Independent Information Technology and business analysis from IT-Director.com

Small Business Has a Big Appetite for Digital and Social Media Marketing

Laurie McCabe, Hurwitz and Associates — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:15:07 +0100

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, Hurwitz & Associates
Posted: 6th November 2009
Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2009

Small business adoption of technology-based solutions rarely keeps pace with the expectations of vendors, analysts and pundits. When it becomes adoption of digital marketing and social media tools, however, small business adoption is fast and furious.

Recently, we (Hurwitz & Associates) conducted a survey sponsored by email marketing vendor Campaigner. The survey investigates how North American small businesses with 1-20 employees are adapting their marketing plans and budgets to compete more effectively in the future. While we uncovered many interesting trends in the first report in a two-part series, Small Business Marketing Health Check (available here), one of the most eye-opening findings is that small businesses are rapidly shifting their marketing initiatives from traditional media to digital marketing media tools, including social media such as blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc., email marketing, search engine marketing and webinars and podcasts (Figure 1). While traditional media, such as direct mail, tradeshows and newspaper advertising still have a part in many small businesses' marketing playbook, they are being overshadowed by digital and social marketing alternatives.

Figure 1. Small Business Use of Marketing Tools

Why are small businesses, who usually take a long time to shift gears, so fast out of the gate in this case? In a nutshell, it's because digital and social marketing solutions deliver on the cheaper, faster, easier and better promise that so many other technology-based solutions don't deliver on. These marketing tools are often less expensive to use than such traditional marketing options as print advertising and direct mail—a small investment can help companies significantly boost marketing reach and return. Digital and social media marketing tools give small businesses more immediate visibility into whether they're reaching their target audiences, and easier ways to track and measure payback on the time and money they're investing than traditional media. You can also rapidly adjust and refine campaigns and outreach as needed.

So, with their appetite whetted, what will leading-edge small businesses be looking for next to take their digital and social media marketing game to the next level? Here are some of the areas that I think hold great opportunity for growth as small businesses appetite in this area increases:

More targeted search optimization and management. Services that are tailored to help specific kinds of small businesses achieve very specific results from their search engine marketing campaigns. For instance, Lotusjump provides a service to help small businesses optimize organic search results for hundreds or thousands of keywords to generate more qualified leads. The automated service automates the process of building more qualified leads based on more specific "longtail" search terms. Yodle, meanwhile, focuses on SMBs with local services business harness existing demand, by helping them to create a Web site, develop an effective SEO campaign across the Web, and help make the phone ring when the business is found through a Web search.
Solutions that help local businesses integrate online marketing and advertising campaigns across different outlets. Own a hair salon or a tree service business? If you do, everything is local, and services that help to reach the local market are what you care about. WebVisible, for instance, buys advertising space from multiple media providers and ad networks, and provides many types of online marketing solutions, including fully managed search advertising, banner/display advertising, call tracking solutions, custom landing pages, promotional URLs and more. Using the WebVisible platform, small businesses can target local advertising more effectively.
Tools that enable you to manage all of your social networking profiles through one client. HootSuite offers a service today that lets you manage all of your Twitter profiles simultaneously, but I don't think I've seen something would let you manage across multiple sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Services that help integrate more structured digital marketing tools (Web sites, email and search engine optimization and marketing) with more ad hoc social media initiatives. Ideally, this integration could significantly boost the value of both types of activities. I haven't spotted a good example of this yet, so let me know if you know of one.

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Intrusion Prevention, Detection and Unified Threat Management

Nigel Stanley, Bloor Research — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0100

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research
Posted: 6th November 2009
Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

When I first began my IT career the only computer link we had to the outside world was a modem hooked up to the telephone which plinked away when dialling and broadcast a bunch of white noise around the room when connected. At that point we knew we had a live link to a local bulletin board and could upload some files.

Quite frankly the only intrusion detection system we ever needed was a rather loud receptionist who controlled access to our building.

Inevitably, as the internet took hold and business realised the benefits of being online with email and the worldwide web, modem connectivity was quickly replaced by ISDN lines and finally broadband. Switching connections on and off just didn't figure anymore, and from the early 1990's onwards organisations were hooked up to the internet 24x7.

With this nascent "always on" computing it was soon apparent that the door to businesses computer networks was open for all and sundry to enter and steal or damage data. Something clearly had to be done and quickly, so the IT security experts turned their minds to systems that could prevent and detect intruders.

Intrusion Prevention, Detection and Unified Threat Management
Intrusion, in the context of IT security, is the attempted or actual entry into a computer system by an unauthorised person. Occasionally this would be an attempt to steal data or, more often, a way of causing damage or propagating a virus or other malware. Sometimes this may be a denial of service (DoS) attack designed, in most cases, to overwhelm an IT infrastructure. In practice, most intrusions are self-propagating malware that search the worldwide web looking for vulnerable systems.

There is evidence that some system intrusions are now being initiated by organised criminals. Some have blackmailed online service providers, such as betting operations, with a threat to launch a DoS attack on busy sporting days. There are even indications that some governments are actively targeting systems belonging to countries they consider a threat—a sort of online cold war.

In an effort to prevent or defeat such attacks we have Intrusion Prevention Systems, Intrusion Detection Systems and now Unified Threat Management.

Introducing Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)
IPS works on the principle that prevention is better than cure. In fact many intrusion prevention activities can be undertaken without investing in expensive hardware or software. Creating and adhering to a good IT security policy is a great way of preventing intruders, as is running up-to-date and well configured anti-malware software on each client endpoint in your organisation. Of course you do need to have in place technology, of which a firewall, well configured, will be the mainstay.

Introducing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)
Intrusion Detection Systems are normally technology-based and used to detect if a system is being targeted. The system will monitor network traffic as it enters and leaves an organisation with a view to sounding an alarm if an unusual event occurs, which, in turn, may indicate a potential intruder. Often an IDS will have a pre-set action to take when an intruder is detected to minimise any possible damage from an attack.

Unified Threat Management (UTM)
Clearly the notion of having separate systems to detect and protect intruders can be inefficient. As is having separate systems to manage anti-virus or other anti-malware activities. To that end there is a considerable move in the market away from pure IPS/IDS to Unified Threat Management (UTM). With UTM, defence systems are aggregated in single management consoles and the overall control of threats is coordinated from one place. That way system duplication is eliminated and the ever-important cost of ownership reduced as much as possible. Over the coming years the differentiation between intrusion detection and prevention will become less important and we will be using the terms less and less. Instead unified threat management will become the catchall phrase.

Intrusion Detection Systems in Detail
The simplest way of thinking of an IDS is to think of a burglar alarm. As a burglar enters a property an alarm is sounded so that the police can be summoned. With IDS an alarm is raised (often via email or pager) and administrators informed of an intruder.

Associated with such a system are false negatives and false positives. Worse case scenario is a false negative, when your expensive IDS fails to trigger an alarm when an event occurs. The first you may know about it is users complaining about off line websites that have been nobbled in a denial of service attack. False positives, on the other hand, may be more irritating but are less problematic. These occur when the IDS believes that an attack has happened. On investigation it transpires that the event was not an intruder, rather an unusual business activity, but nothing to worry about.

More advanced Intrusion Detection Systems will raise an alarm along with a confidence factor based on an immediate assessment of the problem. This will be determined by the system logic and may be based on heuristics or learned behaviour once the system has monitored routine business traffic. Alert thresholds can be set, such as those with a 90%+ confidence factor will alert via a pager and probably those of a lesser confidence factor alert via email.

Clearly there is a lot of responsibility on the security team to ensure that the IDS system has been correctly set up

In practice Intrusion Detection Systems work to protect the network, a host server or an application. Each system requires a different approach to protect it which led to the evolution of Network IDS (NIDS), Host based IDS (HIDS) and Application IDS (AppIDS) systems. In reality, vendors soon realised there were benefits and drawbacks of each approach and current best-of-breed solutions, under the Unified Threat Management banner, will monitor all three areas using a single product.

For the sake of simplicity we will look at each of these areas in isolation to understand how IDS works in practice.

Network-Based Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS)
A NIDS will often be an appliance solution and will be connected to a network segment with the job of monitoring network traffic as it passes up and down the wire. Packets are analysed to determine if there is any odd or out of character behaviour which may indicate an attack. An example may be a sudden influx of packets that appear to be related, which, in turn, could indicate an imminent denial of service attack. Other packet patterns could indicate a port scan in progress, where common ports are explored to see if common network services are running which could be exploited. We cover this in more detail later.

Generally, network-based intrusion detection systems can detect a lot more attacks than host-based intrusion detection systems, as they are closer to the network traffic and can see more of what is happening from minute to minute. The downside is they require additional, and often complicated, setup and maintenance.

The type of monitoring a NIDS undertakes depends on the network topology and the type of attack you are trying to test for. Often a system will be used to monitor a group of computers or a specific network segment. Before the widespread adoption of network switches, intrusion detection systems could be connected to a network hub and be guaranteed to be able to monitor all network traffic that passes through.

Unfortunately the downside was that hubs represented a security risk as, once compromised, it was easy to monitor all traffic that was being processed. Network switches create a more secure network as they create point-to-point links between their ports, but this in turn makes traffic interception far more difficult.

To overcome this, network intrusion detection systems are normally attached to a monitoring socket called the SPAN or switched port analysis port to capture passing traffic.

NIDS use a number of techniques to determine if an attack is underway or not.

Signature matching looks for attack patterns by comparing activity on the network with known signatures in their databases. This uses clever techniques to reassemble packets using protocol stack verification, where packets are examined for their structural integrity and application protocol verification where packets are examined for their specific use.

Protocol stack verification will monitor for malformed packets that do not meet the standard rules for the TCP/IP protocol. This can be useful in preventing denial of service attacks which often rely on the creation of malformed packets, which, in turn, can take advantages of weaknesses in the operating system or application.

With application protocol verification, protocols such as HTTP or FTP can be monitored to check for strange packet behaviour as some attacks can take the guise of valid protocol packets but in very large numbers.

Like most IT solutions, network intrusion detection systems have advantages and disadvantages:

Pros

Few devices can be used to monitor large networks
Little disruption when deployed as NIDS are passive devices

Cons

Some NIDS may be overwhelmed by the volume of network traffic
NIDS cannot analyse encrypted packets
NIDS have to use monitoring ports which are not present on all switches

If network intrusion detection is not suitable then there is an alternative—host based intrusion detection of HIDS.

Host-Based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS)
HIDS are host-based as they sit on a specific computer or server being monitored, rather than at the segment level found in NIDS. Their role is to monitor a host and detect if an intruder is attempting to make changes to system files or attempts to change specific monitored parts of the system, such as the Windows registry. HIDS use a change-based approach to security. Monitored files are initially checked as to their size, creation dates and any other measurable attribute. Any subsequent change to one of these files will create an alert to the systems administrator. Likewise system logs will be monitored to determine who is accessing which of these files and appropriate alerts raised. Often system logs themselves will be attacked by more sophisticated hackers trying to hide their activities. To overcome this most HIDS will create their own, well hidden, log files for monitoring.

HIDS will also monitor system directory files on a server and their own file structure in case there is an attempt to disable the HIDS as a precursor to a coordinated attack.

A major advantage of host-based intrusion detection is that it can often be configured to sit on a host computer and access information that would otherwise have been encrypted as it travelled over the network. How the network data actually reached the host computer is irrelevant, all HIDS worry about is the integrity of their host system.

To improve manageability, some HIDS can be deployed across multiple hosts and monitored from a central location with data being reported back to a single console. Criteria can be set up to determine what events trigger an alert and the way in which the alert should be communicated; normally via email or pager/SMS.

On the average host computer there may be thousands of files. Some of these will need active monitoring whilst others are not so important. During setup the administrator needs to determine which files are vital and therefore need constant monitoring; for example system files.

To assist with this, some HIDS allow files to be triaged using a red, yellow and green colour code. Red files are the most actively monitored, yellow files may be less so and green files not monitored by the HIDS. Other HIDS allow a numerical ranking of files according to their system importance.

Similar to network intrusion detection systems, host-based systems have advantages and disadvantages:

Pros

As HIDS work on a host computer they can be used to monitor previously encrypted traffic
The network architecture is irrelevant to a HIDS as they do not need to monitor ports on switches

Cons

HIDS often need more management than NIDS as they monitor individual files and logs, each of which are capable of raising an alarm
HIDS have a poorer ability to deal with some denial of service attacks
HIDS can consume large amounts of disk space with their monitoring services and logs

Application-Based Intrusion Detection Systems (AppIDS)
AppIDS take the notion of host-based intrusion detection one step further. Instead of monitoring an entire host system they will monitor a specific application that may be running on the host. During this monitoring, the AppIDS system will be looking for any out-of-course activity or other anomalous behaviour that could indicate an attack. An AppIDS can be tuned to monitor specific user activity and determine who is doing what on a system. Similar to a HIDS, AppIDS sit above any encryption that may be in place. Typically an AppIDS will monitor file reads and writes, configuration settings and the use of application execution space in the system memory.

Advantages and disadvantages of AppIDS include:

Pros

An AppIDS can be finely tuned to monitor specific application attributes
AppIDS sit above any encryption algorithms being used
AppIDS will work irrespective of the network topology

Cons

AppIDS are more susceptible to attack as they sit at the application layer
AppIDS can be fooled by some forms of spoofing and Trojan Horses

Common Intrusion Threats—Port Scanning
This is the computer security equivalent of a burglar checking to see what doors or windows may be left unlocked in your house. With the TCP/IP protocol there around 65,000 ports that can be used for services, applications or for programs to communicate on. The first 1024 TCP ports are referred to as the well-known ports and host services such as FTP and HTTP. A port scan is a process of automatically scanning each of a system's ports to determine which ones may have been left open either deliberately or accidentally. This open port can then be probed further to see if there is an underlying weakness in the system waiting to be abused.

As can be seen port scans are a crude way of checking for vulnerabilities and are one of the first attack vectors that a decent Intrusion Detection System will prevent.

Common Intrusion Threats—Denial of Service (DoS) Attack
This is another reasonably crude way of attacking a computer system and can come in a number of forms, each of which is designed to slow down or stop a computer operating. In fact, the simplest Denial of Service attack may be someone locking your office door—if you can't get in you can't do any work.

One of the most common technical DoS attacks tries to prevent users accessing a system by overwhelming it with data. A ping flood is sometimes used to overload a computer with ping packets, which are used in legitimate circumstances to see if a computer is present on a network. If the sending computer has more bandwidth than the computer under attack then an unprotected computer is likely to collapse under the volume of ping packets.

A SYN flood uses a feature of TCP/IP to connect to computers on a network. A message is sent from one computer (often hijacked using malware) to the computer under attack asking for a connection. The computer under attack responds to say it is ready to communicate but never receives confirmation of the connection request. That way the computer under attack sits waiting with half opened connections. With lots of these hanging half connections the attacked system will be unable to respond to legitimate connection requests and be unable to work normally.

The good news is that both port scans and denial of service attacks can be prevented by using intrusion detection systems.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Using Intrusion Detection Systems
Few would doubt that adding an intrusion detection system to your security portfolio is probably a good idea, but there are some drawbacks as well as advantages.

An intrusion detection system is a very useful adjunct to good security practices and policies. There is no point in having an expensive IDS if you allow your users to download malware or copy files from USB thumb drives. Education is vital, as is leadership to demonstrate that the business takes security very seriously. Any violations of a well communicated policy need to be taken seriously. An IDS is a useful way of creating a security baseline and then detecting any deviations from that which may indicate an attack. In this way an IDS will allow you to act before any damage is done and prevent loss to the business.

On the downside, installing and configuring any form of IDS will take time and effort. During the learning phase there may quite well be a lot of false positives and false negatives as the administration team get to fully understand what the system can do and how to tune it. No IDS can 100% guarantee that all attackers will be deterred and, in fact, a determined, educated attacker will probably succeed whether you have an IDS or not. That said, a very large percentage of untargeted attacks will be prevented with the most basic intrusion detection system.

In Summary
IT Security is a tough gig. It needs administrators to work with developers, database administrators and the business to get the correct balance of security across the organisation. The simplest option can at times appear to be the easiest—unplug your systems from the internet and you will no longer need to worry about intrusion detection systems. We all know the reality is very different and in today's modern, connected world internet connectivity is mission critical for most businesses. To that end it is important that we get security right from the start. Putting in place an intrusion detection system, as part of your unified threat management strategy, is now as vital as installing Office productivity software on user's PCs. We can no longer rely on receptionists with shrill voices to protect our organisations from intruders.

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Webinar on managing hybrid and cloud computing types

Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:55:00 +0100

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions
Posted: 6th November 2009
Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

I'll be joining John Favazza, vice president of research and development at WebLayers, on Nov. 10 for a webinar on the critical role of governance in managing hybrid cloud computing environments.

The free, live webinar begins at 2 p.m. EDT. Register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/695643130. [Disclosure: WebLayers is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Titled "How Governance Gets You More Mileage from Your Hybrid Computing Environment,” the webinar targets enterprise IT managers, architects and developers interested in governance for infrastructures that include hybrids of cloud computing, software as a service (saaS) and service-oriented architectures (SOA). There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

Organizations are looking for more consistency across IT-enabled enterprise activities, and are finding competitive differentiation in being able to best manage their processes more effectively. That benefit, however, requires the ability to govern across different types of systems and infrastructure and applications delivery models. Enforcing policies, and implementing comprehensive governance, acts to enhance business modeling, additional services orientation, process refinement, and general business innovation.

Increasingly, governance of hybrid computing environments establishes the ground rules under which business activities and processes—supported by multiple and increasingly diverse infrastructure models—operate.

Developing and maintaining governance also fosters collaboration between architects, those building processes and solutions for companies, and those operating the infrastructure—be it supported within the enterprise or outside. It also sets up multi-party business processes, across company boundaries, with coordinated partners.

Cambridge, Mass.-based WebLayers provides a design-time governance platform that helps centralize policy management across multiple IT domains—from SOA through mainframe and cloud implementations. Such governance clearly works to reduce the costs of managing and scaling such environments, individually and in combination.

In the webinar we'll look at how structured policies, including extensions across industry standards, speeds governance implementations and enforcement—from design-time through ongoing deployment and growth.

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What can BPM Vendors Learn From the iPhone?

Mark McGregor, MarkMcGregor.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:02:00 +0100

By: Mark McGregor, Author, Speaker, Coach, MarkMcGregor.com
Posted: 5th November 2009
Copyright MarkMcGregor.com © 2009

Over the past few weeks I have been in contact with a lot more BPMS vendors than I would normally speak with. I have found it fascinating to see and hear how many of them are wrestling with the same issue. How can I make my product stand out from the crowd and get more sales?

Now it is not for me to judge in detail, but to my simple mind it appears that so many of these products essentially behave in the same way (I know there are things sold as different, but when one looks at the key functionality they are all getting nearer and nearer to each other). Of course some of the differential depends on the platforms you wish to run on but, in essence, they appear to be sailing in a sea of sameness, with convergence being the order of the day.

This set me thinking that perhaps this was similar to the mobile phone market. Mobile phones have been around for many years now and whilst some people prefer Nokia, others Blackberry, or HTC or... handsets. Largely the handset market is pretty similar (and very crowded!); sure we can choose up-market phones or basic phones, but in essence you would think that most of the angles had been covered. Major manufacturers have invested many millions of dollars developing their phone platforms and trying to make profit from them. The making profit increasingly be the hard part.

So it is into this market that Apple steps just a few years ago. A market that by all accounts was saturated and filled with manufacturers all struggling to make the returns they need. Whether you love iPhones or loathe them, you can't argue that they are an absolute phenomenon and are driving amazing revenues and profits for Apple.

So what might lie behind this success? Well, in the first instance, Apple focused on the aesthetics, they designed a quality product that looked both different and enabled people to interact with it in new ways. So tick box one, they understood that having a great platform was only one piece of the jigsaw, making it look nice and work in a way people found more intuitive was equally, if not more, important.

If you have ever seen the quick demos of BPM products you will know that, to date, very few vendors have actually invested in User Interface design, either for their design tools or in their generated applications. Interestingly enough, this is an area where Global 360 with their "Persona based BPM" are taking a different approach. They have engaged with a design agency and are now in the process of delivering new interfaces with a greater focus on aesthetics and natural ease of use. The approach has still to reach deep into their design tools, but it certainly looks fantastic on the generated applications. The idea is simple, if we can generate applications that the user finds easy and pleasing to engage with, then our clients will be more successful and we will sell more of our own product.

This leads us on very nicely to the second tick box in Apple's success. Applications! Apple realized at once that it was not the technology platform that would stand alone, other companies are quickly trying to mimic the intuitive interface of Apple and, as a phone, it has pretty well the same (in some cases actually less!) functionality than other phones. It would be applications that would make the difference; Apple very quickly built or helped others to build a wide range of applications for the iPhone. As well as making money, it was the applications that made the phone successful. Those who have and love their iPhones are increasingly spending more and more time using the device for a wider and wider range of tasks and activities. (Of course this brings in to focus the challenge of battery life! But we can't have everything.)

So, perhaps in order to break out from the pack, BPM vendors need to focus less on their technology stack—their platform—and instead focus more on creating or having created libraries of applications. Perhaps the time has come for component based BPM. The idea that we can simply build and assemble BPM applications from various vendors and assemble them together seems to make some sense. Not so easy I know, but if Apple proved that User Interface and applications are what generates sales and profits, even in a crowded market, then perhaps that is what it will take for a BPM vendor or two to break from the pack. We all know that swimming in a sea of sameness is a recipe for disaster and as SAP also proved you don't have to have the best technology underpinning your software product to succeed.

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HP takes converged infrastructure a notch higher with new data warehouse appliance

Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:10:00 +0100

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions
Posted: 5th November 2009
Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Hewlett-Packard (HP) on Wednesday announced new products, solutions and services that leaves the technology packaging to them, so users don't have to.

HP Neoview Advantage, HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, and HP Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services are designed to help organizations drive business and technology innovations at lower total cost via lower total hassle. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP’s measured focus
HP isn’t just betting on a market whim. Recent market research it supported reveals that more than 90 percent of senior business decision makers believe business cycles will continue to be unpredictable for the next few years—and 80 percent recognize they need to be far more flexible in how they leverage technology for business.

The same old IT song and dance doesn't seem to be what these businesses are seeking. Nearly 85 percent of those surveyed cited innovation as critical to success, and 71 percent said they would sanction more technology investments—if they could see how those investments met their organization’s time-to-market and business opportunity needs.

Cost nowadays is about a lot more than the rack and license. The fuller picture of labor, customization, integration, shared services suppport, data-use-tweaking and inevitable unforeseen gotchas need to be better managed in unison—if that desired agility can also be afforded (and sanctioned by the bean-counters).

HP said its new offerings deliver three key advantages:

Improved competitiveness and risk mitigation through business data management, information governance, and business analytics
Faster time to revenue for new goods and services
The ability to return to peak form, after being compressed or stretched.

The Neoview advantage
First up, HP Neoview Advantage, the new release of the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform, which aims to help organizations respond to business events more quickly by supporting real-time insight and decision-making.

HP calls the performance, capacity, footprint and manageability improvements dramatic and says the software also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with industry-standard components and pre-built, pre-tested configurations optimized for warehousing.

HP Neoview Advantage and last year's Exadata product (produced in partnership with Oracle) seem to be aimed at different segments. Currently, HP Neoview Advantage is a "very high end database," whereas Exadata is designed for "medium to large enterprises," and does not scale to the Neoview level, said Deb Nelson, senior vice president, Marketing, HP Enterprise Business.

A converged infrastructure
Next up, HP Converged Infrastructure architecture. As HP describes it, the architecture adjusts to meet changing business needs, specifically what HP calls “IT sprawl,” which it points to as the key culprit in raising technology costs for maintenance that could otherwise be used for innovation.

HP touts key benefits of this new architecture. First, the ability to deploy application environments on the fly through shared service management, followed closely by lower network costs and less complexity. The new architecture is optimized through virtual resource pools and also improves energy integration and effectiveness across the data center by tapping into data center smart grid technology.

Finally, HP is offering Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services that aim to help customers transition from isolated product-centric technologies to a more flexible converged infrastructure. The new services leverage HP’s experience in shared services, cloud computing, and data center transformation projects to let customers design, test and implement scalable infrastructures.

Overall, typical savings of 30 percent in total costs can be achieved by implementing Data Center Smart Grid technologies and solutions, said HP.

With these moves to converged infrastructure, HP is filling out where others are newly treading. Cisco and EMC this week announced packaging partnerships that seek to deliver simiar convergence benefits to the market.

"It's about experience, not an experiment," said Nelson.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

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Survey: Virtualization and physical infrastructures need to be managed in tandem

Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0100

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions
Posted: 5th November 2009
Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

If your company uses test and development infrastructures as a proving ground for shared services, virtualization and private cloud environments, you’re not alone. More companies are moving in that direction, according to a Taneja Group survey.

Yet underlying the use of the newer infrastructure approaches lies a budding challenge. The recent Taneja Group survey of senior IT managers working on test/dev infrastructures at North American firms found that 72 percent of respondents said virtualization, on its own, doesn’t address their most important test/dev infrastructure challenges. Some 55 percent rate managing both virtual and physical resources as having a high or medium impact on their success. The market is clearly looking for ways to bridge this gap.

Sharing physical and virtual infrastructures
Despite the confusion in the market about the economics of the various flavors of cloud computing, Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group, says one thing is clear: Enterprises are comfortable with, and actively sharing, both physical and virtual infrastructures internally.

“This survey reaffirms that shared infrastructure is common in test/dev environments and also reveals it’s increasingly being deployed for production workloads,” Bartoletti says. "Virtualization is seen as a key enabling technology. But on its own it does not address the most important operational and management challenges in a shared infrastructure.”

Noteworthy is the fact that 92 percent of test/dev operations are using shared infrastructures, and companies are making significant investments in infrastructure-sharing initiatives to address the operational and budgetary challenges. Half the survey respondents are funding projects in 2009. Another 66 percent of respondents will have funded a project started by the end of 2010.

The survey reveals most firms are turning to private cloud infrastructures to support test/dev projects, and that shared infrastructures are beginning to bridge the gap between pre-production and production silos. A full 30 percent are sharing resource pools between both test/dev and production applications. This indicates a rising comfort level with sharing infrastructure within IT departments.

Virtualization’s cost and control issues
Although 89 percent of respondents use virtualization for test/dev, more than half have virtualized less than 25 percent of their servers. That’s because virtualization adds several layers of control and cost issues that need to be addressed by sharing, process, workflow and other management capabilities in order to fully maximize and integrate both virtual and physical infrastructures.

“Test/Dev environments are one of the most logical places for organizations to begin implementing private clouds and prove the benefits of a more elastic, self service, pay-per-use service delivery model,” says Martin Harris, director Product Management at Platform Computing. “We’ve certainly seen this trend among our own customers and have found that additional management tools enabling private clouds are required to effectively improve business service levels and address cost cutting initiatives.” [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Despite the heavy internal investments, however, 82 percent of respondents are not using hosted environments outside their own firewalls. The top barriers to adoption: Lack of control and immature technology.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

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Database Key Management - an Introduction

Nigel Stanley, Bloor Research — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0100

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research
Posted: 5th November 2009
Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Speak to IT security experts and ask questions about what they consider to be one of the most difficult challenges they face and coming quite close to the top of the list, along with user education, will probably come encryption key management.

Not normally associated with the role of the DBA, encryption keys enable us to secure databases but still provide managed access to approved users.

Securing SQL Server Data
Of course it is silly sending a person data from a SQL Server database that is encrypted without giving them the means to decrypt the data and view it in plain text. This decryption process is facilitated by the use of cryptographic keys. In fact there are two types of keys - symmetric and asymmetric. With symmetric keys the same key is used to both encrypt and decrypt the data. In an asymmetric model different keys are used to encrypt and decrypt the data.

Why bother with two separate keys and the asymmetric model? Well, keys are at the heart of the encryption algorithm. If a key used to encrypt data is the same as the key to unencrypt data then anyone with access to the key can unlock my cipher text. In the asymmetric model I issue a public key that enables a user to encrypt the SQL Server data but only I have the private key to decrypt the data. That way I can receive secured data in the knowledge that only I can see the plain text data.

SQL Server 2005 supports three types of data encryption.

Symmetric key encryption. As we have seen this is a risky encryption method to support as the key used to encrypt and decrypt the data is the same. It can have a use if you are using encryption to secure data wholly inside the SQL Server, and the use of AES or Triple DES algorithms is recommended.
Asymmetric encryption. SQL Server uses the RSA algorithm and supports 512-bit, 1,024-bit and 2,048-bit keys
Certificates, which is similar in approach to asymmetric key encryption. SQL Server uses the IETF (Internet Engineering Taskforce) X.509v3 specification along with RSA for data encryption.

As keys are so crucial to SQL Server encryption, their careful management is vital.

Key Management
Imagine I have encrypted some SQL Server data using my private key. I then decide to leave the company and go and work elsewhere, taking my private key knowledge (i.e. my password) with me. The data I leave behind is all in cipher text and is now lost to my former colleagues. Imagine another scenario where the DBA has encrypted a SQL Server table and stored the data on a backup tape. A few years later there is a requirement for discovery, due to a legal action, and the data needs to be recovered. If the private key has been lost then the data can not be accessed, which will cause a storm of legal issues.

Even the basic issuing of keys is fraught with difficulty. Many years ago vetted couriers were dispatched by airplane, with a briefcase secured to their wrist containing the month's keys for that remote office. Now key distribution can be facilitated automatically but, even so, it is very easy to make mistakes and get into a horrible confusion.

SQL Server 2005 Key Management
We have already discussed some of the difficulties with key management and the knots that you can end up being tied in if your key management should go wrong. The good news is that SQL Server does provide some basic key management tools, reducing the need for other key management products in the more simple deployments. In more complex deployments, SQL Server can be a good citizen of third party key management products.

Keeping private keys secure is vital to the integrity of a secure SQL Server. Many wonderfully complex encryption algorithms have been rendered useless as the associated keys have been leaked. SQL Server 2005 uses an encryption hierarchy to protect its keys.

The first security layer is the Windows Data Protection API, referred to as DPAPI. This enables keys to be secured discretely in Windows and provides support for the Crypto API. It was introduced with Windows 2000 and protects the SQL Server 2005 service master key which is the root key for each instance of SQL Server installed on a specific computer. If this root key is compromised then all other keys on that computer will be vulnerable. The service master key needs little maintenance by the DBA but should be backed up and stored securely away from the SQL Server it applies to. The service master key is a bit like energy - it can't be created or destroyed. There is only ever one per instance of SQL Server. The key is secured using the credentials of the logged in user, and is managed under the same account as the SQL Server service. Therefore, anyone that has access to that service account will have access to the service master key so be careful in allocating accounts and users.

Next in the hierarchy is the database master key. This is a database-specific version of the service master key and, as such, secures all keys in a specific database and protects all the user keys, symmetric /asymmetric keys and certificates. If this is compromised then all other keys in the same database will be vulnerable.

The built in keys (service master key and database master key) are not generally used directly for encryption but will be used internally by SQL Server as part of the internal key management infrastructure.

The scale of a database key hierarchy can be as straightforward or complex as you like, but bear in mind the more complex a key hierarchy the more that can go wrong, as well as possible performance implications if a large key hierarchy needs to be traversed on a regular basis.

User keys in SQL Server comprise certificates, asymmetric keys, symmetric keys and pass phrases. These are the keys that the DBA will use to protect database data.

A certificate is a digitally signed object that keeps the public key associated with the owner of the private key. SQL Server can create certificates for use within the database server but certificates for use outside the server need to be obtained from one of the trusted third-party certificate issuers. Certificates can be created and managed using T-SQL in much the same way that you create and manage other database objects.

Asymmetric keys are created and managed much the same way as certificates and are useful if you don't want the full overhead of certificate management but still want to issue public keys.

Symmetric keys are useful when performance may be an issue, as they require less processor cycles to implement and manage - asymmetric key management algorithms can take up significant server resources. The significant downside of symmetric keys is the fact that the keys need to be shared, and shared secrets are difficult to protect - as many people know!. That said, symmetric key encryption does have a part to play when securing data inside a SQL Server, as the key never actually leaves the server.

Pass phrase keys are useful if you are happy to look after a suitable pass phrase yourself, outside the remit of SQL Server. They are implemented using the T-SQL functions EncryptByPassPhrase and DecryptByPassPhrase.

Encryption and key management in SQL Server 2005 need not be too difficult as long as you take a sensible and measured approach. Not all solutions will need every last bit of data encrypted and if you do need to implement encryption think through the possible performance implications. Like everything in the world of databases, there is always a compromise, but for many security must, quite rightly, be a number one objective.

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Part 1 of 2 - Innovation in social networking for business

Roger Whitehead, Office Futures — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:22:34 +0100

By: Roger Whitehead, Director, Office Futures
Posted: 5th November 2009
Copyright Office Futures © 2009

I had posted on this topic a few days ago but have thought again about how best to present the data from the survey I mentioned. I am therefore reposting the item with the changes included. The earlier version is no longer present.

In the blog posting titled "Social netting—the whats and whys (2)", I mentioned at the end a forthcoming Bloor Research market overview of social networking for business. This is now available, free.

The main focus of the research Carl and I are doing is innovation in social networking for business. We asked companies to tell us what's new from them in these three areas:

the products or services themselves, such as new technologies or features
how they deliver their products or services, such as via a 'cloud'
how their customers are using the product or service.

We got completed forms from 17 relevant companies, about a third of those we contacted. One (Open Text) bought another (Vignette) soon after, leaving 16 sets of results. That's not bad for a first pass and includes companies of various sizes, from IBM down to small businesses. Their customers are similarly varied.

One company that responded but whose details don't appear on the chart or in part 2 is Visible Technologies. Theirs is an interesting offering, consisting of a set of tools to allow companies to oversee, analyse and engage in social networks. One of its main values is in what marketers call sentiment analysis. Visible Technologies refer to "social media listening". Unfortunately, their services don't fit our framework, so with regret we have omitted them.

The other suppliers' responses were mixed. Most were informative and to the point. At the other extreme, some read like copy-and-paste jobs from corporate literature. We've therefore supplemented what all the respondents said with research from elsewhere.

Product and service innovation
Each entry has a numerical rating that reflects our assessment of its product or service's innovativeness. Part of the usefulness of software lies in the way it comes to the user organization, so innovation in this aspect is included in the score. The top score possible is 5.0.

Note that innovation is not the same as invention. Innovating is doing something new, not just dreaming it up and patenting it (otherwise Xerox PARC would feature in many answers!) Also, we're interested only in useful innovation, that has practical value rather than being change for the sake of it.

Another consideration is that innovativeness is not an absolute. Features that might be only moderately advanced in a new product from a small start-up company would be seen as highly innovative in an established product from a large, enterprise-class supplier.

A new company is obliged to offer something innovative to gain funding and customers. Existing suppliers of enterprise software are judged on other matters as well, such as architectural continuity, product support and sustainability. Our assessments are therefore relative to the context.

You will see that there are no low scores for innovativeness. This is unsurprising, as only those companies who see themselves as innovators have responded.

Fitness for the purpose
We have also rated each entry by its likely fitness for application in a target user organization. This is an imaginary large corporate body, with a wide range of needs that span multiple countries and involve the use of several human languages.

The model organization has the competence and confidence to specify, install, use and manage the product well but will need support in all its operating countries. This could come direct from the supplier or through trading partners. Again, 5.0 is best.

Almost any product or service can be used within a large organization or part of it. By "fitness", we mean how able it is—or soon will be—to meet the typical expectations for enterprise software. Those encompass such matters as data quality and quantity, security, compliance, reliability, and depth and breadth of interaction. They also include close integration with corporate data and processes, and single sign-on. 'Skinning' and branding also appeal to corporate buyers (but not in a cattle herding way).

Some suppliers, and users, might argue that all this is too much of a burden to place on a social networking product or service whose essence is ease and lightness. We would agree, if social networking were only ever to deal with discretionary or informal information or have local or external application. Once it starts being expected to handle corporate data or regarded as an enterprise-wide service, these requirements will make themselves felt.

This is not bad news. As IBM and others show, Web 2.0 tools (mashups, etc.) allow suppliers or user organizations to combine consumer-level ease of use and adaptability with industrial-strength security and robustness. Attractiveness and corporate fitness are not antithetical.

What we mean by social networking
A quick reminder that we see social netting products and services as offering most or all of the following:

Publishing tools—blogs, wikis, texting, tweeting, podcasting, videocasting, content feeds, etc.
Interpersonal communication and collaboration—instant messaging (IM), email and conferencing (text, voice or video), shared editing. Groupware, in effect
Searching and navigating—syndicated search, content maps, user directories and maps, machine- and user-created categorisation (bookmarks, tags and ratings)
Community creation and management—forum moderation, content promoting, invitation issuing, etc.
Tools for managing and extending the system.

A major part of the ethos of social networking is allowing personal choice and group direction-setting. These are matters of implementation and system control as much as of the products or services themselves and are hard to envisage within some organisations.

Looking at the results
Here below is a chart of our ratings of respondents' offerings. Some of the data points are moved slightly away from their true positions for readability. Click on the chart to see it larger.

Social networking products and services assessed

The results are interestingly varied:

only two companies—IBM and EMC—combine offerings that are demonstrably of enterprise strength with, in their context, significant innovation
the most innovative offerings, again in context, come from Mzinga, Socialtext and ThoughtFarmer but all have yet to show their readiness for use in our target organization
Traction Teampage scores highly on innovativeness but is not suited to enterprise use in the fuller sense
DreamFace Interactive is similarly innovative but looks even less ready for corporate adoption
Open Text is potentially strong in both dimensions but has few large users to boast of. Its newly-acquired Vignette product range has yet to be integrated
three offerings—from Atlassian, Jive and Novell—occupy what we think of the up-and-comers' space. They are moderately innovative but need the evidence of some successful large installations to convince of their enterprise strength
the remaining 5 companies' offerings are middle-sitters, with plenty of scope to improve in either direction.

Applying the results
Our choice of specimen organization favours software and services suited for working behind the firewall as well as outside it. This does not in any way belittle the usefulness of those offerings designed only for outward-looking use—it is a vital part of what social netting can do—but does bias our results.

Similarly, we concentrate on systems for large companies and have assessed products and services accordingly. Some of the software given a modest rating on corporate fitness could be well suited for use by a smaller organization or a division of a large enterprise.

Finally, please note that the results of our survey are not a general judgement on any company or its products or services. We have looked at only two of the many aspects that need considering when specifying a potential solution.

Next
Part 2 gives the details on which we based our assessments.

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Part 2 of 2 - Innovation in social networking for business

Roger Whitehead, Office Futures — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:18:12 +0100

By: Roger Whitehead, Director, Office Futures
Posted: 5th November 2009
Copyright Office Futures © 2009

Here below are summaries of the details on which we have based our assessment of the innovativeness and corporate readiness of the listed products and services.

1. Atlassian Confluence is Java-based wiki software that also provides scope for blogs, software project management (through Atlassian's JIRA product), mashups and 100+ third-party plug-ins. It integrates with Microsoft SharePoint and runs in Microsoft, Apple and Linux environments.

Packaging: Downloadable from the Web or as hosted service.
Innovation score: 3.0. Apparently doing little new directly on features. Add-ins extend the range of tools but are unlikely to be as effective as native capabilities
Company: 200+ employees; 3 offices - Australia (home), USA & The Netherlands; partners worldwide; 9,000+ customers in 100 countries
Corporate fitness score: 4.0. Used by a long list of household names worldwide, with some large installations. Narrower set of features than some competitors. Smallish company supporting several products.

2. DreamFace Interactive is a open-source Web 2.0 product, based on AJAX, that lets users build their own social networking systems and mash-ups. Uses 'DataWidgets' for creating, distributing and syndicating content, all accessible from PCs, Web browsers and PDAs. Mobile services include banking and payments.

Packaging: Downloadable from the Web as an open source (Community Edition) or commercially-licensed (Enterprise Edition) product.
Innovation score: 4.0. An easily adaptable product, using modern tools and methods.
Company: 10+ employees; 1 office - France; some partners; no large customers listed
Corporate fitness score: 1.5. Potentially useful but little evidence of enterprise adoption so far.

3. EMC CenterStage is Web client software for the Documentum system. It comes in basic ('essentials') and 'Pro' versions. Pro combines social networking tools with mobile access via BlackBerry devices, federated search and textual analysis, all with control of security, compliance and data retention. It is designed for use inside or outside the firewall.

Packaging: Available as a discrete, single-server version or, for larger installations, a multi-server, multi-tier product
Innovation score: 4.0. A wide set of tools all closely integrated with a leading enterprise electronic content management (ECM) system.
Company: 37,000 employees; 400 offices in 60 countries; many partners; many customers, of all sizes
Corporate fitness score: 4.5. EMC is a corporate software specialist. CenterStage has high potential but is not yet widely used, even by existing Documentum customers. It is unlikely to appeal to companies that don't (or don't intend to) use its ECM software.

4. FreshNetworks is a hosted service, built on the Drupal open-source content management system and offering a wide range of features. These can carry the customer's branding. There is a strong marketing bias in the company's software and services.

Packaging: FreshNetworks' service includes installation, community management and traffic analysis. A network can carry the customer's branding.
Innovation score: 3.5. Its reporting and analysis service make FreshNetworks especially useful for marketing-based communities.
Company: 25 employees; 2 offices - UK and Spain; no details offered on partners or customers
Corporate fitness score: 2.5. The company operates internationally but seems to have few customers. Its software service is outside the firewall.

5. Huddle.net is a networked service aimed at helping teams collaborate on-line, both internally and across the firewall. Tools include voice and web conferencing, whiteboards, management of digital assets, documents and projects, and personalised dashboards. Huddle is accessible from iPhones and via Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and Xing. There is a connector to the InterCall conferencing service.

Packaging: Offered in free and paid versions. Branding is available. Aims for 'viral' spread.
Innovation score: 2.5. The network basis is attractive but the tools are more groupware than social netting.
Company: 30+ employees; 1 office - UK (+ USA in 2010); no details offered on partners; large number of users, including household names worldwide
Corporate fitness score: 3.5. There are some large installations.

6. IBM Lotus Connections combines adaptable social networking tools with enterprise-strength platforms. Wide range of social netting tools but needs other IBM tools for a full offering, typically at some cost in complexity. Client software runs in Microsoft, Apple and Linux operating environments and on various PDAs; server software runs in Microsoft, AIX and Linux environments. Integrates with Microsoft Exchange.

Packaging: Licensed software to run on customer's machine(s), purchasable online or via partners. Many features are offered as a 'cloud' service, LotusLive Connections.
Innovation score: 4.5. Part of IBM's campaign to bring Web 2.0 to its big (and smaller) iron. Enterprise-wide shared bookmarking (from its Dogear project) and task-centred working are ahead of its competitors' offerings.
Company: Nearly 400,000 employees; offices in over 170 countries; many partners; many customers, of all sizes
Corporate fitness score: 5.0. IBM is a corporate software specialist and has several large installations of Connections worldwide. Will probably appeal mainly to existing IBM customers.

7. IGLOO produces and hosts turnkey social networking systems, branded for each customer. It offers a range of groupware, social netting and document management tools that integrate to form either internal ('Workplace Communities') or external ('Marketplace Communities') systems. These can integrate with Google Analytics and are accessible from BlackBerry and iPhone PDAs.

Packaging: A hosted service.
Innovation score: 3.5. A useful set of tools offered in easy-to-adopt packaging. Provide a best practice 'playbook' online.
Company: 50 employees; 1 office - Canada; some partners; good list of well-known customers but mainly in IGLOO's domestic market
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. Can integrate with Microsoft SharePoint and other enterprise software. Small to medium-sized installations so far.

8. Jive Social Business Software offers a collection of groupware and social netting tools. They can integrate with YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft Office and SharePoint, SAP, Salesforce and, in 2010, Documentum. Access is possible from iPhone and BlackBerry PDAs, as well as PCs and browsers. Multilingual searching is offered, as is traffic analysis.

Packaging: As licensed software, as a hosted service or via a cloud.
Innovation score: 3.5. A good set of tools in a range of packagings. A new bridging tool lets users import external discussions to internal conferences.
Company: 150+ employees; 10 offices - USA (HQ) and Europe; some partners; wide range of customers
Corporate fitness score: 4.0. Has some large installations, mainly in North America and Europe, including EMC (q.v.).

9. Josh XCAP is a modular, Java-based product for external communities. It runs in all the main small-server operating environments and uses the MySQL database. XCAP offers more than 20 modules for a wide range of social netting functions, including content management.

Packaging: Downloadable licensed software for user organizations and site developers. XCAP Xpress is a ready-for-use version.
Innovation score: 3.5. XCAP's environmental versatility, modular structure and large number of APIs help make it adaptable to most needs.
Company: 15 employees; 1 office, in Sweden; 4 partners, all in northern Europe; a good number of customers
Corporate fitness score: 2.5. The software is used outside the firewall by several large publishing companies but mainly in Scandinavia.

10. Liferay Social Office provides a good range of groupware, social networking and content management features for internal or external use. A plug-in to Liferay's popular open-source Portal product, Social Office can mirror the organizational structure of a company. It is built in Java and offers an API for integration with corporate software.

Packaging: Downloadable free as open source software or licensed in an "enterprise" version
Innovation score: 3.0. Built around a hierarchical system of communities and organizations rather than individuals.
Company: 90+ employees; 6 offices - HQ in USA, others in Europe and Asia; there are Liferay Portal partners on 3 continents; many customers for Portal but Social Office is too new for that
Corporate fitness score: 3.5. Multilingual, with good integration with enterprise software. Product still in beta.

11. Mzinga OmniSocial integrates social networking, groupware, e-learning and learning management, and membership analysis tools.

Packaging: A hosted service supplied in three versions - for marketing, human resources and support - all able to carry the customer's branding. These can occupy their own Web site or sites or can be made part of another site.
Innovation score: 5.0. The inclusion of its previously separate learning tools makes Mzinga's software unusual, if not unique. Community activity analysis is a bonus.
Company: 170 employees; 9 offices - 2 real and 6 virtual in the USA, 1 (real) in Australia; no partners listed; customers around the world, some large
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. The combined product is new and has few customers so far. Enterprise integration is not evident.

12. Novell Teaming offers a wide range of social networking tools allied to groupware (GroupWise) and document management, with an option of workflow management. It is written in Java and runs on Linux servers. Access is by a range of Web browsers. Teaming integrates with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and can use MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Packaging: Licensed software to run on customer's premises.
Innovation score: 3.5. The workflow tools make Teaming unusual.
Company: 3,900 employees; 100 offices around the world; many partners but few for this product; many existing customers, often large, but few for this product
Corporate fitness score: 4.0. Novell is a corporate software specialist. It seems to be aiming this product at formalised organizations. There are no public details of large installations.

13. Open Text ECM Suite is an integrated suite of groupware, document management, search, workflow and, latterly, social networking tools. It is an evolution of Open Text's longstanding LiveLink enterprise offering and can integrate with Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle or SAP.

Packaging: As licensed, downloadable software and as a hosted service.
Innovation score: 3.5. A strong product but slightly off the pace in its social networking abilities. The company's recent acquisition of Vignette should improve that.
Company: 3,000 employees; 46 offices, in Canada (HQ), others in North & South America and Europe; many partners worldwide; many existing customers, often large
Corporate fitness score: 4.5. Open Text is a corporate software specialist with worldwide offices; it aims ECM Suite at strongly formalised organizations. There are few publicly-listed large users of the social networking tools.

14. Socialtext offers a set of integrated social netting tools, including wikis, micro-blogging and, new this autumn, 'social' spreadsheets. The tools are accessible from desktop devices running in Windows, Apple OS and Linux. Mobile access is also possible. Socialtext software uses the Google OpenSocial API, and can link to Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Connections.

Packaging: Available as a hosted service or as an 'appliance', a plug-and-go bundle of hardware and software on Socialtext's premises or the customer's.
Innovation score: 5.0. The appliance offering and the 'behind the firewall' wiki spreadsheet are unique.
Company: 75 employees; 5 offices, in the USA (HQ), Canada and the UK; no details listed of partners; many existing customers
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. Socialtext has a good set of features but it comes from a smallish organization with, so far, no large customers listed.

15. ThoughtFarmer is software for behind-the-firewall social networking. It offers a range of Web 2.0 tools that link closely with a user organization's Microsoft infrastructure, such as .NET, SQL Server, Active Directory and Exchange Server. Access is by browser, running on varied devices, only Internet Explorer gives single sign-on. ThoughtFarmer is multilingual, offering localised user interfaces, multiple language versions of any page and automatic translation of content (using a Google service). The user interface can carry the user organization's branding.

Packaging: Commercial product to run in a user organization's Microsoft server environment.
Innovation score: 5.0. For being able to switch between 7 languages and for its relationship browser.
Company: 25 employees; 1 office, in Canada; has a few partners, in three continents; few large customers.
Corporate fitness score: 3.5. The reliance on Microsoft underpinnings narrows the range of potential user organizations. Growth will also be limited by the small number of partners.

16. Traction Teampage is a Java server for internal and external collaboration that gives users wiki and blog tools, with discussion and tagging. The latest release includes free-text search and analysis (from Attivio) and the option to link to Oracle databases. The server software can run on Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X computers. Access is by Web browser running on Windows, Macintosh or Unix machines or BlackBerry PDAs.

Packaging: TeamPage Server is a downloadable licensed package to run on the customer's premises or from a cloud (Amazon EC3). TeamPage5 is a free, downloadable server package with limited use and capabilities.
Innovation score: 4.0. For its fluid user interface and access to Attivio's information extraction tools. A broader range of social netting tools would be welcome.
Company: 11 employees; 1 office in the USA; 1 European partner and a Japanese reseller; users worldwide, some of them large.
Corporate fitness score: 3.0. Traction Software is a small company that is not growing. It has a popular product but there is no indication of its likely integration with corporate processes or application software.

= = = = =

That completes the summary of results on products, services and their delivery.

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SAS and the Business Analytics Innovation Centre

Dr Fern Halper, Hurwitz and Associates — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:27:00 +0100

By: Dr Fern Halper, Partner, Hurwitz & Associates
Posted: 4th November 2009
Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2009

Last Friday, SAS announced that it was partnering with Teradata and Elder Research Inc. (a data mining consultancy) to open a Business Analytics Innovation Centre. According to the press release,

"Recognising the growing need and challenges businesses face driving operational analytics across enterprises, SAS and Teradata are planning to establish a centralised "think tank" where customers can discuss analytic best practices with domain and subject-matter experts, and quickly test or implement innovative models that uncover unique insights for optimising business operations."

The center will include a lab for pilot programs, analytic workshops and proof of concept for customers. I was excited about the announcement, because it further validated the fact that business analytics continues to gain steam in the market. I had a few questions, however, that I sent to SAS. Here are the responses.

Q. Is this a physical center or a virtual center? If physical, where is it located and how will it be staffed? If virtual, how will it be operationalized?
R. The Business Analytics Innovation Center will be based at SAS headquarters in Cary, North Carolina. We will offer customer meetings, workshops and projects out of the Center.

Q. Will there be consulting services around actually deploying analytics into organizations? In other words, is it business action oriented or more research oriented?
R. The Business Analytics Innovation Center will offer consulting services around how best to deploy analytics into organizations, as well as conduct research-based activities to help businesses improve operational efficiency.

Q. Should we expect to hear more announcements from SAS around business analytics, similar to what has been happening with IBM?
R. As the leader in business analytics software and services, SAS continues to make advances in its business analytics offerings. You can expect to hear more from SAS in this area in 2010

I'm looking forward to 2010!

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Goodbye portability - hello tin

Philip Howard, Bloor Research — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0100

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research
Posted: 4th November 2009
Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Thirty years ago, if you wanted to license software you bought proprietary software running on a proprietary database or file system that ran on a proprietary operating system running on proprietary hardware. Then along came UNIX, which promised portability at the operating system level, and along came Oracle and Ingres, which promised portability at the database level. Both companies championed the principles of openness and portability.

Now consider the world today: Ingres is an open source vendor, which is about as close as you can get to remaining true to its origins. Oracle, on the other hand, first introduced Exadata and now Exadata V2.

Exadata V2 is great technology. It will significantly boost performance for both transactional and warehousing environments based on the latest version of Oracle Database 11g.

However, is it open and portable?

I completely agree that Oracle Database 11g is. If you are an SME that doesn’t need anything very powerful or with lots of capacity then Oracle Database 11g is as open and portable as it ever was. But if you are a major enterprise user then, to all intents and purposes, I don’t think it is. Clearly, Exadata V2 gives a significant boost to performance, whether in OLTP or warehousing environments, compared to Oracle Database 11g running on other platforms.

Let’s go back a bit. Why did Oracle introduce Exadata in the first place? Oracle’s position is that “customers were asking for end to end solutions where some intelligent software is optimising the capabilities of commodity hardware to deliver high performance, scalability, and reliability - at the lowest possible cost”.

In my view, what that amounts to is that Oracle was under competitive pressure from the likes of Netezza. But, whatever the reason, the question was how to meet these customer requirements/competition? Oracle’s position is that “the data warehousing problem wasn’t in the database software – it was the inability of the storage systems to deliver high data throughput to the database.” While Teradata and Netezza might go along with that, the likes of Sybase and Vertica probably wouldn’t. In any case, Oracle developed Exadata and now Exadata V2.

What this does is to combine smart storage software from Oracle and industry-standard hardware from Sun. To overcome the limitations of conventional storage, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers use a massively parallel architecture to increase data bandwidth between the database server and storage. In addition, smart storage software offloads data-intensive query processing from Oracle Database 11g servers and does the query processing closer to the data. The result is faster parallel data processing and less data movement through higher bandwidth connections.

So, to return to the original question. Why would you not implement Exadata V2? In my view you’d have to be a lunatic not to. And since there’s only one platform for Exadata V2 (and that will shortly – probably - be owned by Oracle) then you are effectively turning your back on openness. Now, of course, Oracle makes the point that you are perfectly at liberty to port Oracle Database 11g to any platform you want to. And that’s absolutely true and you can do that. But if you did, then right now you would have to classed as certifiable: why on earth would you want to implement something that is inferior and doesn’t give you as good performance? You’d have to be nuts.

Oracle’s perspective is that Oracle Database 11g is as open and portable as it ever was. Mine is that Exadata V2 means that this is no longer true at the high end. As Nietzsche put it: “he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster”. Oracle doesn’t think that quote is apposite. You make your own mind up.

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Web security market consolidation

Bob Tarzey, Quocirca — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:23:38 +0100

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca
Posted: 3rd November 2009
Copyright Quocirca © 2009

Two acquisitions announced in the last week underline the battle to gain market share and technical superiority in the web security market and continue the debate about how content security is best delivered—at the edge of the network or in the cloud using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

First, on 28 October, Cisco announced it was buying ScanSafe, a UK company that had established a strong position in SaaS-based web security, and today, M86 Security (formerly Marshal) announced it was buying the Israeli firm Finjan, a specialist in real-time web threat analysis.

These acquisitions are the latest in a continuum of such deals, marking the near end of consolidation of the web security sector that has taken place over the last few years, as there are few small specialists left. Most are now part of the broad portfolios of large security vendors, which is, in Quocirca's view, no bad thing as it stabilises the market and provides new sales channels for the strongest products. The same sort of consolidation happened at an earlier stage in the email security market.

For example, the overall leader in web security, Websense, shook the market in 2007 when it bought one of its main rivals, SurfControl. This strengthened its market share, but was also part of a broader strategy to widen its portfolio, as SurfControl had other assets including email security. Websense had already acquired Port Authority—a data loss prevention vendor—and has since acquired Defensio to strengthen its spam filtering.

McAfee followed with the purchase of Secure Computing in late 2008. Its rivals Symantec and Trend Micro are also in the web security market—the former through its 2008 MessageLabs acquisition (this SaaS-based email security vendor was already developing web security technology) and the latter through a couple of technology acquisitions as long ago as 2005, and in-house development.

When considering which approach to take for web security—network-edge or SaaS—latency is often of primary concern—more so than with email security—as any security technology that slows down web access frustrates users and damages productivity. Network edge vendors claim a performance advantage, but there are two factors that further complicate issues.

First, web security policies that control the web use inside the firewall need to be extended to those working remotely; this is more easily achieved with a SaaS-based service. Second, web-based business processes often span multiple organisations, making the network edge much vaguer than it used to be and content security policy often needs to be extended to external users.

It is interesting that Cisco bought ScanSafe, a pioneer in the delivery of SaaS-based web security. In the past Cisco has stuck to hardware appliances to be deployed at the network edge for security, for example IronPort, which it acquired in 2007 for email security. Perhaps Cisco is recognising that the only way to control disparate web users is with a SaaS-based system, giving customers confidence to use the web for communication and collaboration wherever they are, including the use of web-based voice, video and web conferencing tools. Cisco's only other foray into SaaS so far was its 2008 acquisition of web conferencing vendor WebEx.

M86 Security's acquisition of Finjan tackles the latency issue. M86 Security was already in the web security market with its WebMarshal software aimed at small businesses and its 8e6 appliance for URL filtering that became part of its portfolio when it merged with 8e6 Technologies—leading to the new name. The Finjan acquisition adds real-time web threat monitoring, ensuring all web traffic is inspected for malware with minimal degradation of performance. It also adds some SaaS capability as Finjan was already in the process of extending its gateway-based web security to the cloud.

There are still plenty of choices even though consolidation has meant web security is now mainly in the realm of broad-based one-stop-shop security suppliers. Vendors are increasingly offering both network edge and cloud-based offerings, in some cases a hybrid of both, allowing customers to achieve a balance between performance and reach. Some buyers still regard cloud-based offerings with suspicion, especially when it comes to security, but such offerings are performing better and better, so many are accepting that outsourcing security to experts makes sense.

The web is an essential tool for all businesses. Making its use as safe as possible while ensuring users remain focused on the benefits it brings, knowledge acquisition and communication, while avoiding its many distractions, is the aim of all these products. With the right tools it is possible to ensure the web is a largely safe and productive environment. Happy surfing.

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Business and technical cases build for data center consolidation and modernization

Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0100

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions
Posted: 3rd November 2009
Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Data-center consolidation and modernization of IT systems helps enterprises reduce cost, cut labor, slash energy use, and become more agile.

Infrastructure advancements, standardization, performance density, and network services efficiencies are all allowing for bigger and fewer data centers and strategically architected and located facilities that can efficiently carry more of the total IT requirements load.

But to gain the benefits of these large and strategic infrastructure undertakings, the impact on the network beyond the firewall has to be considered. User expectations for performance and IT requirements for reliability need to be maintained, and even improved.

Fewer data centers means longer distances between servers and users. Network services and Internet performance management therefore need to be brought considered to produce the desired effect of topnotch applications and data delivery to enterprises, consumers, partners, and employees at far lower cost.

Here to help us better understand how to get the best of all worlds—that is, high performance and lower total cost from data center consolidation—we're joined by James Staten, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research; Andy Rubinson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Akamai Technologies, and Tom Winston, Vice President of Global Technical Operations at Phase Forward, a provider of integrated data management solutions for clinical trials and drug safety. The panel is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Staten: Oftentimes, the biggest reason to do [consolidation] is because you have sprawl in the data center. You're running out of power, you're running out of the ability to cool any more equipment, and you are running out of the ability to add new servers, as your business demands them.

If there are new applications the business wants to roll out, and you can't bring them to market, that's a significant problem. This is something the organizations have been facing for quite some time.

As a result, if they can start consolidating, they can start moving some of these workloads onto fewer systems. This allows them to reduce the amount of equipment they have to manage and the number of software licenses they have to maintain and lower their support costs. In the data center overall, they can lower their energy costs, while reducing some of the cooling required.

... Most applications actually end up consuming on average only 15–20 percent of the server. If that's the case, you've got an awful lot of headroom to put other applications on there.

We were isolating applications on their own physical systems, so that they would be protected from any faults or problems with other applications that might be on the same system and take them down. Virtualization is the primary isolating technology that allows us to do that.

... More and more applications are being broken down into modules, and, much like the web services and web applications that we see today, they're broken into tiers. Individual logic runs on its own engine, and all of that can be spread across some more monetized, consistent infrastructure. We are learning these lessons from the dot-coms of the world and now the cloud-computing providers of the world, and applying them to the enterprise.

... On average, across all the enterprises we have spoken to, you can realistically expect to see about a 20 percent cost reduction from doing this. But, as you said, if you've got 5,000 servers, and they're all running at 5 percent utilization, there are big gains to be had.

Rubinson: I focus mainly on delivery over the Internet. There are definitely some challenges, if you're talking about using the Internet with your data center infrastructure—things like performance latency, availability challenges from cable cuts, and things of that nature, as well as security threats on the Internet.

It's thinking about how can you do this, how can you deliver to a global user base with your data center, without having to necessarily build out data centers internationally, and to be able to do that from a consolidated standpoint.

... From the cost perspective, we're able to eliminate unnecessary hardware. We're able to take some of that load off of the servers, and do the work in the cloud, which also helps reduce them.

... In terms of responsiveness, by using the Internet, you can deploy a lot more quickly. It allows us to give that same type of performance, availability, and security that you would get from having a private WAN, but doing it over the much less expensive Internet.

This is really important, as we have seen more and more users that are going outside of the corporate [networks]. People are connecting to suppliers, to partners, to customers, and to all sorts of things now.

... By optimizing the cloud, we're able to speed the delivery of information from the origin as well. That's where it's benefiting folks like Tom, where he is able to not only cache information, but the information that is dynamic, that needs to get back from the data center, goes more quickly.

Winston: When I joined [Phase Forward], it had two different data centers—one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. We were facing the challenge of potentially having to expand into a European data center, and even potentially a Pacific Rim data center.

By continuing to expand our virtualization efforts, as well as to leverage some of the technologies that Andy just mentioned ... Internet acceleration via some of the Akamai technologies, we were able to forgo that data center expansion. In fact, we were able to consolidate our data center to one East Coast data center, which is now our primary hosting center for all of our applications.

So it had a very significant impact for us by being able to leverage both that WAN acceleration, as well as virtualization, within our own four walls of the data center.

We run electronic data capture (EDC) software, and pharmacovigilance software for the largest pharmaceutical and clinical device makers in the world. They are truly global organizations in nature. So, we have users throughout the world, with more and more heavy population coming out of the Asia Pacific area.

... We have a very large, diverse user base that is accessing our applications 24x7x365, and, as a result, we have performance needs all the time for all of our users.

... Our primary application, our flagship application, is a product called InForm, which is the main EDC product that our customers use across the Internet. It's accelerated using Akamai technology, and almost 100 percent of our content is dynamic. It has worked extremely well.

Staten: ... Users are all over the place. Whether they are an internal employee, a customer, or a business partner, they need to get access to those applications, and they have a performance expectation that's been set by the Internet. They expect whatever applications they are interacting with will have that sort of local feel.

That's what you have to be careful about in your planning of consolidation. You can consolidate branch offices. You can consolidate down to fewer data centers. In doing so, you gain a lot of operational efficiencies, but you can potentially sacrifice performance.

You have to take the lessons that have been learned by the people who set the performance bar, the providers of Internet-based services, and ask, "How can I optimize the WAN? How can I push out content? How can I leverage solutions and networks that have this kind of intelligence to allow me to deliver that same performance level?" That's really the key thing that you have to keep in mind. Consolidation is great, but it can't be at the sacrifice of the user experience.

... The right location [for data centers] has to be optimized for a variety of factors. It has to be optimized for where the appropriate skill sets are. It has to be optimized for the geographic constraints that you may be under.

You may be doing business in a country in which all of the citizen information of the people who live in that country must reside in that country. If that's the case, you don't necessarily have to own a data center there, but you absolutely have to have a presence there.

Winston: ... We had users in China who, due to the amount of traffic that had to traverse the globe, were not happy with the performance of the application. Specifically, we brought in Akamai to start with a very targeted group of users and to be able to accelerate for them the application in that region.

It literally cut the problem right out. It solved it almost immediately. At that point, we then began to spread the rest of that application acceleration product across the rest of our domains, and to continue to use that throughout the product set.

Rubinson: ... We recently commissioned a study with Forrester, looking at what is that tolerance threshold [for a page to load]. In the past it had been that people had tolerance for about four seconds. As of this latest study, it's down to two seconds. That's for business to consumer (B2C) users. What we have seen is that the business-to-business (B2B) users are even more intolerant of waiting for things.

It really has gotten to a point where you need that immediate delivery in order to drive the usage of the tools that are out there.

... Just putting yourself in the cloud doesn't mean that you're not going to have the same type of latency issues, delivering over the Internet. It's the same thing with availability in trying to reach folks who are far away from that hosted data center. So, the cloud isn't necessarily the answer. It's not a pill that you can take to fix that issue.

... For Akamai, it's really about how we're able to accelerate. How we are able to optimize the routing and the other protocols on the Internet to make that get from wherever it's hosted to a global set of end users.

We don't care about where they are. They don't have to be on the corporate, private WANs. It's really about that global reach and giving the levels of performance to actually provide an SLA. Tell me who else out there provides an SLA for delivery over the Internet? Akamai does.

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

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Interview on IASA, the value of architecture, and Cloud Computing

Neil Ward-Dutton, MWD Advisors — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:26:10 +0100

By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors
Posted: 2nd November 2009
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

While I was at IASA's ITARC NYC the other week, Matt Deacon (day job: developer/architect evangelist for Microsoft in the UK; evening job: UK Chapter President of IASA) interviewed me about my thoughts on the value of architecture, the role of IASA and also about the talk I gave at the event.

The talk I gave was on a recent survey we completed in association with IASA—focused on architects' experiences of, and views on, Cloud Computing. In the second half of the interview Matt talks to me about some of the early findings from that survey.

The video interview with Matt and me is about 21 minutes long, and it's published on Microsoft's Channel 9. I think the discussion turned out pretty well, though I say so myself... Matt has also published an interview with the SEI's Len Bass from the same conference btw, and that's worth a look, definitely.

The full survey findings will be published as part of our new Software Delivery advisory service, which we'll be launching this month. If you're an enterprise IT practitioner and you'd like to find out more about the service here's something for you; if you work for an IT vendor organisation, here's some information for you.

I'd love to get feedback from you if you have time to sit through the interview... what did you think?

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How to Select the Right Skype for Business Solution

David Tang, VoSKY Technologies — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0100

By: David Tang, Global VP, VoSKY Technologies
Posted: 2nd November 2009
Copyright VoSKY Technologies © 2009

With over 480.5 million registered users, Skype offers tremendous potential for businesses. Skype has indicated that over 30% of its user base utilises Skype for business to enhance communications and reduce costs. The large global Skype user base also provides a very attractive B2C opportunity, allowing interaction and driving sales opportunities with millions of potential customers. How do companies capitalize on Skype and what's the best approach to bringing it into your business? That depends on what telecoms & telephony gear you already have installed.

Maximising the use of your existing infrastructure to minimise outlay and get the fastest return on investment makes sense, so lets look at some typical existing business comms deployments—and the best approach to Skype deployment in each case.

Skype without a PBX
For smaller companies without a key system or PBX, the option is to use Skype for Business. This provides the same features as the consumer service: voice, video and conferencing calling, instant messaging (IM), group IM and a mobility client, but scaled for business usage, with the benefits of low cost. These can be deployed on stand-alone desk phones or wifi phones, giving flexible business connectivity.

Skype for Business also lets businesses make use of the Skype Business Control Panel (BCP), a free web-based tool which lets businesses allocate and manage their employees' Skype credit balances centrally and keep track of expenditure with built-in reporting tools.

Skype with IP PBXs
For those who do have an IP-PBX Skype offers two options: Skype for Asterisk and Skype for SIP.

Skype for Open Source PBX
Skype for Asterisk (SFA) is a channel driver that integrates with an Asterisk-based IP-PBX. Connecting the Asterisk-based IP-PBX to the Skype network adds new functionalities and reduces communications costs. It's a great solution for Asterisk developers and integrators. However, for the typical business, it could be challenging to deploy since SFA is neither a complete nor turn-key solution. Businesses will need to deploy an Asterisk open source PBX and pay for an Asterisk consultant or integrator to support the integration.

Skype for SIP
The second solution is Skype for SIP (SFS). This more recent offering from Skype is a SIP trunking solution that connects directly to SIP-based IP-PBXs. The key advantage of SFS is that it allows Skype users to call the SIP IP-PBX by simply clicking onto the Skype ID. It also allows companies to utilize the Skype button for Web Click-to-Call. SFS is presently in beta.

Skype for Legacy PBXs
With nearly 80% of PBXs in the market still being non-VoIP or key systems, preserving existing infrastructure whilst adding new cost-saving VoIP functionalities is great for any business—especially in the current economic climate.

PBX-to-Skype Gateways are an excellent solution to connect to analogue and digital PBXs. They integrate with existing office phone systems, enabling businesses to preserve their investment. The Gateways are PBX agnostic, providing seamless integration between Skype and any analogue or digital PBXs via FXO, FXS or T1/E1 interfaces.

Furthermore, these turnkey Gateways deliver plug-and-play integration with the existing comms system, making it easy for IT managers to configure and manage. There is no need to use headsets for Internet calls because all inbound and outbound Skype calls are routed through users' regular desktop telephone handsets.

Skype Certified PBX-to-Skype Gateways
VoSKY is the only vendor that offers a full range of PBX-to-Skype Gateways that are fully tested and certified by Skype. The turn-key gateways enable businesses to benefit from rich Skype functionality and let users make, receive and transfer Internet-based Skype calls over standard office phone systems for free or for a fraction of the cost of standard calls using SkypeOUT.

VoSKY Exchange PBX-to-Skype Gateways let companies add enhanced applications to their legacy analogue or digital phone systems like Voice VPN, enabling them to easily interconnect multiple branch offices without paying for expensive leased lines; remote access, enabling mobile and remote workers to dial directly via Skype into the company PBX from any location, reducing their international calling costs; or Click-to-Call, linking their website and phone system to provide real-time interaction with website visitors, enhancing customer relations.

The benefits of Skype for business solutions are clear—you cut costs whilst opening your business up to the worldwide Skype community. But to make the most of Skype it's important to choose the right Skype for business solution for your company. By ensuring you identify the correct approach for your business the benefits of Skype could be tremendous, no matter which communications infrastructure you have.

http://www.vosky.com/

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Pervasiveness and micro-decisions

Philip Howard, Bloor Research — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0100

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research
Posted: 2nd November 2009
Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Unlike Judith Hurwitz (see “Can we free process and data?”) I was not at IBM’s Information On Demand (IOD) conference last week. Partly this is because IBM now runs a European IOD event, partly it is because I met with Ambuj Goyal (head of Business Analytics and Performance Optimization at IBM) in Paris in September and got pre-briefed on “information-led transformation” and partly because IBM knows very well that I won’t go to Las Vegas (everybody should go there once—I’ve been there once).

Anyway, what about information-led transformation (ILT)? This is IBM’s next step in its strategic direction for information management: first there was information on demand, through which IBM talked about unlocking the value of information, then the information agenda—which describes “how” one can unlock that value (and which has been astonishingly successful) and now there is ILT. What is it exactly?

Let me take a step back. A few years ago all the BI vendors (and ILT is not just about BI—it’s about business optimisation—but I’ll get to that point in a moment) were pushing the idea of “pervasive BI”. The problem with this is that it is essentially a contradiction in terms. What BI is all about, as it is most usually understood, is doing some slicing and dicing, or analytics, or data mining, that supports a very limited number of people within the organisation. Typical BI tools are simply not suited to day-to-day use by average employees. Yes, you can add a search interface that makes it easier for non-technical people to query the data but the truth is that most people in their day to day jobs don’t have, or don’t perceive themselves as having, a need to run queries per se.

What ILT does, at least in part, is to recognise that this concept of pervasiveness doesn’t work. That traditional BI is about making macro-level decisions. On the other hand, there is a huge constituency of people who do have to make micro-decisions on a daily basis. And these people need to have relevant information in order to make those decisions. This is what ILT is all about: providing people with the information they need (and only the information they need) to take all those little decisions that they have to make every day.

Now, you don’t want BI for this purpose and you don’t want people to have to run queries; you want information provided within a business process or application, or maybe presented via a dashboard, that just provides the information that is necessary for that particular worker. This is what ILT is all about: enabling people to do their jobs better through the provision of relevant information.

What that means is that the information has to be in the right format, it has to be trustworthy, it has to be available when you need it, and you need to make sure that your information is aligned with your business objectives. And that’s when you get into the technology and solutions, because IBM aims to provide exactly those capabilities through its various products and services, whether that’s leveraging BI, data mining, the underlying database, data integration, its business glossary, master data management, data quality, its industry-specific information agenda roadmaps, tools and accelerators or any of a number of other offerings. As far as the end user is concerned, of course, all of this is invisible.

Of course, it’s not just about transformation, ILT is also about continuous improvement but ILTACI would be a bit of mouthful. Whatever you call it, this is exactly the sort of thing that businesses ought to be thinking about.

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Do you have an analytics strategy and why should you care?

Marcia Kaufman, Hurwitz and Associates — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:39:14 +0100

By: Marcia Kaufman, Partner, Hurwitz & Associates
Posted: 31st October 2009
Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2009

After just returning from IBM's Information on Demand (IOD) Conference in Las Vegas, I would like to take this opportunity to virtually whisper just one word in the ear of a current–day Benjamin Braddock—"analytics". Many businesses have spent the past 25 years or so automating and streamlining business processes in order to drive improvements in efficiency and productivity. But now, it is becoming apparent that these businesses expect their future success will increasingly depend on how skillfully they manage, govern, and analyze information. Businesses are applying analytical techniques to business information to help reduce risk and increase the certainty that they are making the right decisions.

IBM has, in fact, spent $12 billion in software investments (both organic multiple acquisitions like SPSS, Cognos, Filenet, iPhrase, and Ascential Software, just to name a few) over the past 4–5 years to ensure it will be able to support its customers in their quest to unlock the business value of information. In addition, in April of 2009 IBM announced a new organization comprised of 4000 consultants focused on advanced business analytics and business optimization—teams with skills in applying business intelligence technologies like mathematical modeling, simulation, data analytics, and optimization techniques.

In an era of intense competition, tight credit, and cost concerns across global and vertical markets, this focus on getting the most value from the information you have makes a lot of sense. Companies find they are processing more information than ever before, but less of this information is being accurately and adequately used. The quantity of available data that a business needs to manage and understand has skyrocketed along with the increase in instrumented and intelligent products. For example, RFID tags that are embedded in manufactured products, plants and animals generate an enormous amount of data in efforts to control inventories and improve security and safety. Trying to make decisions with inadequate, inaccurate, or untimely information is like driving a fast sports car down the highway with a very large blind spot impeding your view of the truck approaching on your side. You need to know about the obstacles that might appear in your pathway before you try to make a "real-time" correction and steer your car (or your business) off a cliff. So, students and business leaders alike please take note, I see some "analytics" in your future.

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Building trusted Cloud APIs: Sonoa and apigee

Neil Ward-Dutton, MWD Advisors — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:02:09 +0100

By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors
Posted: 31st October 2009
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

The other day I got a business update from Sonoa Systems, sparked by the arrival at the company by Sam Ramji—former Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft. Sam is now the VP of Strategy at Sonoa.

As you can see in our report on Sonoa, the company is making significant inroads in a critical area of service management, focused on assuring the quality-of-service delivered by APIs. The company started out selling its core technology, ServiceNet, as a service management platform for SOA implementations, but recently it's expanded its focus to delivering enabling technology that helps media companies, SaaS providers, telcos and other service providers—as well as traditional "bricks and mortar" companies like Guardian Life which want to offer some of their internal capabilities as wholesale services—ensure that the API consumer experience is reliable and that quality can be guaranteed. MySpace, Warner Music and MTV Networks are all customers.

Now, Sonoa sees its ultimate value as enabling enterprises that want to jump "into the Cloud"—but that also need to continue to comply with policies and governance requirements—to make the leap; principally by driving up the level of API-quality trust and visibility that can exist between service providers and consumers.

In the context of this goal, the recent launch by Sonoa of a freemium-model, self-service, hosted implementation of the core ServiceNet technology under the brand "Apigee" (see www.apigee.com) is a smart development. The idea is to enable API providers, and developers consuming APIs, to quickly set up and use value-added API management services. There are already 250 customers live, evenly split between API providers, API consumers, and those who both consume and provide APIs.

We know from our research that although there's very significant interest from organisations in the potential flexibility, time-to-market and cost profile that Cloud Computing and SaaS models can bring, security and trust remain the top concerns for those many companies that haven't yet dipped their toes in the water. It'll be fascinating to see if and how companies like Sonoa can drive broad, mainstream adoption of the "remixable services and data" Web 2.0 promise that has so much potential value.

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Rural Payments Agency: More Government Data Loss

Alastair Revell, Revell Research Systems — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:01:56 +0100

By: Alastair Revell, Managing Consultant, Revell Research Systems
Posted: 31st October 2009
Copyright Revell Research Systems © 2009

Farmers Weekly has reported that the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has lost the payment details of every farmer in the United Kingdom that has ever claimed a farm payment. The details include names and addresses, bank details, passwords and security questions and apparently were not encrypted. The number of farmers affected is believed to be around 100,000.

The details were leaked to Farmers Weekly by frustrated civil servants working on the single payments system and an external consultant who was advising on the system.

The whistle-blowers allege that 39 backup tapes went missing last year when they were transferred from offices in Reading to Newcastle. Thirty-seven tapes have been recovered, but two are still unaccounted for.

The whistle-blowers were concerned that the RPA and DEFRA would remain tight-lipped over the incident. According to Farmers Weekly, DEFRA has admitted that tapes went missing, but has told them that the data was not lost in transit and was instead misplaced within the data centre.

DEFRA has also admitted that the data on the tapes was not encrypted, but insists information could not be accessed without specialised technical equipment and knowledge. The government department has also insisted that the risks posed to farmers are very low.

Apparently, the tapes were last seen in June 2008, but were discovered as missing by the contractor, IBM, in May 2009. Their loss has only just become public knowledge in late October 2009.

Obviously, this will do little to bolster the general public’s justifiable lack of confidence in the government’s ability to safe-guard their data. The question is soon going to be what data has the government not lost!

However, as I have said before, I do not believe that the government is actually any more cavalier with data than the private sector. It is just that the government is an easier target to expose. I believe the data handling procedures of many commercial organisations are equally poor.

This most recent loss has barely hit the headlines, probably because it is no longer newsworthy to say that the government leaks like a colander. The next organisation to be vilified by the press for data loss may well come from the private sector…

This weblog is produced by Revell Research Systems.

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Is cloud security really different than data center security?

Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz and Associates — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:25:48 +0100

Almost every conversation I have had over the past year or so always comes back to security in the cloud. Is it really secure? Or we are thinking about implementing the cloud but we are worried about security. There are, of course, good reasons to plan a cloud security strategy. But in a sense, it is no different than planning a security strategy for your company. But it is the big scary cloud! Well, before I list the top ten issues I would like to say one thing: if you think you need an entirely different security strategy for the cloud, you may not have a comprehensive security strategy to start with. Yes, you have to make sure that your cloud provider has a sophisticated approach to security. However, what about your Internet service provider? What about the level of security within your own IT department? Can you throw stones if you live in a glass house (yes, that is a pun...sorry)? So, before you start fretting about security in the cloud, get your own house in order. Do you have an identity management plan? Do you ensure that one individual within the data center can't control all of the data within a single environment to minimize risks? If you don't have a well executed internal security plan, you aren't ready for the cloud. But let's say that you have fixed that problem and you are ready to really plan your cloud security strategy. So, here five of the issues to consider. If you have others, let's start a conversation.

You need to start at the beginning with understanding the characteristics of your cloud provider. Is the company well funded? Is its data center designed with security at the center? Your level of scrutiny will also depend on how you are using the cloud. If you are using Infrastructure as a Service for a short term project there is less risk than if you are planning to use a cloud to store important customer data.
How is your cloud provider implementing security in a multi-tenant environment? How do they ensure that one customer's data doesn't impact another customer's data?
Does your cloud provider give you the ability to monitor security of your data in the cloud? This will be important both for compliance and to keep track of your own security policies.
Does your cloud provider encrypt your critical data? If not, why not?
Does your cloud provider give you the ability to control who is allowed to access your information based on roles and authorization? Does the cloud provider support federated identity management? This is basic security best practices.

Now you are probably saying to yourself that this isn't rocket science. These are fundamental security approaches that any data center should follow. I recommend that you take a look at a great document published by the Cloud Security Alliance that details many of the key issues surrounding security in the cloud. So, I guess my principle message is that cloud security is not different than security in any data center. But the market does not seem to understand this because the perception is that a cloud is somehow not a data center that can be secured with regular old security. I think that we will see something interesting happen because of this perception: cloud vendors will begin to charge a premium for really good security. In fact, this is already happening. Vendors like Amazon and Salesforce are offering segregated implementations of their environments to customers who don't trust their ordinary security approaches. This will work in the short term primarily because during this early phase of the cloud there is not enough focus on security. Long term, as the market matures, cloud vendors will have to demonstrate their ability to provide a secure environment based on basic security best practices. In the meantime, cloud vendors will rake in the cash for premium secure cloud services.

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Unintended consequences of the cloud - part II

Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz and Associates — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:17:51 +0100

As I was pointing out yesterday, there are many unintended consequences from any emerging technology platform—the cloud will be no exception. So, here are my next three picks for unintended consequences from the evolution of cloud computing:

4. The cloud will disrupt traditional computing sales models. I think that Larry Ellison is right to rant about Cloud Computing. He is clearly aware that if cloud computing becomes the preferred way for customers to purchase software the traditional model of paying maintenance on applications will change dramatically. Clearly, vendors can simply roll in the maintenance stream into the per user per month pricing. However, as I pointed out in Part I, prices will inevitably go down as competition for customers expands. There there will come a time when the vast sums of money collected to maintain software versions will seem a bit old fashioned. In fact, that will be one of the most important unintended consequences and will have a very disruptive effect on the economic models of computing. It has the potential to change the power dynamics of the entire hardware and software industries.The winners will be the customers and smart vendors who figure out how to make money without direct maintenance revenue. Like every other unintended consequence there will be new models emerging that will emerge that will make some really clever vendors very successful. But don't ask me what they are. It is just too early to know.

5. The market for managing cloud services will boom. While service management vendors do pretty well today managing data center based systems, the cloud environment will make these vendors king of the hill. Think about it like this. You are a company that is moving to the cloud. You have seven different software as a service offerings from seven different vendors. You also have a small private cloud that you use to provision critical customer data. You also use a public cloud for some large scale testing. In addition, any new software development is done with a public cloud and then moved into the private cloud when it is completed. Existing workloads like ERP systems and legacy systems of record remain in the data center. All of these components put together are the enterprise computing environment. So, what is the service level of this composite environment? How do you ensure that you are compliant across these environment? Can you ensure security and performance standards? A new generation of products and maybe a new generation of vendors will rake in a lot of cash solving this one.

6. What will processes look like in the cloud. Like data, processes will have to be decoupled from the applications that they are an integral part of the applications of record. Now I don't expect that we will rip processes out of every system of record. In fact, static systems such as ERP, HR, etc. will have tightly integrated processes. However, the dynamic processes that need to change as the business changes will have to be designed without these constraints. They will become trusted processes—sort of like business services that are codified but can be reconfigured when the business model changes. This will probably happen anyway with the emergence of Service Oriented Architectures. However, with the flexibility of cloud environment, this trend will accelerate. The need to have independent process and process models may have the potential of creating a brand new market.

I am happy to add more unintended consequences to my top six. Send me your comments and we can start a part III reflecting your ideas.

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Separating core from context brings high returns in legacy application transformation

Dana Gardner, Interarbor Solutions — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:00:00 +0100

This podcast is the second in a series of three to examine Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line. Through panel discussions we examine the rationale and likely returns of assessing the true role and character of legacy applications, and then further determine the paybacks from modernization.

To gain the most return on modernization projects, many enterprises are separating core from context when it comes to legacy enterprise applications and their modernization processes. As enterprises seek to cut their total IT costs, they need to identify what legacy assets are working for them and carrying their own weight, and which ones are merely hitching a high cost—but largely unnecessary—ride.

A widening cost and productivity division exists between older, hand-coded software assets and replacement technologies on newer, more efficient standards-based systems. Somewhere in the mix, there are also core legacy assets distinct from so-called contextal assets. There are peripheral legacy processes and tools that are costly vestiges of bygone architectures. There is legacy wheat and legacy chaff.

With us to delve deeper into the high rewards of transforming legacy enterprise applications is Steve Woods, distinguished software engineer at HP, and Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP. The discussion is moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: This podcast is about two types of IT assets: core and context. That whole approach to classifying business processes and their associated applications was invented by Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc.

He came up in Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution with this notion of core and context applications. Core being those that provide the true innovation and differentiation for an organization. Those are the ones that keep your customers. Those are the ones that improve the service levels. Those are the ones that generate your money. They are really important, which is why they're called "core."

When these applications were invented to provide the core capabilities, it was 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago. What we have to understand is that what was core 10 years ago may not be core anymore. There are ways of effectively doing it at a much different price point.

As Moore points out, organizations should be looking to build "core," because that is the unique intellectual property of the organization, and to then buy "context." They need to understand, how do I get the lowest-cost provision of something that doesn't make a huge difference to my product or service, but I need it anyway.

The "context" applications are not less important, but ... you should be looking to understand how that could be done in terms of lower-cost provisioning [of them].

Woods: [A lot of the interest in separating core and context in legacy IT applications] has to do with the pain users are going through. We have had customers who had assessments with us before, as much as a year ago, and now they're coming back and saying they want to get started and actually do something. So, a good deal of the interest is caused by the need to drive down costs.

Also, there's the realization that a lot of these tools—extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, reporting, and business process management (BPM)—are proving themselves now. We can't say that there is a risk in going to these tools. They realize that the strength of these tools is that they bring a lot of agility, solve skill sets issues, and make you much more responsive to the business needs of the organization.

... What I created at HP is a tool, an algorithm, that can go into any language legacy code and find the duplicate code, and not only find it, but visualize it in very compelling ways. That helps us drill down to identify what I call the unintended design. When we find these unintended designs, they lead us to ask very critical questions that are paramount to understanding how to design the transformation strategy.

... When you identify the IT elements that are not core and that could be moved out of handwritten code, you're transferring power from the developers—say, of COBOL—to the users of the more modern tools, like the BPM tools.

So there is always a political issue. What we try to do, when we present our findings, is to be very objective. You can't argue that we found that 65 percent of the application is not doing core. You can then focus the conversation on something more productive. What do we do with this? The worst thing you could possibly do is take a million lines of COBOL that's generating reports and rewrite that in Java or C# hard-written code.

We take the concept of core versus context not just to a possible off-the-shelf application, but at architectural component level. In many cases, we find that this is helpful for them to identify legacy code that could be moved very incrementally to these new architectures.

... A typical COBOL application—this is true of all legacy code, but particularly mainframe legacy code—can be as much as 5, 10, or 15 million lines of code. I think the sheer idea of the size of the application is an impediment. There is some sort of inertia there. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and it's been at rest for years, sometimes 30 years.

So, the biggest impediment is the belief that it's just too big and complex to move and it's even too big and complex to understand. Our approach is a very lightweight process, where we go in and answer to a lot of questions, remove a lot of uncertainty, and give them some very powerful visualizations and understanding of the source code and what their options are.

... When you go to the legacy side of the house, you start finding that 65 percent of this application is just doing ETL. It's just parsing files and putting them into databases. Why don't you replace that with a tool? The big resistance there is that, if we replace it with a tool, then the people who are maintaining the application right now are either going to have to learn that tool or they're not going to have a job.

If we get the facts on the table, particularly visually, then we find that we get a lot of consensus. It may be partial consensus, but it's consensus nonetheless, and we open up the possibilities and different options, rather than just continuing to move through with hand-written code.

Evans: If you look at this whole core-context thing, at the moment, organizations are still in survival mode. Money is still tight in terms of consumer spending. Money is still tight in terms of company spending. Therefore, you're in this position where keeping your customers or trying to get new customers is absolutely fundamental for staying alive. And, you do that by improving service levels, improving your services, and improving your product.

... The line-of-business people are now pushing on technology and saying, "You can't back off. You can't not give us what we want. We have to have this ability to innovate and differentiate, because that way we will keep our customers and we will keep this organization alive."

That applies equally to the public and private sectors. The public sector organizations have this mandate of improving service, whether it's in healthcare, insurance, tax, or whatever. So all of these commitments are being made and people have to deliver on them, albeit that the money, the IT budget behind it, is shrinking or has shrunk.

The leaders must understand what drives their company. Understand the values, the differentiation, and the innovations that you want and put your money on those and then find a way of dramatically reducing the amount of money you spend on the contextual stuff, which is pure productivity.

Woods: ... Decentralizing the architecture improves your efficiency and your redundancy. There is much more opportunity for building a solid, maintainable architecture than there would be if you kept a sort of monolithic approach that's typical on the mainframe.

... The problem is sometimes not nearly as big as it seems. If you look at the analogy of the clone codes that we find, and all the different areas that we can look at the code and say that it may not be as relevant to a transformation process as you think it is. I do this presentation called "Honey I Shrunk the Mainframe." If you start looking at these different aspects between the clone code and what I call the asymmetrical transformation from handwritten code to model driven architecture, you start looking at these different things. You start really seeing it.

We see this, when we go in to do the workshops. The subject matter experts and the stakeholders very slowly start to understand that this is actually possible. It's not as big as we thought. There are ways to transform it that we didn't realize, and we can do this incrementally. We don't have to do it all at once.

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

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Is it Possible to Make Predictive Analytics Pervasive?

Dr Fern Halper, Hurwitz and Associates — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:54:55 +0100

I just got back from the IBM Information on Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas. A key message was that the future is in analytics and predictive analytics at that. IBM has already invested $12B ($8B acquisitions, $4B organic growth) in analytics since 2005. Its recent purchase of SPSS has enabled the company to put a stake in the ground regarding leading the analytics charge.

Predictive analytics uses historical data to try to predict what might happen in the future. There are different technologies that can help you to do this including data mining and statistical modeling. For example, a wireless telecommunications company might try to predict churn by analyzing the historical data associated with customers who disconnected the service vs. those that did not. Attributes that might serve as predictors include dropped calls, calling volume (in network, out of network), demographic information, and so on. An insurance company might try to predict future fraud using past claims that where the outcome is known. Adam Gartenberg's blog describes more examples of this. IBM plans to make predictive analytics more pervasive in several ways.

Making models easier to build. It will make predictive modeling tools easier to use for those who build the models. A good example of this is the SPSS PASW Modeler product that uses a visual paradigm to build various kinds of models. I stopped by the SPSS booth at the show and saw the software at the demo area and it is nice with lots of feature/functionality built into it. Training is available (and I would argue necessary), for example, to understand when you might want to use a certain kind of model.
Embedding the predictive model in a process. Here, the predictive model would become part of a business process. For example, a predictive model might be built into a claims analysis process. The model determines the characteristics and predictors of claims that might be classified as fraudulent. As the claims come through the process, those that are suspicious, based on the model, would get kicked out for further examination.

So, given these two approaches, can predictive analytics become pervasive?

In the case of making predictive modeling tools easier to use, the question isn't whether someone can use a tool, but whether he or she can use it correctly. The goal of a tool like PASW is to enable business users to build advanced models. Could a BI power user who is accustomed to slicing and dicing and shaking and baking data effectively use a tool like this? Possibly, if they have the right thought process and they pay attention to the part of the training that describes what type of technique to use for what type of problem. It is a good goal. Time will be the judge.

As for embedding predictive analytics in business processes; this is already starting to happen and here is where the possibility of making prediction more pervasive gets exciting. For example, telecommunications companies can embed predictive analytics into a call center application to understand an action that a customer might take. A call center representative can make use of the results of the model (without understanding the model or what it does). He or she is simply fed information, from the model, (in real time) to help service a customer most effectively. The model can be created by a skilled analytics person, but deployed in such a way that it can help a lot of other people across an organization. One key will be the ability to integrate a model into the actual code and culture behind a business process.

Look, I don't have a crystal ball (little predictive modeling humor there), but I am very excited about the possibilities of predictive modeling. I did this kind of modeling for years at Bell Laboratories, way back when, and it is great to see it finally gaining traction in the marketplace. Predictive analytics can be a truly powerful weapon in the right hands.

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What are the unanticipated consequences of Cloud Computing- Part I

Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz and Associates — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:57:37 +0100

Maybe I am just obsessed with cloud computing these days. I guess that after spending more than 18 months researching the topic for our forthcoming book, Cloud Computing for Dummies, I can be excused for my obsession. Now that I am able to take a step back from the noise of the market, I have been thinking about what this will mean in the next ten years. Consequences of technology adoption are never what we expect. For example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s no one could imagine why anyone would want a personal computer. In fact, the only application people could imagine for a PC was a way to store recipes (I am not making this up). Keep in mind that this was before the first PC-based spreadsheet was designed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Franston (that's them in the picture). No one in those days could have predicted that everyone from a CEO to a three year old child would own a personal computer and its use would change the way we conduct business. (I never did find a recipe storing application).

The same logic can be applied to the Internet. While the Internet had been used 40 years ago by researchers, it was not a commercially viable option until the mid-1990s. In the early days of the Internet it was a sophisticated communications technology with a command line interface. Once the browser came along, businesses tended to use it to share price lists, marketing materials, and job postings. There were certainly message boards but only for the real techies. There were environments such as The Well which was the first online community used primarily by academics and wild-eyed researchers.

In that context, I was thinking about what we might expect to happen with cloud computing? There is a lot to say, so I decided to break this into two parts—each one will have three consequences. Here are today's top three:

Cloud computing will begin to change the way we think of an application. To be truly useful to large groups of individuals and businesses requires economies of scale in terms of massively scaled workloads. The only way to accomplish this is either to cherry pick a few big workloads (like email) or to branch out. That branching out is inevitable and will mean that vendors with cloud offerings will componentize their software offerings into modular services that can be mixed and matched with other services.
The prices that vendors will charge for cloud computing services will drop dramatically over the next few years. As prices drop it will become a lot more economically viable to substitute on premise environment for the cloud environment. Today this is not the case; large companies supporting thousands of users in an application environment cannot justify the movement to a cloud platform. What if the costs drop to the point where the economics (with the right workloads) favor cloud based services? When this happens there will be a tipping point that we might not even notice for a few years. But I predict that it will happen. We are already seeing Amazon dropping prices for its EC2 environment based on the competitive threat from Microsoft Azure services announcement.
The cloud will change the way we manage data. The traditional way we think about data, neatly stored in specific databases to handle a specific business problem, will inevitably change. This won't be an overnight change but it will happen. Data will increasingly be seen as a reusable resource that can be used in lots of different situations. There will continue to be strategic line of business applications but they will be more systems of record that keep track of the final result of actions that take place dynamically in the cloud. The value of data is not in its tight packaging as we have been used to for decades but it the flexibility to move, transform, and leverage data. The watch word for data in this new model will be Trusted Data in the Cloud.

I would love to know what you think of my top three choices; send me your comments and I will add them to my list for tomorrow.

As we deal with the cloud hype it is too easy to be dismissive and cynical. But we always treat complicated new trends that way—until one day they become the normal way of business and life.

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Mainframe-style data sharing comes to AIX

Julian Stuhler, Triton Consulting Ltd — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Since its introduction to the market in the mid-90s, DB2 for z/OS data sharing became the gold standard for enterprise data-serving scalability and availability. Customers using DB2 on midrange platforms have long been calling for similar capabilities. This has now arrived in the form of DB2 pureScale.

Based on the industry leading System z data sharing architecture, DB2 pureScale integrates IBM technologies to keep critical systems available 24/7. The technology is currently built on IBM Power Systems with other platforms available in the future. DB2 pureScale allows organisations to have multiple database servers in a system that all share a common set of disks providing both scalability, availability and application transparency.

"This is the single most significant technology release that IBM has introduced to the midrange market in the last decade. By utilizing many years of mainframe data sharing experience, DB2 pureScale will revolutionise the way organisations are able to manage their workload, helping them to achieve industry-leading levels of scalability and availability for their mission critical applications." said Julian Stuhler, Triton Director & Past President of IDUG (International DB2 Users Group) "Triton have been working with data sharing on the mainframe since it appeared in the mid-90's. It is hugely exciting to know that we will be able to put these skills into practice for our midrange customers now too."

Continuous Availability
DB2 pureScale keeps critical systems available all the time, giving uninterrupted access to data throughout both planned and unplanned outages. Fast recovery and data availability is assured, even with large clusters, by utilising the centralised locking capability of PowerHA pureScale.

In situations where one or more servers fail, whether due to hardware or software problems, the workload balancer automatically recognises which servers are available and sends transactions across to these servers without application interruption. Whilst this is happening, DB2 pureScale is doing a fast crash recovery on the failing node. By using automatic workload balancing to ensure that no node in the system is over loaded, DB2 will route transactions or connections to the least heavily used server.

Zero Downtime for Planned Outages
DB2 pureScale allows routine hardware maintenance, operating system changes or other configuration changes to be carried out by simply removing the relevant server from the cluster. The workload balancer redistributes transactions to the other servers in the cluster. This is done with complete transparency to the application and no interruption to the environment meaning that planned outages can be carried out whenever necessary rather than waiting for that late-night-on-Sunday window. This is vital for global organisations with users accessing their systems 24/7.

Capacity on Demand
Being able to quickly respond to rises in workload has become a competitive advantage. IT teams need the ability to respond quickly to change requests and provide extra capacity at peak times.

DB2 pureScale is designed to allow organisations to grow and shrink their server cluster on demand. This can be done without application changes and with no interruption to the business. Organisations that experience large peaks and troughs in their workload can add more capacity during that period and remove it when workloads reduce.

Cost Savings
Instead of over-provisioning environments to handle peak times, organisations can license the machines they want for the time they need. Customers can choose to pay for the additional cores only on the days that they use them. This means that a server can be added for a few days during those peak times and released when it is no longer needed, without additional cost.

Application Transparency
DB2 pureScale allows modification, maintenance and tuning transparently to the application. Additional servers can be added without the need for application developers to re-design their applications.

Triton Consulting are IBM Premier Business Partners and have expert knowledge of DB2 both in mainframe and midrange environments. Having expertise in both areas means that our consultants can bring their years of mainframe data sharing experience together with their knowledge of DB2 for midrange and so are ideally placed to provide support on DB2 pureScale implementations.

http://www.triton.co.uk/

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Managed Print Services - the answer to the "less-paper" office

Louella Fernandes, Quocirca — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:00:00 +0100

"Hit print intelligently", "Control print", "Print less, save more"—all mantras of printer companies today, despite the fact they are striving to increase sales of printers and consumables. Add to this the common email signature of "think before you print" and you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe we just shouldn't print at all? But like it or not, printing will continue to support 21st century businesses for some time to come. While the digital age has failed to deliver the paperless office, the "less paper" office is realistic. Paper remains a versatile, portable and personal reference medium and despite the growth in online collaboration, most still prefer to read a printed report or hard copy set of PowerPoint slides.

This is good news for printer companies, as such graphic-rich documents mean higher value pages which use more consumables. But it is good for businesses too; the affordability of today's business printers means that professional quality printing from office applications is simple and fast. Consider how fast a set of colour, graphic-rich PowerPoint slides can be printed. As presentation decks get larger and more complex, colour printed output increases—in volume and cost. Colour business print volumes have been further boosted as many businesses are also using high-end colour printer and copier devices to print material that would have previously been fulfilled by external print houses. With all this taken into account, it is estimated that, on average, an office worker prints a staggering 8,000 pages per year. According to NewField IT, this can range between 3,000 and 15,000 per year dependent on industry sector.

But what is not such good news is the escalating costs that uncontrolled printing can lead to for these same businesses. While professional colour business documents may promote effective communications, unnecessary colour printing can prove very costly. Few organisations have real insight into what is being printed, where and by whom. Fragmented ownership across departments and geographies has created device sprawl which means that many organisations operate a complex print environment, characterised by a tangled mix of devices from multiple vendors requiring different consumables, software, drivers and service contracts. On top of this, a lack of centralised print management tools means that few organisations have full visibility into print costs across their enterprises.

More organisations are recognising that operating an uncontrolled print environment is a huge cost and productivity drain. Managed print services (MPS) has emerged as a way to create efficiencies in the print environment through device consolidation, ongoing print management and document workflow solutions to support business processes. There is no "one-size-fits all" approach to MPS, but it should always include an external total cost of ownership (TCO) assessment of the existing printer fleet. This is increasingly incorporating environmental assessments to evaluate energy and some vendors, such as Ricoh and Toshiba, also offer security and risk assessments as part of their services. Whilst many organisations use printer vendors' own assessment services, there are third party independent consultants such as NewField IT who offer assessment services that are not linked to a particular supplier.

Device consolidation follows the assessment, and looks to achieve a balanced deployment strategy where cost, productivity and device utilisation are optimised. This may include, for instance, replacing outdated single function printers, which are often energy inefficient and expensive to run, with latest multifunction peripheral technology (MFP). However MPS does not require capital investment, and through implementing a more effective cost per page or utility approach to pricing, organisations can make immediate savings to operational expenditure. If an organisation has already invested in MFPs for example, simply removing or retiring desktop or single function printers to reach a device ratio of 1 device to 10 employees rather than a more common 1:4 ratio or less, can realise immediate cost savings and, with the appropriate software tools such as secure printing, can minimise wasteful printing. This leads to both financial savings and environmental benefits. Implementing services such as proactive supplies replenishment or predictive service features means that device availability is improved, and therefore improves overall business continuity. Fewer paper jams or toner-out problems also mean less dependence on the IT department, which can focus on other activities.

Large enterprises have been the early adopters of MPS due to direct programmes available from HP, Lexmark, Ricoh and Xerox. So far the SMB market remains largely untapped, although vendors are expanding availability of services for channel partners to deliver MPS to organisations in this space.

The foundation of any MPS should be to focus on exploiting the capabilities of multifunction printers (MFPs) which have evolved to become sophisticated document processing and information management hubs. Advanced scan-to-email and scan-to-file capabilities enable MFPs to function beyond the standard print, copy and fax features. With many organisations already having invested in such devices, MPS offers the opportunity to harness such document capture and archive capabilities to support business processes which remain paper reliant. With paper output unlikely to go away any time soon, organisations need to invest in products and services that ensure effective, reliable and secure printing.

Quocirca believes that the cost-savings agenda will continue to drive MPS adoption, particularly in large enterprises. However, organisations must ensure that contracts offer the flexibility to integrate with new technology to meet changing market and business demands. Notably, as the demand for outsourcing of the desktop environment grows, more organisations will become receptive to outsourcing the print infrastructure too. Few organisations possess the resources, expertise or time to effectively manage printing in-house and, as they continue to wrestle with complex environments and cost reduction imperatives, MPS should be placed higher on the agenda of both SMBs and enterprise's cost-saving initiatives.

Quocirca's report on the evolving MPS landscape is available for download here.

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Another Plea for Plain English!

Laurie McCabe, Hurwitz and Associates — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:12:35 +0100

Yesterday, I was listening to NPR's Here and Now at lunch time while running a few errands in my car. I tuned into a great story about the "Plain English Campaign", which was founded in 1979 by now 71-year old Chrissie Maher. The organization's mission is to campaign against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information.

Host Robin Young and Ms. Maher shared a lot of interesting statistics on how organizations from the Veteran's Administration, the Navy, the FAA to General Electric have saved time, money and even lives by rewriting documentation and other materials in clear, simple language instead of a lot of jargon and babble. The two used terminology favored in the financial services industry to illustrate how complicated, contrived, dense language makes financial documents so difficult to understand-and probably contributed to the economic meltdown.

Hmmm...I thought, the technology industry suffers from this too. But my overall impression is that as an industry, we are communicating more clearly than we have in the past. Sadly when I got home, I realized we may have further to go than I thought, as I opened a press release for "New Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com Increases Developer Productivity for Creating Rich Internet Applications in the Cloud" in my inbox. The first paragraph reads as follows:

SAN FRANCISCO - October 26, 2009 - Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, and Adobe Systems Incorporated [NYSE: ADBE], today announced the availability of a new offering that unites the power of the Force.com platform with the richness and ubiquity of the Adobe® Flash® Platform to enable a new generation of cloud-based rich Internet applications (RIAs). The new offering, Adobe® Flash® Builder™ for Force.com, integrates the two platforms to bring the richness of the consumer Web to enterprise cloud applications to enable a significantly improved level of developer productivity.

Whoa—translation, please! I think that the release is saying that these two vendors are teaming up to make it easier for developers to write cooler, more interactive Internet applications. But what was the person (or people) that wrote this thinking—or drinking—when they came up with that? Between "power of the Force", the cloud, the flashes, the RIAs and the rest of the hot air, they've made it unnecessarily complex to sort through. You might even think this was an alliance between different empires in Star Wars, instead of two technology companies.

Believe me, I understand that it is very tough to break down complex, technical things into understandable terms. And of course, it can be hard to resist trying to make all this stuff sound (more?) exciting. I'm setting up an RSS link to the Plain English site as another reminder to always at least try to demystify the technology solutions I'm writing about, instead of making them harder to understand.

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Can we free process and data?

Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz and Associates — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:36:51 +0100

I am still at IBM's Information on Demand conference here in Las Vegas (not my favorite place… but what can you do). In listening to a lot of discussions around strategy and products I started thinking about one of the key problems that customers are facing around business process and managing increasingly complex data. What companies really want to do is to have the flexibility and freedom to leverage their critical data across applications and situations. They also want to be able to change processes based on changing business models.

This is the core issue that companies will be facing in the coming decade and will be the difference between success and failure for many businesses. Here's an example of what I mean. Let's take the example of a retailer in a competitive market. Let's say our retailer had five or six applications: Accounting, Human Resources, supply chain management, a customer support system, and a customer facing e-commerce system. Each of these systems has an underlying database; each one manages this data based on the business process that is the foundation of the best practices that is the value of these packages. Even if each of the packages are the best in their markets there is a core problem since each solution is a silo. Processes that move between these systems tend to fall through the cracks. This is why we, as customers of such retailers, are often frustrated when we call about a product that wasn't delivered, doesn't work, or requires a change only to discover that one department has no ability to know what is happening in another area. For most companies the dream of a single view of the customer is aspirational but not practical right now. In reality, it is hard for companies to mess with their existing applications. These solutions are customized for their business environment; they were expensive and complicated to implement—and change is hard. In fact, companies only change when it is more painful to stay with the status quo than it is to change. In a retail scenario, companies change their approach to process and data management when they must change their business model because the current processes will lead to failure. Retailers are currently faced with emerging approaches to selling and managing customer relationships that are challenging traditional selling models. Look what a company like Amazon.com or Netflix have done to their slower moving competitors.

A number of customers I have spoken with understand this very well. They are looking at ways to separate their core data assets from the underlying applications. Many of these customers are at the forefront of implementing a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to managing their software assets. They are increasingly understanding that the secret to their future success is the knowledge they have about their customers, their needs and future requirements within their own set of offerings and those from partners. These companies are setting a priority of making this data independent, secure, and accurate. These business leaders are preparing for inevitable change. At the same time, I have seen these customers creating SOA business services that are, in essence, codified business processes. For example, a business service could be a process that checks the credit of a potential partner or links a new customer request for service to the set of applications that confirms the request, orders the part, and notifies a partner.

So, here is the problem. These customers are implementing this new model of abstracting data and process based on specific projects or business initiatives. These projects have gotten the attention of the C-team because of the impact on revenue. But, in reality, the real breakthrough will happen when the separation of data and process are the rule, not the exception.

This is going to be the overriding challenge for the next decade because it is so hard. There is inertia to move away from the predictable packaged applications that companies have implemented for more than 30 years. But I suggest that it will be inevitable that companies will begin to understand that, if they are going to remain agile and change processes when they anticipate a competitive threat. These same companies will understand that their data is too important to leave it locked inside an application linked tightly to a process.

I don't have the answers about what the tipping point will be when this starts to become a wide spread strategy. I think that the cloud will became a forcing action that will accelerate this trend. I would love to start a dialog. Send me your thoughts and I promise to post them.

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PDFSalesLeads - A Clever Solution to the Pesky .PDF Problem

Laurie McCabe, Hurwitz and Associates — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0100

In our industry, vendors spend a lot of time and money developing white papers to educate prospects about new technologies. White papers that are well-researched and clearly written can help explain the value of new or complex solutions to the audiences that can potentially benefit from them.

Of course, vendors also want to generate qualified sales leads from their white papers. But when it comes to tracking and measuring how well they actually perform in terms of lead generation, many marketers find themselves in a quandary. After publishing a white paper as an Adobe .pdf file, do you gate access to the paper by requiring people to fill out one of those annoying registration forms (and risk losing the reader), or do you just put the document up without a registration gate, and leave it to chance that prospects will contact you on their own?

Last week, Vitrium briefed me on it's new solution, PDFSalesLeads, which I think will give both vendors and web surfers a happy medium. With PDFSalesLeads, you can embed a registration form anywhere in your .pdf document, so that the reader can take a look at the information first, and then decide if they want to register and receive more information or be contacted.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) based solution comes with 8 standard registration questions, you can use as few or as many of these as you like. You can embed the form in 5 steps, which the site guides you through. Pricing is $49/month, for an unlimited number of documents and leads.

One of the things I really like about this solution is that there is a skip button. So if a reader doesn't want to fill out the form, they don't have to. This is great for people like me, who are often doing secondary research—not shopping. And, actually, this should save vendors time and money too when you think about it. I can't even count the number of sales calls and emails I've gotten from downloading .pdfs for things that I'm really not a prospect for. So while marketers may get fewer leads, they should be better quality leads.

Another cool thing about the solution is that the embedded registration form stays with the .pdf. So as the .pdf gets circulated around via email, subsequent recipients can register if they want to, giving you the potential to capture these viral leads.

Vitrium is also developing an on-premise, enterprise version for companies that want to run it internally, but they are going to prove it out and work kinks in the SaaS environment. The enterprise version will have features for batch file loads, and system to system integration with CRM systems. Vitrium will likely also find a market for this with white paper aggregators, such as Ziff-Davis or TechTarget, who can offer the service and manage leads for their clients.

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IT in lifesaving environments

Rob Bamforth, Quocirca — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Virtually every form of endeavour is dependent on access to information and communication in order to provide controls and support for the processes that it entails. While much of this can be accomplished by face-to-face interaction between people or using paper based records, the volumes of information involved and the need to communicate instantly at a distance with increasing numbers of people means that technology is playing a role in most processes. Mobile technology, in particular, can be of great benefit.

However, in many environments it is still paper-based processes that dominate. Quocirca recently interviewed 150 healthcare professionals and 28% thought paper-based processes were so widespread in their workplace that it was a "pen pusher's paradise". This should not be a surprise as there are many critical processes and decisions that have to be made which have far reaching consequences, both medically and financially. Recording the stages of the process to ensure that the right procedures have been followed and who was involved are vital not only for doing what is best for those in care, but also offering the right support and protection to those providing the care, demonstrating compliance with pre-determined procedures in the event of a problem.

There is relentless pressure for increased productivity in healthcare, as in other industries, and consequently the need to automate processes increases. Information captured needs to be verified and shared more readily, and may involve more people in many locations. This means form filling, ticking checklists and getting confirmation signatures and, according to Quocirca's research, security, speed and accuracy of input are the most important factors.

An IT solution based on mobile devices should be able to meet those requirements, but with a wide diversity of technologies and products available, choosing the right elements is a challenge. Despite its widespread use by both commercial organisations and consumers, information technology is relatively fragile; mobile devices break, software crashes and networks connections are lost. In time and life critical environments, these failures can have a profound impact.

There are many reasons why mobile devices might fail, but lack of care or attention by those using them plays a big part. This is rarely a deliberate act on the part of the user and in healthcare often stems from the challenges of the environment workers operate in, where patients are the primary focus for care, not computer hardware.

While few health roles have a need for truly ruggedised technology, improvements in hardware design, sound policies and frequent employee communication have minimised the risk of devices failing. Similarly, the problems associated with software failures can be addressed by choosing simpler and more dedicated or specialised technology. This has the added benefit of users seeing the device as a useful tool for a frontline job, rather than an indication of status only bestowed on managers, or an object of management control.

However, it is still important to look at the specific needs of those who might directly benefit most from the use of mobile IT. Thorough training and ongoing support is necessary to assist all workers transitioning from a paper-based system to mobile technology. It also requires upfront consultation to ensure that automated processes work, and that they will be accepted by staff and any representative trade bodies. In addition to training in basic functionality, there is also a need for ongoing coaching to ensure the new system continues to deliver benefits and does not introduce new complexity or interfere with the primary tasks.

The more complex or intrusive the technology, the more training will be required and the greater the total cost. In the most challenging health environments, like intensive care or emergency response, where workers have many other critical considerations, the last thing they need is to be taking time to learn how to best use the tools at their disposal. It has to become second nature, but all too often training is focused on the technology rather than its use, and is too brief.

The traditional paper-based processes that surround healthcare professionals provide useful controls and guidance but have fallibilities as well as inefficiencies. They are error prone, labour intensive and make it difficult to distribute or process information in a timely fashion. Automating these processes makes sense, and many different mobile technologies, not only the established laptop and PDA, but lightweight simple to use technologies for example Digital Pen and Paper , allow information to be captured, processed and used at the point of need.

The challenge in roles where information processing only plays a secondary part is that much of what IT solutions offer is complex and intrusive. It needs to be kept simple and specific to the task in hand—this is a thought process that not only healthcare, but any industry could benefit from. The research referred to in this article is discussed in Quocirca's report "Light touch, firm impression", which is freely available for download here.

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