Freeform Comment

Public VoIP for cheap long distance calls

2008-07-17T14:12:00.002Z

I had to prepare for a research project recently that would involve conducting lengthy telephone interviews with service providers around the globe. As a home-based worker with a small company, I began to get very jittery about the likely size of the phone bill I would run up – small businesses and big phone bills being like the proverbial oil and water – and so began to search for cheap phone options in the form of public VoIP.

After looking at various options, I settled on Jajah. It wasn’t so much the rates that were the deciding factor - yes, they were very good, but they were comparable to other VoIP players. What I particularly liked was that I didn’t need to download any software onto my already overburdened laptop. Nor did I have to invest in a VoIP phone, or worry about which one was the best buy (a big deal for me as I am a true Northerner – I worry and I watch my money, often both at the same time).

In practical terms, the Jajah service is phone-to-phone, which means that the call is initiated on the Jajah website, and the service calls both parties and connects them. There are some neat options, too, such as an easy-to-use address book for saving dialled numbers, the allocation of a local number for regularly dialled contacts to circumvent the need to use a PC for subsequent calls, and an automatic redial at a pre-determined time. There is even a conference call option (though I haven’t tried that yet). The whole thing is scarily simple.

Of course, none of this matters if the call quality is poor – particularly as these are business calls. But so far, for me, call quality has been pretty good – I’d say it is on a par with my standard landline. Additionally, call quality hasn’t degraded during a call, even for very long calls. And the fact that I am using my own phone has a positive impact on the overall experience. A few calls have been barely audible, but I have typically been able to remedy these by re-dialling. And on the odd occasion that I haven’t then, of course, I still have my landline.

Pre-Jajah use, I was very sceptical about public VoIP for business use, and viewed my landline as far superior – a bit of ‘phone snobbery’ to be honest. Now, though, I am a VoIP convert, and find myself raving about it to anyone who will listen. I have some minor quibbles, for example, around the address book set-up, but as for the big downsides, I’ve yet to find them.

I’m not necessarily recommending VoIP for routine business use as the cost of local/national calls from traditional providers is not high enough to justify the switch. However, it is a pretty compelling commercial proposition in the context of a specific usage requirement such as a period of intense of international calling for a home-based or small business user.

Desktop Virtualisation – Where to Begin

2008-07-17T13:38:00.006Z

There is increasing discussion in many organisations, across a broad range of geographies, industry verticals and sizes, concerning the subject of “Desktop Virtualisation”. Even without the tremendous volume of vendor hype concerning the subject it is easy to understand why this subject is grabbing attention. A quick glance at the figure below highlights many potential reasons why an organisation might decide to investigate desktop virtualisation.

As we can see whilst the combination of cost reduction and resource / space optimisation receives most attention, but only just. In fact compared with the cases for x86 server virtualisation, and even the virtualisation of storage, cost reduction is much less of a factor in the desktop arena. Indeed one can clearly see that factors such as improving service reliability and providing better service levels along with providing better response to changing business requirements are almost neck and neck with cost reduction as the leading driver for desktop virtualisation. It is interesting to note that these are matters with which those charged with supporting desktop PCs inside (and often outside) the business have struggled since the PC first appeared in the workplace.

Now we also know from our research that whilst there are several benefits that organisations envisage using desktop virtualisation solutions there are also a number of issues to be faced. When it comes to challenges or barriers to the adoption of desktop virtualisation, the small matter of “determining where desktop virtualisation is appropriate” is ranked as the biggest issue, closely followed by “unclear business case”, “other more pressing priorities”. A self confessed “lack of familiarity with the technology” highlights that all parties have major work to undertake before starting major desktop virtualisation projects. So where should efforts begin?

In the same way that most IT organisations have struggled to deliver very high or even, at least as seen by end users, adequate and responsive desktop support service many frustrations stem from the lack of visibility support staff often have regarding the current state of the deployed PC / Laptop population. It is my very strongly held belief, backed by not inconsiderable real world experience in these areas, that in order to be in a position to deliver effective desktop support services and to be able to make valid decisions concerning potential desktop / laptop service deployments there is an unavoidable need to build and maintain an accurate record of deployed inventory coupled with information of software installed and the nature of the users of each and every piece of of IT technology and service. IT Inventory management is no longer a “nice to have”, it is a necessity.

I would further argue that adding additional information to such a repository and making it into a true asset management system yields considerable advantages in ongoing IT support, service monitoring and planning.

Thus before anyone considers undertaking any desktop / laptop service project they would do very well to put in place an asset management system or at least a reliable, maintained inventory repository. There are now many tools available to assist in this task, including the functions required to ensure that once it is built it continues to hold up to date information rather than an historical snapshot of the state of affairs when the system was installed. The first step along the path of any desktop virtualisation project must be the creation of an IT asset repository, after all you need to know what’s being used and by whom before any rational choices can be made. Indeed, as I have often stated, such a system should be the foundation of all IT management systems.

Is There a Business Case To Be Made In Favour of Virtualising the Desktop?

2008-07-01T09:33:00.000Z

If you are looking at desktop/notebook replacement or optimisation now, what are the options and considerations that should be on your mind as you weigh up the options? As one of my colleagues stated a day or two ago, “given that so much has come to market over the last 12 months, not forgetting developments at Citrix, Microsoft as well as VMware, at one level, it is all very exciting and full of possibilities, at another, it bloody confusing!” So what are the options?

Well the “straightforward” option might be to simply replace all desktops and laptops in a like for like switch and consider moving to Windows Vista. At one level this offers simplicity of change in as much as the new operating system is unlikely to pose to a major headache for users. However before such a transition be attempted it is absolutely essential that a thorough evaluation of application compatibility be undertaken. There are some clear management benefits that can be achieved with Vista, especially in the area of policy setting , particularly around power management. However as an interesting side note, one senior IT director mentioned that had made the decision to defer a move to XP SP2 because of application compatibility issues. For his organisation the move from XP SP1 to Vista apparently holds fewer problems due to the superior sand boxing in Vista (i.e. you really can run things reliably in compatibility mode). To put it another way, he said more of their XP SP1 applications ran successfully under Vista without modification than under XP SP2.

However, there are now many alternatives to running “standard” desktops and laptops. Great to have choices, but it does make life a little more complex. Such alternatives include, but are by no means limited to, application streaming, desktop virtualisation, application virtualisation, virtual machine plus application capture, and a more traditional terminal service driven application approach to name but a few. But our research shows that it is not simple to make a business case for going down the 'virtualised desktop' route. That mix of solutions holds lots of potential cost savings in management, and possibly in hardware too. But, and it is very big but, it is hard to make a case for some of the newer elements therein and especially on the new management tools for virtualised desktop that are only just beginning to trickle out.

We are also seeing that it is a prime objective for CIOs to make solid 'NOW' business cases which I and several of my colleagues suspect means that we will only see a slow take up of desktop virtualisation solutions unless there are extremely clear forcing factors to accelerate adoption. It is now clear that CIOs are extremely reluctant to base any investment case on futures or too many assumptions reflecting just how hard nosed business stakeholders are nowadays.

Thus there is now a clear onus on desktop virtualisation vendors and, indeed, on the analyst community to help explain just what options are available, where they fit, where each is inappropriate and, perhaps most importantly of all, what is the business case for adopting such solutions. No small job here then.

Behind the scenes at the National Gallery provides plenty of food for thought.

2008-06-19T21:46:00.002Z

I recently had the pleasure of attending an event which took a group of analysts and journalists ‘behind the scenes’ at the National Gallery to see some of the work HP is involved in.

Combining new and old has always fascinated me. The sight of a Victorian frontage hiding a glass and steel interior may horrify the purist, but for me, the contrast and aesthetic effect created is simply fantastic. (I was on a stag weekend to Dublin recently. The Guinness storehouse is an example of this on a grand scale).

Hence, on that premise alone, the National Gallery trip seemed like a pleasant – but only vaguely relevant – way to spend an afternoon. In hindsight, not only did it remind me why technology is so important for adding colour to our busy lives, it was also relevant to my interests in information management and sustainability.

The topic of the day - restoration and analysis of the collection at the National Gallery, is relevant but only to a point – highbrow art is not to everyone’s taste. However, combining technological advancement with ‘traditional pastimes’ is relevant to us all. And, as we seem to find less and less time in which to enjoy ourselves, we need all the help we can get.

So, the two sides of the day. First we were treated to lectures on the restoration work being carried out on some of the paintings. HP provides the equipment (and sponsors a doctoral post) to carry out non-invasive studies (imaging) so that the gallery can learn more about composition; x-ray imaging reveals the artist’s original plans -many paintings are altered during their creation- and other information on colour pigments and so on. All fascinating stuff, if that’s your thing.

The second part of the day was about creating new applications and communities by liberating information. Or at least, that’s what I now see it was about. A sizable investment in on site technology and the National Gallery’s website has created a resource that allows the user to access practically any work in the collection. High resolution zooms (useful if you are into studying the actual painting, as opposed to admiring it), and a whole load of useful search and referencing capabilities are now at the user’s fingertips.

Having only had a short time to play on it, I know I’m hugely underplaying the features. However, the net result is a system which creates opportunities for a range of activities; from tourists planning gallery visits, to scholarly groups carrying out research or sharing information.
In short, the gallery has extended the reach and influence of its entire collection to a global audience. The collection can be scrutinised in infinitely more detail than ever before, without actually being there.

The gallery has to address information storage and management as knock-on effects. While it applies new ideas to old works, it also creates new, but not insurmountable challenges for itself. One of the solutions the IT department is currently playing with is virtualisation. Interestingly, although there are limitations on the use of images from its collection, the gallery seemed relatively relaxed about its 'IP' being disseminated globally. Perhaps the knowledge that the real thing hangs on its wall helps somewhat.

As an example of how moving bits instead of atoms can enrich work and play, I believe this one deserves thinking about. The fact that the example stems from a relatively surprising source makes it even more interesting.

Technology, when applied thoughtfully and appropriately can improve the way we interact with the world, and lessen the impact of us doing so.

It is this sentiment that all organisations should seek to apply to their people, products and processes, instead of charging into the data centre and seeking to reduce power consumption before really thinking about what the business wants to achieve.

Not If or When, The Question is What?

2008-06-16T10:03:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I pointed out that IT management tools are finally, after many decades of masquerade, ready to deliver the functionality that their product descriptions infer, namely capabilities to actively manage nearly all elements of the IT infrastructure rather than simply monitor if systems are up and “running”.If one takes this as a valid starting assumption then one really must consider how organisations can best move their systems management thinking forward.

Some IT managers may be tempted to ask the “should I really look at automating my systems management processes”? To which the answer is very clearly yes. The pressure on IT to deliver more flexible services to its customers is immense whilst the workloads now placed on IT administrators is almost overwhelming. Doing nothing on automation, the “If” question, is no longer an option.

So we then move on to the “when” side of things. Often this is phrased along the lines of “sure we will adopt this technology (whatever it may be) when the time is right and when the technology is mature enough”. Frankly, and at long last, for automating very many systems management and administrative tasks that time is now. The technology is now advanced enough to deal with many routine, repetitive tasks that consume so much scarce It personnel resources. Now I do understand that the automation of well understood, and sometimes even well documented, IT processes will grate for many of my IT generation who can remember numerous occasions when IT solutions did not quite deliver what was promised. For systems management automation this is a major challenge and one that needs to be addressed quickly. The technology is available, but often the trust of said systems is not there.

Which just leaves the question of “what” management tasks to automate. Well this will vary organisation by organisation. And if the trust of new management automation tools is not there then the identification and testing of the automation of simple tasks should be the first step to take. It will consume some of those scarce personnel resources but the investment in locating and automating tasks will quickly prove to be of immense value. And not just in saving time but potentially in raising the quality of the IT services delivered.

Asset + IT asset management = enterprise service management. Perhaps.

2008-06-12T00:38:00.003Z

The IBM Tivoli Pulse event a few weeks ago left me with a clear thought. Convergence between enterprise asset management and IT (asset) management) is a long haul. This is not a bad thing – except – and we know this to be true of some IT vendors – there is always the risk that if things don’t move fast enough, interest is lost, ideas go stale, people get distracted.

Am I saying IT vendors are a bit fickle on occasion? Moi?

I don’t expect IBM to get bored easily though, but I do expect it to start looking for ways to catalyse the consolidation between the two camps.

So what’s all this about anyway?

The view is that there are significant benefits and economies of scale to be found in consolidating the visibility, control and management of assets owned or used by an organisation, which traditionally are divided into two classes: enterprise (non IT) assets and IT assets.
By having a single view of an asset base, services can be better aligned to the goals of the business, because it has better control over the things it uses to deliver the services which define it as a business, and better control over the services which support it as it does its business.

On paper, it’s a common sense principle of ‘single version of the truth’. In practice, it will take most organisations a long time to get there because the asset guys and the IT guys are facing the notion of giving up some level of control or ownership. For people more used to repairing trucks or moving physical goods to specific places, and for people more used to making sure email servers don’t crash, it is understandable that one could have difficulty in seeing the world from the others’ point of view. But mutual understanding and appreciation isn’t actually what’s required. Mutual access and roles-based manipulation of the same, consistent information is. Two disparate groups of people collaborating physically, or ‘giving things up to each other’ isn’t the issue. But this I fear, (or fear of this, in fact) could be the rate limiting factor.

As long as each side has the access to the information they need to carry out their jobs, the source of the underlying data – as long as it’s consistent – is hardly relevant. Furthermore, the asset guys ‘get’ services, the IT guys know how to make things talk to each other and stop them falling over – both sides in fact have things they can teach the other. Figuratively.

So the long haul sentiment comes about from the human nature angle I outlined above, and the fact that this year’s star customer at Pulse was the same as last years. Its not going very quickly, yet.

Also, IBM is treading (too) carefully in that it went to lengths to maintain a clear demarcation between talking about Maximo customers (its enterprise asset management (EAM) customers acquired during the MRO purchase) and Tivoli (systems and IT management) customers for fear of being seen to be favouring one over the other, or perhaps running into the type of uncertainty Oracle’s recent acquisitions created. This makes the audience it has for actually evangelising the notion of convergence artificially small, which is ironic, given it owns two customer bases with minimal overlap which form the foundations for what is a pretty sensible idea.

Rather than taking the softly softly approach, what needs to happen is for IBM to start providing the reasons why, and help customers work around the reasons why not. And then find as many McCarran Airports as it can to become advocates.

I have to say I’m a little surprised at the (apparent) lack of buzz on this from the Tivoli or Maximo customer base, as there must surely be an opportunity for asking IBM to ‘step up and prove it in my organisation’.

Microsoft’s virtualisation story was pretty cool at MMS, so why’s it all gone quiet?

2008-06-02T22:53:00.004Z

I had a few days in Vegas at MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) at the end of April, just before I moved house and then took some time off to get things straight. When I got back it was like the whole thing never happened. Even a quick Google search on ‘Microsoft+virtualisation’ gives me content from 2005 from the fifth finding down. Weird.

It wasn’t like Microsoft didn’t say anything of note either: pricing for virtualisation capabilities inside Windows Server 2008, support for non-Microsoft virtualised environments, and the big one which hasn’t really been talked about loudly up to now from any vendor with management products – managing virtualised environments. Sure, the word ‘Beta’ was all over the place, but that’s what we’re used to.

I’ve not quite decided yet if virtualisation needs calling out specifically as a candidate for special management focus, and that’s possibly a conversation for another time. Until organisations get their bearings, fine, after that virtualisation needs to be seen as the means to an end it really is, and managing as such. The fact that generating change in a virtualised environment is slicker than in a physical environment does make the case for an equally slick approach to management, but that’s not the same as treating virtualised and physical environments as separate entities. There are too many management silos already.

But the virtualisation product-in-beta-list wasn’t the most interesting bit. That came when Microsoft, by placing such a low price point ($28 or some seemingly made up figure) on the virtualisation component of Windows Server 2008 made the clearest statement of intent / reality around virtualisation yet. Virtualisation isn’t the exciting bit. What organisations do in their virtualised environments is the exciting bit. The fact that it’s Microsoft saying this means virtualisation is no longer hip or sexy, but it is real, because now it’s a mainstream activity.

And that’s why I thought there’d be more out there on this: there were a few mumblings about ‘being late to the party’ (which only make sense if you forget there is an entire world outside of the fortune 500) and managing non-Microsoft environments circulating before hand, but then again, as a group we’re quick to gripe but slower to acknowledge change. Or maybe, as the conference silly season was / is in full swing, everyone simply went home and immediately got on a plane for the next one. I know I did (and the house move, obviously). IBM Tivoli Pulse next.

PS. A big thumbs up to everyone who got a mention in the IIAR analyst of the year poll. Our stable mates MWD and Redmonk did rather well, and for a relative newbie we’re rather pleased with our own showing too.

Missing Meta Data Needed for Effective Storage Management

2008-05-30T14:56:00.003Z

Ever since time, or at least Computing time, began most of the focus has centred around the processing of data. Until recently it would be straight forward to argue that too little attention has been given to the long term storage of said information. But as the volume of data being generated soars and the costs of storing it escalates dramatically it is clear that something has to be done.

Over the course of the last ten days I have visited the EMCWorld show in Las Vegas, been present at the opening of the IBM Global Archival Centre in Guadalajara and spoken with both HP and Fujitsu Siemens about various aspects of storage management in modern business. And there is one thing on which all agree - it's time for change.

Traditionally there have been two approaches to the long term storage of data. One was to leave it alone until the "system", usually a business application, dies or if there is just too much data to leave it at rest move some of it to tape. The decision of just what data to move off of the spinning disks was usually based on how old it was or, in sophisticated cases, when it was last accessed or modified.

Now this might be better than nothing but in today's high pressure, litigious business world where attention is grabbed by anything that saves money or that can help generate new value it is clear that such basic methods of data archiving are simply not tenable in sophisticated tiered storage architectures where information may need to be retrieved with great speed. Enter Content and Document Management systems coupled with clever archiving management software.

Until recently such systems have required considerable effort to get in and running and as a consequence have usually been deployed in only key situations. But now some vendors have started to deliver software that helps to automate the discovery and categorisation processes that form the foundation of ECM / EDM systems. Step one “Discover” just what data is out there in the enterprise and step two “categorise” it in terms of its importance and in terms of by which management policies it should be controlled.

It then becomes possible to define policies that describe just how and on which platforms different classes of data should be held. Then everything else is relatively straightforward (if you can ignore the internal politics associated with questions of data classification and importance ranking). Modern software and the experience of best practices obtained in the real world are now offering the chance for wide spread data classification to happen. And it is this meta data and classification that hold real promise to help in the effective administration of data over long periods of time. Automation is the key as is not attempting to do everything at once.

Finally “Management” Not Just “Monitoring”

2008-05-15T17:12:00.000Z

Almost since the world was created, at least the IT world, computer systems and all the associated, and increasingly complex, plethora of associated equipment has required feeding and watering. Few systems, with perhaps the notable exception of the AS/400 sorry System i no wrong again the i, manage to keep themselves functioning efficiently, if at all, without the care and attention of skilled IT professionals. As the number of systems to be controlled and looked after increased the gods of IT, better known as the software vendors, started to build tools to monitor the condition of servers and storage. Strangely these monitoring tools were called “management” systems.

Today with every organisation seeking to optimise both the availability and effectiveness of its IT systems the demand for true systems management tools has never been greater. The increasing deployment of virtualised systems adds further to the need for tools that really help with the automatic management and administration of systems. Just in time many of the tools that have previously only provided capabilities to monitor systems have moved forward and, at last, are bringing to market true management functionality and options to automate many tasks that until required the undivided attention of sys admins.

Now it is interesting to note that it is not just the vendors who have traditionally supplied monitoring / management tools that are bringing updated offerings to market. Alongside IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView and BMC Patrol, the management giants,can now be found a range of newer, though not new, entrants. Amongst these is the industry behemoth that is Microsoft and it is interesting to note that the company is rapidly developing not only management tools to help automate the administration of Windows systems but is actively developing capabilities to manage virtualised systems, including those running on their hypervisors supplied by other vendors.

Then there are other suppliers such as Quest and EMC amongst the raft of virtual system management specialists who are putting together strong offerings. The management space is finally able to deliver, at least from the software supplier side of the equation, management and automatic administration capabilities; it is no longer just concerned with monitoring.

This situation then raises the obvious question, namely are IT professionals ready to exploit the management and automation capabilities that are now becoming available? I hope that the take up of these capabilities will be rapid although I do detect that many system admins still consider any management automation capability with more than a little scepticism, and perhaps with some concern over their job security. Granted these management tools need to prove themselves in the real world and that the vendors have a duty to deliver them with some idea of how they can be best exploited. They must be utilised as widely as possible if IT is help its business customers to exploit as fully as possible the benefits that IT delivers.

Welcome Josie

2008-05-08T20:01:00.004Z

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Josie Sephton into the fold as the latest addition to the Freeform Dynamics team.

Josie may be a fledgling Freeformer, but is a highly experienced telecom analyst and consultant with a solid track record in the industry, most recently with Ovum. She joins us to head up our activities in the service provider space, which means Jon and I won’t have to bluff our way through all that telecoms stuff anymore – we now have someone who really does know what they are talking about :-)

Seriously, as other areas of activity and have been so busy for us, we have struggled to cover the service provider area adequately, and filling this slot will provide much needed focus on a really important part of the industry.

You can check out Josie’s bio and contact details here.

Security solutions seeking problems

2008-04-25T12:58:00.002Z

The last few days have involved me in a number of meetings with both vendors and end customers of all sizes. For much of the week I spent time at the Infosec security show in London but I also managed to squeeze in meetings with ProCurve, once again considering the security facets of its solutions. There was also opportunity to interact with some IT and information management customers considering various aspects of their use of IT and the business drivers. To cap things off nicely I was a panel member on the Lions' Den session at Infosec where 6 innocent security vendors have their solution propositions pulled to pieces by a panel that includes professionals with very significant experience of what constitutes an acceptable, and operationally sustainable, security offering. It is fascinating to note just how much fun the audience takes in seeing vendors harassed.

Too many security solutions struggle to either correctly identify potential business benefits they enable. It is clear that even fewer appear to understand the restrictions that various facets of European and national legislation can have in limiting the usability of solutions found acceptable in North America. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the fact that many security solution vendors have little understanding of how acceptable business users find the impact of said solutions, often resulting in systems becoming less secure as a result of users taking deliberate solution avoidance tactics.

But the most disturbing element of all is that it is abundantly obvious that many security solution sellers do not appear to know whether the professionals of the IT industry who would be charged with system implementation and operation will be able and comfortable keeping the offerings running as intended in daily operations. In fact the response of some IT pros with whom I converse is that frankly too many security platforms either deliver too little in the way of benefit or are just operationally unsustainable.

Now in some ways it is unfair to identify IT security solutions alone as have having these failings. In fact many developments from vendors suffer from shortfalls in at least one of these areas, especially accurate identification of business advantage. But too many security solutions appear to suffer from limitations in all these matters. This is strange as "security" is no longer a novel concept. What is needed is for the vendors to really find out what challenges their potential customers are facing along with gaining a measure of what operational and user inhibitors are in force that could influence, positively or negatively, the take up of their offerings.

If those identified as a concern would cause them problems they must clearly address these issues. A good example is the matter of “white listing”; in such solutions the buyer must positively authorise all applications / sites / correspondents etc. in order for the user to be able to utilise it. If something is not on the white list it will not work. Many organisations consider the burden that maintaining a credible white list to be too great and frequently try to avoid such systems. So if your solution depends on "white lists" it will be a tough sell to those who really do not want to be burdened with maintaining of such lists. So try someone else or re-engineer the solution. Of course actually making sure that you are solving a real problem can be useful research to carry out as well. Anyone want to buy a chocolate teapot?

Why is IT Still Not Communicating Well With Business?

2008-04-17T20:08:00.007Z

For many years now there has been intense discussion within the IT "industry" highlighting the absolute need for IT to get much closer to the business clients it supports and whose daily activities would not be possible without the use of IT systems. The requirement for IT to align its efforts and services in line with business need is not in doubt, so why is it that IT still does such a bad job communicating with its customers?

The figure above illustrates just how much room there is for improvement in IT / Business communications. As of today it appears that few organisations have formally established and monitored service levels that report in terminology and language with which business users will be comfortable. For straight forward IT performance the number with formal service levels reported in business terms are in place in around one in three organisations with just under another third having some informal measures in place. But when it comes to measuring and reporting on IT's contribution to either overall business goals or bottom line business value the number of organisations with formal reporting processes in place drops to only one in five or even lower.

Until IT undertakes to report on its contribution to business value generation it will face considerable difficulty in having meaningful conversations with business users about how investment in IT can help move the entire business forward. Instead it is more likely that all discussions will focus simply on the overall size of the IT budget with special focus on how can this figure be either held static or reduced whilst not impacting established technical service levels. There are tools available now that can help IT measure and report on such topics as the contribution to the bottom line, overall business goals and even on business value generation. Many of these can be found in the BSM (Business Service Management) area. All take effort and require both a sound technically monitored IT infrastructure but they also need that the business sits down and identifies how its processes operate and the role IT systems play therein. It takes effort and human resources but the efforts are worthwhile.

Perhaps a bigger challenge can be found in the traditional way that IT has always operated, namely with limited "contact" with business managers and too much comfort relying on technical IT language. The biggest benefits to the entire business and to IT departments themselves will come not directly from establishing and formally reporting on these matters in business terms but in establishing expressive two way communications between business and IT professionals. This needs cultural changes in both communities. Are you ready to make it happen? Is your business?

Let go and relax. Information management is about trusting your tools

2008-04-13T00:03:00.004Z

I’m not a major player when it comes to gadgets and tools, I often download things and they remain unused, and whenever I get around to it, cleared out.

A recent invite to download something ‘I might find of use’ from my colleague Jon Collins, no stranger himself to finding new things to play with led me to installing Xobni, an Outlook plug-in that’s been around since September last year and ‘helps you organise your flooded inbox’. Except it doesn’t help me organise my flooded inbox. It’s better than that. ‘Helping organise’ infers that I have to do something, and that, for me, usually means I don’t, or won’t.

Given ten minutes, Xobni goes off and looks at your inbox (and archive) and is ready to work. A one word search brings up relevant emails, attachments and the like. Sure, that’s already a (albeit slightly flaky) feature of outlook but what isn’t is the ability to let you ‘zoom’ in and out of conversations you had with people, show the files you swapped, other people linked to that person, a cool looking mini ‘graphic equaliser’ bar chart showing when someone has contacted you, and contact details shown prominently. You can go backwards and forwards through searches without having to start over. Simply put, it’s a small but significant step forwards for me.

I get the name too: In-box, backwards. Rather than sitting at the end of (too many) singular messages, it wraps up lines of communications into relationships and conversations. It’s like the control you felt you had while writing singular mails, except you still feel in control even after a multitude of replies, forwards and attachments. In that sense, the name fits.

I quite like it, and I’m not the only one. I assume that Microsoft will buy it at some point and make Xobni’s features native to Outlook. It does beg the question (as I’ve read somewhere) ‘what was the Microsoft Outlook team doing while the Xobni guys were doing this?’ Waiting patiently perhaps.

The bigger picture is also of relevance. We can’t continue wrapping our arms around the data we own / think we might need but don’t know when, we’d rapidly (perhaps we already have) run out of space – certainly time, trying. Employing tools that work, and that we can begin to trust to find things for us on, when we need them, is. I don’t know if this encourages us to become even more slovenly in terms of keeping things ‘tidy’, but then again, how much control do we actually have over our inboxes even when we try? Even deleting the junk seems to be a job in itself.

When we consider ‘business intelligence’ these days what we really mean is gaining control over the increasing volumes of information – much of which does actually have some business value associated with it (especially in smaller organisations like ours where email and other conduits of unstructured data are the primary means of capturing and sending information) – we receive and use.

I’ve seen the light, and although it’s taken me some time, I’ve taken a step forwards in gaining control – by letting go and trusting something to do it for me. It feels good. I have other things to worry about.

Next stop: information management at a group level – we’re slowly extending the scope in which we utilise the latest version of SharePoint. I’ll report back soon.

Virtualisation Management – Vendors See the Light?

2008-04-03T15:41:00.010Z

At the end of last year we carried out a survey on all aspects of virtualization and whilst the results were interesting there were few knock me over surprises. However the findings did show, very, very clearly that there were some aspects of the virtualization solution ecosystem that real world users identified as needing to be addressed, preferably sooner rather than later. One of these concerns the small matter of the management of virtualized environments where today it appears that the chief solution deployed is the expensive, and frequently scarce, resource known as skilled IT manpower. Well it appears that the management of virtualization platforms, especially in heterogeneous environments, is now recognised by several vendors for having the undoubted importance it has to enable such systems to really deliver the potential benefits promised.

As the figure highlights almost no one considers that vendors support the management of virtualized systems well. Our research shows that this applies to all areas of virtualization not simply to the case of server systems highlighted in the chart. Coupled with this a very large number of respondents to the survey also highlighted that they expect their management processes and procedures will need to undergo modification to enable these platforms to operate day in day out supporting front line business applications. Given that fewer than one in twenty of the survey respondents felt that vendors do a good job supporting heterogeneous virtualized server systems it is good to see that several of the suppliers of virtualization tools are now getting around to highlighting just what they can do.

Clearly the major systems management vendors can be expected to add this feather to their armouries but so far few of the heavyweights have yet to make an impact. That said it is interesting to see that Hewlett Packard has begun to make noises that it believes it has not just the tools themselves that can have a positive impact but that their capabilities further benefit from many years of experience and know how administering complex virtualized environments. There is certainly some merit in this argument and we shall have to see just how well they can not only deliver heterogeneous management capabilities but also how effectively they can take them to market, especially beyond the company’s established OpenView user base. I expect that the other major vendors will soon follow suit and start promoting their own solution approaches.

Beyond the usual management suspects the field has so far been left open to a number of specialist solution providers, the majority of whom have little in the way of visibility even where effective products exist. There are one two exceptions, most notably VMware’s own management tools that heretofore have focused on their own platform offerings, and perhaps most notably PlateSpin, now in the process of being acquired by Novell. There are however other significant players out there.

For example I expect that Sun will start to actively market its entire virtualization platform suite, in which management capabilities have taken centre stage; it is also clear that Citrix will begin to promote its own solutions as its XenSource acquisition becomes embedded in the portfolio. However, I do hope that vendors such as Parallels can get some visibility for its own heterogeneous management capabilities but this poses no small challenge to an organisation that despite its rapid growth is still small in a world of very large vendors.

Virtualization management and its effective routine administration are essential if the swath of business benefits potentially achievable with virtualization is to be delivered. This especially applies as one begins to look beyond the simple first benefits advantages of improving resource utilization and reducing capital and operational costs. The real medium and long term advantages of virtualization lie in the ability of such systems to not only support flexible IT but to encourage business flexibility based on IT to thereby deliver additional business value. Virtualization Management, especially heterogeneous full infrastructure management is essential and is required now by organizations large and small. I shall watch with interest to see which solution approach and what tools will develop to become the gold standard.

Storage Vendors for All Sizes

2008-03-27T17:23:00.001Z

I have spent a lot of time over the course of the last few months with a number of storage vendors. What has struck me most forcibly has been the continuing energy and effort being applied to the provision of new solutions and the extension of existing offerings into new markets. In the last quarter of a year I have especially noticed that many vendors are now expending considerable energy to actively seek to promote their wares in markets where they have not, traditionally, focused in the never ending effort to gain new customers, preferably profitable, customers. I am going to look at three in particular to illustrate the differing approaches being adopted by storage suppliers as they seek to grow.

Let's start by considering the company formerly known as Network Appliance. At its recent worldwide analyst meeting NetApp, as it is now officially named, highlighted some interesting research. Chief amongst which was that when one considers the major storage vendors by the volume of storage they manufacture, rather than by the volume of storage they sell under their own brand name, NetApp now believes itself to be ranked number 3 behind EMC and HDS. Even more interesting is that the company claims that it is now number 4 in the provision of storage software behind EMC, Symantec / VERITAS and IBM.

On the face of it these figures are impressive and are even more so in the light of the company's research that shows that in unaided awareness surveys NetApp was recognised by only some 9% of organisations across the world, whilst achieving only a staggeringly low 3% recognition rate in EMEA and just 5% in Asia Pacific. I find these numbers almost unbelievable, but then again I spend a lot of time speaking with storage vendors. But in order to try and raise the company's profile NetApp is going to actively target the 90% of the 5,000 largest buyers of storage with whom it does not currently enjoy a "decent" share of the storage spend wallet. Despite the company doing a poor job of stating so, this does not mean that NetApp will not be paying attention to the large numbers of organisations in the small and mid-market sectors where it currently enjoys success but simply that it, in tandem with its partners, will be actively pursue the larger consumers of storage.

In contrast EMC, HDS and Fujitsu-Siemens along with IBM are all vigorously seeking to enhance their presence in the small and mid-market sectors. For example Fujitsu-Siemens is now looking to deliver its sophisticated X10Sure solution to SMEs. This solution allows multiple servers (both physical and virtual) to access a common pool of networked storage resources to provide better business service resilience and recovery without the need to devote significant dedicated resources to high availability provisioning. The solution, which is available as either a dedicated appliance via a software licence provides the type of remote boot and automated fail over capabilities using pooled server and storage resources. Such facilities have traditionally been the province of only highly business critical systems, and then usually only in large enterprises. This is a good example of a vendor looking to take technically advanced storage solutions into the broad midmarket sector of the economy.

Consider Brocade. As a company it is now attempting to push into markets adjacent to its traditional core storage networking base, or to create new markets close to its home. One example would be its File Management Engine appliance that enables the transparent migration of open files, including Microsoft Windows files, to assist in the maintenance of service level agreements. The software in the appliance also has the capability to discover the where, what and when accessed / edited of file use. These are facilities with which Brocade has not heretofore been associated.

All of these vendors, and indeed most of the rest of the storage community including HDS, EMC, IBM, Symantec et al, are not simply faced with developing new solutions. Beyond this for all of them lies the challenge of positioning themselves and their offerings in markets where they are not well known. This is no minor issue. Moving beyond an established base poses many questions and perception challenges and I confidently expect every storage vendor to have to meet this head on in the coming months. Who will come out ahead?

##@%$££~!!! Yep - I'm buying a house...

2008-03-19T23:34:00.006Z

Analyst invents novel scoring system for rating the people he’s paying to buy a house. And squeezes Theory of Constraints in sideways.

6 years ago when I sold my first London flat and bought a bigger one, I’d say the impact of technology (at least on my involvement in the process) was practically zero. Updates were delivered by letter or phone, and until the exchange of contracts I was really none the wiser as to what was happening at any point in time. Given the successful outcome, ignorance was bliss.
This time though, as we balance a remortgage, a new mortgage, a purchase and a let, there are lots more variables and lots more people involved. Even without the tools of communication we now take for granted, I’d still want more information, more often, than last time.

So am I getting it? Sort of. I’m happy to report that the basic tools are in play. Sort of.

Estate agent: not bad at keeping in touch and responding to email. Sadly lacking in basic info so of limited use (6/10).
Solicitor: Email not being the easiest form of communication for them due to their propensity for slightly long winded prose, hats off for making the effort. And for sending pdf reports (7/10).
Mortgage broker: My mortgage progress chaser has been a diamond – based in Cyprus: I ask, I get (9/10).
Mortgage company: hahaha – only joking. Talk to a customer? Purrlease. Even with a credit crunch on and nobody buying houses one of our banks is claiming it’s far too busy. The other can’t repeat a simple x.xx% rate correctly and keeps having to be asked to go back and do it again. I digress. (0/10).
Surveyor: eeeuuugh..this is where it all came unstuck. Basically if we are due to complete soon, it would be good to get the surveyors report before we do. 3 weeks later and counting... He turned out to be a pretty decent guy who cared about his work and gave the impression that had he known how to make life easier for me he probably would have. Possibly.

The system most UK surveyors use is called Quest, and it sounded suspiciously like my guy was on version 0.1, (DOS-based) while the supplier is currently offering version x with web-enabled reporting / publishing capabilities and other bells and whistles aimed at sending reports out to whomever needs them without stress and killing trees. I suspected the excuses about ‘the system’ were being a little overplayed, so I called the Quest software helpdesk to discover that the problem I was being described could have been fixed for a £25 upgrade. Really.

Well probably, I’ll never really know. I have my report now, and as people only have to suffer this sort of nonsense once in a blue moon they are unlikely to act other than to moan about it on blogs. (He still gets 0/10 though).

Of the 5 parties in the chain, 3 have got their act together on the communications and service front. 2 have not. Yet sadly, my overall level of contentment is actually far lower than it was when nobody would talk to me 6 years ago.

Why? Well we’re really talking about process optimisation. Optimise a few steps and things look rosy, until the ones left un-optimised drive you mad / lose you money / your job etc.

This got me thinking of Eli Goldratt’s theory of constraints (TOC), illuminated nicely in ‘The Goal’, where a production manager working to improve the output of his factor finds this out first hand. Without going all Sophie’s World on you (I assume this guy never really existed..don’t laugh..) he got there eventually, by taking a ‘holistic, end to end view ‘(simplified version).

The notion desperately needs applying to one of the biggest causes of stress, heartache and wasted money in the UK today (no, not the lotto) – buying a house. HIPs are a waste of time. Is your solicitor going to charge you less because a few searches have been already done? Is he heck. Will it make your mortgage faster to process? Nope. Will it make your homebuyer’s report arrive faster? Ha.

So would the government support a common sense idea involving a web portal, simple encryption, basic workflow and some collaboration? Of course not, we already got HIPs this decade.

Anyone know the number of a venture capitalist up for a punt?

Appendix I: Sending / receiving signed forms (March 2008, UK House buying process)

Surveyor prints letter and faxes it to mortgage broker(mb)
mb scans fax and emails it to client
Client receives then prints email. Signs it.
Signs wife’s signature too, as figures by the time it’s been scanned, printed, faxed and printed nobody will be able it read it anyway.
Client scans email, sends to mb
mb prints email and faxes to surveyor.
Four (4) copies of same form arrive by post.
Grrrrr..

Get a Life..Cycle

2008-03-12T19:11:00.002Z

Meetings with two different vendors recently got me thinking about ‘opposites’ and how it’s probably quite uncommon for organisations to think about IT solutions aimed at opposite ends of the development – operations spectrum at the same time.

As well as sharing a name with one of my favourite bands, Gomez offers application performance services from the user’s perspective. It will also, if you want, provide guidance on how to improve customer experience by designing web apps properly in the first place. Given that most organisations with which it works already have some kind of online presence, the practical reality is more akin to re-engineering and improving, rather than starting from scratch, but that’s by the by. Neverfail offers disaster recovery software and data protection. In a nutshell, it helps you back up after a fall.

So, back to the point: if you employ application lifecycle management, does it tell you what to look at in terms of designing-in protection or applying operational protection where most appropriate? Does portfolio management? Do you have an ‘eyes open’ understanding of where weaknesses might exist in the fundamentals (scope, design, architecture, and audience) all the way through testing to the operational end? (IT and user training, systems management and security).

If no, you’d never think about a Gomez or a Neverfail at the same time. If yes, you might, and you might end up applying your resources, time and budget more effectively than the next man.

Disclaimer: Neverfail is a client.

Virtualisation at all Scales, but where’s the management engine?

2008-03-06T21:53:00.002Z

Over the course of the last few weeks anybody taking even a quick scan of the IT media would have been inundated, if not overwhelmed, by the flood of press releases detailing product developments in the heady world of virtualisation. The scope and speed of the developments border on the bewildering as the range of applicability of virtualisation ranges from individual applications and virtual machines running on laptops and desktops through small and large x86 servers all the way up to the largest mainframe, the IBM z10. Even virtualisation in the storage arena is moving forward just as rapidly, and again across all scales.

But where is the common management framework that could enable any virtual platform to be managed and administered as part of the big picture rather than as a standalone element? Well as things stand today it's called "IT staff". The management software tools currently on offer are not keeping up with the extraordinary pace of developments. In fact this challenge is probably beyond the wit of man but it is fair to point out that this area is badly lagging behind and has done so for some time.

Frankly this is almost unbelievable given that over the course of the last few years organisations have been pointedly seeking to optimise, finance officer code for minimise, all areas of IT expenditure of which personnel costs are anything but trivial. And across much of IT management tools have developed apace although it would be only fair to point out that whilst today considerable automation of once routine IT administration is now feasible such capabilities have yet to be fully exploited in most organisations in any area of IT. This is mostly down to either a lack of trust in the tools themselves or that organisations have still to put in place the processes and policies needed to fully make use of automated systems management; possibly both.

In any case management tools for the many areas impacted by new virtualisation solutions are nowhere near as sophisticated as might be expected and as are plainly required now that virtualisation is seeping into the mainstream. As things stand today Manpower is taking the place that should be held by management tools as the unifying administrative framework for virtualisation. Things are changing but not quickly enough. The deployment of virtual platforms has brought considerable economic benefits in terms of the better utilisation of computing resources but these are under threat unless management tools catch up. Of more importance still is the fact that the real medium and long term value of virtualisation can never be truly exploited without excellent management solutions being aggressively deployed in support of business critical operational platforms in order to generate new value. I am referring to the flexibility to rapidly respond to fluctuating business conditions that is a fundamental advantage of virtualised operations. Herein lays the key to business value generation rather than simple cost avoidance.

The management tools available to manage virtual systems are developing and these advances need to accelerate. Equally organisations must work out which ones will fit their needs if flexibility is be made available, operational risk is to be minimised and IT costs are to be controlled. The challenge is there to vendors, service organisations and to business as a whole. Virtualisation must stop being seen as a purely a simple cost control lever if additional business value is to be generated. But in a poor economic climate in much of the world, can this happen or is the timing wrong. Is your business bold enough and ready to exploit virtual solutions to generate value or are you still solely focused on cost?

Virtualisation – The Answer to World Poverty and Global Warming?

2008-02-28T21:18:00.002Z

This week has witnessed more development in the virtualisation field than could comfortably be covered by a large posse of analysts each armed with virtualised light sabres. Indeed, the last 4 days could mark a real coming of age of virtualisation; just count the events:

The first VMworld show in Europe star studied with announcements from VMware and a veritable host of partners
IBM launching its latest, greatest Mainframe and the archetypal virtualisation platform, the z10
Microsoft heroically introducing the Windows Server 2008 platform

These developments will each bring new capabilities to different facets of virtualisation but there are a couple of aspects the avalanche of announcements spotlight, namely the twin deities of the potential for energy savings and monetary optimisation. Indeed virtualisation and its attendant cohorts are so brimming with vitality and ideas that the primary danger to be tackled in the coming weeks and months will be the need for every organisation to sort out the wheat from the chaff. And with so many developments occurring in parallel this task will turn out to be no mean challenge.

So where should organisations first look? Well, probably by considering their local equivalents of "world poverty" and "global warming", namely power consumption and its attendant, and now highly visible, costs. Virtualisation in all its facets from the desktop PC, through the boughs of x86 servers through to high end servers and the vast volumes of data now held by organisations still offer plenty of scope for resource usage optimisation. But this is just the beginning. The real challenge ahead lies in managing complex virtualised environments not simply at the system level but at a business service level.

VMware and its growing array of partners recognises this and the whole community is now setting out to deliver management tools to help administrators keep virtualised environments, not just individual virtual machines running when and where required. In fact it is really interesting to watch these companies slowly putting together the numerous administrative and automation tools that the grand-father of virtualisation, and still the gold standard in so many ways, has long taken for granted. The mainframe, for it is that of which I speak, is now coming out fighting on the green / energy efficient / space optimisation front in addition to its long held virtues of reliability, scalability and security. X86 virtualisation is moving forward rapidly and offers many benefits when well deployed but a close look at the area highlights how many of the developments taking place are seeking to mimic the capabilities of the mainframe.

This is to be encouraged. Our research shows that it is fair to say that most organisations are now very comfortable with the drivers for the adoption of virtualisation solutions on x86 servers. There is much less understanding of the potential for storage virtualisation and virtualisation of the desktop. These areas will move rapidly in the coming months, but there is a clear communication gap between the suppliers on one side and the users on the other. And guess what? Power reduction and monetary savings will figure high on the reasons why these should be considered. A solution to global warming and world poverty? Maybe not. But definitely a step in the right direction, even if there were not a host of other good reasons to look at virtualisation.

Management Maturity – Change, Threat, Opportunity?

2008-02-15T18:01:00.002Z

I have spent a lot of time over the last few months thinking about the often haphazard evolution that IT management approaches and technologies have taken over the last few years. And in many respects the use of the term "evolution" is, for once, nearly accurate in its original scientific sense rather than in its modern marketing guise. Many approaches have been tried with a small number delivering some benefits. The rest have either died out or are in the process of fading away slowly, stuck in niche ecosystems.

IT infrastructure management today faces a number of severe, unavoidable challenges. Chief amongst these, although by no means always the most visible, is the need for infrastructure management to become far more responsive to the high level, often ill-defined, value drivers of the business. This challenge will inevitably require fundamental changes in both IT management toolsets and core infrastructure modification - much of which is already underway, at least in parts. It does however also need radical, probably painful, alterations in IT behaviour and process.

At the very least it is becoming apparent that with so much focus still placed on the "overhead" costs associated with daily management of all aspects of the IT infrastructure that there is pressure in many organisations for the undertaking of Network and IT management team consolidation. Indeed, there is probably a case to be made for this to happen in all but the most complex and specialised of network, server, storage or software environments. The drive to add greater flexibility to the IT administration and management teams also offers potential for these previously separate units to interact more swiftly and with hopefully more room to explore new methods of driving and supporting true business innovation through the use of IT. These alterations in work patterns will hopefully foster better IT - Business / Business – IT communications to enable business objectives to mould IT resource usage. Indeed the end game is really about IT being able to utilise all the infrastructure management tools in combination proactively to enable new business operations and the generation of additional value.

The unification (albeit still with some elements of embedded specialisation) of IT skills will be helped as the management tools available begin to encompass broader areas of the infrastructure than has previously been the case. There are already moves to bring together some elements of networking, systems and storage management capabilities into single tools with a degree of functional commonality. Equally the integration of management tools seeking to combine virtualisation and platform administration will assist in these changes as will the development of resource reconciliation, recharge and reporting solutions along with enterprise wide licensing schemas.

In order for IT to modify its operations to provide better services and flexibility the road to change will involve significant effort, and disturbance, for many large IT organisations. IT workers in small and mid-tier businesses are usually rather more generalist than specialist in nature so will have less to modify in their operations. Of course, the business itself needs to be able to exploit these capabilities and so it too needs to able to change its operations just as quickly. I suspect that as IT and the IT professionals who deliver these fundamental services enhance their flexibility that they will probably rush ahead of the ability of the rest of the business to exploit these changes. At last a chance for IT to be seen leading the business or simply just more pain ahead?

Corporate concepts and slogans

2008-02-15T12:18:00.001Z

On Citrix's 'Transform your datacentre into a delivery centre':

Last week Citrix held a series of calls / presentations to announce / re-state its positioning and messaging, with a couple of product listings and roadmaps to show, in words and pictures at least, how its capabilities and product offerings would support / enable its over-arching story, announced as the slogan for its re-named and grouped series of products now stabled under the Citrix Delivery Center brand.

In an area (virtualisation) which needs competition to raise awareness beyond the already converted, it's a pretty good summation of Citrix's overall corporate goal, as it speaks to a few relavent areas which not only capture sentiments already exploited by Citrix, but adds a couple of new and relevent ones to create, in my opinion, quite a neat and rounded story:

Citrix products enable 'delivery of functionality'
The data centre is tasked with delivering IT functionality
This delivery is the outcome of setting the IT department up as a service provider

It is the latter point which could be the clever bit, given the industry in general has been somewhat pre-occupied with all things ITIL and service oriented of late.
I should point out that I made the 3 bullet points above, up, but that's what I take from the slogan. Others might not, which is fair enough. The good thing is that the big picture story doesnt hammer on about virtualisation either. It doesnt need to. Virtualisation is the tool, not the outcome.

For anyone who is not a big fan of corporate mantras, mission statements, conceptual marketing and so on, this article provides some relevent commentary.

Obviously, to have any chance of sucess, as with any corporate identity, there needs to be an appropriate set of products and customer service capabilities to back up the story, and that's where we should focus our attention. If that's lacking, then fine, the story is hollow and the organisation responsible for marketing hot air is hopefully doomed to failure.

This latest re-stating of intent, from this analysts perspective at least, captures some interesting contemporary sentiment which deserves a look under the covers before being dismissed as an empty gesture.

Sun Sparkle around the Black Hole of Virtualization Management

2008-02-08T20:12:00.001Z

Many vendors that have started off their existence with a strong emphasis on hardware struggle to come to terms with the modern IT world where, for the majority of organisations, subtle differences in hardware architecture and performance are no longer the main drivers in their acquisition strategies. A clear trend over the last few years has seen hardware selection becoming less and less important except for the few organisations that require highly specific performance characteristics. The IT world is now, essentially, software driven and changing the culture of any large vendor to accept this difference is a challenge. Last week I attended the annual analyst conference held by Sun Microsystems and it was fascinating to note just how clearly the senior management of company now accepts the software mantra, albeit with yearnings still for hardware involvement somewhere along the line if at all possible.

The new understanding of the importance of software, especially of management software, is encouraging. From my point of view it is even better to hear the company setting out its stall in two key areas well away from the Java, Solaris and Star Office areas for which its software is best known. Now the company has made it clear that it is setting out its stall in one of the most dynamic sectors around at the moment, namely virtualisation, and is also ready to begin actively promoting its thin client solutions around its Sun Ray offerings. Both of these are areas in which Sun does not currently enjoy a high profile even though the company can trace back its virtualisation solutions to the mid nineteen eighties.

On the virtualisation side of things the company is ready to promote both its file based storage virtualisation solutions built on top of the Solaris ZFS file system. Now whilst one can argue that Sun has not set the world on fire with its storage profile it is clear that the company is getting together a strong suite of solutions comprising both its own offerings, including Thumper, and those that it OEMs. However, it is the Sun xVM Server family and especially the Sun xVM Ops Center management software that hold the potential to catch the eye. Sun xVM Server is a Hypervisor family based on XenSource and its own software to provide desirable qualities such as scalability, availability, manageability, and security allowing the effective consolidation of Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms.

All well and good so far. But with Sun xVM Ops Center the company is actively targeting an area that recent research work carried out by Freeform Dynamics highlights a major issue for many organisations. I am talking about the ongoing management and administration of physical and virtual systems using a single, coherent toolset, tasks that today pose a significant challenge. To this end xVM Ops Center provides capabilities to discover servers across the network, even when powered off, along with sophisticated provisioning of Operating Systems, firmware and other suitably packaged software, coupled with automatic updating and patching for Red Hat, SuSE and Solaris. In addition the software provides functionality to manage, in a secure fashion, users and a range of heterogeneous data centre systems. XVM Ops Center has been built with interoperability very much in mind to permit it to interact with other management tools. Finally, at least for now, Sun xVM Ops Center also supplies a reporting / auditing capability to simplify compliance reporting.

Many of these capabilities can be found in other tools, especially those available from specialist suppliers. Sun is one of the first of the large enterprise vendors to promote its heterogeneous management capabilities in the virtualisation arena and as such it could cause a stir if Sun can do an effective job communicating Ops Center to end user organisations and its channel community.

When it comes to the company's thin client offerings the Sun Ray software has really come of age and now allows Sun ray clients to securely access applications of any type, including Microsoft Windows. Sun now also supplies desktop virtualisation solutions to allow thin client operations on PCs and laptops. Together these are more areas where Sun needs to increase its marketing efforts in order to sell solutions to new customers.

It is probably fair to say that Sun now has a much more substantial suite of software solutions than at any time in the past and, much more importantly, appears to be serious about expanding its market presence selling such solutions. It is also true that the company's senior management really has taken on board the importance of software to its future success. We shall have to see how quickly the culture of the rest of the organisation and its channel partners can take this to heart; it is difficult to modify entrenched behaviours. If it can get the message to sink in and if it can get effective marketing in place for the software solutions it will be interesting to watch the market reactions, and those of its potential competitors.

A silver lining in the public sector's IT cloud?

2008-02-05T18:11:00.001Z

It's easy to criticise the way that publically funded bodies seem to be good at making very hard work of things like IT, while private sector organisations only make hard work out of them.

While spending a day with IBM recently listening to its efforts across the public sector, from defence and healthcare, to local authorities and education, I took on a newfound appreciation for the scale of the challenges facing the public sector and its chosen partners when it comes to getting the biggest bang per buck out of technology to help them deliver better services.

It's easy to listen to success stories and wonder why nuggets such as these (St Bart’s NHS Trust using ITIL if you can't be bothered with the link) don’t get championed at a higher level and spread, virus like, across the nation (why don’t they??), and it’s easy to get annoyed by anecdotal evidence of small minded wastefulness ('Bradford refused to ask Leeds for advice on its ERP implementation but was happy to trek to Scotland'). But it's much harder to come up with a single strategy to make everything just work better, because I don’t think there is one.

Which is why a strategy to implement lots of small, good things and then swapping them around until everyone has them might actually work.

Moving on, but in a similar spirit, Southwest One was brought to my attention at the aforementioned event and is an interesting idea not only because it's an example of two local authorities collaborating on a grand scale to create an SSP (Strategic Service delivery Partnership) but for a number of equally interesting reasons:

· the service delivery company is comprised of staff from both LAs plus IBM;

· IT is not a separate component - rather an integral part of the whole thing;

· it has room for growth - other public sector bodies can use its services.

Now I know that some of the attributes above are defined by the very nature / point of a SSP, and that not all SSPs launched thus far have been complete successes, so it remains to be seen if Southwest One will eventually form a positive part of the Blair government's legacy, by showing that SSPs in general, and this one in particular, (see here for some questions being raised about its existence in the first place, IBM's motivation and so on) can work and deliver additional benefits over and above traditional outsourcing arrangements.

At the same time, IBM has stuck its neck out because it rounded out its bid with a lot of social transformation related activities. It needs to be seen to deliver on this as well as the IT side, otherwise the harm that could be caused will have much wider impact on both the communities involved and IBM, than an underperforming IT solution.

On the notion of good ideas spreading and being replicated, elements of the Southwest One concept are reflected over in Suffolk, where Suffolk County Council and Mid Suffolk District Council have merged IT departments to share back-end business processes. The overall scale looks smaller, but it has its finer points too - for example there has not been a single, wall to wall standardisation of service provision - instead, the smaller, more rural Mid Suffolk has more local, public facing elements to its offering, to reflect the makeup of the area. Its 'proper thinking' like this that needs recording and centralising for others to benefit from.

Fine comment from CSD (the name of the shared services company) CEO Bridget Taylor:

"These things should be running themselves. People have more than enough to do trying to improve the lives of the public to worry about how the IT or the HR works too. We were looking for a private sector partner to effectively deal with those two parts of the business."

Shame this type of thinking wasn’t more apparent when there was uproar at the prospect of NHS logistics being outsourced last year (20 years after everyone else did, logistics definitely NOT being an NHS role), and strangely little fuss made about proposals to ship spectrographic analysis (reading x-rays and the like) out to India (I'd prefer my ER consultant to do that thanks). Strip what you do back to the bones and it’s easier to see the difference between the outcome, and the tools used.

Shared service models do mean change, which many will not like, especially the ones who find themselves surplus to requirements in a modernised, services and performance centric environment. However, rather than being responsible for providing jobs for life, public sector organisations are mandated to provide the best possible ways of using tax payers money, and that means moving with the times.

It is this element, and not the rise of IT as a means to achieving this, that leadership and the unions need to address on behalf of their workers.

Of course we're rubbish at protecting your data - we're not even trying.

2008-01-31T13:10:00.000Z

I rarely get wound up at what I read in the IT press, but the headline and some of the content of this gem got me going. Its not so much the speculation of a once every 5 year screw up, (once every 5 minutes it seems of late) it's the apparant resignation of the whole thing, and the lack of acknowledgement of responsibility.

Why am I so wound up? We just completed a pretty in-depth review of organisations' information governance (and underlying information management capabilities - you can't have the former without the latter - at least if you want it to work) capabilities and the headline findings explain why we are seeing so many information related screw ups these days.

Governance in general is starting to drive corporate requirements and activities, but drill down to the 'information governance' layer (information being the 'lifeblood of the modern business' - cliched but true) and we see lack of ability/effort on a grand scale:

No central ownership of responsibility for information governance;
Inadaquate information retention policies;
Poor or little ability to classify, archive and retrieve information.

If what I'm reading about and discovering during my research activities is anything to go by, then the apparant and constant haemorrhaging of the 'lifeblood' by numerous organisations entrusted with our information means there will be soon some well deserved flat-lining in the proverbial operating room. If thats what it takes, then so be it. We can't consider even for a minute another Ford Pinto scenario, where major corporations would rather clean up mess after mess than design their businesses to work properly in the first place.

The sad thing is that many organisations claim to have policies and processes in place to deal with information related incidents, yet we find that under the covers they, and the tools in use are simply are not up to the job. Maybe they were 10 or 20 years ago. Not any more.

Like the first batch of the Internet revolution companies discovered too late, you can't build a business from the outside in - if there is no structure, process, management capability (people and technology) then you will fail. Doing business properly costs money. Time for some hard talking in the boardroom, medium term expectation setting of lower dividends, and some spending of profit to get process, people and information mangement capabilities up to scratch.

I have no idea how this translates into the public sector, but simple maths dictates that if you employ less people that don’t care about doing a good job, there is more cash to pay a smaller number of people that do. 'We can't pay our staff well enough to care' won't wash for much longer. Then there's IT investment, but we'll save that for another day.

Networking Comes Out of the Closet

2008-01-31T11:35:00.001Z

Over the course of the years few things remain certain in the rapidly developing world of IT. Of those that do the under appreciation of the efforts of IT staff easily tops the list but over the last 10 years a case can also be made that the underlying network fabrics utilised by one and have become, like IT staff themselves, so taken for granted as to be almost invisible. This may be about to change

Network connectivity is the very lifeblood of modern IT systems usage. Whilst everyone works on their documents they all need, and more importantly want and expect, to be "connected", to both company business applications, including the near ubiquitous e-mail, and the Internet at large. The actual network plumbing is rarely considered, even by IT support staff. The core routers and wide area linkages that bind business locations together are, today almost invisible, except on those increasingly rare occasions when communications links fail. The last couple of years have seen some communications platforms garner a modicum of visibility, most notably those solutions addressing Wide Area Networking optimisation and acceleration, but overall networks are taken for granted.

This is especially the case when we look at the jugular vein of each and every IT system, namely the core LAN infrastructure. Since CAT 5 Ethernet cabling coupled with switches in floor closets became the de facto LAN architecture over a decade ago only organisations faced with extreme performance challenges have spent much time looking at LAN switching. Today very few suppliers, with Cisco and HP ProCurve the most recognisable, dominate the Ethernet switching market but things may be about to change as high performance networking specialist Juniper Networks is set to enter the fray.

Over the last few years Cisco and HP ProCurve have come to dominate much of the LAN switching market both now have large established customer bases. Juniper will need to work cleverly to gain footholds but it is clear that its solutions have the qualities and characteristics to appeal to many organisations, most notably those that are aware that they face performance challenges in the delivery of network services to key users. For such organisations the high performance and very high availability characteristics of the new Juniper EX Series switches could appeal. The range offers fixed-configuration, virtual-chassis, and Terabit-chassis models, although I suspect that the company will need to expend some effort to explain just where the virtual chassis models fit. One area that Juniper is ready to promote is that all of these offerings run using its established Junos operating platform thereby allowing users family with this operating system and management tools to administer the switches using familiar tools.

The entry of Juniper into the switching market should make LAN switching far more visible in the coming months and offer organisations an opportunity to look afresh at what they are doing here and to consider afresh their needs. I will watch this space even more closely as Cisco, HP ProCurve and Juniper square up to each other. Will you look again at Switching or do you plan to carry on as you are? This is a fascinating, though unsung area that nearly everyone is using but of which nearly all are unaware. Perhaps switching, and networking in general, more than any other aspect of IT truly captures how things should be.