Open Reasoning

Amazon AWS Direct Connect hits the UK

2012-01-14T13:18:00.014Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Robin says:

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

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

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

Oracle fleshes out its ‘big data’ portfolio

2012-01-11T16:53:00.004Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use of social media by analysts and analyst relations professionals

2011-10-09T10:04:00.017+01:00

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

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

Level and type of social media use within the IT industry

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

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

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

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

Social media should not replace traditional AR comms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Service management wake-up call

2011-07-06T14:20:00.004+01:00

All IT departments are judged on service delivery

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

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

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

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

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

So why is this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apples and Oranges

2011-06-30T07:44:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

The penny then dropped on something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy 100th birthday IBM

2011-06-16T13:58:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-06-11T09:19:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agile development in context

2011-05-22T09:26:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Article originally written for Computing Magazine)

Welcome Martha

2011-05-09T13:14:00.001+01:00

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

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

A road warrior’s experience with the iPad

2011-04-21T10:44:00.005+01:00

Tales from 10 months of trial and error

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

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

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

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

So what’s my experience been?

Initial expectations and immediate disappointment

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

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

Investigating workarounds for document authoring, editing and review

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

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

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

Definitely not a laptop or smart phone replacement

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

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

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

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

Discovering the value beyond traditional use cases

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

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

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

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

Web browsing and access to cloud apps

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

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

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

Great for reading and personal use in general

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Is IT really broken?

2011-04-20T13:35:00.007+01:00

A quick sanity check

I have just been reading a blog post from a vendor that opens with:

“Senior IT leadership wants to transform a traditional IT organization into a more cloud-like IT service provider. They know it's important, and there's a sense of urgency.”

The assumptions underlying these sentences are:

1. IT is generally broken and everyone is urgently trying to fix it
2. IT leaders are aspiring to adopt an internal supplier approach
3. The cloud delivery model is seen as the universal answer

The specific vendor concerned is not important, because we have heard similar lines from many sources over the past year or two. But this latest post has prompted this regular reminder from Freeform Dynamics that you should take a lot of vendor messaging around trends with a pinch of salt.

In case you read some of the messaging and end up feeling negligent because you are not treating total transformation of your IT delivery to the cloud computing model as an urgent imperative, don’t beat yourself up because you are actually normal.

If you have a nose around the Freeform Dynamics website, you will find reference to a lot of research that directly challenges all three of the above assumptions. I have personally been designing, running, analysing and interpreting studies for almost 10 years that have explored IT delivery approaches, levels of satisfaction with IT within the business, and, more recently, where the various forms of cloud potentially fit into the greater scheme of things. Based on this, I really do not recognise the world that is often described by IT vendors.

The reality is that IT departments vary immensely in their level of performance, but the majority are actually doing a pretty good job, and few regard things as being anywhere close to breaking point. Sure, everyone has particular areas of acute weakness and need, and we often pick up a sense of urgency around those, but that’s a manageable situation in most environments, not some kind of huge crisis that has IT leaders up at night wondering how they are going to transform their entire operation to fix things.

We would also challenge the notion that IT should aspire to operate more like a discrete internal service provider. That may not be what was meant by the above quoted statement, but you could interpret it as advocating IT becoming a business within a business. Organisations that have tried this have generally created as many problems as they have solved, as IT always has an eye on its own survival and interests, while business stakeholders get distracted by ‘alternative’ sources of services.

The most mature organisations have IT departments operating as an integral part of the business, with senior IT management being genuinely agnostic on the question of how specific service requirements are fulfilled. The trick to real success is good IT-business alignment, effective governance, and IT playing predominantly an enabling, support and orchestration role, blending internal and external resource use to drive the desired business result. If the head of IT views external providers as competition (which is a by-product of the internal provider model), that’s a recipe for conflict as well as poor performance. Furthermore, if the business engages external IT suppliers independently of the internal IT department, risks are created due to inevitable disjoints and accountability discrepancies in areas such as information management, security and compliance.

And as regards cloud being the answer, that’s too big a topic to get into properly here. Suffice it to say that many of the things discussed under the cloud computing umbrella have a valuable contribution to make, but there are no magic bullets and for the foreseeable future, the game being played is one of mixing and matching the traditional with the new, and the external with the internal. This has many implications for the structure and activity of the IT department, and we have explored some of these at a high level in our paper Applied Cloud Computing. But it’s a complex topic that needs serious investigation, thought and planning.

So, when looking at cloud, and indeed the evolution of IT service delivery in general, focus on your own priorities and agenda, and don’t get too distracted by exaggerated vested interest claims of trends that you might end up being left behind on.

Consumerisation and productivity (Part 2 of 2)

2011-04-20T08:06:00.004+01:00

Harnessing the potential chaos

In a Part 1 of this discussion, I covered the hard reality of consumerisation and the dangers of letting end users take too much control of IT. The argument I made was that user decisions in relation to tech are more likely to be driven by ‘want’ rather than ‘need’, and that challenges stemmed from the fact that users generally don’t know what they don’t know.

But given years of user frustration with IT, and the ease with which users can now make their own arrangements, we have to accept that the genie is out of the bottle. Like it or not, users will have more of a say in the use of IT in business from this point onwards.

Against this background, I promised some practical tips on how to think through the whole consumerisation thing in your environment, so here goes.

The first thing you must do, as implied in my previous comments, is to acknowledge and accept the situation. It’s no use pretending that nothing is happening, and if you do see consumerisation tendencies in your workforce, you must accept that blocking all such activity is going to be hard, if not impossible.

Indeed, we have heard tales from IT managers confirming that attempts to block unilateral adoption of technology and services typically fail. Some forces are simply too powerful to resist, e.g. senior business managers and politically strong groups such as the sales department are some of the worst offenders when it comes to breaking any ban you might try to enforce. Even if you could persuade such groups to set an example and resist temptation, the chances are that activity across the broader workforce would simply go underground. You are then in an even worse position as employees are actively hiding stuff from you, so you a have lack of visibility as well as a lack of control.

So what kinds of things can you do to manage the situation?

In order to answer this question, we need to understand the different types of behaviour we see. If most employees in a particular group are doing something new that provides a capability that they wouldn’t otherwise have, then this may be an indicator of a genuine need that is not being met, or a potential opportunity to do things in a better way. Use of a public social media site to facilitate project or team coordination, or the adoption of personal handhelds to provide email access when away from their desks might be examples here. Other examples include the use of pay-as-you-go audio conferencing services, public web and video conferencing, use of slate devices by sales guys to give more intimate customer presentations, and so on.

In such situations where there is a clear business benefit, you have two main choices – embrace what they are using and put some kind of support and control structure around it, or replace what they are using with a more ‘business ready’ alternative. Which option you lean towards will depend on the nature of what they are using at the moment and what alternatives are available that might better fit the needs of the business and IT, if any.

If most users have adopted the same solution but it’s clearly inappropriate, e.g. a consumer class online service that offers limited control over security and information management, or a handheld device that is going to be difficult to secure, manage and support, then replacement is the only safe option. If users are essentially solving the same problem, but with no consistency, e.g. they are all using a different online service or device, then replacement will again be the most likely solution as excessive diversity usually translates to high cost and risk.

The decision to embrace a solution that users have initially adopted unilaterally can only be made with proper due diligence. I am not going to go into detail here; suffice it to say that you make an assessment based on all of the technical, functional and commercial criteria you would normally apply when evaluating an option from a vendor or service provider.

But what about when there isn’t a clear business benefit or you don’t have the budget for a replacement approach? This is where clear policies are required. You may, for example, elect to tolerate a certain amount of personal equipment use for employee satisfaction or morale purposes (which can have an indirect benefit in terms of recruitment and staff turnover management), but put some boundaries around what is permissible. Some organisations, for example, have said that personal smart phones may be hooked onto the email server if they are on an approved list or meet certain criteria.

But let’s be clear that every device connection to the network or public service used will come at a cost and/or carry some risk, so even if you do take a more permissive approach, lines need to be drawn and some employees need to be told “No”. If the company and the IT department are seen to be generally accommodating, defending those lines and enforcing the policy is much more likely to be effective than trying to implement a blanket ban on anything personal.

The reality is that consumerisation is a complex topic, and while no one has all the answers at the moment, I hope this discussion has at least got you thinking about how to deal with it pragmatically.

Consumerisation and productivity (Part 1 of 2)

2011-04-20T07:59:00.003+01:00

A hard look at the practical reality

Let me put my cards on the table. I do not, repeat not, subscribe to the view that users always know what’s best for them in a work environment. Indeed over the years, I have come to the conclusion that generally they don’t.

Why? Well for two reasons. Firstly, users are generally driven by ‘want’ more than ‘need’, and ‘want’ is in turn driven primarily by factors that are very subjective and not particularly business oriented – status, image, personal interest, religion (with a small ‘r’), etc.

Secondly, users generally don’t know what they don’t know. They are unaware, for example, of how important requirements such as cost management, security, compliance, return on investment and future proofing are to making sensible technology related decisions. They are even less aware of the factors that enable these such as consistent policy, efficient and effective processes, coherent infrastructure and properly managed support.

So, I feel compelled to challenge people when they use the terms ‘consumerisation’ and ‘productivity’ as if they are synonymous. Let’s define these two terms so you can see what I mean.

When people talk about the ‘consumerisation of IT’, they are generally referring to the phenomenon of users making their own decisions on technology and services. In practice, this is centred on the elements of IT that are most accessible to users, i.e. devices (notebooks, handhelds, slates, etc) and publically available services (e.g. social media, communication and collaboration services). What these have in common is that users are able to start making use of these without involvement of IT professionals, though, of course, the IT department is often leaned on to provide connectivity to the corporate network and bail users out when things go wrong.

Productivity is about the business getting the best return from resources consumed (money, man hours, management bandwidth, operational bandwidth, etc) whilst ensuring the business is properly protected from exposure to unnecessary risk. I know some talk about it in the context of individuals being able to make the best use of their time, but this only matters if the net contribution from any productivity improvement action is positive at an overall business level. At the risk of repeating myself, but in the interests of getting absolute clarity on this, productivity can only be sensibly assessed, monitored and managed at an aggregate level – focusing on individual employees can be very misleading.

Now if we bring these two concepts together, it becomes very clear very quickly that ‘consumerisation’ and ‘productivity’ do not always go hand in hand. As a really simple example, if a free-for-all on mobile devices leads to some notional productivity improvement from employees being able to get their email on their personal iPhone or Android device, this is only useful if there isn’t a negative impact elsewhere. If the result is that IT needs to spend additional time on management, support and remedial work that detracts from their ability to service critical processes or business development activity, then the result could easily be an overall net loss in business productivity (not to mention the probable increase in various risks).

As I am in that kind of mood, there is one more notion I would like to challenge. This is the principle that consumerisation somehow means that we should give users a totally free hand to choose their own tech, even when it’s funded by the business. I often hear people say that we shouldn’t force equipment and applications on people. It’s better to give employees an allowance for kit such as notebooks, slates and mobiles, and let them install whatever software they think is best for them to do their jobs efficiently. This is reinforced by the premise that Generation Y types coming into the workplace will ‘demand’ it anyway, so you might as well ‘get with the programme’.

Quite apart from the obvious dodgy reasoning that for the first time in human history, it apparently makes sense for inexperienced teenagers and young adults with a lot of growing up to do to dictate business policy, we must again come back to the principle that users really aren’t that informed and objective when it comes to tech decision making. Some might think that the latest premium bling available in the High Street, or the budget option if that’s all they can afford, might make them more productive, but the chances are that something provided by the business that has been selected in an informed and sensible manner will actually do the job much better.

But the genie is now out of the bottle. The trouble is that too many tech related decisions in the past made by IT departments have been very one-sided. The emphasis has often been on meeting the corporate requirement and making the life of IT professionals as easy as possible, with not enough consideration given to user preference. This history and the associated user frustration with IT, together with the ease of access to technology we all now have as consumers, means the phenomenon of consumerisation is probably here to stay in one form or another. If you try to stop it, you’ll simply drive activity underground. The imperative is therefore to manage it, bearing in mind all of the factors we have discussed.

In my next article on the matter, I’ll pick this up and suggest some ways of thinking through it to drive genuine productivity while avoiding the pitfalls of natural chaos.

Continue to Part 2 of discussion....

Negotiating your way to a dynamic IT environment

2011-04-11T12:59:00.003+01:00

That thorny question of software licenses

The principle of server virtualisation is now pretty well accepted in the mainstream IT professional community, but Andy, Tony and I have been having a lot of conversations with IT professionals recently suggesting that software licensing can still be a problem. On quite a few occasions, we have each heard stories about consolidation initiatives that have got bogged down in wrangles about the commercial and legal aspects of software deployment.

While most of the experience gained is from consolidation projects at the moment, thinking beyond these to the creation of more dynamic virtualised environments, ultimately to ‘private cloud’, the difficulties are likely to become even more pronounced. After so many years of physical and virtual server hosting being an integral part of mainstream IT, it’s telling that many are still struggling to determine what’s legal and most cost effective in this context too.

When you analyse things, based on all of the input we have received, two basic problems exist. The first is the undermining of the link between value and cost when virtualisation technology is used to partition servers. This arises because virtual servers generally only use a subset of the underlying physical server resources available. Sometimes this is implicit, as applications compete for shared resources, other times it’s more explicit, e.g. when a virtual machine (VM) is only allocated access to two CPUs in a four way box. The emergence of multi-core and multi-threaded processors, and the option to allocate fractions of CPUs or cores to VMs, then complicates things further.

Some vendors have ignored all this and insist on charging a licence fee based on the full physical spec of the host machine. This approach is now less common than it used to be, but when it is applied it can restrict flexibility and/or lead to quite punitive costs that many consider to be unfair. Others vendors have attempted to deal with the issue, but often in a manner that is difficult to understand or administer, and typically employing approaches that err on the side of their interests rather than their customer’s.

The second problem arises from the flexibility that stems from decoupling the software layer from the physical server. In a virtualised environment, applications are no longer tied to a specific machine, so the hardware underpinning a software installation is no longer necessarily persistent. Even in a manually administered setup, the ease with which virtual servers can be relocated between physical boxes means operations staff have a lot of freedom to optimise resource usage. They are increasingly taking advantage of this as requirements evolve and hardware is naturally refreshed. But much of this activity is not catered for by traditional software licence terms.

Whether it’s compliance, cost or both you are concerned with, these kinds of problems are primarily associated with licences relating to systems software (operating systems, database management systems, application software, etc) that have historically been based on the attributes of the chunk of metal used to run them. Such challenges will obviously increase as assisted or automated provisioning and workload management become more prevalent.

And if we take the promise of cloud computing literally, we will ultimately be dealing with a continuous process of workload provisioning, re-provisioning and de-provisioning, sometimes even across the on-site/hosted boundary. It’s therefore ironic that some of the vendors at the forefront of advocating the cloud nirvana are arguably the least prepared for dealing with it from a licensing point of view.

The upshot is that wherever you are on the trail of more flexible and dynamic IT delivery, most IT departments should probably be prepared for some ‘interesting’ discussions with software vendors in the future. These will by definition have to go beyond the usual periodic haggling on price that is a natural part of the contract review and renewal process. The fundamental basis upon which software is licensed is being challenged.

Unless you do your homework and prepare well, some vendors, particularly those with a reputation for exploiting contract terms to maximise their revenue regardless of value delivered, will attempt to take advantage of your ignorance. As part of this preparation, getting a better handle on what you already have installed, how (or even whether) it is being used, and how it is licensed, may be necessary, as software asset management is a weakness that often surfaces in our research. The last thing you need is having to rely on the vendor sales rep’s view of what you have in place.

We would also highly recommend talking to other organisations with similar environments and objectives. While vendors often write terms into contracts prohibiting the disclosure of specific terms and prices to third parties, it’s perfectly possible to exchange higher level experiences on approaches and the games being played without the risk of contract breech. Third party expert advisors who are brought in to negotiate on behalf of their clients can also be useful.

Having said all this, some software vendors are trying very hard to do the right thing, and we must remember that they are often on a learning curve too. Nevertheless, you still need to be careful as you negotiate your way into the world of dynamic IT.

(Originally published on CIO.co.uk)

Investigating the channel aspects of the cloud

2011-03-15T08:37:00.002Z

I am currently looking at the extent to which it makes sense for those in the IT channel – VARs, resellers, ISVs, SIs and so on – to get involved with various cloud computing options. I have an opinion piece lined up for CRN Magazine (should be published in the next couple of weeks) that outlines my current thoughts, which are basically that there is too much uncertainly at the moment to ‘bet your business’ on cloud, but that it makes sense to start gaining some experience sooner rather than later if you can do that without distracting from your core business that much.

This is a bit of a generalisation, of course, but with all the rhetoric around channel partners having to ‘get with the programme’ or risk being left out in the cold, I thought something was required to balance the debate.

The truth is that demand for most kinds of cloud based solutions is still pretty limited when you compare it to the IT market as a whole. A lot of the numbers sound impressive when you hear them in isolation, but in relative terms, I am hearing from many of those that are active that it’s still quite hard to find, qualify and close cloud related opportunities (compared to traditional business).

And from a business planning perspective, there is still the difficulty that the street price for many services has yet to settle. Some tell me that prices and margins can only come down, which makes ROI assessment quite hard to deal with. Others say the margins on many of the products they sell are slim anyway, so price/margin volatility doesn’t matter as they would look to do the same with cloud as they have always done – i.e. make money from spin-off revenue lines such as professional services and cross/up-sells.

To illustrate how inconsistent things are at the moment, I have also heard the view that some prices will actually have to go up as there is no margin in some of the early market offerings. I guess if the service provider set their prices originally based on a direct Web-based sales and deployment model, then only later figured out that selling around the channel was very difficult (particularly in SMB), they may have ended up with numbers that don’t add up in the indirect sales context.

Beyond demand and the ability to make profit, the one big concern I am hearing quite frequently is around customer ownership, but it’s more of a question than a problem statement at the moment. The issue is whether the channel partner would be expected to sign the customer on the service provider’s paper, thus notionally passing control of the relationship to the provider. Given that some cloud providers have little or no experience with the channel, and that lack of experience often translates to lack of discipline (e.g. in preventing/managing sales conflict in the field), the issue of whether providers can be trusted is clearly at the back of some people's minds.

Anyway, these are some of the things that are coming up in my conversations in addition to the usual discussion around the challenges of modifying your accounting models and remuneration plans to deal with the switch to an annuity based revenue model, but I am still very much in investigation mode.

So, if you have experiences, thoughts or opinions in this area, especially if you are working in the IT channel, I would be really interested in hearing your views. My contact details are on our website, but the easiest way might be just to ping me an email here.

Where is the immediate cloud opportunity?

2011-03-03T10:18:00.004Z

Let’s get specific

Pinning the term ‘cloud computing’ down to a single definition is not just hard, it’s impossible, primarily because vendors have habitually used and abused it to refer to so many different things.

Over the past couple of years we at Freeform Dynamics have tried to break the cloud computing discussion down into its constituent parts in various ways to create some clarity. We have also considered some of the underlying principles that will remain once the marketing people get bored of the term and move on. And over the last year, we have developed a way of walking people through the confusion, both interactively and through advisory material, in order to help them figure out how cloud computing in its various forms might fit into their own plans and activities.

More recently, we have turned our attention to looking beyond cloud at the long term strategy and direction level, and considering where, exactly, the opportunities are for CIOs looking for short to medium term advantage. In order to do this, it helps to distinguish between the different types of cloud ‘proposition’ out there, by which we mean the various categories of offering that translate to solutions you can actually buy.

We’ll be publishing some comprehensive material on this topic shortly, but as a heads up for those who follow my blog, we have identified three types of cloud proposition that we have concluded represent the best bets for the shorter term. These are:

Resource pooling technologies: The IT vendor community has been working for a decade or so on more capable provisioning and management systems that allow IT resources to be utilised in a more flexible and efficient manner. The basic idea is that you make lots of physical assets, whether they be servers or storage devices, look like a single virtual resource pool capable of supporting a variety of virtualised workloads ‘on demand’ in a flexible manner. Applications and workloads can be provisioned rapidly, overall asset utilisation can be increased, and management overheads can potentially be lowered. Over the past couple of years, the term ‘Private Cloud’ has been coined to refer to technology solutions in this space. Whatever you call it, what we are seeing today is the culmination of many years of research, development and early adopter testing. While some of the jargon is new, the technology being offered in this space is now ‘mainstream ready’, i.e. robust, usable and available at a reasonable cost.

Infrastructure hosting: The cloud speak here is ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), and the tendency is to focus on the dynamic and ‘elastic’ services brought to the fore originally by Amazon. However, traditional fixed contract hosting is still very relevant, so there are two important developments in this space that stem from service providers having access to the same (or similar) technology that underpins private cloud. Firstly, better technology has allowed providers to manage their own resources more efficiently. This is shifting the lines in terms of economics, bringing down prices and making even traditional fixed hosting more attractive in a wider range of scenarios. Secondly, for customers that need it, elastic services with both physical and commercial flexibility are becoming more widely accessible on a fully supported basis. The bottom line is that the infrastructure hosting market, while several decades old, is now throwing up some very interesting new options.

Utility style SaaS: The tendency in the industry is to lump all forms of hosted application services into the same ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) bucket. It helps, however, to distinguish between services that are generally implemented by customers ‘as they come’ and services based on application functionality that needs a lot of configuration, tailoring and integration work to get up and running. All indications are that the market for the former, i.e. straightforward solutions such as email, basic content management, social business, and even unified comms and collaboration, represents a stronger short to medium term opportunity than the latter. The utility nature of these propositions translates to rapid access to new or improved capability as well as potential cost savings. We also see lots of investment within the consulting community to help organisations with their utility-style SaaS initiatives.

Following on from this last category, more complex SaaS offerings such as ERP and broader scope CRM (beyond simple sales force automation) involve a similar level of evaluation, due diligence and implementation work as their traditional on-premise equivalent, and the potential for cost saving is generally lower. Furthermore, unravelling the issues around information security and management, development, maintenance and support of interfaces that cross the on-premise/provider divide, etc, can be quite a challenge. Separating utility and complex SaaS offerings avoids organisations rejecting the former because of issues that really have more to do with the latter.

The cloud proposition we haven’t mentioned yet is ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS), which is basically about hosted application platforms upon which custom cloud applications can be built and executed. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss this fully, but suffice it to say that we see this as the least well defined, and therefore the most risky, of the cloud plays. While we would encourage organisations to gain experience in this area sooner rather than later, and potentially take advantage of PaaS for tactical requirements, making strategic commitments is hard when standards are immature and competition between proprietary services has yet to play out.

So, for the time being, we would provide three recommendations to CIOs in relation to cloud. Firstly, pay attention to it as there is some interesting stuff going on. Secondly, avoid binary thinking; it is less about evaluating ‘cloud’ as a whole, and more about looking at the opportunities represented by the discrete categories of offering. Thirdly, focus on the three propositions we have called out when looking at short to medium term adoption.

The trick with cloud is always to be clear on the specifics.

SaaS is not utility computing

2011-01-26T21:32:00.001Z

It matters who delivers it and how

Cloud computing is frequently likened to utility services such as electricity, water or gas. If all that’s being consumed is compute cycles or storage space, then this analogy can be useful to understand what’s on offer. The ‘on demand’ principle of consuming just what you need when you need it is common to both types of service, as is the ability to switch providers with relative ease when required.

Things can be often be very different, however, when it comes to business application functionality delivered via the so called ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) model. If it’s a customer relationship management solution, for example, the way it works is likely to become ingrained in your business, with elements of the service becoming intimately intertwined with your business processes.

If you invest time, money and effort in a lot of setup and configuration during implementation, as is par for the course with more complex application services, this dependency becomes stronger. Even with something apparently as straightforward as an email and collaboration service, it’s amazing how much of your workflow, security and other information and process related policy becomes embedded in the system.

The upshot is that unlike utility services, switching SaaS providers is likely to impact well beyond the price you pay and who sends you the bill. Moving from one provider to another, or bringing an application back in house, can involve significant cost and disruption. With this in mind, effective due diligence before committing to a service is critical. And here’s the rub. Cloud rhetoric often creates a false impression of flexibility, which can in turn encourage customers to short-cut or even bypass the checks and balances they would normally apply when making decisions.

So what needs to be considered? The fundamental principles here are no different to the selection of important on-premise software. Some SaaS specific considerations exist that we’ll come onto in a minute, but it’s worth recapping on the discipline typically used to evaluate a key application package. This is a much better point of reference than utility service selection.

Making sure the solution is a good fit functionally and technically is obvious, but experience over the years highlights many dangers and pitfalls. Making assumptions is one problem, and this can can easily lead to disappointment. You might think a modern CRM system would naturally support the latest mobile technology, but that’s not always the case. And we all know that sales reps are sometimes ‘economical with the truth’. The solution might well be capable of integrating with your accounting system, but finding out later that 20 man days of professional services or a third party component is required to achieve this is a nasty surprise.

None of this changes with SaaS. In fact it could be argued that the risks are higher. While we have seen a lot of consolidation in the traditional application marketplace, the cloud space is littered with startups whose services are sometimes based on half-baked and largely unproven home grown solutions. There are then providers who started out with lightweight consumer-class services now opportunistically targeting the business sector with solutions that are not anywhere near ‘enterprise ready’ from a security, access and management perspective.

Beyond the solution, attention must also be paid to the supplier. Evaluating substance and stability (e.g. financially) is again pretty obvious, but ‘staying power’ is even more critical with SaaS. With an on-premise solution, a supplier going bust may create a support and maintenance problem, but if it’s SaaS, the service could close down with much more serious and immediate consequences.

The cultural dimension is important too, not so much the touchy feely stuff such as “putting the customer first” or “becoming a strategic partner”, but the supplier’s core values and how these manifest themselves in tangible ways that affect customers. Examples here are policies around licensing, pricing, maintenance and support, and what happens when things go wrong or disputes arise. The degree to which the needs of different industries and company sizes are taken seriously is another consideration.

Turning to SaaS specifically, an extra set of dependencies and constraints exists as a result of limited customer control over the application environment. What happens, for example, when a major functional upgrade or change is made? Are all subscribers forced to take it on at the same time? And what about frequency of upgrades and whether a road map is published to support forward planning and preparation? While trickling out ad hoc updates on a continuous basis may suit some customers, others may prefer changes to be batched up so they can move from one ‘release’ to another in a more controlled manner.

Providers vary a lot in terms of practices in this area, and a mismatch can potentially lead to issues around integration, compatibility, compliance and user expectation management. We could go on to talk about the importance of alignment on security policy, data protection, end user support, and other things that will be dependent on the nature of the service and provider delivering it. The point is that with SaaS, the system does not belong to the customer, and that has consequences.

But let’s not run away with the notion that SaaS is totally about getting what you are given. Many providers make facilities available which allow self-provisioning of users and features, ‘soft’ configuration and tailoring of the service, and effective management of security and access. This goes quite a way towards ensuring that control is maintained in the customer’s hands for most day to day requirements. SaaS providers also come in all shapes, cultures and sizes, so the chances of finding an organisational soul mate are pretty good if effort is put into shopping around.

Get it wrong, however, and the risk of being stuck in the equivalent of a bad marriage is significant, and escaping from the situation could be both expensive and disruptive.

The perception and reality of cloud security

2010-11-21T22:50:00.002Z

Some back to front thinking in evidence?

One of the most frequent concerns about cloud is security. Andy Buss and I were discussing this the other day as part of a research scoping exercise. We are currently designing a study to look at the risk related aspects of Software as a Service (SaaS).

Something we always try to avoid in our research and analysis is falling into trap of generalising too much. In this case, it was important to acknowledge that businesses vary significantly in terms of their risk sensitivity, e.g. based on the degree to which they are regulated, the amount of confidential or personal information they handle, their operational dependency on IT, and their general risk awareness. Attitudes to security therefore range from extreme paranoia at one end to total complacency on the other. And even within a given organisation, some systems and data will be regarded as highly sensitive, and others will not.

The logic then goes that categorisation of applications based on their risk profile is a good place to start when considering which requirements lend themselves more to cloud based deployment from a security perspective.

So far so good, but then the conversation with Andy got really interesting.

The unspoken working assumption to this point was that application profiling would allow organisations to identify low risk candidates for initial cloud activity. To put it another way, if you're concerned about the hosted services model representing a security risk, then gain some initial experience with less sensitive applications for which security is less of a consideration.

The trouble is that for many small and mid-sized businesses, it could be argued that such advice would be flawed. Whatever the current perception, the reality is that a reputable service provider will almost certainly be able to manage application access and information security better than the majority of smaller businesses (and arguably many larger ones), so data and transactions would probably be a lot more secure in a third party hosting environment. The reasoning here is not rocket science, even though it may not be obvious to many. Service providers have the economy of scale to justify investment in top-notch technology and skills in a way that SMBs, with the best will in the world, could only dream of.

As responsible analysts, perhaps we should therefore be turning the logic on its head and advising at least some organisations to prioritise putting their most sensitive rather than least sensitive applications and data sets in the cloud first. While the original opposite view might be intuitively appropriate, that would be simply pandering to ignorance and ill-considered prejudices.

As this point, I can almost hear the abuse being directed at whatever medium you are reading this on – “Bloody naïve ivory tower analysts that have never done a real day’s work in the real world giving us bloody stupid advice about putting our most sensitive data into the hands of ‘fly-by-night’ cloud upstarts? They should get themselves a proper job and stop writing such crap”.

Then again, maybe this line of reasoning has got you thinking, which to be honest, is all I am trying to achieve.

In the real world, of course, it’s not legitimate to provide sweeping advice like the above. But neither does it make sense for those in IT to make sweeping generalisations about whether cloud services are or aren’t a good idea, on security or any other grounds. The point is that it needs some thinking about, and sometimes the most obvious conclusion can prove to be incorrect in many scenarios.

It’s for these kinds of reasons that one of my other colleagues, Tony Lock, and I put together a paper entitled “Applied Cloud Computing: A practical guide to identifying the potential in your environment”. In many respects, this was a reaction to all of the generalised opinion we hear on both sides of the house, as both the evangelists and the sceptics are guilty of the same crime in this respect.

The reality is that it’s all about context, and what’s appropriate or meaningful in one situation could be a total non-starter in others. Then there are those grey areas where it’s difficult to call it either way. With this in mind, after almost a quarter of a century in IT, I am still waiting for an example of a technology or approach that is universally right or wrong regardless of the circumstances.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in a more practical treatment of cloud computing, including some down to earth thoughts about security, integration, management and the general impact on the IT department, you can download the abovementioned paper from here.

The great mainframe utilisation debate

2010-11-02T07:50:00.004Z

Are you getting the most out of yours?

Someone recently asked me why mainframes are not utilised more broadly in large organisations that have them as part of their IT infrastructure. The point of the question was not so much to do with whether the capacity in place is fully used, more that people routinely seem to put workloads that are very well suited to the mainframe onto architectures that are more costly and complex to install and run.

In terms of high level context for this debate, many IT professionals we speak with tell us that x86 scale-out architectures (including what many call ‘private cloud’) are now very efficient compared to traditional discrete server deployments for dealing with mixed workloads. Those that are more mainframe savvy, however, suggest that the ‘big iron’ is still superior when it comes to the floor space occupied, the power consumed, and the admin resources required per unit of work done.

Of course this kind of generalised view doesn’t take into account the fact that there are very well engineered and run x86 environments, and (albeit less likely) very poorly implemented mainframes. Neither does it acknowledge that the nature of certain workloads and associated constraints often precludes the mainframe as an option for hosting them.

Nevertheless, we are continually coming across examples of organisations migrating workloads from the mainframe onto, say, a Unix or x86 based Oracle system, only to find that software licence and running costs soar, and managing the peaks and troughs of demand fluctuation becomes a challenge. Similarly, there are examples of organisations procuring a whole landscape to implement a new application on a Microsoft or Oracle platform when the same requirement could be fulfilled with lower cost, space, energy, cooling and operational implications in the existing mainframe environment.

So why is this? In our experience, there are three common reasons for IT professionals being reluctant to utilise the mainframe their organisation has in place for new and changing requirements.

The first is an out of date perception of the mainframe as being totally proprietary, despite the advances made over the last decade. Today’s mainframe, for example, supports the majority of open standards that are important from a software architecture and development perspective, allowing a good degree of portability and interoperability with other systems. This includes concepts such as Web services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the use of modern programming languages.

The second reason is a perception that the mainframe is expensive. This is a more interesting one. If you were to start with a green field site, the chances are that app for app in the early days your outlay would be greater if you went down the mainframe route. There comes a point, however, when the curves cross, partly down to the fact that the incremental cost of adding an extra unit of capacity once you are past a certain level drops off considerably compared to the x86 or Unix alternatives, and partly because the mainframe rules supreme when it comes to resource utilisation.

On this last point, it is worth remembering that the architecture underpinning the modern mainframe originates from a time when computing power was extremely scarce and expensive. Right from the outset, it was highly optimised to natively balance the use of resources efficiently in a mixed and fluctuating workload environment. And over the years, it has only got better at this, not just in terms of core processing, but also via the introduction of ‘offload engines’. These are basically ancillary processors specialised to deal with certain types of processing (e.g. Java runtime execution), which are seamlessly invoked when required.

Meanwhile, Unix, Windows and Linux environments are still subject to the principle that if you optimise them for one type of workload, they won’t run other workloads as efficiently. This is why rapid provisioning to achieve dynamic flexibility in a private cloud setup typically still involves moving complete stack images around (from an appropriately configured operating system upwards) when an application needs to be allocated more resource. While some might refer to the x86 ‘virtual mainframe’, there are still some fundamental differences that have implications in terms complexity and efficiency.

The third common reason for appropriate workloads not finding their way onto the mainframe is organisational prejudice and inertia. Unfortunately, as a function of history, many mainframe groups have become politically isolated over the years. This has often come about because they are perceived as being far too obsessed with matters security, resilience and operational integrity. A common complaint from architects and developers in the distributed computing world is that they are made to jump through hoops to get even the simplest of things done when they try to engage with the mainframe guys.

The irony is that many of those responsible for distributed systems are nowadays striving to emulate the traits they have previously criticised. As x86 architectures are increasingly used for business critical applications, for example, a lot more attention is having to be paid to security, resilience and so on. Nevertheless, when it comes to company politics, double standards are applied, and one man’s rigour is another man's uptight paranoia.

When we pull all of the above together, the upshot is that many large organisations are sitting on an asset that could do much more for them and help them meet some of their operational, environmental and cost reduction objectives, but they are not taking full advantage of it. Expecting busy rank-and-file IT practitioners to deal with the barriers we have discussed, however, is unrealistic.

With this in mind, there are two groups that are important: CIOs, who can evaluate the role of the mainframe in the big picture context and start to break down some of the barriers through a combination of policy, education, and the encouragement of collaboration between teams, and architects, who can apply a much more objective approach to evaluating practical requirements and making sure workloads end up on the right technical architecture for the right reasons.

If you are sceptical about the relevance of some of the things we have been discussing, it is worth considering that one of the reasons the mainframe is often not front of mind when it comes to future planning and new requirements is because it largely just sits there doing what it is supposed to do – i.e. handing complex and critical computing requirements - with minimal operational overhead and distraction. I’m sure a lot of people nurturing x86 infrastructures wish they could say the same about their environments.

Cloud computing will devalue the role of IT professionals

2010-10-29T13:14:00.005+01:00

Exploding this and other myths

You’ve heard the rhetoric: Cloud computing changes everything. The days of the enterprise data centre and the small business computer room are numbered. At some point in the not too distant future, you’ll be switching off the last server, turning out the lights, and looking for a career change. No need for IT professionals any more when cloud providers are taking care of everything the business needs.

The sad thing is that some people really believe all this. And it’s a great story to write about if you are a journalist too. Disruption of the status quo, with traditional infrastructure and software vendors being usurped by the likes of Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, and some juicy scaremongering about whether your job will be safe in the future.

So what’s the reality?

Well there are two main things going on under the cloud computing banner. The first is the continued evolution of technology to enable more efficient and flexible infrastructure to be built, largely based on the concepts of virtualisation and resource pooling. These approaches can be used in house to create a more dynamic IT environment that, over time, can reduce costs, boost the responsiveness to new and changing requirements, and, as importantly, make the life of IT professionals easier in many respects.

These same developments allow service providers to pretty much do the same in their data centres – i.e. reduce costs and increase flexibility. This in turn changes some of the economics and practicalities of hosting, which potentially shifts the line in terms of what it’s feasible, desirable and sensible to outsource from an enterprise IT perspective. With the trends we are seeing, despite the prejudices and genuine risks associated with the hosted service model, it would seem reasonable to assume an increase in the uptake of hosted services as time goes on.

The point is, though, that a lot of what runs across your existing IT landscape today is actually very predictable and probably doesn’t need the extreme flexibility touted by cloud technology and service vendors. Traditional infrastructure and hosting models will therefore co-exist with dynamic ‘private clouds’ and ‘on demand’ or ‘elastic’ cloud services for the foreseeable future.

Contrary to the aforementioned rhetoric, this means that the role of the IT professional will become even more important. When things are working across computing models and domains, often crossing the in-house/service provider boundary, you’re going to need more skill and experience to make sure it all hangs together, not less.

This is something we explore in our latest paper entitled ‘Applied Cloud Computing’, and in this we talk about managing the additional complexity and risk that is inevitable as organisations take advantage of cloud related developments. The need for more robustly defined architectural standards, security policy and operational process that can cope with cross-domain integration and dependencies means that far from de-skilling, some IT departments will have to up their game.

If you have any views on this yourself, drop me a line. Meanwhile, if you are interested in reading more, the abovementioned paper can be downloaded from here.

Intel helps customers take ownership of the cloud agenda

2010-10-28T09:26:00.008+01:00

Most major players in the IT industry have attempted to take ownership of the cloud computing agenda over the past couple of years. With each one defining cloud in a different and often very contrived way, much confusion and scepticism has been created among customers.

Even when suppliers have tried to play the cloud game with a straight bat, they have often failed to appreciate the practicalities of the real world in which their customers live. Time and time again, our research at Freeform Dynamics has identified disconnects between vendor propositions and the requirements of mainstream IT professionals in this whole area. While it is easy to talk in simplistic terms about ‘a move to the cloud’, the devil is in the detail, and too many supplier pitches come across as idealistic or naïve.

Against this background, representatives of Intel and BMW yesterday gathered a group of analysts and reporters to the famous CERN research establishment in Geneva to announce the ‘Open Data Centre Alliance’ (ODCA). The aim of this new initiative is to help shape the evolution of cloud computing at an industry level in a much more objective manner.

Unlike vendor driven consortia that spring up from time to time, the ODCA doesn’t appear to be some political association of convenience to allow one ‘faction’ to position against another. It is owned and run by customers, and some big ones at that. On the steering committee, for example, are prominent brands such as China Life, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International Inc, National Australia Bank, Shell, Terremark, UBS and, of course, the aforementioned BMW.

Speaking on behalf of the ODCA, Mario Mueller, VP of IT Infrastructure for the BMW Group, talked about dealing with the rising cost of IT. Nothing new in that, but while outlining the rationale for the new alliance, he also spoke of the opposing pulls of managing the complexity of heterogeneous environments on the one hand, and the risk of vendor lock-in when the alternative proprietary/homogenous path is pursued on the other.

This dilemma is a familiar one to many of us. A degree of architectural and building block consistency is required to achieve the full potential of the next-generation dynamic data centre promise. Indeed, CIOs and architects tell us through our research that the role of standardisation around the technology stack is well understood and appreciated. At the same time, however, we commonly encounter a reticence to commit to integrated stack propositions in which the likes of Oracle and Cisco deliver everything (server, storage, networking and other technology) pre-optimised out of the a box. The fear is lack of flexibility to substitute components and an uncomfortable level of specific vendor dependency.

The ODCA hopes to make things better by defining customer requirements for openness and flexibility collectively then articulating these with a single voice. To this end, the alliance has already identified a range of usage scenarios or use cases to which cloud technology and services are relevant. A series of working parties has been created to flesh these out and report back to both the ODCA membership and the broader industry from the first quarter of 2011 onwards.

In many ways, this represents a bunch of big customers saying “enough is enough” and declaring that they are now taking ownership of the cloud agenda, with interoperability being at the top of the wish list, along with automation and client awareness. This last point refers to the increasing challenge of end-point diversity in the enterprise, with various forms of desktop virtualisation coming onto the scene, along with an increasing range of devices such as smart phones and slates.

In an ideal world, computing clouds should work seamlessly in a federated manner and deliver services to each end point in line with its nature, capabilities and constraints, but such things are easier said than done.

And this is where Intel comes in. As an advisor to the ODCA, it will help in the definition of roadmaps and act as a catalyst or facilitator in the game of getting other industry players motivated and committed to the cause. As a company that sits way back in the supply chain, with no real axe to grind in the front-line delivery space as suppliers duke it out at the product and service level, it is well placed to fulfill this role.

In tactical terms, Intel has a history of making things happen through a combination of general market awareness raising via its marketing machine coupled with firm ‘pushing from behind’ to get the ecosystem moving. The WiFi market would not have developed as quickly as it did without such efforts from Intel a few years ago. Of course some aggressive R&D to throw enabling technology into the mix is also part of the process, and Intel is not afraid to go out on a limb a bit here.

All in all, this is a very interesting move, and in my view the timing is right for a customer led initiative after the vendors have made such a hash of things. With this in mind, it will interesting to see who in the vendor community picks up the mantle and responds. Definitely one to watch.

Lithium helped the penny to drop

2010-10-22T08:00:00.007+01:00

A more tangible take on social CRM

While I go about my business as an industry analyst, I sometimes come across problems and solutions highlighted by the vendor community that somehow don’t seem quite right. When my instincts flag up such situations, it’s often because the way the problem has been defined is not something I can personally relate to, and/or from our end user research, we know that mainstream IT and business professionals wouldn’t see the world in that way.

I have had this niggling ‘something is not quite right’ feeling about the whole ‘social CRM’ thing. At a high level, the reasoning seems sound enough; social networks are now well ingrained into consumer behaviour, so it makes sense for CRM systems and processes to somehow integrate with them. However, when you hear some of the propositions from the incumbent CRM vendor crowd, they don’t seem particularly well thought out.

In relation to sales and marketing, for example, you rarely hear anything that is genuinely ‘game changing’ as claimed. When you strip away the revolutionary rhetoric, most of it boils down to social networks representing just another medium or channel that can act as a vehicle for promotional activity. Some of the more specialist marketing consulting houses go beyond this and talk about ‘influencing the influencers’, which is basically about identifying people who have a large ‘following’ and focusing your promotion on them, on the premise that they will pass the goodwill onto their flock. When you consider, however, that the majority of Facebook users reportedly only interact routinely with less than ten people on average, this kind of tactic can only ever represent a part of the overall marketing equation when considered in the context of the mass consumer population.

And on the customer service side, some of what I hear seems downright reckless – e.g. the harvesting of tips, tricks, and problem resolutions from social networks and facilitating the automatic propagation of these as part of your support processes. Judging by the number of recommendations I get for dodgy registry hacks whenever I search for a resolution to a Windows problem on the broader internet, it’s clear that for every useful and legitimate piece of insight or advice you come across, literally tens or hundreds of useless or even dangerous ‘opinions’ exist. It’s then the old problem of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Yet the principle of genuine communities helping each other in a relatively well-bounded manner is well proven and useful. Furthermore, in any customer base, ‘experts’ exist that probably know more about the real world application of the product or service than the supplier or manufacturer itself. My instincts therefore told me that it should be possible to pull all this together in a way that made sense, and ultimately, after a conversation with a company called Lithium, it all started to fall into place.

With its roots in the gaming industry, Lithium had a suite of software that facilitated genuine communities to be built by recognising the concept of ‘credibility’. This isn’t just based on the ‘follow the noisiest’ principle in which the most prolific contributors tend to become the centre of attention (as is the case in many social media ‘echo chambers’); it’s driven by a rules-based scoring, ranking and reputation management system based on the things that really matter – good product knowledge, original problem solving capability, and so on. Sounds pretty obvious when you say it, and anyone (like my 15 year old son) who participates in a gaming community will already be familiar with the principle, but when you apply this approach to the ‘social CRM’ problem, you can see how it might solve some of the challenges.

I’ll not attempt to explain the workings of the Lithium engine, and there may well be other solutions out there that do the same or similar, but talking to the Lithium guys was the first time I could get my head around some of the specifics to do with the interplay between customer services and social networking. It’s probably noteworthy that with the latest iteration of its solution, which allows a virtual community to be built as an overlay across a number of popular social networks, Lithium has rebranded its core offering as the ‘Social Customer Suite’. I suspect this is as much as anything so Lithium can distance itself from some of the ill-defined arm waving that goes on under the social CRM banner.

Anyway, this is an area that Josie and I will be ramping up coverage of as we look forward, so if anyone out there has recommendations for other solutions we should be checking out (apart from the obvious traditional CRM suspects), then let us know.

Jon Collins moving on

2010-10-08T14:57:00.002+01:00

It is with mixed feelings that I have to announce that Jon Collins will shortly be moving on from his role at Freeform Dynamics, which may come as a surprise to some, but not to others.

Those of you who know Jon well will be aware that he has led a double life for quite a few years now – part analyst, part music biographer and author. His debut book on the band Marillion was first published in 2004, and was quickly followed in 2005 by a biography of one of my own favourite bands from university days, Rush. He then went on to assist another major artist, Mike Oldfield, with his autobiography, and was building quite a reputation in music industry circles.

Then Helen and I came along and disrupted all that, by appealing to ‘analyst’ Jon and inviting him to help us take the then one year old Freeform Dynamics to the next level. We had both worked with Jon before and obviously needed someone with his skills and IT industry insights, but as important as all that, Jon was a trusted friend who we knew shared the same core values as we did, both personally and professionally.

The Freeform role needed a lot of focus and dedication, so Jon agreed to join us on the basis that he would not write any more books for a least a year – two at the most, then have the option of going back to redeveloping his music and other writing interests at some point thereafter.

Well it’s now been four years, which from our point of view has been a bit of a result, but it was inevitable that a time would come when Jon would want to pick up those deferred interests again and move on – and that time is now.

In terms of specifics, as part of the transition, Jon has already stepped down as CEO and handed the reins back to me from a leadership perspective, with Helen picking up the general management part of his role. To be honest, given that the three of us have always worked quite closely as a management team, this has been a fairly natural and straightforward process, though we will of course miss Jon’s unique perspective on the world as we move forward.

Speaking of management and leadership, I’ll take the opportunity now to say that I am particularly grateful to Jon for stepping into the CEO slot when I was unable to continue in it myself for medical reasons a couple of years ago. Again those of you who know Jon will be aware that he mostly fulfilled this role out of necessity rather than desire, and I’m sure he won’t miss the drudgery that often comes with running a company.

But he’s not getting away that easily. Jon will remain full time with Freeform Dynamics until the end of this month, and will then continue as a Freeform affiliate. While he has decided to leave the analyst role behind, he will be available to help us out as a consultant on projects. We are also exploring some collaborative work around the intersection of IT with the media industry, which is an area in which Freeform has conducted some initial consumer studies recently. Indeed Jon already has some meetings lined up to socialise the results of one of the studies into consumer media procurement and consumption with some interesting music industry figures. Not sure what will come out of all that, but lots of possibilities.

In any event, I think we’ll look back on the ‘Jonno years’ with some affection in the future – a time of mini-books, cloud hype busting, and some great debates.

So why the mixed feelings on my part?

Well there is no denying that Helen and I are going to miss working with Jon as closely as we have done over the past few years, and I think the same can be said of the rest of the Freeform team. But at the same time, I am also excited to see a close personal friend pursue some of his other passions, and wish Jon every success in the future.

Devices and the Cloud

2010-09-17T09:49:00.001+01:00

A return to client/server computing?

What’s your perfect device? Are you a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android smartphone fan? Are you wedded to your MacBook or Windows notebook? Do you see the iPad and the myriad of slates that will follow as the future of client computing? Regardless of preferences, the chances are that you have an opinion. You care about devices.

But hold on, how can that be right? Surely with everything supposedly moving into the cloud, the devices you use to access your internet based applications and data are not that important. Provided they run a browser, why do you care?

If you put idealism and purism to one side for a minute, the reasons are pretty obvious. Different form factors meet different requirements simply from an interaction perspective. If you are composing or manipulating content in a big way, then you probably want a decent screen (or screens), a keyboard and a mouse. If it’s lightweight business communications and document handling while on the road, then slates fit the bill pretty well. Just messaging and casual content related activity, and we are in smart phone territory.

We could go on and talk about entertainment and the options around video and sound, but the point is that depending on what we are doing, we ideally want a different size and shape of device, with different interaction, input and output capability.

The other consideration is local processing power and storage capacity. Even with today’s ‘pervasive’ wireless networks, we are still a long way away from being able to assume a fast and stable connection when out and about. The ability to access at least some of the applications and content we want when disconnected will therefore remain a requirement for some time to come. Whether it’s composing an email or watching a video on the train, you don’t want to be interrupted while your device tries to reconnect after losing the network.

Local device processing capability can also have a big impact on the user experience. Even on a reliable network with a lot of back-end horsepower, if all execution takes place server-side, network bandwidth constraints and latency can significantly limit the quality of graphics and video, as well as hampering overall responsiveness. But this is a theoretical drawback today as most of the devices we use, even the ones we think of as ‘dumb’, still have quite a bit of processing and graphics capability on board. It might not be obvious, but even when apparently just accessing Web content through a browser, our device is doing a lot of work locally – compressing and decompressing content, graphics rendering, and even executing application components that are automatically downloaded and run in the browser environment.

Beyond the browser, there is then the whole ‘app for that’ phenomenon initially popularised by the iPhone, but now common across the mobile industry. In this model the user is very consciously downloading applications to run locally, even though many of them are simply front ends for Web based services. This is despite the fact that many people are holding up the iPhone, iPad and similar as examples of devices designed for the cloud computing era.

All of this raises an important question. If the client device at the ‘edge’ of the cloud is doing so much work, doesn’t that negate a lot of the benefits touted by cloud advocates? Many of these are to do with the centralisation of complexity, yet the way things are going, the client side of the equation is, if anything, becoming more complex. Now, for example, if you are a developer and want to enable that optimised and robust user experience across a range of devices catering for different user needs and preferences, you must build, deploy, maintain and support multiple versions of the client component – for the iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Symbian devices, Windows phones and anything else that becomes popular – not to mention the good old PC and Mac platforms.

The truth is that we are seeing a resurgence in client/server computing. OK, so now it’s sexy mobile apps accessing Web services in ‘the cloud’ rather than PC front ends talking to database back-ends, but the consequences are the same from a cost and complexity perspective.

So, like many other aspects of cloud computing, you cannot take the promises of reduced complexity at face value across the board. While new ways of doing things promoted under the term ‘cloud computing’ provide some great options for optimising the way IT is delivered, it’s amazing how old principles and ideas resurface along the way. And as this happens, we must be careful not to forget the lessons of the past, in this case to do with managing complex distributed client/server landscapes.

The significance of Salesforce.com’s 'Chatter'

2010-07-21T06:11:00.014+01:00

Salesforce.com to me is a bit like the boy who cried ‘Wolf!”. Every press release it issues contains claims of industry revolution, even if all that’s being announced is some incremental development of its service portfolio or another partnership of convenience. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Salesforce.com is a great company with a great set of offerings, but the continuous stream of evangelism does make it hard to distinguish hype from reality.

It’s because of this that I almost missed the significance of ‘Chatter’, which is the new social networking element added into the Salesforce.com portfolio that provides what on the surface looks like basic Twitter or Facebook update type functionality, but on a secure/private basis.

At the time Chatter was announced towards the tail end of last year, way ahead of it being available on general release (as usual), I didn’t take much notice of it. After all, it seemed a bit niche, closed and limited compared to the more horizontal enterprise social media plays by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

This week, however, Tony and I attended an industry analyst gathering at which a number of Salesforce.com customers shared their early experiences of Chatter (which is now, by the way, available to be turned on by any subscriber to the core application services for no additional fee). As the customers told their stories, it gradually dawned on me that there was something really significant going on here. To understand this, we need to recap on some of my previous analysis.

One of the things I have always had a problem with is the ‘build it and they will come’ approach to implementing social media in a business context. Having spoken with people involved in larger scale ‘Enterprise 2.0’ rollouts, there appears to be a couple of recurring challenges. The first is concerned with adoption – people are often nervous or unsure of how to participate in a social network in the workplace. Driving adoption, even in organisations with a progressive and permissive culture, can therefore be harder than you might think.

The other challenge is concerned with who does actually participate. Confidence and willingness to communicate does not necessarily correlate with an individual’s ability to contribute value to others. To put it bluntly, there is a difference between noisiness and usefulness. In an open and unstructured environment you often see a few prolific communicators dominating the network, with some of your most insightful staff with a huge amount of value to share on business matters put off by the seemingly ad hoc nature of the medium. Ask them a direct question and they will respond, but expect them to volunteer something unprompted and you could be waiting quite a while.

It is for this reason that I have always advised that social media type collaboration solutions be deployed in a structured and objective manner to support specific business processes or specific groups of users, at least in the first instance. This provides a clear context for the initiative which makes it easier to assess impact and nudge things in the right direction. If you know where you are looking to drive benefit, e.g. in the sales process, customer service area, or within R&D, you are likely to achieve a lot more than if you take a scattergun approach and cross your fingers that something useful will emerge from somewhere.

From a business perspective, a more focused and structured approach also provides purpose and an important set of prompts to which less gregarious members of the workforce are more likely to respond. If you make it clear, for example, that sales people uncovering an opportunity above a certain value or for a brand new product will be expected to reach out to their colleagues for relevant ideas and input using the enterprise social networking system, it is clear how they are supposed to participate. Similar techniques can be used in other parts of the business and end result is a much more balanced and useful set of dialogues, with much broader participation.

Of course ultimately, you are aiming for use of social networking to really take hold and proliferate across the organisation, breaking down boundaries and achieving that step change in efficiency and effectiveness that the Enterprise 2.0 advocates often highlight. The point is that you can’t simply throw tools at the workforce then stand back and let them work it out for themselves. Well you can, but in the meantime there will be obvious applications of the technology that drive clear and tangible benefits that are likely to be overlooked.

Coming back to Chatter, it is significant because it was born out of a process-centric application environment. If you consider Salesforce.com’s core applications, the context is sales or service management, but it was also useful to hear from FinancialForce.com at the abovementioned event that has produced an enhanced version of Chatter (Chatterbox) and embedded it into its Force.com-based accounting solution.

This solid results-oriented heritage means there is a clear focus on tangible benefit, and the one thing that stood out as I listened to the speakers was that they were constantly referring to repeatable use-cases in which improved collaboration leads to direct improvement in performance, exactly in the spirit I have previously outlined.

With this in mind, Chatter represents a great opportunity for existing Salesforce.com customers to start exploring the benefits of enterprise social networking in a business-like manner. It is particularly useful that the new capability is being made available at no additional cost if you subscribe to the core sales or service applications, as it can be difficult making the business case for explicit investment in this area. The ability role the solution out independently of the core applications to the broader employee base is then provided through a Chatter-only subscription, so you won’t be constrained by the scope of your existing user base.

Salesforce.com would obviously like non-subscribers to look at Chatter as a generic social networking solution for the enterprise, whether the core sales and service applications are seen as relevant or not. In this sense, the company has jumped into what is becoming quite a crowded market, and measured against the competition might struggle to compete on pure functionality terms. Social media applications are a natural for deployment via the SaaS model, however, so there is every chance the company can carve out a slice of the action for itself despite the relative immaturity of its solution.

In the meantime, my feeling is that Salesforce.com with Chatter is likely to do a lot more to prove the concept of enterprise social media than most of the players with more generic solutions that have hitherto been hogging the action. Salesforce.com has always been about helping its customers drive improved business performance in a pretty direct manner and that’s not a bad mindset to back up a social networking play.

FOOTNOTES

While talking about this post internally, I got the following comments back from the team:

Tony: The only thing I might add is the need for users to have good filters to stop chatter overwhelming them, regardless of good intentions, as more and more people get into ‘social’ habits. This is something that is missing from the initial implementation.

Jon: Having used Chatter a little bit, it’s also good because Chatter events are created automatically, as people go about their business – creating a socially friendly, visible audit trail that other people can interact with. So it’s not just that it integrates with a specific process, but that the process spins off bits of chat without you having to do anything.

Tony’s comment highlights that Chatter is still very much at the version 1.0 level in terms of sophistication, and I would add to the filtering related restriction he mentions the absence of any concrete plan for Chatter to span organisational boundaries or integrate in a two way manner with public social networking services. These are areas Salesforce.com says it is looking at, however.

The point Jon makes is very relevant, and I would add to this how useful it is to be able to have a document or information/transaction entity at the centre of a chat, e.g. a sales opportunity, proposal, customer support case, meeting agenda, and so on. This reinforces the relevance of Chatter to process optimisation.

Finally, I'll take this opportunity to thank the speakers at the event I mentioned for a very informative and entertaining set of presentations. These included Martin Reents from Conject, Kimberly Jansen from Misys, Louis Nauges from Revevol and Liz Schofield from FinancialForce.com.

CRM market dynamics: Response to journalist inquiry

2010-07-19T07:34:00.000+01:00

The analyst team here at Freeform Dynamics frequently gets asked for comment by journalists. This usually takes place over the phone, but occasionally a request comes in over email.

The following is my response to one such email request. It might be interesting in its own right (it pretty much sums up my views of the CRM market), but it also serves to illustrate the level of exchange we have with journalists, even though all that gets usually gets printed is a one or two line quote – if that!

Of course not all journalists are the same. Some are only after a sound bite to substantiate an angle or argument they have already made their mind up on. The more senior guys tend to be looking for genuine input to shape their thinking, however, especially when writing more in-depth feature pieces. The other way requests vary is in the level questions are pitched at. While the one below is very generic and high level, most are more news oriented, typically looking for comment on developments, announcements or events relating to a specific vendor or solution.

Anyway, this is pretty typical of the kind of response I would give to an incoming journalist request asking a bunch of open questions at a more generic level. It’s not exhaustive as the idea is simply to provide some interesting angles and the relevant background/context to help them write something meaningful. Enjoy…

RESPONSE TO PRESS INQUIRY ON CRM MARKET DYNAMICS

Tell me what the key trends are that have developed in the enterprise CRM space over the last couple of years?

Most people think of organisations reacting to the recession by cutting costs, but another common response has been to get smarter about sales effectiveness. In a market where there are fewer deals going down, it is necessary to win a higher proportion of those deals simply to stand still in terms of revenue and margin. This has led more progressive organisations to put a greater emphasis on analytics, segmentation, planning and best practice workflow within the sales operation as a way of improving targeting and win rates.

We have also seen a greater emphasis on closing the loop between sales and service, and bridging the gap across sales channels, as organisations have done everything they can to protect and exploit their existing customer base, and make sure that no opportunity has escaped the net.

There has then been a continuing trend towards SaaS based deployment, with Salesforce.com being joined by others, most notably Microsoft and its army of partners, to provide more options with regard to hosted solutions.

What major developments/shifts in direction do you see the enterprise CRM marketplace taking in the next year or two?

While there has been a lot of talk about CRM systems helping organisations deal with social networks in a B2C and B2B context, there has been little action to date. Solutions are still immature and large CRM incumbents are slow in their thinking in this area at the moment. They will catch up, but a lot of the innovation and best practice is likely to come from smaller web based players and specialist point solution providers. We anticipate this whole area really heating up, however, as organisations look to a) monitor and manage discussions taking place in social networks around their brand and products, and b) use social networks as an outreach and engagement channel to drive incremental business. We caution here against organisations viewing social media as a separate, discrete channel, however – it is imperative that it is thought of as an integral part of a multi-channel strategy.

With the coming of age of smart phones and the emergence of new mobile form factors such as the iPad (and its inevitable followers), the mobile dimension to CRM is going to be another area that really heats up. This will manifest itself in two ways – a) Mobile access to CRM systems by sales and service teams to the next level (i.e. much richer functionality), and b) the use of CRM systems to facilitate outreach and engagement to customers via their mobile devices, again in both a sales and service context. Mobile advertising and other forms of promotion (especially interactive campaigns) will be a big part of this, and a lot of what we have seen with the iPhone has set the scene here.

As an evolution of the analytics and planning activity that we were discussing above, we anticipate more organisations looking to embed business intelligence in the sales and service process itself, rather than treating it as a separate periodic activity. The imperative here is for suppliers to step up to the mark with best practice, whether enabled through the core R&D activities of CRM vendors, the efforts of their partners (e.g. to build industry templates), or the enabling of customer/user communities to help themselves, e.g. through social media and similar.

Beyond these developments, a hope rather than a prediction is that we see the needs of small businesses catered for more effectively by the CRM supplier community. Salesforce.com is too complex and costly for most smaller entities and Microsoft seems to be following with offerings that are also more suitable to the mid-market and above. Sage seems to be making some reasonable efforts, as are some of the smaller Web based SaaS players, but the space is massively underserved at the moment despite a clear need (the vast majority of smaller companies have no structured CRM solutions in place at all right now).

How are/will CRM products change to adjust to these changes/trends?

Continued evolution of analytics/BI capability, encapsulation of best practice in solutions as much as possible, mechanisms to manage and exploit social networks, and the next level of functionality around mobile. As part of the latter, there is a clear need to move beyond Web interfaces on mobile devices to properly designed mobile extensions to the application.

As part of some of the above, we also see a need for the CRM supplier community to tune into and even partner with social media companies, mobile operators and others in the industry ecosystem. And as we mentioned, there is a clear opportunity in the small business space for suppliers who step up with affordable and accessible solutions.

Putting the 'I' back into 'CIO'

2010-06-12T23:24:00.001+01:00

Nice sound bite, but does it make sense?

On a few occasions recently I have heard presenters on stage remind their audience of the fact that the 'I' in 'CIO' stands for 'Information', the premise being that we all appear to have forgotten this over the years with a shift in focus to technology. The line is usually put forward following the cliche 'information explosion' discussion, and the message is that CIO's need to pay more attention to dealing with the 'information problem'.

On first consideration, this sounds like a reasonable thing to say. Most business information in the majority organisations is now stored electronically, which means IT is implicitly involved in creating, managing and exploiting it - ergo the person with ultimate responsibility for IT systems must also be responsible for the information held within them.

It is then a short logical step to argue that the CIO is the one who needs to sort out all of the issues around fragmentation, quality, consistency, completeness, retention and retrieval of information that cause so many challenges for business users on a daily basis. And if you really wanted to take a partisan view, you could also argue that a big contributing factor to us ending up where we are today has been the piecemeal and uncoordinated way in which IT systems have been implemented and accumulated over the years, which is obviously down to the CIO and his or her predecessors.

But how valid and helpful is this way of thinking? Well let's consider things in a little more of a balanced and holistic way for minute.

Two notions that are often confused are 'stewardship' and 'ownership'. A steward is responsible for looking after what they are given to take care of, but obviously doesn't have control over the initial state they receive it in nor what happens when the owner takes control back from time to time. If someone gives you a car to look after that has been neglected, for example, you can do what you can to patch it up within your means and maintain it thereafter, but can't keep it in good condition if the owner keeps taking it for a drive and abusing it.

And so it is with information. The CIO is in effect the chief steward, but it's business management that ultimately owns and controls the organisation's information. The CIO and their team can advise that it would be best if consistent coding schemes for products, customers, and so on were used across divisions, or that an existing system should be extended to deal with a new emerging need rather than a new one implemented, but they cannot force such things to occur. They can also recommend discipline and policy in relation to the way information is generated, manipulated and stored using desktop and workgroup tools, but if a politically strong business unit decides it will do its own thing with Microsoft Office and SharePoint, they can't dictate otherwise.

There is then the reality of authority, funding, and resourcing limitations. Most senior IT professionals we speak with are aware of the need for proactive steps to deal with the issues we have been discussing through implementing some kind of over-arching information strategy and supporting IT framework. Being the stewards rather than the owners of the data, however, they cannot go it alone, and finding people within the business to step up and help take some of the hard decisions around information rationalisation, consolidation, retention, and so on is very difficult. Securing budget and resource to implement horizontal capability or infrastructure to start breaking down some of the silos and boundaries in practical terms is also hard when information related work is typically funded as part of discrete projects at an individual system or function level.

So if that's the problem, what's the solution?

Well unfortunately there are no easy answers or magic bullets. In fact, the truth is that in a medium or large business environment it probably isn't even possible to scope a single project to put everything right that would be feasible to execute, no matter how much funding was available.

The way forward begins with getting senior business management to acknowledge the challenges and the ongoing consequences of not addressing them in a robust and systematic manner. The thorny question of ownership, with all of the political issues and power plays, then needs to be dealt with - and by ownership, we don't just mean of the various information types and stores, but of the over arching challenge of driving cross process, cross function and cross department improvement activity.

In practical terms, this typically boils down to setting a direction or creating a programme, with a range of goals that map onto the short, medium and long term objectives of the business. I quite like the IBM term for this, 'Information Agenda', though other vendors and consulting firms put forward the same idea using different language. Individual projects can then be spun out from this over-arching programme with specific deliverables, picking off some of the hotspots in terms of business pain and/or opportunity to ensure that tangible returns on investments are realised before patience runs out and the plug gets pulled - which is the big danger if a more 'boil the ocean' approach is taken.

In some organisations, imperatives that are often though of as a chore, such as those associated with regulatory compliance or the integration of a newly acquired company, can actually be a blessing in disguise in the context we have been discussing by providing further impetus to a broader information improvement initiative. Such activity is often dependent on integrating, consolidating and/or rationalising information structures and sources, and if this is done in the right way, the work involved can be reused to help optimise more general business decision making and management. Compliance, merger and acquisition activity can also act as catalysts in the all-important breaking down of boundaries, not just between IT and the business, but between departments and groups within the business itself.

However the improvement initiative comes about and is justified, though, it only really stands a chance of success if there is executive level ownership within the business, and both buy in and participation from key business stakeholders. Of course IT professionals have a critical role to play too, but if anyone tries to delegate ownership of the programme to the IT department, then this must be resisted at all costs, as there is no way IT can pull off the execution of a major programme when, as we said before, it doesn't have the necessary ownership or authority to call the shots when required. Unfortunately, no amount of talk about putting the 'I' back in 'CIO' will change this.

The bottom line is that an organisation's information belongs to senior business management, and any improvement initiatives associated with it are business change programmes.

(Originally written for CIO Online)

This thing called cloud

2010-06-08T12:51:00.002+01:00

It's not a kinda magic

(originally written for www.computing.co.uk)

A few years ago, I was charged with investigating something called SOA. Having never heard of it at the time, I asked some people who had been writing a lot about it to define it for me in a nutshell. Interestingly, none of them could explain it in less than about 5 minutes and each (eventually) gave me a different definition.

The lesson I took away from this was that the media, social media, analyst and marketing domains sometimes act like a big echo chamber. The same things are heard over and over again on high profile topics as messages from a small number of original sources bounce around, with detail and precision often being lost along the way. Most stories we read in the press or on blogs, for example, are derivatives or composites of stories that have gone before, or simply the paraphrasing of a press release that has spun a definition to serve its particular purpose.

And so it is with cloud. When you get past the sensationalist talk about paradigm shifts, market transformation, and that wonderful cliché, “the cloud changes everything”, you end up with a wide range of definitions, some of which are pretty woolly, many of which directly conflict with each other. The only real commonality is that it usually boils down to something to do with hosted services.

The net effect is that the more you investigate cloud, the more confused you can become. In terms of specifics, some put the emphasis on infrastructure, and focus on the renting of server and storage space from service providers, often with reference to players like Amazon. Others major on hosted applications and speak of ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS), with Salesforce.com typically cited as their darling.

Even within individual advocacy groups, you come across differing views. Some use the ‘C’ word to describe pretty much all forms of infrastructure hosting, for example, including the traditional contract based approach, while others say that services must be based on the ‘elastic’ pay-as-you-go model to qualify as 'proper' cloud. With application services, the arguments tend to be around the ‘purity’ of the architecture, and while some say this doesn’t matter, others are almost fanatical in their belief that multi-tenancy applications are the only true foundation for cloud.

And it doesn’t stop there. Beyond infrastructure and application hosting, we have the 'platform as a service' (PaaS) wars between Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com and others. This is to do with standards, interoperability and portability in relation to hosted application development and deployment environments. There are then various telco plays around hosted communication services, and a number of vendors and analysts talking about so called ‘private clouds’, ‘community clouds’, and so on, with reference to more closed shared computing environments.

If we net all this out, the reality is that the word 'cloud' has no agreed meaning in the industry at the moment. It is therefore not surprising that many of the people echoing the noise gravitate to the view that 'it's all cloud', and speak or write in a non-differentiating manner, which can sometimes be very misleading.

So what's the answer? Should we just dismiss it all as hype and spin?

Well no. The trick is to focus on what is underpinning all of the noise in terms of fundamental trends and developments. When you do this, it becomes clear that cloud computing in its various forms is not the ‘cause’ of anything; it is rather a marketing friendly word used to label certain ‘effects’ of the ongoing evolution of capability in some key areas.

Those key areas include developments in the speed and robustness of communications, the coming of age of highly scalable commodity based data centre infrastructures, the emergence of flexible and scalable software architectures, and, not least, advances in management and provisioning systems. If these are the ‘causes’ then, one of the most obvious ‘effects’ is allowing service providers to offer hosted capability of various kinds in a manner that is much more cost effective and accessible for the customer compared to even three or four years ago. This, together with new flexible commercial models, is shifting the line in terms of what it might make sense for customers to have running in a service provider environment.

But we are still mostly talking about hosting, so all of the things you have had to think about in that context for years still apply in terms of how to manage integration, accountability, support, data security, regulatory compliance and overall service levels when activity crosses the organisational boundary into one or more third party domains. Indeed, it could be argued that as hosted services become more accessible, there is a real danger of checks and balances being bypassed and organisations ending up with a tangled mess of service contracts, not to mention conflicts, redundancy, gaps and lock-in issues, that may come back to bite in the future.

Approached responsibly, however, there are some real opportunities emerging from the confusion. Economies of scale in the service provider domain are bringing down the cost of hosted services in general, making even traditional contract based offerings that have been around for years potentially more attractive than they once were.

Advanced provisioning, billing and self service capabilities are then providing a level of flexibility not previously seen, creating some brand new use cases around hosting. Consider, for example, overflow scenarios allowing more resources or capacity to be acquired on demand to deal with a transient need, then dropped again with no cost or contract implications. Highly fluctuating web based applications, periodic workloads such a payroll and billing, and IT requirements around development and test environments spring to mind when we think about the relevance of a more ‘elastic’ approach to hosting.

So, there are some tangible benefits to be gained from looking more closely at the specifics of this thing called ‘cloud’. We just need to remember that it’s not some ‘kinda magic’ – it’s just IT.

The pre-integration balancing act

2010-06-03T14:35:00.001+01:00

Let’s not sacrifice interoperability

For as long as I have been in IT, the ‘right’ way to drive things has been towards openness and interoperability. Indeed over the past couple of decades we have seen some great leaps forward in both vendor cooperation and the development of relevant industry standards. All of the great work around Web services, for example, has done much to ease the burden of systems integration. And when some vendors have gone against the flow, they have been chastised by customers and sometimes penalised by regulators.

Recently, however, I have been getting a bit concerned about this trend towards openness reversing. We have seen this in the mobile space, for example, with end-to-end closed solutions, locking together devices, operating systems, software provision and even content delivery under the tight and uncompromising control of one vendor. The argument is that such behaviour is in the interests of stability, security, performance and an overall optimised user experience, but there can be no doubt that market control on the part of the vendor also has quite a bit to do with it, and that users and developers end up getting locked in along the way.

Meanwhile, over in the core enterprise IT domain, we have then seen the emergence of so called ‘appliances’, which are essentially black boxes usually designed to perform a single function such as content filtering, network load balancing, etc. The idea here is to assemble a set of components that may be proprietary and/or heavily modified, then hard-wire them together so they work optimally as a highly tuned and robust single unit. Such products are sold and purchased on the premise that the user never wants or needs to know what’s going on inside the box. The solution is thus delivered and supported as a single entity.

This is great when dealing with highly specialised appliances and can yield benefits in the form of performance and simplicity, but there are dangers when the idea is taken too far in some other contexts, such as the delivery of ‘integrated stacks’.

The practice we are talking about here is based on stitching together hitherto discretely delivered components to form a platform or solution in which everything is pre-integrated and pre-optimised, sometimes generically, sometimes finely tuned to deal with a particular type of workload. Typical components include things like server, storage and networking hardware, operating systems, database management systems, middleware and management tools, and even applications in some instances, such as comms and collaboration or business intelligence software.

The upside of this practice is that components are delivered as a coherent solution that is fit for purpose ‘out of the box’. This can potentially save customers a lot of time and expense, as even with open interfaces, effort is usually still required to assemble and test the platform or solution, and this ‘acceleration to value’ spirit is clearly behind some integrated stack propositions.

It is important to be wary, however, of vendors stepping over the line. If the message coming across is that the only way of getting the most out of the individual components included in the package is to use them together, then this should raise a flag from an interoperability perspective. There is a big difference, for example, between saying that a particular RDBMS comes pre-optimised to run on a specific type of hardware when delivered as an integrated solution, and saying that the RDBMS will never run as well on alternative hardware, regardless of the effort you put in.

At the time of writing, integrated stacks offered by the likes of Oracle, Cisco, HP and IBM, enabled through various acquisitions and partnerships, are as yet largely unproven from a demand perspective. Freeform Dynamics research, however, has previously revealed that the customer appetite for bundled and pre-integrated offerings is significant in other areas such as application platforms. It is also the case that some of the workload specific offerings optimised to deal with analytics, web applications, and so on, are quite compelling when you consider the expertise and effort necessary to achieve the same level of tuning through manual configuration. Bearing these factors in mind, it would therefore be reasonable to assume that this latest clutch of developments in the integrated stack space will tempt a significant number of organisations over time.

Given the dangers though, when evaluating options and looking for shortcuts to value, it is worth making an assessment of whether the vendor is coupling components so tightly that you would sacrifice significant functionality or performance, or incur significant overhead, if you ever tried to deviate from the formula in the future, which is almost the definition of lock-in. An ideal solution will lighten the integration and optimisation load without constraining your freedom.

But there is no right or wrong here, and you may perfectly legitimately be willing to compromise on openness and live with longer term risks and constraints to meet short term needs or objectives. The only real requirement is to think through what’s on offer and consider the implications of the decisions you are making to avoid unpleasant surprises down the line.

Microsoft versus Apple

2010-06-02T13:00:00.003+01:00

There is an interesting discussion going on over at The Register looking at whether Microsoft is now on the run after being apparently out-performed in various ways by Apple (see here).

The comments against this article reflect the common sentiment that Microsoft is now a 'has been' vendor that is destined to follow he pack from this point onwards, and may even struggle to keep up. I can see how some might form this view based on some of the evidence provided, but with my focus on the business sector, I wouldn't give up on Microsoft just yet. In this context, the competition is not Apple, but Oracle, IBM, et al, and the Redmond brigade is not doing so badly against these guys.

And re Apple in the business sector, here is a comment I posted against the above article that highlights one area in which I think Microsoft is quite forward thinking while Apple is not even in the game (as far as I know):

It's still early days, but looking to the future, we are probably going to see a blend of delivery models for desktop computing, whether in a home or business environment. This isn't about devices, indeed it is more about device independence. Microsoft is investing a lot in this area at the moment while Apple, at least looking in from the outside, seems to be going in the opposite direction - more emphasis on devices and locking devices to specific software and services. As of today, the device appears to be the pivot point for market leverage, but I doubt this is sustainable over the longer term.

The big question is going to be where the pivot point shifts to. You could argue that it moves to the content layer, which would also play to Apple's strengths. My feeling though is that content sources will continue to proliferate so the concept of a desktop, or 'virtual home', that holds the ongoing context for your online and other activities might become the point of influence and stickiness. Right now, the Windows client machine fulfils this for the majority of users, though youngsters could be considered to be using services like Facebook for this.

Whether the virtual desktop is something that will help Microsoft in the battle against Apple in the consumer space is debatable, but the fact that Apple appears to be working in conflict with longer term trends towards open virtualised environments in a business context could be significant.

This discussion will clearly roll on, but I do think it is important to keep perspective and not just look at the media and consumer view of the world. While both of these have an impact on what goes on in business, there are other considerations in an enterprise or SMB business environment that are easy to overlook.

iPad: First impressions of a sceptic

2010-06-01T16:28:00.002+01:00

Anyone who has followed my jottings over the years will know that I am an Apple sceptic. I have spent the money and taken the time to get to know the Mac and OSX, and concluded that claims of superiority over Windows are vastly exaggerated. Indeed the two MacBook Pros that we have in our household have now been reformatted to run Windows 7, which provides the same level of performance and stability as the Apple alternative, the equivalent user experience, but with a lot more freedom and flexibility.

I also spent 18 months regretting the day I signed up with O2 for an iPhone, which I found limited and awkward, with an appalling battery life and an overall experience that was simply not in the same league as the BlackBerry for the kind of things I want to do with a handheld. While I continued to use the iPhone as a personal device, I was not willing to take the performance and productivity hit in a business context just for the sake of appearances. Perhaps I missed an opportunity to enhance my image, but at least I could get my job done efficiently.

Of course these are personal views and experiences based on my own requirements, likes and dislikes, and I accept that others have a different lifestyle, different work related requirements, and put the emphasis in a different place when it comes to the importance of form versus function.

So why did I even bother to consider an iPad?

Well ironically, it all started with a few minutes playing with a Windows 7 touch screen tablet a few months ago. While the touch screen interface always seemed to be more of a gimmick to me on a handheld, particularly the iPhone, aiding casual activity but hampering routine or heavy use, that didn't appear to be the case on a larger screen where the gestures were less cramped, and the buttons, icons, and menus, and the keys on the soft keypad, were easier to hit accurately when moving quickly. In a nutshell, the larger real-estate seemed to allow the touch screen interface to flourish. It was then that the penny dropped.

The trouble with the Windows tablet, however, was that it was still pretty bulky and obviously had the overhead of a full blown operating system. But when I thought of the characteristics of that interface along with the basic concept of an instant on lighter weight device, I could see the potential of the iPad. I then remember tweeting that the iPad was probably the only Apple device I could see me actually using and sticking with since the original iPod Nano. Not surprisingly, after saying this, I got it in the neck from colleagues and friends on the basis that I had been so critical of the iPhone in the past, and that the iPad was simply a larger version of the same idea with all the same constraints and limitations. It was also pointed out to me that the iPad lacked some basic features such as a standard USB port, a standard printing mechanism, and a camera.

Despite all this, there was no getting away from the fact that this was the first genuinely new form factor to hit the mainstream for a long time and my instincts were crying out that there was something worth checking out here. A few days ago, I therefore picked up a 3G iPad from the Apple Store in Southampton, and have been working with it ever since.

So what are my early experiences?

At a general level, while the operating system, software and connectivity are essentially the same as the iPhone in terms of mechanics, and anyone who has used the smaller form factor device will instantly have a level of familiarity, the overall experience is far from iPhone like. I was pleased (and a little relieved after spending the money) that the initial views I formed from playing with the Windows tablet I mentioned earlier were upheld. The touch screen interface works so much better on a larger screen, and even the soft keyboard is effective for relatively fast typing (this post is actually being typed with it).

With regard to data entry, the one thing I would highlight is the extremely important role played by the standard iPad case. Apart from protecting the device, it has a neat mechanism that allows it to fold back on itself for holding the iPad at just the right angle on a desk or on your lap for typing. This might sound like a trivial detail, but believe me, it transforms the iPad from a consumption only slate to a content production device - obviously not as effective as a laptop with a proper keyboard and mouse, but certainly good enough for reasonably rapid note taking or text only authoring, which deals with quite a lot of my requirements on the road.

The bigger screen obviously then has a big impact on the general usability and effectiveness of applications, from email and productivity apps, through viewing documents and other content, to, of course, web browsing, though the lack of Flash is a bit annoying with the latter, and I keep coming across sites that don't render properly. I guess Safari users in general must be accustomed to some of this.

In terms of business content access, I am still experimenting with viewers, but have found a promising couple of apps that allow different types of documents to be downloaded, managed and accessed on in the device. This is important as I like to carry around a lot of reference material with me (research reports and charts in particular) for use in meetings, and unless I could do this conveniently, I would need to continue taking a laptop everywhere with me.

At the time of writing, I have downloaded Apple’s iWork suite of productivity apps (word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software) but apart from using 'Pages' to type the words you are reading, I haven't had a chance to explore its capability properly. In theory, there should be everything anyone would need in terms of office capability on a mobile device, but our previous experiences piloting the full Mac platform taught us that transferring anything other than relatively simple documents between iWork and Microsoft Office is a bit hit and miss from a format preservation point of view. I expect my authoring with the iPad will be largely restricted to emails, blog posts and articles, so I will probably end up transferring things back and forth via email messages. A neat feature that helps here is the ability to send a document as a Word *.doc file from within Pages itself with just three taps on the screen, and to open incoming Word documents attached to email just as conveniently, with no explicit import/export action required in either direction.

Other things worth mentioning - the battery life is excellent, on both WiFi and 3G, so a big change there from the iPhone. I have been using the unit for a few hours at a time and have not yet seen the battery meter drop below 75%. I have also had no problems with the weight of the device, which I find perfectly comfortable to manage, even for long periods, despite reports I have read about this being an issue.

The only real problem I have experienced in terms of the unit not working as it should is with WiFi. We have two access points, one at either end of the house, and the iPad only works reliably with one of them. On the other, it will connect fine, but will not automatically reconnect after going to sleep and waking up again. This is a known issue that I have yet to troubleshoot properly.

There's a lot more I could say about the consumer/entertainment functionality, which is pretty good as you would expect, but my main question with this new entrant onto the market was whether it was going to be suitable as an all-round mobile productivity tool in a business context. So far, I would say it looks very promising, but I will report back again after a few weeks of serious use.

In the meantime, rest assured that I have not gone soft on Apple or the subjective and often dubious justifications we hear constantly for the use of its products from so called 'fanbois'. While I really like the iPad, it is because I can see the point of it - it fills an important gap - but I still don't buy the arguments people make for the Mac and the iPhone, which in my view continue to represent unacceptable compromises in most business scenarios. I guess the obvious question is whether I will change my view once the Windows and Linux alternatives to the iPad hit the streets. We shall see.

In the meantime, while I would hesitate to make a firm recommendation, I would not discourage anyone from considering the iPad as a business productivity tool - provided of course, you are willing to pay the premium price.

BI versus Decision Support

2010-05-18T10:00:00.000+01:00

As an old timer in the industry, I remember the days when the term ‘decision support’ was commonly used in reference to the reporting and analysis capability embedded in IT systems. As all kinds of new fangled ideas then came onto the market, however, carrying much more dynamic labels such as ‘data warehousing’, ‘analytics’ and ‘business intelligence’, the older phrase became unfashionable and ultimately regarded as synonymous with the production of the infamous ‘doorstop report’, containing far more management information than anyone could ever use effectively.

Lately, though, I have been involved in a number of activities around the management and use of information for business decision making, and I have to say that I am starting to miss the old terminology. The trouble is that when people hear the language in common use today, they tend to map the various terms onto technology categories for either the heavy lifting type of extraction, transformation and collation of data often associated with data warehousing, or the heavy BI style number crunching and analysis that typically follows.

When we then see reports from analysts highlighting business intelligence as being high on the CIO agenda, it can all get quite misleading. Our own research at Freeform Dynamics consistently tells us that many organisations continue to struggle with the problems of data fragmentation, duplication, and so on, and indeed this is increasingly an area for improvement that is recognised and prioritised for investment. But in technology terms this encompasses a whole range of information management and delivery solutions beyond classic BI.

One of the things I have been up to recently, for example, is writing a short book on the use of information at the edges of the business, which is basically about surfacing the right data at the right level and the right time in a business process. In many cases, this does not involve a lot of ‘analytics’ per se, as the data required may actually be quite simple – e.g. an aggregate view of customer activity in call centre context. The problem to be solved is therefore around systems integration, rules definition, workflow execution, and so on – basically the coming together of information management with domains such as service oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM). Get this right, though, especially if you can take an architectural approach to information integration and delivery, and you can enable even relatively unskilled workers on the front line to make key decisions, avoiding the overhead and delay of referrals, escalations, and so on.

Beyond the structured process world, a lot of the challenges among professional workers when comes to getting their hands on the information they require to do their jobs effectively are to do with identifying, locating, extracting and collating both structured and unstructured data from various internal and external sources. That’s not a job for a traditional BI toolset either, that’s about everything from portals, content management and enterprise search, through to collaboration and potential even social media systems.

My suspicion is that when CIO’s are asked about their priorities, and one of the options on the survey form is BI, they take this as proxy for all forms of activity and investments aimed at helping their workforce make better decisions. It’s the old problem of mixing up subjective technology categories with an objective definition of what organisations are trying to achieve. The misleading view thus comes from the round trip – the researcher asks about BI investments, the CIO translates this to spend on helping people make better decisions in general, and the analyst interprets the response as referring to budget allocated to business intelligence solutions – either that, or there are going to be some very surprised and happy BI sales guys out there.

Personally, I would reinstate the term ‘decision support’, as this encapsulates the problem definition very nicely. Sadly, it’s probably got too much baggage to be resurrected, however, so in the meantime, let’s all at least remember its spirit. Enabling effective decision making is not always about the clever number crunching end of the spectrum. In both an operational and professional worker context, huge benefits can often be gained from implementing far less glamorous capability.

While traditional business intelligence continues to evolve into areas of predictive analytics, in-memory databases, and other sexy technology, which are all potentially very important and valuable, it is therefore worth taking a look at the amount of time wasted on the front line of the business, and the risks that arise from a simple lack of basic information access. The chances are that there is some low hanging fruit just there for the taking.

But is that really cloud? Check out this survey

2010-05-06T13:05:00.030+01:00

Some have accused me of being a cloud computing sceptic, and it's true that I have not been one for pulling punches in some of my previous posts on the topic (see here, here, here and here, for example).

Let’s be absolutely clear, though - my criticisms have largely been around the language and messaging used by vendors, service providers and evangelists rather than anything to do with tangible substance. The issue I have is that when you put all the hype, assumptions and conflicting ideas together, the end result is market confusion.

And to me this is doubly frustrating because some great developments around hosted services and dynamic IT infrastructure that had hitherto been making good headway in terms of market acceptance have been undermined by having the cloud label slapped on them, a label which, to many, is synonymous with ‘new and unproven’. Ironically, therefore, the over-enthusiastic marketing has probably actually set mainstream acceptance back in some areas.

When raising this problem with those putting out their various cloud messages, the typical reaction has been to look at me as if I am missing something really obvious. Indeed I'm sure that some have regarded me as a Neanderthal for not ‘getting’ their particular flavour of cloud goodness and not buying into their ‘game changing’ rhetoric.

So, to illustrate the problem in very tangible terms, I did a quick Web search and dug out some of my notes from supplier briefings, and compiled a list of different types of offering that have at one time or another been held up to me as an example of cloud computing in action. I then used this list as the basis for an online survey in which I asked a pool of IT professionals to indicate which items they regarded as being legitimate examples of cloud.

Just over 400 responses were received and the results pretty much speak for themselves. When it comes to hosted infrastructure, for example, some of the most common and important services in the market today are generally not accepted as being examples of cloud:

The two gold stars on this chart indicate where more than 50% of respondents acknowledged the cloud credentials of the service concerned, and it is telling that there only two of these. If we look more closely, these are the ones that are concerned with highly flexible on-demand services that are faithful to the pay-as-you-go with no ongoing obligation commercial model. As soon as any aspect of the service is fixed, either in terms of physical resources allocated or through commitment to some kind of minimum contract or spend, then most say we have moved away from the cloud computing concept.

These same principles of physical and commercial flexibility are applied when judging services higher up the stack around things like email and business applications.

Again we see the flexibility angle coming through, extended to include the idea of multi-tenancy when it comes to application services.

What’s interesting about this one is that some services we see heavily promoted as cloud – Web mail, hosted Microsoft Exchange, even the core contract-based Salesforce.com proposition – are frequently not regarded as legitimate examples of cloud computing if all the marketing is put to one side and they are described in a more dispassionate manner. The main thing again, however, is the variability and inconsistency of views, which reflects the level of confusion out there. The picture we see also underlines how wary we need to be of generalised and unqualified statements about cloud computing, e.g. when people talk about uptake, potential, forecasts, practicalities, etc, what exactly are they referring to? It’s this kind of imprecision and ambiguity that makes it such hard work to figure out the meaning and relevance (or otherwise) of that next cloud computing press release or PowerPoint pitch.

More to the point in practical day to day terms, all of the hype and ambiguity is currently adding overhead to interactions between suppliers and customers in the IT and communications space. Everyone needs to spend time and effort wading through unhelpful marketing and positioning, which adds to the cost of sale for vendors and service providers, and makes it harder for IT and business professionals to work out what’s valuable and relevant. I wonder how many people on the buying side of the equation, for example, have missed opportunities because they had already rejected one form of cloud, and failed to appreciate the potential of another because it carried the same label.

Furthermore, I also wonder whether more traditional contract-based hosted services, which are well-proven and continue to represent huge value in many business scenarios, are being undermined by the misguided industry obsession with everything having to be ‘elastic’. This doesn’t make any sense when you analyse requirements and look at parallels from other industries such as telecommunications (where contracts are still very relevant, despite the pay-as-you-go alternative).

Coming back to my little survey, beyond what’s on the above charts, there were a number of other areas explored, including hosted communications services and on premise offerings (for building so called ‘private clouds’), and the picture for these was equally inconsistent. In fact, the whole notion of the term 'cloud computing' being associated with enabling technology as opposed to online services was generally rejected.

If you are interested a seeing the other results, and reading the Freeform Dynamics view of what they mean for buyers and sellers of services and solutions, we have put together a short research note which you are welcome to download from here.

I am tempted to sign off by saying that on the core question of whether the industry is confusing the hell out everyone on this whole cloud computing thing, I rest my case. But this isn’t about scoring points, it is about commercial clarity and efficiency of dealings in the market place. So my question to all of the marketing and PR professionals out there in the supplier community is when was the last time you asked your front line sales guys and resellers whether dressing everything up as cloud has actually made their job easier or helped them meet their targets? And do your customers believe they are getting more value now because you have called something cloud, than before you went through your rebranding exercise?

I would be genuinely interested in the views of sales and marketing people on this, so check out that research note and ping me with your feedback if you have any thoughts.

Telcos to deliver VaaS

2010-03-18T09:20:00.002Z

This is hilarious or sad, whichever way you look at it. Eyeing the Twitter feed last night, I saw someone had tweeted a question about whether carriers were going to be moving to VaaS – ‘Voice as a Service’. When I asked if this was a joke, the reply was that a couple of telcos in the US were already starting to use this language – so apparently not – which begs the question of what the hell they think they have been delivering to the world for the last few decades.

Seriously, I can only imagine that some bright spark creative marketeers came up with the idea of repositioning hosted PBX and VoIP offerings using trendy new cloud speak. This reminds me of an IBMer trying to convince me a few months ago that some of the traditional Citrix installations they had done for customers were proof of ‘Desktop as a Service’ in action, and Steve Ballmer repositioning Microsoft’s desktop and mobile business lines as now being about intelligent devices to access the cloud, because the cloud, apparently, is now the centre of everything.

Is it just me that thinks this is all totally unhelpful nonsense?

Business productivity: Talking a more holistic view

2010-03-12T18:59:00.012Z

The word ‘productivity’ comes up a lot when IT vendors and service providers talk about what they are trying to do for their customers. Whether it’s mobile communications, search technology, the latest version of desktop office tools, or whatever, it is common to hear claims of productivity boosts.

When used in a lot of trendier contexts, the notion of productivity is usually associated with getting more out your workforce, and it often goes together with the whole ‘empowerment’ theme. Looked at from an IT perspective, the focus here is ‘user productivity’, and given the amount of time we all waste wrestling with, let’s just say, ‘suboptimal solutions’, any help in this area is gratefully received.

The problem with user productivity, however, is that it is notoriously hard to assess or measure. A lot of it boils down to trying to figure out how much unproductive time can be ‘reclaimed’ through the use of the latest ideas and offerings, which is OK, but can be a challenge to work into a business case for investment.

Against this background, I have had some interesting conversations with both IBM and Microsoft recently which ended up with us taking a broader view of productivity when trying to put some of their latest marketing activities into perspective. With IBM, I was trying to get my brain around what ‘Smart Work’ (part of the ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative) actually boiled down to in terms of tangible ideas or propositions that could be acted upon. With Microsoft, the challenge was making sense of what’s behind the message: “Because it’s everybody’s business”, which seemed to be getting at productivity in one way or another.

As an aside, I have to say that vendors don’t make it easy for people to figure out what the hell they are going on about when they wrap everything up in what can appear to be abstract and arbitrary concepts. I’m sure a lot this stuff originally made sense in those ‘messaging workshops’ while the flip chart pages with inspiring phrases were being stuck around the walls, but by the time it has all been pulled together into slick looking PowerPoint decks and creative advertising campaigns, the meaning is often as clear as mud to the rest of us.

Anyway, back to the plot. While trying to unpick some of the marketing concepts, it occurred to me that a lot of what the abovementioned vendors and others seem to be driving at is the value of thinking a bit more holistically about things like productivity. Now it could be argued that a lot of us running businesses have always thought in that way, and it’s only when analysts and vendors get stuck in product/technology category ruts that we end up with fragmented and disjointed thinking. However, there is some value in introducing a bit of structure and precision here so we can achieve some clarity on how traditional categories and domains map onto the holistic view.

When Jon Collins and I went through this, we ended up with the following points and principles:

1. Productivity is a function of efficiency and effectiveness. A key notion here is that boosting output is as much about focusing on the right activities as it is about generally reducing overheads and costs.

2. The thing that really matters at the end of the day is business productivity, which is not just about the user level, but how well everything works at the next level up – organisation structures, processes, policies, practices, etc. This is basically about having the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right way.

3. An important principle when looking to improve productivity is visibility and understanding. This might sound obvious, but the point is that it’s not just about whoever is responsible for managing some aspect of business performance being able to see what’s going on, it’s also about making sure users understand the context of their activities and how their individual performance impacts in the greater scheme of things.

On this last point, we are mostly talking about business professionals rather than task workers, though some argue that there are benefits in making the latter more aware of how their jobs relate to the bigger picture.

Circling back to technology, it is clear that if you take this more holistic business productivity view, you need to coordinate your activities across a number of disciplines. The role of desktop and mobile computing doesn’t need much explaining, nor does the potential contribution of collaboration and unified communication solutions. But then we have things like Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow to deal with the over-arching process view, and Business Intelligence (BI), both at a macro and personal level, which is often the key to working out what the right things are to do in the first place to drive that effectiveness dimension.

Of course you could take the cynical view that this all nets out to the question of what you need in place to run an efficient and effective business, which in itself is not particularly original. As IT vendors think more in this manner, however, no matter how they dress it up and obscure it with marketing speak, there is a greater chance that they will actually make sure what they deliver works together a bit more effectively, which is something to be welcomed and encouraged.

IT trends: Don’t get distracted by the spaniel

2010-02-23T10:05:00.007Z

For better or for worse, we are the owners of a mad Welsh Springer spaniel called Charlie. Buried in there somewhere is a set of gun dog genes reflecting the fact that breeds such as this were designed to sniff out and retrieve game that had been shot down by their owners. All a bit dubious in terms of history, and quite irrelevant in the context of a family pet like ours, apart from the upshot that Welsh Springers are inherently working dogs and need a lot of walking and a regular opportunity to exercise their well developed sense of smell.

The best places to walk a spaniel are where there’s lots of open space and a lot of interesting tracks to sniff out and follow; the forest close to where we live, for example, is ideal. When you go walking in places such as this, it can be quite entertaining to watch Charlie trotting around you with his nose less than an inch in from the ground. When he picks up a scent, it’s just like he’s on a mission, and all of his actions become very intense and purposeful. Every now and again, though, he’ll pick up another scent that he finds more interesting, and there’ll be a sudden change of direction as he follows that instead.

As you are walking, the net effect of all this is basically Charlie rushing around you, sometimes off to the left, then cutting across your path to your right, and so on, but generally moving along the route at the same overall pace as you. I’ve never tried to measure it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if on a 5 mile walk, the actual distance covered by Charlie as he constantly and passionately pursues his various ‘missions’ wasn’t 20 miles or more.

So what’s all this got to do with IT progress and trends?

Well it occurred to me the other day when I was out walking Charlie that we see a lot of similar behaviour in the IT industry. Vendors and pundits tend to latch onto tracks or missions that they pursue intensely and purposefully for a while, almost as if the entire future of the industry and their customers depended on it. Then they come across something more interesting and they’re off in a different direction pursuing a different mission.

A lot of vendors in the software space, for example, latched onto business service management (BSM) as the mission a few years ago, and off they went declaring the need to focus not on IT per se, but on the services delivered by the IT organisation to the business. Then there was a switch in emphasis, and the mission became centred around service oriented architecture (SOA) as a way of achieving ‘IT Business Alignment’. Indeed some declared SOA to represent a ‘paradigm shift’ in terms of the way we think about IT, what it’s for, and how to do it. Now the chasing of the SOA ideal has been dropped and there’s a whole new mission around cloud computing, on the premise that we now have another ‘paradigm shift’ which is going to redefine the way we think about IT delivery yet again by separating the ‘what’ of service delivery from the ‘how’.

This kind of behaviour is all very Charlie like, and the illusion of purpose and progress is reinforced because so many industry analysts, journalists and pundits make a living out of tracking the metaphorical spaniel, and only pay scant attention to the actual progress of the walk.

Meanwhile, just like the person in the dog walking analogy, those in mainstream IT organisations are making steady progress along their route. Some, on occasions, have tried to follow the spaniel, and ended up knee deep in mud or tangled up in thorn bushes; the companies that tried to implement strategic SOA initiatives to ‘transform’ the way they work spring to mind here. Most, however, recognise the grand industry ‘imperatives’ as the spaniel missions they are, and stay focused on making steady progress along a more measured and sensible path.

In the IT industry ‘missions’ I have referred to above, for example, there is a common theme around service centricity, the basic idea being to regard IT as the means to an end rather than an end in itself. Implicit in this is the notion that there can often be many different ways of delivering the same capability or service to business users, with a different set of pros and cons associated with each. The trick is therefore to focus on services and service quality delivered as the pivot point for IT investment prioritisation and decision making.

This idea of service centricity has been gradually increasing in momentum among mainstream IT organisations as a natural part of evolving the role of IT within the business. Along the way, a lot of the spirit and principles that underpin some of the spaniel missions like BSM, SOA and cloud computing have been embraced. But, and here’s the important difference, if you are running an IT shop in the real world, while you obviously want to take new and enhanced ideas on board, you need to do so selectively and in the context of the complex existing environment you are working in, bearing in mind everything else that’s going on in terms of priorities, commitments, constraints and so on. To put it another way, IT leaders and others involved in IT delivery cannot afford the kind of single track obsessive behaviour that is so often advocated by many in the supplier and analyst community.

Thankfully, in most cases, the spaniel mission approach within the industry is recognised for what it is – interesting to watch, but distracting and potentially dangerous to follow. In line with this, people are also wising up to the tricks and spin often employed to create the impression of momentum around spaniel missions by re-classifying historical activity. I have had, for example, classic Citrix deployments with exactly the same architecture put to me over the years as evidence of thin client computing, server-based computing, desktop virtualisation and, most recently, desktop cloud computing. It’s surprising how often you find a lot of old familiar stuff underneath when you scratch the surface of customer stories put forward to substantiate the latest ‘developments’ and ‘imperatives’.

Those of you familiar with the work of Freeform Dynamics will know that unlike most other analyst firms, we track the walk and advise the walker, and don’t confuse the activity of the spaniel rushing around it with meaningful progress.

Not sure if this analogy works for you, but the general principle of evaluating the relevance of industry propositions to your own objectives and activity is the key message here. It’s your progress that matters, not trying to keep up with every supposed trend that emerges at industry level.

Another annoying cloud briefing

2010-02-05T17:49:00.003Z

I just sat through another cloud consulting services briefing from a major IT vendor. Some of it was under NDA so can’t talk about specifics, but that’s not really relevant to the point that has prompted me to write this.

I guess my big problem is that I have spent the last ten years as an analyst looking at different disciplines and domains across the IT industry, from virtualisation and service oriented architecture (SOA) at the architectural level, through the evolution of provisioning, monitoring and management capability in operations, to Business Service Management (BSM), Business Process Management (BPM) and IT governance at the business delivery end of things. Along the way, I have investigated the relevance of hosted services and other forms of outsourcing in various contexts, and spoken to lots of really bright people from CIOs, through architects, to software engineers and operations specialists, about the interplay between all these things.

Then I hear people talking about the cloud revolution and how it changes everything. I listen to evangelist presentations talking about how [insert vendor/consulting firm name] is going to help customers navigate through this brand new world of possibilities and imperatives. And when you get to the actual detail of what they are talking about, it’s the same virtualisation, provisioning, management, SOA, BSM, BPM and hosting stuff that has been steadily evolving and maturing over the past decade, just talked about under this new ‘cloud strategy’ umbrella. And that’s the best case scenario, from big incumbent vendors and consulting firms who know that piling into enterprise customers with crackpot messages about the whole of their operations moving into the cloud (i.e. someone else’s data centre) is probably not going to be taken that seriously.

Against this background, I really wonder what CIOs, architects and those running data centres out there think of these pitches. Do they just see them for what I think they are (unless I am missing something), as a repackaging of selected elements of IT strategy consulting services? When we got down to the brass tacks slide in today’s presentation, for example, there was nothing on it as a discipline or technology domain that was less than five years old. And talking about it all as cloud doesn’t change the conversation about making it all work together effectively – we figured out a long time ago that if you start with BSM and IT governance and work backwards, you end up embracing all of the aforementioned stuff anyway.

But the evangelists and marketeers come back and point out that the game really has changed. It’s a new philosophy of computing, and IT departments need to run themselves as service providers, etc. But again, while this discussion about styles of IT service delivery might be new to some, it certainly isn’t to anyone who has moved in senior IT and business management circles, and even if cloud brings that discussion to a broader audience (which would be a good thing of it didn’t get so garbled and/or dumbed down), surely claiming that it’s all new and revolutionary risks running into a credibility problem when most of the detail looks all so familiar.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think there have been some great developments in all the areas I mentioned that have been incrementally adding capability to help build more flexible, dynamic and open systems, and break down some of the cross boundary constraints, but all that has been happening anyway over the past 10-15 years. Within this, there have been some specific developments around self service provisioning, metering and billing that support attributes often associated with the cloud bandwagon such as elasticity and pay as you go business models, but that’s only relevant in certain scenarios, and all of the other important stuff to just make IT better and easier is being overshadowed by this.

So let’s keep some perspective guys, and stop confusing the hell out of everyone by pretending it’s all new. The argument that there have been a lot of developments over the past few years means you might benefit from some strategic consulting is fair enough, but trying to sell a service on the premise that customers need to put together a ‘cloud roadmap’ or some other such blinkered and contrived nonsense – come on.

Footnote:

Comment from Jon Collins when reviewing the above: "I think some vendors are being taken by surprise by the fact that Cloud just equates to IT done right. It's a bit like the kid who runs into the bar having just found something out that’s very exciting, only to find everyone in the bar not only already knew it, but also knew it wasn’t that exciting after all. I wonder if, when the dust settles, whether the CIOs and IT managers might well be the guys in the bar, and [the vendor], the kid."

ROI in context

2010-01-30T09:01:00.004Z

Avoiding analysis paralysis and delusion

The consideration of Return on Investment (ROI) understandably increased during the downturn. In line with this, IT vendors have spent a lot more time talking about it and some even provide financial models to help customers assess it. While all this seems eminently sensible, however, we must be careful not to get too carried away, as coming up with valid and meaningful ROI cases is more difficult than many people acknowledge.

The usual interpretation of ROI revolves around time and money. One way of thinking about it is to consider the amount you will ultimately get back by investing a certain amount now. If you spend £20,000 on an IT system, for example, you might calculate that it will return £60,000 worth of benefit over its anticipated 10 year lifetime in the form of cost savings and/or increased revenue performance.

The first and most obvious problem with this approach is that the majority of organisations don’t have a good enough handle on the current costs and the current contribution of existing systems to feed accurate and precise information into the calculations. Assumptions and estimations therefore need to be made which are difficult to verify. The result is often an unknown level of error in the calculations, but more significant is that the process is open to manipulation to support any pre-existing agenda. Nudge a couple of assumptions in one direction and the investment case can be made; nudge them the other way and the proposal is canned.

The other big problem with basing assessments on the ultimate return is that a lot can happen over the lifetime of an investment. This is especially true of IT systems, as today’s leading edge technology providing competitive advantage or operational efficiency is tomorrow’s legacy holding the business back and sucking in excessive resource to keep it running. The inevitable changing of both the business and IT landscapes over time can render initial assumptions invalid and even core functionality less relevant or appropriate.

One way of tightening things up is to consider a shorter period. You may judge the context and environment to be relatively predictable over the medium term, for example, and therefore look to calculate a return over, say, a three year period. The other common approach is to look at payback time or time to ‘break even’. This is based on considering how long it will be before the amount of money spent is recouped in either cost savings or enabled improvements in revenue/profit generation. Of course both of these approaches, or any combination of measures you choose to use, are still open to manipulation, but assuming the right spirit, discipline and motivation, the impact of inaccuracies in your assumptions and estimations is less if a shorter period is being considered.

Having said all this, though, we still need to be realistic and appreciate the limitations of ROI assessments in the real world. While the creation of comprehensive ROI cases using elaborate models and complex spreadsheets can look very scientific and create the impression of precision and accuracy, the reality is often different. At best, an ROI model is a decision making aid that helps you to lock down as many of the known variables as possible in a structured manner, but it still requires good business sense and value judgements to work around the inevitable gaps, e.g. using ‘what if?’ style analysis. At worst, an ROI model can be a political tool used to create the illusion of rigour, and designed to precipitate a predefined outcome on the basis that no one is likely to come back down the line and check the numbers anyway.

Even if you approach ROI responsibly, however, it is important not to let it get in the way of doing the right thing in some circumstances. Back in the 90’s, for example, the justification for a lot of investment in ERP was simply to prevent business operations from collapsing. With so many organisations reliant on a fragile patchwork of highly customised point solutions, and/or considering the uncertainty of Y2K, they had little choice but to invest. What were they going to do if your financial ROI calculations came out unfavourably, just leave things as they were and wait for the inevitable catastrophe? That’s a bit like taking time out to calculate the cost justification for fixing faulty brakes on your car then questioning the result. Sometimes you just have to spend money to manage risks and keep things viable, and what you need to spend that money on is pretty obvious.

But some go too far the other way, and always just spend money on the obvious. If you are running out of disk space in your IT infrastructure then the obvious thing to do is buy more storage, right? Well not necessarily. You might find that investment in better information management software and/or storage virtualisation means you can free up space through safe deletion, archiving, etc, and make use of orphaned storage that was previously unutilised. Solving the immediate problem in this way might cost more initially, but has a much better payback over time, through cost savings on hardware, reduced administrative overhead, and the freeing up of information so it can be properly exploited for business benefit.

If you look across IT, there are lots of examples like this where the first decision to make is not which product or service to buy, but which approach to take to solving the problem, which brings us back to the question of RIO, and specifically the precision of ROI analyses. While the concept of return in investment in a generic sense is critical to understanding the significance of going down one route or another, because the impact of alternative approaches can be very different, you often don’t need a meticulous detailed analysis to tell you what you need to know. The above storage example is a good indication of this as, for instance, would be considering whether to implement a like for like replacement of an aging telephony system or an IP based alternative that opens the door to full unified communications.

Rough cut analysis is often adequate for this kind of direction setting and as a tip, rather than trying to express all elements of business value in strict monetary equivalents, and use arbitrary assumptions to do this, it is sometimes more meaningful to use more qualitative scoring, rating and ranking mechanisms. Taking our unified communications example, trying to put a monetary value on the benefit of streamlined communications, which in turn (amongst other things) enables more informed and efficient day to day decision making, is actually very hard. One clinched deal or avoided disaster as a result of key people being able to collaborate quickly and effectively and the investment may have paid for itself through a single event, but that is incredibly difficult to predict. What you can do, however, is rate different options as having a high, medium or low impact on operational or commercial decision making efficiency and effectiveness, which might be relatively crude, but at least good enough to give you a steer.

Downstream from this, once you have decided on an approach and are simply considering which product or service to buy, another trick is to focus on the cost element. While you might not have all of the metrics and data necessary for a robust financial ROI calculation, you might have enough for a reasonably accurate assessment of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the solutions being considered. Assuming they are functionally equivalent, this might be an appropriate measure to decide between one product and another.

In conclusion, while assessing the return on significant investments is clearly a part of running IT in a business-like manner, it is important not to be a slave to detailed financial modelling. Good decision making is enabled by the right amount of analysis, conducted at the right level, based on appropriate measures, backed up with an objective spirit and a healthy dose of common business sense.

Getting up to speed on desktop virtualisation

2010-01-14T14:45:00.004Z

Now’s not a bad time to be considering this stuff

I remember reading an analyst prediction at the end of 2008 that 2009 was the year in which desktop virtualisation was going to go mainstream. I challenged this at the time on the basis that we had recently completed a number of studies at Freeform Dynamics suggesting that IT Pros in the mainstream weren’t even clear on what terms like ‘desktop virtualisation’ and ‘virtual desktop infrastructure’ (VDI) actually meant, let alone why they should be investing in this area.

As it turns out, things didn’t take off in any big way in 2009, we simply saw an ongoing creep of early adopter activity as anticipated. The good news is though that the past year has seen quite a bit of real world experience being gained, and both awareness and skills have been building. While we are still in the early market, it’s clear that some of the technologies and specific offerings have reached the status of ‘mainstream readiness’, and there are enough examples of deploying in various real world scenarios to provide a degree of confidence about what can be expected. This all bodes well for the future.

The biggest challenge at the moment is simply confusion, as just like in other areas such as cloud computing, the same or similar terminology is routinely being used to describe some quite different things. I am not going to go into the different flavours of desktop virtualisation here, but if you want a very accessible overview and explanation of the main options, see the paper Tony and I put together last year entitled “Evolution of Dynamic IT”. This was originally intended as a primer for IT pros working in medium sized businesses, but the walkthrough of various desktop delivery architectures is pretty generic.

In the meantime, while you won’t catch me making simplistic predictions about the market, I would say that 2010 is not a bad time for many businesses to start getting up to speed on all of this stuff if they haven’t done already. Here’s why:

The desktop is integral to IT service delivery. It is the most common point of access for users, and as such, how well it performs has a disproportionately high bearing on user satisfaction and the perception of IT, even without considering productivity impacts. Beyond this, we know from research that allowing the desktop environment to drift and become too out of date has significant cost and risk implications, as well as representing a huge distraction to IT staff. Whichever way you look at it, the way in which the desktop is enabled is something to be taken very seriously.
From a timing perspective, a combination of the economic downturn and the negative reception to Windows Vista led many organisations to put their normal desktop modernisation and refresh cycles on hold, often for a year or more. However, as economic conditions improve and the positive response to Windows 7 neutralises the Vista effect, it’s only natural that desktop modernisation will find itself back on the agenda. With a whole bunch of new delivery solutions that have been knocking around the edges of IT for a while becoming ‘mainstream ready’ as mentioned earlier, there are now quite a few viable alternatives to simply moving forward with the next iteration of the Windows ‘fat client’ desktop.

If this line of thinking makes sense to you and you do start to investigate alternative options, the one piece of advice I will leave you with is not to assume that a single approach, whether the traditional desktop or a virtualised model, will be appropriate to solve all of your business and end user needs. Experience tells us that most organisations are probably best served by a blend of desktop delivery mechanisms, so as well as getting up to speed on the technology, it is also important to analyse and segment your users and make sure you fully understand their needs and constraints.

As you are going through this, here are some reports and papers we have put together that you may find interesting and useful:

• Evolution of Dynamic IT
• Desktop Modernisation
• Desktop Virtualisation
• Linux on the Desktop

All are available for free download from http://www.freeformdynamics.com/.

I have been writing stuff, honest!

2009-12-06T11:32:00.012Z

To anyone out there who measures a man's worth by the volume of his blog output I probably look a little lacking at the moment, having not posted anything for about a month.

I have been writing stuff, just not here.

The truth is that when push comes to shove and you have limited time, secondary output channels such as social media have to take back seat to the primary channels we use for communicating with the broader audience we serve. Rightly or wrongly, mainstream IT and business communities are still better reached through more traditional media and publication mechanisms.

If you want to see what I have been up to over the past month or so, which includes a couple of reports on desktop and server modernisation, plus a lot of discussion stuff around the evolution of ERP and CRM, check out my page on the Freeform Dynamics site. This provides links to my recent output and, for future reference, it's kept pretty well up to date. All Freeformers have one of these pages, by the way, and they can all be accessed from our home page at http://www.freeformdynamics.com/.

Anyway, no more exuses. The blog is an important channel for some of the people I interact with, so I'll try to post a bit more to it from this point onwards. I'll include some spin-off discussion from our more formal analysis, and perhaps some of my more opinionated stuff on what's going on in the industry.

Watch this space.

New insights into Desktop Modernisation

2009-11-06T09:08:00.003Z

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.

Mobile rants and moans

2009-11-03T19:33:00.007Z

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..... :-)

Vista and Lotus - Knowing when to let go of a brand

2009-09-10T11:30:00.004+01:00

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.

Getting to grips with consumerisation

2009-09-09T14:14:00.002+01:00

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.

Vodafone UK ready to walk the walk

2009-09-02T17:19:00.002+01:00

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.

Incongruous cloud communication

2009-08-27T08:32:00.003+01:00

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'.

There’s no escaping the cloud

2009-08-25T08:29:00.000+01:00

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?

Unified Communications in Context

2009-08-19T18:16:00.007+01:00

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, these 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, lead 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

2009-08-19T07:27:00.009+01:00

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.

Will cloud put traditional hosters out of business?

2009-08-04T14:50:00.006+01:00

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.

SOA Performance - Seeing through the complexity creep

2009-08-03T13:49:00.002+01:00

Had an interesting chat with the Application Performance Management (APM) team at CA about performance with respect to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We were comparing notes on the way in which it is easy for SOA initiatives to descend into confusion as services proliferate and knowledge of the dependencies between them gradually degrades.

From a performance and troubleshooting perspective, this can be pretty bad news as when an application slows down or breaks, it can be difficult to pinpoint where the bottleneck or fault has occurred. This is one of those nitty gritty practical issues that SOA advocates often neglect, but is a real risk for those who are upping their commitment to this distributed computing model.

While this may not be new for more experienced adopters, it is not so simple to know where to start. In an ideal world, good SOA governance would minimise the degree to which such problems occur and, for example, prevent surprises from a service being hammered into failure because a developer decided to call it from a particularly demanding application without telling anyone.

Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in an ideal world, so generating some kind of visibility of what’s going on at execution time is a requirement. Inspection of raw logs from various components in the system coupled with cleverly placed debug code are some of the more common ways of troubleshooting, but this can be tedious and time consuming.

Against this background, I had read about CA’s extension of the APM capability it acquired with Wily into the SOA domain, but hadn’t had a chance to check it out properly. I got that chance recently at CA’s analyst conference in Ottawa.

For those who don’t know the Wily solution set, it grew out of the need for tools to monitor and troubleshoot complex Java applications in high end application server environments, then evolved into more of an end to end APM system. The basic idea is to drop agents in at key points in your network to monitor transaction calls, e.g. between the web server and the application server, the application server and the database management system, and so on.

Data accumulated in this way can be used for real time monitoring and alerting, and for analysis of history for both troubleshooting and planning purposes. While a picture of end-to-end performance can be derived at an application or individual user level (something that can also be done with solutions that monitor response times ‘at the glass’), the approach adopted for the CA APM solution goes further by providing visibility into the performance of individual transaction steps behind the scenes.

As the solution has become increasingly well proven, CA has enjoyed significant growth in demand for the Wily technology, even though it is still not that widely known in the mainstream. As the solution has evolved, however, it moved on from the concept of ‘see to’ to ‘see through’ monitoring, and this is the key to helping unravel what’s going on in a complex SOA environment.

As an example, if the application being monitored makes a call to a service elsewhere on the network, it has always been possible to capture response times at that step along with diagnostic information when things go wrong. This is the ‘see to’ approach. But what if that service calls another one behind the scenes? This is where ‘see through’ visibility comes in, which can be achieved by distributing coordinated agents to equipment running relevant services, and/or by plugging an agent into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Of course CA is not the only game in town when it comes to performance management, whether in an SOA or traditional application environment, and anyone investigating this field should check out players like HP, IBM, Quest and Compuware too. I thought the insights I got from the CA guys were worth sharing, however, hopefully to stimulate some thought among IT shops who have taken a more tactical approach to SOA and have had visibility and performance issues sneak up on them over time.

It’s an interesting area that we will continue to investigate, so if you have any experience or insights yourself that you are willing to share, feel free to ping me with your thoughts.

The evolving role of the mobile operator

2009-06-30T19:56:00.005+01:00

Mobile operators have their roots firmly in the utility services space. Indeed, many business customers still think of them largely as providers of voice minutes, perhaps with a little bit of data access or mobile email thrown in as a peripheral part of the deal.

Yet while they sometimes struggle to get their efforts recognised, most mobile players today are capable of delivering far more than that. Their service offerings are typically now quite diverse and comprehensive.

When Josie and I were recently reviewing our plans for researching mobile operator propositions for the business sector, we therefore ended up looking at a number of different dimensions and solution areas, the main ones being:

• Convergence of fixed and mobile communications
• Mobile email and other forms of messaging
• Full blown unified communications
• Communications enabled business processes
• Remote access to corporate applications
• Operator hosted business solutions
• Communications management solutions
• Professional services in relation to the above

To one degree or another, we have seen initiatives from most of the larger mobile players in most of these areas over the past few years. Those part of a larger group have been collaborating more with their sister organisations in the fixed telecom business, consulting and managed service business, and so on, while others with more of a mobile pure-play background have grown into new areas either organically or by acquisition.

Across the board, we have also seen mobile operators partnering a lot more with players in the IT space in acknowledgement that activity in many of the areas mentioned crosses the traditional separation between the IT and communications domains.

This extension of capability and propositions is interesting when looking at the dynamics of the industry in general and the way in which the supply side of the equation is changing. From a customer perspective, it also raises the question of whether mobile operators have now evolved enough to be regarded as genuine strategic suppliers to the enterprises they serve.

Before continuing with this line of thinking, it’s probably worth defining what we mean by the term ‘strategic supplier’. It’s something I personally spent a lot of time looking at when writing the supplier management chapter of ‘The Technology Garden’ book.

While it is tempting to regard suppliers that you spend a lot of money with or rely upon heavily for operational purposes as strategic, we prefer to put the emphasis on organisational synergy. By this, we don’t mean some woolly ‘feel good’ factor, but the existence of a relationship based on genuine trust and mutual understanding at a level that matters in terms of overall business direction.

A good test of strategic status is whether you call a supplier and take their advice on key issues before making highly significant business or technology decisions – not necessarily in every case, but in the areas relevant to their sphere of experience and expertise.

With this definition in mind, it is not unusual for big IT incumbents such as SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and so on, to be regarded as strategic. Large consulting and outsourcing firms also often acquire strategic status.

So what about mobile operators?

Well to date, I can’t recall an example of a senior manager proactively calling out a mobile operator when asked to name the top three or four strategic ITC suppliers to their business. This is clearly a function of the limited utility-centric relationship that has traditionally been place, but is it time to reconsider our view of the operator community?

When we consider that many of the organisations we speak with during our research highlight changing working patterns within the workforce and the impact of advanced communications on the way they operate as strategic front-of-mind issues, a convincing argument could be made to invite mobile operators more into the planning process. After all, on paper at least, they would seem to have a lot to contribute having gone through their own analysis of requirements, dependencies, practicalities, etc when constructing their portfolios of offerings.

In practical terms, however, we need realistic about what we can expect in terms of maturity. We have come across mobile operator initiatives, for example, that have started by pulling together a few talented guys from the existing business and asking the get up to speed from a standing start in a new area. The trouble is that teams such as this on a steep learning curve often don’t know what they don’t know, and this really isn’t a good starting point for developing even a tactical advisory relationship with the customer, let alone a strategic one.

In other cases, operators have been smart enough to hire good managers in from other domains, e.g. the IT sector, but even then, it can take time to assemble and optimise offerings, delivery processes, and so on. While the thinking might be quite mature, challenges might still exist at the execution level while experience is gained.

Of course many of the new offerings we see emerging have arisen from the acquisition of going-concerns, or the back-ending of products and services with resources from established sister companies or partners. Where this is the case, there is a better chance of robust thinking and delivery, but even this is not enough in my opinion.

To step up to the role of strategic supplier, mobile operators really need to demonstrate a clear understanding of the overall communications, collaboration and remote access landscape, how it is evolving, and how to help customers figure out which things to do in which order to move forward efficiently and effectively in the context of their businesses. This has to include both the customer internal view, e.g. how certain initiatives and systems are likely to impact others and vice versa, and the industry view, with a clear articulation of how the operator fits into the overall supplier landscape.

There are all kinds of other things we could point to, including coherency of offerings and operations across geographic boundaries and a proven track record of delivering on the basics, for example, but at the end of the day, it’s meeting minds on big picture philosophy, objectives and requirements that matters – and, of course, a willingness to do what is needed to establish and maintain a high level, trusted and open relationship.

So are they there yet? Well at an operator community level I would say no, mostly because their activities are not as mature and joined up as they need to be, though some are starting to get pretty close. Earning a seat at the top table is not going to be easy though, as there are plenty of other contenders and a range of incumbents who are already providing advice and guidance in the areas we have mentioned.

Having said this, perhaps there is an opportunity here for customers looking for fresh input and ideas to start developing stronger relationships with operators as they continue their journey from utility, through solution provider, to strategic partner. Different perspectives can, after all, sometimes be useful to shake up our thinking, and let’s not forget that those with something to prove are often willing to try a lot harder when it comes to relationship building.

Event review: IBM Information on Demand, Berlin

2009-06-11T08:35:00.002+01:00

Organisations are accumulating information rapidly – a lot of information – and as research shows, the majority have challenges managing and exploiting it.

It was against this background that I recently attended IBM’s 2009 ‘Information on Demand’ event (IOD2009) in Berlin, designed to bring together customers, partners and industry analysts like me to discuss information management related matters and how IBM technology and services are relevant to them.

The danger with such end-user oriented gatherings is that they are so often designed primarily to cater for the immediate needs of ‘the faithful’, i.e. existing customers that are already committed the vendor’s offerings, and just want to know about the latest releases and roadmaps, and perhaps have an opportunity to network and party with their peers.

Now I am not going to say that IOD2009 didn’t have an element of this. Indeed, I would have been worried if it didn’t as it’s important to keep customers in the loop and gather their feedback at a detailed product level. It is also extremely valuable when a vendor facilitates networking and knowledge exchange within its user and partner community. Beyond such essentials, however, it is nice when events push the out the boundaries, tackle some of the bigger questions and issues, and even promote some thought leadership and best practice. IOD2009 delivered on these things too.

One of the enabling factors here is the breadth and depth of the IBM information management portfolio. Unlike niche vendors who can only address one part of the problem, and therefore sometimes define the world in a very blinkered manner and skew conversations accordingly, IBM has the luxury of considering the bigger picture holistically, in the knowledge that it has solutions relevant to most parts of it. In addition, the presence of its professional services divisions helps it to maintain solid bridges between the PowerPoint-centric world of product management and the real world in which solutions must be made to work in practice.

The only thing that gets in the way, at least for a pragmatic Brit like me with simple working class roots, is the amount of management consulting speak that American IBM executives insist on using when articulating visions, problems and solutions. Having said this, you can get a pretty good feel for the central theme of IOD2009, the ‘Information Agenda’, from some of the sound bites and phrases used in various keynotes:

* Leverage information for smarter business outcomes
* Move from information based projects to an information based enterprise
* Effective analysis and decision making starts with trusted information
* Creating meaningful business insights is what matters
* Put new intelligence to work to achieve ongoing differentiation and market leadership
* From application led transformation to information led transformation
* Right information at the right time at the right point in the business process
* The workplace is everywhere so data needs to be available everywhere
* Become an intelligent company

These are from my notes, and while I may not have jotted all of them down exactly right, the flavour and sentiment of what the audience heard should be pretty clear.

The overriding message was to move forward from the fragmented way in which information has typically been managed and exploited in the past, and start joining the dots. There is an organisational value perspective to this, which centres on a view of information as an enterprise level asset with the potential to contribute a lot more benefit than is being realised today. The key here is to break down barriers and open up silos to generate more coherent higher level insights into performance and operations.

Related to this is the functional dimension, based on the argument that we can manage and exploit information more effectively if we coordinate policy and practice across storage, backup, archival, description, discovery, retrieval, search, analytics, access, delivery, and so on. The cost and risk benefits of such a coordinated approach are particularly relevant against the backdrop of the current economic and regulatory environment.

The Information Agenda represents a step forward for IBM in the way it articulates information related challenges and how its various products and services work together to help tackle them. IBM is not telling us anything we don’t already know in terms of defining the problem, and is certainly not the only vendor waking up to what’s required. But now it is getting its own act together in terms of joined up thinking and offerings, which is something it has sometimes struggled with in the past, it’s got to the stage where it really can help its customers to define or review their thoughts, priorities and plans in the bigger picture context.

The maturing of IBM’s approach around the Information Agenda concept therefore has to be welcomed. Suppliers that can see beyond point products and have a grown up conversation about pulling the relevant threads together in a practical way have much more to contribute.

With this in mind, I found the detailed breakout sessions dealing with best practice and cross domain views of the world particularly interesting at IOD2009. The traditional product oriented content was still there, but set against the backdrop of the holistic Information Agenda concept, I am sure a lot of delegates couldn’t help but return to their organisations with bigger ideas and a motivation to put them into practice.

A realistic exploration of the Desktop Linux opportunity

2009-06-09T08:17:00.005+01:00

How often have you dismissed the views expressed by extremists because what they are saying is so far removed from your own position and perceptions? The problem is that while single issue activists can make a lot of noise, they often come across as being out of touch with the complexities of the real world. Indeed, the irony is that when idealism takes precedent over practicality, the cause being promoted is actually far less likely to strike a chord with the mainstream.

And so it has been with open source fundamentalists promoting desktop Linux as an alternative to the traditional Windows client platform. The starting point for the argument is typically that Windows is completely broken and the only reason people carry on using it is because they are lazy or have been brainwashed by the Redmond evil empire. Linux is then positioned as the answer to everyone’s problems based on technical superiority and the righteousness of open source.

It’s clear that a lot of evangelists espousing such views are enthusiasts that have adopted desktop Linux for their own personal use but have little experience of deploying it in a real world business environment. Indeed, locating objective information on the practicalities of using desktop Linux in a mainstream business context can be a challenge.

In order to tackle this problem, we at Freeform Dynamics tracked down over a thousand IT professionals who had done it for real and extracted a range of tips, tricks and traps from them – not at a techie level, but in relation to the scoping and targeting of activity, and how to work around things like application availability and compatibility constraints.

The feedback we received was received was remarkably candid, and confirmed that far from being perfect, desktop Linux brings with it a range of issues that need to be taken into account when considering its use. Nevertheless, there was a strong consensus that if deployed in the right way to the right kinds of user, Linux, and some of the open source applications that are typically used with it, can form a foundation for reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the desktop computing environment.

One of the most interesting parts of the study was the light shed on the question of targeting. While experiences varied between organisations, it was clear that as of today, Linux is most appropriate for deployment to users with relatively simple and predictable requirements, such as transaction workers and general professional users. These groups tend to view the computer on their desk as simply a tool to get their jobs done, so are less likely to resist the change that Linux represents. They also tend to be dependent on a relatively small range of applications which keeps testing, porting and migration costs at a manageable level.

At the other end of the spectrum, the advice from those with experience was that groups to avoid are Windows power users, mobile workers and creative staff, who are much more of a challenge. This is because their needs are generally more demanding, more dynamic and less predictable, and there tends to be a higher degree of reliance on specific applications that not available on Linux.

While thinking about selective targeting based on such observations might seem pretty obvious, it’s all too common to hear desktop Linux being dismissed on the basis that it won’t work for those in finance who are addicted to Excel macros, or those in the marketing department who just couldn’t live without their PowerPoint animations.

The trick is to not to get distracted by such users and explore the possibilities associated with those, for example, who live in the ERP system or some other core application for most of their working day, with minimal requirements for sophisticated document authoring, etc. And in many organisations, these make up the majority of the user population.

If you’re interested in reading more, details of the study, which was sponsored by IBM as part of our Community Research Programme, are written up in a full report which is available for free download here.

Two men say they’re Jesus....

2009-05-14T07:27:00.006+01:00

I had a link to a short video entitled ‘Cloud Computing in Plain English’ sent to me yesterday, which I thought provided an useful overview of utility computing and the role virtualisation plays in that context.

While I thought some other parts of the video were a bit confused, the thing that really struck me about it was the way in which the term ‘cloud computing’ was used to refer to the utility computing model only. Indeed, within the video, cloud was differentiated against Software as a Service (SaaS), which was positioned almost as being an old-hat way of doing things with some undesirable restrictions that ‘cloud’ overcomes.

I couldn’t help thinking of a similar ‘back to basics’ video from Salesforce.com that talks about cloud computing in reference to the SaaS and Platform as a Service (PaaS) models. The view expressed there is very similar to the messages heard from other SaaS/PaaS players and wannabes, from Google to the myriad of smaller application service providers that have sprung up in recent times.

So, we have two conflicting views here, and as the old Dire Straits lyric goes: “Two men say they’re Jesus; one of them must be wrong”.

It seems as if we are moving from a situation in which the term ‘cloud’ was so ill-defined that it could pretty much mean anything, to one in which certain factions are attempting to assume ownership and exclude definitions that don’t fit their requirements. Not sure if this is progress or just adding to the confusion.

While I personally detest the word ‘cloud’ in the IT context because it is so ambiguous and I am a bit of an obsessive about precision, I have grudgingly accepted it on the basis that it is not going away, and have learned to work with it. The only way to make sense of a lot of discussions in this space, however, is to begin each conversation or review by establishing which flavour of cloud is actually being talked about.

In order to facilitate this, the Freeform Dynamics team analysed all the things that cloud could potentially mean and came up with quite a few categories that we now use as a starting point for interaction. These cloud categories are explained here if you are interested, and as you’ll see, we take quite an inclusive approach, regarding cloud as an umbrella term (if you’ll forgive the pun), which breaks out into multiple offerings from vendors and service providers, some of which are very different.

With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see where all this ends up at an industry level. I guess it will either come down to who has the deepest pockets to promote their definition of cloud from a marketing perspective, or the industry actually cooperating to unravel the tangled mess of terminology, ideas and ideologies that exists out there at the moment.

In the meantime, it's important to be on your guard and be careful about making assumptions on the language you encounter when on the receiving end of marketing messages, media coverage and analyst advice.

Integrated solutions as a service - iSaaS anyone?

2009-05-07T08:34:00.012+01:00

Against the background of ever increasing hype around cloud computing, it’s interesting listening to keynotes from senior executives on the supplier side of the equation. I was watching a video of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff speaking at the company’s recent Cloudforce event in the UK, for example. Stirring stuff, and some great material explaining the value proposition for ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS), or ‘enterprise cloud computing’ as Benioff and his disciples now call it. Well worth a watch.

If you took it all on face value, though, you could walk away with the impression that all of those headaches we have struggled with for years in IT have disappeared overnight, and that all you need to do is whip out your credit card, sign up for a few cloud services, then sit back with your feet up. In fact, if you were tuning in from your computer room sitting next to your racks of servers and other kit, you might even get a complex about being one of the backward few who aren’t already moving everything into ‘the cloud’

The trouble with all of this time shifting, i.e. talking as if activity in the mainstream is more advanced than it is in reality, is that it creates the impression that all of the problems have been solved. If we stick with our Salesforce.com example, while this particular supplier must be congratulated for creating a great proposition around a very specific application – sales force automation – when claims are made that this is an indicator of application requirements as a whole now shifting en masse the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, there is a danger of losing sight of some of the significant challenges that still exist.

Many of the questions to do with integration between services, and between in-house systems and service provider offerings, are yet to be resolved, for example. All the big players have views on this and can deliver great PowerPoint presentations and demos to illustrate how it will all work. But if you were to scale out your commitment to cloud computing today beyond a small number of discrete services, you would very likely end up in a unpredictable mess, at the mercy of a range of providers who are not yet mature enough to play nicely together from either a physical integration or commercial cooperation perspective. The reality is that we have a long way to go before real-world integration, support and maintenance requirements in even some of the simplest multi-provider scenarios will be dealt with to the satisfaction of most mainstream enterprises.

There are some examples of more mature thinking in the cloud computing arena, however, that acknowledges some of the practicalities. I recently attended a customer day run by Cobweb Solutions, a UK based provider that has been delivering hosted business services, predominantly to small and medium businesses (SMBs), for over a decade now. I was actually there in my capacity as a customer (we use Cobweb’s hosted Exchange service at Freeform Dynamics), but I couldn’t help listening as an industry analyst.

During his introduction, Mark Adams, the Managing Director of Cobweb, talked through the history of the company, from being labelled an ‘Internet Service Provider’ (ISP) in 1998, an ‘Application Service Provider’ (ASP) in 2001, and a ‘Managed Service Provider’ (MSP) in 2004 after the wheels fell off of the ASP bandwagon. More recently, people have referred to Cobweb as a SaaS or cloud service provider. As Mark explained, however, while the services offered have been evolving, extending and maturing over the years, the core Cobweb proposition hasn’t really changed. The fundamental components of this boil down to no capital investment, no hardware to maintain, and enterprise level security, resilience, recovery and compliance for the SMB customers served.

Having said this, the way in which the Cobweb service has been evolving is quite interesting. The pivotal hosted Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint offering has been gradually extended to include complementary services like mobile access, content filtering, archiving and retrieval, etc – all pre-integrated and presented as options that can be selected from a self provisioning portal. This approach, with Cobweb basically assembling pieces of an overall solution jigsaw and providing a single point of support for everything, has now been extended to include ‘Customer Relationship Management’ (CRM) based on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 software suite.

This integrated solution services model overcomes a lot of the integration and accountability related gotchas that can potentially trip customers up as they broaden their commitment to the cloud computing - if something goes wrong with the interfacing between your CRM and messaging system, there is no ambiguity about who is responsible for fixing it.

In acknowledgement of another often glossed-over practicality, Cobweb has teamed with ConsultCRM, a professional services firm that will help customers with everything from analysis and scoping of requirements, through configuration and data migration, to training and rollout of the CRM service. While other providers often give the impression of it just being a case of ‘subscribe and go’ with SaaS services, Cobweb is up front about the need for most customers to go through a traditional implementation cycle if they are to be successful.

In many ways, firms like Cobweb are setting the benchmark for delivery of genuinely integrated SaaS based solutions into the SMB space that bring together multiple packages and components in a way that minimises hassle and risk for the customer. The downside, however, is that the integration work required takes time, which may frustrate some customers who would prefer not to wait for new components and upgrades to be added to the service. This is something we at Freeform Dynamics had to deal with last year, for example, when we were forced to introduce a second provider into the equation to gain access to the latest version of SharePoint because it was so far out on Cobweb’s roadmap. And while Cobweb is now up-to-date in this area, the lag in delivery of new capability is still evident, e.g. it’s still going to be a while before a unified communications capability will be offered, which is a natural next step for its customers.

Ultimately, the emergence of standards and the maturing business practices within the cloud provider community will allow mixing and matching of services that need to work together coherently to be achieved more conveniently and with less risk. But for SMBs in particular, the broader solution approach will continue to have a place for those needing a relatively standard mix of pre-integrated capability, prioritising cost, coherency and risk management over always being smack-bang up to date.

Big Blue ISV double-take

2009-02-12T09:00:00.004Z

In comparison to many of its strategic competitors, IBM has been behind the curve in the small to medium enterprise (SME) space for many years now. Whether it’s hardware, email servers, platform software or development tools, IBM’s presence as a supplier tails off rapidly as we look below 5,000 employee mark in terms of company size.

So is it that IBM offerings are less suitable for smaller businesses than alternatives from Microsoft and others? Well not if you consider it on capability. IBM has invested a great deal in packaging and even designing solutions for SMEs under the Express umbrella, and doing a good job of making enterprise class technology accessible to those with more modest IT budgets and limited IT resources. So why the lack of market penetration?

There are a couple of contributors to this, the first being that other suppliers better managed the transition to commodity kit and software that swept the market during the 90s, while IBM was still focusing its efforts on higher margin proprietary platforms. The end result was a loss of position in the traditional reseller and integrator channel that serves the needs of the majority of smaller businesses when it comes to IT infrastructure. The likes of Microsoft and HP therefore largely took control of some important routes to market, and while IBM has been trying to catch up since, and nowadays has very much embraced commodity solutions as well as open standards within its portfolio of offerings, the gap that exists is still pretty big.

The other big contributing factor to IBM’s challenges in the SME space is the way in which technology is bought. Unlike large enterprises that make explicit investments in IT infrastructure improvement and evolution, the type of platform technology that IBM delivers tends to be pulled through more on the coat-tails of business application purchases in smaller organisations. This brings the companies who build and deliver those business applications, commonly referred to as ‘Independent Software Vendors’ (ISVs), into sharp focus. And when we look closely at these, the majority of them focused on SMEs are using non-IBM technology, e.g. from Microsoft and Oracle, to underpin their solutions at the moment.

In practical terms, the two factors we have been discussing are linked. If we think of it from a business perspective, ISVs generally need to focus on selling their own capability in the sales cycle. They really don’t want to waste time explaining to customers who are already familiar and comfortable with the Microsoft stack, for example, why the application they are offering is based on something else. To put it another way, if you are an ISV targeting the SME market, then building your application on Microsoft or Oracle technology has traditionally represented the path of least resistance and therefore the lowest cost of sale. This is a generalisation, of course, but it does lie at the root of why relatively few SME focused ISVs have bet their business on an IBM platform in recent years.

The exceptions are very interesting, though, and when you talk to IBM business partners you hear a couple of strong reasons as to why they ended up in the Big Blue camp. The first is technology and the feeling that IBM platform solutions are more open, standard, capable and scalable than the alternatives. The breadth of the portfolio is also a perceived strength for some, with solutions ranging from data warehousing at one end to systems management at the other. While Microsoft and Oracle could legitimately argue with most of these claims nowadays, it is clear that some ISVs believe the IBM foundation and backing provides them with a useful competitive differentiator.

The word ‘backing’ provides a clue as to the other big reason given for embracing IBM platforms as an ISV. While some we have spoken with allude to historical challenges interfacing with the complex machine that is Big Blue, they also highlight the rewards that are available if you can crack it from a partnering perspective. The general consensus also seems to be that while things are not perfect, the IBM partnership programmes are becoming progressively clearer and easier to access.

Against this background, it was interesting talking recently with three of the IBM executives responsible for overseeing ISV related activity in Northeast Europe – Robert Curran, VP General Business Channels, Melinda Matthews, Director of ISV and Developer Relations, and Aidan Troy, Director of Channel Sales. What struck me most about the conversation with these guys was that as they talked about their programmes and activities, the rationale for working with ISVs was consistently explained in terms of what was in it for the partner. This is in stark contrast to my discussions with people in similar positions within other IT vendors who are more inclined to talk in terms of partners being a route to market for product – a subtle but very important difference, implying a genuinely partner centric mindset.

Having said this, the IBM team were very clear about their objectives in business terms, and spoke in a realistic way about the need to ‘convert’ key ISVs in target industry sectors that are currently aligned with the competition, or at least get them to embrace elements of the IBM technology portfolio in a complementary manner.

The point was made that many of the acquisitions IBM has made over recent years is helping a great deal here. On the one hand, the broadening of the portfolio, often with products that already coexist and interoperate with other vendors’ technologies, provides more potential entry points into the partnership discussion. Then, of course, each acquired product has brought with it a partner base of its own, which provides potential win/win opportunities for some ISVs to extend their involvement with IBM through cross training and evolution of existing commercial arrangements.

We also spoke about the resources, facilities and education/coaching available to ISVs to help them from initial porting/development of solutions, through go-to-market planning, and ultimately sales and marketing execution. This is something I will pick up on in more detail in the future, along with some of the internal mechanisms in place to coordinate between product, industry and partner groups across IBM on both a local and international basis. Suffice it to say in the meantime that when you speak to senior management and tour one of the facilities geared up to supporting business partners (‘Innovation Centres’) as I have a couple of times now, the level of commitment IBM is making to driving and enabling its ISV community leaves little to the imagination.

So, I will be watching with interest, and indeed tracking through market research, the impact IBM’s efforts through the ISV and other programmes on its SME market share over time. It appears to be doing all the right things to make itself more relevant, and with ISVs having to deal with ever more complex requirements, I can see many of them tempted into the IBM fold by the breadth and depth of both the products and support on offer.

It’s not going to be easy though, and I don’t imagine for a moment that Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and other competitors are going to allow IBM into their partner bases without a fight, but from what I have seen, it is definitely a case of ‘game on’, so any ISV looking to re-evaluate the foundation for their solution would do well to check out what’s on offer from IBM. After all, when someone is coming from behind, they are often willing to put in a lot more effort to catch up.

Don’t let Microsoft timescales dictate your Windows migration schedule

2009-02-03T12:43:00.005Z

There is a lot of talk at the moment about desktop migration schedules. With the majority of enterprises still managing XP estates, the big question is whether to make a short term move to Vista, hang on and wait for Windows 7, or dig in and not think about it until you really have to.

A minority - typically represented by small tech-savvy professional services firms in the IT, engineering and media sectors, in particular - will take the uncertainty as a cue to investigate alternatives such as Linux and Mac OS X. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but outside the scope of this article.

For most, the key question remains about when and how to move forward in terms of Windows releases. Having looked at the options, there isn’t a single ‘right’ answer to this that applies to every organisation. So what’s the best way to think about the issue and come up an appropriate plan?

A couple of things are worth bearing in mind as a foundation for the discussion.

First: the physical deployment of the operating system itself, i.e. getting the new version of Windows onto target machines, can involve significant operational effort, but the real cost and pain of most previous Windows migrations has been associated with testing and remediating applications, utilities, drivers and so on. We know from those who have already made the move from XP to Vista that this is not a trivial task in that particular case. Real compatibility issues are typically encountered with both commercial and in-house developed software that need to be identified, understood and fixed methodically. Tools exist that can help with the process, but there is no getting away from the need to treat the exercise as a properly planned, resourced and funded project if you have anything more than a handful of PCs.

Second: from what we have seen and heard so far with the beta version, Windows 7 is largely an optimisation of Vista rather than a generational leap forward. I am sure that Microsoft and others might debate this throwaway comment from various different angles, but the pertinent point is that software designed to run on Vista will very likely run on Windows 7 with no compatibility issues.

Microsoft’s claims here seem to be corroborated by feedback from beta testers. Indeed, it seems every man and his dog has now given it a whirl and is reporting positive experiences in developer communities and social media circles.

The upshot is that the bulk of the effort put into the ‘hard bit’ of an XP to Vista migration i.e. the remedial compatibility work, will not need to be repeated during a subsequent move from Vista to Windows 7. Of course it’s unrealistic to expect perfection, and you would be mad to assume compatibility without going through a full re-test of everything. But the chances are that most things will pass and need no further action, making the whole thing much less costly, time-consuming and risky.

So how does this help when considering migration strategy and timing? Let’s not pretend the situation is ideal, but at least it puts control of the decision back in your hands. With early experiences and Microsoft promises indicating a relatively small difference in effort between a two step (via Vista) and one step (skipping it) migration, the consequences of choosing one route or the other are not that great.

So it’s up to you, really. If it suits you to move sooner rather than later, then there is no need to hold back from implementing Vista for fear of having to duplicate a huge amount of effort. Yes, there will be additional work involved in the two-step journey you will ultimately be taking, but the second refresh will be much less daunting.

If you plan to wait for Windows 7 before rolling out your next major upgrade, you can begin testing and remedial work in advance using Vista. Having said this, the stability of the current beta bodes well for the future, so working Windows 7 directly into your test and preparation activities may be possible sooner than we might expect, based on past experiences with new Windows releases.

The last question that remains is how to decide if and when to move forward. Critics maintain that there is simply not a business case to migrate from Windows XP, so why bother at all?

I would not dispute the difficulty in justifying a Vista rollout from an end user value perspective, although larger organisations that have taken Vista fully on board report significant payback from operational improvements. I personally haven’t formed a strong view on whether Windows 7 will change the cost/value equation very much, though my own experimentation with the beta (admittedly just a single data point) has revealed a noticeably better user experience that could arguably make a difference to productivity - it’s too early to make a call on this, though.

But the cost/benefit calculation associated with the operating system per se is not the main issue. After all, the only reason Windows is there is to run applications. And with the relentless upgrade spiral among software vendors, practicality says you can’t fall too far behind without running into support and compatibility problems at the other end of the conveyor belt.

There’ll come a time when the latest releases of solutions that are important for your business will no longer run on XP, in the same way that vendors have gradually dropped support for pre-XP versions of Windows. So unless you are one of those looking to defect to Linux or OS X, the move from XP is inevitable at some point down the line. And it’s always better to act proactively than reactively.

So, whether you are an enthusiastic pioneer or a grudging pragmatist, the good thing is that you can largely set your own pace in terms of migration timing, which is exactly as it should be.

Republished on the The Register here.

Google gets real on Apps go-to-market

2009-01-16T09:09:00.002Z

I was interested and encouraged to see the announcement this week from Google of its new initiative to create a reseller channel for its online office applications. While I still remain sceptical about the appeal of cloud based propositions in a core business environment as a replacement for traditional desktop suites, mainly because the feedback we get is that people have more pressing things to worry about than fixing something they don’t regard to be broken, if traction is to be gained in this space, then the channel is a key part of the equation.

This is something I have discussed in depth in my research note entitled ‘Taking Cloud to the Mainstream’, which can be downloaded from here if you are interested in a review of some of the market practicalities and realities.

In the meantime, while the cloud evangelists will no doubt get all excited about one of their darlings making this move, we have to be realistic about how long it takes for a supplier to develop a viable and productive indirect channel. Too often, I have seen reseller initiatives started then fade away after 6-12 months as patience is lost with the slowness of the process. The reality is that it takes at least a couple of years for a brand new channel programme, especially a volume one, to deliver consistently. Whether Google will have the staying power remains to be seen, though if it wants to penetrate the SMB market, it really has no choice for the reasons I outline in the abovementioned research note.

In many ways, this move by Google is a bit of a distraction when considering how the SMB market for SaaS based solutions is going to open up in the shorter term. The real player to watch here is Microsoft, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it already has the channel in place, and extending existing relationships and agreements is an order of magnitude easier and quicker than building new ones from scratch. Secondly, the Microsoft Software plus Services (S+S) philosophy is both more mature than the Google’s cloud centric play and resonates much better with the target audience. From a channel perspective, the S+S approach, potentially allowing bundles of pre-integrated on-premise and on-demand offerings to be sold together, is also more in tune with the cross-sell imperative that is ingrained in the reseller community.

Despite these market realities, though, I applaud this latest move from Google as a sign of it getting real about tackling the mainstream business sector effectively, rather than relying on posturing and media hype, which cuts little ice in that space. I also welcome the possibility of some serious competition for Microsoft in the office suite arena, which the market is desperately in need of. Will Google Apps provide this? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, as Google is now very much playing on someone else’s turf.

The role of Microsoft in the downturn

2009-01-14T11:42:00.003Z

Towards the end of last year, I received an invitation from Microsoft to meet its UK Managing Director, Gordon Frazer, to discuss ways in which the company was able to help its customers deal with the impact of the economic downturn. Having already spent a lot of time researching how IT departments might respond to the squeeze (subsequently written up here), the topic was very much front of mind. Indeed, I had already looked quite closely at ways in which Microsoft and other major vendors could be of use in this context.

Against this background, I accepted the invitation, but stressed that I was mostly interested in a discussion of what Microsoft can do, or is doing, that is different to the pack, rather than covering the more obvious stuff we are hearing from the vendor community in general. I also thought it would be a good opportunity to get under the skin of how Microsoft is viewing the current economic situation and the spirit with which it will be operating as we look forward to 2009 and beyond.

Before getting into the discussion itself, it is probably worth recapping why it is relevant to pay particular attention to Microsoft. Quite simply, this boils down to the fact that it is the most prominent vendor in terms of incumbency. When we ask IT professionals about the suppliers that are important to them in our large scale research projects, Microsoft consistently comes top of the list, regardless of organisation size. Here, for example, is a plot of the results from a recent online survey (November 2008) of close to 1000 respondents.

This data happens to be based on an open, unprompted question. If you offer IT professionals, particularly more senior ones, a list of commonly incumbent vendors, you typically see Microsoft cited in over three quarters of cases as being important. This difference between prompted and unprompted in itself is interesting, in that even if you do not think of yourself as a ‘Microsoft shop’, so are not inclined to name Microsoft when asked an open question about important suppliers, as soon as you are prompted, it reminds you just how much of its stuff is embedded in your infrastructure. When considering how to respond to economic pressure, at some point, you are therefore likely to have to think about Microsoft and/or the solutions it provides that are relevant to your business.

If we turn this around, this places quite a bit of responsibility on Microsoft as a supplier as it touches so many organisations. And from a Microsoft perspective, one of the first things I discussed with Frazer was the challenge of responding to the needs of such a diverse customer base, which in the business sector ranges from self employed home workers to the largest multi-nationals in the world. There is then the variation in how and to what degree the squeeze is going to hit people, not just between different sectors and organisations, but even within them.

Given this, we agreed it was inappropriate to make the simplistic assumption that the blanket response to the down-turn will be obsessive cost cutting across the board. While it is true to say that most will have an eye on cost, many will also be looking to develop and invest in certain parts of their business to extend them or make them more effective. This will be particularly true if you see the economic climate as an opportunity to outmanoeuvre the competition or grab pieces of the market that are vacated by struggling incumbents. There are then fundamental imperatives such as ensuring the operation of your sales and marketing operation is as finely tuned as possible to make sure you win more than your fair share of business in a challenged market with fewer opportunities.

The point here is that it is necessary for us to think a bit more intelligently and holistically as IT professionals when considering how to respond to the squeeze, as summarised in the following chart from the abovementioned report:

This kind of view is useful to put some of the Microsoft related specifics I discussed with Frazer into perspective.

In terms of infrastructure optimisation, for instance, Microsoft’s recent emphasis on virtualisation is very relevant. It’s not so much that Microsoft has anything particularly new or innovative here by way of fundamental capability, especially on the server side of the equation. Indeed, there are more mature virtualisation players and solutions out there. The significance is that Microsoft is looking to lower the barrier to entry in terms of skills, complexity and economics, the idea being to not only deal with the requirements of large scale data centres, but to also bring simple cost effective virtualisation capability to the masses of small and mid-sized organisations that are yet to take advantage of this kind of technology.

The general theme of making things cheaper and more accessible also runs through some of the other plays highlighted by Frazer. Looking beyond IT operations to how technology can help the business deal with economic pressures, the spotlight quickly swings to mobile technology, unified communications, portal based collaboration, business intelligence, and so on. These are all areas in which Microsoft has attempted to provide easy ways for customers to ‘build out’ from their existing Microsoft infrastructure to improve workforce efficiency and effectiveness, both of which are important when the squeeze is on and getting the most from your people is a key imperative.

In practical terms, whether it’s extending access to Exchange with Windows Mobile devices, snuggling Office Communication Server (OCS) alongside Exchange to allow instant messaging, web conferencing, etc, or simply starting to make use of the embedded BI capability within SQL Server as the foundation for enabling better decisions, the spirit is one of delivering new capability in comfortable, incremental and ‘recession friendly’ steps.

These examples, and others around SharePoint, Office System and CRM, led to a discussion with Frazer about a couple of other things to consider.

Firstly, something that can be said about a lot of software solutions, but particularly applies to Microsoft products, is that only a fraction of the functionality they provide is actually exploited. We have already mentioned that SQL Server, for example, can do a lot more in terms of sophisticated information management and analysis than many IT professionals take notice of or even realise. And how many organisations out there are using Microsoft Office on the desktop as simply a collection of document editors, with SharePoint Services running in the network as a glorified file share? In this case, look beyond the obvious functionality and together these solutions represent a pretty capable authoring, workflow and collaboration environment.

The point here is that in the current climate, it is going to be worth a lot of organisations reviewing the degree to which they are getting the maximum value from their existing Microsoft infrastructure. With a little end user training or thought about policies and process, a lot can be achieved in terms of delivering incremental value to the business. With this in mind, Frazer highlighted the investment Microsoft has made in terms of online training, guides, templates, etc, much of which is available at no cost from www.microsoft.com. His view was that enabling customers to make the most of Microsoft technology represents a good win/win. The customer clearly benefits, but so does Microsoft, as organisations are much more likely to remain loyal and extend their investments in the future if they are getting good value from the solutions already in place.

The second discussion point that emerged from talking through specific propositions was around the way in which Microsoft products are often designed to work together. Frazer understandably highlighted the ‘synergies’ here, and I agree that there are many organisations out there that are happy to immerse themselves in a Microsoft-centric world to take advantage of the incremental value this can represent. However, our own research tells us there are probably as many organisations that are wary of selling their soul to Microsoft for fear of compromise and/or lock-in. It is not that they don’t see Microsoft as having strong solutions in specific areas, they just acknowledge that stronger solutions from competitors exist in others, and they like to qualify components objectively to ensure the optimum mix of technology.

With this in mind, my message to Frazer was therefore to make sure that the value of individual solutions was considered and articulated effectively so those looking to make decisions in a specific domain could compare like for like objectively. A good example here is virtualisation. While Microsoft has developed some decent server side technology in this space, it has a tendency to position an overall virtualisation proposition that encompasses the desktop also, all wrapped up in integrated management capability. It’s a great vision, but not particularly useful when server and desktop virtualisation plays are at different stages of maturity and acceptance, and are managed by different groups within the customer’s organisation anyway. As one response to the squeeze is to scope projects and investments even more tightly, trying to broaden the discussion is often going to be counterproductive.

The last topic I discussed with Frazer was less about the part played by technology per se and more about the mechanisms for acquiring it. We both saw a potentially important role for financing options and hosted solutions. We also agreed, however, that lack of awareness was one of the biggest challenges in both of these cases, particularly with regard to small and medium businesses. Here, though, Frazer highlighted one of Microsoft’s biggest assets, its channel of resellers, ISVs, etc, and alluded to efforts being made to enable partners in these areas. I am inclined to agree that solution providers on the front line dealing directly with the mainstream lower and mid-markets are critical to educating customers on the options. Given that a lot of the channel is so short on knowledge at the moment in these areas, however, and often even struggle with the more fundamental topic of Microsoft licensing options, it will be interesting to see how the channel enablement activity pans out.

Meanwhile, I have to say that I was pretty impressed with the down to earth and pragmatic nature of what I was hearing from Frazer. Quite a contrast to some of the idealistic, cliché and, quite frankly, ill-informed stuff we hear from some vendors on how best to respond to economic challenges. I guess as Managing Director, though, Frazer 'is that business leader’, who no doubt will have some challenges of his own to work through as Microsoft navigates its way through the difficult times ahead. Perhaps the empathy that stems from this is what keeps him grounded when it comes to discussing the hard stuff.

Justifying investment in collaboration technology

2009-01-06T10:49:00.003Z

Having listened to a lot of vendors and advocates talk about the rationale for investment in technologies that enhance collaborative working, it is amazing how much the word ‘innovation’ comes up. The premise for adoption of everything from unified communications to Enterprise 2.0 (business oriented social media solutions) is so often to ‘unlock the potential of your people’, allowing them to get their heads together and come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things that take the business forward. As part of the discussion, it is common for an emphasis to be placed on new business models, improved processes, and similar.

While the consideration of how improved collaboration facilities can enhance innovation is completely appropriate (provided you are clear on the type of innovation you have in mind), it is important not to lose sight of how enhancing collaborative working can drive straightforward efficiencies within existing processes and models. In fact, improving workforce efficiency is a more common driver for investment.

The key here is appreciating that many business processes in place today already rely on interactions between people that can’t necessarily be captured in predefined workflows. Whether it is moving a deal forward in a sales context, resolving a customer support issue with input from different departments, or agreeing budgets across cost centres for the next financial year, such activities often involve a lot of paper and email flying around in an unstructured manner, not to mention phone calls, meetings, etc. And a similar set of interactions is evident when we look at more project oriented work.

There is a lot to be gained by greasing the wheels of all such activity through improved communication and collaboration facilities that can translate to direct and measurable benefits to the business, without getting into the whole innovation thing that is so difficult to translate into a tangible return when putting together a business case.

So, as a tip, particularly if you are looking to justify a collaboration related investment in these difficult times, centre your case on the efficiency angle. Depending on the environment, the benefits from enabling innovation may be significantly greater, but if you can’t pin down the return, getting approval to spend is going to be much more difficult.

The broadening collaboration gap

2009-01-04T10:00:00.004Z

One of the basic principles upon which all of our research at Freeform Dynamics is based is that there is no such thing as ‘Average Inc’. Whether we are talking about organisational structures, business processes, corporate culture, IT landscape, level of regulation, etc, there are clearly many factors that define values, priorities, constraints, and ultimately behaviour.

This in turn limits the value of many of the more subjective discussions that take place in the industry around the relative merits or otherwise of new ideas and technologies. The notion of an individual product or solution being 'the best', or even better or worse than anything else, typically doesn't make sense unless you define the context in which adoption is being considered. And when we turn our attention to perceptions, the organisational environment and context plays a big role in determining the degree to which the relevance and value of a given type of solution is appreciated.

An example of this was illustrated recently by Josie in her recent blog post discussing how well BT is tuned into the needs of its customers when it comes to unified communications (UC). In this, she illustrates how the presence of a collaborative culture can increase the chances of UC adoption by between 5 and 10 times. This makes sense as those who value effective communication and collaboration are much more likely to be interested in ways of ways of enhancing interactions across the workforce, as well as with customers, suppliers and partners.

But what of those organisations at the other extreme with highly individualistic cultures in which minimal collaboration and sharing tends to take place? After all, quite a few of these exist.

The problem is that most of the messaging we hear from vendors and advocates in this space starts with the basic assumption that improved collaboration is a priority for all organisations. Indeed many prefix their pitches with a discussion of how the world in general is becoming more collaborative and interactive, almost as if the business community is homogenous in its ambition, direction and action.

Unfortunately, this is simply not the case. In a study we conducted in the middle of last year, for example, we found that at least 4 in 10 of the larger organisations interviewed placed no real priority on driving improvements in this area. While this finding in itself is significant, the picture becomes even more interesting when we look at which organisations are increasing the emphasis on sharing and collaborative working, and which are not.

What we can see here is not only a collaboration gap, but one that is getting wider. In a nutshell, those organisations that currently operate in highly collaborative manner are generally looking to drive even more collaboration. At the other extreme, while some recognise the imperative to get better, the majority of those with a highly individualistic culture are either standing still or moving backwards (just look at the red and amber segments on the bottom bar above).

To me, this is all a little worrying, as I see a lot of preaching to the converted going on out there, which is only going to reinforce this dynamic. I have already discussed the problems associated with advocates and evangelists not really appreciating what goes on outside of their echo chamber, and failing to connect with the mainstream. With vendors, it is more a case of business motivation, in that it is natural to direct your promotional material and sales force at those that are more likely to buy collaboration solutions. Along the way, many organisations that probably have a greater need than most to enable a more collaborative working environment, but do not realise this, are being left out in the cold.

Of course you could take the view that if an organisation doesn't appreciate the value of improvements in this domain then it deserves to be left behind, and I have read comments to this effect on various blog posts recently. Personally, I would prefer vendors and advocates to act on the principle put forward at the very beginning of this post, i.e. that environment and context are extremely important when trying to drive enlightenment, motivation and action. The trick is to move the discussion from a subjective to an objective footing, talking less about generic benefits, and more about specific scenarios that organisations of different kinds can relate to easily. My own view, as previously discussed, is that this objective approach is relevant regardless of the culture and environment currently in place.

Meanwhile, improved communication and collaboration will become even more of an imperative for many in the economic downturn (discussed in context here), so a more inclusive approach could be argued to be particularly appropriate in these challenging times.

Enterprise 2.0 and the issue of workforce composition

2008-12-30T09:09:00.005Z

Following on from my previous post on the importance of social media enthusiasts breaking out of the echo chamber, I thought I would share a snippet of research from a study we conducted in collaboration with MWD a few months ago.

The reason for doing is because I think something a lot of people overlook is the composition of workforces. Advocates often argue that the real potential of ‘Enterprise 2.0’ is realised by rolling out social media freely across the workforce on a totally inclusive basis and letting people get on with it.

The problem, however, is that most employers rely on a high proportion of the workforce, those whose roles are very process and/or task oriented, just getting on with their job.

In case you are having trouble working out the use of percentages on this chart, what it is telling us is that in almost half of the organisations interviewed (a cross section of larger enterprises), fewer than one in four employees could be categorised as knowledge or information workers, i.e. the kind of employees for which a case might be made for improved collaboration.

For the remainder of employees, the potential distraction (equivalent to cost in business terms) of providing them with social media facilities is likely to far outweigh any potential benefits.

You can argue with this on idealistic grounds if you like, but if any social media advocate inherited control of a large enterprise and became immediately accountable for productivity, process efficiency, customer service and, ultimately, profitability, would they really be willing to take hit?

So, the takeaway here is to be realistic about the scope of your ambition for social media in a business context and be really quite selective about where you choose to roll it out. And if you do decide to go for it, then approach any initiative objectively. For more thoughts on this, see my article entitled 'Collaboration - get it together' published a little while back on Silicon.

Breaking out of the social media echo chamber

2008-12-29T21:28:00.007Z

I was alerted through Twitter to an interesting blog post by Amber Naslund entitled "Are we sharing solutions or soundbites?", in which she discusses the issue of social media enthusiasts often failing to connect effectively with the business mainstream. She opens by saying:

Something’s been gnawing at me lately, and it’s taken some pondering to figure out exactly what it is. But I think I’m frustrated that we’re not doing a better job of carrying social media into the places it really matters: the businesses that don’t understand, don’t believe, or both.

It is a concern that immediately struck a chord with me as it is something that David and I have been discussing a lot lately - i.e. the fact that mainstream businesses need more insight into where, how and why social media fits into their world, if at all.

Amber is clearly a social media enthusiast, and just like other advocates, spends a lot of time developing and discussing ideas with like minded people, an example of the echo chamber principle in action. As she points out, though, this can can sometimes create an illusion of progress and consensus within a community that is not representative of wider world:

It’s comfortable in the echo chamber, because we can put one of our sound bites on Twitter and readily and immediately have the comfort of a bunch of replies saying “Amen”. We can put a post on our blog that outlines the truths we hold to be self evident as social media advocates, and we can be confident that there will be a trove of comments lauding us (or at the very least, merciful silence). But what good is any of that if we aren’t moving anything forward? What are we doing for those who are not yet sold on any of this?

Amber goes on to discuss some of the questions that need to be addressed to move things forward in a tangible manner and her full post is well worth a read (see here).

If you pop over there, you'll see quite a few interesting comments, including a couple that demonstrate the purist mindset that particularly thrives in the echo chamber and is in fact a big mpediment to making progress.

Buried in the thread somewhere are my own thoughts on the matter, but for your convenience, here they are cross posted from the original comment:

The biggest problem advocates have is the ‘magic bullet’ mindset. If you are a business leader or CIO, then the sound bites that get fired at you from the social media camp are just part of a constant stream of ‘magic’ propositions that hit you from IT vendors, management consultants, analysts, and, indeed, other advocacy groups such as the open source movement, cloud evangelists, etc.

Beyond this, there is a tendency for advocates to think far too generically, assuming that everyone has the same business problems and objectives, all weighted in the same way. This is not the real world. Culture, objectives, constraints, workforce composition, level of regulation, nature of IT landscape, etc, vary immensely between industries and organisation sizes, even between individual companies who might look very similar from the outside.

Against this background, it is impossible to generalise on the ‘actual’ impact of social media in business, not to mention the perceived relevance by business decision makers, as it is all so dependent on the environment. Adoption practicalities too are also dependent on context.

I picked up on one aspect of this recently, the cultural dimension, in a recent article I put together which discusses a snippet from a research study we conducted a few months ago (see here), but even that is only part of the equation.

The practicality of social media adoption, which is most productively considered alongside broader collaboration, BPM/workflow solutions, and emerging ideas in unified communications, is something we at Freeform Dynamics will be spending a lot more time on in 2009.

Meanwhile, I would urge social media enthusiasts to turn the telescope around and adopt a bit more humility. Enterprise 2.0 is just one part of a big complex set of things that’s going on in terms of business evolution, and it is important for advocates to get a handle on the bigger picture and understand where their ideas fit into the greater scheme of things.

Downturn perception versus reality?

2008-12-29T21:05:00.006Z

I am in two minds about the feedback we have received recently through our research which tells us that IT professionals are generally not predicting doom, gloom and/or panic as a result of the credit crunch and associated economic downturn. I have written a couple articles for The Register and Computing which summarise the sentiment we are picking up (see here and here), and the level-headedness is on face value very encouraging.

But I can’t shake this nagging thought that people are simply underestimating the degree to which their IT budgets are going to be hit. This is one of thoose situations that arise from time to time when the feedback we receive through surveys and other input does not sit well with your instincts as an analyst.

Then again, perhaps I am being unduly influenced by news reports of household names in the retail industry going under, and the general sentiment in the mainstream media and amongst financial analysts that 2009 is going to be really tough in most markets. The BBC today has been forecasting unemployment figures shooting up to near 3 million again in the UK over the coming 12 months, for example, with the service sector being hit particularly hard.

However bad it gets, though, the good thing is that IT departments, for the time being at least, still seem to have a little time and budget to prepare for the worst. This got Tony and I thinking about the kinds of things IT professionals could consider doing to put themselves and the companies they work for into the best position to manage things as efficiently and effectively as possible through the hard times that are likely to come.

As is the nature of these things, the more we talked, the more we could think of, and we ended up turning the whole discussion into a full 15 page report on the kinds of measures that could be considered, from the obvious infrastructure improvement stuff, through various ways of enabling the business itself to respond appropriately to increased economic pressure and uncertainty. We have also included some thoughts on one of Tony's particular domains of interest and expertise - alternative funding and financing options for IT investment - an often neglected area that could come into much sharper focus over the coming months.

Anyway, if you are interested in our thoughts and conclusions, the report is entitled “IT Delivery in the Downturn”, and, as per the usual drill, it can be downloaded free of charge from here.

The futility of challenging Apple perfection

2008-12-05T07:54:00.002Z

I know, I should get over it, but it does annoy me the way the Jobs faithful go on about everything being perfect in their world and Apple being able to do no wrong. Perhaps its age or maybe I have got some kind of genetic disorder that prevents me from ‘getting’ the whole Apple thing.

When I look at the Mac, all I see is a computer that uses exactly the same GUI paradigm as Windows PCs, just implemented a little differently, though not differently enough to pay a massive price premium for or to justify all of the hassle associated with switching and having to live with irritating compatibility issues. I then look at the iPhone and see a user interface design that has been deliberately dumbed-down and sacrifices efficiency for novice user simplicity, all powered by a handset with appalling battery life and inadequate external controls because the ‘slim and sleek’ look was prioritised above utility.

Now when I say these kinds of things, it is easy for me come across as ‘Apple bashing’, but in reality, my observations are simply made to challenge the notion that Apple is delivering stuff that is perfect and somehow more ‘special’ than other manufacturers, because it is not. Sure it has come up with some nice designs and implemented some original thinking in certain areas, but nowhere near as much as a player like IBM, for example, which has invested in and delivered serious innovation (as opposed to Apply style ‘nice touches’) for decades – there is no comparison here.

Where Apple is different is with respect to openness – or more accurately lack of it. The faithful point to tight integration between hardware, software and services as allowing Apple to optimise the user experience. Fair enough, and as massive BlackBerry fan myself, I am familiar with the advantages of an end-to-end proprietary solution. But such tight integration is a double-edged sword in that it can restrict choice and interoperability, which *should* be a major consideration for those considering Apple kit in a business context.

Anyway, fed up with feeling like the boy in the fairytale shouting “But the emperor’s wearing no clothes”, I snuck a cheeky little question about whether Apple or Microsoft can be considered more closed into one of our market tracker surveys to see what others thought. As it turns out, the majority of those who had an opinion identified Apple as the king of closed technology and the master of proprietary controlling behaviour. See here for some examples of what people came back with – lot’s of stuff Microsoft would get slated for big time if it tried to do the same things.

Meanwhile, at a personal level, having tried OS X for a couple of months, I thought it was alright, but my MacBook Pro now boots into Vista – not because I think it is better, but because it is simply more convenient and productive for the job I do. I wish I could say that my iPhone had been similarly repurposed, but it is pretty much just sitting there doing nothing at the moment. As a hard-core BlackBerry user, the iPhone looks like a clumsy prototype that is a total non-starter for my road-warrior type business requirements. I have even stopped using it for music as the user interface is nowhere near as quick and convenient as the navigation wheel on my iPod, which I have now gone back to.

But, having said all that, I have come to terms with the fact that I am not going to win these arguments. Apple somehow seems to have struck a chord with the masses and the elite, so I’ll just shut up from now on, accept my Apple blindness as personal affliction, and let them get on with it.

Change in leadership at Freeform Dynamics

2008-11-30T16:46:00.002Z

Looking back, the last seven years for me can be summed up by the phrase ‘rewarding but intense’. After picking up the then-struggling Quocirca back in 2001 and driving its development to a solid going concern, then founding Freeform Dynamics in 2005 and building one of the most well respected analyst boutiques in the industry, I have created a few jobs, helped a few individuals with their careers, and hopefully contributed to the greater good in lots of other worthwhile ways.

There comes a time, however, when it is right to look after yourself a little bit more, and for me, this translates to finding a way to focus more on my family, and my passion for being an analyst. With this in mind, I have therefore asked Jon Collins to take over from me as Managing Director of Freeform Dynamics, and I am pleased to say he has accepted.

So what prompted the move?

Well, as some of you may know, I was diagnosed with one of those ‘illnesses for life’ things over the summer, which tends to make you re-evaluate everything. Fortunately, while I was laid up in hospital for a period and Jon and Helen were covering for me, it became pretty obvious that Jon had some skills and experience that were ideal for taking Freeform Dynamics on to the next level of development. It was then that the seed was planted for the change in leadership.

As for me, I am going to assume the role of Research Director, alongside Martin Atherton, and the two of us will support Jon and Helen who together will be driving the company from an executive perspective. As Helen was a co-founder of Freeform and has driven the operational side of the business from day one, this gives us a really solid team at the top to maintain the positive momentum and steer us through 2009 and beyond.

So, it’s all looking pretty good for Freeform, and I hope you’ll join me in wishing Jon every success in his new role.

Catching up after an eventful summer

2008-10-23T08:00:00.003+01:00

I am never very impressed when people start up blogs, keep them going for a while, then the posts dry up. So, I am a little bit embarrassed that it has been three months since my last post here. In my defence, I did declare right at the beginning that this was an extracurricular activity and that the day job would have to take precedent. Nevertheless, apologies to anyone left out there with Open Reasoning on their watch list.

So what’s being going on that’s prevented me from posting here?

Well project fulfilment work for one thing. Demand for the kind of services we offer at Freeform Dynamics, with a focus on short, sharp high impact research studies and consulting engagements, seems to be growing, despite what’s going on with the economy. I wonder if this has to do with budget pressures driving a shift in emphasis from ongoing subscription services, which don’t necessarily deliver stuff in sync with business requirements, to procuring tailored services on demand that are designed to address an immediate need and have a more obvious and direct payback. Not sure, but it would make sense. It will also be interesting to see whether free research output plays more of a role over time.

In the meantime, I feel compelled to point out that I have actually been writing elsewhere – check out the site if you are interested. Indeed, with nine people in the research team now, there is a pretty steady stream of content coming out of the Freeform Dynamics camp, so if you haven’t subscribed to our site RSS feed yet, get onto that now!

I’ll just mention one last thing for the record. Quite a few people out there are aware that I was suffering a bit health-wise over the summer, spent a short time in hospital, and was ‘grounded’ for a while when I got out. So, I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for their support over that period and understanding when had to cancel meetings and events. I am pretty much fully back in the saddle now, though, so expect me out and about on the briefing and events circuit again pretty soon. I have a feeling the coming few months are going to be pretty interesting in lots of different ways.

The importance of the back channel

2008-07-15T21:50:00.002+01:00

Following recent discussions about the use of social media by analysts, I thought I would throw something into the mix that I has been referred to a couple of times but has not been particularly highlighted. This is the way the ‘public channel’ works in tandem with the ‘back channel’.

Consider, for example, that while it is obvious when a blog post or a tweet on Twitter sparks an open conversation in public, it is not so obvious when it prompts a private exchange via email, instant messaging, the telephone, or some other mechanism. Indeed, it is quite common in my experience for two related threads to be running in parallel, one in public and one in the private back channel. More commonly, however, the back channel exchanges are spin-off conversations that have their roots in the public discussion, but take it down a different route.

So why am I bothering to go on about this?

Well, it’s because I think it is easy to under-estimate the significance of some of the apparently casual social media exchanges that go on in public. The fact is that they are the tip of the iceberg. When I recently tweeted about a problem I was having with desktop software, there was very little in the way of public response, but it resulted in a briefing request, an offer of technical support, and couple of separate email conversations with others who had experienced similar issues – all of which contributed to the case for creating a new study in which we gathered feedback on the topic from a few thousand IT pros.

This is perhaps an extreme example, and it is more likely that back channel exchanges are used to compare notes and ideas on things you are already working on, or perhaps even to indulge in a little private gossip. Then, of course, it works the other way around. A private conversation can migrate into the public domain – which then prompts further back channel exchanges.

The point is that it is a mistake to think of social media in isolation. It is just part of the overall communication mix. And on a related note, we must not forget that the ability to converse in private is still an essential part of managing relationships and doing business.

A Bit of a Restructure

2008-06-13T09:24:00.001+01:00

It’s been very busy here recently at Freeform Dynamics. Josie’s new arrival, a number of new projects, and an increase in coverage have given us pause for thought – and as a result we’ve looked at how we are structured as a company, both to fit with our current commitments and to give us further room for growth moving forward.

So, we have organized ourselves into three loosely knit teams: a technology-oriented team and a people-oriented team (or as Dale has characterized them, the "geek squad" and the "peep squad") for research coverage, and Freeform Central to co-ordinate project activities. Let’s take a look at them.

The technology-oriented team comprises Tony Lock, Jon Collins and Martin Atherton. Tony will lead general infrastructure and its operational management – so, servers, storage and networking, virtualisation and provisioning, service management and security. Jon picks up the software side of things – think SOA, development, information and content management for example. And Martin’s remit is to consider how all of that aligns with the business in terms of governance and compliance, service delivery and so on. There are overlaps and fuzzy boundaries between all of these things, so the team will continue to work closely together and cover for each other but this should give you an indication of who should be the first port of call for each subject, and who should be copied in.

The people-oriented team is made up of Dale Vile, Josie Sephton and David Tebbutt. Dale will continue to look at IT strategy and the user experience, including desktop and mobility. Josie is our lead analyst on the service provider side, also taking a view on emerging markets. Finally, David Tebbutt covers collaboration, social networking and sustainability across both IT and the business. Again, there are clear cross-overs between these roles, and indeed between the two teams but it gives a starting point and helps us when it comes to tasking primary research activities.

Freeform Central will be led by Helen Vile and Martin Atherton, and supported by Dale Vile and Linsey Berry. The role of Freeform Central is to co-ordinate projects and provide shared research services across the team – though individuals will still be responsible for co-ordinating their own briefings and managing enquiries! This last bit is important – while we want to operate efficiently, we don’t want to put any barriers between our core audience and the team. Meanwhile, this will enable us to continue to build our corpus of research-based insight, which we are rapidly understanding is seen by our customers as our major differentiator. This will be expanded on in a future post.

We hope this makes sense – if you have any questions, please let us know. Onward and upward!

AR guys struggling with blogs

2008-06-01T20:53:00.003+01:00

There is an interesting post over here from Carter Lusher discussing the difficulties the AR community is encountering with the whole phenomenon of analysts blogging.

Carter lays out a segmentation model that might help with this, but I cannot help thinking that the approach is missing the point a little. I have been on record before as saying that while I blog, I do not define myself ‘Blogger’ with a capital ‘B’, and I am sure the same can be said of most other analysts that make use of blogs as just one medium through which they communicate.

To my mind, the AR people out there might do better figuring out which analysts matter to them, for whatever reason, from buyer influence to the insights they provide, then tracking all of their output (or at least that which is relevant to you) through whatever mechanism. Whether it is a firm branded blog, a personal blog, twitter, a column or article in a traditional publication, or more formal output driven out through research notes and reports, it shouldn’t really matter – monitoring should be analyst or firm centric rather than medium centric.

With a decent RSS reader, use of free aggregation services, and the relevant filters and watches in place, keeping tabs on most forms of electronic output nowadays should not be that big a deal – should it? There are even analyst blog and twitter directories that various people maintain, so you don’t even have to do the leg work to know who is publishing what and where.

Perhaps what is needed is AR training on some of the basic technology and techniques that can help to automate the monitoring process, or at least take a lot of the pain out of it.

Then again, I am not an AR person, so perhaps it is a lot harder than it looks from the outside.

New Freeformer added to team

2008-05-08T21:10:00.002+01:00

Freeform continues to expand with the addition of Josie Sephton, ex Ovum, to the team.

Josie will be covering the service provider space. See here for announcement.