Mike Vizard

When Exceptions Are the Business Process Rule

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:14:01 GMT

The biggest issue with business process management is not all the rules, but rather the exceptions. In fact, there can be so many exceptions that it’s a wonder that anybody can discern any rules at all.

And yet, that’s exactly what a new offering from Approva purports to do. Approva One adds a layer of control mechanisms over any given set of business processes. The software learns what individuals are responsible for any given process in the organizations. It then sends an alert to that individual or group of people any time it discovers an exception requirement in any given process.

The system also provides executive dashboards that help identify processes and tools for creating audit trails that make it easier to see who approved what set of decisions during any given process. The software also includes a set of templates that identify the most common exceptions associated with common business processes.

Given that any given business process typically spans any number of applications, Mike Evans, vice president of marketing for Approva, says the need for an independent layer of control to handle exceptions that is developed by a third-party vendor is critical to maintaining the integrity of a business process.

We’re on the cusp of a major shift away from thinking about processes in terms of packaged enterprise applications. But as that shift begins, we’re going to find that business processes are never as neat as we would like them to be. So the question is not whether we can eliminate all the exceptions, but rather resolve them as quickly as possible.

Enterprise Software Licensing Gets Cloudy

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:49:20 GMT

Software licensing has always been something more akin to an approximation rather than an exact science. The price companies usually paid for software was tied to the number of processors used. More recently, we’ve seen more interest in pricing based on the number of users or actual use of the software based on metering technology.

But by and large, most software vendors have been slow to evolve their pricing models, and with the advent of virtualization, multicore processors and cloud computing licensing negotiations are getting even more complex.

The result is that there is no standard approach to enterprise software licensing, which has resulted in a model where the cost of the software basically comes down to the negotiating skills of the customer. Wayne Federico, CIO and vice president of technical services for the IT consulting firm Miro Consulting, says that while companies such as Oracle may have worked out some terms for running their software on a specific cloud computing platform such as Amazon, the vast majority of the industry is taking an educated guess when it comes to licensing software the runs in virtual environments in the cloud.

Miro, which has developed an entire practice dedicated to handling software licensing in the cloud for clients, is seeing a lot more interest in moving more mission-critical applications that usually involve complex licensing agreements into the cloud. But Federico says it’s still early in the transition to the cloud. One of the things holding up that transition besides the maturity of cloud computing platforms, is that no one is sure what they are paying for just yet.

In the meantime, software vendors have been trying to require customers to prove they are compliant with the terms of their license when the customer moves the software from their premise to the cloud provider. That results in a lot of very granular negotiations between the customer, the software vendors and the cloud computing providers.

Unfortunately, Federico says he doesn’t expect any progress any time soon when it comes to creating standard sets of terms and conditions for cloud computing. The important thing to note right now is that the power definitely resides with the buyer and -- just as in the rest of life -- it’s not so much about what the price is as what you’re willing to pay.

GM Revamps Manufacturing Systems for the Volt

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:44:45 GMT

Sometimes the better part of valor is to just start over again.

General Motors appears to be taking that approach when it comes to setting up the manufacturing systems for its battery assembly operations for the new Chevrolet Volt that is due out in 2011.

As a car that sports a plug-in battery, the manufacture and assembly of those batteries is a fairly important component of the entire project. Previously, GM had a set of manufacturing systems optimized and customized for each manufacturing plant.

But with the design of the Volt, GM took the opportunity to adopt FlexNet manufacturing operations management software from Apriso to help manage not only the plant, but all the facilities tied to the plant.

Implemented by Hewlett-Packard, the basic idea is to give GM a unified view of all the manufacturing operations tied to the production of the Chevrolet Volt, said Sam Phillips, HP Enterprise Services business manager for the GM account.

Like most U.S. automobile makers, GM is trying to reinvent itself from within. But that approach can easily be applied to any number of manufacturing disciplines where untold numbers of companies are not as competitive on a global basis as they once were. Obviously, better IT systems are not the only issue at hand when it comes to global competition. But if you can’t see what you’re really doing in the first place, it’s kind of hard to assume that you’re doing it the best way possible.

Financial-Planning Applications as a Service

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:22:06 GMT

In the wake of a recent IBM survey of chief financial officers that found major gaps in the distribution and processing of financial information, Adaptive Planning CEO Bill Soward contends that the real issue might be the software.

Adaptive Planning, which provides a financial-planning application as a service, expects to sign up its 1,000th customer this year. Like IBM, Soward argues that the budget process needs to be more iterative and inclusive, given the current financial climate. In fact, Adaptive Planning just published its own survey of financial executives in which almost half said they expect to see another downturn before the economy fully recovers.

Soward says that when it comes to financial-planning software, most companies take the path of least resistance by relying on spreadsheets. But those applications are prone to inaccuracy and raise all kinds of compliance issues because many of them are based around custom macros that few people in the business actually understand.

A software-as-a-service approach, he argues, is inherently more transparent and collaborative. Soward adds that Adaptive Planning will be adding support for interfaces to link to other popular SaaS applications in the near future, and will also probably offer custom add-on applications for a variety of functions closely related to financial planning.

Given the lack of financial visibility that most companies exhibited in the recent downturn, Soward makes some salient points. The only real issue is that when it comes to putting sensitive data in any type of cloud computing scenario, financial people tend to be the most conservative. But given the need for tools that allow finance departments to be more closely aligned with the business, Soward is betting that more finance officers will soon overcome that reticence.

The Real Value of a Google Apps Marketplace

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:07:26 GMT

While all the buzz (pardon the pun) today is about the launch of the Google Apps marketplace, the launch of such an offering from Google is arguably overdue. After all, Apple pioneered to concept and now every software vendor on the planet is opening up some sort of online marketplace.

The Google marketplace is interesting because of the extent to which Google has opened and documents its application programming interfaces (APIs). This means that instead of just opening an online store where customers can find interesting third-party applications, Google is actually beginning to build a true IT ecosystem around Google Apps.

Examples of the benefits of this integration are already starting to abound. Box.net, for instance, offers a collaboration application as a service that allows Google Docs users to seamlessly store files in a service that includes the workflow and content management capabilities that most corporate customers expect to have. According to Jen Grant, Box.net vice president of marketing, the Box.Net service for Google Apps essentially provides many of the same capabilities that customers expect to see when using something like Microsoft SharePoint alongside Microsoft Office.

Another extension of the Google Apps environment comes in the form of a Syncplicity service that synchronizes files on mobile computing devices and Google Apps. Since launching the service early this year, Syncplicity CEO Leonard Chung says users of the service have synchronized more than 2 million files with Google Apps.

What’s different about the Google approach, adds Chung, is that the service basically allows end users to store any document in an format they want, and retrieve that information using any application format they choose. In contrast, the rival Microsoft Office Live service is basically a locked-down environment where one file format rules over all.

The other key attribute of the Google service is support for OAuth and OpenID, said Chung. This creates the opportunity to provide customers with single sign-on capabilities that can be extended across both Google applications and existing on-premise applications or other software-as-a-service offerings.

Ian Knox, senior director for product management at Skytap, a provider of cloud computing services, echoed the OpenID assessment. Skytap envisions customers hosting their enterprise applications on Skytap servers and then using Google Apps to access the data in those applications. To accomplish that, the Google environment needs to be as open as possible, he said.

With the launch of Google Apps Marketplace and the recent acquisition of DocVerse to add support for Microsoft Office documents, Google has begun to orchestrate the collective activities of an entire third-party application ecosystem that is effectively working together to isolate Microsoft in the cloud.

Simplifying Data Governance

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:21:15 GMT

While there’s general agreement that there is a much greater need for data governance, there’s not much agreement on the best way to go about it. A lot of that disagreement stems from the manual nature of first finding out who has access to what data and then managing that access on an ongoing basis.

Courion says it has solved that problem with the release of Access Assurance Suite 8.0. According to Todd Chambers, Courion chief marketing officer, this release integrates with data loss prevention (DLP) tools, security information event management (SIEM) tools and other sources of access control information to gain an understanding of which users have access to what types of data. It then takes that information and runs it through an analytics engine that Courion developed to identify what data is at risk and who has access to it.

Once an IT organization establishes that information, the Courion system is designed to allow customers to set policies that control which employees are allowed to access to what information once all the pertinent data is discovered.

Data governance is a thorny issue inside most IT organizations because while most IT organizations are nominally responsible for managing the data, they typically don’t know which employees should have access to what data, and perhaps most importantly, what data is the most sensitive.

In recent months, we’ve seen the emergence of a new class of data governance tools that allow IT organizations to manage data, while giving business users responsibility for actually delegating who has the right to access that information. But the missing link for many organizations has simply been finding a way to get started, which appears to be an issue that Courion is now finally addressing.

Cloud Computing Forces Data Governance Issue

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:43:57 GMT

With security positioned as the number-one issue holding back the adoption of cloud computing by luminaries such as RSA president Art Coviello in his recent RSA Conference 2010 keynote, there’s obviously a lot of gnashing of teeth over the relative security merits of cloud computing.

Some argue that cloud computing platforms provide greater levels of security because the systems are guarded by world-class experts. Others argue that it’s only a matter of time before we have a major security breach that results in hundreds, if not thousands, of customer accounts being compromised. This debate has led the Cloud Security Alliance to identify the top seven security threats to cloud computing.

But Tom Young, a partner and managing director for CIO services and infrastructure at the IT consulting firm TPI, cautions that we shouldn’t let hysteria govern our cloud computing emotions. The real issue is identifying the appropriate level of security for various types of data. Obviously, the most sensitive data should continue to reside on premise, but there is a host of information that companies routinely store that doesn’t need to be that secure. Like everything else in the land of IT, security in the cloud has to be evaluated against the risks and liabilities involved. That means that for the first time, many IT organizations are going to have to implement data governance policies that will ultimately decide where certain types of data are stored.

In addition, the long-term benefits of cloud computing services, when it comes to analytics, might further tilt the equation in favor of cloud computing. It won’t be long, says Young, before cloud computing providers offer analytics services that help identify underlying trends in a company’s data. IBM, for instance, is already moving in this direction.

Right now, says Young, there are two schools of cloud computing. One is led by relative enterprise IT newcomers such as Google and Amazon that have gained traction at the departmental and business-unit level. The other camp is led by IBM and Microsoft, which are campaigning for more strategic corporate cloud computing initiatives that are likely to be decided by a team of C-level executives. Which camp will ultimately dominate is still anybody’s guess, but as the cloud computing decision moves higher up in the organization, the more strategic the security question becomes.

New Crossbeam CEO Sees Wave of Security Consolidation

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:00:35 GMT

Crossbeam Systems, in the wake of the untimely passing of former CEO Peter Fiore, today named Mike Ruffolo, most recently CEO of Liquid Computing, as its new CEO.

Crossbeam makes an X-Series platform based on an architecture that has been specifically optimized to run security software. Security companies that have partnered with Crossbeam to deploy their software include Check Point, IBM, Imperva, Sourcefire, Trend Micro and Websense.

As IT organizations look to rein in security costs, many of them want to consolidate the number of systems they are running security software on. The Crossbeam platform allows them to run multiple security applications from different vendors on the same platform, thereby saving on the cost of deploying and managing dedicated hardware for each piece of security software.

Crossbeam’s biggest competitors are Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems, both of which are making a case for consolidating security software directly on top of routers and switches. Ruffolo argues that while there is much to be gain from consolidation, especially when it comes to energy costs and power consumption, performance requirements dictate that having a central security platform is the more efficient way to achieve that consolidation.

Ruffolo says that smaller organizations may still have a need for dedicated security appliance, but any large IT organization that is pursuing a defense-in-depth approach to security that involves multiple vendors is likely benefit from hardware consolidation that ultimately lowers costs and improves overall performance.

Free Windows 7 Training Raises Cost Issues

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:00:40 GMT

As part of an effort to help get more IT professionals trained on how to deploy and manage Windows 7, the folks at The Training Camp have partnered with Microsoft to make available one day of free hands-on training.

According to Sharon Lee, director of marketing for The Training Camp, the program is primarily aimed at IT professionals who are out of work or have no other means of upgrading their skills. There are six more sessions that will be held in the next few weeks in Los Angeles, Reston, Va., Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle and Irvine.

The free one-day courses are intended to give attendees a leg up on Windows 7, and the Training Camp hopes that attendees will move on to take either one of the three- or five-day classes that the company offers. The cost to attend those classes, which go for 12 hours a day, starts at $2,195 for the three-day class, which includes accommodations and a certification test, but no travel.

The availability of a free hands-on training class for Windows 7 brings up questions about the best way to train IT professionals on new products such as Windows 7. Obviously, there has been a massive movement to online training because of costs. But Lee argues that onsite training accomplishes a lot more in a much shorter period of time, especially when there is a test involved. The question is, who should pay for it? A lot of companies now think it is incumbent on IT professionals to find ways to pay for their own training in order to keep their skills current. Many IT professionals would argue that in the service of their company, it’s incumbent upon the company to pay to train them every time the company adopts a new technology. Companies, however, feel that a lot of that training goes to waste when the IT professional walks out the door to take another higher-paying job.

Others would argue that it is incumbent on the vendors to train the employees of the customer on how to use a product given the fact that they want the customer to buy the product in the first place.

As more companies get ready to make the move to Windows 7, at least one person in the company should be enough of an expert to help everybody else make the migration as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, you’re probably going to spend a lot of time on trial and error that will ultimately cost more in lost productivity than it would have to train someone.

Unfortunately, the current economic climate seems to be pushing more of the weight for the cost of IT training back on the IT staff, who risk losing their jobs if they don’t stay current on new technologies. The good news is that as the economy begins to improve, that training should put them in a position to benefit from demand for new IT skills.

Application Lifecycle Management Gets Agile

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:37:48 GMT

What started as a new application development methodology favored first by independent open source developers and then commercial packaged application vendors is now making its way into enterprise IT.

The fundamental concepts of agile computing development are not all that hard to grasp. Instead of developing components of an application sequentially, all the elements and processes associated with creating the application are done in parallel. Once the initial release is completed, subsequent updates are rapid, as opposed to the massive annual upgrade cycle previously associated with enterprise software.

This is all well and good, but legacy application lifecycle management (ALM) tools were not designed to manage an agile development process. This shift in application development paradigms has created opportunities for companies such as VersionOne, which today delivered an Ultimate Edition of its namesake ALM offering. This version of ALM adds analytics, an integrated environment for regression testing and free open source connectors for integrating with applications.

One of the reasons so many application development projects go awry, said VersionOne CEO Robert Holler, is that far too many IT organizations still rely on spreadsheets or sophisticated bug trackers to manage these projects. While agile development has a lot to offer in terms of speeding the overall process, it also results in a lot more parallel development that needs to closely monitored and tracked.

Agile development is not going to replace every other style of application development out there. But it is quickly becoming a major alternative approach that IT organizations are going to need to master in a world where every application is going to delivered as a service using some form of cloud computing or another. There are, of course, a number of vendors pushing into the ALM sector touting their agile development bonafides, including Collabnet, which just moved to acquire Danube. And IBM and Microsoft are both expected to extend their management platforms as they relate to agile software development.

So the real question isn't really whether most IT organizations will be embracing some form of agile development, but rather how.

Google Breaks Down Microsoft Office Door

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:00:09 GMT

Google is moving toward its goal of becoming a universal service for storing and managing documents by acquiring DocVerse, which allows users of Microsoft Office applications to share documents online.

The acquisition advances Google’s ambitions for document-sharing, not only on its own platform, but also for documents created using virtually any application.

Microsoft as well as other third-party online services allow sharing of Microsoft Office documents. But with Google expanding its service, soon every similar service will support document sharing across multiple types of applications. That, in effect, is converting what were previously software-as-a-service offerings into something more akin to a cloud computing platform.

These services soon will become part of the mainstream work experience, especially as the security frameworks around them become more robust. And as these service proliferate, the ability to share documents across multiple mobile computing devices, regardless of operating system, will become a lot easier as well.

Study Highlights Advances in Health Care IT

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:31:52 GMT

Check out research by HIMSS on spending priorities and electronic medical records adoption plans.

The annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference this week was the backdrop for the release of the society’s annual leadership study, which more than anything highlighted the impact that federal stimulus funding is having on IT priorities in the health care sector.

Demonstrating “meaningful use” of electronic health care records by next year is now the No. 1 IT priority of the 398 IT professionals surveyed. And while the term “meaningful use” is open to some interpretation under the federal guidelines, the survey shows that a significant number are serious about making the appropriate levels of investment required to digitize medical records.

Another major IT-related initiative related to federal stimulus spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is the creation of health information exchanges. Although participation in these types of projects is far from universal, more than one-third of the participants said they are in the process of building some form of exchange. Whether those exchanges will span multiple health care providers or simply implement automation for existing suppliers and distributors is unknown, but most people seem to be betting that cross-provider networks won't be developed soon.

Overall, the study indicates that progress is being made, but perhaps not at the pace that most politicians and taxpayers would like. At this rate, it's likely to be 2012 before investments in electronic health records begin to pay off, while it might take longer to see the effects of HIE deployments.

The good news is that improving patient care, versus achieving financial stability, is once again the primary business objective of most of the IT professionals surveyed. And a significant percentage of health care IT professionals report a decline in the number of security breaches they have experienced.

But as always, in the health care sector, budgets for IT systems remain a challenge. About three-quarters of those surveyed said their IT budgets and staffing for 2010 will increase significantly. But at the same time, almost one-quarter identified a lack of financial support as the No. 1 barrier to implementing IT.

Ballmer Bets Company on Cloud Computing

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:55:57 GMT

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a gathering of students at the University of Washington today that he is betting the company on cloud computing.

Given the nature of the audience, Ballmer dwelled heavily on describing the rudimentary elements of cloud computing. The most salient cloud computing statement he made was to claim that 75 percent of all Microsoft employees are working on some sort of computing computing related initiative; and that by this time next year that number would be 90 percent.

The heart of Microsoft’s cloud computing effort is Azure, which the company is about to kick off a 100-city tour to promote. According to Aziz Virani, executive vice president for global technologies and solutions for the IT services company Avanade, the ultimate winner when it comes to cloud computing will be defined first by the company that has the most popular and useful applications available in the cloud, and then secondly, the company that does the best job managing those application across hybrid clouds. Right now, he concedes, Google and Amazon may be the most “fashionable” names when it comes to cloud computing, but when it comes down to enterprise applications it will be a battle between Microsoft and other enterprise computing stalwarts such as IBM.

Virani said that despite all the hyperbole thrown around about cloud computing, hybrid environments where applications run on both shared and private cloud computing deployments will be the norm for years to come. As such, the companies that can manage those types of deployments have the best long-term strategic advantage. In terms of Microsoft, he added, it will be very hard for all but a few companies to match Microsoft in terms of breath and depth when it comes to cloud computing.

Avanade, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, has also created an off-shore factory to help customers migrate their applications to Microsoft’s Azure platform. But Virani cautions that cloud computing is a long-term trend, rather than a short-term event. Obviously, utilitarian applications such as electronic mail and backup and recovery will move the cloud first. But other more complex applications will have to be redesigned to leverage the best aspects of public and private cloud computing infrastructure. And that, he said, will take much longer to unfold than most people realize today.

Jitterbit Spars with Informatica over Salesforce.com Integration

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:06:31 GMT

First loading data into and then integrating applications with Salesforce.com has always been a source of annoyance for many IT organizations. The tools that Salesforce.com provides are not as robust as most IT organizations would like, yet the middleware offerings provided by vendors that specialize in this area can be overkill for what customers want to accomplish.

Jittebit today announced it plans to thread the needle when it comes to Salesforce.com integrations. The company launched Jitterbit Data Migration services for Salesforce.com customers based on its open source middleware software. According to Jitterbit CTO Ilan Sehayek, the service leverages Jitterbit’s simple-to-use middleware service that is easier for users to master than a rival on-premise offering from Informatica, while also providing a more robust architecture that can handle a lot more than Salesforce's 200-record limit.

Informatica takes some exceptions to Jitterbit's characterizations, especially when it comes to its recently launched Cloud 9 cloud computing service that includes support for Salesforce.com integration. Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager for Informatica Cloud says the cloud computing implementation has been specifically designed to be easy to use, which accounts for the popularity of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange platform for third-party applications. He also notes that unlike Jitterbit, the Informatica assumption is that no consulting services will be required and that the Informatica cloud computing service uses the same delivery model as Salesforce.com.

Papas also dismissed the Jitterbit pricing model, which seeks to charge customers based on the volume of data they are migrating and the length of time it takes them to do that. Jitterbit counters that this approach makes the tool more accessible for one-time use, and that it offers an enterprise license for its software.

If you con't plan to customize Salesforce.com in any way and plan to basically start fresh with it, your organization can be up and running pretty quickly. But any company of any size usually not only wants to customize Salesforce.com, t wants to bi-directionally integrate it with any number of enterprise applications. This is creating demand for Salesforce.com-centric middleware because many companies are finding that their most important information about their customers now resides in a service.

As IT organizations find themselves becoming the integrators of those services, there’s going to be a lot more call for middleware tools and services that enable that integration in the way that IT organizations feel most comfortable. Whether that will be relatively new players such as Jitterbit or one of the established kings of middleware remains to be seen. But the need for solutions to the problem is already upon us.

Modern Malware Versus Security Fatigue

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:58:06 GMT

View more results from our survey of midmarket IT leaders on their security concerns and spending plans.

The problem with modern malware is that is never behaves as expected. Although the security industry as whole is getting better about responding to known threats, new threats pop up all the time.

Take for instance the recent Aurora attacks on Google and other companies that exploited an unknown weakness. No amount of spending on traditional anti-malware software would make much difference in this instance.

According to FireEye chief security architect Marc Maiffret, these types of attacks are not particularly sophisticated. They simply discover an unknown weakness, then methodically exploit it. Maiffert says his company’s approach to security can defend against these types of threats because all application code coming into an enterprise is run on a virtual machine inside the FireEye Malware Protection System.

But acquiring those systems might not be all that high on the IT agenda. A recent survey of about 140 senior midmarket executives conducted by IT Business Edge found that only 38 percent plan to purchase, upgrade or replace security software within the next 12 months. This drop in priority for software solutions would suggest a combination of security fatigue and economic malaise. Some might argue that this indicates that IT organizations have confidence in their existing solutions. But whether that trust is well placed is another story.

As Maiffret points out, the bad guys just have to be right once. IT organizations, especially at the midmarket level, might not be premium security targets. But being lucky is never the same thing as being smart, and when it comes to security, we all know it’s only a matter of time before luck runs out.