One of the challenges associated with desktop computing is that discussions around needs and value are often complicated by subjective matters.
Even users with relatively routine requirements usually have opinions on what matters about the machine on their desk. There is then the question of image and status that pre-occupies certain types of user, and the tricky job of separating actual business needs from personal interests and desires when it comes to power users.
Layered on top of this are factors such as advocacy and religion, with Mac and Linux fans preaching their alternative way, some in IT looking for an easier life trying to force thin clients on everyone, and even good old fashioned reactionary politics playing a role, as some object to Microsoft’s dominance and what they perceive as a faceless global organisation exploiting its commercial clout.
Against this background, we recently ran an online survey asking respondents (over 1,100 IT pros) about their thoughts and plans on the topic of desktop modernisation, taking the opportunity along the way to figure out where organisations are out there today with their desktop estates.
Some of the findings are pretty much as you would expect – e.g. it’s a Windows world, with XP in particular still dominating the business PC environment. But some of the other stuff that came out was a little more interesting. We found, for example, that the strong positive reception to Windows 7, even before its release, had led to two out of three then current Vista migration initiatives being halted or put on hold.
We also uncovered evidence emphasising the importance of future-proofing desktop estates, and indications that the deferral of investment in many organisations as a result of the downturn and lack of enthusiasm for Vista had elevated the risks here.
Pulling it all together, though, what was clear from the research is the importance of understanding the requirements of different types of user, which can vary significantly, and taking a service delivery view of world rather than getting bogged down in the relative merits of newer and older technology at a feature/function level.
If you are interested in reading more on all this, a full report has been produced which you are welcome to download from here.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Mobile rants and moans
Just read a passionate blog post by Philippe Winthrop pleading for some of the emotive coverage in relation to mobile platforms to be toned down. He starts out by saying:
The Internet has been all a twitter (all puns intended) with the new "Droid" coming from Motorola and Verizon Wireless. In fact an analyst at Citigroup is really excited about it. CNET wonders if Motorola can make a comeback with Android devices. Another analyst downgrades RIM. Then, Gizmodo says Palm "lost". People keep on panning Windows Mobile while saying the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread. These inflammatory titles really need to stop.
He then goes on to run through the six major device platforms around at the moment – Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, webOS (Palm) and Windows Mobile – pointing out that none of these is in any danger of disappearing from the scene in the foreseeable future; so why all this adversarial talk about devices among pundits?
I’m inclined to agree with his point and I empathise with his frustration. Rather than silly stories about winning and losing, commentators would do much better to accept that there is currently a very rich landscape, and help to guide people through it, especially those writing for business users.
And while we’re into getting stuff off our chests, I would like to add that from business sector perspective, device/OS manufacturers and operators playing games with exclusivity on new devices is really not helpful. Perhaps in the consumer space subscribers go rushing from one operator to another because the latest hot device has just become available on a particular network, but businesses just can’t behave that way. And with mobile comms and mobile remote access now falling under the IT umbrella in mid-sized and larger organisations, there is good awareness that the device part of the equation is the most volatile, and therefore represents the least suitable pivot point for sensible decision making.
All of this is very front-of-mind for me at the moment as I have been reviewing the options for meeting Freeform Dynamics’ own mobile communication needs, and if you haven’t tried to compare and contrast offerings directly for while, take my word for it, it hasn’t got any easier in recent times.
We are quite aggressive users but have a pretty good handle on our usage patterns and volumes (average minutes and data consumed per month, roaming requirements, etc), so you would think it would just be a case of simply getting a few quotes and looking at what’s included and excluded from the contract. But then things in the small print catch you out such as voicemail access charges, lengthy restrictive agreements, draconian support hours, etc.
On this last point, for example, I was amazed that with one global network, my access to tech support for core business usage on a business contract was actually less than a teenager on the same network looking for help with problem on their pre-pay phone. So much for flexible working any time, any place, anywhere - all well and good from a support perspective, provided you don't stray too much from normal office hours in your home country!
Coming back to where we started, while we all love reviewing and writing about devices, from an enterprise mobility point of view, there really are a lot more important things that matter. As an analyst, I was pulled off onto other areas of coverage for while, but I now feel the need to get back into the whole mobile thing again after recent experiences.
I dunno, you turn your back for a few months..... :-)
The Internet has been all a twitter (all puns intended) with the new "Droid" coming from Motorola and Verizon Wireless. In fact an analyst at Citigroup is really excited about it. CNET wonders if Motorola can make a comeback with Android devices. Another analyst downgrades RIM. Then, Gizmodo says Palm "lost". People keep on panning Windows Mobile while saying the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread. These inflammatory titles really need to stop.
He then goes on to run through the six major device platforms around at the moment – Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, webOS (Palm) and Windows Mobile – pointing out that none of these is in any danger of disappearing from the scene in the foreseeable future; so why all this adversarial talk about devices among pundits?
I’m inclined to agree with his point and I empathise with his frustration. Rather than silly stories about winning and losing, commentators would do much better to accept that there is currently a very rich landscape, and help to guide people through it, especially those writing for business users.
And while we’re into getting stuff off our chests, I would like to add that from business sector perspective, device/OS manufacturers and operators playing games with exclusivity on new devices is really not helpful. Perhaps in the consumer space subscribers go rushing from one operator to another because the latest hot device has just become available on a particular network, but businesses just can’t behave that way. And with mobile comms and mobile remote access now falling under the IT umbrella in mid-sized and larger organisations, there is good awareness that the device part of the equation is the most volatile, and therefore represents the least suitable pivot point for sensible decision making.
All of this is very front-of-mind for me at the moment as I have been reviewing the options for meeting Freeform Dynamics’ own mobile communication needs, and if you haven’t tried to compare and contrast offerings directly for while, take my word for it, it hasn’t got any easier in recent times.
We are quite aggressive users but have a pretty good handle on our usage patterns and volumes (average minutes and data consumed per month, roaming requirements, etc), so you would think it would just be a case of simply getting a few quotes and looking at what’s included and excluded from the contract. But then things in the small print catch you out such as voicemail access charges, lengthy restrictive agreements, draconian support hours, etc.
On this last point, for example, I was amazed that with one global network, my access to tech support for core business usage on a business contract was actually less than a teenager on the same network looking for help with problem on their pre-pay phone. So much for flexible working any time, any place, anywhere - all well and good from a support perspective, provided you don't stray too much from normal office hours in your home country!
Coming back to where we started, while we all love reviewing and writing about devices, from an enterprise mobility point of view, there really are a lot more important things that matter. As an analyst, I was pulled off onto other areas of coverage for while, but I now feel the need to get back into the whole mobile thing again after recent experiences.
I dunno, you turn your back for a few months..... :-)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Vista and Lotus - Knowing when to let go of a brand
Microsoft spent an absolute fortune on the Vista brand. In marketing terms, the Vista campaign was huge by any standards, and was a big success insofar as raising awareness of Microsoft's next-generation Windows offering was concerned.
Of course as we all know, things didn't work out too well for Microsoft. The the new features and functionality of Vista turned out not to be as game-changing as Microsoft had implied in its messaging, and to make matters worse, the product wasn't really ready for mainstream use at the time it was launched. Initial expectations were therefore not met, leading to a significant backlash in the media, and ultimately among users. In the business context, many made the decision to defer upgrading because of the perceived risk and lack of incremental value, which is why XP is still the dominant version of Windows in corporate environments today.
The irony is that once Vista had settled down over the course of the first year or 18 months, it turned out to be a respectable operating system; certainly fit for purpose, and potentially offering some significant benefits, especially from an operations and risk management perspective in larger enterprises. But by then it was too late. Regardless of what was going on with the product, the Vista brand had accumulated too much negative baggage. And painful though it must have been, we have to give Microsoft credit for realising this, pressing the big red reset button, writing off its investment, and starting again under the Windows 7 banner - a tactic that seems to have paid off.
There is a lesson here, perhaps, for another vendor that has accumulated significant brand baggage that is getting in the way of customers appreciating the potential of a couple of its product lines. Back in the 90s, IBM lost the battle for dominance in the email and calendaring server arena with Lotus Notes and the back-end Domino server that drives it. For reasons that don’t matter now, Microsoft stole the market from under its nose. While IBM still argues the toss around market statistics, frequently trying to make the case that Lotus Notes/Domino is still as successful as Exchange, the following chart from our last Reg barometer study sums up the real situation.
The data we are looking at here predominantly relates to respondents from the UK and USA. Based on this, IBM's footprint looks to be about half that of Microsoft in organisations with greater than 5,000 employees, dropping proportionally as we look to smaller entities. Significantly, however, whereas the commitment and sentiment associated with Microsoft Exchange is overwhelmingly positive, Lotus Notes/Domino is much more likely to be regarded as legacy. This is particularly noticeable in the corporate sector where almost half of respondents using the IBM solution put it into the legacy category.
To be fair, this picture is from almost a year ago, and though it hadn’t changed that much from the previous year (apart from the Lotus footprint shrinking a little), IBM has been doing some pretty good stuff recently. The latest Notes 8.5 release, for example, looks excellent, and if feedback from LotusSphere user group events is anything to go by, the response from the installed based has been very positive. In addition, a number of other offerings have recently emerged or been enhanced under the Lotus brand in hot areas such as social computing and unified communications, which provide some great options for Notes/Domino shops to extend their investments in a future proof manner. With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see if we pick up any changes in commitment and perception when we run our next Barometer (watch this space).
In the meantime, there is a big question around whether Lotus offerings will make a significant impact outside of the Notes/Domino installed base, and the challenge here is not so much relevance and value in an absolute sense to a Microsoft Exchange shop, for example, but perceptions around the Lotus brand. There are two issues here, both stemming from the fact that the words ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ have been tied together so strongly over time. The first is that as the latter acquired its legacy image in the broader market, that couldn’t help but rub off on the former.
Even if IBM is successful at refreshing the Lotus brand, however, and creating a more positive and up-to-date feel around it, there is still a second problem to contend with. This is that the same historical association between ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ leads to the assumption that anything carrying the Lotus name is probably aimed at extending or enhancing the Notes/Domino environment. Given that Exchange shops generally have no appetite for considering a switch to the IBM alternative for core email and calendaring, the likelihood is therefore that they simply dismiss other Lotus branded offerings, such as unified communications and social computing solutions, as not being relevant to them.
Ironically, the latest ‘Lotus Knows’ marketing campaign (http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/) runs the risk of actually aggravating the situation. While the fundamental idea of trying to create and propagate enthusiasm among end user influencers has merit, and there has reportedly been excitement within the ‘Lotus Loyal’ installed base, the whole thing revolves around the benefits of an end-to-end Lotus environment, with Notes/Domino featuring prominently. This simply reinforces the abovementioned assumptions and makes it even more likely that Exchange shops, 97% of which (according to our barometer data) indicate continued committed use, will totally ignore what IBM has on offer under the Lotus brand, even though it might prove useful to them.
Coming back to where we started, against this background, there is a strong argument for IBM grasping the nettle as Microsoft did with Vista, and either letting the Lotus brand go altogether or at least re-branding some of the newer stuff it has stuck under the Lotus banner. Admittedly, it’s not quite the same situation as Microsoft faced in that the Lotus brand is not tarnished in the same way as Vista; it’s more a case of the brand being entrenched in history and having become a bit tired over the years. Nevertheless, by burdening a lot of really cool software with so much historical baggage, IBM is not doing itself or the broader market any favours. The only party to benefit is arguably Microsoft, who will continue to pick up a lot of unified communications and social computing business in Exchange accounts by default, with an important set of alternatives from IBM not even being considered.
Of course as we all know, things didn't work out too well for Microsoft. The the new features and functionality of Vista turned out not to be as game-changing as Microsoft had implied in its messaging, and to make matters worse, the product wasn't really ready for mainstream use at the time it was launched. Initial expectations were therefore not met, leading to a significant backlash in the media, and ultimately among users. In the business context, many made the decision to defer upgrading because of the perceived risk and lack of incremental value, which is why XP is still the dominant version of Windows in corporate environments today.
The irony is that once Vista had settled down over the course of the first year or 18 months, it turned out to be a respectable operating system; certainly fit for purpose, and potentially offering some significant benefits, especially from an operations and risk management perspective in larger enterprises. But by then it was too late. Regardless of what was going on with the product, the Vista brand had accumulated too much negative baggage. And painful though it must have been, we have to give Microsoft credit for realising this, pressing the big red reset button, writing off its investment, and starting again under the Windows 7 banner - a tactic that seems to have paid off.
There is a lesson here, perhaps, for another vendor that has accumulated significant brand baggage that is getting in the way of customers appreciating the potential of a couple of its product lines. Back in the 90s, IBM lost the battle for dominance in the email and calendaring server arena with Lotus Notes and the back-end Domino server that drives it. For reasons that don’t matter now, Microsoft stole the market from under its nose. While IBM still argues the toss around market statistics, frequently trying to make the case that Lotus Notes/Domino is still as successful as Exchange, the following chart from our last Reg barometer study sums up the real situation.
The data we are looking at here predominantly relates to respondents from the UK and USA. Based on this, IBM's footprint looks to be about half that of Microsoft in organisations with greater than 5,000 employees, dropping proportionally as we look to smaller entities. Significantly, however, whereas the commitment and sentiment associated with Microsoft Exchange is overwhelmingly positive, Lotus Notes/Domino is much more likely to be regarded as legacy. This is particularly noticeable in the corporate sector where almost half of respondents using the IBM solution put it into the legacy category.
To be fair, this picture is from almost a year ago, and though it hadn’t changed that much from the previous year (apart from the Lotus footprint shrinking a little), IBM has been doing some pretty good stuff recently. The latest Notes 8.5 release, for example, looks excellent, and if feedback from LotusSphere user group events is anything to go by, the response from the installed based has been very positive. In addition, a number of other offerings have recently emerged or been enhanced under the Lotus brand in hot areas such as social computing and unified communications, which provide some great options for Notes/Domino shops to extend their investments in a future proof manner. With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see if we pick up any changes in commitment and perception when we run our next Barometer (watch this space).
In the meantime, there is a big question around whether Lotus offerings will make a significant impact outside of the Notes/Domino installed base, and the challenge here is not so much relevance and value in an absolute sense to a Microsoft Exchange shop, for example, but perceptions around the Lotus brand. There are two issues here, both stemming from the fact that the words ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ have been tied together so strongly over time. The first is that as the latter acquired its legacy image in the broader market, that couldn’t help but rub off on the former.
Even if IBM is successful at refreshing the Lotus brand, however, and creating a more positive and up-to-date feel around it, there is still a second problem to contend with. This is that the same historical association between ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ leads to the assumption that anything carrying the Lotus name is probably aimed at extending or enhancing the Notes/Domino environment. Given that Exchange shops generally have no appetite for considering a switch to the IBM alternative for core email and calendaring, the likelihood is therefore that they simply dismiss other Lotus branded offerings, such as unified communications and social computing solutions, as not being relevant to them.
Ironically, the latest ‘Lotus Knows’ marketing campaign (http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/) runs the risk of actually aggravating the situation. While the fundamental idea of trying to create and propagate enthusiasm among end user influencers has merit, and there has reportedly been excitement within the ‘Lotus Loyal’ installed base, the whole thing revolves around the benefits of an end-to-end Lotus environment, with Notes/Domino featuring prominently. This simply reinforces the abovementioned assumptions and makes it even more likely that Exchange shops, 97% of which (according to our barometer data) indicate continued committed use, will totally ignore what IBM has on offer under the Lotus brand, even though it might prove useful to them.
Coming back to where we started, against this background, there is a strong argument for IBM grasping the nettle as Microsoft did with Vista, and either letting the Lotus brand go altogether or at least re-branding some of the newer stuff it has stuck under the Lotus banner. Admittedly, it’s not quite the same situation as Microsoft faced in that the Lotus brand is not tarnished in the same way as Vista; it’s more a case of the brand being entrenched in history and having become a bit tired over the years. Nevertheless, by burdening a lot of really cool software with so much historical baggage, IBM is not doing itself or the broader market any favours. The only party to benefit is arguably Microsoft, who will continue to pick up a lot of unified communications and social computing business in Exchange accounts by default, with an important set of alternatives from IBM not even being considered.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Getting to grips with consumerisation
There can be little doubt that the personal and domestic use of technology has had an impact on user expectations and behaviour with regard to the way IT is used in a business context.
This arguably started when the PC used at home typically became more up to date and of a higher spec than the equipment used in the workplace. The same has happened more recently with mobile devices, where extremely advanced technology is accessible to anyone in the high street making the standard issue corporate mobile look pretty lame in comparison.
Then we have the advent of social media and the evolution of the Web in general. Whether it’s blogging, personal networking, content sharing, conferencing, or even full online application services, people have become used to sophisticated capability being available over the wire on demand.
When looked at from a business perspective, these developments can be viewed very positively. The general adaptability of employees and their willingness and ability to embrace new ideas and capabilities are clearly enhanced. Potentially, costs can be saved also, as many users seem willing to spend their own money to deal with business requirements if it means they can work with the tools they prefer.
However, tech savvy users solving their own IT needs can also create issues in the form of elevated risks and increased support overhead and costs. Contributing factors here are the desire to be different for the sake of it (with the consequences of fragmentation that come with that), a tendency to tamper with standard issue tools, and the enthusiastic amateur DIY approach to development and integration.
With this in mind, the topic of ‘consumerisation’ is coming into focus. By this we mean the trend towards users having a lot more say in the technology that is used in the workplace. Within this, we have users acquiring technology and services for business use on a personal funding basis or via local departmental budgets and expense accounts.
If you don’t see this happening in your organisation, then you’re probably not looking hard enough, so key question is how to deal with it.
The first thing to dismiss is any thought of simply blocking all of this activity. Experience has shown that if you try, it will just go underground, which makes any challenges even more difficult to deal with. Locking down the infrastructure and policing bans on certain activities is in itself very expensive anyway and, even if you go down this draconian route, can you really be sure that creative and determined users will not find ways to circumvent your control measures?
There are some lessons we can learn from more progressive CIOs and other senior IT leaders who started to acknowledge and embrace consumerisation long before it became as prominent a phenomenon as it is today. We spoke with some of these as part of the research for The Technology Garden. Through these conversations and subsequent research, it is clear that while no hard and fast formulas exist, a number of principles have emerged that are worth considering as part of your response to the trend.
The first and most obvious is to acknowledge that consumerisation is unstoppable, so the sooner you accept this and start to figure out how to deal with it, the better.
The next principle, and a good place to start when moving forward, is to establish clarity on what constitutes core activity, to which a set of non-negotiable constraints and policies will apply, as opposed to peripheral activity, within which you can accommodate more personal preference.
As an example, you might define the execution of ERP and CRM related transactions as core, but provide some freedom on how those transactions are invoked. In practical terms, this could translate to an SOA back end infrastructure that exposes transaction related services for assembly in any way the user wants in a portal interface, or access via any other suitable front end, whether browser, PC or mobile device based.
Picking up on a very key word here, ‘suitable’, it is important to acknowledge the difference between flexibility and anarchy. Even within the domain of peripheral activity, it makes sense to define some basic ground rules and guidelines around issues such as security, compliance, integrity, supportability and so on.
The spirit here is to meet users half way by agreeing to accommodate user preferences, but not to the extent of creating tangible negative consequences that will be difficult, impossible or prohibitively expensive to manage. Saying you will allow personal equipment to be hooked up to the network provided it meets certain criteria in terms of spec, securability, ability to receive electronic policies, and so on, is an example here.
Consumerisation best practice is evolving in many other ways, and it is impossible to go into all them here. It is, however, worth mentioning one more very important principle, and that is the one of visibility, i.e. making sure you have sight, as far as is practical, of everything that goes on. Through automated discovery of devices and software in the context of asset management, monitoring of network activity to track websites and online services being accessed, etc, the trick is to watch, rather than block, by default, and act when certain scenarios arise.
One such scenario might be the spreading of a particular type of clearly useful activity within the user base, e.g. some saw this happen with public web and audio conferencing services, then step in to either support what’s being used or provide a more supportable alternative that meets the same need. Other scenarios might represent more of a threat, e.g. the leakage of corporate information via social networks, in which case a combination of policy and education might be in order.
So, you can do a lot to manage, even leverage, the consumerisation trend. It is therefore far better to roll with it than resist it, otherwise you risk losing control and missing opportunities.
This arguably started when the PC used at home typically became more up to date and of a higher spec than the equipment used in the workplace. The same has happened more recently with mobile devices, where extremely advanced technology is accessible to anyone in the high street making the standard issue corporate mobile look pretty lame in comparison.
Then we have the advent of social media and the evolution of the Web in general. Whether it’s blogging, personal networking, content sharing, conferencing, or even full online application services, people have become used to sophisticated capability being available over the wire on demand.
When looked at from a business perspective, these developments can be viewed very positively. The general adaptability of employees and their willingness and ability to embrace new ideas and capabilities are clearly enhanced. Potentially, costs can be saved also, as many users seem willing to spend their own money to deal with business requirements if it means they can work with the tools they prefer.
However, tech savvy users solving their own IT needs can also create issues in the form of elevated risks and increased support overhead and costs. Contributing factors here are the desire to be different for the sake of it (with the consequences of fragmentation that come with that), a tendency to tamper with standard issue tools, and the enthusiastic amateur DIY approach to development and integration.
With this in mind, the topic of ‘consumerisation’ is coming into focus. By this we mean the trend towards users having a lot more say in the technology that is used in the workplace. Within this, we have users acquiring technology and services for business use on a personal funding basis or via local departmental budgets and expense accounts.
If you don’t see this happening in your organisation, then you’re probably not looking hard enough, so key question is how to deal with it.
The first thing to dismiss is any thought of simply blocking all of this activity. Experience has shown that if you try, it will just go underground, which makes any challenges even more difficult to deal with. Locking down the infrastructure and policing bans on certain activities is in itself very expensive anyway and, even if you go down this draconian route, can you really be sure that creative and determined users will not find ways to circumvent your control measures?
There are some lessons we can learn from more progressive CIOs and other senior IT leaders who started to acknowledge and embrace consumerisation long before it became as prominent a phenomenon as it is today. We spoke with some of these as part of the research for The Technology Garden. Through these conversations and subsequent research, it is clear that while no hard and fast formulas exist, a number of principles have emerged that are worth considering as part of your response to the trend.
The first and most obvious is to acknowledge that consumerisation is unstoppable, so the sooner you accept this and start to figure out how to deal with it, the better.
The next principle, and a good place to start when moving forward, is to establish clarity on what constitutes core activity, to which a set of non-negotiable constraints and policies will apply, as opposed to peripheral activity, within which you can accommodate more personal preference.
As an example, you might define the execution of ERP and CRM related transactions as core, but provide some freedom on how those transactions are invoked. In practical terms, this could translate to an SOA back end infrastructure that exposes transaction related services for assembly in any way the user wants in a portal interface, or access via any other suitable front end, whether browser, PC or mobile device based.
Picking up on a very key word here, ‘suitable’, it is important to acknowledge the difference between flexibility and anarchy. Even within the domain of peripheral activity, it makes sense to define some basic ground rules and guidelines around issues such as security, compliance, integrity, supportability and so on.
The spirit here is to meet users half way by agreeing to accommodate user preferences, but not to the extent of creating tangible negative consequences that will be difficult, impossible or prohibitively expensive to manage. Saying you will allow personal equipment to be hooked up to the network provided it meets certain criteria in terms of spec, securability, ability to receive electronic policies, and so on, is an example here.
Consumerisation best practice is evolving in many other ways, and it is impossible to go into all them here. It is, however, worth mentioning one more very important principle, and that is the one of visibility, i.e. making sure you have sight, as far as is practical, of everything that goes on. Through automated discovery of devices and software in the context of asset management, monitoring of network activity to track websites and online services being accessed, etc, the trick is to watch, rather than block, by default, and act when certain scenarios arise.
One such scenario might be the spreading of a particular type of clearly useful activity within the user base, e.g. some saw this happen with public web and audio conferencing services, then step in to either support what’s being used or provide a more supportable alternative that meets the same need. Other scenarios might represent more of a threat, e.g. the leakage of corporate information via social networks, in which case a combination of policy and education might be in order.
So, you can do a lot to manage, even leverage, the consumerisation trend. It is therefore far better to roll with it than resist it, otherwise you risk losing control and missing opportunities.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Vodafone UK ready to walk the walk
It has been very interesting watching Vodafone go through its journey over the past five or six years. From the delivery of relatively unsophisticated utility type services around telephony and SMS, it’s moved into the online media space on the consumer side of the equation, and has been edging more into the IT solutions space on the business side.
With regard to the latter, conversations with Vodafone have on occasions been relatively hard work. As with any organisation on a steep learning curve, one of Vodafone’s biggest challenges has been knowing what it doesn’t know when operating ‘off patch’. Initial discussions about plans to work with IT resellers alongside the traditional comms channel, for example, raised as many questions as they did answers. I have also never been particularly convinced about some of the company’s forays into the hosted business applications arena beyond email, though to be fair, I could say the same about most of the mobile players.
A year or two ago, however, things started to come together in terms of plans and aspirations. Over a relatively short space of time, Vodafone seemed to wise up and articulate where it was headed in a much more realistic and coherent manner, at least at a high level. I suspect the recruitment of talent from the IT sector had something to do with this, but the impact of some pretty interesting acquisitions undoubtedly played a part too.
In the UK, for example, we saw Aspective brought into the fold with around 120 employees and a well established IT solutions capability around core business applications such as CRM, field service automation, and business intelligence. With a strong professional services team experienced in the whole application lifecycle, from initial requirements assessment, through configuration and deployment, to mobile and remote access, Vodafone had acquired both skills and street credibility in the enterprise applications space. The injection of of a bit of enterprise IT culture into the overall mix undoubtedly had a positive impact too.
Meanwhile, Vodafone also had ambitions to cross the boundary between mobile and fixed communications and move up the value chain to deliver more services on top of the core voice and data proposition. A key acquisition here within the UK market was Central Telecom. This brought with it another set of important skills, this time in the Unified Communications (UC) arena. With around 200 people in the service delivery domain (300 total), 6,000 existing customers, and established partnerships with the likes of Avaya and Nortel, Vodafone had again accelerated its journey to credibility and capability in a new domain.
Of course to really capitalise on all this, it was going to be necessary to pull the threads together with existing capability into some kind of coherent strategy. For a while, however, it wasn't particularly obvious how this would be done. Indeed, there was a period over which I stopped asking how Apective was being integrated into the mother ship as I wasn't getting any particularly useful responses. As it turns out, this is because Vodafone UK had been spending a serious amount of time analysing the way the market is going and figuring out its position within it.
Having been through that exercise, what's come out the other end is actually a pretty good analysis and a very convincing strategy, at least in relation to the large enterprise space. Beyond traditional voice services, for example, there is now pretty well-established demand for mobile messaging around the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and other advanced devices, and Vodafone's existing home-grown professional services group continues to be aligned with this.
We then have an extremely lively secure remote access arena, and one of the most common activities going on here is enterprises extending the reach of their core business systems out into the field via mobile middleware and devices. Not surprisingly, the resources picked up as part of the Aspective acquisition, with their knowledge and understanding of enterprise application world as well as mobile technology, have been refocused in this area. This represents a bit of a shift in emphasis from the original Aspective proposition of delivering core application solutions and services per se, but makes a lot of sense in the context of Vodafone's overall business.
A less well established market, but one that is receiving a lot of attention at the moment, is unified communications (UC), and this is clearly where the acquired Central Telecom expertise and credibility is being targeted. The obvious question here, though, is how Vodafone differentiates itself, given that it is turning into such crowded space. As mentioned above, it has inherited some very relevant partnerships with established IP Telephony players, but there is nothing unique about this when you look at the competition. However, by combining Microsoft's UC offering with predictable commercial terms around mobile services, and delivering seamless integration between the fixed and mobile worlds, it has come up with a comprehensive total solution that deals with many of the commonly encountered disjoints and integration issues.
Overlaid on these individual streams of activity is a management and delivery framework which is designed to keep things coordinated at both the market and individual customer level, and maximise the synergies between the various competencies that exist across the three service groups. This is important as overtime, as the buying community matures and starts to pull together their own activities across the various areas, which is still not happening as much as it ideally should, Vodafone needs to mirror that behaviour. For the time being, however, having the three areas of focus with separate but coordinated resources probably makes the most sense.
So does this mean Vodafone is now walking the walk as well is talking the talk when it comes to total enterprise communications? Well, we need to bear in mind that some of the developments we have been discussing are still not fully bedded in and proven as cogs that will turn together smoothly as part of the overall Vodafone machine. It is also important to understand that what we have described relates to Vodafone UK only, and while similar initiatives are being executed in some other countries, the group as a whole still suffers from a degree of geographic inconsistency. This is clearly something that multinational customers will have to work through when evaluating Vodafone has a potential strategic supplier as they move forward with their advanced communications agendas.
Credit where credit is due, however, and while it has been a long time coming, it is nice to see at least the UK operation starting to get its act together properly.
With regard to the latter, conversations with Vodafone have on occasions been relatively hard work. As with any organisation on a steep learning curve, one of Vodafone’s biggest challenges has been knowing what it doesn’t know when operating ‘off patch’. Initial discussions about plans to work with IT resellers alongside the traditional comms channel, for example, raised as many questions as they did answers. I have also never been particularly convinced about some of the company’s forays into the hosted business applications arena beyond email, though to be fair, I could say the same about most of the mobile players.
A year or two ago, however, things started to come together in terms of plans and aspirations. Over a relatively short space of time, Vodafone seemed to wise up and articulate where it was headed in a much more realistic and coherent manner, at least at a high level. I suspect the recruitment of talent from the IT sector had something to do with this, but the impact of some pretty interesting acquisitions undoubtedly played a part too.
In the UK, for example, we saw Aspective brought into the fold with around 120 employees and a well established IT solutions capability around core business applications such as CRM, field service automation, and business intelligence. With a strong professional services team experienced in the whole application lifecycle, from initial requirements assessment, through configuration and deployment, to mobile and remote access, Vodafone had acquired both skills and street credibility in the enterprise applications space. The injection of of a bit of enterprise IT culture into the overall mix undoubtedly had a positive impact too.
Meanwhile, Vodafone also had ambitions to cross the boundary between mobile and fixed communications and move up the value chain to deliver more services on top of the core voice and data proposition. A key acquisition here within the UK market was Central Telecom. This brought with it another set of important skills, this time in the Unified Communications (UC) arena. With around 200 people in the service delivery domain (300 total), 6,000 existing customers, and established partnerships with the likes of Avaya and Nortel, Vodafone had again accelerated its journey to credibility and capability in a new domain.
Of course to really capitalise on all this, it was going to be necessary to pull the threads together with existing capability into some kind of coherent strategy. For a while, however, it wasn't particularly obvious how this would be done. Indeed, there was a period over which I stopped asking how Apective was being integrated into the mother ship as I wasn't getting any particularly useful responses. As it turns out, this is because Vodafone UK had been spending a serious amount of time analysing the way the market is going and figuring out its position within it.
Having been through that exercise, what's come out the other end is actually a pretty good analysis and a very convincing strategy, at least in relation to the large enterprise space. Beyond traditional voice services, for example, there is now pretty well-established demand for mobile messaging around the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and other advanced devices, and Vodafone's existing home-grown professional services group continues to be aligned with this.
We then have an extremely lively secure remote access arena, and one of the most common activities going on here is enterprises extending the reach of their core business systems out into the field via mobile middleware and devices. Not surprisingly, the resources picked up as part of the Aspective acquisition, with their knowledge and understanding of enterprise application world as well as mobile technology, have been refocused in this area. This represents a bit of a shift in emphasis from the original Aspective proposition of delivering core application solutions and services per se, but makes a lot of sense in the context of Vodafone's overall business.
A less well established market, but one that is receiving a lot of attention at the moment, is unified communications (UC), and this is clearly where the acquired Central Telecom expertise and credibility is being targeted. The obvious question here, though, is how Vodafone differentiates itself, given that it is turning into such crowded space. As mentioned above, it has inherited some very relevant partnerships with established IP Telephony players, but there is nothing unique about this when you look at the competition. However, by combining Microsoft's UC offering with predictable commercial terms around mobile services, and delivering seamless integration between the fixed and mobile worlds, it has come up with a comprehensive total solution that deals with many of the commonly encountered disjoints and integration issues.
Overlaid on these individual streams of activity is a management and delivery framework which is designed to keep things coordinated at both the market and individual customer level, and maximise the synergies between the various competencies that exist across the three service groups. This is important as overtime, as the buying community matures and starts to pull together their own activities across the various areas, which is still not happening as much as it ideally should, Vodafone needs to mirror that behaviour. For the time being, however, having the three areas of focus with separate but coordinated resources probably makes the most sense.
So does this mean Vodafone is now walking the walk as well is talking the talk when it comes to total enterprise communications? Well, we need to bear in mind that some of the developments we have been discussing are still not fully bedded in and proven as cogs that will turn together smoothly as part of the overall Vodafone machine. It is also important to understand that what we have described relates to Vodafone UK only, and while similar initiatives are being executed in some other countries, the group as a whole still suffers from a degree of geographic inconsistency. This is clearly something that multinational customers will have to work through when evaluating Vodafone has a potential strategic supplier as they move forward with their advanced communications agendas.
Credit where credit is due, however, and while it has been a long time coming, it is nice to see at least the UK operation starting to get its act together properly.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Incongruous cloud communication
I have recently been involved in a number of vendor events in which the keynote focused on the massive change that cloud computing is supposedly bringing to our industry, only to be followed by feedback from customers, embarrassingly sometimes from the same stage, making it clear that that senior IT professionals are generally not swallowing the hype at the moment.
While people are interested, it is clear that most regard developments in cloud services as just an evolution of hosting and outsourcing - not necessarily without value, but to be thought of in a similar way when it comes to due diligence and decision making. Capabilities of service providers to one side, from an internal policy perspective, if you have previously shied away from making extensive use of hosted services for reasons of security, compliance, trust, etc, then it is unlikely that introducing what is in effect just a variation on a 30-year-old model will change this. On the other hand, if you're the kind of organisation that has always been comfortable with the use of third party hosted services, then, while you might find some of the new commercial models and the concept of elasticity interesting in some scenarios, you are unlikely to regard cloud computing as the revolutionary concept that is being peddled in keynotes and PowerPoint by the vendor community.
I personally think it is a bit of a shame that vendors feel they cannot take a more balanced and measured approach. The big danger is that over-positioning can easily lead to customers dismissing everything being said and missing out on some of the opportunities that the collection of technologies and services currently brought together under the cloud computing umbrella represent. For those that look at developments objectively, there really are some good things happening that throw up interesting opportunities to streamline IT delivery if you can figure out where and how the new stuff fits.
While there continues to be incongruity between what vendors are telling us customers need, want, and are doing, and what the customers themselves are actually saying, the credibility gap that exists at the moment between cloud marketeers and IT decision makers will continue.
Having said this, the disjoint does present some interesting opportunities for mischief making. If you want to read about one of those, and an interesting issue that occurred to me at one of the abovementioned events, see 'There's no escaping the cloud'.
While people are interested, it is clear that most regard developments in cloud services as just an evolution of hosting and outsourcing - not necessarily without value, but to be thought of in a similar way when it comes to due diligence and decision making. Capabilities of service providers to one side, from an internal policy perspective, if you have previously shied away from making extensive use of hosted services for reasons of security, compliance, trust, etc, then it is unlikely that introducing what is in effect just a variation on a 30-year-old model will change this. On the other hand, if you're the kind of organisation that has always been comfortable with the use of third party hosted services, then, while you might find some of the new commercial models and the concept of elasticity interesting in some scenarios, you are unlikely to regard cloud computing as the revolutionary concept that is being peddled in keynotes and PowerPoint by the vendor community.
I personally think it is a bit of a shame that vendors feel they cannot take a more balanced and measured approach. The big danger is that over-positioning can easily lead to customers dismissing everything being said and missing out on some of the opportunities that the collection of technologies and services currently brought together under the cloud computing umbrella represent. For those that look at developments objectively, there really are some good things happening that throw up interesting opportunities to streamline IT delivery if you can figure out where and how the new stuff fits.
While there continues to be incongruity between what vendors are telling us customers need, want, and are doing, and what the customers themselves are actually saying, the credibility gap that exists at the moment between cloud marketeers and IT decision makers will continue.
Having said this, the disjoint does present some interesting opportunities for mischief making. If you want to read about one of those, and an interesting issue that occurred to me at one of the abovementioned events, see 'There's no escaping the cloud'.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
There’s no escaping the cloud
You can run, but you can’t hide
So you think the cloud is not for you? If that's the case, you are not alone. Feedback from we get from IT professionals has been consistently mixed on the subject of cloud computing. In spite of all the hype, many working at the sharp end in mainstream IT departments remain sceptical.
While some dispute the economics and dismiss the claims of the evangelists as being wildly exaggerated, others point to some of the integration challenges of getting multiple cloud services working together with your in-house systems. There are then the questions about how to coordinate security and access policy across multiple operating domains, the dangers of getting locked into proprietary services, and, quite frankly, the readiness of some cloud service providers with a limited track record and/or more of a consumer background to step up to the mark when it comes to supporting core business processes.
By far the most commonly heard concern, however, is that of trust. Many IT pros are reticent about handing the corporate crown jewels, i.e. core information assets, across to a third party for safe keeping, especially when that third party is a US multinational perceived to be open to governmental snooping under the pretence of antiterrorism legislation. And regardless of how robust the provider’s security infrastructure appears to be in physical terms, stories of admin passwords escaping into the wild and exposing private information have a tendency to feed the fears of the sceptics.
One response to this is to simply sit tight and carry on with the 'box hugging' approach, maintaining everything in house where you can keep an eye on it. But does that mean information pertinent to your organisation's business will be 'safe’ from the cloud?
I had interesting exchange a few months ago at a vendor conference I attended that cast doubt on this. As is becoming very clichéd nowadays, the senior exec stood up and gave a keynote talking about how cloud computing was the future and how his company was well positioned to help organisations 'make the transition’. You would get the impression from listening to him that the whole world was committed to embracing this brand-new disruptive paradigm shift that was taking place. To illustrate the point he talked about how the use of Salesforce.com had transformed his own organisation.
The following speaker that stood up was one of the vendor's customers - a big financial institution. After talking about how the vendor's traditional product offerings had helped his organisation, the floor was opened to Q&A. One of the questions asked at this point was to what degree the company had embraced cloud computing, to which the answer was not really at all because, you guessed it, the idea of the bank’s data and/or core business systems being looked after by a generic third-party would be a 'difficult sell' to business stakeholders. While bespoke hosting arrangements with a trusted traditional outsourcer might be one thing, this utility stuff is a different kettle of fish altogether.
Feeling in a slightly mischievous mood, I stuck up my hand, reminded the presenter that the vendor hosting the conference had described the bank as a strategic customer, and had also talked about all of its sales and account management needs being fulfilled by Salesforce.com. Given the deep interaction between the two companies, I therefore suggested that a lot of proprietary information about the bank was probably being maintained in the cloud whether they liked it, trusted it, or not. This would, for example, include the names, positions and responsibilities of key people, and who knows what other background on each, along with details of not only past but also future projects, which trusted suppliers had been made aware of in confidence, or which had been mentioned indiscreetly by an employee over a beer with a salesperson. When I asked whether the aforementioned bank stakeholders were aware of this, or how they would feel if they realised it, the response was merely that this was an ‘interesting question’.
The point here was not to pass judgement on whether cloud services are a good or a bad thing, either in absolute terms or for any given organisation, but simply to highlight the fact that there really is no escaping the impact of this trend. In the example given, we were talking about CRM data, but as cloud-based ERP gets used in a collaborative supply chain context, as sensitive contract information ends up in the inbox of a supplier, customer or partner who happens to be using Google's hosted email service, and so on, we have to accept that the security and privacy of our proprietary business data will increasingly be dependent on cloud providers.
As the bank’s spokesperson said, this really is a very interesting problem, and there is no easy answer to dealing with it. Some cloud providers are clearly very competent and probably don't represent a significant risk, but if someone we deal with is putting information we care about into the hands of dodgy or inexperienced cloud players, there is a potential exposure, at least theoretically.
But is this a real problem, or something we shouldn't get too hung up about? Perhaps it's a question of making sure policies are in place to deal with the sharing of information or the vetting of third parties before sensitive information is shared with them. Then again, we could ask whether anything has really changed. After all, how well do we police the way in which other parties store and manage information that is confidential or sensitive to our business now?
So you think the cloud is not for you? If that's the case, you are not alone. Feedback from we get from IT professionals has been consistently mixed on the subject of cloud computing. In spite of all the hype, many working at the sharp end in mainstream IT departments remain sceptical.
While some dispute the economics and dismiss the claims of the evangelists as being wildly exaggerated, others point to some of the integration challenges of getting multiple cloud services working together with your in-house systems. There are then the questions about how to coordinate security and access policy across multiple operating domains, the dangers of getting locked into proprietary services, and, quite frankly, the readiness of some cloud service providers with a limited track record and/or more of a consumer background to step up to the mark when it comes to supporting core business processes.
By far the most commonly heard concern, however, is that of trust. Many IT pros are reticent about handing the corporate crown jewels, i.e. core information assets, across to a third party for safe keeping, especially when that third party is a US multinational perceived to be open to governmental snooping under the pretence of antiterrorism legislation. And regardless of how robust the provider’s security infrastructure appears to be in physical terms, stories of admin passwords escaping into the wild and exposing private information have a tendency to feed the fears of the sceptics.
One response to this is to simply sit tight and carry on with the 'box hugging' approach, maintaining everything in house where you can keep an eye on it. But does that mean information pertinent to your organisation's business will be 'safe’ from the cloud?
I had interesting exchange a few months ago at a vendor conference I attended that cast doubt on this. As is becoming very clichéd nowadays, the senior exec stood up and gave a keynote talking about how cloud computing was the future and how his company was well positioned to help organisations 'make the transition’. You would get the impression from listening to him that the whole world was committed to embracing this brand-new disruptive paradigm shift that was taking place. To illustrate the point he talked about how the use of Salesforce.com had transformed his own organisation.
The following speaker that stood up was one of the vendor's customers - a big financial institution. After talking about how the vendor's traditional product offerings had helped his organisation, the floor was opened to Q&A. One of the questions asked at this point was to what degree the company had embraced cloud computing, to which the answer was not really at all because, you guessed it, the idea of the bank’s data and/or core business systems being looked after by a generic third-party would be a 'difficult sell' to business stakeholders. While bespoke hosting arrangements with a trusted traditional outsourcer might be one thing, this utility stuff is a different kettle of fish altogether.
Feeling in a slightly mischievous mood, I stuck up my hand, reminded the presenter that the vendor hosting the conference had described the bank as a strategic customer, and had also talked about all of its sales and account management needs being fulfilled by Salesforce.com. Given the deep interaction between the two companies, I therefore suggested that a lot of proprietary information about the bank was probably being maintained in the cloud whether they liked it, trusted it, or not. This would, for example, include the names, positions and responsibilities of key people, and who knows what other background on each, along with details of not only past but also future projects, which trusted suppliers had been made aware of in confidence, or which had been mentioned indiscreetly by an employee over a beer with a salesperson. When I asked whether the aforementioned bank stakeholders were aware of this, or how they would feel if they realised it, the response was merely that this was an ‘interesting question’.
The point here was not to pass judgement on whether cloud services are a good or a bad thing, either in absolute terms or for any given organisation, but simply to highlight the fact that there really is no escaping the impact of this trend. In the example given, we were talking about CRM data, but as cloud-based ERP gets used in a collaborative supply chain context, as sensitive contract information ends up in the inbox of a supplier, customer or partner who happens to be using Google's hosted email service, and so on, we have to accept that the security and privacy of our proprietary business data will increasingly be dependent on cloud providers.
As the bank’s spokesperson said, this really is a very interesting problem, and there is no easy answer to dealing with it. Some cloud providers are clearly very competent and probably don't represent a significant risk, but if someone we deal with is putting information we care about into the hands of dodgy or inexperienced cloud players, there is a potential exposure, at least theoretically.
But is this a real problem, or something we shouldn't get too hung up about? Perhaps it's a question of making sure policies are in place to deal with the sharing of information or the vetting of third parties before sensitive information is shared with them. Then again, we could ask whether anything has really changed. After all, how well do we police the way in which other parties store and manage information that is confidential or sensitive to our business now?
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Unified Communications in Context
We here at Freeform Dynamics have been tracking developments in the unified communications market for quite a while now. If we go back three years, it was still largely all about visions and theory, with very little activity in the mainstream in terms of real life adoption.
As time went on, we started to see activity as a result of traditional communications players such as Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Nortel, NEC, etc up-selling from IP telephony requirements. Where this happened, however, customers often failed to capitalise on the true potential of unified communications from a value perspective, as initiatives had not been set in the appropriate business context with the necessary business and IT stakeholders involved. Indeed, one of the challenges has been how to articulate the problems, opportunities, principles and benefits associated with unified communications in a meaningful manner, which is why I wrote ‘Joining the Dots of Business Communications’ a little while back, to at least provide some clarity around the basics.
As economic pressure has continued to impact IT and communications related investment decisions, the need for precision in terms of business context and rationale has become even more critical, especially as one of the most common objections to embracing unified communications is difficulty making the business case. While no one argues with the vision of removing the friction and disjoints in the way we communicate today by implementing a more seamless approach that cuts across telephony, conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging, and so on, many say they have more pressing demands on the finite funding and resources they have available to them.
One of the things that doesn't particularly help here is the generic way in which the unified communications proposition is often presented. Whether it’s vendors or pundits, there is a tendency to discuss the area without distinguishing between the different scenarios in which the same (or similar) underlying technology can be applied. The reason this is significant is because it is only possible to get 'crunchy’ about defining specific benefits and practicalities if you are precise about the kind of deployment you are considering.
When we get into discussions with those who are evaluating the relevance of unified communications to their business or trying to establish the best way forward, we find it very useful to run through some of the different types of initiative we see. At the highest level, this can be boiled down to three important categories that each map onto different drivers and stakeholders within the business:
General Comms and Collaboration
The business problem being tackled here is removal of the communications related fragmentation and disjoints associated with the activities of professional workers such as managers and executives, sales and marketing personnel, consultants and engineers, etc. While there are some important cost and productivity related benefits to be realised in this area, allowing professional workers to communicate more quickly, reliably, and in a richer manner enhances decision making, sales effectiveness, innovation and team working in general. Furthermore, facilities such as smart call routing, unified inboxes, etc, leads to improved organisational responsiveness to external parties, whether in a sales, partnering, supply chain, or service context. In many ways, this form of unified communications, including the mobile technology element, is best thought of as an enabler of any broader workforce collaboration initiative already in place or being considered.
Business Process Optimisation
Some vendors have started to talk about ‘Communications Enabled Business Processes’ (CEBP), which is essentially about implementing enhanced communication capability to streamline more structured activities within the business. The premise here is that the performance of many processes is directly dependent upon the efficiency with which individual contact and response takes place. This could be as simple as tracking down an appropriate individual and confirming their availability to deal with a job, incident or issue, and there are many examples of this across industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, utilities, telecoms, etc. It could also be more sophisticated, e.g. allowing key resources to be brought together automatically for troubleshooting or remedial purposes as a result of a systems-triggered event in a logistics, manufacturing or service management context, for example. The difference is that while communication is initiated by an individual on an ad hoc or discretionary basis in the general comms and collaboration scenario, with CEBP, it is kicked off in accordance with predefined rules as an embedded part of a structured process.
Enhanced Contact Centre
The use of unified communications can move the traditional call centre concept forward in a couple of different ways. Firstly, applying some of the same principles already discussed in relation to the first two categories of initiative, it is possible to extend customer service activity, for example, beyond the walls of the call centre to bring expertise residing in other departments or even in the field. The ease with which availability can be determined and calls routed in a device and location independent manner makes this possible. Taking this to the next level, unified communications enables the move to a more virtual approach, in which the need for centralised resources in a physical call centre is diminished, or even done away with all together. Some organisations are already taking advantage of this to incorporate home-based agents seamlessly into their customer service operations. Beyond the internal dimension, the same underlying unified communications technology can also be used as a foundation for enhancing communication with customers, allowing richer interaction across a range of different mechanisms to be offered without running into routing and efficiency issues.
These three flavours of unified communications initiatives illustrate that even at the highest level, the technologies and solutions we are talking about here can be applied in quite different ways. Some vendors, such as IBM and Avaya, have a good handle on this and can advise accordingly. Others still tend to focus on one type of deployment, e.g. Microsoft puts the emphasis on enhancing the communication and collaboration of ‘information workers’ (the first category above). As we said at the beginning, some are also still discussing unified communications in more of a generic way, and can find it hard to bridge the gap between the high level vision and specific business benefits that can be assessed objectively.
Of course there are also the differences in implementation requirements to consider. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that interoperability with existing telephony, email and desktop productivity solutions is key for general comms and collaboration; integration, e.g. via the SOA model, with both bespoke and packaged applications will be required for CEBP, and the ability to work with CRM and other call centre technology is key in the contact centre scenario.
Having said all this, I do still have some sympathy with those who discuss unified communications as just 'one thing', as this viewpoint does have some merit if you put the business context to one side and focus purely on the architectural perspective. It could be argued, for example, that wherever you start in terms of type of deployment, if you implement the technology in the appropriate manner, you will be laying the infrastructural foundations to deal with subsequent requirements in other areas down the line.
The trouble is that this doesn't help with initial scoping, understanding and justification when each type of solution falls within the domain of different budget structures and business sponsors. The CIO and their team are therefore going to be in that familiar situation of trying to balance longer term infrastructure development interests at an overall enterprise level with the immediate business needs that are used as the foundation for justifying and funding the initial project.
The one thing for certain, though, is that trying to secure business buy-in to the high level unified communications vision and proposition for the organisation as a whole is not going to be that easy in the current climate. Getting specific in the way we have described is therefore key to getting things moving and starting to take the organisation forward in the right direction.
As time went on, we started to see activity as a result of traditional communications players such as Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Nortel, NEC, etc up-selling from IP telephony requirements. Where this happened, however, customers often failed to capitalise on the true potential of unified communications from a value perspective, as initiatives had not been set in the appropriate business context with the necessary business and IT stakeholders involved. Indeed, one of the challenges has been how to articulate the problems, opportunities, principles and benefits associated with unified communications in a meaningful manner, which is why I wrote ‘Joining the Dots of Business Communications’ a little while back, to at least provide some clarity around the basics.
As economic pressure has continued to impact IT and communications related investment decisions, the need for precision in terms of business context and rationale has become even more critical, especially as one of the most common objections to embracing unified communications is difficulty making the business case. While no one argues with the vision of removing the friction and disjoints in the way we communicate today by implementing a more seamless approach that cuts across telephony, conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging, and so on, many say they have more pressing demands on the finite funding and resources they have available to them.
One of the things that doesn't particularly help here is the generic way in which the unified communications proposition is often presented. Whether it’s vendors or pundits, there is a tendency to discuss the area without distinguishing between the different scenarios in which the same (or similar) underlying technology can be applied. The reason this is significant is because it is only possible to get 'crunchy’ about defining specific benefits and practicalities if you are precise about the kind of deployment you are considering.
When we get into discussions with those who are evaluating the relevance of unified communications to their business or trying to establish the best way forward, we find it very useful to run through some of the different types of initiative we see. At the highest level, this can be boiled down to three important categories that each map onto different drivers and stakeholders within the business:
General Comms and Collaboration
The business problem being tackled here is removal of the communications related fragmentation and disjoints associated with the activities of professional workers such as managers and executives, sales and marketing personnel, consultants and engineers, etc. While there are some important cost and productivity related benefits to be realised in this area, allowing professional workers to communicate more quickly, reliably, and in a richer manner enhances decision making, sales effectiveness, innovation and team working in general. Furthermore, facilities such as smart call routing, unified inboxes, etc, leads to improved organisational responsiveness to external parties, whether in a sales, partnering, supply chain, or service context. In many ways, this form of unified communications, including the mobile technology element, is best thought of as an enabler of any broader workforce collaboration initiative already in place or being considered.
Business Process Optimisation
Some vendors have started to talk about ‘Communications Enabled Business Processes’ (CEBP), which is essentially about implementing enhanced communication capability to streamline more structured activities within the business. The premise here is that the performance of many processes is directly dependent upon the efficiency with which individual contact and response takes place. This could be as simple as tracking down an appropriate individual and confirming their availability to deal with a job, incident or issue, and there are many examples of this across industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, utilities, telecoms, etc. It could also be more sophisticated, e.g. allowing key resources to be brought together automatically for troubleshooting or remedial purposes as a result of a systems-triggered event in a logistics, manufacturing or service management context, for example. The difference is that while communication is initiated by an individual on an ad hoc or discretionary basis in the general comms and collaboration scenario, with CEBP, it is kicked off in accordance with predefined rules as an embedded part of a structured process.
Enhanced Contact Centre
The use of unified communications can move the traditional call centre concept forward in a couple of different ways. Firstly, applying some of the same principles already discussed in relation to the first two categories of initiative, it is possible to extend customer service activity, for example, beyond the walls of the call centre to bring expertise residing in other departments or even in the field. The ease with which availability can be determined and calls routed in a device and location independent manner makes this possible. Taking this to the next level, unified communications enables the move to a more virtual approach, in which the need for centralised resources in a physical call centre is diminished, or even done away with all together. Some organisations are already taking advantage of this to incorporate home-based agents seamlessly into their customer service operations. Beyond the internal dimension, the same underlying unified communications technology can also be used as a foundation for enhancing communication with customers, allowing richer interaction across a range of different mechanisms to be offered without running into routing and efficiency issues.
These three flavours of unified communications initiatives illustrate that even at the highest level, the technologies and solutions we are talking about here can be applied in quite different ways. Some vendors, such as IBM and Avaya, have a good handle on this and can advise accordingly. Others still tend to focus on one type of deployment, e.g. Microsoft puts the emphasis on enhancing the communication and collaboration of ‘information workers’ (the first category above). As we said at the beginning, some are also still discussing unified communications in more of a generic way, and can find it hard to bridge the gap between the high level vision and specific business benefits that can be assessed objectively.
Of course there are also the differences in implementation requirements to consider. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that interoperability with existing telephony, email and desktop productivity solutions is key for general comms and collaboration; integration, e.g. via the SOA model, with both bespoke and packaged applications will be required for CEBP, and the ability to work with CRM and other call centre technology is key in the contact centre scenario.
Having said all this, I do still have some sympathy with those who discuss unified communications as just 'one thing', as this viewpoint does have some merit if you put the business context to one side and focus purely on the architectural perspective. It could be argued, for example, that wherever you start in terms of type of deployment, if you implement the technology in the appropriate manner, you will be laying the infrastructural foundations to deal with subsequent requirements in other areas down the line.
The trouble is that this doesn't help with initial scoping, understanding and justification when each type of solution falls within the domain of different budget structures and business sponsors. The CIO and their team are therefore going to be in that familiar situation of trying to balance longer term infrastructure development interests at an overall enterprise level with the immediate business needs that are used as the foundation for justifying and funding the initial project.
The one thing for certain, though, is that trying to secure business buy-in to the high level unified communications vision and proposition for the organisation as a whole is not going to be that easy in the current climate. Getting specific in the way we have described is therefore key to getting things moving and starting to take the organisation forward in the right direction.
Server Virtualisation Workshop
One of the things I love about my job is the interaction I have with IT professionals out there just getting on with stuff in mainstream IT departments. It provides a real contrast to many of the discussions around visions, transformations and magic bullets that all too often characterise the vendor pitches and briefings we as analysts are continually on the receiving end of.
As part of our community activities, one of the mechanisms we use to tune into experiences and perceptions at the sharp end is the online workshop. In a nutshell, we work with one of the big news sites, e.g. The Register, and elicit feedback and discussion by publishing a series of thought-provoking articles exploring a particular topic from various different angles. Along the way, we run surveys to provide more quantitative intelligence on what's going on.
At the time of writing, we are working through the topic of virtualisation in one of these workshops, and have just finished dealing with the x86 server side of the equation. If it's an area you are interested in, check out the links below, and don't just read the articles, have a scroll down some of the comments attached to each. Various bits of feedback bring the discussion of costs and benefits to life, for example, confirming some of the stuff we get from vendors, but also throwing up some things we don't often hear, or providing real world examples of principles in action or practical considerations.
We'll be writing and publishing a summary report on all of this soon (one of my jobs for this week), but if you are into virtualisation and are interested in a bunch of real world views and experiences, I encourage you to click across and have a browse of the raw material in the meantime.
Virtualisation Workshop Links
Is server virtualization delivering for you yet?
Real world, real benefits?
Virtualization payback, now and in the future
Do you really want to join this pool party?
Virtualization rocks - but who cares beyond consolidation?
Roundup of discussion from Week 1
Server virtualization – what could possibly go wrong?
Rise of the Virtual Machines
Virtualization security – oxymoron or perfect partnership?
New environments, new security risks
Does *free* virtualization = certain chaos?
Round-up of discussion from week two
Counting the cost of virtualization
Avoiding nasty surprises
When is an operating system not an operating system?
Challenging traditional ideas
Getting under the shell of virtualization
Week 3 round-up: On kernels and other nut puns
The discussion within the workshop is now moving on to desktop virtualisation, and we'll be finishing off by taking a look at the relationship between virtualisation and cloud computing. So, feel free to check here for new articles and feedback over the next few weeks.
As part of our community activities, one of the mechanisms we use to tune into experiences and perceptions at the sharp end is the online workshop. In a nutshell, we work with one of the big news sites, e.g. The Register, and elicit feedback and discussion by publishing a series of thought-provoking articles exploring a particular topic from various different angles. Along the way, we run surveys to provide more quantitative intelligence on what's going on.
At the time of writing, we are working through the topic of virtualisation in one of these workshops, and have just finished dealing with the x86 server side of the equation. If it's an area you are interested in, check out the links below, and don't just read the articles, have a scroll down some of the comments attached to each. Various bits of feedback bring the discussion of costs and benefits to life, for example, confirming some of the stuff we get from vendors, but also throwing up some things we don't often hear, or providing real world examples of principles in action or practical considerations.
We'll be writing and publishing a summary report on all of this soon (one of my jobs for this week), but if you are into virtualisation and are interested in a bunch of real world views and experiences, I encourage you to click across and have a browse of the raw material in the meantime.
Virtualisation Workshop Links
Is server virtualization delivering for you yet?
Real world, real benefits?
Virtualization payback, now and in the future
Do you really want to join this pool party?
Virtualization rocks - but who cares beyond consolidation?
Roundup of discussion from Week 1
Server virtualization – what could possibly go wrong?
Rise of the Virtual Machines
Virtualization security – oxymoron or perfect partnership?
New environments, new security risks
Does *free* virtualization = certain chaos?
Round-up of discussion from week two
Counting the cost of virtualization
Avoiding nasty surprises
When is an operating system not an operating system?
Challenging traditional ideas
Getting under the shell of virtualization
Week 3 round-up: On kernels and other nut puns
The discussion within the workshop is now moving on to desktop virtualisation, and we'll be finishing off by taking a look at the relationship between virtualisation and cloud computing. So, feel free to check here for new articles and feedback over the next few weeks.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Will cloud put traditional hosters out of business?
Elasticity isn't everything
It sometimes seems as if the whole world has gone cloud crazy - well at least most of the vendors, pundits and many in the media. If we listen to the evangelists, the days of the enterprise data centre are numbered and players like Google, Amazon and Microsoft will inherit the earth. Even David Cameron, the illustrious leader of the opposition to our UK government, has been talking about handing over the country's health records for storage and management to one of these big American multinationals.
In the midst of all this noise and hype, many have lost sight of the fact that getting a third party to run some of your infrastructure for you is a model that has been around for at least three decades. Indeed, those who have been taking advantage of hosted services, or on the other side of the fence, delivering them, must be wondering what all the fuss is about. Just what, exactly, is this cloud thing bringing to the party that's apparently going to change the way everything works?
Well to deal with this question, we need to be very clear what we mean by cloud services. There are all kinds of definitions kicking about, but most of it boils down to three types of offering. If we start at the top, we have software as a service (SaaS), which is essentially based on the concept of renting application functionality from a service provider rather than buying, installing and running software yourself. Offerings within this range from services such as Salesforce.com at one end, delivering the equivalent of a complete application suite, to players like MessageLabs at the other, whose services are designed to complement your operational infrastructure.
If we drop down a level in the systems stack, we then have platform as a service (PaaS), which is all about providing, well, a platform in the cloud, upon which applications can be developed and executed. Players like Google, again Salesforce.com (this time with Force.com), and Microsoft (with Azure) exist in this space. Facilities provided include things like database management, security, workflow management, application serving, and so on. Once you have developed your application, it then takes advantage of the scalability and on-demand economics associated with the cloud computing model at execution time, which is great for highly dynamic externally facing applications, for example. The snag is, at least for today, that these environments are very proprietary, offering little in the way of portability should you want to move your application elsewhere.
We then get to the bottom of the stack, and it is here that we find the concept of infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The proposition here is the offering of compute power and storage space on demand. The difference between this and the other two categories of cloud is that the software that executes is essentially yours. In practical terms, the model is based on the same principles of virtualisation that we are all familiar with in the context of server partitioning or flexible storage. Rather than running a virtual image on a partition existing on a physical server in your data centre, you spin it up on a virtual machine that you have created in the cloud. Virtual disks can be created in a similar manner to deal with the storage side of things.
“Hold on”, you might say, “but haven't we been doing this with traditional hosting companies and ISPs for a long time?” Well in terms of the basic principle of renting virtual servers from a provider to run some of your stuff on, then the answer is obviously “Yes”. The difference is that hitherto, we have generally been required to commit to that rental for a reasonable period of time and pay for the resources allocated whether we use them or not. In the cloud model, we can grab a virtual server for as little as a few hours then drop it again, and only pay for the time and/or resources that we have used. And if the load on the application fluctuates, the horsepower available to it can be adjusted accordingly. Rapid and automatic provisioning and deprovisioning, coupled with clever billing systems are the key to this on the service provider side.
With such an attractive model emerging, it begs the question of whether existing hosting companies and ISPs will be threatened by the new breed of cloud services offered by the likes of Amazon. To address this question we have to remember, however, that the kind of flexibility we have been talking about, or ‘elasticity’, as the cloud folk like to call it, is likely to come at a price. Indeed, as some of the traditional hosters have started to extend their service portfolios to include cloud type offerings, this difference becomes very apparent in their price lists (if you do the calculations).
Conveniently, however, while cloud computing advocates are constantly comparing the cost of IaaS with the cost of running on-premise equipment, they typically ignore the comparison between the elastic cloud model and the traditional static hosting approach. And when we consider that the majority of computing workloads running in the average data centre or even on existing hosted infrastructure are not that dynamic, this is quite an important difference to consider. After all, why would you pay a premium for elasticity and you don't really need it.
Looking forward, it is clear that the on-demand IaaS model will find its place for executing applications that are genuinely very dynamic in nature, or for grabbing resources to deal with transient needs such as development, testing, one-off number crunching jobs, and so on. And many of the traditional hosters have already realised this and are moving in that direction. There will, however, continue to be a demand for the kinds of hosting we have always been familiar with. Whether it's commodity server space, or more bespoke hosting arrangements, cloud is not going to kill the traditional approaches or providers.
In fact, as customers are likely to need a blend of static and dynamic hosting arrangements in most situations, providers who can offer a range of options within a single service portfolio, and for strategic hosting arrangements back that up with good quality support and account management, will continue to do well. Amazon will not, at the end of the day, rule the world.
It sometimes seems as if the whole world has gone cloud crazy - well at least most of the vendors, pundits and many in the media. If we listen to the evangelists, the days of the enterprise data centre are numbered and players like Google, Amazon and Microsoft will inherit the earth. Even David Cameron, the illustrious leader of the opposition to our UK government, has been talking about handing over the country's health records for storage and management to one of these big American multinationals.
In the midst of all this noise and hype, many have lost sight of the fact that getting a third party to run some of your infrastructure for you is a model that has been around for at least three decades. Indeed, those who have been taking advantage of hosted services, or on the other side of the fence, delivering them, must be wondering what all the fuss is about. Just what, exactly, is this cloud thing bringing to the party that's apparently going to change the way everything works?
Well to deal with this question, we need to be very clear what we mean by cloud services. There are all kinds of definitions kicking about, but most of it boils down to three types of offering. If we start at the top, we have software as a service (SaaS), which is essentially based on the concept of renting application functionality from a service provider rather than buying, installing and running software yourself. Offerings within this range from services such as Salesforce.com at one end, delivering the equivalent of a complete application suite, to players like MessageLabs at the other, whose services are designed to complement your operational infrastructure.
If we drop down a level in the systems stack, we then have platform as a service (PaaS), which is all about providing, well, a platform in the cloud, upon which applications can be developed and executed. Players like Google, again Salesforce.com (this time with Force.com), and Microsoft (with Azure) exist in this space. Facilities provided include things like database management, security, workflow management, application serving, and so on. Once you have developed your application, it then takes advantage of the scalability and on-demand economics associated with the cloud computing model at execution time, which is great for highly dynamic externally facing applications, for example. The snag is, at least for today, that these environments are very proprietary, offering little in the way of portability should you want to move your application elsewhere.
We then get to the bottom of the stack, and it is here that we find the concept of infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The proposition here is the offering of compute power and storage space on demand. The difference between this and the other two categories of cloud is that the software that executes is essentially yours. In practical terms, the model is based on the same principles of virtualisation that we are all familiar with in the context of server partitioning or flexible storage. Rather than running a virtual image on a partition existing on a physical server in your data centre, you spin it up on a virtual machine that you have created in the cloud. Virtual disks can be created in a similar manner to deal with the storage side of things.
“Hold on”, you might say, “but haven't we been doing this with traditional hosting companies and ISPs for a long time?” Well in terms of the basic principle of renting virtual servers from a provider to run some of your stuff on, then the answer is obviously “Yes”. The difference is that hitherto, we have generally been required to commit to that rental for a reasonable period of time and pay for the resources allocated whether we use them or not. In the cloud model, we can grab a virtual server for as little as a few hours then drop it again, and only pay for the time and/or resources that we have used. And if the load on the application fluctuates, the horsepower available to it can be adjusted accordingly. Rapid and automatic provisioning and deprovisioning, coupled with clever billing systems are the key to this on the service provider side.
With such an attractive model emerging, it begs the question of whether existing hosting companies and ISPs will be threatened by the new breed of cloud services offered by the likes of Amazon. To address this question we have to remember, however, that the kind of flexibility we have been talking about, or ‘elasticity’, as the cloud folk like to call it, is likely to come at a price. Indeed, as some of the traditional hosters have started to extend their service portfolios to include cloud type offerings, this difference becomes very apparent in their price lists (if you do the calculations).
Conveniently, however, while cloud computing advocates are constantly comparing the cost of IaaS with the cost of running on-premise equipment, they typically ignore the comparison between the elastic cloud model and the traditional static hosting approach. And when we consider that the majority of computing workloads running in the average data centre or even on existing hosted infrastructure are not that dynamic, this is quite an important difference to consider. After all, why would you pay a premium for elasticity and you don't really need it.
Looking forward, it is clear that the on-demand IaaS model will find its place for executing applications that are genuinely very dynamic in nature, or for grabbing resources to deal with transient needs such as development, testing, one-off number crunching jobs, and so on. And many of the traditional hosters have already realised this and are moving in that direction. There will, however, continue to be a demand for the kinds of hosting we have always been familiar with. Whether it's commodity server space, or more bespoke hosting arrangements, cloud is not going to kill the traditional approaches or providers.
In fact, as customers are likely to need a blend of static and dynamic hosting arrangements in most situations, providers who can offer a range of options within a single service portfolio, and for strategic hosting arrangements back that up with good quality support and account management, will continue to do well. Amazon will not, at the end of the day, rule the world.
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