul the IT Management Process

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:36:41 -0500

It's nobody's particular fault, but the way most IT organizations think about managing their daily operations is in the need of an overhaul. Over the years the way IT organizations manage applications and servers haphazardly evolved largely because so many of the processes involved are manual endeavors. In essence, this manual approach to provisioning and configuring servers results in a lot of inefficient use of IT labor that only serves to drive up the total cost of enterprise computing.

What IT organizations need is a more automated approach to not only dynamically provisioning a server, but also keeping track of all the software components that make up any application stack. One company that is trying to help drive the convergence of systems and software management in the enterprise is Fastscale.

Fastscale not only allows IT organizations to dynamically provision physical and virtual servers, it also allows IT organizations to compress software stacks and then provides a repository for keeping track of what elements of an application are related to each other. In some ways, you could think of it as a configuration management database (CMDB) tightly coupled with an integrated application and systems management framework.

Fastscale just rolled out a workgroup version of its enterprise-class management framework that can get people started down the path of integrated IT management for somewhere between $25,000 to $50,000. The Fastscale approach to IT management points the way towards a more holistic approach to IT management that eventually will be the hallmark of any mature IT organization.

Far too often, the way IT organizations approach managing IT reflects the products they acquired and the management tools that came with them. This approach inevitably results in fiefdoms and unnecessary turf wars that delay projects and increase costs. This current system only exists, however, because it mirrors the way the technology is deployed. Unfortunately, that means that the technology all too often winds up managing us rather than us managing IT as a whole.

Making Business Intelligence Applications Smarter

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:52:01 -0500

One perplexing oxymoron of IT industry is the simple fact that most business intelligence applications are not all that smart. These applications do a great job of capturing all the data needed to understand the business, but the analytic tools associated with these applications have typically been found wanting.

The good news is that providers of business intelligence applications are moving to remedy this problem by starting to provide higher quality analytical tools within their business intelligence environments. For example, IBM's Cognos unit just announced a deal with SPSS under which it will integrate SPSS analytical tools with its business intelligence software.

The integration of analytic tools, which developed as a separate discipline, with business intelligence applications is long over due. Unfortunately, most of the analytic tools were designed for analysts that had doctorate degrees, so only just now starting to see a wave of analytical tools capable of be mastered by relative mere mortals.

Whether analytic tools will continue to stand up as a separate category is anybody's guess. But it's clear these tools are becoming a major product differentiator inside business intelligence applications. And as that continues to happen, business intelligence applications will start to get smart enough to not only answer questions from end users, but also start to suggest to end users what questions they should be asking given all the available data.

What's Hot Now 6-4-09

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:42:05 -0500

How to better manage IT vendors and getting more value out of ERP tops the week's agenda. Six Crucial Mistakes IT Organizations Routinely Make When Managing Vendors There are a handful of openings that IT organizations routinely create that allow vendors to divide and conquer. Here's how to prevent them. Unraveling the ERP Conundrum While most IT organizations report that their organizations get value of their ERP investments, an Accenture survey shows that most customers are not even using half the features of their ERP system largely because they don't have the time or skills to master them. AMD Rolls Out Six-Core Instanbul Processor for Servers Even though new server sales are through the floor, AMD and its server vendor partners are rolling up new offerings based on AMD's latest multi-core processor. AMD is also rolling out new Phenom and Althlon processors as well. In the meantime, Hewlett-Packard and IBM are battling it out for top server honors. Recession Adds to Linux Momentum The open source operating system was already gaining steam before the recession, but now seems to be benefitting greatly from the recession. But it still has a long way to go before it unseats Windows Server from Microsoft. NetApp Counters EMC Bid for Data Domain A proxy war for the rights to acquire data deduplication vendor Data Domain has broken out after EMC tried to outbid NetApp. Acer Embraces Google Android Operating System for Netbooks With sales of netbooks rising, companies such as Toshiba and Fujitsu are jumping into the category alongside Acer. Microsoft is even tweaking Windows 7 for netbooks, while Sandisk is readying a solid-state disk for such systems and Intel looks to be a de facto platform for the category even if it has some doubts about the popularity of netbooks. Elsewhere, Intel and Psion settled a netbook trademark dispute. Dell Readies New Crop of PCs for the Enterprise Even as sales continue to slide, the former worldwide leader in PCs is looking to regain its crown later this year, but rivals such as Acer are promising thinner, lighter systems at a time when brand loyalty for notebooks is rapidly evaporating. Green IT Poised to Go Mainstream With IT organizations now responsible for the electric bill in the data center, a new survey from Symantec finds Green IT is gaining momentum as IT organization start to embrace more energy efficient products. HP, meanwhile, is hoping Green IT will also extend all the way out to the printer.

Putting an End to the Vicious Cycle of Business Intelligence

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:03:54 -0500

When it comes to business intelligence, the mean time between making the initial investment and getting a meaningful return on it is way too long.

What most IT organizations first get when they invest in a business intelligence application is a framework that has to be relentlessly tweaked and before it becomes something that is actually tuned to the specific needs of the business.

Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time and, worse yet, consulting dollars to accomplish. As a result, even once the business intelligence framework is ready for action, it's too costly to deploy across the entire organization, there by limiting its overall effectiveness. And finally, just to add a little insult to injury, once all business intelligence systems are all set to go, word comes down from the business side that market conditions have changed again so the IT organization needs to rework the business intelligence framework.

To its credit, even though IBM has made a lot of money in this space, IBM is pledging to help end this vicious cycle of business intelligence. The company has launched an effort that spans its Cognos business unit, the IBM Software business unit and IBM Global Services to create business intelligence frameworks that are more useful out of the box. To that end, IBM consultants are working to deliver frameworks for various vertical industries that come with a lot of metrics for that industry already built into the application.

The whole effort is intended to be a tangible manifestation of IBM's commitment to helping build a Smarter Planet on the assumption that the more people that have access to business intelligence tools that are aligned to their industry, the faster they will actually draw benefits from those applications.

Clearly, the IT industry still has a very long way to go when it comes to business intelligence. Arguably, the last 25 years has been all about how to more efficiently collect data. So maybe the next 25 years should be all about how to finally go about deriving some value from analyzing all the data we already routinely collect?

A License to Print Green

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:04:49 -0500

Everybody knows that on some level that all those printers strewn about the enterprise are wasting paper and energy. The simple fact of the matter is that most fleets of printers and other output devices in the enterprise are not managed. They have been randomly deployed and, all too often, paid for by some department with enough budget money to indulge the whims of a handful of executives and office managers.

Fortunately, the whole move to Green IT creates enough of a mandate for IT executives to right many of the printing abuses of the past. The problem is that many of them have lacked to tools to create the irrefutable reports necessary to overcome the objections of individual departments that are too attached to their existing output devices.

To help IT managers effectively make the Green IT argument, HP is adding Eco Solutions Reports to the HP Web JetAdmin tools it makes available to customers that need to manage fleets of output devices.

The reports themselves are not going to make every one automatically want to embrace Green IT. But they do given IT organizations an effective tools for making the economic case for replacing older output devices that more often than not cost more to operate than replace. For the more environmentally minded, HP is also updating its Carbon Footprint Calculator tools to help IT organizations figure out how much carbon their existing printers are throwing off into the atmosphere.

Either way, the case for taking a more managed approach to output devices can be made based on economics, the environment or both. The only question is at what pace will IT organizations be able to make those changes given the current economic climate? The answer to that question may ultimately have more to do with how much capital expense they can allocate to printers at the moment, or conversely move towards an operating expense budget based on leasing and managed services given all the other pressing IT requirements of the moment.

The Demise of Report Writers and Spreadsheet Jockeys

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:25:51 -0500

The time may have finally come to put report writers and spreadsheet jockeys out of the collective misery of IT.

With advent of simpler to use business intelligence tools, IT organizations now have a way to give end users the ability to analyze data with requiring IT organizations to dedicate people to running reports or allowing users to write their own macro applications on top of spreadsheets that all too often are based on faulty formulas.

For example, Tableau 5.0 from Tableau Software is one of several relatively new offerings on the business intelligence scene that is starting to gain traction with IT departments. Rather than requiring IT organizations to master comparatively complex enterprise-class business intelligence solutions, the Tableau approach allows IT organization to set up a lightweight infrastructure that allows end users to interactively analyze data on their own without requiring intervention from the IT staff to create the actual reports.

This not only frees up IT personnel, it also make the end user happier because they no longer feel like a hostage to the IT department. In fact, it's just that feeling of helplessness that gave rise to all the spreadsheet jockeys.

We all know at least one spreadsheet jockey. They have taken the time to master all the intricacies of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. They are capable of building the most elaborate applications to analyze and data set loaded into the spreadsheet. The trouble is that more often than anyone cares to admit, the mathematical formulas underlying the analysis is deeply flawed. This leads to all kinds of business decisions getting made based on faulty intelligence.

Worse yet, spreadsheet applications are rarely documented and from governance perspective can compound and obfuscate any numbers of issues related to compliance. Report writers and complicated spreadsheet applications are essentially legacy applications from a bygone era that IT organizations have been asked to support to the detriment of themselves and the business at large. And now that they can be replaced by more effective solutions, the time for IT organizations to move on is finally at hand.