Amazon AWS Direct Connect hits the UK

Last week was extremely busy, so the first I heard of Amazon’s Direct Connect service being available in the UK was when Tony forwarded me a journalist request to provide an analyst comment. In a nutshell, Direct Connect allows an Amazon customer to hook up to the AWS cloud service via a dedicated comms link, rather than having to send all traffic over the public internet.

The journalist asking for input was Rosalie Marshall at Incisive, and the article she produced can be seen here – worth a read if you want a quick summary.

The comment I provided, which is quoted in the article was as follows:

“Relying on the public internet for core application connectivity introduces a degree of variability and uncertainty around bandwidth, speed and latency that is unacceptable to many large organisations, which are increasingly putting the emphasis on end-to-end quality of service management. Utilising dedicated links to cloud providers overcomes this and hooking up via incumbent communications service providers can also have benefits in terms of costs, monitoring, troubleshooting and support."

“While security, per se, should not be an issue when sending traffic over the public internet, provided it is appropriately encrypted, directly connecting to the cloud provider does take away a commonly perceived risk, which may make it easier to get sign off from non-technical stakeholders when making cloud-related decisions.”

These comments were based on various conversations with senior IT decision makers, along with, of course, insights from the extensive primary research we have carried out to explore the practicalities of cloud adoption. If you are interested in seeing some of this, a particularly relevant report is one that Andy put together a few months ago, entitled: “Cloud Connectivity; Carefully does it”, which can be downloaded from here.

You can check out that report at your leisure, but suffice it to say that one of Andy’s main conclusions from the research was that connecting to cloud services is a whole different ball game to enabling remote access. Just because you have the comms in place to handle the latter, doesn’t mean they will be up to dealing with the former.

Back to the AWS announcement, Andy later followed up with Amazon and arranged for the team here to speak with Robin Meehan, Chief Technology Officer at Smart421, Amazon’s launch partner for Direct Connect in the UK. Robin pretty much reiterated the points outlined above in my initial take, but we also covered some of the practicality.

Robin highlighted the importance of a one-stop shop for the entire service end-to-end (connectivity and AWS infrastructure services), pointing out that most enterprise customers want to use a specialist to outsource these kinds of activities as they are not core business.

This makes absolute sense. Picking up on the trend towards end to end service management in the enterprise space, one of the frequent snags is how to deal with parts of the chain for which you may not have the specialist skills in house – particularly for elements that are physically outside of the datacentre. More and more, there is a need for trusted partners to whom responsibility can be delegated, and that often means working with suppliers that offer a broader scope and more coherent service.

As Robin says:

“We have deep connectivity skills and reach, as well as the application layer/IaaS skills, so when the customer says 'I can’t reach my Amazon EC2 instance', we are able to triage the problem effectively as we understand the entire architecture. For example, if it turns out to be an EC2 security group issue (aka firewall at the AWS end), we won’t blame the network.”

Of course none of this precludes Amazon customers piecing together the solution themselves, using their own expertise and general comms service providers, but as our research has highlighted, setting up the comms for business critical cloud services is not necessarily as easy as many make it out to be, particularly when more demanding applications and/or larger user bases are involved.

Anyway, the bottom line is that this recent announcement is welcome as it provides UK AWS users with choice that’s been available to US customers for a while now.

Oracle fleshes out its ‘big data’ portfolio

I couldn’t say this for certain, but I get the impression that the marketing noise around ‘big data’ has now exceeded that of ‘cloud computing’. Either way, there is no doubt that the ‘next big thing’ is now pretty well established as vendors clamour for position in this rapidly moving area.

Unlike cloud, however, which started out as largely a re-hashing of familiar ideas around hosting, SOA, data centre automation and business service management, the whole big data movement is introducing net new capability to the business mainstream from the outset, which was confirmed in a recent Freeform Dynamics research study (122 IT pro respondents, November 2011):



That’s not to say that everything talked about in terms of big data technology is new in absolute terms, but until recently, there weren’t that many offerings in some key big data areas that you would call genuinely ‘enterprise ready’. This has been especially true in the areas of distributed indexing and search, and large scale distributed analytics, where it has often been a case of hand-crafting solutions based on a combination of open source and commercial components to get the desired result; fine if you are Yahoo!, Facebook or a big bank with lots of resource to throw at it, but not really tenable in a busy and resource-constrained mainstream IT department.

With this in mind, vendors like IBM and EMC have been playing the game of bringing open solutions together with their own proprietary technology for a while to form coherent offerings, or at least out of the box integration between the pieces required. This has been necessary because of the shortcomings of environments such as Apache Hadoop in the areas of resilience, security, management and development tooling.

In an announcement this week, however, the daddy of the high end database world, Oracle, has declared its hand. Having already been dabbling in the area of distributed indexing and search (with the Oracle NoSQL Database), it is now getting into bed with Cloudera, arguably the most established independent specialist provider in the Hadoop world.

The end result is the Oracle Big Data Appliance, a Hadoop stack underpinned by Sun/Linux servers and other platform components from Oracle, and augmented with Cloudera’s enhanced Hadoop management environment. Oracle has also announced a portfolio of what it calls ‘Big Data Connectors’, which provide ease of integration between the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or Oracle NoSQL Database, and a traditional relational database environment.

These announcements are especially interesting given Oracle’s existing strong presence in the high end data management and analytics space. The Cloudera guys are extremely capable and have been doing some good stuff, but the Hadoop distribution at the centre of their activities is strengthened by the Oracle platform pieces. Furthermore, rightly or wrongly, enterprise IT departments often prefer to work with an established incumbent when introducing new ideas and capability into the mix.

Oracle’s broader database management pedigree is also important when we consider that big data technology will, on the whole, complement rather than replace traditional database and storage capability. Indeed there are many scenarios in which it makes sense to exploit both together, e.g. with preliminary exploration and analysis on large data sets with a poor signal to noise ratio taking place in Hadoop, then a more compact and structured derived data set being extracted into a traditional warehouse or BI environment. This is one of the reasons why the connectors Oracle is providing make absolute sense.

The co-existence of big data with traditional database and storage technologies was confirmed during the aforementioned research, which shows quite clearly that with the exception of legacy systems, IT professionals anticipate growth across all of the technology categories explored:



And if you ask the question explicitly, most people confirm that they don’t anticipate big data solutions replacing traditional options in any significant way:



However, turning to hard practicality, we also see a couple of calls to action for vendors on this chart. IT professionals are not convinced that suppliers can back up all of the big data hype with tangible support and services at the moment to help customers realise the potential, and they also have concerns about licensing and commercial arrangements as data related needs become more demanding.

So, despite the technology advances, there is still some work to be done, and it will be interesting to see how Oracle deals with these issues as its big data activities continue to develop.

Use of social media by analysts and analyst relations professionals

I recently had the pleasure of attending an event run by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) looking at the use of social media by analysts and analyst relations (AR) professionals. As part of this, I sat on a panel with a couple of other analysts – Richard Edwards from Ovum, and Dean Bubley from Disruptive Analysis.

A very good summary of the discussion and output has already been published here, so I won’t go over all of the ground we covered and conclusions we reached. However, there are a couple of points I would like to pick up and elaborate on.

Level and type of social media use within the IT industry

Firstly, as part of the introduction to how we at Freeform Dynamics use social media, I shared some snippets of research from a recent study we had conducted. The key chart here is as follows:

What this picture shows is that those working for suppliers within the tech industry are far more likely to be using social networking than the general population of IT professionals in customer/user organisations. This is something we have known for a while, and it’s why the team here at Freeform tend to think of social media primarily as a way of interacting with industry insiders (which Dean Bubley referred to as the ‘Fourth Estate’). The truth is that we have much more effective ways, not least traditional online media, of reaching the users and buyers that are the main consumers of our advisory output.

The above chart is also useful to help us keep the whole social media discussion in perspective. The data presented was gathered via a web survey so those more inclined to interact online will be over-represented because of self-selection. The 30% penetration of social media is therefore almost certainly inflated, underlining the fact that it hasn’t yet pervaded the work place.

We must also remember that social media is not just one thing. Some people use Facebook professionally, others use it purely for personal reasons or not at all. The same goes for Linkedin, Twitter, Google+, blogs and so on. Furthermore, we cannot assume that all work related use is associated with decision making. Many people simply use Linkedin or Facebook to keep up with the movement of colleagues and peers as their careers progress. So, not only is activity fragmented across media/networks, it varies significantly by type and intensity.

Social media should not replace traditional AR comms

Coming to the second point I want to pick up on, the fragmented nature of social media activity is one of the reasons why AR pros should rethink what they are doing if their use of social mechanisms means they start to cut out more traditional modes of interaction with analysts.

IT vendors and service providers communicate with analysts in a variety of ways, from email and telephone at one end, to face-to-face briefings and conferences at the other. Against the background of cost pressure on AR programmes, a few analysts I spoke with while preparing for the IIAR event expressed concern about traditional communication mechanisms potentially being replaced by social media alternatives - Facebook/Linkedin discussions, spokesperson blogs, Twitter events, and so on.

While there is nothing wrong with using social media like this, indeed some vendors already do some of this stuff, social mechanisms should be exploited in addition to rather than instead of traditional ways of interacting.

That's not to say that AR professionals can't spread their time and attention a little differently to embrace social - e.g. if a particular analyst that's important to you is clearly running their professional life on social media, then by all means use the same media to interact with them - just don't assume that such a switch will work for the analyst community as a whole, because it won’t. Assuming an analyst will respond to a Twitter direct message, or pointing them to an exec’s blog as a substitute for a proper conversation, represents a significant degradation of interaction.

The old principle of working out the preferred (or most effective) communication mechanism for each individual remains the same when looking at how social media is worked into analyst relations activity, as does that other fundamental principle of remembering the importance of the 'R' in 'AR'.

The whole debate around how and how much social media should be used by both analysts and AR professionals will no doubt continue, and it will be interesting to see if anyone feels any differently in a year’s time.

Here’s looking forward to the next IIAR debate on the topic.

Service management wake-up call

All IT departments are judged on service delivery

Whenever we put the word ‘service’ into the title of an article to do with IT delivery or management, we can almost guarantee a lower than average click rate. Phrases such as ‘service management’ and ‘service assurance’ are just not grabbers.

Some of this has to do with the pervasiveness of the word ‘service’, which is used and misused in IT-speak to refer to many different things, so is often associated with industry noise. But when used in the context of IT operations, it really is important to take notice of it. As you’ll appreciate by the end of this article, all IT departments are judged on the basis of service delivery, whether they work that way explicitly or not.

But embracing the concept of services proactively when it comes to IT operations has many advantages. Here, for example, is just one of many proof-points illustrating a direct correlation between the adoption of a service-centric approach to IT delivery, and the degree to which IT activities are viewed to be aligned with business priorities.


(The full report from which this chart was extracted can be downloaded here)

If you browse www.freeformdynamics.com, you’ll find reference to this services view of the world in many of our reports. Indeed we now consider it one of our standard segmentation criteria when analysing data, as service-centric IT delivery is generally a good proxy for progressive behaviour and better performance in many areas.

So why is this?

Well some of it has to do with the services view enabling better performance as a result of encouraging an end-to-end approach to operations. Rather than focusing exclusively on monitoring and managing individual components, the idea is that you spend at least as much time and effort on ensuring that everything works together to provide something valuable and appropriate to the end-user. By ‘everything’ here, we mean all relevant parts of the IT and communications chain, including both internal and external components and resources.

As an example, a traditional IT operations approach might include looking after the resilience and uptime of an ‘email system’, and separately managing the uptime and performance of the network. Those taking a service-centric view, however, would be considering the availability and performance of the ‘email service’, as experienced by users at the point of consumption. In our simple example, this obviously needs to take both the email system and the network into account, as the service is dependent on both working acceptably.

It’s at this point that some IT people start to get a bit defensive.

The objection we often hear is that it’s just too onerous to deviate from the component or system based view. The performance of our email service in reality, for example, is actually dependent on a lot of things if you really pull it apart – the PC on the desk or mobile in the hand, the email client software being used, the network (or networks) that transport messages back and forth, the email server environment itself, and the storage devices underpinning it. Pick any other application or ‘service’ and it’s likely to be equally if not more complicated in terms of underlying components and dependencies.

The fear is that it is a short step from adopting an end-to-end services approach and business people starting to judge IT simply on what happens at their screen and keyboard, without taking into account how complicated things are behind the scenes. IT then gets lumbered with a whole bunch of service level commitments and/or expectations that, it is perceived, are a lot harder to manage. It won’t any longer be possible to make the case that you were mostly doing your job well because 99.9 per cent of the infrastructure was working fine, and that major outage was caused by a single component failure that was beyond your control.

But let’s be honest with ourselves here. Users have never really bought into that kind of defence when things have not worked as they should. They have always been pretty much exclusively concerned with what they are able to do (or not do) at the end point of the IT delivery chain. If you ask any user or stakeholder how well they think IT is performing or supporting their area of the business, the language they use is inherently service-centric.

When they talk about email, they focus on the number of times it has been down recently or has been running really slowly. Even if it has been explained to them that the issues have been caused by a comms provider not meeting their obligations, they are not really that interested. They just want you, i.e. the IT department, to make the problem go away.

And it works the other way around too. Business people might well acknowledge how well the call centre system has been running recently, but do they care when you tell them about that major switch failure and the heroic and creative efforts of the network team to re-route traffic and avoid a major outage? The chances are, they’ll probably just shrug, on the basis that it’s your job to keep things running properly, so what’s the big deal?

Adopting a more explicit service-centric approach to IT delivery means you accept these things, and once you do this, you can start to take control. You realise that there is no point in trying to define how well IT is doing in terms of how many green lights are lit within the infrastructure. However good the internal IT view looks, you’ll still ultimately be judged on the basis of what’s delivered to users. If you define and manage expectations and commitments based on this, life actually becomes easier, not harder, as you avoid all of the problems that stem from users defining what is ‘acceptable’ unilaterally, and often in a very subjective manner.

The bottom line is that IT from a business user perspective is all about service consumption whether anyone defines it formally or explicitly in this way or not, so thinking in terms of service delivery within the IT department should really be a no-brainer.

Apples and Oranges

Are people really comparing like with like on the question of Mac versus Windows?

A couple of weeks ago, I had occasion to spend some time on a 4-5 year old MacBook Pro that my daughter had been using, and immediately noticed how sluggish and clunky it felt compared to my Windows 7 notebook that has an i5 processor, loads of memory and an SSD.

So what? That’s pretty much what you’d expect, isn’t it? The hardware running the Windows machine is so much more capable, so the experience is bound to be better.

The penny then dropped on something.

I have been trying to figure out for about four years now (ever since I got the aforementioned MackBook Pro) why Mac users seem so convinced that OS X and the whole Mac experience is so much better than Windows. It’s something that has totally eluded me. Compatibility to one side, Windows and OS X have always seemed pretty much equivalent to me, and nothing any Mac user has said when trying to support their claim of superiority has ever stood up to cross examination .

But then I realised that I am the kind of person, because of the job I do, that is pretty much always using the latest high spec machines, so when I have been comparing Windows and OS X, it’s generally been on equivalent kit.

I would imagine, however, that most people experience the Mac for the first time when moving from their aging Windows machine that has reached the end of its life - otherwise why would they be investing in something new? They therefore end up comparing an old PC running Windows XP with limited memory, a two generation old processor, and a cluttered and clogged hard disk, to a shiny new high spec Mac running a nice clean install of OS X. They then assume the difference is down to the fact that they have switched from Windows to Mac.

And, or course, having just spent a huge amount of money on a premium machine with a premium brand, they obviously need to justify their decision to themselves, their spouse and to the world in general, hence the “Mac is so much better than Windows” line.

Firing up the old MacBook Pro and noting the (relatively) poor experience it delivered compared to my current Windows notebook made me think of the above explanation. Apologies if this is obvious to a lot of people, and sorry if you genuinely believe that OS X is better, but at least it’s a mystery solved as far as I am concerned.

Having said this, I am still interested in hearing further justifications for claims made of Mac superiority from a user experience and productivity point of view. A few months ago I spent two months using one of the latest i7 MacBook Pros (again with an SSD and loads of RAM) as my main business machine, and while I thought the hardware was great, and I became pretty comfortable with OS X, I still couldn’t see what all the fuss was about; and life was still easier and my productivity better when I returned to Windows.

Anyway, feel free to ping me with you thoughts, or flame me if you are that way inclined :-)

Happy 100th birthday IBM

A couple of months ago, I picked up a tweet on Twitter that said something along the lines of: “It’s interesting that all of the tech companies that have made a real difference are the ones that have emerged since the internet came along”

When I finished spewing coffee all over my monitor, I had a think about why my instincts were telling me this was a bit silly. I then went back to the person concerned and asked them to think about what would happen if some evil wizard came along and with a wave of his wand made everything enabled or delivered by one of the older companies disappear instantly.

The obvious example was IBM. Wave that wand in Big Blue’s direction and immediately our entire financial services infrastructure, telecom infrastructure and a lot of our utilities would collapse. Most large organisations and many public services would also be severely crippled.

Now try the same trick with FaceBook – yes people would miss it, but the world would go on, and some might even argue that it would be a better place. Same with Twitter and a lot of the other internet based companies. I have to admit that I hesitated over Google, but when it really gets down to it, while it would hurt to lose internet search, and the immediate access to the information it represents, I am not sure it would bring the planet crashing to a halt in the same way.

And anyway, when you consider that it was the R&D investment of entities like IBM over the previous decades that enabled a lot of what internet companies, and the rest of us for that matter, now take for granted, it puts things into perspective.

From early calculating machines, though DRAM, RISC processors, magnetic disk drives, the relational database, and the PC, right up to the Watson supercomputer that recently won America’s Jeopardy! game show against the best human contestants, IBM has consistently been, and continues to be, one of the most prolific sources of world-changing innovation on the planet.

So we at Freeform Dynamics would like to say happy birthday IBM, as it turns a century old today. Here’s to the next 100 years of innovation.

Is the backward, protectionist IT channel holding back cloud progress?

I have been conducting a lot of interviews recently with vendors, resellers and SIs about why it is proving so hard to motivate the traditional IT channel to get on board with cloud. While there are some examples of success, scaling up action beyond a minority of niche partners or risk takers seems to be proving universally difficult.

This issue is important. If you are a vested interest looking to drive subscriptions in the SMB space, you need representation by the suppliers that smaller businesses turn to for advice and solutions. If you are a customer that’s trying to make sense of if, where and how this cloud stuff can benefit you, then you need your trusted (often local) supplier to guide and support you.

Some reading this might disagree, and make the argument that the cloud renders the channel redundant. Well “good luck with that”, as my teenage kids would say. So far, no one that I am aware of has found a way of selling cloud services around the channel in any volume to SMBs without an army of out-bound telesales or field sales people of their own. It’s hard to achieve serious scale that way, and without scale, the cloud model doesn’t work well economically.

One of the reasons for the lukewarm reception of cloud within the channel is because the switch from a product-based business model to a services/annuity-based one is not trivial. Accounting practices, remuneration mechanisms and the way propositions are sold all change considerably, which is a lot of upheaval. Hard enough if the demand and margins are there, but I am hearing that neither of these is at the moment, so lack of major movement is unsurprising.

Against this background, it really doesn’t help when vested interests preach at the channel and effectively accuse them of being backward and protectionist. Most players within the channel are SMBs themselves, and it is unrealistic to expect them to divert significant resources to help the big guys create a market when the returns are far from obvious. And let’s be clear, switching models is not something you can play at – unless you approach it seriously and commit, you will not be successful.

This whole thing makes me wonder whether service providers have collectively fallen into the huge trap of assuming that the cloud delivery model would lead to general ‘disintermediation’. This is a clever sounding term popularised in the dot-com era that basically refers to the principle of cutting out the middle man by establishing a direct electronic relationship with the customer. It was a flawed and misguided notion then that everything would shift a direct model, and it remains so now, but the relative lack of thought being given to what’s in it for the channel is consistent with this way of thinking.

So too is a lot of the cloud pricing we see. At one end we have unnecessarily low and highly publicised prices set by direct service provider sales activity around email, content management and other horizontal application and communication services. These often leave nothing in the equation to cover the cost of indirect marketing, sales, account management and support activity, and close the door to mark up because the PR machine has proudly declared to the world how little customers should expect to pay.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have highly priced services that make a mockery of the frequently heard claim that cloud options are cheaper than the on-premise or co-location equivalent. When the canny SMB customer does the sums on lifetime TCO versus cumulative cloud subscription fees, it’s no wonder many still stick with traditional delivery options. Sure, there are lots of reasons other than cost to look at cloud computing, but it becomes a hard-sell when you have to work around raised expectations on savings that cannot possibly be met.

Put these price related challenges together with limited demand, small margins, deferred profit and cash-flow disruption (if you divert existing product sales to cloud) and that’s a pretty big ask of channel partners, especially the smaller ones that serve the local and regional needs of the mainstream SMB market.

The reality is that while traditional product pricing generally reflects the costs involved and the need for profit across distribution tiers, cloud related pricing and channel discounts today often don’t. It doesn’t matter whether this is because of land grab attempts by providers, the idealistic notion of cheap, direct consumption models defining the future of the market, or the mistaken view that customers are so ‘excited’ about cloud that they will pay through the nose for it. All this is secondary to the fact that what’s in it for the channel is often very unclear.

With this in mind, I don’t blame those resellers who are cautiously biding their time. The commercial models around indirect cloud based delivery are currently a mess, and the onus is on the provider community to get its act together, not on the channel to change its attitude.

Agile development in context

Business people often complain that IT projects take too long and deliver results that fall short of requirements. In their defence, developers point out that business people are poor at explaining their needs and change their mind too much.

Some believe such conflict is a consequence of the traditional ‘waterfall’ approach to software development, e.g. where the process sequentially moves through requirements gathering, business analysis, systems design, coding and testing. Just like in a relay race where there is no going back once the baton has been passed without destroying the team's performance, revisiting earlier phases in a waterfall development can be costly and disruptive.

So you plan and document everything, strictly manage activity, and enforce rigorous change control along the way. The unwritten mantra is that change is the enemy and should be challenged hard wherever it is requested.

The snag, of course, is that things often do change legitimately over the course of a project, especially if the elapsed time is measured in months or years. This applies to requirements, constraints, technology, surrounding systems, and so on. Furthermore, once you show a stakeholder or user something running, it often sparks new ideas and requirements that they hadn’t previously thought of. If the first time they see working software is in the lead up to ‘go live’, with all the remaining time allocated to testing and remediation, this is far from ideal.

Those challenging the traditional waterfall approach assert that it should not be necessary to design, build and test everything before delivering anything. This in turn leads to the notion of ‘agile development’, characterised by rapid and frequent delivery based on a more collaborative approach. Advocates claim that this reduces time to value, copes better with change, and increases the chances of business needs being met.

In 2001, a number of these advocates came together to define the ‘Agile Manifesto’, within which it was stated that the group valued:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Many seasoned IT professionals might consider a project set up on this basis as an accident waiting to happen. The group, however, was careful to point out “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more”. The manifesto should therefore not be interpreted as advocating an ill-disciplined ‘make it all up as you go along’ approach.

In practice, the term ‘agile development’ actually refers to a collection of well-defined methodologies such as DSDM, SCRUM, Adaptive Software Development, Extreme Programming, and others. Agile methods are grouped together because they are all based on the more incremental and iterative approach to designing and building software. In an agile development project, the overall objectives are still well-defined, but the way in which they will ultimately be met is deliberately kept fluid in case something changes over time. Work is conducted in discrete units of activity, each leading to the delivery of a set of fully working and tested features and functionality that can be reviewed, accepted and actually used by the business.

In contrast to traditional development organisations that group specialists such as analysts, architects, programmers and testers into separate functional units, agile development teams are generally small (less than 10 members), multi-functional, and self-contained. The principle of ‘self-organisation’ with flat team structures and continuous communication is an important ingredient in the mix. The idea is that in a close-knit group with a discrete common goal (i.e. meeting the objectives of the next software release), people will naturally figure out who needs to do what between themselves then collaborate to achieve the result.

Those who have been around the block a few times might be sceptical of this romantic notion. For many (if not most) of the developers working in mainstream IT departments, the work they do is a job, not a vocation. As in any profession, you have a spectrum of capability and attitude, with highly talented, motivated and naturally collaborative people at one end of the scale, and ‘nine to fivers’ with mediocre skills and an uncooperative mind-set at the other. While agile advocates claim the approach brings out the best in people, the success rate will be heavily influenced in reality by the make-up of teams and the environment in which they operate.

We must also be clear that adoption of the agile approach is not a licence to dispense with core skills and disciplines. Project management, coding standards, code documentation, configuration management and comprehensive testing are all still important. So too are horizontal functions that cut across software development projects such as business analysis, data modelling, technical architecture definition, and overall IT governance.

The reality is that agile methods can be useful for handling small to medium scope development projects (or smaller discrete parts of larger projects), where requirements are particularly dynamic or hard to pin down, and the right mix of people can be brought together. But before jumping to agile, it is important to recognise that many of the problems that arise during waterfall projects are not actually to do with the methodology per se, but a lack of discipline, control and effective communication. It may therefore be better to focus on fixing this first.

Considering agile development in the broader context, it can be a useful complement to traditional methods and a potential way of working around stakeholder reluctance to fund long-running monolithic developments. It is not, however, a magic bullet to neutralise all development woes.

(Article originally written for Computing Magazine)

Welcome Martha

It is with great pleasure that I welcome Martha Bennett to Freeform Dynamics. Martha and I have been bumping into each other on the analyst circuit for the last few years, and I have always thought it would be good to have the opportunity to work with her. Well now I can, along with the rest of the Freeform team, and we are all looking forward to having another person join us with a solid track record of real world experience.

Martha will be assuming a VP level role as Head of Strategy, and you’ll find a quick summary of what she will be up to, along with her contact details, on our website here.

A road warrior’s experience with the iPad

Tales from 10 months of trial and error

I have now been an iPad user for 10 months, and despite the fact that the device has been in market for a long time now, I still often get asked whether it’s any good when people spot me using one.

But answering such enquiries is something I find very difficult to do in a meaningful way. The reason is because the iPad is in some respects very flexible, but in others extremely constraining. So, whether it’s ‘any good’ depends on the perspective you take, and whether it is right for any individual will depend on your lifestyle, working patterns and, above all, preferences.

Given this, I thought it might be useful to outline my own experiences and explain where my usage of the iPad has ended up, which is not at all how I expected things to turn out.

Before getting going, it’s probably worth saying that the device I have been using, and currently use, is the original iPad – specifically the 64Gb 3G variant. I have played with an iPad 2, however, and it’s pretty clear that it’s fundamentally the same device, just slightly lighter, slightly thinner, slightly quicker and with a couple of cameras added. Everything I am about to say is therefore not going to be any different.

So what’s my experience been?

Initial expectations and immediate disappointment

When I first got the iPad, it was with business use in mind, and to be honest it was more of a research exercise than anything else – I just wanted to explore where, if at all, it might fit into my typical ‘road warrior’ type of lifestyle. In this context, I could see the potential of something highly portable, with a decent screen size, good battery life and instant-on capability. I thought it might specifically be useful for reading and composing emails, doing lightweight office work, and browsing the Web to keep up with the news. The idea was that on days when I didn’t have anything heavy to do on the road, I could leave the laptop at home.

My initial experiences were promising. The email client was good, and despite taking up almost half of the screen in landscape mode, the soft keyboard was remarkably usable if the device was set down on a flat surface (using the standard cover folded back to support the machine at the appropriate angle). An immediate disappointment, though, was a lack of proper rendering of Microsoft Office documents sent to me as email attachments. With anything but the simplest of Word files, formatting was lost and some documents were pretty much totally unreadable.

Investigating workarounds for document authoring, editing and review

I invested a lot of time and effort looking for ‘apps’ to help with the Office document compatibility issue, and while some improved the situation, none got anywhere near fixing it. I went through a period of asking people to resend Office documents in PDF format so I could read them properly on the iPad, then using various tools that support PDF mark-up for review purposes, but all this ended up creating work for not just me, but everyone else in the team I work with.

It also became pretty obvious to me that the touch screen slate format is fundamentally not suited to routine editing, review and mark-up tasks. Using your fingers to position the cursor, highlight text, cut and paste text, etc, is certainly doable (if you have the right combination of document type and app to allow it), but it’s so incredibly slow and tedious compared to using a mouse and keyboard.

I generally gave up trying do such things after a while, and on occasions when I absolutely had to review something when I didn’t have the laptop with me, I’d get the document sent in PDF, then read it on the iPad while typing comments and corrections into a separate email on the BlackBerry. I still use this technique from time to time, and assure you it is much quicker and easier than trying to mark up a document directly on the iPad. It’s also less fuss for the author when they get the output of the review back to act upon.

Definitely not a laptop or smart phone replacement

Mentioning the BlackBerry brings me back to the question of the iPad’s soft keypad. As good as it is, is still represents a compromise compared to a physical keyboard. Even today, after a lot of practice on the iPad, I can still type a lot more quickly and comfortably on my BlackBerry Bold 9700. I have also discovered that while I receive a lot email, the vast majority of the messages that really matter are actually quite short, so the larger screen of the iPad is not as much of an advantage for routine mobile email use as you might think if you already have a decent handheld device.

As a result of these factors, I gradually found myself going back to using the BlackBerry for anything to do with email while out and about, so I don’t really think of the iPad as an email device any more.

It’ll come as no surprise that I have also given up trying to use the iPad for writing, except in emergencies, for the reasons previously mentioned. I did try using a separate Bluetooth keyboard for a while, and while this made things better, I realised that I had drifted back into laptop territory, and that a proper laptop was actually a lot less fuss and a lot more comfortable and efficient.

So, the iPad has not allowed me to leave the laptop at home at all when going out and about on business, but I still do take it with me most places. Why?

Discovering the value beyond traditional use cases

Well because it really comes into its own in other ways, beyond traditional office and email type activity.

I now, for example, carry around much less paper. It used to be that I would print off reports and research slide sets before setting off for the day that I would need for discussion or illustration during meetings. While in theory you can use a laptop to talk around in a meeting context, I have always found it to be clumsy and intrusive. This is particularly true in a relatively informal setting where talking around (and potentially passing around) a sheet of paper or document is much more natural and conducive to open and free flowing conversation.

As it turns out, you can use a slate to achieve the same effect – i.e. as a direct paper replacement. I will quite often, for example, pull up a research chart on the iPad to illustrate a point I am trying to make, then hand it to the person I am speaking with so they can look at it closely. It can even be passed around for a small group to take a look. People also have no problem when you tell them to “flick backwards” or “flick forwards” to page through the document or presentation – they know what to do intuitively. Using this technique, I can also show samples of our work, whether it’s documents or something we have published online that I can pull up from the relevant website.

With a combination of the iPad, a PDF library containing all of our current research and deliverables, and an always-connected web browser, I can metaphorically ‘create’ any piece of paper I need on the fly, even if I didn’t foresee needing it before the meeting. While sceptics might argue you could pull up the same content on a laptop, believe me when I say it is not anywhere near as effective as using a slate – indeed I can introduce material into a discussion via the iPad in situations where it would be totally unnatural or inappropriate to open my laptop. This is not a benefit I expected, by the way, I just discovered it by accident.

Web browsing and access to cloud apps

The benefit I did expect, and that the iPad has delivered on, is around Web browsing. In my job, I need to stay reasonably well up to date with what’s going on in the IT industry, so I spend quite a bit of time on news sites and vendor websites. The slate form factor is perfect for doing this comfortably, whether on the train, in a coffee shop between meetings, laying on your bed in a hotel room, or even sat on the sofa at home. I also discovered a nice cross-platform utility for caching web pages offline so you can read them later, e.g. while sat on a plane.

The lack of flash support on the iPad is irritating, and I found it particularly noticeable when getting into more research type activity. I find watching video clips quite handy when you want a quick hit overview of someone’s view of a problem, or their high level proposition, and there is some great pre-recorded webcast material out there. A lot of useful content on IT vendor, consulting firm and publisher websites is Flash based, however, and therefore not accessible. To be honest, though, for this kind of more proactive research, I tend to use a PC anyway, harvesting links and segments of text as I go into Office documents, so the Flash thing is arguably moot.

The one thing that’s changed considerably over the course of my iPad use is accessing some of our intranet and cloud based apps. To begin with, I had problems with some of our Microsoft stuff, but today accessing Outlook Web Access and SharePoint is not bad. The one I still have a problem with is Salesforce.com. There is no iPad app, the iPhone one is not brilliant, and Mobile Safari is still not properly supported – all of which is ironic given that Marc Benioff was waving an iPad around on stage about a year ago claiming that such devices were transforming the way customers were accessing their service. As an aside, if anyone out there has found of way of getting a decent iPad experience with Salesforce.com, I would love to hear from you.

Great for reading and personal use in general

Building on my use of the iPad for browsing news sites, etc, I have got so used to using the device for reading stuff that I take advantage of it routinely for pretty much all of the written content I consume on the road, whether it’s business or technically oriented papers, IT vendor literature, or business books or novels. There are lots of ways of reading a PDF on an iPad (I generally favour the ‘GoodReader’ app), but I have settled on the Amazon Kindle app for eBooks as this is portable across devices and syncs both content and current position in books across all registered clients (via ‘Whispersync’). In fact, I now rarely read physical books anymore, even at home on the sofa or while lying in bed. The only real limitation of the iPad in this respect is reading it in bright sunlight, so with the Summer coming, I may be looking at a dedicated Kindle device at some point for more domestic/holiday use.

Talking of entertainment, I have found that the portable video capability of the iPad has become quite an important part of my life. I tend to download TV series from iTunes so if I have an hour to kill and don’t fancy working or reading, I can pull up an episode and relax – great for train journeys home after a long day, on short haul flights, and for those dead periods you occasionally get when staying in hotel rooms. If I have a decent WiFi connection, I also use streamed content in the same way, and even do this around the home. It’s now pretty natural for me to watch BBC iPlayer content, or the BBC or Sky news channel, for example, while shaving in the bathroom, cooking in the kitchen, sitting in the back garden, or whatever.

Interestingly, I don’t tend to use the iPad much for music though. While out and about, the BlackBerry or iPod (1st gen Nano in my case) is generally more convenient with a headset (and the BlackBerry has better sound quality).

Conclusion

Standing back and reviewing all these experiences and learnings, I would sum it up by saying that the iPad is an ideal prosumer device that genuinely cuts across the business/personal divide and delivers significant value on both sides of the equation. From a business perspective, it is certainly not a laptop replacement, however – partly because the slate form factor is inherently not suited to some types of activity (e.g. authoring and reviewing), and partly because neither Apple nor Microsoft seem interested in making Microsoft Office documents properly accessible on the iPad (and there probably isn’t enough money in it for third party app vendors to move much beyond the capability they currently offer). However, the iPad is very useful as a laptop companion and paper replacement in the way I have explained.

The last point I would make is that most of the benefits and constraints I have mentioned would be common to any credible slate offering – e.g. based on Android, WebOS or Windows. The only consideration might be MS Office compatibility for business purposes (which may ultimately be better on other devices), and the role of iTunes on the personal front (which others may find difficult to match). iTunes is very convenient for managing video content, and while I am not a big game player, I would imagine that if you were into this, the sheer volume of titles available for the iPad would be a consideration.

So, is the iPad any good? I personally think so, but it really does depend what you are looking for, and other options are emerging very rapidly.