Mike Vizard

The Trials of Telepresence

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:06:23 GMT

Conceptually, the value of telepresence systems from companies such as Cisco, Polycom and others is easy to comprehend. The challenge is finding the wherewithal to actually deploy it. According to Dane Martin, a principal consultant with the IT services firm Dimension Data, there are basically seven reasons that explain why more companies are not adopting telelpresence at a faster rate. They include:

They already have videoconferencing systems in place.
The cost of telepresence systems is too high.
They had a bad experience with video conferencing systems.
Their network infrastructure can’t meet the latency demands of telepresence.
They don’t have any video specialists on staff.
Telepresence systems create too much pressure from business users for the IT department.
IT organizations are not sure how much real usage there would be.

Of course, we can add to these issues interoperability and the fact that many companies are not sure if they want to acquire telepresence products or have it delivered to them as a service. And finally, nobody is quite sure where telepresence fits in among the pantheon of unified communications solutions.

None of this means that telepresence won’t become widespread. But while the technology definitely adds business value and has made significant strides in the last year, you can’t help but wonder if all these issues mean that mainstream adoption of telepresence is still a year away or more.

Open Source Comes to the Help Desk

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:41:36 GMT

There’s a fine line between being reactive versus proactive when it comes to end-user support that is going to greatly influence your approach to help desk software in the future.

If all you really need is a solid help desk application, then you should take note of OTRS, which most recently added a change management module that complies with version 3 of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) specification.

OTRS isn’t as feature rich as some help desk offerings, and the company is a long way from including advanced levels of IT automation that are designed to integrate proactive policy management within the context of a help desk system.

Built on top of the MySQL open source database, OTRS has most of what an IT organization expects from a help desk, according to company vice president Christopher Kuhn.

OTRS will probably create something of a disruption in the help desk space as it gains traction. But the best thing about it is that it makes help desk capabilities available to a broader array of IT organizations, while giving companies that already have help desk software installed a much lower cost option.

Like many open source vendors, OTRS expects to make money from selling support and a few add-on modules down the road. And if the concept gains traction, it might not be too long before systems management vendors in general are including interfaces that couple their tools to the open source help desk from OTRS.

The Rise of Hybrid Client Virtualization

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:06:14 GMT

Now that Microsoft has officially rolled out its desktop virtualization strategy, there is a lot more clarity in the world in terms of licensing and cost.

Of course, Microsoft wants customers to line up around its approach to desktop virtualization. But in reality, we’re going to not only see a lot more instances of hybrid desktop virtualization deployments involving thin clients, notebooks and desktops running different types of desktop virtualization software, but also servers running a mix of VMware, Microsoft and Citrix software.

This new-found diversity on the desktop may add complexity to the overall IT decision making process, but the potential benefits of desktop virtualization in terms of lower total costs should outweigh that. The choices include not only Microsoft, Citrix and VMware, but also companies such as Wanova, Wyse and Virtual Bridges.

Of course, there are still issues to be worked out. Namely, the performance of desktop virtualization solutions may not be everything we desire, and support for mobile devices ranging from smartphones to notebooks still needs to be worked on.

But as Jeff Groudan, director of client virtualization for Hewlett-Packard, notes, Microsoft’s long-awaited seal of approval for desktop virtualization will help to expand the overall market by simplifying licensing terms. And for many IT organizations, that is half the battle right there.

Knowledge Management Morphs into Collective Intelligence

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:21:35 GMT

The concept of trying to manage knowledge on a corporate level is hardly new. Knowledge management applications have been around in one form or another for years. The trouble was first getting people to populate the application and then actually distributing that information to the right people at the right time. Unfortunately, a lot of these applications die on the vine because after a while they become an exercise in managing knowledge for knowledge's sake.

But now we have the concept of collective intelligence, which seems to be a lot more focused on making sense of all the existing available information. For instance, Imaginatik recently released version 10 of its Idea Central platform that borrows a lot of the concepts associated with social media applications and applies them to the process of managing knowledge in the workplace.

But that’s only half the battle. According to Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell, the other half of the battle is to provide the back-end tools that make sense of the mass of information being collected. That means including text analytics, reporting tools, dashboards and communications applications that make it a lot easier to expose the big idea hidden behind a mass of conflicting data. As Turrell puts it, the process needs to have a discernable workflow that is complemented by the equivalent of a business intelligence application designed specifically for managing ideas.

In the not too distant future, Turrell said that Imaginatik will also add mobile phone support as these devices are rapidly becoming the primary tool for generating the initial communications around a specific idea or issue.

There are a lot of approaches to managing ideas and concepts. But when all is said and done, the reality for most companies today is that most of their intellectual capital is wasted for the want of a clear mechanism for sharing ideas and concepts. We may be calling that process collective intelligence these days, but in reality it still all comes back to finding an effective way to manage knowledge.

IBM Takes Customer Service to Another Level

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:06:29 GMT

Everyone can relate to this customer predicament. You need help with a particular product or service, but you wind up having to call customer service multiple times. Each time, however, you have to talk to somebody different. So each time, you have to explain the problem over again.

Wouldn’t it be nice if somehow the call center systems used by the customer service department knew it was you who was calling and automatically routed you to the representative that could best handle your call. That’s the promise of a Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP) that IBM has developed in conjunction with Assurant Solutions, a unit of the specialty insurance provider.

According to Toby Cook, practice leader for the analytics team at IBM, the software analyzes what a company knows about its customer, the performance history of the customer service representatives, and the previous interactions the customer has had with customer service representatives to determine where to route a call.

Cook says the application runs on an IBM Power 6 system, which now provides the kind of raw compute power needed to deliver this type of analytics in real time.
The software also takes into account how long a particular customer might want to wait to speak to a particular customer representative before routing the call elsewhere and the fatigue that might result from routing too many calls to the same customer service representative.

Companies can also expect to see a bump in sales by routing the best prospects for additional sales to the appropriate customer service representative, he added.
Customer service is activity that more often than not subtracts from the bottom line, so many companies are anxious about keeping customer service costs to a minimum. But at the same time, a happy customer is also more likely to buy additional products. The challenge is finding a way to accomplish both these goals at the same time.

Learning from Application Testing

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:04:19 GMT

When it comes to testing applications, IT organizations spend a lot of time going over the same old ground. This is because each set of testers basically starts from scratch. But many applications have the same basic features that need to be tested, and applications that get deployed in specific vertical industries have the same compliance issues to contend with.

With that in mind, Infosys Technologies has started leveraging its expertise in application testing to create pre-packaged testing systems that will allow the provider of testing services to get a head start on setting up the testing routines for many types of applications.

According to Aparna Sharma, head of client services, independent validation and testing services practice, Infosys Technologies, testing expertise is garnered from more than 7,300 full-time application testers.

Application testing, argues Sharma, should not be left to the internal application-development team, which is roughly equivalent to asking the fox to guard the henhouse.

While IT organizations look to jump-start IT projects as the economy begins to recover, testing is rapidly becoming an area ripe for outsourcing, given the need to use all internal resources to drive as many projects as possible. Furthermore, compliance requirements are becoming increasingly stringent, which makes application testing more critical than ever.

That means that the only real question about an application is not whether to do it, but rather how best to go about it.

Collaborative Application Development in the Cloud

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:54:25 GMT

With the formal rollout today of IBM’s cloud computing service for application developers, the nature and scope of application development projects in the enterprise is on the cusp of major change.

IBM is hardly the only provider of cloud computing services for application development in the cloud. But as these services become more widely available, the opportunity to create application development projects that span multiple IT organizations becomes a lot easier to manage. For example, PayPal is using the Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud service to collaborate with partners in the development of various new application development projects.

Building applications within the enterprise is hard enough. But getting multiple companies to collaborate on an application development project has been next to impossible to manage. The advent of cloud computing services for application development provides a much-needed framework for enabling the collaboration required to make those kinds of projects successful.

In addition, notes Drew Clark, director of strategy for the IBM Venture Capital Group, the rise of these services will make it less costly for IT organizations to create new applications, which should lead more projects. IBM, for instance, says customers typically apply 50 percent of their technology infrastructure to support application development, only to see it sit idle 90 percent of the time.

None of this means that the applications themselves need to run in the cloud. More likely, application workloads will be balanced across private and public cloud computing platforms. But anything that cuts the total cost of developing applications is a good thing. It should reduce application development backlogs while increasing the actual number of applications being developed, but also lead to new types of applications that span multiple business processes that are executed across a federated network of companies.

Capgemini to Bring SAP to the Cloud

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:29:12 GMT

As one of only two official resellers of SAP software, Capgemini has developed a tremendous amount of ERP expertise.

Now the IT services company, in partnership with its Sogeti subsidiary, is gearing up to take that expertise to the cloud with the launch of a Infostructure Transformation Services division that will help customers transform their internal systems to create private clouds.

As part of this push into cloud computing, Joe Coyle, vice president of information technology and services in North America, says one of the first orders of business for Capgemini when it comes to the cloud is deploying implementations of SAP software that have been optimized for specific vertical industries in the cloud.

Coyle says Capgemini is leveraging its relationship with SAP to create licensing options for cloud computing deployments that SAP has been previously hesitant to fully embrace for fear of what cloud computing might do to the company’s revenue and profits. Rather than buying software licenses, customers effectively rent software in the cloud on a monthly basis. A wholesale shift of the SAP business model to the cloud would have serious implications for SAP shareholders.

Nevertheless, SAP officials recognize how attractive cloud computing is to customers, so the company has signaled its willingness to work with Capgemini on cloud computing projects.

Coyle says that customers are taking an evolutionary approach to cloud computing that initially focuses on utility applications such as backup and recovery and temporary systems usually associated with application-development projects. But once customers become familiar with cloud computing and software vendors work out licensing issues, adoption of enterprise applications in the cloud will increase dramatically.

The Wisdom of Corporate Crowds

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:48:00 GMT

There’s a lot of relevant information flowing through any organization that never really surfaces in a timely or relevant way. But a new approach that leverages the concept of “crowdsourcing “ on the Web is now being applied within the walls of the enterprise.

SAP announced at its SAP GRC Insider Conference in Orlando that it is partnering with Crowdcast, a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that makes a game of asking employees what they think of the probability of certain events, such as whether a product will ship on time or if a new competitor will enter a certain market segment by a certain period of time.

According to Crowdcast CEO Mat Fogarty, this approach makes it easier for senior managers to identify potential risks to the business while also marshalling the collective intelligence of the employees. In addition, the Crowdcast application has the potential to boost employee morale while applying a bottom-up approach to managing corporate risk, added Ranga Bodla, SAP senior director for enterprise performance and governance, risk and compliance. That’s because employees are given points that they use to wager on certain outcomes, which provides some incentive to contribute their knowledge to the crowdsourcing initiative.

At the moment, SAP has no plans to integrate its applications directly with Crowdcast, but the company’s is highlighting Crowdcast on its EcoHub portal of third-party applications.

It remains to be seen whether crowdsourcing works as a tool within the enterprise as well as it seems to work on the Web for judging consumer sentiment. But given the usual gulf between the views of employees who deal with customers every day and senior management teams that spend their time looking at spreadsheets, chances are crowdsourcing might provide some interesting revelations.

The Need for Cloud Computing Brokers

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:26:14 GMT

As cloud computing evolves, it’s becoming clear that there will be just as much, if not more, incompatibility in the cloud as in on-premise applications today.

Cloud computing standards that might address these issues are both limited in scope and far from reality, making it apparent that there will be a major requirement for brokering services in the cloud.

One company that is positioning itself to provide those services is Unisys, which is building broker capabilities into its Converged Remote Infrastructure Management (CRIM) software, designed to provide a layer of management software that spans both public and private cloud computing platforms.

According to Brian Ott, Unisys vice president of global service, the broker service will manage all the APIs and service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations that make up various cloud computing platforms. It will give customers the higher level of abstraction they will need to create hybrid cloud computing services that will span multiple internal and external cloud computing platforms.

Ott says that rather than waiting for the big vendors to come up with interoperability specifications for cloud computing that will be of limited scope, customers should define their own cloud computing standards by embracing management frameworks that sit above the virtual and physical servers that cloud computing provider rely on. By doing so, he said, customers will be able to maintain control over the greatly expanded enterprise IT infrastructure.

Unisys is not the first vendor to broach the concept of a cloud computing broker. But as interest in cloud computing grows, it’s only a matter of time before customers need to broker application deployments across disparate sets of cloud computing infrastructure. The only question is whether they will try an bolt that layer of cloud computing management software on after the fact or design an internal cloud computing framework standard today that all providers should comply with if they really want your business.

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 not 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.