TalkBMC - Unwiring IT

This blog has a new home

dturchin — 2009-04-16T19:50+00:00

Not sure if it was falling interest rates or bailout funds but this blog is moving into nicer digs in the BMC Developer Network. Update your RSS feed. Here is the address: http://developer.bmc.com/communities/blogs/unwiringit.

See you there!

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Fixing The Mobile Enterprise

dturchin — 2009-04-07T23:03+00:00

The mobile software industry has failed us all. If you've been reading this blog, you know how strongly I feel about the importance of improving the mobile user experience. That's why we started Aeroprise nine years ago. Using mobile applications should be more like driving a Prius or using an iPod - things we're good at because we love doing them - and less like shaving - something we hate but get good at because the alternatives draw blood. When designing software for handhelds, the end-user experience is all that matters and yet as an industry we've consistently ignored it.

Need proof? There are more than 4.1 billion mobile subscribers. And 6.7 billion people. Phones are quickly eclipsing PCs as the primary computing device. Mobile data usage is soaring while PC shipments plummet. 70% of corporate employees spend more than 50% of their time away from a PC (source: IDC). And yet... a sliver of a percent of all spending on enterprise applications will be for mobile solutions this year.

Talk to any CxO to confirm it's not for lack of demand and it certainly isn’t the weak economy (in fact, the reverse is true). They'll tell you that within 18 months, any application that's not available on mobile devices will be obsolete. So where's the rub? Talk to any subset of five mobile enterprise app users and you'll see it first-hand.

Too few love them and too many are merely proud to know how they work. That must change. If the same principle applied to driving we'd be Emerson Fitipaldi at Speedway by commuting to work accident-free. To meet expectations, mobile business applications can't be about wireless technology and the experience can't be about who can figure them out. They must be about business benefits like improved productivity and real-time collaboration.

Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google's mobile and developer products, points out in an interesting guest post on TechCrunch: "...for the first time ever, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone in 2009." The post focuses on mobile data from a Google perspective but the themes are universal: "users appreciate well-written software, but ease of use and on-device navigability are critical preconditions for usage." Case in point (from the same post): Google Earth had more activations the day it launched on the iPhone than on any other day in its history because the iPhone App Store makes it easy to find and try it. It’s no secret what’s missing and yet we can’t expect different results until we change our approach.

Touch screens aren’t keyboards, wireless networks aren’t always available, and mobile devices aren’t PCs. But when their real value is unlocked, they do things like geo-locate and make voice calls that make them better than any PC ever will be. I'm biased but I think our approach to end-user personalization, presence-awareness, and automatic device optimization are leading the industry in the right direction. Even so, I’m the first to admit we have a lot of work to do. More on what lies ahead in future posts but rest assured, those nicks and cuts will heal soon.

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tags: Aeroprise | BlackBerry | mobile | wireless

Get to know wireless. Your career may depend on it.

dturchin — 2009-03-16T17:39+00:00

We have a customer that was acquired recently by a large technology company. As a result, they're in the process of integrating IT systems and considering which applications stay and go. For a global IT organization with more than 350,000 employees, that's no small project. In fact, they issued an RFP for a new ITSM system months back and have entertained a steady stream of suitors since then. I'm an outsider but from what I've heard several things haven't surprised me about the process (and one has).

Vendors are savvy and differentiate themselves based on analyst ratings, customer success stories, after-sale support, and global reach. No surprise there. What surprised me is that with the exception of one feature, product enters the discussion infrequently. Why? ITSM products are so similar these days that going through the alphabet soup of ITIL this and SLM that is a waste of time. The one feature that comes up in every discussion is – you guessed it – wireless.

There was a time when wireless was heated seats and an extra cup holder. Now it's the steering wheel and engine. Not just an essential part of the sales pitch but the difference-maker that distinguishes strong from weak products, whole from partial ones. It turns out these days the way to a CIO's wallet isn't through a diagram with clouds or a CMDB or a quad-core anything - it's through a BlackBerry.

For this particular customer, wireless means productivity and a lot more. They've narrowed the field to two players, based almost solely on the strength of their mobile solutions. The vendors without a solution at all were easy to eliminate. The ones with immature or incomplete solutions sent the message that they're not innovative and don't see where the market is headed. According to the customer, vendors that lead with the strength of their mobile solution have the "it" factor. The others, not so much.

Customers need to feel confident that vendors meet today's basic requirements and, more importantly, get where computing will be tomorrow. Call it a tip. Call it a warning. Call it whatever you want. All I know is I’ve seen the future of enterprise software and PCs are asleep at the wheel.

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The Airplane Test

dturchin — 2009-03-01T13:02+00:00

Ever look around when phones need to be powered down before takeoff? I call it the Airplane Test. Great way to take the pulse of the handset market. Of course, fliers aren't representative of the overall phone-using population when it comes to mobile habits but they're not a bad cross-section of business users.

On today's flight from Houston, for the first time feature phones failed the test. Incredibly, of the ten devices in my field of view every single one had a keyboard and not one was made by the top three global handset manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, Samsung). A few years ago, smartphones failed the test (in fact, a few years ago the lady next to me failed it - "What is that?" "Uh, a BlackBerry, ma'am." "How does the person on the other end know what you're typing?" [Awkward pause.]).

These days, the friendly skies look more like the neighborhood Fry's. Between Kindles, smartphones, and iPods, the plane has become a thumb gym full of treadmills for digits. The only thing notably absent are laptops. And when they're out it's to watch DVDs or use PowerPoint. Wireless data is evolving: first, it infiltrated schoolyards. Now airplanes. Next cube-ville. Mark my words.

Take the Airplane Test and let me know what you find. Next up: I've hatched a plan to convince the FAA there's no scientific basis for the 10,000-foot ban on electronics. When was the last time an itty-bitty book light took down a 747?

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tags: Aeroprise | BlackBerry | Mobile IT | mobile phone | wireless

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IT Services Company Using Wireless to Buck Down Economy

dturchin — 2009-02-01T14:12+00:00

It goes without saying that we're all affected by the economic downturn - psychologically if not financially. I'm most interested in how our customers are using wireless to cope with it. Last week, the Director of IT at a major federal IT services company said Aeroprise is the cornerstone of their plan to save $100 million this year by increasing service levels and cutting dispatcher headcount.

It turns out all these years they've staffed a large call center with hundreds of dispatchers who mostly relay information to and from the field. In the past, technicians left in the morning with a stack of paper and a pager. They'd dutifully visit customers, chicken scratch notes on dispatch reports, and eventually enter resolution details into Remedy or (more often) rely on underpaid dispatchers to (hopefully) do it for them.

Sure, they'd receive pages if something urgent happened but they couldn't take action in the field, didn't have the details they needed even if they wanted to, and (according to my friend the IT Director), "spent about half their time re-doing work someone did already or phoning around asking for more information." One day, the senior contracting officer noticed dispatching costs going up while call volume was going down - and had an epiphany: eliminate the middle man. How? BlackBerrys + Remedy.

They’ll be using Aeroprise to turn ordinary smartphones like BlackBerrys into real computing devices that will eventually replace laptops. They’re starting with Remedy trouble tickets and change requests with plans to move into other applications later. Mobile employees will collaborate with each other, take ownership of and work requests from create to resolve, and managers will monitor health-of-business issues with real-time alerts and dashboard reports.

Shame that it took financial Armageddon to get there but it did. You see, in better times, nobody scrutinized utilization percentages or wait times or even service levels. Nobody asked if there's a better way of doing things. I guess necessity really is the mother of invention. I'll write more when we know how this plan worked. Whatever happens, I'm rooting for them and not just because it helps Aeroprise.

Even in historical context, wireless is on a short list of technologies - like the printing press, cotton gin, and steam engine - with the unique ability to not only improve productivity but fundamentally change the nature of work. What is most exciting to me is none of us understand even 1% of its transformative power - yet.

Let me know how mobile applications are helping your business and if you don't mind I'll share your story in an upcoming blog post.

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tags: Aeroprise | BlackBerry | Business Value of IT | IT service management | wireless

Mobile apps as "social currency"

dturchin — 2009-01-05T16:23+00:00

Interesting article in today's Mercury News about how applications are redefining mobile devices. It's largely consumer-focused but we in the enterprise community know business apps are worth more social currency than even the coolest phone-lighter-parlor trick-app. According to the article, "[today's apps] herald a new era in the allure of mobile devices — the phone is no longer a fashion statement but a digital bag of tricks." Hard to believe not long ago things like voicemail and ring tones were enough to differentiate devices.

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tags: Aeroprise | BlackBerry

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Dell Doesn't Get It

dturchin — 2008-12-19T13:44+00:00

Dell, a tech pioneer in every respect, is charging $99 per year for access to support agents who "speak American". So there is now a price on "free" tech support. Sanctioned xenophobia. At a time when the world is getting smaller and flatter, this marks a low point in cultural sensitivity and signals a disturbing trend for the support industry. Shame on you Dell. Shame on us for driving Dell to this.

Bob Kaufman, Dell spokesman, said "this illustrates Dell's commitment to customer choice." I disagree wholeheartedly. A commitment to customer choice would be offering premium support for a premium price. A premium price for a "premium accent" is a choice nobody should get.

The problem is not offshore support agents and it's typically not their accents. The problem is offshoring for the wrong reasons - volume and cost savings - instead of the right ones - quality, specialization, and breadth of coverage. The wrong business drivers lead directly to poor service quality and unfair associations between service levels and language skills.

I'm not condoning the outsourcing of American jobs. Quite the opposite. I'm mourning Dell's brazen disregard for market forces that otherwise require our education system and tech leaders to keep up with the rest of the world. The message this sends is that mediocrity is ok if you "speak American" - a gross insult to every American support agent.

At Aeroprise, we provide (excellent, responsive, intelligible) support from our office in Bangalore. I can say with 100% confidence that geography doesn't make good service, training and corporate culture do.

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Wireless to the Rescue

dturchin — 2008-11-26T19:44+00:00

Four of five news stories these days are all bailout-redux doom and gloom. The fifth is about boom times in wireless. I don't want to call it come-uppance but let's just say wireless veterans have enough scar tissue to gloat.

Case in point: Friday's news cycle was dominated by Citigroup, Detroit's groveling, Obama's sugar daddies... and Verizon's launch of the BlackBerry Storm. Quite the juxtaposition: economy faltering, retailers failing, government posturing, and lines around the building for tech bling.

What I want to know is who's out waiting in line at 4am? Is it the dude whose home was just foreclosed? The single mom drowning under the weight of credit card debt? The bonus-starved Wall Street banker who can't leave home without wearing a paper bag? To read the news, you'd think we all fall into one of those categories. The wireless industry is living proof we don't.

What once was a line used solely by tech-heads has become an enterprise-wide mantra: wireless is essential for business. No wink wink nod. No sneaking around CFO authorization. How else to explain Ovum's sunny mobile data revenue forecast this week? The analyst reports 51% data growth for AT&T in the past year, 43% for Verizon, and no sign of a slowdown through 2009. No sign of a slowdown! Wall Street's a smoldering heap, the Fed is bailing out anything that moves, and gallant wireless data on white horse with lance and shield is riding in to the rescue.

We've arrived. Took long enough.

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tags: Aeroprise | BlackBerry | iPhone | mobile | wireless

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Third screen? There are two others?

dturchin — 2008-09-28T17:20+00:00

These days the Wall Street Journal reads like a bad episode of Sesame Street. Turns out today's must-have gadget is brought to us by the letter 'G', as in T-Mobile's 'G1' gPhone. The perennial second-tier carrier ushered in the Android era with a device (manufactured by Taiwan's HTC) that is (gasp!) eerily similar to last year's iPhone and has all the features we've come to expect in a swiss army phone: WiFi, GPS, QWERTY keyboard, touch-screen, accelerometer, and, oh yeah - a phone.

What I found most notable had nothing to do with the features. It was the (carefully-scripted) way wunderkind Google co-founders Larry and Sergey introduced it (paraphrased here): "finally, a handheld device with the power to do the things we grew up doing on computers." The gPhone's geek-cred comes not from the fact that it's a cool smartphone but from the fact that it's a cool computer. Mark the date: data capabilities have officially trumped voice capabilities.

Twenty years ago Nintendo launched the age of wireless data with its brick of a handheld game console, the Gameboy. Ten years ago Motorola launched the age of mobile voice with its StarTAC. They finally converged. Chris O'Brien, columnist for the Mercury News, writes: "when I came to Silicon Valley in 1999, the refrain at mobile trade shows was always the same: "Next year is going to be the year when the mobile Internet becomes huge!" That next year never seemed to come. Until now. The mobile web is here, and it's huge." The incredible thing is it's "huge" and barely anyone's using it. Just imagine what happens when that changes.

In 1998, Interactive Home magazine coined the term "third screen" to refer to something other than your TV or PC. In recent years, the moniker has been co-opted by the mobile industry to refer to mobile devices. As we trek through the alphabet and creep ever-closer to the holy grail of handhelds that are *better* than PCs, the days of the first and second screens as we know them are numbered.

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tags: Aeroprise | BlackBerry | Google | Mobile IT | wireless

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The Seven Laws of Mobile Software

dturchin — 2008-09-04T18:11+00:00

link to an article I wrote for Mobile Enterprise magazine titled "The Seven Laws of Mobile Software". It foreshadows a project Tom Bishop and I are working on - stay tuned for details.

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tags: Aeroprise | Mobile IT | wireless

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The Myth of Device Diversity

dturchin — 2008-08-01T18:41+00:00

There's that great part in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Willy Wonka introduces the kids to his seductive candy forest with the oompa loompas and chocolate river. The fat kid's jaw drops and Veruca Salt's eyes bulge. Great scene. Contrast that with Henry Ford who famously said about the Model T in 1916: "You can have it any color -- so long as it's black." In the past year, enterprise device diversity has shifted from Willy Wonka to Henry Ford.

The intriguing thing is that while companies are retrenching around one or two primary devices everyone around them is doing just the opposite. Take for example the Open Mobile Exchange, an event hosted by O'Reilly I attended last week in Portland. A parade of developers representing open source mobile projects with funny names (Zembly?) proclaimed the supremacy of a dizzying variety of new (and some old) mobile platforms, frameworks, and operating systems. The community is abuzz with everything from the open sourcing of Symbian (recently acquired by Nokia) to the rise of Google's Android and the launch of mainstream LiMo (Linux Mobile) handsets by Motorola. Oh, what a time to be a mobile developer. The choices! The gadgets! The confusion! Two things are clear: 1) there’s no consensus about what devices/formats/features/networks will win and 2) everyone is trying to solve the same problem – how best to deliver a fast and feature-rich cross-platform user experience.

Which brings me back to today's enterprise device landscape - where "BlackBerry" is the new "Kleenex" and diversity means you can have a Pearl *or* (gasp!) a Curve. It’s a whole different universe from what I saw in Portland. For a variety of reasons ranging from security to availability to inertia, enterprises are increasingly standardizing on fewer models, carriers, and operating systems. As with many technology trends, however, it makes sense in historical context. By my calculation, it took five years for smartphones to become mainstream even though RIM shipped its first pager in '96. Similarly, it will be a year or two before new entrants to the market earn corporate IT's seal of approval. The point isn't that enterprises are laggards. It’s that mobile innovation isn't slowing down - on the contrary, it's speeding up. And as it does, adoption cycles get compressed. Case in point: the i(can’t live without)Phone. It took five years to make BlackBerry mainstream and 35% of the Fortune 500 are currently testing Apple’s lovechild less than a year after it launched. I’d say we’re looking at six months when Android handsets arrive. Hey, even Henry Ford eventually went techno-color.

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The Two-Foot Putt

dturchin — 2008-06-10T12:25+00:00

In recent months, Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry, and Apple, maker of the iPhone, launched dueling mobile software venture funds. Both are bold statements at a time when the venture industry is downsizing and credit markets are convulsing. The former is a $150m fund, the latter $100m - up from an announced $50m. That's a $250m bet on the future of mobile software.

You might point out that $250m is spit in the ocean for RIM ($81b market cap), Apple ($156b market cap), or the venture industry ($29b in total funding in 2007). And you'd be right. But the message it's sending is clear: if ever there was a clarion call to mobile entrepreneurs and engineers, this is it. Consider this: in the past month alone, the BlackBerry Bold, BlackBerry Thunder, 3G iPhone, and Samsung Instinct - all high-end smartphones targeting business users - were announced (or leaked in the case of the Thunder).

We often think tech trends can only be identified in retrospect. This is a rare case when a massive opportunity is bearing down on us like a Mack truck. The signs are everywhere - in newspapers and on TV, in consumer and enterprise purchasing behaviors, and of course in the blogosphere. The unique thing about mobile software is that anyone watching the space knew years ago it would take off yet all of us were wrong about when. Why? We assumed the technology and market conditions present now would be present by about 2003.

We've seen the wireless industry go through ups and downs over the years but there's never been an up like this. According to M:Metrics, smartphone users now spend an average of four hours and 38 minutes per month browsing the mobile web. That's up 89% year over year. Page views are up 127%. According to Paul Carton, research director at industry analyst ChangeWave, "IT budget constraints aren't loosening up anytime soon yet IT leaders are shelling out big-time for [BlackBerrys] despite tightening budgets." Who would have thought when wireless was panned as all sizzle and no bacon as recently as last year that it would keep the IT economy out of a recession?

At a meta level, the real driver here is that computing innovation finally shifted from the PC to mobile platform. It's widely-acknowledged that the shift will be complete when our dominant computing environment is a handheld device and we only use tethered machines for tasks handhelds can't do (creating CAD drawings, for instance). Today, it's easy to consume information on mobile devices but it's a pain to produce it. With the advent of better mobile applications, better text-input technology, and more flexible application design tools, it's only a matter of time before that changes. When it does, the race to mobile-centric computing will be on.

It's obvious where wireless is headed because we've seen it all happen before - first when mainframe apps moved to client-server architectures then when client-server migrated to the web. Most important, we learned what not to do when first-generation mobile applications failed in 2000-2005. We know exactly what applications and infrastructure are missing. It's an uncontested layup. A two-foot putt. No need for Tiger here. Someone call Happy Gilmore. The wireless industry is about to produce the next many Microsoft/Cisco/eBay/Google tech success stories. Here are three opportunities someone will exploit to earn a place on that list:

Mobile cross-platform collaboration
VPN security for non-BlackBerry smartphones
Text input for touch-based handsets

You may or may not sink this one but mark my words - many people will. This isn't intended to be career counseling but if you're surveying the tech horizon and looking for a new adventure, now is a great time to be in wireless software. There are too few great tech veterans in the space and limitless upside. That said, another three or four quarters and all the first-movers will be out ahead and the only opportunities left will involve too much sweat for too little equity.

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We're ready for wireless. Is it ready for us?

dturchin — 2008-05-09T12:25+00:00

I showed up at last week's Wireless Innovations, the Dow Jones wireless venture capital event, expecting to see and hear more of the same tired themes:

"technology as panacea"
"angst and confusion about delayed adoption"
"wireless+venture capital=ugly lovechild"

What I heard was different. For the first time in years. I was impressed.

The talking heads just may be starting to get it. Three new themes - ones you've known about for years - got more air time than Reverend Wright on YouTube:

The mobile end-user experience sucks.
That is what has delayed adoption.
Handhelds will become our primary computing devices when mobile applications become context-aware.

Excellent points. Reiterated by carriers like T-Mobile (Joe Sims, VP and GM, Broadband and New Business), hardware manufacturers like RIM (Nedim Fresko, Director of Strategic Platform Initiatives), and infrastructure players like Qualcomm (Sayeed Choudhury, Product Manager for System Software) during the two-day event.

Mobile devices won't just become the dominant computing environment. They'll be better than PCs because they'll do everything we need to do, nothing we don't, and they'll layer intelligence on top of traditional apps like voice to text, location-based services, and collaboration tools that give the flat, tethered computing experience of the past richness and depth it never had.

I sat in on about 30 product demos from early-stage companies. Many showed real promise. Here are a few that caught my eye:

Ribbit: voice meets Web 2.0 - a platform for building telephony applications. The example shown incorporated visual voicemail into Salesforce.com using a soft VoIP keypad.
Foneshow: radio on your phone - on-demand news and programs delivered as voice calls to standard phones.
Ontela: iPhone camera features meet every phone - take, manage, offload, and send camera phone pictures with ordinary devices as if they were high-end smartphones.

Wireless data isn't mainstream. Handhelds aren't our primary computing devices. But both will be soon. What is clear as day is that social and cultural barriers aren't the culprit. When the mobile user experience is truly better than the PC experience, it's game over for anyone in the software industry who slept through the shift. And by the way, a bunch of smart entrepreneurs are almost there.

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Blogging from HDI 2008

dturchin — 2008-03-14T18:08+00:00

Blogging from the annual HDI conference at the Gaylord hotel in Dallas. If you're looking for high fashion, high energy, or oxygen (we're in one of the world's largest atria - think Biosphere without the plants), go to Miami Beach. If you're looking for the epicenter of IT activity, this is the place. There are more than 2,500 attendees and about 80 vendors - all here discussing (ad nauseum) ITIL, the service desk of the future, and "fixing customers not problems."

I'm biased but I've seen two keys shifts in thinking since last year. The first is a broad rejection of "traditional", "antiquated" software pricing models. It seems the proliferation of subscription-based pricing is infiltrating the minds of IT management. Anecdotally, it's not influencing the minds of finance yet but that's not far behind. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had (actually, I can - five so far) with customers who are generally happy with their service and support products but are evaluating new ones because they're fed up with maintenance bills and rigid contracts and are using that as an excuse to switch.

The second is a shift in how the now-cliched "proliferation of all things wireless" is impacting IT. Last year, wireless was on the mind of HDI attendees (this year we lack oxygen, last year it was sleep - the event was held at the Mandalay Bay) but it was IT tools like help desk and asset management apps they were talking about mobilizing. Most of the mobile and wireless dialog was narrowly-focused around best practices for better-arming field technicians.

Today, not the case. The discussion is about how to support mobile employees - not just field techs. How new technologies like public WiFi, virtual teams, ultra mobile PCs, and iPhones create opportunities and challenges for IT. How IT processes and infrastructure can become as mobile as the business. Examples: one university customer said he needs a better way to disseminate information (from course catalog updates to security threats) to mobile phones and PDAs used by more than 50,000 faculty, students, and staff. Another said she needs to enable and support PDAs and wireless printers used by 1,000 police officers. Her department's goal is to reduce the time it takes to have traffic tickets enter the system from the current (abominable unless you're on the receiving end) six weeks to a more palatable one day.

Again, I'm biased, but I've been quietly applauding this shift in attitudes. Not because it benefits my company but because it's a sure sign the push to align IT with the business is finally transcending the call center.

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Yankee Group: "Wireless Top Strategic IT Project"

dturchin — 2007-12-04T11:28+00:00

I thought I'd share highlights from the Yankee Group 2007 Mobile and Business Applications Survey. An excerpt from the full report is available here or in the November '07 print edition of Mobile Enterprise Magazine. The author is Eugene Signorini, one of the most-respected analysts in the mobile enterprise space.

When asked which strategies will impact business application decisions most in the future, IT executives at companies with more than 500 employees in the US and Europe said "enabling mobile access to corporate apps through wireless technology" is a top priority. When asked which mobile application is the most strategic, those same executives said "service and support."

To all of us in IT with an interest in mobility, these results just confirm what we already know. What's more impressive is how much they've changed in the past year. Consider that after service and support applications, the next most strategic applications are "Productivity Suites" followed by "Email/PIM", "Field Service", and "Sales force automation". In previous years, Email/PIM topped the list. This year's report indicates the shift we've all seen firsthand - wireless email and PIM are the garnish you take too much of at the buffet and put back later once you see the main course.

As IT executives have become increasingly mobile-savvy this past year, service and support has steadily ascended the priority list. Why? Again, for reasons we all know - they're at the epicenter of corporate operations. Devolving true control of these critical apps to the point where service is actually delivered starts a powerful chain reaction that touches every other aspect of the business in powerful ways no other mobile solution can.

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