The addition of optimization for RTMPe and RTMPte encrypted Flash expands the MACH5 capabilities to optimize video used by providers for maintaining end-user digital rights management (DRM). This will be important for enterprises looking to publish their news and content through cloud-delivered video services.

Disclosure: Silver Peak is one of my clients and I own stock options in the company. Silver Peak competes with Riverbed.

The introduction complements Blue Coat's existing work in the video space which includes a combination of stream-splitting, pre-population and video caching technologies to scale the use of live or on-demand internal company video, as well as external Web video.File formats already supported includeAdobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, HTML5, QuickTime and Microsoft Windows Media.

While video support continues to be important for all organizations, encrypted video will appeal to a specific subset of users. Leading WAN optimization solutions already improve video delivery though encrypted video is another matter.

IT pros making a significant investment in the MACH5 will want to look at the performance and long term viability of Blue Coat in general and the MACH5 in particular. The company went private last year due to falling revenues, despite a boomer year in WAN optimization overall.

Part of the problem, from a technical standpoint, has been the product's performance. Blue Coat has traditionally not scaled well, struggling to reach above 300 Mbps of WAN throughput. The company only introduced a 1Gbit optimizer the SG9000 series last May.

Disclosure: Silver Peak is one of my clients and I own stock options in the company. Silver Peak competes with Riverbed.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

The announcement consisted of three introductions The Steelhead CX Family appliances replaces Riverbed's xx50 series of mid- to small office optimizers (the CX family scales from 6 Mbps to 90 Mbps) adding more capacity and improving throughput. The appliances are targeted at organizations that only want WAN optimization in their branch offices. The Steelhead EX Series appliances add a multi-function, enterprise-class branch office appliance to the Riverbed mix. If an organization wants what Gartner calls a Branch Office in the Box (BOB) then the EX will be the pick. The appliance runs Riverbed's Virtual Service platform (VSP), which is a Riverbed version of VMWare, enabling the Steelhead to run a virtual appliance.

Perhaps the most interesting product, though, was the Steelhead Granite. This is another storage optimization product, similar to Riverbed Whitewater. Granite enables organizations to maintain data as SANs in the data center and push that data out to the branch. Granite is built around two devices Granite Core, a physical or virtual appliance in the data center, and Granite Edge, a service running on a Steelhead EX in the branch office.

EVEN MORE PROPRIETARY HARDWARE FOR THE BRANCH

My concerns with the announcement are multifold. Partners and enterprises, for one, will be befuddled by the blistering array of products from Riverbed. While there's value to being exhaustive in your product set, it shouldn't be exhausting to identify the right product.

IT need also wonder about Riverbed's hardware upgrade train. How long will it be before these appliances are also superseded by newer models, forcing them to purchase yet more hardware? And how much more difficult will it be to get off that train when the storage department is also vested in the WAN optimizer?

Bundling applications into what's effectively a proprietary VMWare server unnecessarily locks IT into the hardware refresh cycle that they avoid in the data center. An alternative solution would be to load virtual appliances and VMware on off-the-shelf server hardware. This avoids the vendor lock-in yet still provides for consolidated deployment.

BLOCK-LEVEL STORAGE - WITH A TWIST

At the same time, though, Steelhead's Granite solution is unique and offers an interesting architectural twist on branch office storage. Block- and file- level access have generally inhabited different parts of the organization. Block-level storage with its flexibility and performance has traditionally been the domain of SANs and the data center. It's heavily used by databases, Exchange, VMWare and for booting up servers. File based access is generally simpler and more cost effective and better suited for mass file storage or VMWare with NFS.

Increasingly the two approaches are converging with Riverbed, in this case, saying that Granite brings file-level intelligence to block-level data. The Granite Edge device presents to applications as an iSCSI target and then relies on intelligence in the Granite Core device to preload the Granit Edge with blocks likely to be requested by the user. Granite users are able to retrieve data from the local cache, not over the WAN, improving performance and in theory enabling IT to further consolidate their servers into the data center. In the event of a WAN failure, the Granite appliance will keep the change and synchronize them with the new version once the connection is reinitiated.

GRANITE PROBLEMS

It remains to be seen, though, as to how important Granite will be to most businesses. IT already has relationships with storage vendors, such as EMC, Dell, HDS, and NetApp, who can deliver similar capabilities by leveraging existing WAN optimizers.

What's more block-based applications, such as databases and Exchange, are already optimized with good client-server design. Adding a WAN optimizer further improves the line performance in many ways, not the least is enabling second-time Gets to be pulled from cache. All of this and without a proprietary branch office box.

Pre-population of the cache and local file operations certainly sounds intriguing, but this too carries its own risks. Granite provides local access to files even in the event of a WAN failure and then synchronizes changes upon WAN restoration. Yet, such architectures have caused problems in the past. File versions invariably fall out of synch, leaving users and the IT to have to manually reconcile differences. Is that really the approach today's IT pros want to take with their local storage?

Bottom line: Riverbed delivers a hardware refresh and a bold new direction. But the continued use of proprietary appliances and the blurring of the lines between IT and storage silos, will make adopting the technology very difficult for IT. The limitations on agility and lock into a hardware refresh cycle should be top-of-mind for any IT manager looking at Granite for their organization.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant is one of the more thorough, independent analyses in the WAN optimization market today. It evaluates the top vendors in a segment across 15 areas mapped along two axes - their ability to execute and their completeness of vision.

Disclosure: Silver Peak is one of my clients and I own stock options in the company.

Once again, Riverbed was positioned as the market leader, despite recent negative publicity aroundforcing Expand customers to upgrade their hardware.

Silver Peak was the new entrant in this year's Leader quadrant. The company has been making its way up the Magic Quadrant for the past three years. Three years ago, Silver Peak was listed in the Niche Player section only to grow to a Visionary last year and finally to a Leader this year. The company's data center-class strategy has gotten strong marks from Gartner in the past and this year was helped by its continued emphasis on replication, large portfolio of appliances, its global expansion and the introduction of the first, free, data center-class WAN optimizer. The company still does not offer capabilities for home office and mobile users and Branch Office in a Box (BOB) capabilities.

Where there were winners there were losers. Making room for Silver Peak in the Leaders quadrant was Cisco who fell to the Challengers quadrant. "Cisco is a slow follower whose vision is limited to an incremental product road map," writes Gartner. Similarly, Blue Coat System dropped to the bottom of the Leaders quadrant in part because "Revenue has been stagnant" and because it's "been late with features."

You can read the Magic Quadrant for yourself here.

Here's another issue to consider. As vendors attempt to build solutions across multiple product areas it often comes at the expense of product functionality and competitiveness. They lose focus, unable to innovate as quickly as more targeted competitors. In the worst cases, they rely on customer lock-in to generate revenue while eschewing real product innovation.

Take Cisco, for example. For the longest time, Cisco pundits argued that the company's holistic approach to delivering networking equipment lowered Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and improved overall functionality of the network. Presumably, this was because of the greater integration that could be delivered amongst products in the solution set.

But Gartner debunked the myth of a single vendor network last year where it noted such approaches often lead to

• Vendor complacency where over time, vendors can take customers for granted , and he level of attention and service can drop off.
• Less competitive pricing - vendors and their customers will rely on long-standing relationship, and possibly older contacts, to end up with noncompetitive pricing.
• Single-vendor focused element management tools encourage lock-in and limit alternatives.

All of those same risks apply to a holistic application delivery solution. Purchase your load balancer, WAN optimizer, security gateway and more from one vendor, buy into their closed integrations and "holistic" architectures, and over time you'll find yourself once again in the same vicious cycle of vendor lock-in. What's more you'll spend an inordinate amount of time conducting your holistic application analysis and putting into place all the equipment that's needed for that analysis.

The alternative? Take a few hours, deploy a free WAN optimizer from here, and see if it solves most of your application's problems. You may find that you'll still need to rearchitect your applications, but at least then you'll be able to justify that investment to your management.

Tunnels: The Good and the Bad

While tunneling can occur in many environments for many purpose, the principle remains the same: insert one protocol within another protocol (the delivery protocol) of the same or lower-layer of the OSI model. More specifically, this is done in part by changing the source and destination address of the delivery protocol from originating station and the final destination to those of the tunneling devices. By contrast, header transparency, aka "normal" traffic, preserves the original addressing.

For years, this slight discrepancy has inspired heated arguments among IT vendors. Amongst WAN optimization vendors, Cisco and Riverbed have argued for header transparency. Tunneling, they've said, makes applying security policies impossible because the optimization process obscures the payload and the temporary ports commonly used by many VOIP and FTP clients . It can also introduce other networking issues as well, such as "...sub-optimal routing, MTU issues, and hardware/software scalability issues,"blogs Mike Morris over at "Back to Cisco Subnet."

Proponents, like Silver Peak Systems, have pointed out that many of these issues apply whether or not tunneling is applied to WAN optimization. Optimizing the traffic obscures the traffic flow regardless, requiring security policies to be applied before optimizing. Going further, they argue that tunneling provides enormous value in terms of deterministic behaviour and enables value added features, like packet by packet optimization and analysis. There's a great comparison of tunneling vs. header transparency solutions here.

Use Cases for Tunnels

The reality is that even before OTV and RiOS 7, we've seen tunneling used extensively in our networks. We traverse firewalls by tunneling through them, interconnect islands of private IP addresses across the Internet using GRE tunnels, and pass secured information in IPsec tunnels across otherwise unsecured networks.

As we deploy new technologies, tunnels are also essential. The adoption of IPv6, for example, is being simplified by tunnels. Workgroups are being converted to the new protocol and then interconnected via IPv6 tunnels across IPv4 backbones.

What's interesting about tunnels in WAN optimization and data center interconnects in particular is the sheer number of tunnels that have to be configured, which can introduce significant operational complexity into the network. Long time tunnel proponents, like Silver Peak, have spent quite invested heavily in the innovations required to address these challenges. These items include:

• Automated tunnel creation where devices automatically create tunnels when new protocols or applications are detected.
• Automated tunnel assignments where protocols and applications are dynamically assigned to new tunnels.
• Group management where IT can define various parameters across tunnels, such as the actions to take in the event tunnels drop and / or whether encryption should be enabled.
• Cross-tunnel functionality that enables the tunnel management system to aggregate information across tunnels and then act on that information. With WAN optimization, for example, that could mean reporting and acting upon changes in network conditions like the amount of available bandwidth or latency and loss characteristics .

Tunnel adoption is a significant step forward for the industry. It should enable organizations to respond quicker to networking requirements. However, without thinking through these management and implementation issues, tunneling can end up introducing significant operational complexity into the enterprise.

As a veteran of the speed-and-feed wars of networking gear, I was happy to see that InfoTech put its finger on the essential issue in picking a piece of networking equipment - value. It's not the price that matters or even who has the best feature set, but the relationship between the two that matters most.

We in the WAN optimizer industry, for example, can get caught up (and you with us) into the thinking that product value can come from performance increase, but, this can be misleading. Changes from 50% to 95% data reduction may have a significant impact on bandwidth costs, but may not improve data throughput. File transfer improvements by 95% can reduce the time to download an average file from 120 minutes to 6 minutes -quite real value to your users. But if file transfer times are only reduced from 10 seconds to 9, a 95% improvement is negligible.

Similarly, equipment price is often mentioned in assessing value. However, this too can be misleading. Low price tags may initially yield attractive value, but such value assessments can be short sighted. Insufficient scalability in the WAN optimizer's design can lead to costly upgrades after deployment. And then there's the question of what price is used in the value assessment. Average prices across entire product portfolios from WAN optimization vendors, such as Riverbed and Silver Peak Systems, are often used in value assessments, but with vendors delivering a diverse range of products, comparing average portfolio prices can be deceiving.

So where then do you look for value? InfoTech covers a number of areas worthwhile considering, two that might not be so apparent:

Number of applications: A good part of the genius of computer networking has been to amortize the cost of networking equipment across the various applications running over the network. That's why it's so much more affordable to deploy video conferencing system, phone system, video surveillance network, and our applications across a single network than individual ones . The same is true of WAN optimizers. The cost of WAN optimization per application is proportionally higher when WAN optimizers accelerate fewer applications. To gain the maximal return from their WAN optimization investment, IT should look at improving the performance of as many TCP, UDP, and proprietary applications as possible.

Lifecycle costs: Part of the challenge of any value discussion is identifying the price that will be used in the calculations over the lifecycle of the equipment. The purchase price is a small part of the total cost of the equipment. A more accurate measure will take into account other reoccurring factors, such as the maintenance price and upgrade costs. The latter is often driven by the number of concurrent sessions supported on a given platform. Sites often exceed concurrent session count before WAN bandwidth necessitating an upgrade in the appliance. Similarly new software features are often only available on newer appliances. The WAN optimizers with the lowest lifecycle costs will be highly scalable virtualized platforms who can work on commodity hardware, offer a high session count, and affordable service-and-support.

What factors do you consider in your value assessments?

What would happen if we couldn’t agree on the same time? Team meetings would never start on time. You might go catch a movie only to find it was over an hour earlier. Nothing would get done and the functioning of our society would grind to a halt.

A frightening picture that is more suitable for 2012, but applicable to our networks today. The problem stems from the overuse of packet buffers in our equipment, a problem called Bufferbloat. Developers are trained all too well to avoid dropped packets – and for good reason. A 200ms round trip delay can be turned into one second delay when packets need to be retransmitted due to packet loss. (To understand this better read this whitepaper.) So packet buffers were placed to accommodate for the overflow of packets occurs in all shared networks. Each buffer introduces some small amount of delay, though, but saves the much greater amount of delay caused by packet retransmission.

What’s happened though is that as the number of buffers have increased in our network the amount of delay they’ve introduced has also increased, explains Dave Taht, who helps run the site bufferbloat.net. The result? Left unchecked, Bufferbloat will only cause packet loss to get worse:

“As the total traffic becomes heavier, network traffic patterns will grow burstier and more chaotic. Usage of individual links will swing rapidly and crazily between emptiness and overload cascades. Latencies, and total packet times, will zig from instantaneous to check-again-next-week-please and zag back again in no predictable pattern.

Packet losses - the very problem all those buffers were put in to prevent - will begin to increase dramatically once all the buffers are full, because the occasional thousand car pileup is the only thing that can currently tell Internet routers to slow down their sending.

Bad consequences of this are legion. One of the most obvious is what latency spikes do to the service that converts things like website names to actual network addresses - DNS lookups get painfully slow. Voice-over-IP services like Skype and video streamers like YouTube become stuttery, prone to dropouts, and painful to use. Gamers get fragged more.

And it’s not just video that or gaming that going to suffer. The very functioning of the network is undermined: “NTP, ARP, DHCP, SSH, and various routing protocols. Yes, things as basic as your system clock time can get messed up!”

The folk at Buffer Bloat have their own ideas as to how to solve the problem. They identify three approaches - test for and fix Bufferbloat , decrease unmanaged buffer size, and use smarter rules in servicing the buffers.

There is a fourth approach, prevent packet loss altogether without adding delay. The WAN optimizers from Silver Peak Systems, for example, can reconstruct up to six lost packets in real time. Silver Peak does this by applying RAID-like technologies to packet transmission and insert a packet every “N” packets with a CRC check on the preceding packets. Should a packet be lost the receiving side can reconstruct the data with the help of the CRC check. You can read more about the details of the technology here. (Disclosure here: Silver Peak is a client of mine.)

Regardless of the approach, though, network architects need to pay attention towards the impact packet loss will have on your networks today – and tomorrow.

Hybrid clouds are particularly challenging because in order to accelerate hybrid clouds one needs to locate a WAN optimization appliance within the vendor's data center - not something that's likely to happen for most users. (I'm not going to touch one-sided acceleration aka Web caching. It's fine for static content, but where content is dynamic one-sided acceleration won't help much.)

Precisely because hybrid clouds are so vexing, Akamai and Riverbed inked a technology partnership in May. Once product is delivered, sometime in the beginning of next year, instead of locating a Riverbed appliance within a cloud provider's data center, the vendor will be able to deliver their content over the Akamai network and have it accelerated over the last mile with Riverbed's appliances.

A second approach, though, is emerging that leverages the advances in virtualization and the plethora of processing and memory available in existing network equipment. This approach, which I'll call Embedded Optimization, puts WAN optimization within any existing networking equipment not just one vendor's appliances or services. As long as they can run a hypervisor, such as VMWare, KVM or Hyper-V, Embedded Optimization can run within the device.

Probably the best example of this approach was announced today by Silver Peak with its Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA). Avaya has already announced that with VXOA, WAN optimization will be embedded within its Secure Router 4134. In truth, though, you can find elements of this approach from other virtualized WAN optimization suppliers, such as Certeon. (Full Disclosure: Silver Peak is a customer of mine, but really, if you know someone else out there with anything comparable to VXOA, let me know and I'll gladly write about it here.)

Embedded Optimization enables service provider to deliver premium performing services without deploying new hardware. They can turn existing server platforms into WAN optimizers. What's more, as virtual appliances, those services are dynamic. They can be added or dropped as needed allowing the service provider to deliver optimized services to accommodate for flash conditions and then return the line back to normal service afterwards. Coupled with subscription based pricing, commonly used in cloud services, and Embedded Optimization is a natural complement to cloud deployment.

Device vendors benefit because Embedded Optimization gives them a competitive advantage. Storage vendors can show 3x improvement in cloud storage performance. The same goes for remote backup where IT can radically reduce storage times by using an embedded WAN optimizer. VoIP server may not benefit from acceleration much, voice CODECs are already compressed, but their voice quality can be improved. WAN optimizers, like those for Silver Peak, can reduce the packet loss that can yield poor voice quality.

From the perspective of the IT customer, embedding the WAN optimizer within the device also offers a number of benefits. For one, troubleshooting and maintenance is simpler because there's only one device to maintain and IT knows that WAN optimizer has been pretested and configured to work with the specific device. This last point is important. Vendors can simplify configuration by preselecting the specific parameters just right for their devices. In this way, IT can be assured of getting the maximum performance out of their optimizer.

Leveraging the power of a CDN, such as Akamai, is powerful move for WAN optimization, but with virtualization organizations can also avoid deploying a physical appliance in a vendor's data center and do so today. It will be interesting to see which approach wins out.

As partners listened to Microsoft’ spiel at Microsoft WPC today, they may ask themselves the same question that any Google follower should be asking as well – with all of this talk about video, how is your network possibly going to keep up?

From Google+ to Lync to Facebook, application developers are rushing to embed video into the social , collaborative experience. If successful, employees exposed to those applications will come to expect the same in the enterprise - much like that they have with email, IM, microblogging, and more. But for that to happen some fundamental changes will have to occur in our networks. Most corporate networks today simply are not equipped to deliver enterprise-grade video. Cisco understood this with their introduction of the Enterprise Content Delivery System (ECDS). ECDS caches video local for redistribution at the remote site, saving on time and bandwidth need to retrieve the video over the WAN for each requesting user.Blue Coat’s MACH 5 has offered similar capabilities for some time.

Both Cisco's and Blue Coat's technologies will help employees watch YouTube or a corporate video address by caching the video at the local site, saving additional viewers the time and bandwidth needed to download the video. None though will help with video conferencing, the kinds of video being talked about for today’s collaborative applications. There’s a huge difference between video on demand and video conferencing. With video on demand, the challenge is a matter of bandwidth, caching the video addresses that problem.

With video conferencing, the challenge is intermittent packet loss. Unfortunately even at a half percent of packet loss, video quality suffers dramatically. The time it takes to recover lost packets can turn a 200ms delay, for example, into a one second delay after retransmission. Packet loss is endemic to shared networks and it's only going to get worse. Stay tuned to find out why.

One of the items Croslin touched on as we were speaking was the real value behind innovation management platforms - such as Accept Software, BrightIdea, Element8, Imaginatik, Kindling, Qmarkets.net and Spigit. It's a bit different from the party line you hear from these companies. Here's what he had to say:

David Greenfield: We're seeing lots of software that's come out, of late, that helps people collaborate together, helps people innovate together. Where do you see social media and collaboration tools fitting into enhancing innovation?

David Croslin: Well, it's kind of like the water cooler, right? People would stand around the water cooler

and they would discuss ideas, and things like that. In my opinion, most disruptive innovations come from the water cooler. But, unfortunately, nowadays we don't really have water coolers anymore, and people don't really stand around them anymore, and the company processes that are in place (in general) kill off water cooler ideas.

Social media and collaboration tools, things like that, I think are great for entrepreneurs to gather a great deal of information. You were talking earlier about marketing groups, things like that. Being able to tap into potentially millions of people and pose ideas and questions without necessarily revealing your intellectual property that you're trying to determine whether there's a market for, or trying to find a market need-that's really, really fabulous.

At the same time, I think that internal collaboration tools are great. Because we have too many distributed offices now, and you don't stand and look over the cubicle wall much anymore. If you don't have some kind of collaboration tools where people can just brainstorm ideas back and forth, then you've got some serious problems.

But, at the same time, I'm not a big open-innovation fan, at least from the point of view of making money. It has a tendency to push the intellectual property out into the masses, or multiple companies, and one of the things I focus on in the book is the commoditization of your market. If you're basically following an open-innovation model, you're pretty much building an already commoditized product. Because your competitors are equal to you. You don't hit the ground with a truly disruptive innovation. Everybody has it.

Greenfield: What happens when you have innovation management platforms today? Dell's IdeaStorm, for example-I don't know if you're familiar with their platform.

Croslin: Absolutely.

Greenfield: Cisco ran its I-Prize. Starbucks had its own platform. These are forms that allow organizations to pull together the collective understanding of their employees and customers to gather ideas and assess ideas. It's a little more sophisticated than that; they can often gather ideas and then have a second tier of user review or experts assess those ideas. So you start to get this intersection that we've described previously, of the technologists on the one hand and businesspeople on the other hand serving as that second tier, taking ideas from the group, and sorting through them and identifying or amplifying them or changing them to come up with something different or better.

Croslin: Right.

Greenfield: It sounds like, from what you're saying, that's not an approach that you're particularly fond of.

Croslin: Well, it's not that I'm negative on it; it's just a matter of, what is your goal, okay? I've looked at the ones you've described. Dell's IdeaStorm is a tremendous way to gather not only customer complaints, but customer recommendations of incremental enhancements. If you go through it and look at it you'll find that, I think they've got like 140,000 or 150,000 ideas now. Almost all of them have to do with, you know, could you backlight the keys? Could you add a numeric keypad on this particular device? Things like that. Which is all great if all you want to do is continue to sell a commoditized product in a commoditized market. Again, your customer is not going to tell you how to build the iPhone of the notebook market.

Greenfield: But depending on the question and how you pose it, they may be able to tell you, "Gosh, what we would really like to have is our phone consolidated with our media player, you know, and be able to take that anywhere, and make it really easy to use."

Croslin: Yes, I agree. But 99.999% of them will be an incremental invention or innovation of an existing product. If Apple-or let's say Motorola-had started an IdeaStorm equivalent for the cell phone market, would anybody have come up with the iPhone? Or would they have said things like, "If you simplified the menus, that would help," Or, "These buttons are too small for me," that kind of thing?

Greenfield: Right.

Croslin: It takes someone then reviewing all those thousands of things to-I don't want to say, "have that light bulb epiphany"-but be able to say, "Wait a minute. I could combine all these things and create a disruption."

So, yes, you could do that. Now from the point of view of Cisco's I-Prize, I think that, in that case, one of Cisco's major initiatives over the last two years has been their telepresence space. They're really, really pushing it. Now, I worked at MCI and Verizon, and we used to do videoconferencing before anybody knew what videoconferencing was. And then it died off. It was really because travel costs went down.

And now telepresence is coming back, but it's a totally different model of how you communicate with your teams. I think it's very valuable. But it's a hard sell because it's fairly expensive and the existing executive teams in a lot of companies don't really understand how to function that way. So I think Cisco, in their approach to gathering innovative ideas, they're very focused. They didn't just say, "Tell us about anything that you've got out there, and then pick a category that it might apply to." They said, "We want to know about telepresence. Help us understand-basically, how to sell this."

So they've got a cool idea, and they're trying to get their potential market to tell them how to layer on something, like Google did, in order to create an aggressive, growing market.

Greenfield: So if you're going to use an innovation management platform in your organization, or you're evaluating an innovation management platform, it sounds like you should 1) set your expectations right. You might get incremental innovation, but you probably won't get the sort of breakthrough innovations that we've been talking about here, that you're talking about in your book. And 2) even in the context of incremental innovation, you've gotta frame your questions in the right way. Otherwise, you're just going to get lots of different ideas that aren't going to address your core problem.

Croslin: Exactly. You know, I'm really big on pointing my finger at the executive team, saying that they cop out all the time. Having a business initiative of "We need to be more innovative" is a total copout, okay? If you're not defining to your employees where they should be innovative, what market they're after, what problems they're trying to solve, things like that, then you are just abusing that resource. And you're gonna blame them for failing. That's because, like I said earlier, the linkage between marketing and technology is at the executive team. It's almost never at the bottom.

And yet, the executive teams assume that the technology teams have that linkage. And without it, they cannot find a disruptive innovation. They need direction. Otherwise, if they do come up with a disruptive innovation-I talked to a company a couple of days ago, and one of the executives there was very frustrated because they had come up with some truly disruptive innovations, and yet, when they took it to the executive team, [the executive team] said, "We're not in that market," or "We don't do that kind of thing. We do this-that's close, but that's not ours."

It's because there was no market information that could be used to drive it into the executive team. So I think executive teams have got to be far more literal or definitive about what the corporate goals are. If you're tired of not making a lot of money off of cell phones, and you want to make money somewhere else, define where that "somewhere else" is, and let your marketing analysis team do that definition. Then take that to the technology group and build a cool idea, and then attack and disrupt the market. Not the other way around.

Greenfield: Right. It sounds like, whatever tools you're going to be using to implement, it has to begin with the process that you're laying out here. It has to begin with the process of the marketing or the executive team defining the objective, and then turning loose the technical team on how to address or solve that objective.

Croslin: Exactly. So I think any kind of management tool that collects ideas, correlates them by topic, things like that, is a great tool. Because all these little ideas and stuff-the 150,000 that Dell has collected-those are all valuable, don't get me wrong. If a lot of consumers are saying, "You know, I really wish that the keyboard was backlit so that, when I'm in a dark situation, I can see my keyboard," then maybe you ought to consider doing that-and it affects your battery life, and things like that. But is that gonna be truly a disruptive innovation? No, probably not. People aren't gonna pay $100 more for a backlit keyboard. But if you do come up with a disruptive innovation, then maybe that disruptive innovation is a combination of 10 of these things.

Greenfield: And your ability to extract the principle from the idea, it sounds like, is incredibly important. It may be that what they're really saying to you is, "I can't see my keys. I can't see the input device." So maybe that means you do away with the input device and you go to a voice-controlled interface.

Croslin: Absolutely perfect example. Yes, you are right on target. Because what you just did is, you took where a customer said, "Yeah, why don't you do this?" and you boiled it down to the true customer need, right? That's why I said earlier, don't ask the customer how to improve your product. Figure out what the customer's needs or wants are, and address those. And you just did that with the backlit keyboard: "I can't use the device in certain situations."

So then the question becomes, how often do those situations arise? How big is the market for the people who have those situations? Right? Can I justify $100-in fact, I saw one on backlit keyboards on Dell's site where the guy actually said, "I would be willing to pay a premium price for a backlit keyboard." Right? So it doesn't necessarily mean, like you said, that the backlit keyboard is the solution to the problem-or the need. But the need exists. That's where you find disruption.

Greenfield: Unfortunately, it seems that people think in terms of incremental innovation. So if you are going to think about, you know, the Next Big Thing, and you're going to ask customers about what you should do, it sounds like you can do that, and it sounds like that actually could be an approach, but just that the way you interpret the data has to be done differently. And the example that we're giving here, you know, asking about what we should do, means that you not necessarily should create a new backlit keyboard, but we need you to come up with, perhaps, a new kind of interface. That would extend through all the other innovations that you might get in your community as well.

Croslin: Exactly. If I had 150,000 replies from Dell's customers, I would take every one of those replies and say, "What is the pain point-like we talked about earlier-that each one of these replies is talking about?" And can I boil all those pain points down into 10 different pain points? If you look at the Apple iPhone-and I don't know what the pain points are, but they're basically simplification of menus, touchscreen (so that the buttons can be any size you want), larger view-screen-those 10 pain points will define your disruption. Apple didn't create, you know, an interplanetary war weapon to save the planet. What they did was, they solved the pain points that cell phones weren't solving. Lo and behold, overnight they destroyed the traditional cell phone market and created a completely disruptive technology. And a lot of people will tell you, "All they did was combine things!" Yeah-what's your point? They solved pain points by combining existing technologies. That's what people need to do.

I had the opportunity to sit down with David for a chat about the innovationlife-cycleand how it can be applied to your company, innovation management platforms, and intergalactic warfare. Below are his views on IT and innovation. His take on innovation management platforms and how they can best be applied to your organization comes later in the week. As for intergalactic warfare, well, you'll need to listen to the full podcast for that one. (I'll get that posted up in a bit...)

David Greenfield: Thank you so much, David, for taking the time to talk with us.

David Croslin: You bet, man-I'm looking forward to it! This is a lot of fun.

Greenfield: You've seen both sides of the house - technology and business. Are there differences in the way those technical and market-drive side of the business view product innovation?

Croslin: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the hardest thing for inventors, entrepreneurs, and technologists to understand is that "cool" is not enough. You can have an amazing invention, but it has no market value. The management team, on the other hand, looks at things from the money point of view. So, if you can't equate the two in some way, then you end up with something that never goes anywhere. I advise inventors pretty much every day that they've got to abandon "cool" when they're trying to create a new market. Otherwise, the business side can't understand it.

Greenfield: In your book, you lay out a distinction between invention and innovation. The two aren't the same. Why don't you tell us, what are those differences?

Croslin: Innovation is probably the most overused word on the planet right now. So when I started writing the book, I realized that people pretty much brand everything that they consider to be creative to be innovative. In order for me to teach people how to actually innovate, I decided I needed to draw the line somewhere. An invention, to me, is a "cool" idea. It's something that you've come up with that you see potential for, but it's primarily "cool." Innovation, on the other hand, is money. If you don't have a target audience for it, then you're not gonna make any money, so it's not innovative. If it doesn't change a consumer's lifestyle or business style in some way to the positive, then it's not innovative.

Greenfield: The way you're framing it, it sounds like innovation is something which is outward-facing, that companies do towards [consumers] or provide to consumers with, but aren't there innovations that occur within organizations that allow them to operate more effectively, which may never directly affect the consumer?

Croslin: Oh, absolutely. Great question. In my book, I lay out six different key types of innovation, and you brought up two of them-they're external and internal. Companies shift between the two. External innovation is where you're focusing on products and revenue. Internal innovation is where you're focusing on cost reduction, and process, and maybe your infrastructure. They both have potentially a positive impact on your bottom line, but they have totally different impacts on the consumer. I might create great external innovations, but then if my product starts to stagnate, I shift back towards internal, in order to lower my costs and keep driving up my income. In the process, though, I may lower the quality of my product, and so now my customer likes my product even less. My sales had already stagnated, so that's why I shifted to internal; now, suddenly, I'm lowering my quality, I'm laying off my customer support-everything I'm doing is actually alienating my customer and dropping what I call the "transformative value" of my product to my consumer base.

Greenfield: So what happens when organizations face those moments where the market has shifted, they need to reduce costs, etc. What do they do?

Croslin: In my book, I lay out what I call the "innovation lifecycle." The innovation lifecycle is-I looked at hundreds of products, and the way that I've seen things over the last 20 years, and primarily it involves a very simple course: Somebody comes up with a disruptive innovation, let's call it an iPhone. It shifts the market, it creates a new market. Then they incrementally innovate that. So, they come out with version 2, version 3. They add new little buttons, or add a new cover, or whatever. So those are positive incremental innovations. The market is still accepting those, and may be willing to pay more money for them, but at some point the company continues to create new inventions, new features, and try to deliver a new market, but all they do is over-complicate the product, etc. They go beyond what is a "good enough" product. I call those "negative inventions," because they're actually devaluing the product in some way. If that process goes on too long, which is what almost always happens in every market, then you move into what I call "destructive inventions."

When you get to destructive inventions, it's negative invention that, you've now gone so far that your customer looks at your competitors and says, "You know, I like that product better over there, just because I don't like yours as much as I used to." And they take your transformative value of your product, and they give it to your competitor's product. So your product almost collapses overnight once you start destructively inventing. It's at that point that companies start to abandon, they say, "This market's totally commoditized; we can't innovate any more, we've tried. Let's go slash and burn." And so that's when they shift to internal, start slashing costs, slashing teams, because they think the product is dead. But, surprisingly-and I think we mentioned it a little earlier-someone will come out of the blue from below, create another "good enough" product, and will seize the market.

Greenfield: So, what, then, should companies do?

Croslin: Well, the part of the lifecycle is-that's kind of split in half, if you think about it, right? You've got disruptive innovation, which is very, very positive, creates a market. Incremental innovation, which creates positive growth, and then you get into negative and destructive invention-not innovation because they don't deliver real value to the market. And so, at the point that you start to see that shift, where you're saying, "You know, do we know what our customers want? They didn't seem to respond to this, they're complaining about us raising the cost-" Things like that. At that point, you need to figure out what your product really is and try to be disruptive again. In other words, restart the innovation lifecycle. Don't let it keep going!

The problem is that executive teams look at innovation as basically a random process, and therefore, it's very risky. Incremental innovation has a very low risk, because you can look at it, you see your product that exists today, "Oh, let's change this button from blue to green," okay? Well, that's a very simple change, it's cheaper, and you would think your market would probably like it.

But doing something brand new, like Apple did, to where you take a cell phone and you create something basically totally new, as far as how the user utilizes the device-that's risky. It's not risky if you understand what you're doing-if you understand your market, your consumer, and what their problems are. But most companies look at it as a totally random process, and I equate it quite often to gambling. That you're winning the lottery, that kind of stuff.

Most innovation consultants will come in and tell you one of three things (if not all):

1. You need to be willing to take more risk.

2. You need to let everybody in your company invent and innovate.

3. Your management teams need to be more open to accepting new products or new inventions that come up the stream.

And all of those are reflections of, "We don't understand our customer, and therefore we need to take more risk. We need to be willing to do things we don't really understand, but accept them. You know, Joe, down in Shipping, is gonna come up with a new technology to add to an iPhone that would be disruptive." So-and Joe might; I'm not picking on Joe-but I believe that these directives, if you will, are way off base. Because innovation's not random; it's just our perception of how it goes through the cycle is random.

Greenfield: So, then, what is the process for innovation?

Croslin: You've got to target your customers. If you're trying to create something cool, without a market, you've made a serious mistake. You need to start with your customers. You need to start with the potential markets. Trying to come up with disruption requires that you look at what your customer needs and wants. Not what they say.

Greenfield: It sounds like you're describing a product marketing or bus. dev. function that has to work in tandem with your inventors.

Croslin: Absolutely. If you're not looking out at the market at the beginning-I mean, think about most companies that succeed very, very well, okay? Google, etc. In some cases, like Google, they came up with a technology, and then they layered on top of it a functionality-you know, embedded advertising, etc.-that would allow them to make money off of that "cool," okay? So, in some cases, you can take "cool" and turn it into a large revenue stream. In other cases, people have looked at the market, and they've said, like, social networking, things like that-"How could I create a new website or a new app, or whatever, that targets a particular space?" In that case, they're starting at the correct end, and looking at-oh, there's 25 million people that do this...if I get 3% of the market...so then, what do I have to do in order to make me distinctive in other words, disruptive) from the other competitors in the marketplace?

Up until now we've had platforms that were very proficient at pulling together the collective wisdom of employees, on the one hand, customers or external partners, on the other hand, or both. People will come together and through some process, be it predictive markets or through voting, will identify the best ideas.

If you're new to this whole space and don't believe just how successful it all can be, go check out the efforts being made by Dell, Starbucks, Cisco, and San Francisco to name a few.

Ok, very nice, so now you've identified "n" number of ideas that your group have deemed to be most likely to succeed. Now we can debate the process, the rating systems, the methodology, but put all of that aside for a second. All ideation platforms today bring you to this point. The question then is how do you act on those ideas? How do you move from idea concept to reality? And then how do you measure the success of those ideas?

Today most ideation platforms stop there. The tasks, assignments, project goals etc. needed to actually implement an idea are done outside of the platform. This makes it harder for innovation leaders and executives to understand the implementation costs and return of a given idea. It also complicates the process of identifying those individuals whose work have contributed the most to the ideas creation.I think where we're going to next is an end-to-end view where innovators can see from concept to implementation.

I don't think that most ideation platforms will try to morph into project management system - at least I hope not. Certainly vendors might start that ways, but fitting into and working with existing platforms and processes are critical.

Accept Software, for example, tied ideation into the product development lifecycle. Element8 is another firm who gets the big picture. Their Xpont architecture claims to plug into the overall lifecycle of bringing an idea or product to fruition.

But what happens when the ideas you're creating aren't specific to product development? I'm thinking of organizations like the city of San Francisco, where CIO Chris Vein led an ideation effort that uncovered various ways to improve the city, such as saving $75,000 in car washing. There's no product there per se. Just a change in process or methodology.

Ideation platforms are starting now to answer that need. Imaginatik's Bryan Mahoney and Alex Kevorkian , for example, showed me a new platform Imaginatik just released called Portfolio Monitor that will work with Imaginatik's ideation platform, IdeaCentral.As ideas reach a critical mass of popularity or perceived effectiveness in IdeaCentral, community managers or other select users, will be able to click on a button that will transfer the idea to Portfolio Manager for implementation. There you can track history and activity and follow the entire process in the implementation, Mahoney said. Email notifications and other ways of keeping people engaged throughout the process are present as well.

The release had these features covered:

In addition to its reporting features and an intuitive user interface, Portfolio Monitor includes:

• Simple Integration Options – Move/upload ideas from Idea Central or other platforms directly to Portfolio Monitor.
• Standardized Project Workflow – Concepts that are converted into projects are simple to manage. Easily attach a custom, predefined process form, define project teams and assign required workflow to designated team members within Portfolio Monitor.
• Flexible Tracking – Predefined views include General Project Overview (organized by project status), Track by My Concepts (projects the user authored), Track by My Projects (projects in which the user is involved), Track by Sponsor (organized by sponsor name), and more.
• Easy Archive Access – Completed projects can be archived for future reference.
• Exporting Data – Export project data in CSV or Microsoft Excel format.

I've clipped a few screens for you to see better as to what they're talking about:

Faced with budget cutbacks, the city of San Francisco created a website, ImproveSF.org, to find ways the city could be improve. The campaign behind the site was created with the intentions of lowering costs in city government, which in turn would eliminate some of the financial stress felt at that level. Utilizing the site, city employees were permitted to sign in and enter their suggestions on how to best cut costs and raise money. Once submitted, others could comment and vote on the ideas to determine the essential "winners."

The results were astounding, once again affirming the idea that the best innovation comes from the most unlikely sources. There were more than seven hundred participants that played an active part in trying to find a solution. Four thousand votes were cast to determine the final outcome. There were four suggestions, which have been or will be implemented in order to achieve the actual objective- improving the city's financials and should realize a savings of $90,000, he says.

The four best received concepts were broken into two divisions. The first intended to cut costs, the second set out to raise more funds. The winning suggestions, as announced by Mayor Newsom, were amazing:

• The City Government phone lines will no longer utilize music on hold, which surprisingly cost the city more than $900 per month (they are obviously not using VoIP service).
• Ok, get this. Are you reading? This is amazing! The city government was paying out $75,000 per year to wash municipal vehicles! $75,000 per year was spent to wash cars! That will not be happening any longer.
• In order to increase the funds coming into government, credit cards will now be accepted should you decide to invest in some city and municipal ("MUNI") merchandise. Buy a T-shirt today- charge it!
• To further raise incoming funds, excess city property and vehicles will now be auctioned and sold to the highest bidder.

All joking regarding the poor spending habits of government aside, this kind of interaction between upper management and front line employees is exactly what business needs. San Francisco selected BrightIdea, the innovation management, but whether it's BrightIdea or any of the other 20 some odd ideation platforms engaging employees and customers today in developing new ideas isn't a choice it's a requirement.

One of the more interesting twists to come out of a recent conversation I had with Paul Pluschkell, the CEO of Spigit, was a novel way they're working with Cisco to change employee Web surfing habits.

Web surfing habits are a big concern of organizations today. Last year, the FCC became the butt of jokes when it was discovered that computers of several executives were filled with porn – porn that was watched during the financial crisis. An impending report we helped write with Osterman Research puts blocking unwanted content like porn or gambling from entering the enterprise as the No. 4 concern for IT executives, with more than three-quarters (76.2 percent) of respondents indicating that this was “important” or “very important.”

Blocking rogue sites is one approach, but what if instead you could incentivize people to use the Web constructively? You wouldn’t need to block sites or, at the very least, provide a positive reason not to waste time on the Web. The folks at Spigit have tests going on with Cisco where people improve their reputation in a community by browsing the Web constructively.

Reputation has been shown to be an effective motivator in communities, rewarding people through a systematic point system for their constructive contributions to the community. The more they contribute, the higher their rank in the community. The more points they earn, the more they can do within the community, whether it’s purchasing more shares in an idea, advertising to promote an idea or redeeming points at a company shop to purchase equipment and more.

Spigit does this by integrating its reputation engine with Cisco’s Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine. “Reputation APIs are there so you can, if you choose, take advantage of any type of third-party product, track where they’re visiting, giving them points and adding it to their reputation score.” The more time you spend on porn, the lower your rank.

The new clients all come as part of the innovation management platform provided bySpigit, Kindling, and just yesterday, Imaginatik, Each let's you suggest and evaluate ideas, but in slightly different ways:

Idea Central Mobile This innovation management tool from Imaginatik was designed to work with smartphones including the iPhone 3G, the BlackBerry (with OS 4.5 or higher) and the Droid. It can be used to propose new ideas, to seek out the insight of others in regards to current problem areas, or to rate the ideas proposed. The company considers the highlights to be the ability to engage those not currently at their desk, to improve communication by bringing up topics of importance, to more quickly bring ideas to fruition, and to do all of this via a secure line thanks to SSL encryption. This application is available today.

Mobile Spigit With a very user-friendly design and highly interactive capabilities, the Mobile Spigit afree iPhone application released last month has been well received. Ideas are provided a title and description, then all involved are able to voice their opinion of the idea, give feedback, and over time the status of the idea can move from evaluation, to in progress, and finally completed.

Kindling Mobile This mobile application was also released within the last month. It is available for the iPhone, BlackBerry and other smartphone devices. The application is a free feature of the service agreement. Create a new idea template quickly and easily, and then be alerted when new activity occurs on that template. The company will provide free demos for those who request it, so you can try your hand at the world of mobile innovation before you buy.

***** UPDATE

Brightidea Mobile Back in February, BrightIdea announced it's mobile client for the iPhone and iPad as well as Android devices. With BrightIdea Mobile, users can view, post, comment, vote, and share ideas. They can also use Brightidea's corporate micro-blogging feature to post and follow activity within their innovation community.

******

The next time you are on the road, hitting the gym, or even laying in bed when a brilliant idea comes to you, you won't have to wait for the next day to share it. The opportunity to share your brilliance is just a click away.

Well, I can’t say that I am terribly surprised to see that this company is moving with such quick paces. It is the way the big players in the technology industry have to work. Salesforce is wasting no time. With its new partnership, the company is promising Java developers more accessibility to the tools they need to continue to add to the AppExchange.

VMware joined in the efforts to create this new programming solution. VMware is at the international forefront of cloud infrastructure and prides itself on making the shift to cloud computing a smooth transition for companies big and small. More than one hundred seventy thousand businesses and individuals have turned to this company for their expertise in cloud computing. This is another company worth watching, as the first quarter results from this year showed wonderful growth across the board. Revenues for the first quarter were $634 million, an increase of 35% from the first quarter of 2009. The largest portion of the growth came from abroad, but revenue from within the United States still saw a thirty-percent increase over the first quarter of last year.

With the news of this partnership going public, one might have expected to see some reflection in the stock market. However, both companies are currently seeing losses for the day. VMware (VMW) is done over ninety cents per share and Salesforce is still falling after a not-so-good day yesterday. Currently the share price is under eight-five dollars, yet two days ago it closed at more than eighty-nine dollars per share.

Regardless of what investors think, the fact that Java developers can now efficiently program for the “cloud” will likely result in great improvements to the AppExchange portion of Salesforce. Ultimately, that is what will help move the company forward and give them more power to impress investors later.

On April 16, Microsoft’s Newsroom included an article entitled, “Microsoft Word 2010 Coauthoring Enables Multiple People to Work on a Document at the Same Time.” The piece discussed the coauthoring collaboration tool that is supposed to be all the rage when this Office Suite is finally released to the public. It also included an interview with one of the creators of the tool, Jonathon Bailor, in which he stated, “Our goal is actually not to change the way people work, but to make the way that people work easier.”

In line with this statement, a few days later, I received an email in my hotmail inbox alerting me to a new MSN homepage. It advertised a new section of the homepage that includes social networking feeds- Facebook and Twitter to be exact. Nice effort to tie in the ease of collaboration and communication, which Microsoft is moving toward. Though, I was a bit disappointed to find that this portion of the page is hidden in the bottom corner. It actually took me a minute to locate it even though I was searching it out. It was easy enough to set up the live feed once I located it though. I also like the ease of editing the page to fit my interests. Choose from the RSS feeds suggested by MSN, or select your own, including ZDnet.

All and all this page redesign is a nice introduction to the new Microsoft. Though, I still have my reservations as to how great Office 2010 will be. Google Docs, along with its selection of sister applications, are improving at such a rapid rate, it makes me wonder if even a software giant can keep stride. We will just have to wait with baited breath to see just how well the public takes to Microsoft’s new venue.

With the Cooliris 3D Wall, your website becomes a place to hang versus just another stop on the daily internet surf. Borrow images from Ted in Accounting of the recent company picnic, or run RSS feed of industry related news, or even follow the blogs of people writing about your company and make it all visible to everyone in one super cool location. Better yet, take these company promotions on the road with Cooliris Mobile. For the iPhone or the Nexus one, your company can work together to create the best possible collaboration of videos, industry news, and company photos to make customers want to know more. Keep them watching, reading, and wanting more even while on the road.

The company reports that approximately 45,000 walls have been created in the past four months; the largest percentage of which were embedded to Facebook, but with nearly 500 million visitors to the social networking site per month, companies with a Cooliris wall will be communicating in a way that the public understands- visually; interactively. Much of Cooliris is still in beta trial, but that means that the company holds promise of further development. I, personally, would love to see the wall become even more interactive- especially the mobile version- perhaps, a click to call feature for businesses within the wall (they are already working with Google in some facet)

While details were sketchy, what we know thus far is that the new iPhone will bring thousands of new applications as well as a new framework called "accelerate." But, perhaps the biggest news for users is the new form of multitasking that this phone promises. Apple has lagged behind Droid and others in the area and today it moved to fix the problem by adding the capability to the iPhone. Switch back and forth between apps effortlessly, without having to lose what you were doing before you switched.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs claims that they have created a system that allows for smooth transition from one application to another without slowing performance or killing the battery. The running applications will be shown along the bottom bar, where one now sees the phone, mail, Safari browser, and iPod applications.

This is all great news for business professionals who needs to access documents, stay internationally accessible, check their email, and, perhaps even spend a spare moment with the top news feeds.

Among those applications that will "run in the background" are Pandora's Music Box, push notifications, and VoIP (yes, that's right, VoIP- Wait, Skype talking iPhone- eh hem, Verizon, perhaps?). In fact, the head of the Skype Mobile division, David Ponsford was invited to the party to explain that now when iPhone users leave the Skype App, they will still be able to receive calls and will be made aware of those via a visual alert on the screen. Perhaps those figures regarding iPhone being outsold by 2012 are not so precise after all.

The super successful financial software, Quickbooks, was recently made available online and via web application for customer testing on the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other smartphones. The software, which aids in bookkeeping, customer account tracking, and other equally important financial task, has made itself a favorite of a great number of small businesses nationwide for its user-friendliness and affordability. I would be lying if I said that we hadn’t taken it for a spin a time or two in the past.

Having the option to take this handy tool on the road is a pretty nice feature. Thanks to the new Quickbooks Web Application, transactions can be recorded immediately and customer account information can be located from anywhere, but the greatest aspect of this system just may be the potential for virtual collaboration with coworkers and colleagues hundreds or thousands of miles away. Despite the numerous reasons for considering this new application an instant hit, there are also some drawbacks that I feel necessary to mention.

The first and most notable is that this is a web application, not one available in the Apple App Store or BlackBerry App World. Although, I suppose, despite the annoyance of having to call up the website each and every time you wish to use the mobile application, that there is an added level of security in knowing that if lost your phone is not broadcasting that you have a web based financial account to the finder. This application also requires that a monthly membership is paid for web-based Quickbooks. It will not coincide with other versions of the software, so the update must be made immediately if you wish to use this feature. Though, once this upgrade is made to the web based system, the user will never have to make another upgrade again, it provides the freedom to work from desktops anywhere, and provides a comparison of your company against those in your industry (specific company names are not disclosed).

All in all, this application is a very intriguing prospect for many entrepreneurs and businessmen. With the added benefit of a highly sophisticated security system-worthy of national banks- I imagine many people will find their way to the Quickbooks app relatively quickly.