Interviews

The March of the Smartphone Continues

cweinsch@optonline.net — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:29:40 GMT

The dynamics in the cell phone sector continue to be interesting. In its latest Worldwide Mobile Phone tracker, IDC found that feature phones – which still are the largest subsector – are expanding at a slower pace, while smartphones are gaining ground much more quickly. Llamas told IT Business Edge blogger Carl Weinschenk that smartphones are the future, and vendors whose fortunes are tied to feature phones should introduced specialize units – such as those aimed at seniors – get on the smartphone bandwagon or both.

Carl Weinschenk spoke with Ramon Llamas, a senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team. He helped put together the company’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.

Weinschenk: Your recent work says that smartphones are on the rise, feature phones are shrinking, so the newer devices are a bigger piece of the pie then they were before.

Llamas: Smart phones are on the rise enough to offset the decrease of feature phones, whose halcyon days are behind. Smartphones are miniature computers.

Yes, you can do some things on feature phone that you do on a smartphone. But a smartphone is 10 times better, hands down. Let’s talk about the economics of it. Feature phones are much less expensive and the plans are less. It has economics behind it. Smartphone are much more expensive, though they are subsidized in some countries. The U.S. -- is one of places where they are subsidized -- and they have much more expensive data plan.

Weinschenk: But in the long run, the smartphones are more lucrative for everyone in the chain.

Llamas: They can extract more revenue. Companies in the U.S. are leading with the smartphone and the feature is behind. Go into an AT&T store in the U.S. and the first thing you see are smartphone. You have to go to the back for feature phones.

Feature phones are indeed shrinking. It’s kind of by design. Mobile phone companies with long histories in feature phones are more and more into smartphones. motorola is a good example. Sony Ericsson is another. The market is going to become more or even all smartphone oriented. Companies like Nokia, whose majority of businesses are in feature phones, are starting to see an inflection point. Smartphone sales [grow] year after year, and we are starting to see a slowdown in feature phone shipment growth.

Weinschenk: So the handwriting is on the wall.

Llamas: When you have the number one mobile phone vendor worldwide not selling as many feature phones as they used to, it makes it clear that things are not as they used to be. You can bet that everyone is watching, too. So, obviously smartphones have seen increases by users, operators and vendors. It is a top priority [for all three groups] in 20102 and, guess what, it was in 2011 as well.

Weinschenk: How far down does the transition go?

Llamas: What does this mean for tier 2 and tier 3 players that have been feature phone-centric all this time? There is a long list of vendors whose bread and butter has been feature phone voice-centric devices. It is almost like Darwinism in the business world, survival of the fittest. They need to get smartphones out there or focus on one particular niche of the market [with feature phones]. I would say something like prepaid service, along the lines of Virgin Mobile or MetroPCS or Tracefone…What these companies primarily do is feature phone prepaid services.

Weinschenk: What is another example of purpose-built feature phone?

Llamas: Samsung offers mobile phones for senior citizens. When you open it up, you have dial tone, it’s a little louder and you have easy-to-read buttons. Either you adapt or you focus on one area that you can exploit.

Weinschenk: Are companies introducing purpose-build smartphones as well?

Llamas: It is happening. For instance, a company is putting together mobile phones that are indestructible. They are aimed at companies whose workforce work in hazardous conditions, such as on top of poles. If they drop it, it won’t break.

Weinschenk: How big a role is Android playing in this transition?

Llamas: Android is a big big factor. If a lot of companies use it, people ask, “What is your point of differentiation?” You can license Android for free, but you still have to invest millions of dollars to customize it yourself. What really matters is the way in which you make yourself stand out. Is it defensible and exclusive area in which you can win out? Do you have a new way to experience social networks like Motorola has? What is going to be your approach?

Weinschenk: What is the challenge, and what should we watch for?

Llamas: The challenge to vendors is: “How do we do better than the next guy?” Look at Microsoft and the Windows Phone. Nokia is supporting it. That’s huge. My take is to keep a close eye on what Microsoft and Nokia are doing together. I tried their first phone and, you know what? It’s really good.

Watch Blackberry, too. Its name has been dragged around quite a bit, there was an executive shuffle and the new operating system launch has been dragged out. That’s a gift wrapped present to the competition. By the time it comes out there are huge expectations. It can’t just be keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak. [The market will be] hoping it is radical compared to what they had before and what is available anywhere.

Weinschenk: Another trend that has to be mentioned is Bring Your Own Device to Work, or BYOD.

Llamas: The general thinking is yes, a lot of people want to bring in their own smartphone to work. But just because I have a smartphone doesn’t mean I can always hook it up to the company. A lot of IT departments say outside devices have to play by our rules. The number one concern is security. They don’t want something that would unleash a virus or, if it is lost or stolen, company secrets would be lost. Security is a huge issue in the BYOD trend.

Weinschenk: What companies will benefit because of BYOD?

Llamas: BlackBerry does a great job and Apple is making headway. A lot of Android players need to say how they will take the experience that is so consumer-centric and make it more appealing to the enterprise.

Even though Google is hoping to answer that question, enterprise features really are up to vendors to put together. It is not just the features but a whole suite of solutions that will make that device approved by IT managers.

Weinschenk: So the level of enterprise support is not determined at the OS level?

Llamas: There are some enterprise features in the OS. Companies that use Android will need to introduce a long list of solutions, such as remote wipe and MDM. It is contingent on the device manufacturer, not so much on the operating system. The OS is going to be responsible for running the device and how it interacts with the enterprise systems. That’s another story entirely. It enables certain features. Coming up with a whole solution is the vendor’s job.

Weinschenk: Do you see the current trend lines regarding smartphones and feature phones continuing?

Llamas: I think it is going to, but at a decreasing rate. To pick a number, if there has been 75 percent year-over-year growth for three years straight, I don’t see that continuing. But even if it goes from 75 percent to 40 percent, that’s pretty darn good. Find me a sector in this day and age and in this economy that does that.

Cleaning the WAN of 'Dirty Data'

acole602@msn.com — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:56:26 GMT

Arthur Cole spoke with Jean-Paul Bergeaux, CTO, SwishData.

It's fair to say that the cloud pushes the concept of distributed computing to a whole new level. With resources located not just across the data center but across the globe, wide area networks are coming under increasing pressure to maintain data and application performance on par with local networks. Companies like SwishData are bringing new tools to the fight against WAN latency and bottlenecks, as the company's Jean-Paul Bergeaux explains.

“... it must be said that even without the classic WAN that needs a performance boost, network optimization tools can still significantly improve an enterprise’s performance depending on the infrastructure design, applications and usage.”

Jean-Paul Bergeaux: CTO
SwishData

Cole: Now that the cloud has upped the ante as far as distributed computing goes, many enterprises are taking a hard look at their wide area infrastructure. How does WAN optimization need to change to accommodate the new data landscape?

Bergeaux: There really are two worlds in the cloud: the internal and external clouds. Mature WAN optimization products are already in a good position to take advantage of these shifts in the IT landscape to an internal cloud. To make sure they are firmly in place to take advantage of the external clouds, WAN optimization companies need to have a tie-in to the distribution networks that bring cloud products to customers.

Cole: Your solution aims to clean up "dirty data" on the WAN. What does that mean?

Bergeaux: Applications and solutions in today’s IT data centers tend not to be designed to be light on the network in the same way that app designers in the past tended to take as much of the CPU and memory they could get. Think of it as "bloated code," just for the network instead of internal computer resources. This results in not just un-optimized data packets, but chatty network connections that unnecessarily cause many more round-trip communications on the network. Mature network optimization tools help to streamline that bloat and excessive chattiness on the network to get better performance and better network utilization.

Cole: Should enterprises start to view the WAN as the new LAN, not so much a data conduit to branch offices but as an application delivery platform?

Bergeaux: It fully depends on the enterprise. Some do not have users that are a great distance or with small WAN bandwidth connections to the data centers. But those types of enterprises are becoming less and less common, especially as telework and remote/mobile users become more prevalent. However, it must be said that even without the classic WAN that needs a performance boost, network optimization tools can still significantly improve an enterprise’s performance depending on the infrastructure design, applications and usage.

DCIM: Bridging Facility and Data Infrastructure

acole602@msn.com — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:01:09 GMT

Arthur Cole spoke with Henrik Leerberg, product line director for data center software, and Anthony DeSpirito, vice president of global alliances, Schneider Electric.

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is all about balance. Through careful coordination of both facility, mainly power, and data infrastructure, organizations will be better able to match consumption with workload levels. To do that, however, requires a high degree of integration between the platforms that have traditionally governed these separate spheres. Schneider Electric's Henrik Leerberg and Anthony DeSpirito explain how it all comes together.

“The best way to ensure transparency and insight into multi-vendor data centers would be to first of all work with a DCIM platform that truly supports multi-vendor devices and equipment.”

Henrik Leerberg: Product Line Director
Schneider Electric

Cole: DCIM is primarily tasked with building synergy between facilities management and data management. What kind of efficiencies can enterprises expect with these two elements in sync?

Leerberg: Data center facilities and data center IT have basically the same objective — to ensure uptime and deliver on set service-level agreements (SLAs). One side really cannot exist without the other, thus bridging the two groups seems natural. Taking one step further, if one group understands the other group's capacities and requirements, then balancing supply and demand in the entire data center results in significant efficiency gains across the two domains. Companies are then moving toward holistic optimization rather than sub-optimizing in one corner of the data center.

Cole: One of the most significant challenges in deploying a DCIM platform is ensuring visibility of multi-vendor environments? What is the best approach to ensure administrators are getting an accurate picture of their data environment?

Leerberg: The best way to ensure transparency and insight into multi-vendor data centers would be to first of all work with a DCIM platform that truly supports multi-vendor devices and equipment. These systems/platform will normalize how various models of devices are viewed further up the value chain by abstracting away the individuality. This ensures clean and comparable environments that help and guide administrators to make informed decisions despite the use of multi-vendor equipment across their data centers.

Cole: Schneider has forged close ties with Cisco's EnergyWise platform. What are the advantages of aligning with a predominantly networking company as opposed to a traditional platform provider like IBM or HP?

DeSpirito: As the leader in infrastructure solutions, it is incumbent upon Schneider Electric to ensure that our customers have access to the appropriate energy-efficient and energy-management solutions. Our recently deepened relationship with Cisco is another step in providing our customers with these solutions. The alliance between Schneider Electric and IBM has been in effect for well over a decade and IBM customers can take advantage of our energy and data center management solutions through their Tivoli platform. Structureware Central has been integrated though Tivoli's Active Energy Manager for over 5 years and IBM's 8,000-plus Tivoli customers have access and control over their infrastructure efficiency information.

Even for the Compliant, IPv6 Transition Could Hold Surprises

cweinsch@optonline.net — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:06:06 GMT

Carl Weinschenk spoke with Rob Fleischman, CTO of Xercole, about the transition to IPv6.

The transition to IPv6 — the next generation of Internet addressing — is a monstrously complex undertaking. Even if service providers make the suggested software upgrades, challenges will persist. Rob Fleischman, the CTO of search guide provider Xercole, pointed to one such issue. He told IT Business Edge blogger Carl Weinschenk that the process for assigning addresses to users will fundamentally change. This, he said, will make the important task of reverse lookups far more difficult.

“The issue with DNS relates to the fact that that company may have hardware and software that is IPv6-compliant, but that does not deal with how [those elements] work together and how to deploy your network.”

Rob Fleischman: CTO
Xercole

Weinschenk: What is the background of the challenge to the Domain Name Service?

Fleischman: One of the first times in 10 years that folks who run DNS or deal with connectivity have had a real major change. DNS is the domain name service that translates names into data. In most cases, it takes an address, such as www.google.com, and turns it into an IP address. The thing that most people talk about in relation to IPv6 is that it makes the address space much larger. Currently IPv4 has a 32-bit address space, which creates 4 billion address spaces. That sounds like a lot, but it is not when you think of the number of devices out there. IPv6 has 128-bits, which creates a staggeringly large number of addresses — trillions and trillions.

The issue with DNS relates to the fact that that company may have hardware and software that is IPv6-compliant, but that does not deal with how [those elements] work together and how to deploy your network.

Weinschenk: For example …

Fleischman: We talk about forward and reverse names. When you go online today you are given an IP address by your carrier. Say you are a customer of Cablevision in New York and you power up your computer. Under IPv4, the modem is given an IP address. In IPv6-land, however, that is not really the case. When you power up using an IPv6 provider, the carrier needs information from the equipment. They combine it with information that they have to create an IPv6 address.

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Modeling Standard Connects Dots Between Architecture and Business

loraine.lawson@gmail.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:09:11 GMT

The Open Group recently released an update to the enterprise architecture modeling standard, ArchiMate 2.0. What's new about it is that it aligns with TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM), a shift that makes the modeling language easier to use in terms of aligning what architects do with what the business wants. Marc Lankhorst, a principal advisor with Novay and an enterprise architect who served as project leader for the development of ArchiMate, explains to IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson why this matters and what ArchiMate can do to help organizations with silos and integration.

Lawson: Explain ArchiMate for me and your work with it?

Lankhorst: I was the project leader for the development of ArchiMate, with a number of partners from industry and academia. Initially, we developed a language with the goal to help architects create architecture models, like UML is used for software modeling. So the idea was to have a language that’s universal for all architects and helps them to share information without always having the architect present to explain his models.

You're surely familiar with the boxes and lines type of "PowerPoint architecture," and you always have to ask, what is this box and what does this line mean. The goal of ArchiMate was to clarify this, to make sure that you have a standard way of expressing architecture. There's quite a similarity already in the design of ArchiMate and TOGAF because we looked at the structure of TOGAF with its three layers of business systems architecture, information systems architecture and technology architecture, and ArchiMate has a similar three-layer structure, which you'll find in many architecture modeling and design methods. So there was quite a similarity there, but we only covered the core architecture of business and IT systems themselves, so the description of what the organization does is in terms of its processes, in terms of its applications, its infrastructure, but not yet the motivation behind what you do as an organization to get these things running.

The language itself, which was originally developed just to describe these architecture as design artifacts, has now been extended to cover the entire architecture development method (ADM) of TOGAF. Now we have the language to include the motivation behind it -- the stakeholders, the drivers, the goals and the requirements. The language has concepts for modeling those and it also has concepts for modeling projects, deliverables, plateaus, gaps, to also describe how you get from A to B. That's the important change from version one to version two.

It's also driven by what we see in industry, that architecture increasingly has a role in linking business strategy to operations. It's not merely a matter of designing applications. Increasingly organizations are using this to really show how they make their strategy more actionable and get it running in real life and not just on paper.

Lawson: Why was it important to bring the modeling into alignment with TOGAF?

Lankhorst: The main reason is that TOGAF in the process defines a number of artifacts that have to be produced. So TOGAF has a method, and defines which artifacts you want produced as an architect and, of course, if you use models to describe these artifacts, it's useful to have your method aligned with your modeling language. If you look at the concepts in the ArchiMate language version 2, I would say pretty much all of the artifacts defined by the TOGAF method can be expressed in these concepts. So you have the right concepts for describing your architecture deliverables, not only the set of designs of the architecture itself, but also the reasons behind it and the planning behind it; it can all rely on these architecture models. And the idea is, if you have a model that's coherent and binds everything together, then you can do all kinds of analysis, impact of change analysis, looking at where to implement certain requirements, what's the requirements’ coverage, do I support my important business goals, do I have a conflict between different projects?

Lawson: Can you speak to how this might help companies deal with silos and integration?

Lankhorst: One important aspect is the language. If you look at the design of ArchiMate version 1.0, it's very much focused on services. And it's not just services, in a technical sense - so Web services -- the service concept is really central to the design of the language because that gives you a clean way of expressing how different parts of your architecture relate to each other without having to look at the implementation details of the application. You can really state what it offers to its environment.

We use the service concepts not only to describe the externally visible functionality of applications but also at the business level. A service is a business thing in essence; it's something you offer as a company to your customers, for example. And we use it at the infrastructure level. So the focus of ArchiMate itself is already focused on integration, initially mostly on these vertical integrations between your processes, your applications and your technology. But we also apply it in many cases in horizontal integration to model how applications relate to each other.

Since we're talking about enterprise architecture, it's not about the details of the technical interface between applications but it's much more on a business level of what this application offers in terms of services that are of business relevance and how you link that to other applications. So it certainly won't resolve the problem of integrating application landscapes, just by having these concepts, but it gives you insight into what these structures are and where you might want to link stuff or to separate stuff.

Lawson: Does doing a model help people identify integration problems? How does a model work for enterprise architects?

Lankhorst: These concepts force you to think about certain aspects of your application architecture. What I see in my consulting practice is that many architects are focused on the technical details of these applications and they see, "Oh we have all these interfaces and it's too complicated and it's linked to everything else," but they lack the means for expressing this at a slightly higher level and extracting from the technical details and focusing on the essence of the problem.

If you look at the applications at a detailed level of abstraction, you don't see the functional overlaps that easily and you don't see what can be the problem in terms of their services. So in rationalizing an application landscape, I also encounter in my consulting practice that organizations first need to step back from the technical details of their architecture to see what the applications do in essence and what their similarities are, which is much more on a functional level than on a technical level. The right concepts to express what kind of services an application offers to its environment can help you in identifying these overlaps, the similarities, the dissimilarities, maybe the gaps even. So that's one way of using it for integration purposes.

Lawson: Is this also packaged as a software? Are there competing tools?

Lankhorst: There are a lot of different tools for ArchiMate. I know of at least 10 commercial tools and several open source tools. So it's used by many vendors in their architecture tools and that's rapidly increasing.

As a language, I would say there's not really competition because there's no other standard in this same area. There are some tools of course that have vendor-specific ways of modeling architecture and you can see them as competitors. One of the main reasons of developing ArchiMate originally is our customers said we don't want to have a vendor-specific solution because then we can only buy their tools, hire their consultants, get their trainers, etc. So, I would say that as an independent language, as an open standard, there is no competition at the moment. Maybe in some limited areas people are using the UML for some of these purposes, but that's targeted at quite a different kind of use.

Using a Rules Engine to Manage Integration Behind the Scenes

loraine.lawson@gmail.com — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:39:06 GMT

Information Management recently identified five stand-out companies for its 2011 Innovative Solutions Awards. Pegasystems was recognized in the category of BPM. Russell Keziere, Pegasystems' senior director of corporate marketing, explains how customers use Pegasystems to manage business rules and integration behind the scenes, whether you're dealing with airplanes or insurance.

“Pega's approach is to take the rules that govern when and where to get data and how to get data and it creates an abstraction of the data sources so that the rules engine can mediate between one data source and another. We've created a monitoring system that can anticipate and predict slowdowns and access to data.”

Russell Keziere: Senior Director, Corporate Marketing
Pegasystems

Lawson: I understand Pegasystems was a crucial part of the Farmers Insurance Hero project. Can you talk about how your system played into that project?

Keziere: The biggest problem I have with Pegasystems is we have all these Fortune 500 companies using the software, but because business people take our software and specialize it for their needs, they never call it Pega. It always becomes something that they've branded themselves. At least when they buy Oracle, they know they're using Oracle. Our software is customer-centric, so customers take the software and make it their own. We like it that way but we do kind of feel like we're a Mercedes Benz with the hood ornament snapped off with a body that morphs to reflect the personality of each individual driver. It's a problem for brand marketing.

As our founder and CEO Alan Trefler said, it took 26 years of complete-from-scratch rewrites to finally get it right. When we came out with our fourth-generation software, we knew we were onto something. The genius of this software was a vision Allen had after being berated by one of his customers — it was Citibank at the time. He had this vision that business software is never going to keep up with the business. We need to make a software environment that the business can own and change in real time. Once he got it right, the company hit that $100 million plateau, began to grow and it compounded at about 30 percent a year. It's had strong growth right through the worst of the financial meltdown in 2008 and 2009; we've reported to Wall Street that we will see the half a billion dollars next — despite investments in Websphere and Netweaver and Infusion.

Lawson: Do you consider yourself BPM then?

Keziere: Yes, but we're also CRM for customer service and for marketing and for sales.

There are a lot of parallels to BPM but to a certain extent. No one goes to BPM to build all their applications for the enterprise. While we do everything that BPM does, people are using us to do other things as well, and that is to create this dynamic business application layer that is meeting a need for enterprises like Farmers. So really what folks do is they use us to rapidly develop business applications then iterate and improve them, and empower the business people and the people on the front lines of the business to suggest ways to improve the software and the solution for the customers.

We're a global company now, 2,000 employees. We recognize that we've got a lot of competitive challenges because there are these big giants around us. But when people who have a choice between upgrading their SAP or getting an application from Oracle, and they tend to use us instead, we think that the market is telling us that we're onto something that could change the way software's being developed in these enterprises.

Lawson: To what extent does your technology handle or intersect with integration?

Keziere: Every single one of our customers uses Pega to integrate into multiple different systems, but the difference between our approach to integration and an enterprise application integration approach is that we use our artificial intelligent rules engine to manage the integration problem. I'll give you a couple of examples of how we do that.

One of the big problems in the service-oriented architecture world is maintaining the health of a composite application that is feeding data to and from multiple data sources. Frequently, because you are depending upon being able to put data into and take data out of these sources, things can go wrong on the backend or things can change and that can affect the health of the composite application that you're trying to introduce. Pega's approach is to take the rules that govern when and where to get data and how to get data and it creates an abstraction of the data sources so that the rules engine can mediate between one data source and another. We've created a monitoring system that can anticipate and predict slowdowns and access to data. It can help diagnose potential incoming depredations in the system or problems and even pinpoint the exact data source and help you diagnose the fact that someone came in there and messed with procedures on the Oracle database that you're relying on. But we do so in the way that protects the health of the ongoing composite application.

So using rules-driven integration is a unique approach because you have specific problems such as semantic mapping of data. With a rules engine, you're able to maintain with persistence a REST-ful (to use a technology term) for these complex business objects. That's a lot of techno-babble, but what it means is you've got a job to do that goes across multiple different silos and multiple different data services and Pega needs to get that job done regardless if someone has monkeyed with a SQL statement or some BPM/DBA guy has decided this field should be called "X" versus "Y." When you deal with mergers and acquisitions, you have two or three organizations coming together and you're providing a bridge that can help them come together. You really want a smart, process-centric approach to data integration to manage that. That's one great thing that we do.

The other thing that we do is work with Big Data. If you look at our predictive analytics engine, we can look at massive amounts of data that come from outside your traditional database sources. Those can come from sales data, syndicated market research, customer segmentation data or even physical plant asset management event data.

One example is a customer that does medical devices. It monitors literally hundreds of thousands of events on a daily basis from medical monitoring equipment and it senses response patterns and issues alerts. It uses Pega to communicate back to a person.

The British Airport Authority monitors all the different variables in landing a plane and launching a plane out of UK airspace. They use us to correlate those events and respond to the data in much the same way that we analyze the health of a composite application with processing multiple silos and databases, but in this case you're dealing with weather, you're dealing with events that could come up like a volcano in Iceland or a hijacking or merely a pilot who missed his train and won't be there for the 8 p.m. takeoff to Amsterdam at terminal 5. All of those events can have an impact on the experience of the traveler, so Pegasystems is there to correlate these events, analyze them, make a good recommendation to optimize and resolve the situation, sometimes before the managers even know that they have a problem — which is what you want technology to do. Self-heal, identify, predict and anticipate, with predictive analytics, whether you're talking about optimizing a sales process or optimizing what the next best action is for an engagement with your customer.

'You Know You're an e-Hoarder If ...'

acole602@msn.com — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:21:09 GMT

Arthur Cole spoke with Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio.

Big Data is often described as a problem imposed on the enterprises by forces beyond its control. However, the fact is that most data loads consist of multiple duplicates of a relatively small core data set. The problem, as Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh describes it, is that it is usually easier to throw more resources at the problem than attack it from a management perspective. The result is that most organizations have become "e-hoarders" without realizing that a more simple, elegant solution is available.

“The truth is, most companies are e-hoarders, but they do so out of necessity. In order to provide basic IT functions and a level of data protection that business requirements demand, they’ve had very few options to avoid it.”

Ash Ashutosh: CEO
Actifio

Cole: Big Data is synonymous with big problems at many enterprises. What are some of the key ways data management has to change to meet Big Data requirements?

Ashutosh: At the core of Big Data is the fact that much of this is either duplicated data or synthesized data. Take the case of an organization managing 2 PB of data in an SAP environment. Looking under the covers, we find that there really is only 111 TB of database and 18 copies of this database, 16 of which are being used for test and development and two for instant restore in the event of database failure. Today, for every piece of data created, there can be up to 12 replicas stored in various places. Additional copies are made for tasks such as backup, global replication, disaster recovery, data analysis, test and development, and many other functions. The typical approach to managing Big Data has been to throw Big Hardware at the problem: scale-out, scale-up, and every other means of deploying more CPU, storage and networking at the problem.

It is time to have Big Data meet Smarter Data Management. The first step to managing Big Data is to bring the data down to its unique data set and reduce the amount of data to be managed. This requires an application-centric approach to managing data. Next is to virtualize this unique data set so that not only can multiple applications reuse the same data footprint, but also the smaller data footprint can be stored on any vendor-independent storage device.

Virtualization is a core technology behind PAS (Protection and Availability Storage), a new class of storage which condenses multiple data management tasks into a single use case. By reducing the data footprint, virtualizing the reuse and storage of the data and centralizing management of the data set, Big Data is transformed into small data and managed like virtual data.

Since the data footprint is smaller, multiple aspects of management are improved. Less time is required by applications to process data, and data can be better secured since the management is centralized, even though the access is distributed. And since all copies of data are visible, results of data analysis are more accurate.

The smarter data management approach of Actifio PAS allows Big Data to be better backed up, easily recoverable and accessible at over 90 percent lower cost. As a result, companies have reduced storage costs by 10x, saved thousands of dollars in tape management and lowered bandwidth by up to 70 percent, all while freeing up IT staff to drive more strategic initiatives beyond data management.

Cole: You've talked about "e-hoarding." If this anything like the hoarding on reality TV, the hoarder is always the last to know they have a problem? How can enterprises tell if it is an e-hoarder or not?

Ashutosh: There’s an old comedy routine — “you know you’re ‘blank’ if …” Here’s the e-hoarding version. You know you’re an e-hoarding if you:

Consistently ask for more budget to pay for SAN upgrades;
Have so much data that an entire weekend doesn’t give you enough time make a backup copy;
Have volumes of tape that are so old you’re not even sure you could still access the data on them;
Spend more time thinking about how to manage data than you do planning strategic initiatives that could really impact your company’s performance.

Despite the cute delivery, this really is no laughing matter for the IT industry. I’d be surprised if any company with sizable IT needs did not face one – if not all – of these challenges. The truth is, most companies are e-hoarders, but they do so out of necessity. In order to provide basic IT functions and a level of data protection that business requirements demand, they’ve had very few options to avoid it. They’ve been at the mercy of a storage industry that continues to roll out a patchwork of solutions in an attempt to address today’s challenges when they really need to forget about the past and completely start over.

Cole: Some CIOs fear that too much data management and analytics will hamper system response times by consuming too many resources. How can management stacks perform their function without interfering with normal operations?

Ashutosh: The key is virtualization. The amount of data that companies create and store is largely exacerbated by the need to create copies. In fact, the cost of managing and maintaining copy data can be more than five times the cost of managing and maintaining production data.

Virtualization can eliminate the need for copy data and create a model where each piece of data is stored just once and backed up just once. Virtual copies of that data can be called upon by any business application at any time. As a result, companies will require less storage space, less processing power, and less bandwidth, reclaiming their IT infrastructure that has been stretched to the limit for too long.

Standards Coming to M2M

cweinsch@optonline.net — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:40:44 GMT

Carl Weinschenk spoke with Cheryl Blum, the vice president of technology and standards for the Telecommunications Industry Association.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is as broad and diverse as it is promising. The problem is that it is just as diffuse and chaotic. The Telecommunications Industry Association, in conjunction with organizations worldwide, is trying remedy this with a set of standards. Blum told IT Business Edge blogger Carl Weinschenk that the keys are to not reinvent the wheel and to get solicit involvement from each vertical that will use the standard.

“We definitely need input from all the verticals in terms of such things as the frequency of transmission, how much delay they can tolerate. We have to look at all those different things and ensure that we can support those requirements. The biggest thing is that they need to be at the table.”

Cheryl Blum: VP of Technology and Standards
Telecommunications Industry Association

Weinschenk: What is TIA doing?

Blum: Several standards development organizations have been meeting since July of last year to determine if some consolidation is possible on a specific aspect of M2M. M2M is huge. Many different things can fall under it. What we are looking at is consolidation work on what is called the service layer.

If all of these organizations go their own way, it may add some confusion. So [standards] help companies in terms of resources. That’s secondary. [Primarily] it avoids confusion, overlap of work and maybe duplication. It brings uniformity and commonality to this market on a global scale. It might lower some of your operating costs, capex, cut the time to market.

Weinschenk: What is that?

Blum: The service layer provides a mechanism or a way to allow different vertical industries and business domains — health care, smart energy, intelligent transport, industrial automation and others to be able to communicate with each other over various networks and with various applications. It is communications in horizontal manner, in a very secure manner, with high quality of service. It would include how you manage data information coming from sensors meters and other sources. It includes the ordering, the sequencing, the requests and the data transmission from all these users.

The idea is to know where data is going, to make sure it gets there in a secure manner and with good QoS and maybe even use a priority scheme that perhaps says that information for health care is more important than reading a meter.

Weinschenk: There must be a good deal of data out there already on such issues.

Blum: There is work in place in many standards organizations, including the seven in the press release. Many others are looking at M2M, including the ISO, ITU, IEEE and others. Even in the verticals there are organizations looking at M2M. Some have probably developed proprietary mechanisms for their specific industries. Part of what we are doing is working with those groups. If someone wants to provide products across all the industries they would have to deal with all those silos.

We are trying to take information and cut across all of the industries in a horizontal manner and provide a mechanism that would support all these industries.

Weinschenk: So the input of organizations representing the verticals would be welcome.

Blum: The idea is to invite those verticals to the table. We don’t want to do it without them. They have work done already. We will ask, "What are your requirements? What are your needs?" We can use those answers as we develop the standards. There probably will be more than one standard. The idea is to develop standards that would support all these industries and verticals, taking into account their needs and requirements.

We definitely need input from all the verticals in terms of such things as the frequency of transmission, how much delay they can tolerate. We have to look at all those different things and ensure that we can support those requirements. The biggest thing is that they need to be at the table.

Weinschenk: Standards also open the landscape at the business level.

Blum: One proprietary solution may be tied into one vendor. If there are standards, users may be able to use a couple of different vendors. It also protects investments when they build, deploy and implement. They may want to build off what is built and evolve with it. They do not want a situation which they deploy something and then later say, “Oops we’ve got to rid of that.” They want something to build off of and maybe arouse new capabilities or services. If systems can talk across verticals — smart energy talking to intelligent transport, for instance — there can be cross-pollination and cross-integration.

Weinschenk: What does the timeline look like?

Blum: We started to get it lined up and running at the end of July, early August. What I would call a steering or oversight committee was formed in the April time frame. The technical work will be under way by early in the second half of this year. The name, at least for now, is “One M2M.”

The next, big, face-to-face meeting will be at the end of March in Tokyo. We have been meeting on an ongoing basis since July 2011. The group holds meetings via virtual meetings.

Weinschenk: How will the work be promulgated as standards in the various countries?

Blum: Those are things we are still sorting out. Organizations — such as TIA or ETSI in Europe — can take those specifications back and transpose them into a standard. The standards organizations get involved and make it into a standard.

Weinschenk: It all makes sense, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.

Blum: There are still going to be challenges. We need representatives by the industries to ensure that we are building things they can use and that will get acceptance.

Weinschenk: Will IPv6 play a role?

Blum: We haven’t gotten into those kinds of detail, things like IPv6 and security mechanisms. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. When you look at addresses for billions or trillions of sensors, you have to be careful and thoughtful of what kind of addressing scheme to use to ensure that it doesn’t run out.

How Pervasive Plans to Stay Strong Despite Market Consolidation

loraine.lawson@gmail.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:34:55 GMT

Lance Speck, the general manager for integration products at Pervasive Software, spoke to IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson about what the market is like for integration now and why companies take analyst research reports so seriously.

“Master data management for us has been one of our primary growth areas and is a focus where we're putting a lot of our attention and knowledge.”

Lance Speck: General Manager
Pervasive Software

Lawson: It's been a year since we talked. What's been going on? What do you want to brag about?

Speck: There are a number of things, primarily around the overall expansion of the stack. For a long time, Pervasive was viewed as kind of a good reliable set of tools, working tactically in divisions inside of different companies. The market consolidation has helped us. It's removed people from the conversation who have dissolved into bigger stacks, CastIron certainly being one of the biggest. The only pure play out there is really Informatica. So our ability to deliver in the larger more strategic ways is matched by the fact that there aren't that many people out there to compete with.

Two or three years ago we shifted our sales to be more enterprise-focused and that type of shift doesn't happen overnight, either. We are now in the successful deployment stage of something that may have taken 12-18 months to close and another 6-9 months to deploy. That’s when you can actually raise the glass and say well it's in production and working successfully, so that's something we brag about because it was a long way getting to where we are today.

Other things to brag on are we've shifted models three years ago or so to recurring subscription revenue — that’s very difficult for a public company to do because we've got shareholders that want to see the performance now. You can't call time-outs to them and say, “Well hold on for a couple of years while we shift this model.” So we've been able to break records quarter over quarter or year over year the last eight quarters while shifting a large percentage of our base sales through a subscription sale. That's something we're proud of because typically, you can't continue to break recognized revenue numbers while making that shift. We do report deferred revenue and that comes off in our earnings releases and our deferred revenues — that looks very good. A couple of analysts out there in the market have actually picked up on that and said, "Hey, wait a second, something's going on here below the surface that's pretty impressive." So we're proud of that as well.

One more thing is the integration division. We really expanded to find various channels to serve us as well. We released last year something called Pervasive Galaxy, which is a marketplace and the best way to put it is to think of the Apple store combined with a Groupon combined with some combination of marketplace for integration solutions. We already have 150 different applications that were built primarily by Pervasive or our Channel partners that can be served up independent of Pervasive, but most of the time in combination with Pervasive, to bring together the market of people with subject matter expertise, whether it's Great Plains or SAP or Salesforce or RightNow or Oracle or vertical-specifics like HIPAA HL7 to combine those maps, processes and applications with the people who have the needs for that with the people that have the IP that they can then share. Those people who share it own the IP, can sell it and they get to keep about two-thirds of whatever's sold and we get to keep a third.

Lawson: What will Pervasive be focusing on this year? What do you think will be the big trend?

Speck: We as a company invest about 25 percent back into R&D, which we're always proud of. In that 25 percent that we reinvest, one of the biggest chunks is in Big Data. There is an entire team of people here representing easily 10 percent of the company and they didn't just start yesterday because they read that Big Data is coming, but rather have a six-year head start in this space. The majority of our base isn't clamoring for it and saying here's my money, solve this problem, (but) I’d be naive to think in two years from now it's not going to hit us and we'd better be prepared to answer those questions or serve the people with the money in their hands.

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VDI, with a Big Assist from the Cloud

acole602@msn.com — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:44:38 GMT

Arthur Cole spoke with David Grant, vice president of marketing, Desktone.

Virtual desktop infrastructure continues to be the little technology that could. Despite years of criticism, it has nonetheless managed to find millions of seats in the enterprise. New generations of cloud-based desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offerings are looking to lower capital costs and infrastructure complexity even further, while at the same time increasing flexibility on the client side to accommodate all those new smartphones and tablets out there. Desktone's David Grant explains how this market is finally coming together.

“The biggest complaint we see is that the storage is wildly under-scoped in VDI deployments. The cloud helps because it leverages the experience and scale that delivers premium performance required by the desktop.”

David Grant: Vice President of Marketing
Desktone

Cole: It seems like many organizations have a tough time trusting the cloud with anything but low-priority applications and backup storage. What do you say to allay concerns about pushing the desktop away from on-premises infrastructure?

Grant: To be honest, this has not been a big issue in DaaS. Security falls into two areas: data and applications over the cloud and then the physical infrastructure security. On the first one, the majority of organizations still keep their data and enterprise applications back at the home base. We leverage a secure enterprise connection to access the files and applications. So really all they are doing in the cloud is displaying the Windows image. On the second one, we leverage the most reputable service providers in the world like Equinix, IBM and Rackspace for data center capacity, and those organizations have a lot of security precautions and certifications in place. I would argue that the security of these data centers is more secure than most enterprise data centers.

Cole: When it comes to VDI in general, the biggest complaint is that storage can't handle all the new images. How does the cloud help in that regard?

Grant: The biggest complaint we see is that the storage is wildly under-scoped in VDI deployments. The cloud helps because it leverages the experience and scale that delivers premium performance required by the desktop.

Cole: With iPads and iPhones vying to integrate into enterprise infrastructure there is increasing pressure to deploy Apple's enterprise platforms. Would DaaS make it easier to integrate Mac OS, iOS and Windows?

Grant: Our customers think so. As you know one of the big issues with deploying these devices is that many of an enterprise's world is in Windows. Providing users with cloud desktops lets them use their Apple products and still have access to all of the documents and applications that require Windows. This may sound the same for onsite VDI but the big difference is that it is much easier to scale cloud-hosted VDI up and down, so when a user no longer requires the Windows environment you can easily turn off the desktop. With VDI you have to make the big upfront investment that is lost when you retire the desktop.

The other big concern for companies is the investment and time required to build out a VDI platform. Apple users will have to wait for this build-out while with DaaS it can be immediate.

The Exacting Job of Protecting Industrial Control Systems

cweinsch@optonline.net — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:13:38 GMT

Carl Weinschenk spoke to Pike Research Senior Analyst Bob Lockhart. Pike recently released a study entitled, "Industry Control Systems Security."

The Stuxnet worm, which represents a deep threat to the power grid, was a wake-up call for the industrial control industry, according to Pike Research analyst Bob Lockhart. Lockhart told IT Business Edge blogger Carl Weinschenk that there are significant differences between security in the industry control and IT industries. The bottom line is that security in industrial control scenarios is, if anything, more exacting and leaves less room for error than traditional IT implementations.

“I think the ray of hope is that there is a lot more awareness now than a year ago. I hear from my sources in the operations part of the utilities sector that people are starting to ask a lot of good questions about cybersecurity, when in the past they didn’t care.”

Bob Lockhart: Senior Analyst
Pike Research

Weinschenk: How does the power infrastructure differ from IT?

Lockhart: A lot of industrial control systems — SCADA systems — have been deployed over decades. They are not like IT systems. There are some grids that have been in place for 100 years. They have [gradually] been added to. You never see anyone say, “We are going to redo the whole grid.” It is a very measured and slow process. It is a lot more strictly managed.

When Microsoft patches come out, people install them [immediately]. Sometimes, on the control side, it may take two years to install patches, to ensure there are no outages. The point is that there is a lot of stuff that you don’t think about if you come from the IT side. There is a learning curve. IT looks at confidentiality, integrity and availability — CIA. When it comes to the control system, it is safety, reliably and integrity. Fundamentally the number one concern is that nobody gets hurt. So it’s different.

They think about things differently. It is a lot harder [in the utilities industry]. In the banking system, if you send out bad statements, it’s not good — but you can send out a new one. But you can’t take back a blackout. It’s really taken seriously.

Weinschenk: Where does smart metering fit in?

Lockhart: [S]mart metering is subset a smart grid. To us, "smart grid" can be defined as anything to make the grid work smarter. Pike’s definition consists of transmission upgrades — high voltage line, substation automation, distribution automation — the lower voltage power line that takes energy through neighborhoods — and electric vehicle charging. We stop at plug-on car. The last element of our definition is smart metering. That’s a good scope. Some people include power generation. We don’t consider that part of smart grid itself.

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Transitioning to the New IT

acole602@msn.com — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:45:18 GMT

Arthur Cole spoke with Michael Keen, chief enterprise cloud strategist, ASG Software.

IT has grown used to change over the years. From the mainframe to the commodity server, from the token ring to the spanning tree to the network fabric, technology's continual evolution has been the only constant. However, the current changes taking place are unlike those of the past in one crucial aspect: They are remaking not only the structure and architecture of IT systems, but they very role of IT itself. Companies like ASG Software, which specializes in enterprise management and automation systems, are on the front lines of this transformation. The company's Michael Keen shares his views on the coming transformation and how today's IT can prepare for it.

“... in today’s current IT landscape, rapid change is the norm and IT must evolve their enterprise models, people, processes and technology to acknowledge this shift.”

Michael Keen: Chief Enterprise Cloud Strategist
ASG Software

Cole: IT has never been known as an agent of change, and yet change is coming its way at a rapid pace. What are some of the best ways IT can stay in front of developments like cloud computing and social networking without undoing its hefty investment in legacy infrastructure?

Keen: Cloud computing and social networking are two key drivers of change in the current IT landscape. These drivers are forcing the hands of many IT executives to come up with a strategy, and a way to execute against that strategy, to drive agility and flexibility in their infrastructure so they can provide a quick and efficient way for IT to adapt to these changes. Traditional enterprise IT models have always emphasized an opposite view — that change is not the norm, but the exception. However, in today’s current IT landscape, rapid change is the norm and IT must evolve their enterprise models, people, processes and technology to acknowledge this shift.

The problem here is that IT innovation causes so much change that it is difficult to reap the benefits of this innovation. Accordingly, CIOs have often paid close attention to cost, quality and risk management concerns. Because of the complexity of the business environment and underlying technologies, the desired end-state was typically stability of operations, with changes managed as initiatives delivering new functionality while ensuring ongoing stability and controlling costs. Since being able to adapt to change is critical to any organization’s success, it is imperative that they develop a standards-based framework that leverages best-of-breed technologies and components to create a new level of integration between business processes and IT. In addition, IT needs to build their new organization with four fundamental ideals in mind: simplification, standardization, modularity and integration. By applying these ideals they can lay the groundwork for an infrastructure that will meet the demands of their customers, business partners, external customers, etc.

Cole: Is IT's role as the gatekeeper of resources on the way out? What sort of role will it play once business units start tapping into the cloud on a routine basis?

Keen: It absolutely is, and we are seeing this become more and more pervasive across our customers and prospects. End users are already doing an end run around IT to get what they need in a more timely manner so they can be more productive. This is causing IT to scramble to get a handle on this issue and develop stop-gap solutions to meet demands. A specific example of these tactics is a group of developers going out to AWS with their corporate credit cards to spin up virtual machine clusters because it was taking IT six weeks to deploy what the users needed for day-to-day tasks. These end-run tactics cause IT to be reactive, leading to mistakes made in haste to plug any holes in the process and provide a solution to band-aid the larger issue of IT not being fast enough to meet end-user demands.

However, by adopting the four fundamental ideals I mentioned earlier, IT becomes an enabler in a number of ways. It fosters the ability to maximize returns by improving business results, enhance revenue and earnings, increase cash flow and reduce the cost of operations in both the short and the long term. It also helps mitigate risk by ensuring the security and continuity of internal and external business operations, minimize exposure to external risk factors such as security threats and availability issues, and it can ensure compliance to regulatory requirements and recover automatically from virtually any failure — instantly.

At the same time, it can improve performance by optimizing business operations across the enterprise and gaining a holistic, real-time view of the enterprise and all business services enabling enterprise operations, and then use that view to monitor service levels, avoid risks and capitalize on opportunities. And through increased agility, IT will enable the business and operations to adapt to changing business needs and capitalize on emerging opportunities, providing timely IT support for business innovation.

Cole: What decisions need to be made today to best position IT for the future?

Keen: Having an IT organization that is agile and flexible is built, not bought. It is a transformational process, and every enterprise arrives at the task of transforming itself with a different history, differing goals and priorities and diverse transformational needs. Accordingly, for every enterprise there lies a unique path with a different set of steps. In today's ever-changing business climate, successful companies are those that will create a new IT business model that is adaptive and powered by a cloud computing delivery model that can effectively synchronize business and IT. By matching their evolving business needs to their IT environments, organizations will be better able to strike a balance across managing costs and risks, increasing value and quality, and enhancing business agility.

In these cloud-enabled enterprises, the IT organization is transformed into a fundamental enabler for the enterprise. Through this transformation, the enterprise shifts from a series of disjointed business units with isolated, manually connected applications to one that has distributed, integrated business processes that connect with trading partners and is supported by a common, shared infrastructure. This transformation eliminates stranded capacity and introduces a new flexibility that enables the enterprise to respond quickly to change.

Corporate Mobilization Growing Across the Globe, Though Unevenly

cweinsch@optonline.net — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:28:10 GMT

The Mobile Work Force Today

Mobile employees carry an average of 2.68 mobile devices, including laptops, smartphones and increasingly tablets.

Carl Weinschenk spoke with Stacy Crook, the senior analyst for mobile enterprise for IDC. Last week, IDC released research Crook wrote entitled, "Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2011-2015 Forecast."

North America and Western Europe are leading in the mobilization of the work force. But, according to Stacy Crook, IDC’s senior analyst for the mobile enterprise, there is growth elsewhere. Crook told IT Business Edge blogger Carl Weinschenk that the pace of mobilization across the globe is determined by cultural, economic and related factors. She found that by the end of 2015, there will be 1.3 billion mobile workers worldwide, representing 37.2 percent of the work force.

Weinschenk: How does IDC define mobile worker?

Crook: Our mobile worker definition actually is pretty broad. It is difficult to define what a mobile worker is ... so we have taken an inclusive view. We segment mobile workers into three segments and a number of sub-segments under that. The three main segments we count are office based mobile workers, non-office-based mobile workers and home-based mobile workers. Within the office space, for instance, there are three sub-segments: high-level mobile professionals, occasional mobile workers and mobile non-travelers.

Weinschenk: What did you find?

Crook: I think the finding is really around globe, we expect the mobile work force to see pretty healthy growth. The regions we counted are the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific excluding Japan. We have the United States and Japan as two sort of standalone countries. The reasons for that approach is that there is a lot of interest in U.S. trends; Japan is broken out because its characteristics can be quite different than the rest of Asia-Pac. Japan is an outlier because it is seeing a declining worker population overall, so there is declining mobile worker population. They have sort of population control in effect.

Weinschenk: What is mobile work growing?

Crook: There are a few reasons why we are seeing mobile workers grow in healthy amounts across all three segments. I think the four factors that impact mobile worker growth breaks down to technology, cultural issues, economic issues and the demographics of a given region or country. Some of the drivers are advances in technology and advances in wireless networks, the proliferation of mobile devices, better remote access technologies and applications and the growing trend of cloud-based approaches that enable software and middleware applications platforms. There is quite a good range of device management and security software that allow enterprises to feel more comfortable having workers use mobile devices and carry the information on them. That all kind of falls into technology.

Weinschenk: What trends do you see?

Crook: The trend of BYOD and consumerization certainly is growing the mobile population. We are seeing vertical opportunities. Certain verticals are even more mobile, such as the way doctors are using iPads to keep up. There always has been mobility in retail, but now they can do such things as use tablets to create better in-store experiences. The vertical opportunities spur an increased number of mobile workers. There also is growth in home offices. Some issues are related to the economy. A number of people turn to home offices if they are not employed. There also are increases in telecommuting because companies have more flexible styles and recognize it drives employee retention and satisfaction.

Weinschenk: What type of thing controls how this rolls out across the globe?

Crook: Culture serves as an inhibitor and an accelerator. In terms of inhibitors, I think certain cultures in Asia and Latin America in some ways still have a culture in which a worker needs to be in the office. There is the perception that if you are not there you are not as big a part of the team and are not working as hard. In the U.S. there still are certain companies that have a “need to be in office” culture. Many companies are very comfortable with teleworkers. In Europe, a lot of people don’t want to mix work and play. They have a better work-life balance. When they take vacations, they stop working. There are these kinds of cultural issues.

Weinschenk: What are some of the other big differences between regions?

Crook: In some countries … companies don’t have VPNs [or other secure conduits]. It all depends on the culture. Consumerization is a big trend, but in some countries, privacy laws pretty much do not allow the BYOD trend to take off. It is pretty much a cultural thing.

Another factor is the age of the population. Asia is aging, so that slows down mobilization. Some populations are controlled by the government. If there are demographic issues, that will impact mobile workers, too. Another issue is the economy. Not every country has the money to build the infrastructure to support mobile workers.

Weinschenk: So, who is ahead?

Crook: When we look at the number of the mobile software markets … the lion’s share is in the U.S. Western Europe is on our heels. Overall, the majority of cutting-edge mobile technology is in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. A number of regions around the world will follow suit. We are at the forefront and have a high penetration already because we are very into mobile technology. We use it, we like it and have started embracing the consumerization trend. There is a lot of opportunity in Latin America, central Europe and the Middle East and Africa, Asia — minus Japan — still have plenty of opportunity for growth.

Weinschenk: What verticals are hot?

Crook: When we look at verticals in the U.S., certainly health care is one that is growing, professional services is a strong growth vertical, including technical services, legal services and real estate. Other service-oriented areas are taking off. Those tend to have a high percentage of mobile workers, so even though we have high percentage already using it, we expect to see growth. The mobile office opportunity is quite strong in the United States. The mobile non-office opportunity is a little bit slower.

Collaboration in the Cloud

acole602@msn.com — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:20:18 GMT

As more enterprises push infrastructure onto the cloud, it's becoming clear that the technology provides more than just unlimited resources and data flexibility. It's also a boon to the collaborative and social networking work processes that many users have found so compelling in their private lives. No longer is access restricted to those who have the approved hardware/software configurations but to anyone who can add value to the project at hand. Providers like CollabNet Cloud Services are already tapping into the collaborative nature of the cloud, as GM Guy Marion explains to Arthur Cole.

With Guy Marion, VP/GM, CollabNet Cloud Services:

“Enterprises are leveraging a dizzying array of public and private cloud services, bypassing traditional IT operations in order to launch new mobile, cloud and Web apps in a more time- and cost-effective manner.”

Guy Marion: VP & General Manager
CollabNet Cloud Services

Cole: Most enterprises view the cloud as a vast store of ready resources. How can enterprises leverage their cloud infrastructures for advanced functions like collaboration?

Marion: Cloud infrastructures offer secure extranets that enterprises can leverage to securely manage collaboration between employees, departments, contractors, and customers/vendors, without requiring remote access into the corporate firewall. Cloud services typically provide deeper, more specialized services that collaborative teams can use to work more efficiently. These include flexibility to spin up new users and projects on demand, access to seamlessly integrated services and workflow across geographies and departments, a consumer-friendly user experience, and granular visibility and data access controls. Lastly, the cloud brings instant-on compliance for corporate data, like highly elastic storage capabilities that capture full change histories, and enforcement of multi-site backups and redundancy strategies.

Cole: This seems like a particularly welcome advancement for software development. Is it feasible that we could see social networking and collaboration forge development teams on a national or even global scale?

Marion: Yes — and this is already happening at scale. The rise of open source software in the early 2000s brought with it new, meritocratic software development models in which distributed teams of developers could collaborate in a loosely organized fashion, often from opposite sides of the globe, as they built large-scale projects. Today these projects power almost every layer of the modern Web and software development ecosystem. These development approaches have been institutionalized by enterprise, government and academic organizations via implementation of social networking and social coding platforms. Attributes of these platforms include community, social and collaborative frameworks that enable developers to follow, watch, comment on, tag and search the activities of others in their networks, which ultimately results in improved collaboration, morale and developer productivity. The platforms scale to support very large collaborative communities, both for both public and private projects, while offering the security and visibility needed to safeguard IP and meet the compliance requirements of the enterprise.

Cole: Are there any complexities still to be worked out? Should enterprises be concerned about pushing development or other architectures into such a free-wheeling environment?

Marion: Yes. Enterprises are leveraging a dizzying array of public and private cloud services, bypassing traditional IT operations in order to launch new mobile, cloud and Web apps in a more time- and cost-effective manner. Many of the as-a-service vendors bring huge challenges to the security, visibility and compliance requirements of the enterprise. Enterprises need to bring order to the chaos, so one solution is the hybrid cloud, which allows large organizations to harness the flexibility and elastic nature of the public cloud while managing more sensitive data or operations in their own managed private clouds. Netflix, for example, delivers all of its video streaming services through the public Amazon Web Services (AWS), but hosts its more sensitive client and operational data in its private data centers, which are synced to AWS.

Why Hybrid Cloud Is the New Black

loraine.lawson@gmail.com — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:40:57 GMT

Private Versus Public Cloud Computing

A plethora of applications are being considered for the cloud, but it may take at least another year before cloud computing goes mainstream in the enterprise.

Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing for Informatica Cloud, told IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson that private clouds are unusual and likely to stay that way as companies continue to focus on connecting internal resources with the public cloud. That will make hybrid clouds the most common type of deployment. To deal with this shift, CIOs need to think about offering what Cunningham calls "hybrid IT."

Lawson: What's Informatica doing in terms of hybrid cloud?

Cunningham: We're going to be talking more about hybrid IT, because if you start talking about hybrid cloud, you're getting into the specific definition of public-private hybrid, community, some of the NIST definition of cloud computing. This is part of the whole cloud-first initiative when the U.S. government talked about how they were going to go cloud first.

What we tend to talk mostly about is this new reality of hybrid IT, where IT has to figure out how to deliver cloud applications, cloud infrastructure that is integrated with their legacy environment. So really it's a mix of private, community and public clouds — it's all clouds. In our definition of hybrid IT, we're talking more about cloud computing and on-premise applications and platforms.

If you think about Amazon, they have primarily a public cloud infrastructure, but now they have a virtual private cloud and they're sort of blurring the line between being able to offer some private capabilities. Amazon is starting to compete more against Rackspace and some of the other hosting providers that have been the more traditional public cloud infrastructure platforms.

Most of what we've been doing has been focused on integrating software-as-a-service applications and delivering data integration as a software as a service or a platform as a service. So I would categorize it as a public cloud offering in that our repository is publicly hosted and so forth. Most of the use cases we're doing today are still integrating SaaS applications with on-premise systems. We're starting to do some more cloud-to-cloud, like a Salesforce to NetSuite type of use case, but more often than not, it's help me integrate all these proliferating SaaS apps with the existing back-office applications and databases.

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