Bulletin

Posts published in Bulletin.

2018

Posts from 2018.

January 2018

01-08 – Untitled

Untitled

Nothing to Declare bulletin

Hi,

A happy new year to you!

As part of my quest to find a bit of light in the darkness, I’m starting a newsletter, I’d be very interested to know your thoughts.

Let me know if you don’t want to be added, and/or if you have any burning questions you’d like to see answered!

All the best, Jon

— — — — — —

Hi there,

Please find below the first in what I hope will be a long series of succinct and informative bulletins on the state of technology and its consequences. I’m sending this to you directly because I thought you might enjoy it and I also value your opinion, please do let me know any feedback you may have and that will help keep the ball rolling.

Following this direct email, I’ll be sending the next bulletin using MailChimp. If you don’t want to receive any future bulletins of this sort from me, please do let me know and I will not add you (or remove you, depending on when I get your reply).

Cheers, Jon

Nothing To Declare — travels in a connected world

5 January 2018. The Yin and Yang of Innovation and Governance

These are interesting times - whatever your political affiliations or wherever in the world you might be. In this context, technology is a two-edged sword — it holds both great promise and enormous risk. We can choose be evangelists or doom-mongers, or we can simply recognise this dichotomy: for every healthcare breakthrough, there will be a fake news, and so on.

It was probably ever thus — one can imagine the dawn of the iron age, when somebody chose to make a sword even as somebody else made a ploughshare. With each breakthrough comes a breakdown, an opportunity to exploit as well as enhance, and yet somehow we are still here; I remain optimistic that humanity as a whole will prevail, whatever the short-term challenges.

We don’t always make it easy for ourselves. Older companies struggle with innovation for a thousand reasons, leaving gaps for others to fill to sometimes dramatic effect. And meanwhile, our legal systems remain behind the curve, their multi-year, consensus-driven models rendered hopelessly inadequate by the pace of change. And technology is so complex, it can raise unexpected and massive challenges (such as the latest Meltdown and Spectre security flaws in computer chips).

To whit, this bulletin. As I write this, I am reminded of Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America, a weekly new broadcast which ran from 1946 to 2004. Cooke was always the observer, his role to enlighten. I stand more chance of achieving the latter than I do matching his longevity, he died at 96 but I would be 110 by the time I finished if I kept going that long. I can only hope medical science has a few tricks up its sleeve.

So, what’s news?

2018 Predictions

I wish I’d thought of Kai Stinchcombe’s tagline on Medium, “I’m whatever the opposite of a futurist is.” I recently documented my top 5 2018 predictions as follows:

1. GDPR will be a costly, inadequate mess. No doubt GDPR will one day be achieved, but the fact is that it is already out of date. For one, simple reason: we will consent to have our privacy even more eroded than it already is. Watch this space

2. Artificial Intelligence will create silos of smartness. Integration work will keep us busy for the next year or so, even as learning systems evolve. c.f. This piece on the Register: Skynet it ain’t: Deep learning will not evolve into true AI, says boffin.

3. 5G will become just another expectation. But its physical architecture, coupled with software standards like NFV, may offer a better starting point than the current, proprietary-mast-based model.

4. Attitudes to autonomous vehicles will normalize. Attention will increasingly turn to brands — after all, if you are going to go for a drive, you might as well do so in comfort, right?

5. When Bitcoins collapse, blockchains will pervade. The principle can apply wherever the risk of fraud could also exist, which is just about everywhere. But this will take time

6. The world will keep on turning. As Isaac Asimov once wrote, “An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.” Okay, this last one isn’t really a prediction, more an observable fact.

DevOps Automation report

Let’s be clear, it was always about what’s currently being labelled DevOps: if you can do things faster, test them and get them into production quicker, you can find out what you really need and move on. This shouldn’t be rocket science but it is very hard for us humans to get our brains around. In this article I cite Barry Boehm, founder of the spiral methodology — I was surprised to find that it emerged in the 80’s, not the 70’s but no doubt prototyping approaches have existed since the invention of the wheel.

Why do (in-expert) organisations think they are secure?

This is the first in a series of “unanswered questions” — you know, the ones that nag at you but never really get tacked. In this case it was from security expert Ian Murphy — “Why do companies with little or no real security experience think they know their environment better than anyone else?” I welcome any additional questions you may have.

Extra-curricular

In other news, over the break I was involved in a Christmas single which is raising money for mental health charities (I’m also in the video); I have a weekly podcast with my mate Simon; and alongside my writing, I have fallen madly in love with the piano so I have set two challenges for 2018: to finish a novel and to play Widor’s Toccata on the biggest church organ I can find. I’ve started a video blog on the latter if you want to follow my progress.

Cheers, and see you next time. Jon

01-12 – Newsletter

Newsletter

The irony of anti-hype articles

“Good article,” somebody said to me last week about a piece I had put together around Blockchain and the NHS. I had to make a confession — it was a reasonably standard effort, as I put it, “It’s the “not a magic bullet” response any “this is a magic bullet” hype. It goes with “Tech X is dead” vs “No it isn’t”, “It’s going to be more complicated than you think,” “Don’t forget the management aspects” and other handle-turning articles.”

So, yes, got me. It’s a conundrum: when to say something out loud, even if it’s been said before? Indeed, I’ll go further than that — it’s one of the reasons that, a few years now in the past, I arrived at a point where I felt I had nothing to say. The danger at such a point is to come out with something like “the end of history as arrived” but for one I didn’t, and for two, it’s usually rubbish.

Trouble is, in this hype-ridden industry we need the mundane perspectives. Some have built their careers on presenting the obvious as some profound wisdom, but without it, we are leave innovation to operate unchecked. On the upside however, the pioneers of the Internet cannot fully claim, or hold the blame for the failure to deliver utopia. As I say in this article on the topic, “Let’s not be downhearted, rather, let’s recognise that no technology can enable us to transcend our discomfortingly complex, conflicted and ambivalent nature as a species.”

The mess that is GDPR

Moving to articles that were less straightforward to research and write, I said I’d be talking more about GDPR, a topic about which I feel strangely sad. It’s one of the few areas of legislation I’ve ever felt compelled to write to its creators about — the EU powers-that-be kindly sent a hand-signed letter to inform me how my views would be taken into account (no doubt I should be happy not to find out that I had in some way entered myself into a competition).

Why the long face, you might ask? Well. For the life of me, I cannot fathom how it will make our general lives better, at the same time as causing considerable cost to be borne across the world’s businesses. If the former were possible, the latter might be a price worth paying; as things stand, it is not. Still, we are where we are and for now, we will all have to suck it up. As one reader, Peter, points out, “Just one point. GDPR is already a mess and is likely to be used as an excuse for price hikes.”

Extra-curricular

There’s a new GAWI (Getting Away With It) podcast up, while largely non-technical it does venture into some of the above. I’ve configured a Raspberry Pi for use as part of my house-wide AirPlay music network, which is a darn sight cheaper than the alternatives. Piano practice continues — I’ll be updating the vlog. And meanwhile, I’ve been revising the synopsis of the novel I am writing this year, more soon!

Finally, I’ve not quite managed the step to MailChimp just yet, so for now this is still coming from my desktop. Any questions, feedback or requests to unsubscribe, let me know.

Until next time, Jon

01-19 – Nothing To Declare — travels in a connected world

Nothing To Declare — travels in a connected world

19 January 2018. Digital transformation — when specificity becomes too specific

First off, thank you to all who have engaged in conversation, since I have sent out newsletters. I have had some long chats and big reads on GDPR and Blockchain in particular, both of which I shall be following up on. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking, and writing, about digital transformation. It’s not that I think it is all bunk, but rather, as the Irish adage goes, “If you want to get there, don’t start from here.”

A little definition can go a long way, but sometimes it can get in the way — we’ve all been in meetings (if you haven’t, you are the lucky one) where more time is spent trying to define some term, than actually getting on with making things happen. Case in point is digital transformation, which seems to spawn more discussion than any ‘technology trend’ of recent times. This does beg the question of whether something can really be a trend, if nobody can agree what it is… but that’s for another day.

If you’re looking to ‘do’ digital transformation, read this first

To get to the point, i’m not sure there’s any such thing as digital transformation. I set out my reasons why here: in summary, terminology matters not a jot but the propensity to change is fundamental:

1. It’s all about the data — the term is just an ill-considered response to what we knew anyway, that we are in the information age.

2. Technology is enabling us to do new things — to continue the Sherlock-level insight, this really is enabling breakthroughs. Who knew?

3. We tend to do the easy or cheap stuff — trouble is, these breakthroughs happen just as often because we are lazy, as driven.

4. Nobody knows what the next big thing will be — is where the varnish starts to peel. Won’t we just have to ‘transform’ again?

5. That we are not yet “there”, nor will we ever be — which is enough to lead any strategist to breakdown. This gig will never be done.

6. Responsiveness is the answer, however you package it — so our focus should be on ability to change. Common sense perhaps, but it isn’t happening.

On the upside, there’ll still be plenty of jobs

A good example of the digital hype and in particular, point 4 above is how we’re all going to be out of jobs (yes, everyone, from manual workers to lawyers, according to the University of Oxford). Here’s a summary of 10 reasons why nobody should worry about whether they will have something to do in the years to come:

- Because decisions are more than insights.

- Because we have hair, nails and teeth.

- Because we ascribe value to human interaction and care.

- Because we love craft.

- Because we value each other and the services we offer.

- Because we are smart enough to think of new things to do.

- Because complexity continues to beat computing.

- Because experience and expertise counts.

- Because we see value in the value-add.

- Because the new world needs new skills.

The bottom line is that even as we automate certain manual activities, we lose neither the desire, nor the propensity for work. We have evolved such that we see work as necessary: we derive satisfaction from doing it ourselves, and sharing the fruits of our labours with others. Will jobs change? Well, yes, but how does this differ from the past 50 years?

Oh and finally, don’t even start me off on monetisation.

01-26 – Newsletter — whence cybersecurity and trust?

Newsletter — whence cybersecurity and trust?

It’s an author’s worst nightmare. You write a book, it’s complete and just about to be published. So you ask a few people for a review — it would be nice to get some positive words on the back and, frankly, you want a bit of a stroke. So you send off the manuscript to a trusted party… and they come back and say it’s all rubbish. Stop the world, go and sit in a darkened room and hope it all goes away.

And yes, it happened to me when I wrote a short book on information security architecture. The trouble with it is, it suggests that you need to create an architecture for information security: this approach flies in the face of (some) cyber-thinking, which starts from the point of view that any notion of perimeter security should be consigned to the past.

It’s not bad thinking, indeed, it is highly valid. Google have adopted an approach for their own internal systems that encrypts every communication, based on the assumption that no system can be secure. At the same time however, try walking into Google’s buildings and see how far you get. As with so many things in life, absolute positions generally end up tempered when they hit reality.

Cybersecurity best practice really only needs five rules.

1. It’s all about the data. Which means understanding it before you can protect it.

2. It’s a board-level choice. It can’t be delegated away, outsourced or otherwise.

3. It’s about understanding the whole picture. Which means architecture.

4. It’s impossible to protect everything. Which means being able to react.

5. It’s never done. And why would it be, if technology keeps changing.

Obviously, there’s a great deal of devil in the detail but if organisations could only get their heads around the above, we would all save so much time and effort. These rules should be as prevalent as ‘don’t run with scissors’, but while they are not, we reiterate (and indeed write books about) them. And, as an aside, security vendors are stuck with scare-story marketing, not because they want to be forever spelling doom, but because it’s the only thing that works. Ho, hum, and on we go.

To whit, some articles from this week.

Cybersecurity should be a board room topic

A global survey by Allianz has found that cybersecurity is now the number two global business risk, up from fifteenth position 5 years ago. Number one is business continuity, which is a bit of a circular argument of course — a threat to business is not being able to do business? But perhaps organisations are finally getting the message.

Trust in media is collapsing. Is that such a bad thing?

Imagine my delight when I found publication of fake news was illegal during the French revolution, with the obvious consequences. Incidentally, if you want a positive story about the impact of technology its ability to democratise data distribution, execution by guillotine continued well into the 20th century, but it was the arrival of film recording that led to its demise. Turns out the mob thing quickly loses its sparkle if you’re not there.

Extra-curricular: how not to write a biography

In other news (which is semi-curricular, to be fair), I gave a talk on this subject to the Gloucestershire Society of Authors group this week. I’m reminded of Christopher Norris’ response when I went on one of my usual existential rants about whether I was actually an author, or ‘just’ a writer. “Oh, you’re definitely an author,” he sad. “But you’re not an auteur…”

On that note and until next time, Jon

February 2018

02-01 – Can Frugal Innovation models apply to Western corporations?

Can Frugal Innovation models apply to Western corporations?

Frugal Innovation, seen in 2012 as “a distinctive specialism of the Indian system” — is about delivering innovation while minimising costs. Here’s how UK research body NESTA put it back in 2012: “Frugal innovation responds to limitations in resources, whether financial, material or institutional, and using a range of methods, turns these constraints into an advantage.”

As examples such as Tetra Pak’s pyramid-shaped “samosa” packs (lower manufacturing cost, higher efficiency) illustrate, it is possible to use cost minimisation as an innovation driver; the four conditions of “lean, simple, clean and social” can lead to products and services more applicable to populations without access to resource levels available to more ‘developed’ countries.

Organizations looking to replicate the perceived benefits of frugal innovation (for example, to address healthcare challenges in the US, or as per this BearingPoint report) face several difficulties, not least definition. How can the term, also known as jugaad (“making do with what is around”) apply in a traditional corporation — is it simply a case of cutting off the money, or is it an exclusive feature of developing economies — only possible if you have less in the first place?

This contextual factor begs a question of whether it is just marketing speak, turning a limitation into a differentiator — “all our ingredients are hand-picked (because we haven’t got a machine)” or “we only work with a select group (because we don’t have the bandwidth to do otherwise)” and so on. It also opens itself to accusations of post-colonial patronization or even exploitation, as Western-headquartered investments and partnerships target the emerging middle classes.

Whether there is something in frugal innovation for developing economies, as USP or simply as a response to challenging conditions, Western corporations looking at it as an answer may be looking the wrong way through the telescope. To understand why, we need to think about their chequered relationship with the notion of innovation itself.

Back in the day (and to this day), the biggest tech companies would show their prowess through the amount of money they put into research, or through the number of patents they created. With reason, as hardware and software engineering presented a phenomenal number of options, with enormous economic and business potential. At the end of the Second World War (during which many resources had been allocated towards ‘the effort’), money was no object.

As a result, for companies such as IBM, the emphasis was on ‘pure’, rather than the ‘applied’ research models followed by the likes of AT&T’s Bell Labs. “The Watson Lab’s first director, Wallace J. Eckert, gave researchers license to pursue their interests without concerning themselves with business imperatives,” says IBM’s article on the topic.

This approach lasted several decades before IBM and many others had to move to the applied, that is, justification-based, model. They were not alone: I can remember my own programming alma mater, Philips Electronics, announcing that it would follow a similar strategy. (In Philips’ case, it was perhaps catalysed by the repeated failure to monetise its great ideas, such as the compact cassette and compact disk.)

Fact was, and remains, all such companies were hitting the law of diminishing returns, in which each new success requires a bigger effort than the last. With the advent of digitalization (that is, with all companies becoming tech companies) every vertical now faces a similar challenge. Companies can adopt a number of strategies to counter this — for example big banks such (as Credit Agricole) may create a new entity for innovation, to side-step the sluggishness of the mothership.

Or, as happens so often in the technology industry, they can feed the ecosystem and acquire any successful startups that result. Microsoft once had a (negative) reputation for innovation-through-acquisition, and meanwhile Oracle, CA, Cisco and many others have built their businesses on it. As someone from IBM once said to me, “We’d be able to do so much if we could just get our act together.”

So, about that telescope. Rather than seeing limited-resource models as an opportunity, organizations would do well to think about how they can freeing innovation from the constraints and shackles of over-resourcing. So, what can these be?

1. Too much money. The finance industry has a reputation for buying its way out of a crisis, or into an opportunity, with the resulting layer-upon-layer of complex, sluggish technological junk.

2. Too many cooks. Sometimes, indeed much of the time, less opinions are more valuable than more. Making a decision, trying something out and working with the outcome delivers results faster.

3. Too long timescales. We try to do everything we can, adding features and meeting as broad a set of needs as possible, resulting in project timescales that last longer than the problems they were looking to solve.

4. Too many options. Thank Geoffrey Moore for the fact that the entire tech industry is founded on differentiation, meaning we spend far too long investigating options and not enough time solving problems.

5. Too much paperwork. Policies and procedures, sign-offs and authorizations matter, but in many cases have become and end in themselves, making jumping through hoops more significant than achieving goals.

6. Too much stuff. Many of the challenges we look to address — integration, interoperability, virtualisation, network and storage management, cybersecurity, data analytics — are about dealing with the quantities of materiél we have created.

7. Too much thinking. Yes I know, that’s rich coming from me, but all this complexity makes it harder to see the wood from the trees, leaving us stymied or at least, working inefficiently.

Of all of these, perhaps the biggest is that we have too much money. We have the Web’s shotgun approach to spending advertising dollars, to the discontent of, well, everyone; indeed, the “which 50%” model also applies to start-up economy (when I was leading a development team, we struggled to understand what start-ups were doing with the 20-million-dollar cash injections they were burning).

From this, highly encumbered point of view, Frugal Innovation becomes like a holiday experience — it’s what happens when you can stop, think and perhaps even dream. We all know what happens when we come back from holiday and the real world comes flooding back in. All we really need for innovation is the ability to think. And yes, if developing economies have a make-do mindset, that becomes a differentiator worth paying for.

02-01 – The dangers of noun-centricity

The dangers of noun-centricity

The topic emerged in a conversation with a family member — you know the one, “everything isn’t about money, there’s more to life, etc, etc.”

In this industry we occasionally adopt similar framings. I can remember a discussion with CA a few years ago, when the company decided everything was about management. Of course, many things have to be managed, but such absolute positions can only take things so far. Similarly, we could say everything was about governance, or about analytics, or integration, or customers, or cloud, and so on and so on.

Each is true to a point, but not to the detriment of everything else: it’s one of the reasons why I could be so confident back in the day, when I took a ‘hybrid’ stance against the emerging everything-to-the-cloud positioning so loved by companies that would benefit the most.

note the difference with the “it’s all about the data” stance I have taken in previous newsletters

Of course, for businesses, money is very important, and sometimes so is a singular focus, as per Steve Jobs with his unflinching design obsession. But by goodness, if you are to adopt a singular vision, be sure it’s the right one, be ready to change it as soon as it reaches its sell-by date, and above all, recognise it as a mechanism to set priorities, not as something with which to beat customers over the head.

With this in mind, here’s some articles.

02-09 – Bulletin 9 February 2018. AI and the theory of exponential linearity

Bulletin 9 February 2018. AI and the theory of exponential linearity

You know that thing where, in a discussion, a concept comes seemingly out of nowhere, but then changes the whole nature of the dialogue? So it was in a recent conversation with my old friend and colleague Roger Davies, him who has written whole books on Value Management (kind of, what to do when you realise Balanced Scorecard can only take things so far.

“Of course, despite all this innovation, our progress has only been linear,” I blurted, immediately finding myself in a position where I had to justify my remark. “Is that true?” asked Roger. “Yes,” I said, sounding much less confident than I felt. But as we explored the idea, it did seem to hold water — are we any better at communicating, for example, or really any more productive than we were two or three decades ago?

This question is writ large when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, whose impact, we are told, is to be transformative. I admit to being flummoxed in another conversation, this time just before Christmas at the Great Telco Debate, when I was told in very clear terms that AI would, indeed, change just about everything. He clearly interpreted my uncertainty as ignorance, as he undertook to explain (as one might to a child) why this should be.

Interestingly, the example he cited was telecommunications complexity, what with Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), 5G and the like. I was almost immediately taken back to the early Noughties, when I presented on neural networks in enterprise management, on behalf of CA. Also on the bill was an Italian researcher with several PhDs — “Maybe we could share research,” he suggested. I politely declined, not wanting to show him up with my hastily collated notes and superficial thinking.

The thing about all this fantastic innovation is that it has a fractal effect on the problem space. That’s me getting pompous again, but it happens every time: we are as sorcerers’ apprentices, generating data as quickly as we work out new ways to harness it. The impact on most technological fields is that breakthroughs tend to be quite tightly scoped — at the moment, voice, image and other signal processing are seeing the most progress, and will rightly yield some great results alongside the dumb animations we can add to video chats.

But nobody has yet created an algorithm that can somehow get ahead of the game. To my delight and relief, someone far smarter than me has captured this in an article, “The impossibility of intelligence explosion,” i.e. that point at which our own intellects get left behind. By extension, as long as they (our intellects) do not (get left behind), we are stuck with them in all their wonderful, dumb glory. In the meantime, AI will serve to augment, not replace capabilities including that litmus-test topic, radiology.

Don’t get me wrong, these are transformative times. But even so, our relationship with technology remains that of a craftsperson and their tools — it is up to us to prioritise, to architect, to make things happen. We should not expect our environments, or relationships, our abilities or anxieties to be that much different in ten years’ time, compared to now. And that is a good thing.

And so, to some articles.

The digital world needs new lawmakers

</soapbox on>In case it isn’t clear enough from this article, I’m none too comfortable with the repeated, deal-with-problems-after-they-happen approach to the information age. Moves are being made to change this, notably in the financial industry, but here in the UK for example, our general legislative processes still take place over months or years. Not only is this too slow, but it is massively inefficient and open to exploitation by corporations and cybercriminals alike. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Word.</soapbox off>

On luxmobiles and flying unicorns: how diversification and proliferation will rule the routes

On a much lighter note, yes, I very much enjoyed writing this — but it has a serious point. If vehicles are no longer constrained by needing a driver, what will they become? I posited some examples as a staring point:

• Luxmobiles and budget pods. Like Apple vs Android, the market tends to diverge
• Pizza box scooters. Expect transport the shape and size of its load
• Drone swarms. No doubt flying in some sponsored logo formation
• Super Strings. I should really patent the coupling mechanism now…
• Public Subs. What about underwater package delivery? Really, why not?
• Vompods. Awkward but who wants to be the third drop-off after a late night out?
• Flying Unicorns. For multi-functional transport, the aerial has to go somewhere

The last one was first postulated in our ‘techsplaining’ podcast, the ironic title of which seems strangely appropriate.

Webinar: DevOps in the Real World

Yes, I’ve been that person who tries to get people to do things in different ways to previously. Indeed, in the course of this bulletin it was good to hook up again with Mary Lynn Manns, co-author of Fearless Change: patterns for introducing new ideas which I was delighted to contribute something to (my proposed pattern was “Champion Skeptic” — who would have guessed!). I’m rambling, but the long and short is that I am well aware you can’t just tell people to ‘do’ agile, or DevOps, or anything else that makes them have to think differently. Even if it’s a really good idea.

That’s why I’m really looking forward to having a virtual fireside chat about it all with Nigel Kersten of Puppet Labs. If you’re interested you can sign up here.

Extra-curricular

The piano continues - still two hours a night, as the latest video blog shows I’ve started to crack two hands though I’m a long way from being able to just launch in on a piece.

And meanwhile, that august institution the Society of Authors has seen fit to re-post my blog on “How Not To Be A Biographer. Which is nice!

That’s all for now, until next time. Jon

Mr Goat

The other side of the pond

What it looks like from over here

02-16 – Bulletin 16 February 2018. On swords and ploughshares: data doesn’t kill people, does it?

Bulletin 16 February 2018. On swords and ploughshares: data doesn’t kill people, does it?

I need to thank Aleks Krotoski for bringing Kranzberg’s first law to my attention: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” A stark example was the gun designed by Richard Gatling in 1861. Gatling was a complex character, so keen⁠ to demonstrate the futility of war that he created a weapon which showed no regard for human life. If any weapon ever did.

Gatling was, let us say, a complex character — at the same time as selling his weapon to the US Army, he sided⁠ with the Confederates. His invention changed the nature of war in particular, and society in general, as profoundly as Jethro Tull’s seed drill changed the nature of agriculture. While the latter might be seen as a better result, the industrial consequence was to drive many thousands of people into factories, slaves to the machines.

Against the background of a tragic, sobering and repeated cycle of school killings, I do not make the comparison between the equipment of war and that of agriculture lightly. Both involve the same materials, and both can be used for righteous good or for ill. And a similar, almost Gatling-esque level of moral ambiguity is rife in the technological world: a prize for anyone who can identify a vendor or service provider who restricts use of their outputs to positive purpose.

An ethical debate around technology exists, but it has rarely come up in the many thousands of conversations in which I have been involved. Most, if not all examples chosen by vendors illustrate the ‘good’ uses of tech, with the ‘less good’ tending to emerge from real-world experience. So, smart city debates might talk about the wonders of shifting people efficiently, but will avoid bringing up notions of crowd control.

Why is this? I think we, as an industry, genuinely think that the things we do are all for the better. The positive, optimistic voices lead our keynote speeches and case studies, leaving little room for discussion of the downsides (is it any wonder why cybersecurity tends to get forgotten during design stages?). And as Frederic Filloux suggests, the amount of chagrin around having drunk too much kool-aid doesn’t change the behaviour — we can all have regrets in hindsight.

I don’t have any answers, and I wish I did. As I wrote last week, part of it does come from our lawmaking — the nature of legislation is that it covers the areas that the state is willing to control, as per the will of its elected people and its ability to be evenhanded despite the power of unelected lobbies. Another goodly part also comes from within us all, as we accept that such optimism needs to be tempered, not with cynicism but reality.

This also means that not all problems can be solved with the latest technology. Even as we look to make every single device from toasters to traffic-cones smarter, legislation to monitor firearm use with databases of any form continues to be blocked in the US. It is not my place to say how to do things differently in another country, but the scenario illustrates how one technological advance is restricted, such that another can continue unabated.

Perhaps Kranzberg’s first law should read: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is our use of it neutral.” Which brings to some articles.

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Digital World

Here’s something I started writing as a bit of whimsy, and ended up feeling a bit depressed. I do remain optimistic, don’t get me wrong — I remain confident that we shall look back on this period in a few decades as one of the most transformative periods in history, not unlike that moment when someone said to someone else, “What’s that you’ve got there?” “Oh, dunno, think I’ll call it ‘iron’. Let’s see what happens if I sharpen it.”

Messaging the use of AI against terrorist propaganda

Democratisation remains a key element of the information age: simply put, anyone can now say anything to anyone else, anywhere. The message behind this article is that we all have the same tools, so it boils down to how well we use them. Oh, and the law of unintended consequences continues to play out.

UK Cloud Awards 2018

As a judge for this year’s UK Cloud Awards, it’s only a month to go before I’m wading through the unprecedented numbers of entries. Awards events are only as good as the quality of the entries, which puts them in the same category as employment CVs and kids’ homeworks (and opens to the same questions about the level of help they might have along the way). Unsurprisingly, I shall be looking for examples of best practice that others can learn from.

Webinar: IT as a platform for business success

I’ll be ‘mein host’ for a Register webinar in a few weeks’ time — a great position to be in, as all I have to do is ask questions of great panellists and bask in their reflected glory. In this webinar the topic is how mid-market businesses can go beyond tinkering with their IT and start taking on the bigger companies: the answer is going to be architectural, easy to say, harder to do! Always a pleasure to hang out with my old friend and colleague Tony Lock.

Extra-curricular — local leg-ends

I know it’s only one marketing statement, but I confess to have had a huge buzz from Lechlade Festival calling Plucking Different “local legends” — we will be playing the fourth year in a row, with headliners Scouting for Girls. Rehearsal tonight before our first gig of the year, at Stroud Brewery. Expect Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones, Pulp, The Corals, George Ezra, Arcade Fire, U2, Muse, and of course, Gogol Bordello as well as beer and pizza!

02-22 – The bittersweet tragedy of falling thresholds

The bittersweet tragedy of falling thresholds

You have to feel sorry for Charles Babbage, whose 1830’s designs for the analytics engine were never to be realised in his own lifetime. As well as Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the maverick mother of programming, whose own book was never finished. It could be said they were the founders of steampunk, in which all matters tekno-logical could be enabled with clever use of cogs and lenses.

Arguably, they were also the first to experience the falling threshold theory of computation. While it was potentially possible to realising his designs with the accuracy required, the costs were not seen as acceptable by the UK Treasury. How different might history have been, had they been funded. Indeed, another hundred years passed before others attempted to devise contraptions that could perform calculations according pre-‘programmed’ instructions.

When figures (such as German engineer Konrad Zuse, with an adaptation of the telegraph) finally did, they no doubt went through similar epiphanies of invention, those moments where the world appears to open up. “Just what I will be able to do with <insert device, program or concept here> beggars belief,” goes the thinking, repeating a pattern that has no doubt continued since the invention of the wheel.

(As an aside, I am reminded of one of my favourite cartoons from the Wizard of Id. “I have it, I have it! The greatest invention since the wheel!” announces the Wizard. “What is it?” replies the King, to which the Wizard says, “The axle!”)

No doubt the inventors of the tin can envisaged a future in which any foodstuff could be ‘canned’… these waves of invention are so often followed by the equally inevitable realisation that, no, not all problems can be solved — not cost-effectively, at least, and not at the time. Only the advent of Moore’s Law, variants of which still continue, offer any hope: if something isn’t possible yet, then it may be so in a couple of years’ time. Or so.

The thing about Moore’s Law is that it became an impetus to research, a budgetary variant of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in that measuring something influences its behaviour. In this case, funds were allocated and priorities set in order to ensure it remained true. This is without malice or corruption: the potential consequences of delivering on the Law, and the opportunities thus created, were sufficient to drive the strategies of Intel, IBM et al.

Visionaries and indeed, marketers have tried to drive similar self-fulfilling prophecy through the power of their aspiration. When this is both blatant and unlikely to succeed, we refer to this as Kool-aid, illustrative of how easy it is to get whipped up into a frenzy of belief about the next big thing. It is similarly simple to be cynical, to point out how unlikely the vision is in practice. As I have written before, we may be right, for a while.

When breakthroughs tend to happen, they are driven by cost effectiveness, limited in scope and broad in impact: so, for example, the arrival of Hadoop onto the data management scene became possible due to the availability of certain components, notably in-memory data stores (which are lost if the machine is turned off, but that doesn’t matter if you already have your answer). Similar, the wave of “AirBnB doesn’t own a hotel”-type pronouncements.

Most of the major innovations we have seen in recent years are a consequence of these falling thresholds. Computation really is just maths, and infrastructure really is just engineering: anyone preaching the mantra of agility is on firm ground, as the chances are very high that what we see today as the norm (and build our businesses around) will tomorrow become superseded.

Equally, some of that maths will still be held back by the current state of engineering. Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing are all models operating under various levels of constraint. The trick is to avoid listening to what might be possible, which may or may not be noise, while being ready to take advantage of the very real opportunities when they emerge.

Innovation in its truest sense — that is, constant renewal of thinking and practice — is the name of the game. Keeping this in mind, here’s some articles for this week.

What’s missing from the Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence report?

While there’s a lot in this meaty report about what might go wrong about AI, it lacks substance — partially fair given that we are talking about the future, but equally unacceptable given our shared goal of understanding, and mitigating, potential risks. OK, I’m giving away the plot but the consequence is decidedly unscientific, which is surprising given that it comes largely from academia.

Why AI on a chip is the start of the next IT explosion

Ironic that I should write about Kool-aid, with that header! The bottom line is that chip design is moving from something everybody did, back in the day (my first job was Philips Components, and who remembers the Transputer?) to something everybody does. This shift from proprietary to commodity to open, seen so clearly in software, is now happening at the chip level.

Five questions for…

Okay, this isn’t an article but an aspiration (it’s not just technology that has to deal with bottlenecks, in my case, time). Conscious of the fact that briefings with technology companies are important, and that nobody wants to waste anybody’s time, I’m starting a series of posts where I will ask five questions of a technology vendor. I’m thinking that it should be possible to say something new and useful in a short piece.

Extra-curricular — a shout-out for parkrun

Last Saturday I was Race Director for the third outing of the UK’s 500th parkrun venue, at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester. I can’t extol the virtues of parkrun enough — it is incredibly inclusive, with sprinters, walkers and people pushing prams sharing the same route. A run not a race, the goal is to get the world fitter. Long may it continue.

March 2018

03-02 – Bulletin March 2 2018. Show me the money!

Bulletin March 2 2018. Show me the money!

I confess to have got a kick, at a presentation I gave in Berlin in November, out of the impromptu one-man re-enactment of the scene from Jerry McGuire, yes that scene, where Tom Cruise has to shout down the phone to Cuba Gooding Jr. (quick presenter tip, if you are going to pull a stunt like this, probably best not to tell the client first). It certainly livened up what might otherwise have been a quite dry topic around IT procurement.

Truth is, however, that pretty much everything is about money these days. We dress it up in terms of “business value”, “stakeholder outcomes” and so on, but to the extent that we can start to feel positively altruistic about our innovations, but no money, no point in staying in business. I draw the line at the frankly horrible word ‘monetisation’, which (among other crimes against vocabulary) takes a pretty bleak view of what data is for.

I also don’t necessarily agree with the view, as proposed by value management guru (and old friend and colleague) Roger Davies, that everything can be presented in financial terms. Perhaps this is true in principle, but (a) cf my previous points about the nature of terminology, and indeed (b) if we do so we end up in a place where everything does, indeed, become all about the money.

Don’t get me wrong, money is clearly important. Its invention (somewhere in what is now Turkey, an awfully long time ago) was to solve the many problems of not having it — interestingly, it almost immediately spawned the notion of currency exchange, with people taking a bit off the spread for kindly switching one for of value for another. The very word entrepreneurship suggests somebody positioning themselves as an in-betweener, taking what they see as their due for managing whatever hand-off they undertake.

It’s also important, frankly, because we all have to eat. And the fact you can play a mean guitar won’t sit well with the person on the checkout, as justification for your purchases.

But this very confusion around the nature of money, or value, or whatever you want to call it, is fundamental to the changing dynamics of business today, underpinning concepts such as ‘disintermediation’. It’s also unsurprising that anybody who creates something of value, essentially mining their own heads and hands for IP, art or craft, risks being ripped off. Indeed, the whole “Don’t work for free” movement for creative professionals has emerged, rightly, from the difficulty we have disentangling notions of monetary value from value’s more absolute form.

Technology could hold the answer, indeed it may already do so, but the past ten thousand years of progress have also created a deep-seated attachment to both money and the need for intermediaries. The debates around self publishing offer an illustration of how hard it is to separate our (real) need for collaborative endeavour, from the fact we’d be better off doing some jobs ourselves. The fact you can now set up as a self-publishing consultant is both as ironic as it is illustrative.

With this in mind, here’s some articles.

Why can’t we work out a technological solution for music distribution?

Choon is the latest new service to attempt to bring music directly to the masses — this time based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency. In this article I (try to) take things back to first principles of why we make, and listen to music in the first place. And indeed, will continue to do so.

What does “sustainable income” mean for authors?

I wrote this a while back out of pure self interest. A standard phrase from the more successful authors I’ve come across is “then, I became a full-time author…” It’s worth unpicking this as it suggests that the main route to success involves sustaining one’s inherent desire to write with other distractions, such as paying the bills. There aren’t any author practices in which older partners support younger trainees, perhaps we are better for it but it does make me wonder if we have the balance right.

Extra-curricular: Epilogue to Suburbia

Confession: I wrote this as a consequence of a minor fantasy about… what would happen if a small nuclear device was set off over Camberley? I was working there at the time and, frankly, sitting in queues of cars in the driving rain with nothing of note but a concrete elephant and the sad faces of other commuters was starting to get to me. This is actually a prologue, as researchers unpick the remains and try to work out what happened. Perhaps it will turn into a book one day.

03-08 – On Cloud, serverless and all that — are we there yet?

On Cloud, serverless and all that — are we there yet?

This week sees the tenth anniversary of CloudCamp, that self-titled ‘unconference’ which, in its anarchic style, seems to run just as smoothly as any non-unconference I have ever been to — even conferences that aren’t called conferences still need to be organised (and it was, very well). During last night’s London event two of its founders, Joe Baguley and Simon Wardley continued the double act pitting hybrid vs purer forms of cloud computing, the latter overloaded with terms like ‘serverless’, ‘FaaS’ and so on.

Ignoring that the discussion would have gone over the heads of all but the deeply technical (“But, this is one of the least technical events you can come to!” protested one, momentarily forgetting just how much technological knowledge lay behind these innocuous terms), we have its continued debate. On one side, that technology will continue to commoditise, and on the other, that it will continue to diversify. Each are right, creating both dilemma and opportunity for evangelists and those liking a good chat in either camp. And, given that the themes have got a good couple of decades to run yet, so will it continue.

I’m guilty as charged. Back in 2000 I penned two reports: the 50-page “From Application Service Provider to Universal Service Provider” which extrapolated the thinking of my then-boss, Robin Bloor; and “Development is Dead”, which I wrote based on my own experiences as a software development consultant. At the heart is of each is that, while software has the potential to become easier, reducing both barriers to entry and time to delivery, hardware and infrastructure will only get more complex. Because it can.

This dichotomy is as true today as it always has been. ‘Serverless’ software development can exist anywhere there is a server, which is an increasingly wide pool: even so-called ‘edge’ devices (from Echo Dots to toasters) can serve data or indeed, functions. I remember a discussion a long time ago with Akamai, about edge computing — in a nutshell, why send the data to the functionality of you can shift the functionality to the data? The fact that sometimes one will make sense, sometimes the other, is precisely what makes things so hard to pin down.

None of this is a problem, it’s part of the rich, dynamic tapestry of standardisation and commoditisation versus very real limitations of resources such as bandwidth, processing, storage, electrical power and so on. Cost is a consequence of all such constraints, in that, sure, we’d all have mainframes in the basement if we could afford them. But we can’t, and we never will be able to as long as the volumes of data we create continue to exceed our ability to process it all. On we go.

With all this in mind, here’s some articles from this week.

For most firms GDPR is an opportunity, not a threat

GDPR is going to run and run. I can’t say I blame every person and their dog looking to jump on the GDPR bandwagon, let’s face it, cybersecurity and compliance software vendors and consultants have not had the easiest of rides. What some look at as ambulance chasing or FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) spreading, I see as — have you ever actually tried to get budget for anything relating to these areas without some sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the CFO? All the same, a crapload of confusion exists around GDPR right now. Solution: the ICO has a free helpline, so use it.

5 questions for… TechVets

My inaugural 5 questions article is on the back of another event, this one to help ex-service personnel get jobs in the tech industry. It’s a laudable initiative, serving all parties involved. Ed’s note, I’m a great fan of ‘and’ rather than ‘either/or’ in these things — supporting one doesn’t have to diminish support for any other.

Extra-curricular

My Journey to Widor continues — if you haven’t been following this, it’s taking me from a keyboard novice to one of the harder, but fabulous organ pieces. I’m recording progress as a series of vlogs, to be frank because putting it out there means I can’t stop as I’ll look stupid. Sitrep: I’ve got as far as tackling Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which for some reason I’ve been memorising (it seemed like a good idea at the time). Progress video here — I’m pretty made up to be playing such a beautiful piece, despite all the mistakes.

03-16 – Bulletin March 16 2018. Time flies like a banana

Bulletin March 16 2018. Time flies like a banana

I’ll try to keep this short. After all, time is at a premium. Or is it?

It’s funny, isn’t it, how we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about technology, the benefits it can bring and so on, and then cover all the related topics in a rush — the “it’s not as simple as that” stuff like security and management, “the things people don’t realise” areas, like business people not caring all that much (though this is changing). In general, we reach universal agreement that such topics are as important, if not more important, than the tech.

If, like me, you’ve been around the block a few times more than you’d like (to whit, a story: “That bloke over there, he looks really old, older than me!” I said. “No he doesn’t,” replied my wife), then this pattern will be all too familiar, with the latter part often finishing in the bar. If only pubs held design workshops, imagine how far we would have advanced.

Even more surprising by its frequent absence, is the notion of time. Surprising, as we are told that it is one of the most important factors: transform or die, goes the mantra, as everything gets faster, and faster, and faster. Graphs on this topic are typically exponential — the years for an innovation to go mainstream, the likely lifespan of new companies, each follows a similar curve.

Clearly, we are talking about one aspect of time. What comes up less are the very fixed timescales that still occupy most, if not all companies: for example, technology refresh cycles are set at two years, plus or minus, and enterprise contracts can be fixed at three or even more, particularly for outsourcing.

For tech vendors, these cycles are both a blessing and a curse. Knowing when your target’s contracts come up for renewal is very important, of course; but once an acquisition has taken place, it is almost impossible to displace. And sales people are driven by another, quarterly cycle, which gets even less of a mention despite the fact that it influences the client relationship more than anything else. Apart, of course, than the vendor’s own annual cycle…

The pay-as-you-go model does have its advantages, minimising up-front costs and so on, but as anyone who has tried it knows, it has not thus far replaced standard procurement cycles that apply to most other things an organisation might need. A cursory search shows that IT budgets are going to be a maximum of 7% of corporate spend, so you can understand why nobody’s looking to transform procurement to make way for the credit card model.

And even this may be transient. Even now, it looks like we are moving from the mother of all technology centralisation waves (a.k.a. the shift into the cloud) into what may well be its teeming offspring — the Internet of Things is one manifestation of our distributed future, as are the local processing needs driven by machine learning. What payment models this triggers is anybody’s guess.

But even as things continue to speed up, the chances are we will continue to operate within some pretty fixed cycles. Yes, indeed, it’s strange how they never get discussed. Must dash, meanwhile here’s some articles. Oh and P.S. yes, I know, time flies like an arrow. But fruit flies like a banana. HT Rob Bamforth, an awfully long time ago…

In other news… the Origami Mobile Phone Stand

“Ever been stuck, miles from a gadget shop and needing to prop up your smartphone to watch a video or do some typing?” Back in 2013 I was in a B&B on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, and at a loose end, so I thought I’d tackle one of modern society’s greatest challenges. At the time not many had done it (well), so this became the number one origami smartphone stand on Google. Oh fickle fame, it is no longer but for a moment I could stand tall among the paper folding community. Here’s the link.

03-16 – Untitled

Untitled

Human endeavour is a powerful thing. It saw Amelia Earhart fly single-handedly across the Atlantic, Neil Armstrong on the moon and no end of people tracing the steps of others up the slopes of Everest, in the knowledge that they might not come back.

Many of our enterprises were originally formed on the basis of similar, beyond the call of duty effort — “One percent Inspiration, 99 percent perspiration,” as Thomas Edison was purported to say. The combination of money, vision, acumen and consistent, focused effort, even when all seems pointless — Sir Ranulph Fiennes calls this ’motivation’ — is only occasionally rewarded by remarkable success: the legions of failure go silently to their doom, like all those films we will never see because the hero gets killed in the opening scene.

It is against this background that we should view today’s technology superheroes — like Jobs and Gates before them, and many more before that (shout out to unsung hero Tommy Flowers, who had the drive and chops, but not the PR), the current raft of Brin, Bezos, Zuckerberg and of course Musk, have had to deliver all of the above, over a period of decades.

Elon Musk has been close to failure more times than he dares think about, but the announcements keep on coming. For example, Tesla’s latest smart power grid experiment in Nova Scotia in collaboration with the Canadian Government, or DHL’s suggestion that the ROI of Tesla trucks may be better than expected, when maintenance costs are taken into account as well as fuel.

Meanwhile Amazon has moved from being a shaky stock to ‘corporate America’s nightmare’, according to Bloomberg. Jeff Bezos’ entire strategy, we are told, hinges on it being always ‘Day One’, plus a sharing model literally designed on a napkin. Yet the company holds entire industries in thrall, as do Google, Apple, Alibaba and the rest. So, to the elephant in the boardroom: why don’t other companies simply follow suit?

The answer is not about being the most technologically advanced: I’ve been told that Tesla’s battery technology is not the best on the market right now, and Amazon’s infamous recommendations algorithm was initially no better than any number of university machine learning projects. Don’t get me wrong, hardware and software engineering deliver great things — but their presence or absence is not the main lever.

Nor is the answer about money — you just have to look at the investments by technology giants to see that (a) they have plenty of it, and (b) they are spending just as much (if not more) than the upstarts. The very existence of FinTech is illustration that money can’t buy you innovation-led success.

Nor even is the answer about vision. Sorry. We can all come up with sweeping statements about how we are changing the world, but saying them doesn’t make them true, or effective. Last year Facebook changed its mission statement from “Making the world more open and connected” to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” As well as copping out from any blame, the change reflects how Facebook enables change more than causing it: the rest is up to us.

So, is the answer down to ‘digital transformation’ or whatever the latest business change mantra might be? Again, the answer is no, as it puts the cart before the horse. Sadly, you will not be able to use technology to change the way you think, however much potential it offers. Analytics, cloud or whatever will not cause some kind of corporate epiphany at the top, nor anywhere in the hierarchy.

No, no, no and four times no. Rather, the answer is down to doggedness within a context fraught with uncertainty, ignoring anyone that might tell you that you are an idiot (because, frankly, you probably are). Today’s companies are shackled by stock market valuations, quick-buck investors and risk-averse management. It is completely unsurprising that Amazon went from being a loss maker to one of the world’s most valuable stocks — like all of the best stories, it snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. As the Bloomberg author Shira Ovide remarks, “This was a case of preparation meeting opportunity.”

So, is it the case that traditional industries should follow suit, taking huge gambles and risking shareholder wrath? No, as this isn’t an either/or game. Despite the repeated public failures of the Musks and Bezoses, Zuckerbergs and Jobsian inheritors, behind the scenes are well-oiled machines that see experimentation as part of business as usual. Even if the hero does get killed, that’s OK, because these people have more than one story to tell.

Don’t get me wrong, many organisations are making great strides (check out what Philips is becoming, for example). But many more that I have worked with are looking to become better at this innovation thing, without actually addressing the most significant factor — a need to put “doing new things” in front of “doing old things”. That’s in front, not alongside or somewhere over there. My experience working internally in some of our biggest institutions is that they simply don’t have the determination to do it.

As long as this is true, any amount of lean or agile, DevOps or predictive decisions, transformation, digital-first strategy or anything else we can come up with will make a difference. Sure, individual departments may have something to feel proud about, a new app or service, a new type of account or clever customer portal. But as long as these are the exception, not the norm,

Corporations have few guarantees in this tumultuous age, but one thing is for sure. While success is not pre-ordained, any company without a positive attitude to change is on its own death march. Perhaps, for the executives currently in place, this doesn’t matter — they will just move on and take their salaries with them. But if they do not accept the need to embrace change as normal, they will be failing all of their stakeholders, customers, investors and employees alike.

03-23 – Lambda is an AWS internal efficiency driver. So why aren’t we seeing private serverless models?

Lambda is an AWS internal efficiency driver. So why aren’t we seeing private serverless models?

I’ve been in a number of conversations recently about Functions as a Service (FaaS), and more specifically, AWS’ Lambda instantiation of the idea. For the lay person, this is where you don’t have to actually provide anything but program code — “everything else” is taken care of by the environment.

You upload and press play. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Unsurprisingly, some see application development moving inexorably towards a serverless, i.e. FaaS-only, future. As with all things technological however, there are plusses and minuses to any such model. FaaS implementations tend to be stateless and event-driven — that is, they react to whatever they are asked to do without remembering what position they were in.

This means you have to manage state within the application code. FaaS frameworks are vendor-specific by nature, and tend to add transactional latency, so a re good for doing small things with huge amounts of data, rather than lots of little things each with small amounts of data.

So, yes, horses for courses as always. We may one day arrive in a place where our use of technology is so slick, we don’t have to think about hardware, or virtual machines, or containers, or anything else. But right now, and as with so many over-optimistic predictions, we are continuing to fan-out into more complexity (cf the Internet of Things).

Plus, each time we reach a new threshold of hardware advances, we revisit many areas which need to be newly understood, re-integrated and so on. We are a long way from a place where we don’t have to worry about anything but a few lines of business logic.

A very interesting twist on the whole FaaS thing is around its impact on server efficiency. Anecdotally, AWS sees Lambda not only as a new way of helping customers, but also as a model which makes better use of spare capacity in its data centres. This merits some thought, not least that serverless models are anything but.

From an architectural perspective, these models involve a software stack which is optimised for a specific need — think of it as a single, highly distributed application architecture which can be spread over as many server nodes as it needs to get its current jobs done. Unlike relatively clunky and immobile VMs, or a bit less flexible containers, you can orchestrate your serverless capabilities much more dynamically, to use up spare headroom in your server racks.

Which is great, at least for cloud providers. A burning question is, why aren’t such capabilities available for private clouds, or indeed, traditional data centres? In principle, the answer is, well, there should be. Despite a number of initiatives, such an option has still to take off. Which begs a very big question of — what’s holding them back?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the public cloud model as a highly flexible, low-entry-cost outsourcing mechanism. But nothing technological exists that gives AWS, or any other public cloud provider some magical advantage over internal systems: the same tools are available to all.

As long as we live in a hybrid world, which will be the case as long as it keeps changing so fast, we will have to deal with managing IT resources from multiple places, internal and external. Perhaps, like the success story of Docker, we will see a sudden uptake in internal FaaS, with all the advantages — not least efficiency — that come with it.

03-23 – The more that things change…

The more that things change…

It’s hard not to be a cynic as an independent industry analyst. Indeed, you are given little choice: the nature of the beast is that a bandwagon will appear, over the brow of a nearby hill, proclaiming something that (you swear) you have seen many times before as new, improved and indeed, the answer to everything.

No, it isn’t, you say. But even in doing so, you somehow validate it. “Artificial Intelligence isn’t as straightforward as that,” one might argue, in the process helping to spin up the flywheel still faster. “AI, you say? Thanks, I must take a look at that.” And thus, the job of the marketer is done.

This isn’t a bad thing in itself — tech needs its greek chorus — but at the same time, it uses up bandwidth that might be spent on the things that aren’t earning the PR dollars. Most readers will remember the Green IT wave which took up so much attention in the Noughties. Hey, guess what? Sustainable IT is still a thing, it just isn’t a marketing topic.

It also distorts reality. We are, indeed, in a wave of machine learning excitement, caused by the fact that previously unachieveable tasks are now both affordable and timely. Real-time delivery of new insights really is a thing, as are voice recognition and computer vision.

Less so is what has been termed AI, for a stack of reasons: not only that learning and inference models still need to be scoped pretty tightly, but also because they deliver useful gen to humans, not to autonomous virtual beings with the power of reason. As per a couple of recent conversations, what we currently call AI lacks the ability to discern.

But round we go. I’ve not been against taking the marketing dollar to help vendors clarify their stories, with a shrug as I face a reality in which I’m not setting the agenda. My only advice would be, sure, acknowledge the noisy topics under discussion right now, but don’t let these obscure the ones just past. Second-mover advantage really is a thing, whatever the marketers might say.

03-26 – Is enhanced reality an AR/VR cop-out?

Is enhanced reality an AR/VR cop-out?

Watch out, there’s a new term on the block. Even as the initial flurry of excitement over Oculus-primed virtual reality seems to be in a perpetual state of prototyping, and as other forms of augmentation are hanging about like costume options for Ready Player One, discussion is turning to enhanced reality. I know this not because of some online insight (Google Trends isn’t showing much), but because it has come up in conversation more than once with enterprise technology strategists.

So, what can we take from this? All forms of adjusted reality are predicated on a real-time feed of information that brings a direct effect to our senses:

• At one end of the scale, we have fully immersive environments known as Virtual Reality (VR). These are showing themselves to be enormously powerful tools, with potential not just in gaming or architecture but also areas such as healthcare — imagine if you can shrink to the size of a tiny cancer, and then control microscopic lasers to burn it away? At the same time, the experience is isolating and restricted, which is both a blessing and a curse.
• Augmented Reality (AR) rests on the fulcrum between virtual reality and, ahem, reality. Goes the argument, why take a real-time video feed and add data to it, if you can project data or images directly onto what you are seeing? It’s a good argument, but it demonstrates just how fraught and complex the debate quickly becomes. What’s useful information? What’s in and what’s out? And indeed, is a computer really better at discerning the important stuff, than our own senses?
• With its roots in passive information and heads-up display, the notion of enhanced reality (ER) does away with the need to worry about such things. Yes, AR and VR also follow a similar lineage but ER does not try to be anything beyond a context-specific information delivery mechanism. So, a motorbike rider can see speed and fuel, a surgeon can monitor vital signs, and so on.

The difference from other models is that ER starts from the perspective of minimum necessary — that is, what information do I actually need right now. This approach is not that dissimilar to the kinds of displays we are now seeing in cars, and indeed, it pushes the same buttons of how to add information whilst minimising distraction.

So, is this a cop-out? It is not hard to see VR, AR and ER as a Venn diagram, with plenty of overlaps between each. Right now however, no one-size-fits-all solution addresses that little triangle in the middle; meanwhile, the different models enable us to focus on what problem we are trying to solve, rather than worrying about whether today’s technology options are sufficient for one thing or another.

In practical terms, for example, even as the wonks work on deeply immersive experiences, a pair of retinal-focused sunglasses that offer a feed of messages, and/or can link into a feed of data about whatever activity is being undertaken, would probably sell like hot cakes if the price was right. (Indeed, if I could put in an early feature request, a tap on the frame to turn the thing on/off would be most welcome).

Enhanced Reality offers us more than just a lowest-denominator entry point. By focusing on useful data and how to deliver it succinctly, rather than clever hardware and how to make it fit our daily lives, we are putting the horse before the cart and, as a result, perhaps advancing things faster, even if initial use cases appear mundane. If we want to get to deep levels of technological immersion, we would do well to start at the shallow end.

03-27 – Digital Transformation 101: What are we trying to transform, and why?

Digital Transformation 101: What are we trying to transform, and why?

New wine, old skins

It’s pretty easy to be a digital transformation consultant these days. Here’s what you do.

First, you report on the amount of data growth, the increasing rate of change and other exponential factors; you flag up the massive growth of recent, tech-first companies such as Amazon and Alibaba (whilst carefully ignoring those who tried and failed to follow similar models); you list out conveniently acronymised manifestations of technological progress — Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. Oh and IoT. And AI. You get the picture.

Having engendered a suitable level of fear and uncertainty among your target audience, namely executive decision makers (who happen to control consulting budgets), you go in with the scoop: that the only possible response is to transform. Not to tweak, nor encourage stepwise progress, but to make a ground-to-sky, soup-to-nuts matrix-style inversion of the entire organisation.

How should we do this, you are asked. Well, how fortunate you have an answer for that, you say. The response is to run a series of very expensive strategy workshops, which will generate a new vision for the company. You will then review existing lines of business and operational departments, looking at existing processes and advising on the best way to bring them into the new world.

Oh, and you will also propose a cloud-first innovation strategy, which means shifting an organisation’s IT capabilities (planned and legacy) from where they are “into the cloud”. The “cloud” in question just happens to be your data centres, or those of your partner. And thus, you have the company or department in question completely set up for the future.

Strip away the gloss however, and you haven’t done much more than you would have done in years past — that is, a strategy-cum-business-modelling exercise coupled with an outsourcing contract (admittedly to a potentially more flexible infrastructure architecture). The executives involved may not be too bothered that their organisation has not been ‘transformed’, as they now have on their CV that they have overseen a multi-million change programme.

And so, round we go, with consultants taking companies and public organisations a bit further on their journeys. Don’t get me wrong, this is a reasonable outcome but digital transformation it isn’t — which smacks of a wasted opportunity given the amount of effort that went into it. And a source of risk, as all those tech-first companies continue to do all the things they are reputed to do — transform industries, disintermediate supply and demand, and so on.

This presents a conundrum: if this isn’t digital transformation, what is? Perhaps there is no such thing; the term is mere marketing, a sugar-coated way of loosening the purse strings of conservative board members. At the same time, industries are transforming, yadda, yadda, so decision makers should at least do some due diligence on where technology can actually make a difference.

There is an answer, but it is not as straightforward as you might think (it never is, right?), as it means changing board-level attitudes to those key measures of cost, stakeholder value, and risk. You can draw a simple picture, a quadrant chart, if you will — up the side are existing versus new sources of stakeholder value, and across the bottom are existing versus new working practices. The chances are that most of your business will fall into the bottom-left quadrant.

The consequence is simple: that any new sources of value are likely to be encumbered by existing operational processes, while new processes quickly hit a glass ceiling in terms of the efficiencies that new technology can bring. Understanding the dilemma between old processes and new value is fundamental to any transformational business change.

I’m not saying that drawing a picture can change the world, it’s only a model. But being able to perceive your business in terms of how new can create new, even as it makes old more efficient (without throwing the baby out with the bathwater), is profound. It also makes the choice pretty stark — just how much investment (of money, but more importantly, time and political will) do you want to make in the top-right quadrant?

An honest answer to this question will give you all the clarity you need in terms of your actual appetite for transformation. Once you understand this, chances are you will need some consultants to help; you may also decide that outsourced, cloud-based infrastructure gives you the way forward. But at least you will be making decisions with a real grasp of what you stand to gain.

03-29 – Translating for geeks since 1987

Translating for geeks since 1987

I was looking at some stuff about neural networks the other day. There’s two implementations, apparently: one which looks something like a tree-walk algorithm, and the other, more like a fishing net with various knots. I can’t remember exactly what the differences were, but suffice to say that one is better at some things than the other.

Which is important, of course, but not for the purposes of this discussion. More relevant is that the fishing net approach reminded me of something I saw (potentially being invented, I can’t remember) pretty early on in my career. It was known as Layout Interlace Field, and its creator was one Tim Bolton.

Back in the day I was a Pascal programmer for Philips Components, and we were writing software for silicon chip design. The place was delightfully well run, a fact I only found out when I left (I remember reading Tom De Marco and Timothy Lister’s seminal book, Peopleware, and thinking, “Who’d be so dumb as to not apply all that best practice!” – the answer, it turned out, was most other organisations…).

I digress. The thing about chip design is that you are always looking to squeeze as many bits of circuit onto the wafer as you can — Moore’s Law can only get you so far. The exceedingly smart Tim came up with an idea: how about creating vertical and horizontal lines of silicon down the chip, then only connecting the points at which you wanted a transistor to be (like a knot on a fishing net)?

I can’t remember the detail, and right now it does sound similar to a programmable logic array, but it did make for much denser designs. Indeed, it is highly likely that it’s the kind of thing being done in today’s neural-network-optimised chips. Another digression but I must take a look some time. More important was, Tim was the kind of person (and probably still is) that would do things very differently, with all the benefits that brings.

At the same time however, he wasn’t the world’s best communicator of what he created. One of my earliest tasks was to write some documentation for the compaction software Tim had written (Moore’s Law can only get you so far, yadda yadda). I simply had to interview Tim and write down what he told me.

The software was pretty smart, as you’d expect. When you lay out a circuit in a CAD system, you essentially create a series of rules — this track connects to that track, those two elements need to stay so far apart, and so on. Tim’s algorithm loaded all of these rules into a giant (for the time) matrix, did all they could to squeeze everything down to the bottom left corner, and then (the really clever bit) flip the matrix like you might a tablecloth, then squeeze it all down into the bottom left again.

Of course, sometimes the rules were already pretty tight and left little room for any squeezing. So the software also employed a soupçon of simulated annealing, that is, loosen everything up a bit (like when you heat a metal) and then apply the compaction when it is ‘cooling’. Simples.

Of course, Tim didn’t explain it to me like that. Rather, he told me about each instruction, it’s purpose and capability. It was only after sitting with him going through the code (what felt like) line by line over a period of (what felt like) weeks before I had the sudden epiphany about what the code actually did.

Which is pretty much what I still do today. I remain in absolute awe about the engineers and innovators that are creating our shared future in front of our eyes: their engineering talent does not always leave room for more down-to-earth skills, and I am truly grateful for that as well. The day that technology becomes straightforward to understand, I understand, I will be out of a job.

For the time being however, I think I should be OK… with this in mind, here’s a couple of articles for the week.

Is enhanced reality an AR/VR cop-out?

I heard a new term this week, and wanted at least to mark its existence as if seems to make sense. Indeed, I could have written a whole newsletter about the notion of making things a little better than before, rather than changing the world again (or should I say re-imagining? As an aside, I bloody love Indiegogo with its barking mad campaigns, it has replaced Skymall in my mind)… maybe I will just do that.

Digital Transformation 101: What are we trying to transform, and why?

Okay, this may be old news but it only recently occurred to me that the reason consultants love cloud is because they love outsourcing, and cloud is a form of outsource… oh, wait….

Lambda is an AWS internal efficiency driver. So why aren’t we seeing private serverless models?

Cloud is just your stuff on somebody else’s tin, as someone said to me

Heads-up: TechPitch

I hope the above illustrates my genuine delight to be involved as a judge on the TechPitch panel in April. This involves startups at pitching workshops, at the end of which they get to present to a wider audience. Tickets available here.

In other news, Big Big Bread

Those who know me also know my absolute passion, and obsession for making bread. Passion, because it is possibly one of the first thing we ever learned to cook (unless you count turning a small rodent over a fire); obsession, because… I don’t know. Obsessions seem to happen to me rather than me having any choice in the matter (in this case, it was a day-long course with the amazing bread maker). I also have a penchant for beer (my attempts at fermenting have never been as successful, to my shame) and progressive rock music… so here’s a recipe for bread made with beer from one of my favourite bands. Enjoy.

April 2018

04-13 – The unintended narcissism of personal epiphanies.

The unintended narcissism of personal epiphanies.

No tech articles this week, as I’m just back from holiday. Normal service will be resumed next week.

Do you still have “that book”? You know, the one that you read and you found that it so closely mirrored your experience, or gave answers to questions you thought were unanswerable, to the extent that you thought, “Wow, that’s amazing! Everyone needs to read this!”

I know I do. As I worked through my first mid-life crisis, I was recommended M. Scott Peck’s ‘The Road Less Travelled’. “Life is hard,” it started, and I was hooked. The discovery that the author was a serial philanderer and alcoholic did little to dampen my ardour; indeed, it only increased as I realised he was human too.

It was only decades later that I realised many of the ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’, ‘Men Are From Mars’ and indeed, the current generation of similar books (quick tip: to get published, put a swear word in the title) share a thread: a personal analysis of individual experience.

They are also, frequently, written by people of a certain age. My suspicion has long been that they arise from the ashes of personal challenge — epiphany following hopelessness, like sunrise follows dark. At such moments, the human tendency is (in my experience) to become somewhat evangelical: the world must know. In book form.

The reader’s realisation that the author has slain similar dragons creates its own epiphany, together with a reinforcing feedback loop: I must be right, thinks the author, as, well, look at all the people who have said so! Cue publisher asking for follow-up and a guaranteed future on the self-help speaker circuit.

Strangely, none of this ever gets talked about — we prefer our gurus to appear fully formed, no doubt from some guru school, where they have spent decades of apprenticeship before emerging into the light. And similarly, their words are presented as fact: no “What I have found,” nor, “This won’t be true for everyone, but,” nor, “In my opinion,” to precede sentences.

Which makes sense: if they were just the words of the struggling person in the street who had learned a few things, they wouldn’t be that interesting, would they? None of this is a bad thing in itself, as it results in old wisdoms being re-iterated by, and interpreted for each generation.

However, our desire to keep things simple affects our ability to discern and, frankly, makes us lazy. If we are presented with three reasons why something may be so, why look for a fourth? And meanwhile of course, the views as originally expressed become entrenched: it is hard for a guru to change his or her mind (ask Chris Anderson).

We can all have opinions and experiences, hard data and soft anecdotes. But the moment that we disconnect our views from the information that supports them, we risk creating a new kind of truth — one dependent on esteem rather than fact. Even in this unprecedented age, there is nothing new under the sun.

All the best, Jon

P.S. Incidentally, the book I picked up on holiday was Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. I haven’t finished it yet, but I can confirm it fits into the category of being a Very Important Book. And it does buck the trend, as will many others.

04-27 – Bulletin 27 April 2018. Flipping compliance… on its head (GDPR redux)

Bulletin 27 April 2018. Flipping compliance… on its head (GDPR redux)

I seem to keep getting drawn into GDPR-related compliance conversations. I do so uncomfortably, for two reasons: first I am not a lawyer, and second, given the general level of misunderstanding about the new regulation (under a month to go, folks), I am very wary about offering anything that might be perceived as advice. Something I am absolutely clear about, however, is that it is all the wrong way around.

Let me say first that I understand why. We live within a social structure based on the rule of law, rather than any other principle. The law may be an ass but it has stood us in good stead over the centuries: from its roots setting out rules of civil conduct, or presenting the latest impositions of those in power, it’s generally been accepted (sometimes begrudgingly), as the rulebook to be followed.

This was all very well when resources were plentiful, but as we have come up against the limitations of our own population growth and voracious appetites, efficiency has become the name of the game. There was a point, not that many decades ago, where the role of law flipped from something to be followed unthinkingly, to a set of criteria to work within.

So, it’s become less important, for example, to do the right thing, and more important to demonstrate that the rules have been followed: the cry if “I didn’t do anything wrong” ((c) Richard Nixon) may be defensible, even if the behaviour is deemed unethical. It’s well-known that banks have made it their business to look for loopholes in regulation, and why? Because that’s where the money is.

For law makers, the result is to create more laws. Banking regulation is getting more and more complex: this creates more complexity, and therefore the potential for more loop holes. And so it goes on. And on. And on, to GDPR, which has done a pretty good job of closing a number of stable doors… though it remains to be see what it has not dealt with in terms of our privacy.

Apologies, I’m rambling as usual. On the topic of GDPR conversations, organisations of all shapes and sizes have several choices. The first (and most obvious) is to comply with the regulation, appoint data controllers, inform customers and request appropriate consent, and all that. Frankly, doing so is blooming hard given the level of information, and the scale of the challenge.

The second, however, is to address it from same the perspective as the regulation. GDPR is coming into force in direct response to repeated abuse of personal privacy, in the name of (that horrible phrase) ‘data monetisation’. Its base requirements are pretty straightforward: hold only the data you need to do the job, and have good reason to do so.

For organisations looking to do the same thing that they did last week, this makes things pretty simple: define what you do, say what data you need, and if you need to ask customers to do so, then ask. This is no more nor less than an information strategy — the difference is that it is being publicised to customers. Bluntly, it you don’t have one, you should, for a raft of reasons not just compliance.

Of course it may be the case that an organisation wants to hold onto more information than it needs, and/or do things with it that the customer doesn’t like. The answer, simply, is, well, don’t, or you will get into trouble. But the majority of organisations I have spoken to are not in this category — they just want to ensure they don’t get caught short. Creating a clear and defensible statement of intent, then broadcasting it out to those affected, is a solid starting point.

The third choice, open to all but probably only accessible to the biggest organisations, is to play the “we aren’t doing anything wrong” game, that is, see loopholes in the regulation as an opportunity to push things as far as possible (or at least, make hay until the loopholes are closed). This will inevitably happen with GDPR, indeed, it probably already is if Facebook’s ’sidestep’ is anything to go by.

One thing’s for sure — this isn’t over — May 25 is a starting point. Let’s see where it goes… and meanwhile, here are some articles for the week.

GDPR – are we witnessing the death of one-way monetisation?

GDPR has certainly put the cat among the pigeons, for better or worse. This article is a stake in the ground — building on the above, it is becoming less and less viable to take customer data and then try to make money out of it for its own sake. Apparently. Also building on the above, time will tell whether organisations simply find other ways to take data-related value out of customers and pass it to shareholders.

Five questions for… the AURA fitness band

Apropos of data, we continue to look for new ways of creating it. I don’t think there’s any contradiction, in that all technologies can be used for both good and less good purposes. In this case, the potential of low-cost bio-impedance data (to indicate BMI, heart rate and hydration) is pretty compelling. And/but it is yet another illustration of how the ultimate owner of any such data should be the individual to whom it relates.

5 questions for… Densify: a sign of the times

On a different tack, the number of meta-infrastructure solutions — that is, technologies that help organisations decide what to do with their resources, wherever they are — appears to be proliferating. Densify helps organisations migrate workloads to the cloud, or optimise them once they are there, by understanding which of the (quite complex) options are appropriate. And it will continue to have a role as long as cloud providers are not offering optimisation as a service.

Semi-curricular: How not to be an industry analyst

Following on from the highly successful “How not to be a biographer” seminar, I’m plotting with the IIAR to present a few anecdotes about lessons I’ve learned across the last 19 years (including taking a break). More information soon. Oh and it will likely be followed by “How not to run a marathon.”

Until next time, Jon

May 2018

05-04 – Bulletin 4 May 2018 - Absolutes corrupt absolutely, and other idea-ologies

Bulletin 4 May 2018 - Absolutes corrupt absolutely, and other idea-ologies

“Information wants to be free” — Stewart Brand, founder, Whole Earth Catalog

“Privacy is dead - deal with it” — Scott McNealy, founder and CEO, Sun Microsystems

The technology industry is founded on a platform of ideas and aspirations. Engineering has played its part, of course, creating the basis for instantaneous, global communications and massively scalable data processing. But our mental models have set the scene for what we do with all this wonderful electronic gubbins.

This has its plusses and minuses, of course. One of the reasons for starting this newsletter was a recognition that tech can cut both ways: working in the industry has to be founded on an optimism that the good will outweigh the bad, which has been true thus far.

Despite the digital revolution being founded on shades of grey (sic), on the ideas and aspirations front, people respond better to black and white: we have Highlander-like, “there can be only one” war of ideas, and may the most powerful win over the rest.

(Indeed, I’m guilty as charged: when I first heard about the OpenFog consortium for example, my first thought was, “That’s a bit of a vague name — couldn’t they have come up with something stronger?”)

As troops rally behind an idea, they find themselves exposed to its flaws and become defenders of, even apologists for, its weaknesses. For example, on notions of information wanting to be free, open data advocates now face the reality of (largely corporate) machine learning; privacy being dead is the yang to open data’s yin.

Meanwhile, people of influence are judged by their ability to offer clarity — it’s a trick employed by futurists, rock star analysts and others to demonstrate prowess. And, frankly, it’s much easier for pundits to speak in absolutes, than it is to second-guess the way that complexity will take us.

It would be counter to this whole line of thinking to suggest that ideas are therefore bad. Ideas serve a purpose, they offer a rallying cry behind which people, and budgets, can unite. They catalyse change and break through inertia. But they have a decay curve, which the human psyche is ill-equipped to deal with.

The deeper truth is that the dynamics of an idea — where it came from, the purpose it serves and the impact it has, are more important than static notions. Ideas are stakes in the ground, nails in an ever-moving nail-and-string picture. Sure, we can offer clarity at various moments in time, but clarity too has a sell-by date.

With this in mind, here’s some articles for the week.

5 questions for… Auddly, targeting the source of music creation

Ensuring people get paid for their art is a complex web, easily exploitable by, well, anybody who wants to stand in between artist and recipient. Most attempts to resolve this operate at the listening end of the gramophone, whereas Auddly inserts itself right at the start of the production process. The service is designed to meet an industry need, by those who need it, and it has some pretty solid backing. As always, the challenge will be in take-up, of the service and more importantly, the practice (of logging participation) it represents.

5 questions for… Cloudistics. More than a cloud in a box?

Continuing on last week’s hybrid theme, Cloudisitcs is looking to bring the cloud into the data centre — its stated USP is that it brings software-defined networking along with it. Any vendor in this space has a mountain to climb: my gut feel is that the company is more about establishing its IP than about becoming the world’s number one purveyor of hybrid cloud infrastructure. Though the latter would be very nice, and all big companies have to start somewhere, the laws of probability are stacked against it. Here’s an overview, and my take.

5 questions for… Densify — Redux as the link was wrong last week (thanks Alan)!

As I was saying, the number of meta-infrastructure solutions — that is, technologies that help organisations decide what to do with their resources, wherever they are — appears to be proliferating. Densify helps organisations migrate workloads to the cloud, or optimise them once they are there, by understanding which of the (quite complex) options are appropriate. And it will continue to have a role as long as cloud providers are not offering optimisation as a service.

Extra-curricular: Super-Awesome, The Musical

As if I didn’t have enough on, I’ve been writing a musical. About the tech industry. Yes, you heard that right. It’s a kind of cross between Rocky Horror and The Office. I’ve completed a draft of the first half, and I’m now finishing the second, which means turning it into Alexandrine (hexameter) form as a hat-tip to Cyrano de Bergerac. I have absolutely no idea whether it will see the light of day, but I’m loving doing it…

Sincere thanks for reading this far, and for sticking with this bulletin. A long time ago, I can remember my boss admonishing me (gently) for rushing into his office, starting to describing a problem, then saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve got it,” and rushing out again. By saying things out loud I’m starting to build a picture, which will play into the various things already bubbling away. More news soon, and good luck with all of your own projects!

All the best, Jon

05-11 – Bulletin 11 May 2018 — The Seven Laws of the Information Age

Bulletin 11 May 2018 — The Seven Laws of the Information Age

Definitely one for a Friday. And definitely a straw man — feedback very welcome.

The law of falling thresholds

Advances in the fundamental building blocks of technology — processing, storage and communications — reduce bottlenecks and make new things possible due to falling cost, power and size needs, in parallel with increased capacity, capability and bandwidth. The Internet of Things, for example, is a manifestation of how sensor-based remote management and control can apply to whole new areas, once it becomes affordable that is. In turn, this enables new practices and models such as pre-emptive maintenance or competitive fitness apps.

At an infrastructure level, falling thresholds are enablers to new approaches to storage and processing, driving specifics such as in-memory Apache Spark, and more general trends like cloud computing. As 5G becomes a thing, so we will see vastly increased bandwidth, making such things as streamed augmented and virtual reality possible — should anybody want them, of course!

The law of self-fulfilling prophecy

Like the technology it creates, the technology industry is constrained by both financial and engineering limitations, which means it has to set priorities. Frequently, these are put in place based on supply and demand: if the market for RAM increases, so will finance be found to create more of it. At the same time, priorities can be influenced by agendas, charisma, personal drive and other forms of influence.

A positive example of this is Moore’s Law: when an entire industry gets behind a single theme, putting the necessary research behind it, so it is possible to maintain a steady level of progress across, well, decades. We’ve also seen the single-mindedness of people like Steve Jobs, who drove the market for tablet computers through seeming force of will, and of course Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

The law of potential differences

Over recent decades, many of the most exciting breakthroughs in technology-led business models have resulted from spotting new connections to enable value exchange. That is, I give you something, and you give me money back. These are dressed up in clever economic terms but boil down to the same set of questions: what can I give you that you are prepared to pay for, and/or how can I short-circuit existing business models?

The result plays to the agile startup: given just how slowly old corporations move, if I can do something new quickly, I will be able to siphon off a bunch of money and grow to such an extent that I will have established myself by the time they catch up. E-business, disintermediation, Uberisation, the Network Economy are all manifestations of this same principle.

The law of exponential complexity

This can be formulated in a number of ways. For example, that the amount of data that we create will always exceed the amount of processing we have available. Or that the needs of the devices we have to manage, in terms of volumes, rate of update or upgrade or will always exceed our capacity to manage them. Or that the attack surface will always be greater than our ability to secure it. Or that the photos we take will never be tag-able in a meaningful way.

However it is framed, the consequence is always the same: that the hopes we have — we the business, or IT management, or home user — live in a constant state of forlorn hope, that the next generation of technology will solve what remain some pretty fundamental issues (manageability, security, insight delivery). Only to find that next-gen tech creates as many new challenges as it purports to solve. So, on we go.

The law of inflating expectations

A counter to the law of falling thresholds is that a technological advance can very quickly become a default, rather than an exception. We only have to look at the progression of video, from a minority owning expensive, tape driven camera equipment, to a situation where capturing and uploading video has become a blight on music gigs, and indeed a disappointment if it is not possible for whatever reason.

In turn this drives the law of exponential complexity, as our default behaviours result (for example) in generating far more video content than we can fit on our two-year-old smartphones. Again, this is a law which can be ‘leveraged’ by technology companies: by getting the customer base to see the new as the norm, it drives new spend as the old very quickly becomes inferior.

The law of unintended consequences

Innovation is no longer in the hands of the technologically savvy few, as individuals create whole new ways of using tech that were never part of the plan. Often these are positive, such as geocaching; equally, they might drive the use of a new technology to its absolute limit, driving designers to distraction and feeding the law of inflating expectations.

And frequently they can have negative consequences. Each new generation of technology creates new ways to extricate money from people, which is why we have a whole industry around cybersecurity, to counter a whole industry around cybercrime.

The law of innovation decay

Any innovation has a sell-by date, as over time, contextual requirements will move to a state which make the innovation a poor fit to the situation at hand. Individual solutions can never change as quickly as the problem spaces they serve, in many cases as hardware, software and communications are overtaken by the very complexity that they create.

In part this is a consequence of the law of self-fulfilling prophecy: the push to create new things inevitable drives things out of date more quickly. It also results from the laws of both inflating expectations and unintended consequences. Some device vendors have exploited this law through designed obsolescence, accelerating the point at which a device will become redundant.

05-18 – Bulletin 18 May 2018. It’s all virtual. All of it. (Or why I can’t write about NFV)

Bulletin 18 May 2018. It’s all virtual. All of it. (Or why I can’t write about NFV)

Anyone who has read some of my written work will know I’m a bit of a one-trick pony. I start with some cultural reference or anecdote, then segue into a more technical or managerial point. Over the years I have found myself using the same stories more than once: in particular, the moment when Dave Lister finds that he is the only human left alive. Here’s its most recent outing, in relation to GDPR (of all things).

I’m saying this apologetically, because I find myself urged to use it again. For months now, since I was involved behind the scenes on a pretty big project on the topic, I have been wanting to write about Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and its impact on telecommunications. However, for some reason I have found I have nothing to say on the subject. Which (for a pundit) is more than a little worrisome.

It’s not as if there’s nothing to talk about. For the record, NFV has emerged in the telco space as a new way of creating communications services: rather than having custom-built hardware and software for each specific need, why not follow the lead of data centres, bring in a virtualised infrastructure stack and be able to support any new software function with minimal hardware change? What’s not to like?

The answer, as many telcos are discovering, is that it isn’t as simple as that. Challenges of ripping out and replacing an entire global telecoms infrastructure couple with the fact that earlier iterations of NFV stacks have not been, shall we say, fully market ready? Money has been spent, disappointment felt and a mood of reticence has settled across large parts of the industry.

There we have it, in a nutshell. A good idea meets a complex world, working brilliantly for some and causing problems for others. Fall back, regroup and try again, a bit more slowly. Like my anecdotes, we’ve heard them all before. Which goes a long way towards understanding why I’ve struggled to write anything coherent about it.

But, like any other unsoluble problem, it has refused to leave my head, stuck like an unfinished conversation. The issue is not that we’ve seen it all before, but that we are lulled, somehow, into believing that anything we do in tech is in any way real. Of course we can see some mind-bending physics and remarkable engineering, but its ultimate purpose is to create and manipulate representations of things.

It’s all virtual, all of it. Every A-to-D converter, every API, bootloader and on-screen widget is a façade, designed to disguise the few trillion transistors, gates and fibres that lie behind its slick interface. This isn’t some glib philosophical point, as it lies behind a great deal of procrastination and distraction.

Any conversation that starts with the idea “technology idea X doesn’t work” is flawed: we can say it is poorly configured, or that it doesn’t fit existing practices, or that existing practices are a poor fit to what it does. What we should not say, however, is that it is a bad idea in itself: to do so implies that it exists in some tangible way. By treating an idea as a thing, we stop focusing on how well it is designed.

Specifically on the topic at hand, NFV is a work in progress. It will improve, for two reasons: first its inherent structure will be improved, as it is used and understood. And second, as new functions are developed we will start to see proper innovation, rather than just building the old services (e.g. messaging, email, voice) in new ways.

And more broadly, it was always about virtualisation. While this might have been slowed by both corporate inertia and hardware vendor lock-in, we are moving inexorably towards putting the control in the software, rather than tying it into the hardware. While we may all experience Lister-levels of incredulity from time to time, this doesn’t make reality — or indeed virtuality — any less true.

With this in mind, here’s a couple of articles I have actually been able to write.

5 questions for… ADLINK. Edge-Fog-Cloud?

ADLINK is a little-known company outside of its own space, but is right in the thick of the increasingly distributed world we are seeing come out of IoT. Here I speak to Steve Jennis about where this space is going. In conclusion, as we move from a centralisation to a distribution wave, the cloud providers are going to have their work cut out.

Is Enterprise DevOps an Oxymoron?

Oh, I long for the days when I was working things out for the first time, those wonderful moments of epiphany… these days I linger somewhere between discovery of the wisdom of others, and the knowledge that (to pick another over-used cultural reference) there is nothing new under the sun. In this article I introduce a report I am currently researching, on how DevOps can make a difference at scale, in the enterprise environment. All thoughts, stories and guidance very welcome.

Extra-curricular: Super-awesome, the Musical (Redux)

The first draft is now complete. No spoilers but the final song is called “Perfectly Illogical.” Now all I have to do is write it through another few times, but that will be less taxing than getting it to here. Famous last words…

Thank you as ever for reading. This bulletin now has over 350 opted-in recipients, and a small number of people (20-ish) I am still to contact. If it’s not your thing, please feel free to unsubscribe at any time.

All the best, Jon

05-18 – Bulletin 25 May 2018 — Happy GDPR Day! And other conundrums of governance.

Bulletin 25 May 2018 — Happy GDPR Day! And other conundrums of governance.

| :—– | | I thought I’d skip the picture this week and get straight down to business. I’ve written before how technology is a two-edged sword: so, indeed, is governance.  It’s not just the bureaucracy that comes with it. Bureaucracy is the yang to governance’s yin (“Easy for you to say,” to coin a phrase), you can’t have one without the other. In my experience, this follows a sorcerer’s apprentice style path: once you start feeling that controls need to be in place, these generate more controls (to count for the things you didn’t originally think of), and so on and so on.  This also feeds a dodgy part of our psychology we could call “tin-pot general syndrome”. I’m not going to lie - when I was responsible for IT security for a large organisation, I started getting a bee in my bonnet about how security policies weren’t taken seriously. Then another bee. Until I realised, and took it upon myself to block access to IT resources, if they were to be used insecurely. That’ll stop ’em!  What I missed however, was the very premise for corporate IT security - to reduce business risk. In disabling access by users to systems, I felt I was doing my job… but my shadow-boxing, however well-meant, was also preventing business from being done. It was only years layer that I realised I was the problem.  Governance, like any intervention, can have an undesirable, even counter-productive effect. In the case of GDPR, for example, we have all been swamped in recent weeks by a slew of messages telling us how much our privacy is valued. No breach has taken place, but I can’t help wondering which I care about more: people misusing my data, or people sending me a raft of messages asking whether they can use my data. Or indeed, what is the difference.  And meanwhile, from the recipient’s standpoint, governance (again, however well-meant) can become not a guide, but a set of goals. We have seen it repeatedly in the financial industry, and I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that thousands of lawyers are right now looking at how the text of the GDPR can be kept to, even as notions of data monetisation, targeting and so on can be achieved.  Don’t get me wrong, GDPR is a good thing —or would be, if it was just a little clearer. The many emails that I have received from providers of all types, and the differences between them, are a good indication fo just how confused everyone is. And meanwhile, here’s a conundrum: “The GDPR only applies to loose business cards if you intend to file them or input the details into a computer system.” So, if your business cards are in alphabetical order right now, I suggest you give them a shuffle and stop thinking you might one day want to file them, just to be on the safe side… In other news, here’s some articles from this week.    The Five Cs of DevOps at Scale While it’s long been yet another conundrum, I’ve been racking my brains why we have a situation where something (in this case DevOps) works very well for some people, but doesn’t seem to work at all for others. Are the latter group just wrong, or are contextual factors dictating success or failure? As a straw man, I have suggested the following areas to start looking: * Commodity - DevOps works best in an environment where the infrastructure building blocks are relatively uniform. * Consistency - Frequent deliveries of software requires a significant amount of discipline * Collaboration - While DevOps is highly collaborative, even sociable, many corporate environments are not so much * Continuity - Similarly, DevOps requires repeated and controlled cycles: this can be a challenge for many organisations * Charisma - The secret sauce of DevOps is its mentors, whose easy-going zeal cuts through the fog and makes sense of it all So, why do these factors (or their absence) make things so much harder? The answer, I believe, is that they impact the ability to respond to change sufficiently fast, in an already complex environment. Feedback very welcome!   5 questions for… the Mellel word processor While I don’t mention it in this article, I’m a great fan of Mellel’s competitor, Scrivener. It feels almost counter-intuitive, that I should be using a non-standard desktop word processing application — surely everything should be online these days? Well, sorry, but for me, tablets and phones have a place but so do laptops, keyboards and indeed, big screens. The world should know that alternatives exist to what have become de facto standards, for good reason: because they do a subtly different, yet still valid job.    Extra-curricular: the piano continues to obsess Sitrep: Piano is improving. But 5 months in and I still can’t make a video. So here’s the warts and all, straight off the card upload. You can hear the sound of me taking a photo on the iPad rather than starting the video, and my head is chopped off. Meanwhile, there’s a full version of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier first prelude in C (at about the 4-minute mark), and various other bits and bobs. It’s a good indication of where things are up to. Still loving it.   Thank you, as ever, for reading this far and for all the feedback you have sent. The list is now 100% opted in, which has another psychological effect - I feel I am writing to people, not just firing things into the ether. As far as numbers go, this means 368 people, with roughly 150 reads per week, which is really great. All the best and speak soon, Jon |

June 2018

06-01 – Bulletin 1 June 2018 - A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Bulletin 1 June 2018 - A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

What’s in a name? The answer, as so many literary characters have told us, is: “Quite a lot.”

“I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass.”

Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 5: “The Bridge of Khazad-dûm”

The irony of working in an industry which is all about naming things (perhaps that should be on the business card: “Head of Naming Things”), is that often the same old stuff gets a name which makes it look and feel different to the time before.

The lifecycle of a newly-named area goes something like the following:

• Someone, somewhere coins a term for something. It could be new, old, or simply evolved

• ‘The market’ (that is to say, a set of like-minded technology vendors, consulting firms and so on) picks up on the term and uses it in their literature

• As this continues, they do what marketers are good at, which is to differentiate. “Unlike other suppliers of <term>, we…”

• In parallel, a broader range of analysts, journalists and relationship brokers look to incorporate the term in their own understanding and exploration of the topic it represents.

Yes, there’s some back and forth between groups on this. Meanwhile I, no doubt like many others involved in tech, follow a staged approach towards understanding what is going on.

First, I start to hear the term used repeatedly, and think, wow, am I so thick that I was unaware of an entire area of IT? I’m not kidding — most recently, it was use of ‘shift-left’ as a testing best practice.

Second, I buy into the idea that, yes, it really does mean something and I need to know all about it. It may start to feel vaguely familiar at this point.

Third, as its provenance emerges, I recognise its derivative nature for what it is, re-tying the strands of understanding I had thought were starting to unravel. Peace is restored.

Of course, it could be the case that an entirely new field has emerged. This does happen: the mobile phone doesn’t have much of a precedent, for example; virtualisation is also noteworthy.

More often than not however, new developments sit somewhere along a line from “a clever re-naming due to changing circumstances” up to “the same old stuff, re-packaged because we were bored of the old name.”

IoT for example, sits somewhere towards the left hand end. Sensor-based remote management and control may not be new, but the costs have fallen to such an extent that you can put sensors literally anywhere.

I’m racking my brains for examples of the right hand end of the scale, but the constant refresh of data management comes close… from data warehouses, through big data and now into data lakes.

Sometimes the name really does look like something new, but then you give it a prod and you realise its implications are as old as business itself. Take Robotic Process Automation, for example.

It’s got it all —a three letter acronym (RPA) which has a buzzy term in it, a direct hook into both software products and consulting services. But behind the hype are business-oriented rules engines and other repackaging.

And don’t even start me off on digital transformation. Though I agree — “business model and process re-engineering to integrate and incorporate use of analytical insight from internal and external data sources” isn’t quite as snappy as a title.

The irony is that, in all the hubbub around re-invention, we lose track of the innovation. Which goes some way to explaining why the industry can sometimes appear to move incredibly fast, at the same time as being laboriously slow.

Perhaps we need a term for that. Here’s a couple of articles for the (short) week.

5 questions for Shawn Rogers of Tibco – from data to insight

As I write in this article, my recent chat with Shawn Rogers was delightfully devoid of jargon. Equally interesting was how the company is having to grow into more of a consultative role, as the nature of the problems it can solve for its customers becomes more complex. I see this as further evidence of a move towards a wave of distribution, following the centralising influence of public cloud.

From the archive: A Technological Map of the Future

You know how it is, you sit in a coffee shop and start doodling… and before you know it you have put everything you understand onto a single sheet of paper. I’m not sure things are that different today, which is good on the one hand, but at the same time, illustrates how far we have to go.

Highly curricular: How Not to be an Analyst

As previously mentioned, I presented on this topic to the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations last week — it was pretty useful to help me get my thoughts in order. I have written up my notes as a blog, the five rules are:

1. Analyse, don’t preach (the clue is in the name)

2. Don’t get distracted by influence

3. Beware of silo-ed thinking

4. There’s no ‘I’ in analyst

5. Avoid the basic gotchas

Oh and of course, avoid drinking wine before replying to job ads!

Thanks for reading and until next time, Jon

06-08 – Bulletin 8 June 2018 - Apple and the decay curve of potential difference

Bulletin 8 June 2018 - Apple and the decay curve of potential difference

This week’s plan to write about WWDC was thwarted when I realised there was not much to say…

OK, that’s not quite fair. The plans around Augmented Reality look very interesting, though they are ‘just’ software enhancements and not unique to Apple. The speed-ups, streamlining and additional usage controls in iOS are very welcome, as is the fact that CarPlay supports other apps than Apple Maps. The new features on the Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV look useful.

But it’s all a bit, you know. Like that party you go to when you expect food, and someone comes round with a tray every now and again, but it’s not quite what you want, so in the end you nip out and get a sandwich. Or the shop you go in towards Christmas, which all looks like it should fulfil all your needs, but in the end you can’t see one thing you want to buy.

I’ve written before about how many technology companies, and indeed darlings of the platform economy, benefit from a sudden release of potential value. Uber managed to link together drivers and passengers for example, missing out pesky and anti-competitive taxi corporations, as well as avoiding (until recently) niceties such as passenger safety.

These opportunities come from the law of reducing bottlenecks which arise as a technology increases in capability and reduces in cost. But they have a best-before date: that’s the nature of commoditisation. It’s also the nature of fashion, which is not a coincidence.

It’s not hard to remember what technology looked like in pre-Apple days: beige or grey, clunky and thick. In large part, it did not attempt to be cool: exceptions such as Sony differentiated against the blandness of, well, just about everybody. Apple made tech cool, at a moment when it was not the norm.

But, frankly, now it is. Apple’s USP is no longer that it is the coolest, nor that it is the most innovative or leading edge: the days of pulling a laptop computer out of a flat envelope are over. Of course it has ongoing credibility, but it is more Audi than Tesla.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter: with one of the world’s biggest corporate cash piles, it is not going anywhere soon (but then, that didn’t slow the demise of Sun Microsystems, when it became the dot in dot-bomb). However, the rationale upon which the organisation’s rebirth was founded is no longer differentiating. Which is food for thought indeed.

Just the one article this week.

The missing element of GDPR: Reciprocity

Blah Blah GDPR… As I was walking down the high street this morning, it suddenly clicked that yes, finally, stuff about people was being treated as such, and not just some sanitised view that we call ‘data’. Data is difficult to abuse, but people it is more straightforward. So I welcome the ongoing debate and activity (which largely boils down to: what’s your privacy policy?), at the same time as questioning its scope and future-safety.

06-22 – Bulletin 15 June 2018 - On briefings, corporate transference and other tricks

Bulletin 15 June 2018 - On briefings, corporate transference and other tricks

I was sitting on a briefing call earlier this week when I confess my mind was starting to wander. Briefings, for the initiated, are where a company get to tell you things about themselves, and you get to ask interesting questions. Inevitably, they are designed to present things in a good light, so you can find yourself wondering about which bits have been left out. There’s some standard tricks that any briefing recipient needs to watch for.

1. Corporate transference

This is an old, familiar phenomenon to anyone working on the outside of an organisation. Inevitably, as a system of people develops and matures, it solves problems and reaches states of epiphany — that moment of clarity when everything gets worked out. This is sometimes followed by, “We must tell the world!” evangelism, whether or not the world already knew about it.

I remember a briefing a good ten years ago, by a software vendor (you can probably guess who) which had just worked out just how important IT security was. So, they proceeded to tell a room full of people that already knew this, in clear and unequivocal terms. Is vendor-splaining a thing? If not, it should be.

2. Challenge-opportunity

In a similar vein, organisations can be forced to address a weakness in their portfolio, offering or approach. “I know,” goes the mantra, “let’s not see it as a challenge, but an opportunity, right?” And so, out of the blue, there appears a great new service which is, great, yeah, just great.

Now, it’s not for anyone to put anyone else down, but this approach can appear more than a little disingenuous. Every now and then it become difficult to resist the urge to call B-S, though this response is frowned upon in a professional setting. And so we keep steam, but we all know, don’t we?

3. Down-scoping

Case studies are always good value, as they make things real, bring the intangible to life. Behind the scenes of any case study activity are difficulties in getting customers to talk openly about their own problems, to appear allied to one vendor vs. another, and so on. The result is that examples, when they appear, are not reflective of the situation as a whole.

The result can be that the example is of some obscure bank in Nebraska (I choose any place guardedly, apologies to Nebraskans who don’t feel at all obscure), or a department of a larger enterprise that happens to have got its own act together. “We’ve enabled new business value in ABC retailer” sounds so much better than, “An initiative in ABC’s new, yet short-lived customer experience facility used our stuff.”

The result of the above is that the world can appear a wonderful place, at least for the duration of the briefing, yet the joy starts to fade just minutes after it ends, leaving the briefed wondering whether they heard anything useful at all. It also feeds a bigger challenge faced by the industry, which is: if we had all the solutions two decades ago (when I first started being briefed), why to the problems still pervade?

Part of the answer does come down to continued change, growing complexity and so on. But an equal measure needs to be placed at the door of our being a little too ready to accept the good news stories at face value. For sure, nobody wants to spend their working lives in a constant state of cynicism. Yet we remain unable to have any clear measure of progress, beyond processor cycles and storage volumes. Hm.

In other news, here’s a couple of articles from this week.

5 questions for… Electric Cloud. Whence DevOps?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking a stack of briefings around DevOps as part of a report I’m putting together. The wood I’m trying to separate the trees from is, what’s so new now, compared to an awfully long time ago? Back when I was still literally a kid, software process people knew what configuration management and automation was; they also had tools and practices around operations, and ways of managing difficult conversations. So, if that’s not the topic at hand, what is? In this article, Sam Fell has some useful thoughts around the nature of complexity, which is a good place to start.

5 questions for… Nuance – does speech recognition have a place in healthcare?

I’ve been a speech recognition advocate since I used to tramp round fields with my dog, transcribing interviews using a hacked-apart laptop, a scroll wheel and a headset. Which is also a long time ago. I am, frankly, surprised we (including me) seem to prefer sitting in front of a screen, with all the RSI and back problems we incur as a result, alongside the inefficiency. Will speech recognition have its day? Who knows, but I hope so for these reasons alone. In this article I speak to Nuance about how it could make a difference in the (needy) healthcare sector.

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, as ever.

Jon

06-29 – Bulletin 6 July 2018. On methodologies: not the weapon, but the hand

Bulletin 6 July 2018. On methodologies: not the weapon, but the hand

| :—– | | I’m all for methodologies. Of course, I would say that – I used to run a methodology group, I trained people in better software delivery and so on. From an early stage in my career however, I learned that it is not enough to follow any set of practices verbatim: sooner or later, edge cases or a changing world will cause you to come unstuck (as I did), or the approach will reach a best-before point, which goes a long way to explain why best practices seem to be in a repeated state of reinvention.I was also lucky enough to have some fantastic mentors. Notably Barry McGibbon, who had written books about OO, and Robin Bloor, whose background was in data. Both taught me, in different ways, that all important lesson we can get from Monty Python’s Holy Grail: “It’s only a model.”Models exist to provide a facade of simplicity, which can be an enormous boon in this complex, constantly changing age. At the same time however, they are not a thing in themselves; rather, they offer a representation. As such, it is important to understand where and when they are most suited, but also how they were created, because, quite simply, sometimes it may be quicker to create a new one than use something ill-suited for the job.And so it is for approaches and methods, steps we work through to get a job done. Often they are right, sometimes less so. A while back, myself, Barry and others worked with Adam and Tim at DevelopmentProcess to devise a dashboard tool for developers. So many options existed, the thought of creating something generic seemed insurmountable…… until the epiphany came, that is: while all processes require the same types of steps, their exact form, and how they were strung together, could vary. This was more than just a, “Aha! That’s how they look!” as it also puts the onus onto the process creator to decide which types of step are required, in which order. It therefore becomes important to understand both the steps and the reasons they exist.With the above very much in mind (as I lifted it from my wrap-up), here’s an article from this week.   Five questions for: Mike Burrows of AgendaShift While I didn’t get actively involved in Mike’s collaborative book-writing process (for a number of reasons, not least, I’m not really a practitioner any more), I did observe the process and I think he is on to something. Hence this article. In another recent conversation, Tony Christensen, DevOps lead at RBS, said the company’s goal had become to create a learning organisation, rather then transforming into some nirvanic state. True Nirvana, in this context at least, is about understanding the mechanisms available, and having the wherewithal to choose between them.  Extra-curricular: Plucking Different plays Gogol Bordello In case it wasn’t already apparent, I’ve become a bit obsessive about packing as much in as possible before my sorry body packs in underneath me. To whit, in this song at least I find myself fronting a ukulele band as we deliver a new take on the gypsy punk song. File under: I won’t wear that shirt in the hot sun again. Also file under: no, I didn’t expect to be doing that either. Thanks for reading, Jon |

06-29 – Bulletin: The cognitive dissonance of customer centricity

Bulletin: The cognitive dissonance of customer centricity

“Do as I say, not as I do” - John Selden, c. 1654

“Do be do be do” Baloo, 1967

Cognitive dissonance is a very human trait. Few, if any, could claim not to be guilty of it; in the main, we content ourselves with minor inconsistencies of behaviour, which we justify sufficiently to push out of the mind’s eye, forgotten before long. Similar dissonances apply in the working day of the technology writer, analyst or pundit, who invariably and repeatedly stumbles onto topics or framings that would be impossible to keep to, even if they were possible to achieve.

An obvious example is how technology is going to fix everything, at some point. Take any new or repackaged capability, start writing about it and before long, you will have an article or report that, if one just does what it says, will assure absolute success. That’s fair enough — after all, who wants to read something that says, “Umm, Artificial Intelligence. Well, if you want to do it, it probably won’t work for you, but why not give it a go, you could get lucky?” We have to be reasonably succinct, direct and dare I say it, prescriptive, otherwise we are not really helping, are we?

In general, we hope, we get it right. In my experience, we get it less right when we talk about things we don’t fully understand: how easy it is to miss some vital piece of information, which not only colours, but changes everything. I remember a few years ago, I was writing about a mobile solution for people working on building sites. In the process, I spoke to a couple of construction engineers and was very quickly put right: “You don’t understand,” said one, “Mobile phones are completely banned on site.” “What, completely?” “Yes, completely.”

Some mantras are almost impossible to get wrong, at least on the surface. For example: all enterprise IT should exist to deliver some kind of ‘business value’; the earlier you spot a problem, the easier it is to solve; and, of course, it’s all about the customer. I’m not picking this last one at random, as it has suddenly decided to be a significant element of a report I’m writing. The trouble with it is not that it is wrong (though like all absolutes, including this one, it can never be one hundred per cent true), but that we all know better.

Right now, the technology industry is at the eye of a storm of its own creation. Back in the day, it existed far apart from people, who would access data via green-screens (and who were given tech-subservient titles, such as data entry clerk, as a result). Today, technology is everywhere, infiltrating most aspects of our daily lives. But while we may be leaving the era of ‘computer says no’, we are a long way from a time when we, as people, call the shots.

The increasingly frequent examples of backlash against out-and-out data monetisation — as illustrated by California’s decision this week to bring in privacy laws — are symptoms of this. And, or indeed but, the strangest thing is that we all know that we are being held in thrall. All of us, from top CEOs to those living and working at life’s front lines, are aware. We are like the construction workers: we know the rules how we live our lives, and we know when and where technology is failing to deliver.

Yet, still, we present technology, and business, like it can do no wrong, like it is enough to say that customers are an organisation’s most important asset, or that the customer experience is driving corporate strategy. These statements are not false in themselves, not generally, but they present an incomplete picture: more realistic is that, when we get things right, we find that customer-oriented measures increase.

This is not some idealistic view, far from it. Rather, it is a the starting point for a hypothesis: if customer-centricity is as important as we make out, it should be possible to put a value on where we have come from, where we are now and where we want to get to with it; equally, we might be able to be more honest about where compromises have to be made, or indeed, what constitutes a blatant abuse of accepted social contracts.

It may just be the case that ‘delighting the customer’ really is the best way for most organisations to go about their business. If so, we can only make it true by accepting that we are a long way away from such an aspiration. And, what is more, we all know it.

No articles this week. as I have been deep in said report. I hope, instead, you will enjoy some feedback to a budget hotel owner.

Thanks for reading, Jon

July 2018

07-13 – On digital transformation, and when a useless term proves useful

On digital transformation, and when a useless term proves useful

I find myself drawn back into the term ‘digital transformation’ as I am starting up two projects on the topic right now (more about both very soon). As I’ve said before, the term is not very good. However, and as I am learning, its very existence is serving a purpose.

First off, however much organisations may want to look liked they are emerging like a butterfly from a chrysalis, the reality is much more mundane. Given that even the smallest changes take a large amount of time, this should come as no surprise.

As anybody working in a big company knows, large-scale change just doesn’t happen. It can’t, any more than humans can trans-substiate and re-appear somewhere else. What can happen is either making existing things work better, or enabling new things to happen separate from the old.

In these contexts, digital transformation starts to sound a little bit like the allegorical lipstick on a pig. If it’s not wholesale change, is it really transformation as such? Well, no, but yes. The term may be inaccurate, but its purpose remains.

What the heck is he on about, I hear you say. Ah, I reply: based on the raft of interviews I have recently had the ‘pleasure’ to work through on the topic, I can confirm that at least some enterprises see it as important.

Why? Because conversations involving the term ‘digital transformation’ take a different tack to those about specific technologies. Even with disagreement about what it might actually mean, or whether it can be delivered upon, digital transformation is accepted as meaning business, not technology change.

As a result, the conversations lead to topics such as customer experience, business value, models and so on, rather than integration, scalability, operational management and other such more tech-y topics.

I’m not going to lie, I still don’t like it. But it is a boon that technology-related strategies and conversations can put the business, and/or its customers first. If it has to be called digital transformation in order to achieve this, I’m all for it.

Thanks for reading, Jon

P.S. No articles this week (did I say I was starting up two projects? :) )

07-20 – Bulletin 20 July 2018. On journeys to the cloud, and what to say when you have nothing to say?

Bulletin 20 July 2018. On journeys to the cloud, and what to say when you have nothing to say?

I’m all ears…

It’s not that big a secret why I dropped out of the analyst business for a while. Having spent over ten years being asked what I thought about everything and anything technological, one day I simply found I had run out of things to say. It wasn’t any big crisis, more a flummoxed shrug which came uncoincidentally at a time when everything, I mean everything, was going to “move to the cloud.”

We now know better, of course. A philosophical shift towards thinking about workloads rather than resources has been taking place for some time, based on an increasingly flexible architecture. The only reason you (still) have to think about hardware is because of its constraints, bottlenecks and work-arounds; take these away, either by having enormous availability or by clever orchestration, and the conversation can focus on the problem you are trying to solve, rather than what you use to solve it.

Should everything have just moved to the cloud, we would indeed now be in a world where IT infrastructure didn’t matter at all (hat tip: Nicholas Carr, who painted such a picture). For a raft of reasons however, nothing could be further from the truth. Technology is fragmenting and diversifying, just as you would expect anything to do when all constraints are removed: isn’t commoditisation the ultimate constrained environment? (It is also no coincidence that, as the conversation has moved more towards representing this increase in complexity, I have found myself re-joining it. But enough about me!)

So, what does one do when one has nothing to add? One shuts up, of course. Over the past few years I have spent a fair portion of my working hours ghost-writing for very smart, yet strangely less articulate members of the technological community. In doing so, I’ve learned an inordinate amount. Not only about technology and business, but also about listening.

Listening is hard. Not only because of the noise/signal ratio, but because of our individual perspectives, framings and indeed, fears and hubris: it can sometimes be the hardest thing in the world to pay attention to what people are telling you. At a recent event, a speaker was complaining to me about how stupid some of the questions were. I didn’t say anything, but I remain firmly in the belief that when someone says, “Can you explain better, I don’t understand,” that’s probably down to your inarticulacy rather than a fault of the audience.

Back in 1997, I wrote an article for my consulting colleagues about blockers to listening. As I’m a hoarder, I still have them so here they are:

• baggage - extraneous clutter in our own brains which distracts from the conversation in hand

• inner noise - the conversation sets off a train of thoughts which, though fascinating, prevent us from continuing to listen

• control - leaps of understanding about what the person is trying to say, missing his/her actual point entirely

• ping-pong - where a client’s point triggers a memory or an opinion, so we spend the next minutes looking for a suitable gap to express it

• display - where we use the conversation as a tool to express our own knowledge, ignoring the client’s subject matter and making him feel stupid in the bargain

• hidden agenda - where we ensure that the conversation achieves our own goals, forgetting to check that the client’s goals are satisfied.

We’ve all done them, me more than most probably. But over the past twenty years, I have at least learned that often, saying nothing is the best form of communication.

10 Reasons why Broadcom is buying CA Inc

Here’s an “article” for the week. I say “article” because I confess to have been tickled as to why a chip company might by an enterprise software company. I couldn’t resist a bash at why that might be.

Extra-curricular: Society of Authors Annual Awards

The SoA is like one of those best-ket secrets: anyone who professes some kind of authorship can can join for a nominal fee, make the most of its great legal and other services, and attend small events with luminaries of the writing world (Stephen Fry’s speech was worth the cost of entry). When seen as a collective, authors are not such a scary bunch but they generally share one characteristic: the ability to finish things. I will this on board!

Thank you again for reading, as always.

Jon

07-28 – Bulletin 27 July 2018. Technology may be indifferent, but people are not

Bulletin 27 July 2018. Technology may be indifferent, but people are not

I’ve written before about the nature of technology to be neither good nor evil: it’s an easy thing to say, a bit like, “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Which is of course true, but guns make it easier. Whether they should be banned is also for people to decide: sometimes we see a certain facility as being too dangerous for public ownership, whereas we shrug and grudgingly accept others. “Cars don’t kill people, people do” is just as true, but nobody but a minority is looking to ban cars on public safety grounds.

Sure, sure, heard it all before. But such justificatory denialism takes place at a much deeper level. One can watch Facebook’s share price plummet as changes its practices, or indeed see similar companies go out of business, at the same time as accepting the platform for what it is. Disdain of social media may be merited, but at the same time, only a minority are switching it off. It’s a conundrum: if we really believe something is bad, why are we so slow to act?

There’s a reason I’m bringing this up. Our corporations are out to maximise the value they give to their shareholders: that’s a fact; so is the reality of social responsibility, green, pink or any other form of washing of the corporate image. So, on the first hand, there’s always going to be a tendency to put business profit over customer value: some take this to an extreme, but basically, if you don’t, you will go out of business. And on the second, by extrapolation, however much an organisation wants to do the right thing, it must first do the profitable thing.

We might grumble and rail about this, but we all know it can’t be any other way — for many, their jobs depend on it. So what, so what? So, we don’t really get over the hump of finding this a problem unless a real crisis hits: we go with the flow, based on the assumption that more good will happen than bad.

I have two bees buzzing in my bonnet about this. Today, I spoke to Ali Hadavizadeh, Program Manager at the Farm 491 AgriTech incubator — Ali is passionate about helping new companies innovate, in the name of sustainable and safe food production, and we concurred on how we as an industry and a population have been sleepwalking towards a crisis. Companies that look to maximise profit and deny environmental damage are rightly castigate-able, but we have a tendency to avoid paying too much attention to this…

… and meanwhile, retail organisations have valid reason to be testing all kinds of technology in the name of improving how they engage with customers. I’ve been involved in various recent studies which suggest, first, that the route to ultimate success is about genuine, long-term human loyalty as opposed to “what can we get out of whoever walks though the door”; and that the continuing e-commerce wave distracts from this more idealistic view due to its tendency to cause a race to the bottom.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think it has a great deal to do with transparency. GDPR is certainly helping, as it forces organisations to say what they are doing with data (or indeed, change their practices, which is in part the cause of Facebook’s stock fall). It also links back to customer-centric thinking: the best route to profit is to give people what they value the most. One thing’s for sure: we all know what’s going on really, but in the majority of cases, we choose to ignore it as a collective. On our own heads be it, then, when things go wrong.

Apropos of which, here’s an article for this week.

Five questions for… the Thinaire platform

As I say in the article, if you want to innovate, you have to stand on the shoulders of anything you can find. In this case, Thinaire brings a bunch of retail-related capabilities to the table: it’s the platform, baby, but then it’s up to retailers, and indeed ourselves, to discern.

Extra-curricular: Never say never

It’s still Friday as I type this, but I am just back from playing a gig… I’ve just about come to terms with the fact I don’t need to pinch myself to prove it’s happening. More strangely, we seem to have picked up a sizeable audience in Myanmar and the Philippines: without prejudice to the above, we put a quick Facebook ad out to see what happened and were quite astonished by the level of interest. So who knows where that might take us! Meanwhile, here’s us playing Gogol Bordello at a local music festival. And why not.

August 2018

08-03 – Bulletin 3 August 2018. We are all data companies, and therefore analysts, now

Bulletin 3 August 2018. We are all data companies, and therefore analysts, now

It is perfectly natural for anyone to want to protect a domain they have spent so long building. All those skills, accumulated experience and expertise become part of who we are; take them away, and our life loses meaning (which, as Victor Frankl will tell you, is a bad thing).

I am, of course, talking about the artificial, yet rapidly diminishing boundary between the analytical haves and have-nots. Case in point: industry analysts have built global businesses on the basis of being able to know more about what’s going on, or count more things, or simply have the time to do so, than anyone else. Such smarty-pants specialists exist in every industry, in every domain.

And their days are numbered. I’m not talking about the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As a techie, and therefore someone you’d expect to say different, I remain to be convinced about the rise of the robots as in some way signalling the demise of everything else. I won’t reiterate old arguments, apart from to say that absolutes tend to architect their own demise.

Taking the technology-as-tool position, we need not speculate, as the truth is all around us. Consumerisation and augmentation, disintermediation and democratisation are all (over-blown, but nonetheless) terms describing the increasingly distributed nature of tech, and therefore of its impact. Put simply, it used to be for the few and will end up for the many.

Or put simpler still, anyone can run a survey these days. In a briefing this week, I found myself discussing a vendor’s research even as I wondered to myself whether I was out of a job. “Thanks for making me redundant,” I joked, cheerily. Then, I laughed a hollow laugh, put the phone down and sobbed hopeless tears.

I didn’t really, but you get the point. Meanwhile, marketing data companies are finding themselves overlapping (if not yet competing) with manufacturers, even as both software-as-a-service providers and membership organisations realise that behavioural insights are most valuable thing they own.

Fact is, as lower levels of technology commoditise, we all journey up the data-driven pyramid of needs only to find that it wasn’t just us that had the same idea. So, will this leave us all competing over who’s got the best insights? I don’t believe so, in fact, I think the opposite will be true as we actualise data’s role to augment, rather than replace, what really matters in life.

Such as healthcare, and indeed, food production. To whit, here’s an article for this week.

Five questions for… Ali Hadavizadeh, Farm491

Coincidences are rife. I happen to live a stone’s throw from the UK’s only AgriTech incubator, at the same time as believing passionately in the need, and opportunity to help assure sustainable farming through technology innovation. Here’s an interview. Of course, this is another sword that can cut both ways (which is why I wrote last week’s newsletter).

In other news — Travel Forward conference 5-7 November 2018

I really must stop saying yes to things, but this one’s a bobby dazzler — I’m going to be Programme and Content Director for the Travel Forward, the travel technology conference attached to World Travel Markets. We have a fabulous programme and some top speakers, and, well, who doesn’t want to see our travel experiences made better through tech? Watch this space for updates and feel free to share your own experiences!

As ever, thank you for reading, and all the feedback which is both appreciated and which helps steer this ship.

Cheers, Jon

08-10 – Bulletin 10 August 2018. Tactics trump strategy every time

Bulletin 10 August 2018. Tactics trump strategy every time

Business knows the answers. But can it stick to them?

I’ll keep this quick, I promise. I know, I always say that. But something struck me as I interviewed an old friend and colleague for a survey report I’m writing: we know what the answer is.

You know, that conversation you had, in the car or in the bar, about how to sort out the problem, take over the world or make lots of money. It wasn’t wrong then, and it isn’t wrong now, is it?

There’s the rub. Working out the answer is not the hard bit. Yeah, whatever, we know this, right? 1 percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration? Sure, heard it before?

But this is where it gets weird. Not only do we forget that we know what the answer was, we then carry on like we never knew in the first place.

To whit, a conversation I had with RBS’ Tony Christensen about learning organisations. It was always the right answer, just as agile, or customer-centric, or anything else might be.

To the extent that it gets dull to hear these terms trotted out. So, what’s getting in the way of, you know, just keeping them front of mind?

I think perhaps, that the default human tendency is tactical. Our reptilian cerebellum, left to its own devices, simply wants to eat, sleep and have pleasure. Every day we wake up and have to convince ourselves of a higher path.

So, in corporate culture we are not so much fighting against entropy, but our inability to delay gratification. Meanwhile, we hold entropy to account: put simply, “if you can’t explain to me how this will deliver clear long-term ROI, we’re not going to do it.” Followed by: “Now, lunch?”

This is not so much the sky-hook upon which all business failures can hang, as the plug-hole down which their potential will inevitably disappear.

In case you were wondering, this has a fantastic amount to do with technology. Any of the strategic topics or trends in discussion — insight-driven decision making, or digital transformation, or DevOps, or whatever faces a constant battle against our all-too-tactical nature.

Meanwhile, we carry on doing things the way we’ve always done them, long after they pass their sell-by date, because habit trumps tactics. Food for thought.

Meanwhile, here’s an article for this week.

Seven lessons from writing the report, Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise

It’s never too early to move into a reflective mode. Here’s some thoughts about what I have learned, as I complete my DevOps report (due this month):

1. It’s not (just) about DevOps.

2. It is all about business value delivery.

3. Reality is the biggest bottleneck to DevOps.

4. Man, is there a crapload of DevOps vendors.

5. Cloud is cause, catalyst and now consequence of the DevOps stalemate.

6. Enterprises know where they want to end up, but are stymied.

7. Tech could start by turning some of that smartness onto itself.

Thanks again for reading, see you next week.

08-17 – Bulletin 17 August 2018: Why are we still talking about data integration?

Bulletin 17 August 2018: Why are we still talking about data integration?

New context, same challenges

I’ll keep this short (just as he says every week) but don’t you ever get that feeling of deja vu? I was having coffee with a head of digital technology from a major hotel chain this morning, when the conversation turned to the data integration challenges of digital transformation.

In case you haven’t had this conversation before, it goes something like this: legacy systems is a challenge; programmatic data access (e.g. via APIs) is a good help; but it’s all quite complex isn’t it; and a software vendor who is looking to solve the problems.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had that conversation. Indeed, right back when I first became an analyst in 1999, we would talk about Extract-Transform-Load, or component-based interfaces and web services; XML was going to change the world, and vendors like Constellar had it all sorted.

It does beg the questionL have we really progressed at all? The answer is, yes, of course, we have, but we keep making things even more complicated, in the hope that, at some point, we’ll just supersede all that old stuff. What can possibly go wrong?

Onward, upward, and here’s an article from this week about the UK Government’s Making Tax Digital initiative, because digital’s going to make everything better, isn’t it?

Thanks for reading and all the best, Jon

08-24 – Bulletin 24 August 2018 - We are porcupines, in a hindsight-oriented world

Bulletin 24 August 2018 - We are porcupines, in a hindsight-oriented world

We are under attack. We spend our lives in deliberate, naive ignorance of the thousands of dangers we face, in case we scare ourselves rigid, thereby rendering ourselves completely, and counterproductively, useless.

At the same time, we are constantly calculating risk, like tennis players watching the trajectories of multiple balls and somehow managing to swipe them away before they hit. As a race, we have proved ourselves immensely good at this, by the fact hat we are still here.

Which makes it all the stranger when we are faced with a new cyber-related issue. I use the term “cyber-related” as it’s not strictly security, or privacy, that is always involved. Case in point: the continued attempts by social media giants to get their houses in order.

When something new happens, we act like porcupines on the (super)highways of the Information Age, somehow confident that the protections we have developed over aeons will continue to serve us. In the case of political interference and behavioural manipulation however, our in-built mechanisms are clearly inadequate.

From a vulnerability perspective, what took place is (and continues to be) child’s play: identify, through a process of repeated testing, identify what is most likely to get a reaction from a person, then do that thing. However smart we think we are, our inability to do nothing when provoked has been our undoing.

(And, if I’m being too general in the above, let me me be clearer: it’s the “like” or the “retweet” button that we just can’t resist clicking).

Over the years, I’ve talked about security risk being more akin to permeability than any single big nasty. Bad things continue to happen, like waves buffeting the harbour wall: that is their nature. We can keep our guard across areas we understand (not clicking on spam email for example).

It appears, however, that we can’t do the same against areas we don’t (yet) know to be bad. A new attack surface, when it appears, does so largely unprotected. For the past three decades and probably longer, it has been thus.

Which is where it gets strange. Simply put, we don’t have law-making mechanisms that take this into account. We fall down with horror, pick ourselves up and carry on with our lives, as we look to how existing laws and compliance frameworks might deal with this ‘new’ situation, all the while never dealing with the root cause.

And thus we continue to create locks for stable doors, long after the notion of a stable has been superseded several times over. I’m not sure whose interests it serves, beyond anyone that wants to profit from the discrepancy. But, on we go.

Foreword to Smart Shift: From Kibish to Culture

No article this week (I’m waiting for feedback) but in other, apropos news, a couple of years ago I wrote a book about how technology was changing how we need to think. It was never published, but has been languishing on my hard drive. Ironic that I didn’t want to start it as it kept going out of date; as things now stand, it was pre-Trump, pre-Cambridge Analytica and pre-GDPR so is already well past its best before.

At the same time, as I recognised how quickly things change, across the writing it morphed into a history of technology’s impact. I’ve decided to put the whole thing online, both for posterity and potentially, as a foundation for some future work. I’ll be doing this over time but for now you can read the foreword, here.

08-31 – Bulletin 31 August 2018. Where the heck did GDPR go?

Bulletin 31 August 2018. Where the heck did GDPR go?

Moving from ‘the’ thing to ‘a’ thing…

If anyone wants to see the inner workings of the tech industry writ large, look no further than GDPR. No, I’m not talking about the need for good data, etc, but more about how much of a difference marketing dollars make.

One minute, it was the topic on the tip of every organisation’s tongue; the next, it just wasn’t. It just vanished, from the press, from web sites, from the tech dialogue. It’s not just me thinking this (beware the anecdotal evidence; Google Trends shows it down to 10% of its May-time peak.

Are we to surmise that it’s a done deal, that every organisation now has a watertight policy in place, that chief compliance officers are being made redundant? Of course not: GDPR is still there, right where the DPA was before it.

No; rather, it no longer has the fat lens of the marketing budget behind it. The system we have works like this: pick a topic, talk about it at your events and across your content streams, assign a PR agency to engage with journalists, and lo and behold, it becomes the most important thing in the world.

Particularly if your competition does the same. Tech companies, consulting and law firms all know the system works, which is why they do it. Of course, you need a valid reason to bring it up: for a provider, this is most likely to be that you can make money by talking about it, or that you might lose money if you don’t.

Suffice to say that some vendors I’m speaking to, even those big ones, don’t want to talk about GDPR anymore. Some still do, because it suits their needs: they’re not wrong to do so. If you’re a hammer manufacturer, it’s a good idea to talk about nails.

At the same time, we punters need to be clear on one thing: a topic of discussion should not be seen as a priority just because it is being discussed. It’s what turned me off from cloud in the first place: nothing wrong with it as ‘a’ thing, but it was never ‘the’ thing.

On a similar note, it’s why I smile when I see complex topics being treated as simple, even when everyone knows they are not. Such as DevOps, for example. With this in mind, here’s an article for the week.

Five steps to delivering DevOps at scale

DevOps is one of those fantastically vague technology trends: it’s not a product or service, it’s not really even a methodology… but at the same time, it is possible to get it wrong. In this article, I distil down five things I learned from Puppet’s Nigel Kersten, in a recent webinar. Here to help, I hope!

In other news… something novel

No, it’s not Paganini, but something else. Now at 60K words. Watch this space.

This is the 32nd edition of this newsletter, which certainly feels like quite a thing. Thank you for sticking with it.

All the best, Jon

September 2018

09-07 – Bulletin 7 September 2018. A computer that says yes, who wants one?

Bulletin 7 September 2018. A computer that says yes, who wants one?

I have been doing a lot of interviews recently with a group I will loosely call ‘digital leaders’, that is, people responsible for making technology make a transformative difference (as opposed to just meeting a need). I know, that already sounds like it’s vanishing up its own rear, but they are genuinely making, or have made, such changes to their businesses. And this observer has been learning a lot from them.

As discussed on a previous occasion, the ill-understood term digital transformation does have a place, as it moves the conversation from under, to above the bonnet (or hood) of the car (or automobile). The more I think about it (and I hold my hand up as someone who is working through this very process), this is about reframing our understanding of technology as something that enables, as opposed to something that responds.

Now, then. This is tricky stuff for me of all people to write about, particularly given my reputation for waffle. “Nice stuff, Jon, but can we make it a bit more crunchy/specific/fact-based/etc?” said just about everyone I’ve ever worked with, and rightly so. Something that enables vs. something that responds? Or, put more bluntly, what on earth is he on about this time?

To make it a bit more crunchy/specific, I’m going to borrow from a call I had today about how our use of technology is moving from systems of record, surrounded by processes. We are asked for information in a certain way and in a certain order, because that’s what the computer tells us it needs. And, largely, we are so overwhelmed with the wonder and magic of it all, we go along with it, be it filling in our tax returns, applying for a mortgage or booking a holiday. We accept, like the digital serfs that we are, pulling technology-powered turnips out of the frozen ground with unspoken gratitude.

But this is not how things are going to be. Rather, we will be allowing data to flow to where it is needed, with interfaces that enable us to do the things we want to do. I don’t need to say this as some kind of futurist, as it’s already happening: those upstart online companies have got to where they are by using this one, simple trick, of allowing the user, not the computer, to define the process, moving the tech into a subordinate role. Which tech is perfectly happy to occupy, if it is programmed to do so.

I’m not sure what else to add, other than to acknowledge that we are nowhere near this becoming the norm. As an example, I mentioned tax — some work I did last year involved interviewing government officials, who saw tax-as-you-go as a viable alternative to current (data entry based) systems. We haven’t even begun to understand just how profound a difference it will make to our lives, when this shift takes place, in tax, in retail, in finance, in healthcare: even ‘modern’ tools like Facebook will appear linear, clunky and old-fashioned as a result. (Oh, wait, they already do).

It’s going to happen, either over a period of time or in an explosion of change. Sure, there will be governance issues, privacy challenges, problems of misuse and the (continuing) potential for global destabilisation. All of which is exactly why we need to talk about it now. A storm is brewing: however much we rely on “computers that say no” at the moment, we are already moving away from the place where they have are burden rather than enabler. And we don’t have to look very far: as William Gibson once noted, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. And, for those who want it, it’s there for the taking.

09-16 – Bulletin 14 September. On mobile apps, engagement and human nature

Bulletin 14 September. On mobile apps, engagement and human nature

When vertical becomes horizontal

How quickly we forget. Or not that quickly, in the case of one large vendor, who (as of last year) was still looking at how it could somehow stave off the threat of consumerisation. That’s where employees have mobile phones and other paraphernalia, in some cases better than corporate kit, and so they start setting expecta… what, you mean, you knew already?

The world has moved on, faster than you can say “bring your own device strategy.” Even as I chatted today, with the head of a big department at a major consumer-facing organisation, I realised how old-hat my phrasing had become. Ostensibly, the conversation was about mobile apps, but I was quickly put to rights.

Not very long ago, this was how we articulated things: “You need an app.” Of course, all knew that the phrase was a consequence of how things stood — nobody needs an app as an end in itself, but having an app is a reflection of how well an organisation understands its user base. Simply put, if everyone is on a mobile device, best to adopt the interface du jour.

Trouble is, that’s no longer true (if it ever was, even if transient). We’ve moved from not having mobile devices at all, to them becoming the sharp end of customer engagement, to… to a point where they are recognised as just one interface among others, including face to face, phone, web site and whatever else comes along.

Which brings to the point, that it was never about the device. More, as was pointed out, it’s about delivering a service at the point of need: if the best way to reach someone is via a phone, or a retina display, or a billboard, or a customer service rep, so be it. The smarter you can get at understanding the notion of engagement, the more engagement you will have.

Which is what it’s all about. A few years ago, when I became bored of talking about technology for its own sake, I turned my attention to the human. Either, I thought, tech will make us something we are not, or it will make us something more than we are, or it will augment our lives in some way. Whatever it does, I decided, the latter category — augmentation — is the most likely.

In other words, and at least in the short term, the goal is to consider the all-too-human end before the means (for better or worse: “We are only… human.”). When I think about technology’s impact, in my head I like to position it against how we behaved when we lived in straw-hutted villages, as some still do. How ever much you add or take away, augment or diminish, it’s all about people.

I was about to “go off on one” about the future, but we should remain grounded in both the present, and the past. We are seeing so much change, but I am yet to see any deviation from what we might call human nature. While this might come as a disappointment, it is perhaps fundamental.

09-21 – Bulletin 21 September 2018. The first law of commoditisation

Bulletin 21 September 2018. The first law of commoditisation

Technology is still blooming hard.

Most careers, for better or worse, start in actually doing things, progress through telling people to do them, and end with deciding how they should be done. I know a few people who, having followed such a course, decided management wasn’t for them and went back to a hands-on role, a move which is either called a mid-life crisis or common sense, depending on your perspective.

For a techie, it can be easy to lose touch, to forget the whys and wherefores of what makes all that clever digital stuff work. We are told it is simple, and very often it is: the world of RESTful interfaces (a.k.a. exchanging information between programs in neatly formatted plain text), cloud-based services and so on have taken away a great deal of the pain.

When things go wrong however, they can be just as awful as ever. Why? Largely because there’s too many possible options. Older operating system versions. Deprecated interfaces. Ancient libraries to retain compatibility with.

We can talk about a lack of skills, but the smarts required to understand such a morass are based more on some Sherlockian attention to detail than specific expertise. Problem solving is detective work, with root causes sometimes a long way from symptoms.

Case in point: today I managed to get a small PHP package running on my web site. Why wasn’t it working, I hear you ask: well, I say. First, after much hair-pulling and message passing with the help desk, I email to say how it seems strange that the PHP version isn’t changing when I flick the option in the control panel.

Ah, they say, that’s because you are pointing at the wrong server. We migrated you a while back, but (and this part was silent) neglected to tell you. Suddenly I have an explanation as to why nothing I did (about getting a certain library installed) made any difference.

This wasn’t the end of the story (I won’t bore you with the extra security features that broke everything, nor the absence of a directory for session information) but, well, it was interesting reminder of what we might call the first law of commoditisation: nothing is actually commoditised, all that we’ve done is stuck a layer over the top, a facade if you will.

So, work above this layer and all will be well. But woe betide should you delve beneath, either deliberately or because you fall down some technological fissure. Far from everything becoming simpler, it continues to become more complex. It’s enough to drive a systems engineer to drink, and speaking of which:

Smart Shift: There is truth in wine

As mentioned last week, I shall be uploading my book to the web, section by section. This week, a story of sensors, drones and data articulated through the medium of wine. I’ve also added the foreword. Any and all feedback welcome: either this will become a living document or (more likely) I will learn from it and move on. Which is already a good thing.

Strategy & Technical Considerations for Successful Enterprise DevOps

Finally, finally, finally, my report on enterprise DevOps has been released. I have learned a great deal, not least that we are still at the starting blocks — not least because of all the complexity mentioned above. If you don’t want to read the words, I recommend that you check out the picture. Meanwhile, here are some of the articles I wrote along the way.

Is Enterprise DevOps an Oxymoron?

The Five Cs of DevOps at Scale

Seven lessons from writing the report, Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise

Five steps to delivering DevOps at scale

Could DevOps exist without cloud models?

Extra-curricular: The Day of Gloaming

While the manuscript of my novel is with a reader, I thought I’d write a short story. The tendril-laced premise literally came to me in a dream. Enjoy!

Finally, every week I get feedback from a handful of people, positive and observational, which I look to feed into my thinking. Thank you for reading , and keep it coming!

Jon

09-28 – Bulletin 28 September 2018. What are analysts analysing, anyway?

Bulletin 28 September 2018. What are analysts analysing, anyway?

Differentiating between philosophy and technology

Honour is understandable between thieves. After all, if I start stealing from you, what’s to stop you stealing back? And, similarly, few analysts go out on a limb to question or correct their peers. They might question back, and then, all hell would break loose. Of course it happens, on occasion: most often a smaller analyst firm will call out one of the industry behemoths, in the knowledge that, frankly, nobody is listening that hard anyway. It’s like attacking HMS Victory with a pea shooter.

I’ve done it myself, on occasion, largely by virtue of being unable to keep my mouth shut than any deeper motive. Over a decade ago, when IDC announced to the world that we would run out of storage, I called BS: the very notion was impossible (and showed a deep misunderstanding of resource management). We haven’t run out of any such thing, for the record. Nonetheless I do feel vaguely embarrassed at having spoken up. Just like that time at EMC, and that time at… oh well, we are where we are.

At the same time, I wonder if we do enough cross-scrutiny. The trouble with IT industry analysis is, well, where to start? but it comes too easily from losing a sense of objectivity. Technology products and services generally exist to solve a problem: the better we can define the problem, the easier it is to create a solution. For all the Three-Letter Acronyms, terms and we churn out, therefore, each one offers a touchstone, a rallying call. We saw it with ERP, then CRM; with ORBs and ESBs, with SDN and NFV. What they mean matters less than the fact they create a space.

Sometimes, however, this process goes wrong, most often when a trend emerges from the front lines rather than being triggered or catalysed by providers. We saw this with open source and SOA, then Cloud and BYOD; more recently we’re seeing it with DevOps. The models analysts use to define a space fall short, as do their philosophical basis: “What’s the market for cloud?” is one example of how traditional analyst thinking comes unstuck (answer: if you’re asking that question, you really don’t get what’s going on).

This does lead to some fascinating disconnects. It’s the analyst’s job to be the trusted third party, to make the complex simple and help guide decisions. Yesterday, I was in a meeting with a pretty big computer company, talking about a topic currently close to my heart. “That position aligns with our thinking, but we’re not hearing any other analysts talk about it like that,” I was told. Again, the topic is irrelevant (as is the fact I know several analysts that could help out). More telling was the fact that the analyst community as a whole wasn’t helping.

For sure, both me, the big company and a few other people I know could be completely wrong, but I don’t think that this the case. Rather, in this case, the topic (OK, it was DevOps) is seen as an end-point, and any products associated with it are a means to that end. Nothing could be further from the truth: for sure, it’s a good place to get to, but it is merely a point on a bigger journey. Let me put it this way: you won’t become any better at delivering innovation quickly by implementing DevOps tooling. That would be like buying some breathing apparatus, and becoming an expert diver overnight.

Of course, it’s never a good thing to buy some tech and believe it’ll change things, but in many cases, it does get a result (remember getting your first mobile phone?). And often, tech does need a rallying call, to help explain why it’s a good idea; it’s also a lot easier to talk about something if it has a name. However, just because the industry works best with bandwagons, we shouldn’t just assume everything needs one and in some cases, it can be counterproductive.

The bottom line is, where technology exists to support a philosophy, we should act very differently to where a new way of working falls naturally out of buying a particular piece of tech. Sure, there’s a spectrum, but we should be able to differentiate between the two.

Smart Shift: Brainstorming the future

The next section in Smart Shift is now up. It covers Robert Boyle and the Royal Society, unicorns and VCs, smart belts and hype cycles. Feedback welcome, as always!

October 2018

10-05 – Bulletin 5 October 2018. The future isn’t going to happen, and this is why

Bulletin 5 October 2018. The future isn’t going to happen, and this is why

One of my disappointments about working in IT is that I wasn’t there at the beginning. No, I don’t mean offering tea to Babbage and Lovelace, though that would have been quite the coup. I’m thinking more about the early days of silicon, when things really started to heat up.

Having mentioned Babbage, his situation does illustrate a point which pervades to this present day: the Information Age has been defined as much by what isn’t possible, as what is. I’ve previously talked about threshold theory, in that some things happen simply because they become possible, whereas before they weren’t.

In Babbage’s case, while his plans for a (second) calculating machine were valid, he couldn’t afford to build it — the amount of work required (and therefore cost) to engineer a machine of such complexity was beyond his fundraising ability. It’s been built, subsequently, and it works: you can see it in the Science Museum.

Similarly, I remember speaking to Augustin Huret, just after his (software-based) algorithmic inference capability had been acquired by consulting firm BearingPoint. To the point: his algorithms had originally been devised by his father, in the 1970s, but no machine was powerful enough to be able to run them. When Huret Jr came on the scene, the cost of running them was still too expensive. Today, it costs a few hundred quid a pop.

My point isn’t about threshold theory; it is, however, about the fact that we already get much of the maths, we’re just waiting around for infrastructure that can support it. Not a dig, just an observation. To extrapolate, yes, we will be able to apply such algorithms more broadly in the future. But, unless someone invents a new branch of maths, we will also largely be constrained by them.

What I’m fumbling with is my strange lack of conviction about the singularity, SkyNet, the notion that we will all be creatures of (potentially diabetic) leisure as robots do everything for us, and so on. There’s something missing in the equation, like that flow diagram which incorporates “insert something magical here.”

At the moment, AI is operating in two dimensions. The first is deep: for a well-bounded domain, such as voice, image, or other expected-pattern recognition, we can expect linear improvements in capability, perhaps to a point where it will be difficult to discern whether we are being listened to by a computer, or by a human. For simple, code-able instructions, this sounds quite the thing, if that’s your preferred form of communication.

Meanwhile, we’re looking to go broad - “Give me a data set and offer me insights about it.” Algorithms can offer in one of two ways: either they work on the basis of anomalies, looking for unexpected messages in bottles across an ocean of flotsam; or they require seeding with some kind of domain knowledge, context or hypothesis which can then be tested. Some companies (I was talking to Google yesterday) are getting very good at this stuff.

But yet, as I say, something’s missing from the equation. I don’t know what it is, but I am starting to understand why it is missing. Simply put, on one side we have mathematics, algorithms, patterns and rules; and on the other, biology, hormones, irrationality, caring, identity. What they can’t do is be a bit dumb or flighty, go the extra mile or wait around long after it feels pointless. Nor would they want to, if they had a concept of wanting in the first place.

I’m saying this as I think it’s a really important element of what we will see in years to come. Computers may be able to generate mood music that pushes the right buttons: all algorithms have to do is A/B test every combination and tweak their variables as they home in on the right ones. In other words, they can do what computers can do, sometimes with world changing consequences.

All of this to reinforce that we may be heading towards an augmented world, one in which mundane and mechanical tasks and decisions are automated, and we have extra information to work with. But the notion that we are heading anywhere more futuristic than that remains highly unlikely, in my opinion. To whit: either I am wrong, in which case we need to start creating legislation around a post-singularity, artificially intelligent world, or I am right, in which case, we need to start planning around notions of algorithmic augmentation.

Even if we do arrive at some post-singularity world at some point, the chances are that we will have already spent several decades working through this, far less exciting yet equally risky scenario: we should, therefore, plan for it. This means not being distracted by media-friendly notions such as ‘robot rights’, nor dwelling (as we do) on current issues such as privacy (as it is currently presented). Complacency is not an option: the world of 5-10 years needs a whole new set of laws and norms, based on what algorithmic augmentation brings.

Here’s an article for this week.

Travellers know what they want: all we have to do is listen to them

With my programme-director-for-travel-forward hat on, I’m always amazed at how easily we switch from one psychology to another. The ill-fated Stanford Prison Experiment is one case in point, but we can look closer to home — not least how we create vs how we use technology. In this article, I propose the idea of listening to our travelling selves, rather than trying to second-guess the notional needs of others. I know, crazy, right?

What is the smart shift? And the incredible shrinking transistor

In the final section of Smart Shift’s first chapter, I summarise the book’s purpose — “as the transcontinental train of change hurtles on, is there any handrail that we can grab? The answer, and indeed the premise for this book, is yes.” As it didn’t seem fair to leave you on quite such a cliffhanger, I’ve included the first section of the next chapter as well. Which, not uncoincidentally, covers Babbage. But not Ancient Greece: for that, you’ll have to wait until next week.

10-13 – Bulletin 12 October 2018. Innovating fast and slow

Bulletin 12 October 2018. Innovating fast and slow

I can’t remember who originally said it, but it’s true that we have a two-track industry: sometimes change comes very quickly, and sometimes, it takes a lot longer. There’s multiple dimensions to this. Not least our inability to spot a good idea from a duff one.

Google Glass for example, or more broadly, 3D TV were touted as game changers. The former was quite likely to be an idea before its time, and the latter, well, perhaps we simply didn’t need it. That didn’t prevent multiple global corporations pouring literally billions into the concept, however.

And meanwhile, we have the success stories. Apple did not invent the tablet computer, but boy, did that Jobs chappy know how to drive home a point. He was right: previous incarnations of similar products simply didn’t cut the mustard.

Today, it’s largely true that Apple products command a premium: other companies have caught up, and in many cases surpassed the capabilities. Apple broke the (Wintel) mould, set the bar and freed up a lot of innovation-led thinking.

All the same, Apple happened to be in the right place, with the right ideas, at the same time. Last week I wrote how maths had been waiting for infrastructure to catch up; in this game, it can be more important to catch a wave, than ‘re-invent’ the surf board.

Individual innovations happen at a moment in time because they can: right now, there’s a queue of great ideas biding their time, founders setting out their stalls and hoping they don’t run out of money before the wave hits. If they do, don’t fret, hopefully the VCs will back the next great idea…

Meanwhile, many industries appear considerably behind the curve. In fact however, they both are, and aren’t: in travel for example, of course we will one day end up with some kind of micro-charging mechanism based on what we do, rather than what we book. The fact this doesn’t exist is because it can’t, not yet.

My old colleague Martin used to tell the story of Michelangelo: when asked how he carved the Statue of David, he replied, “I simply removed all the stone that wasn’t David.” We would do well thinking about the future in much the same way: take away the challenges, and let it unfold naturally.

Smart Shift: The world at your fingertips

No articles this week, but here’s a book section. Starting with Darius the Great and ending with Peter Gabriel, this latest extract from Smart Shift covers the explosion of networking and communications.

And finally, if there’s one thing this newsletter seems to have proven, it’s that I am unable to write something short. Nonetheless, this is the fortieth I have written, somehow. Not quite sure how that happened, but here we are.

As ever, thanks for reading.

Best, Jon

10-22 – Bulletin 19 October 2018. On technology, the nature of work and long haul flights

Bulletin 19 October 2018. On technology, the nature of work and long haul flights

Augmenting all kinds of intelligence

By the time this lands in your inbox, I will have been on and off an aeroplane, having been to a conference (GitHub Universe) in San Francisco. I’m glad I went, but I’m also reminded of what put me off long-distance travel a few years back— you can pretty much write off a week.

But wait. How can I be glad I went, if at the same time I’m writing off a week? I didn’t deliver any reports, for sure. At the same time, I learned, I engaged, I advised a bit, all reasons why I do this job. I was not alone: 1,500 people came from multiple countries to do the same.

There’s an easy point to make here, which is that we still need physical presence to get certain things done, at a certain level. Frustrating it may be for video conferencing providers, but you can’t beat a face to face meeting. We know this; more important is what it means for the future nature of work.

Cutting to the chase, we’re told many jobs will disappear due to AI/automation/disintermediation/cloud/<insert buzzword here>. We shouldn’t be surprised about this — whole businesses are disappearing, taking their jobs with them.

At the same time, whole new businesses are appearing and with them, new types of work. Data scientists, knowledge workers, programmers and engineers are exponentially in demand, even as transactional tasks are superseded or automated away.

But more than this. A fear could be that only ‘smart’ people have a place in this brave new world: achieve post-degree-level status or find yourself consigned to the railway arches. A future for the educated few, and not for the broader populace.

But then, we have the fact that I, and millions of others, are travelling huge distances in order to get the job done. Human interaction cannot be automated away, even if it can be made more efficient. Which means people will have to be, and stay good at, well, being people.

It has been written that nine different kinds of intelligence exist. Each of these can be augmented in some way through technology, but a mix of personalities will continue to be what makes the world go round. I have a plane ticket to prove it.

With the above in mind, here’s a couple of articles for the week.

The best practice game changer that is GitHub Actions

First, a view from the conference. I’m always wary of seeing any new release of a product as a ‘game changer’ but a couple of factors play in the favour of this one: first that 31,000,000 developers have been the ability to build development workflows; and second, there’s no particular limit on what these workflows can look like. I have a feeling demand may go right up to the level of supply.

The third journey: the travel industry may not be transforming, but it is certainly transitioning

And second, topical, topical, on the nature of travel. I am loving speaking to travel providers across the board about how their organisations, and the industry as a whole, are changing. “The real innovation is coming from those thinking about what people want to do, as opposed to where they want to stay or how they want to travel.”

| :—– | | £7,950.52 |

10-26 – Bulletin 26 October 2018. The world beyond the bandwagon

Bulletin 26 October 2018. The world beyond the bandwagon

It seems to be a human truth that we need touchstones, things that people can rally around. The tech industry is no exception, indeed, it could be argued that industry analysts have ‘touchstone lifecycle management’ baked into their business models. Gartner presents its hype cycle like something that it observes, but in reality the company’s magic quadrants (and Forrester’s waves, and so on) are a significant factor in characterising, therefore making acceptable and confirming the existence of, new technology areas.

Once this has been done, once the bandwagon comes shimmering into life through sheer force of rhetoric, everyone and their dog will jump on board. It doesn’t really matter whether the theme, trend or capability is absolutely right: those vendors whose products fit its definitions will crow, and others will claim a level of differentiation (cf Geoffrey Moore. “Unlike other vendors of <insert technology here>, the Acme solution enables…”).

Meanwhile, analyst firms large and small then have something to advise upon. “It’s not as simple as that” offers a reasonable starting point for a lucrative career in explaining what the heck the industry is on about this time. And PR companies and journalists have a new, interesting topic of discussion to replace the stale bandwagons of yesterday, a new new thing to supersede all those old new things. It is what it is.

As they are embraced and enhanced, some touchstones gain an almost transcendent state. Best practices and training courses emerge, buzzwords take form and are adopted, people become experts in the field. But wait. This isn’t taking place from a standing start, prior to which these were just fields. For something to become the next big thing, it needs to have already achieved some kind of critical mass.

Sometimes a vendor will attempt to ‘create a space’ but this takes time and money, and success is not guaranteed. More likely is that sufficient organisations have already adopted a version of the capability under discussion, and find themselves suddenly thrust into a technology leadership position. To take a specific example, we saw it when all those users of network event management systems discovered they had been doing something called IT Service Management… which then became Business Service Management.

It can be a little befuddling, to find yourself leaders in the field when last week you were just getting on with the job. Even more so when all those home-grown systems, practices and processes, which worked as far as they did, become not quite as good as the brand new gold standard.

For example, if organisations developing software find their methods misaligned, in name or deed, with the ‘standards’ imposed by the (say) Agile Industrial Complex” (hat-tip: Martin Fowler), they can hit a challenge. I remember working on a report years ago, which drew the scorn of at least one industry luminary for suggesting any way could exist other than the recommended way (even though our research showed otherwise). My favourite comment (I paraphrase) was, “Who even is this guy? He doesn’t come to any of our forums!”

The bottom line is, we are working in an infinitely complex and constantly changing industry. No absolutes exist, but every now and then we do arrive at definitions we can all agree upon, even for a short while. We should embrace these for what they are, not as a final answer but a moment of respite, of calm in the tumult, of shared direction and navigation. It’s everyone’s job to recognise the role of such constructs as a means to ease, not add to the pain.

November 2018

11-02 – Bulletin 2 November. There is nothing to hype but hype itself

Bulletin 2 November. There is nothing to hype but hype itself

It’s a funny old world, in which the topics of discussion are set for us and we talk about them, whether we like it or not. Last week I pondered the role of the analyst as a creator of terms, and therefore bandwagons. In doing so, however, we can starve oxygen from areas of equal merit, simply because there isn’t enough to go around.

What defines whether an area gets onto the podium, and is therefore deserving of sponsorship? The analogy is entirely appropriate, in this race to get ideas past the post. Competition is stiff: I remember a discussion with my old colleague Dale Vile many years ago, where he pointed out how tend, if not hundreds of potential game-changers are vying for position in the CIO’s budget.

I’m reminded of another conversation, this time with Dale Nix, who was at the time CIO for Forte Posthouse hotels. I was in his office, talking about the latest developments in IT but at the same time, hoping he would sign up to Bloor’s IT-Director.com subscription service. “Look at this,” he said, pushing a copy of Management Today across his desk. In it was an article, about CRM or similar. “When can we have one of these?” his boss had scrawled in the margin.

It’s one of the reasons I took some time out from this analyst lark for a while. It wasn’t, as I have suggested wholly that I became fed up of having an opinion; rather, I became frustrated with only having opinions about things that seemed to matter to the technology vendors I spoke to, to the detriment of other areas that were clearly, blindingly, having a major impact.

Social media was one, as part of the ‘wave of consumerisation’ which has changed the way we think about technology today. Hype? Maybe, but then it’s difficult to talk about technology at all without adding fuel to its various fires.

Case in point: here’s an article for this week.

Is Travel the Blockchain Beachhead?

It is fascinating how the number of people saying Blockchain is pointless seems to exceed the number saying that it has a purpose. You’d think that would kill it stone dead, but no, organisations keep thinking they have worked out a good use for the massively distributed ledger concept. I can’t see the fuss, nor the anti-fuss: I wager it will find good use in precisely the areas where it is useful. I know, right? And one of those areas may well be travel.

In other news: Travel Forward is go!

After several months of preparation, the Travel Forward conference hits Excel on Monday and Tuesday. In the build-up, I’ve loved speaking to senior execs at some of our best-known travel companies: speaking to real organisations is an excellent way of putting the hype in context. If you’re going to be in the area, do say come say hi to your friendly programme director!

11-09 – Bulletin 9 November 2018. Transform or die? is a red herring: the future will be physical

Bulletin 9 November 2018. Transform or die? is a red herring: the future will be physical

We already know the end game

Oh what a circus, oh what a show. My mind is cluttered by watching the travel and hospitality industry go to town, filling the whole of Excel as it did. This was my first time seeing such a big event come together from behind the scenes — I have never seen so many chop saws, as stands as big as I have seen were built literally from scratch.

My role within World Travel Market, as it is known, was to run a technology-for-travel conference programme, which (like all the best shows) somehow, magically, all came together. It is equally fascinating to watch an industry in its element: there’s more progress than you might think, but less than the players might like.

Travel has its digital bogeymen, the AirBnBs and Booking.coms that everyone detests even as they try to emulate them. Detests, really? Fair enough, that’s probably too strong a word. Cloud-first companies are like the cool kids that join school in the third year, coming from nowhere and somehow capturing the adolescent flag. It’s not so much hate, as confused envy.

At the same time (and despite the best efforts of consulting firms to imply everyone is at the start of the journey unless they’re already at the end), most organisations are already taking a punt. Most have apps, most buy in to the notion of customer experience, most are dabbling in various forms of agile development or are looking to get on top of the analytics capabilities they invested in years ago.

The point is, it is plain silly to suggest that they need to ‘understand’, or ‘get it’, or have any other form of epiphany. I’ve read endless papers that suggest our organisations need top-down buy-in, or stakeholder engagement, or whatever. In the real world, the chances are this already exists, at some level; yet still, it is not enough to go up against those upstarts who are digital by default.

And it is precisely this which is being played, a screw to be turned, a feeling of inadequacy that remains a constant, however much effort is being put in. It’s coming from a hard reality that digital change can’t take place while physical resources also need to be managed. And it’s a lie.

We’re on the cusp of something different. Amazon is opening physical, if highly automated stores. Uber and others are investing in vehicles. Why? Two reasons. First, once the algorithms commoditise, software-fist organisations need to look beyond that to differentiate. And second, because humans like working and being with humans.

And travel will be at the forefront of this. Is it always necessary to have a person working through the options for a particular trip? No, but many are prepared to accept a premium for doing so. And as for the feeling of welcome… to extrapolate, I’m reminded of a recent “Game of Thrones” tour in Dubrovnik. Of course it could have taken place with an iPad or an AR headset, but, yeah, a guy in a suit of armour was a lot more fun.

Traditional organisations already know they are on to a good thing, even as the rug is being pulled out by startups that don’t have to worry about the physical — yet. But they will. For many, it’s a case of hanging in there, building the future at the same time as not losing the assets created deep in the past (which is akin to not selling off school playing fields for housing).

The future will be physical, and it belongs to those with the staying power to keep hold of the past at the same time as delivering on the potential of what technology brings.

11-16 – Bulletin 16 November 2018. Marketing is the new porn

Bulletin 16 November 2018. Marketing is the new porn

You can’t beat an attention-grabbing headline, can you? But in this case I think it is appropriate. Back in the early days of the Web, so went the principle, most of the great innovations came from the pornography industry: first to e-commerce, first to video and first to fleecing punters of every penny they had whilst ensuring a steady stream of addicts.

I paraphrase of course, and I confess to not be speaking from experience. Equally lacking is my inside knowledge of the previous holder of the technological crown, the military, from whence of course came the Internet Protocol itself. By the time I came onto the scene, personal computers had opened the door to a new breed of happy-go-lucky hacker whose only interest was typing lines of code from magazines.

How naive and halcyon those days were, for any school kid, back in the day… but that’s a subject for another bulletin. Where was I? Ah yes, marketing. To introduce the topic I feel another digression coming on, around clichéd anecdotes. I reckon I have about ten that I keep trotting out, whether I’m writing for myself or others…

For example, if I am going to write about computer viruses, I will probably reference John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider. Here’s one from 2013 but they go back much, much further — probably to 1999 when I first started writing about such things. If security is the topic, I might also reference the quote “never put down to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity.”

And meanwhile, when talking about various aspects of commerce, I might quote the apocryphal question asked of a criminal: “Why do you rob banks?” “Because that’s where the money is,” he is reputed to reply.

And so, to marketing, and the current obsession with ensuring the we give customers what they want — this latter all too often, still, a euphemism for the aforementioned fleecing punters of every penny. I’m not going to turn this into a rant: I’ve railed against the horrors of ‘monetisation of data’ before, and you’d have to be crossing the Sahara backwards on a camel with a bag on your head, not to have had some personal experience.

Nonetheless, the fact that we all shoulder the burden of being algorithmically marketed to, even as we (and certainly many of the people reading this) are working for organisations doing the deed, bears some scrutiny. I’m reminded of speaking to a director of a charity about the practice of ‘chugging’ (charity mugging, another personal bugbear). “But it works,” he said, with a what-else-are-we-supposed-to-do expression.

Indeed. Not only is the use of technology to reach inside our wallets and purses the most obviously tappable opportunity; also, in a world where margins are tight and a race to the bottom exists across retail and other commerce, it offers a potential lifeline. Not to mention all those digital-first startups that seem to have whipped the lion’s share of custom from under the noses of traditional merchants, providers and everyone else.

So, all attention is on the use of technology for marketing. Digital transformation is all about, you guessed it, selling more things to more people. Or at least, orienting your organisation so that understanding buying behaviours becomes a major influence. Pretty much every new technology is first seen in terms of what it can do to enhance customer relationships, i.e. do better targeting, Case in point: the low-hanging fruit for AI, for all its potential, is around recommendations engines.

Meanwhile, it’s without irony that ‘customer experience’ is a big thing at the moment: CX is one of those strange topics which only exists due to its inherent absence. “You mean, we should try to understand the customer better and deliver better as a result?” said no company ever, apart from all those who had completely lost touch with their raison d’être. Which, wait, is an awful lot of them.

I’m not downhearted. Attention will move on, from direct targeting to differentiation; I have no proof but I like to believe that the hold of ‘brands’ over individuals, the product version of our celebrity culture becomes more tenuous every day. We can wear Gucci spectacles for example, but they will be made by one of two companies, to the same standards: only the logo will change. Of course I could be wrong, we are as sheep after all, but I hope not.

On that, cheery note, here’s the latest section of Smart Shift.

A platform for the web of everything

Who remembers Prince Charles talking about “grey goo”? An interview with Graeme Hackland, top bloke and CIO at Williams Formula 1 team, took place a few years now but remains illustration enough about the law of thresholds, which has taken sensors from chunky things on aeroplanes to tiny devices that litter our transportation and other systems like dust.

That’s all for this week. Still queuing those articles up and (extra curricular) have been progressing both novel and musical, watch this space!

Cheers, Jon

11-23 – Bulletin 23 November 2018: You can’t program serendipity

Bulletin 23 November 2018: You can’t program serendipity

I’ll be heading off to AWS Re:Invent on Sunday. As well as thinking once again about the paradox of having to go half way round the world to meet tech industry people face to face, I’m reminded of the serendipities of doing so, such as meeting multiple people called Dave.

The very nature, and indeed joy of serendipity is that it follows a non-algorithmic pattern that we can nonetheless follow. For example, if I stay at home, I will be far less likely to bump into someone on a station platform who might offer me an opportunity, or make an introduction, or, well, whatever!

Strangely, this goes a long way to explaining the AWS business model. I’m not referring to all that HQ-in-Luxembourg shenanigans but the nature of creating an all-encompassing platform. I genuinely don’t think the AWS powers that be know what it is for, as that isn’t the job; rather, the goal is to ensure that whatever people are using right now is incorporated.

This goes some way to explaining the astonishing, and continued announcements of new features, functions and packages supported by the AWS platform. The company has done a great job of catching little waves, not differentiating or caring about whether they are important but allowing them to happen, making them available. Let serendipity decide could have been the underlying mantra…

…until more recently. I’ve noticed the rhetoric around cloud providers evolve, not only from its original “everything to the cloud” towards “everything to the cloud but the stuff you don’t want in the cloud”, but also towards “which cloud should I use for what?” As providers mature, they are offering more evaluate-able services, for example around artificial intelligence capabilities and IoT models.

The result is that genuine reasons are emerging to choose one over another, that is beyond “we have everything you might need” kinds of arguments. It has been difficult to keep up with it all, to be frank, but as the debate moves up a level or two, it will get both easier to understand and therefore harder for providers to differentiate.

To put it in concrete terms (and to go up even higher in the stack), “We have great virtual machines, fab storage and every open source package you might need,” is a very different proposition to, “We have the best solution for healthcare/retail/<insert industry here>.” Right now we are somewhere between the two.

Ultimately, cloud providers have been deriving value from that old chestnut of disintermediation, a.k.a. giving people what they want more easily than the traditional alternative. All well and good, one might say, as it has got them to where they are; now this source of differentiation is being used up and as a result of inevitable market evolution, providers are looking to differentiate in other ways.

We continue to live out what has been termed the platform economy, which has been based on operating build-it-and-they-will-come models at a most strategic level. The future will continue to lie in building on platforms, but as lower levels commoditise, so will battles be fought in terms of the solutions, not the platforms, on offer. Proactive serendipity may have had its day.

In other news, here’s an article for this week.

On Value Stream Management in DevOps, and Seeing Problems as Solutions

A frequent habit in tech is to describe something that isn’t working in a way that suggests an answer: “Data Leakage Protection” is one of the more obvious. In business circles meanwhile, the whole notion of efficiency relates to the fact that much of what we call work is unproductive and pointless. I know, I know. So, Value Stream Management is both an answer and a set of questions — what’s not working, and how can it be fixed? When applied to DevOps, it’s also an indicator that it doesn’t deliver pots of gold without a bit more forethought.

Extra-curricular: Super-Awesome — the Musical continues apace

Sometimes, things move from a nice idea to a “blimey, this might actually happen” state almost by stealth. I started writing a musical on a whim in 2010, and completed a first draft earlier this year: suddenly I have collaborators, songs and, well, if you’ve never heard something you’ve written sung by a professional singer, I highly recommend it. Now planning a reading early next year, followed by a workshop and then, perhaps a Kickstarter but a long way to go before that happens! Keep watching this space…

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

Cheers, Jon

11-27 – Bulletin: The arrogance of startups

Bulletin: The arrogance of startups

Let me start by saying that I admire anyone who wants to set up on their own.

Trouble is, some ideas just aren’t that good. And this begs the question, what does differentiate it from the rest?

The trouble is, you’ve got to be visionary and all that, but there’s a fine line between that and being an idiot.

December 2018

12-01 – Bulletin 1 December 2018. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are

Bulletin 1 December 2018. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are

“Why do simple when you can do complicated” - A Breton proverb

It’s a quote from Anaïs Nin, I believe. As well as a lyric from that popular beat combo Marillion, in a song which deliberately pulled together a series of proverbs, platitudes and quotes, and set them to a country dancing back beat. But I digress.

A webcast I was recently involved in hosting incorporated one of my pet hates, namely a conversation around “the market for” a certain technology. Last week I talked about characterising problems as solutions: it’s also possible to characterise solutions (and therefore problems) as markets.

You know the thing, and if you don’t, it goes something like this: “The technology area is called NNT (New New Thing). Just to put it into context, Gartner estimates the size of the market for NNT to be $3.2 billion…”

I’m not calling out Gartner here, but the company (or IDC, Forrester or a number of others) is frequently quoted. You can pretty much guarantee that nobody would ask how the figure was derived, even if Gartner would tell them. Which they won’t.

Markets thrive on figures, so they are a necessary element of doing business, even if perceived by some to be flawed. I’m not sure they are, any more than the fact that we are all in the land of the blind, a wilderness of future-facing mirrors in which any estimate is better than none.

But that’s not my point, or at least, not the point I wanted to make. Which is: what is a technology vendor doing talking about market sizes, however calculated, when the audience is nothing to do with people who care about markets?

For the record, I’m not calling out this specific vendor either: it’s a bad habit of the industry. I suppose it could be justified for reasons of comparison: it kind of says, “this area matters.” But so does, “We spoke to 3,000 large companies and they all think NNT is awesome.”

So why does it wind me up, get my goat or otherwise cause a ripple in my otherwise flat calm? The simpler answer might be what I’ve already said, that it is in some way irrelevant or inappropriate… but no, I’m not very good at simple answers. Perhaps I’m part-Breton.

More to the point is how the framing might skew behaviours. By seeing a solution (or indeed a problem) as a market, the goal becomes less about resolution of a challenge, and more about achieving a sale. Of course, one necessitates the other, but the cart should not come before the horse.

I’m a great believer that technology provision, done right, should manifest as a win-win: nothing makes me happier (okay, a pint on a Friday night makes me happier, but bear with me) than hearing a customer say about a product, “This thing is brilliant, couldn’t do without it.”

In this scenario, everyone gains: the vendor makes money, the purchaser does whatever it makes possible, and all can smile. Make it about market sizes however, and the win-win is no longer part of the equation.

No articles this week as I have been pillar to post at AWS’ annual event in Las Vegas (yes, I should have posted this before I got on the plane). Definitely two articles next week, not least my thoughts on cloud in general, and the conference in particular. Watch this space!

All the best, Jon

12-07 – Bulletin 7 December. The enterprise as a platform

Bulletin 7 December. The enterprise as a platform

Why do complicated when you can do simple?

Since I quoted the Bréton proverb ‘Why do simple when you can do complicated’ a few weeks ago, it’s been turning round and round in my head as it seems to pretty much set the scene for all that prevents technology from working. I remember a conversation with an analyst a few years ago, where he likened trying to change the enterprise environment as the equivalent of mining. I paraphrase, but his analogy referenced the largest mineshaft in the world as being roughly a kilometre deep, compared to the 13,200km-diameter planet we occupy. So, he said, while any effort to change might feel like it’s doing a great deal, it’s equally only scratching the surface.

This is one of the reasons, if I may, that big consulting firms are a bit of a con. Not that they mean to be, but, honestly, who can name a single large company that has re-invented itself as a slick, genuinely agile business? All these terms like digital transformation are very nice, and they certainly look good when wrapped in some futuristic stock image but, frankly, it’s never going to happen. Which is one of the reasons my money is on everything-as-a-platform.

Back in the day, when I was an OO consultant, I learned that the thing is less important than the interface: once you have posted an API call, you don’t care what happens behind the scenes as long as you get the response you need, in the time you need it. We’ve been through various waves of this, from right back at Yourdon and Constantine’s 1975 work on structured programming (maximise cohesion/minimise coupling), through (indeed) OO, to component-based development, web services, RESTful interfaces and the (ahem) rest.

The point is, “the enterprise” as we know it can also be accessed as a notional platform of services. Back in the day, I had to deliver some UML training to the British Library but on the first day, I was told how the organisation had an embargo on any new IT spend: essentially, all activity had to be on maintaining existing systems. The five-day course became an exercise in working out what BL’s users wanted to do, then mapping that onto what ’services’ BL had available: it was all a facade, behind which was a set of monolithic systems. But, as I was told several years later when I bumped into the head of IT at a Microsoft event, the idea of seeing existing systems as a platform… had worked.

That’s not to say it’s a panacea, or magic bullet or whatever, we all know how there is no such thing (and indeed, file “Technology X is not a silver bullet” alongside “Tech Y is dead, long live tech Y” and other rinse-and-repeat articles that do the rounds about, well, every new trend). And indeed, whatever you do, don’t let any such notion fall into the hands of the enterprise architects, who will map the heck out of it and end up with service catalogues you can prop a car up with. But seeing existing, joyously legacy technologies through the lens of an interface means you can let them be for a little longer, putting the effort into what you can build on them rather than trying to change them wholesale.

Just a thought. And speaking of simple, here’s an article for this week.

Five Questions for: Melissa Kramer of Live UTI Free

As I note in the pre-amble, not every innovation needs to be a smorgasbord of buzzy technological terms, nor should it be: we can all learn from this healthcare example in which access to good information can go a long way towards better diagnosis and treatment of this common condition.

That’s all for this week, until next time! Jon

12-14 – Bulletin 14 December 2018. Who keeps changing the terminology?

Bulletin 14 December 2018. Who keeps changing the terminology?

What’s in a name?

TLA’s seem to appear out of nowhere, arriving fully formed into mainstream discussion: Value Stream Management is just the latest in a series. To understand the process behind the creation of a new term, here’s what happens, as a semblance of steps:

First, technology evolves, or lurches forward, depending on your point of view. Innovation tends to follow a path of least resistance, in which organisations without so much baggage (often startups) grab hold of a techno-combo to deliver something that either wasn’t feasible before, or would have been, if people had got their act together.

Second, everyone starts doing whatever the technology enables. So, for example, that cloud computing thing, or in layperson’s terms, “using a virtual machine running on someone else’s hardware.” In a matter of months, the new technology area goes from looking like an exception, to something with potential to be a norm.

Third, the analysts start to get a whiff of it… Industry analysts are before all else, trend spotters — they spend time talking to people about what businesses and consumers are doing with technology, and so have a good vantage point to see when a theme is becoming a trend.

…then fourth, they give it a name. What happens next is, in some meeting room in some office block, a bunch of analyst-y types express their fascination about what is going on, and agree to write a report about it. Which needs a snappy title. The name could come from ‘the thing’ itself, or if none exists, the analysts will make one up.

Fifth, the report will look to ‘define a space’. IT industry analysts don’t think in terms of solutions to problems: if the answer is “change the way you do things,” they’re not so interested. But if software or hardware is/can be involved, suddenly things are very interesting as this means you can create a ranking of whoever provides said software.

Sixth, technology providers orient themselves around the new name. Gandalf (the wise, then the white) knew the power behind a name, and so do IT companies. Vendors cited in the report feather their nests with it, while those missed out rail against pay-to-play industry corruption; and meanwhile, a bunch of others with similar products will claim to also do ‘the thing’.

Seventh, industry experts spend the next period helping companies with ‘the thing’. Once a bandwagon has been created, the cycle plays out with the larger majority of organisations trying to work out if they need whatever it is being talked about. Consulting firms will tell them they can’t do without it; analysts will say, “well, if you’re going to do it, here’s what to think about” and so on.

And round we go. From this analyst’s perspective, I am still taken by surprise by the apparently sudden appearance of new terms and mechanisms, with most people I come across giving the impression that they knew about it all along (for fear of looking dumb). Generally, then, I go through a wave of panic and inadequacy before realising (a) I could understand what it was about after all, and (b) the implementation challenges were, and remain, the same as ever. Perhaps one day I will find I really have missed something enormous but thus far, thus good.

Here’s an article for this week.

Five Questions For… Seong Park at MongoDB

I’m currently spending my time thinking about processes and roles, hence my increasing focus on Value Stream Management and hence also, this conversation with VP of Product Marketing, Seong Park, about the relationship between (essentially) a database company and the developer community.

Cheers and all the best, Jon

12-21 – Bulletin 21 December 2018. The loneliness of the cybersecurity professional

Bulletin 21 December 2018. The loneliness of the cybersecurity professional

Where the bad things are

I do feel sorry for anyone that works in cybersecurity. They’re like the people who thought bicycle helmets were a good idea before anyone else thought they were cool, or like anyone in health and safety, or quality, or any other discipline that (from the outside) looks like it’s trying to get in the way.

Worst case, security professionals are lumped into that humourless group that wants to prevent people, businesses, whoever from getting on with their lives. Like, you know, traffic wardens. Unlike whom, it’s the security guy that takes the hit when things go wrong. As I say, it’s a thankless task.

It’s the security professional’s job to predict what might go wrong, and therefore create an opportunity to do something about it in advance. What a task, when everything you say is a hair’s breadth from doom-mongering. It’s one of the reasons I advocate visibility as a precept: that is, tell the board what the risk is, and then let them decide whether to play safe, or fast and loose.

Here’s the idea: in business leadership, one of the main jobs is balancing risk — in general this is measured financially, although business leaders are not alien to the concept of saying “what the heck” and just doing something anyway, based on gut feel (indeed, this increasingly feels how the West is run, but I digress).

So, forewarned is fore-armed. Trouble is, in many cases we just don’t know what the potential consequences are. When writing about data privacy in recent years, I have talked about aggregation and peripheral risk — that is, what if a data sample makes it look like you were in the vicinity of a crime?

Such risks still exist. However and unfortunately, I failed to consider the possibility of using harvested behavioural data to target incite-ful ads that have had an unexpectedly strong influence on our democratic processes; nor did I predict the use of such techniques by foreign powers. I wasn’t alone.

Our inability to spot such world-changing consequences of our technological use further undermines the credibility of the crystal-ball-gazing enforcers we call cybersecurity experts. Which does lead to models such as cyber-recovery planning, that is, “plan for failure as it’s all going to go wrong anyway,” but can also feed a “why bother, as it’s all going to go wrong anyway” attitude.

Security pros are between the rock of an intransigent, uncaring business, and the hard place of failing to spot some future cataclysm. And yes, I do feel sorry for them.

On a more cheery note, here’s an article for this week.

AWS Re:Invent 2018 Reflects an Industry Coming of Age

Technology is at an interesting juncture, as we move from a wave of fragmentation and explosion to one of standardisation and simplification. The former was caused by the joint forces of cloud infrastructure and open source software, and the latter is happening because just using either his no longer a differentiator in itself. That’s my take anyway, with consequences for even the biggest cloud players such as AWS.

That’s all for this week. It just remains for me to wish all of my readers a very happy Christmas (don’t eat too much plum pudding), and see you next week. Thanks for reading!

Jon

12-28 – Bulletin 28 December 2018. What ho 2019: predictions of a bygone age

Bulletin 28 December 2018. What ho 2019: predictions of a bygone age

The more that things change…

Why are bricks the size they are? Frankly, I don’t know, but I bet it is down to a number of factors which had to be weighed up one against another. Not least ease of laying, production quality and, probably, aesthetics. The result is a reasonably standard set of dimensions which can be seen the world over.

In a similar way, many of the things we do with technology work best when they are at a certain scale. Code modularity, for example, balances internal and external complexity, probability of dependency, functional specialisation and generalisation. The result is similar, whether you are working with old-school programming functions or all-new microservices.

The same notions apply for business processes, user stories, data models and, probably, any type of abstraction. We could call it Goldilocks’ First Law in that it feels just right, balancing the needs of cohesion and coupling. It can be equally straightforward to get wrong, as I have found out across various software audits and consulting assignments.

What has this got to do with predictions, I hear you say? It’s a good question, not least in that I didn’t mean this bulletin to head in the direction it has. The plan was to make some general point about right-ness, then use that to set a few expectations for the coming year.

Having derailed myself (prediction zero: this won’t be the last time), I could nonetheless continue regardless. But heck, in for a penny. Instead, here’s a few ancient truths dressed up as analytical wisdom:

1. Something that wasn’t quite possible before becomes possible. Possibly because it is cheaper to do, or processing/networking/storage passes a threshold. In this camp are various applications of AI, IoT and other data-intensive use cases.

2. Something gets standardised and everyone adopts it. Standards often happen because everything is using a certain thing anyway, or it passes an adoption threshold of some sort. Suddenly we go into this doublethink stage, where people act like they’d always been doing it. Cue: Kubernetes and microservices.

3. A consensus is reached that if something is going to happen, it needs to be managed. Generally this will be because that new new technology has proved itself in pilot studies but crashed and burned when adoption went enterprise-wide. From the failures fo early adopters come frameworks and tools that were always necessary, in (ahem) hindsight. P.S. Hello, Value Stream Management.

4. Something that everyone said was pointless becomes both successful and mundane. You know, that new kind of tech it seems that everyone is banging on about, yet most seem to say it’s over-hyped nonsense? Well, whaddyaknow, there was a use for it after all, but it’s not actually that interesting. Those who said it was cool are now, frustratedly, trying to say, “I told you so,” but, frankly, nobody cares. And Blockchain.

5. Something which looked like it has done its time proves to still be useful. While many applications end up in the elephants’ graveyard, the capabilities that they are built of tend to last a bit, or a lot, longer. Cue yet another article (I should know, I’ve written plenty) titled, “Tech XYZ is dead: long live tech XYZ,” which points out the flaws in suggesting the demise of, well, anything. So, no, serverless models will not wash away everything that has come before them, sorry.

There we have it: now we can all write a few predictions. Or alternatively, we can finish the roast, have a final, wistful look back at 2018 and wish each other all the best for the new year, whatever may come to pass. Merry Christmas, and may health, happiness and perhaps a little value-based positivity come your way.

This has been by 52’nd newsletter, which means I lasted the year without running out of things to talk about. Hurrah, huzzah and thank you all for reading this far, and for this long.

All the best, Jon

P.S. A few more thoughts from me about the nature of prediction happen to be the next section of Smart Shift, so here it is. Not sure what happened to the formatting, but scroll down and it’s there.

2019

Posts from 2019.

January 2019

01-04 – Bulletin 4 January 2019. A culture of change, or a change of culture?

Bulletin 4 January 2019. A culture of change, or a change of culture?

The more that things… oh never mind.

It’s happened again. There I am, on a call with a well-recognised technology company in its space, with a solution to a problem faced by numerous organisations. We’re talking through the challenges it solves, how simple it is to deploy, the benefits it brings… and then I ask, perhaps naively, a question about what else needs to be in place in order for it to, well, work.

“It does require a change of culture,” says the spokesperson, to my complete lack of surprise but immediate thought of, yes, what was I thinking? Of course it does — require a change of culture, that is. And of course, that is the hardest thing of all.

We shouldn’t blame ourselves. Humans are creatures of habit, and in these complex, ever-changing modern times, life can be more about coping strategies than any level of progression. We do the jobs we have always done, not because we want to but because there barely seems to be time to think about doing it any other way.

And, when the going gets tougher, we try to take (back?) more control. I remember how, as an IT manager in the early Nineties, I decided it was a good idea to log out anybody who had left their workstation switched on over lunch. That’ll show them, I thought, and never mind if they lost unsaved work, at least we were more secure.

In hindsight, I was both increasing business risk (which I think I’ve written about before), and reacting in a knee-jerk manner to the fact I was struggling to manage everything in front of me. Many of the things I did in that period were beneficial: setting standards, implementing processes and so on, but logging people out wasn’t one of them.

I’ve also written about just how complex businesses can be. You don’t have to work for a massive company for it to be (seemingly) overburdened with conflicting information, multiple ways of doing things, minor disagreements, politics and fire fighting. But any one of these things can slow any efforts to change to a standstill.

Which is where cognitive dissonance and bias come in. I have not experienced childbirth but I can only assume, given just how painful it is reputed to be, that our capacity for denial is second to none — otherwise the one-child policy would need no enforcement.

A similar mechanism may be at play for any individual who has worked through the trauma of organisational change. We can come out with platitudes and mantras about communication and collaboration, but any facilitator who has experienced getting people to actually talk to each other will know just how much of a wonder it can be.

And so, be it data-driven decision making, or agile development, or continuous learning, or digital-first, or any other term that consulting firms spout, each can be hamstrung from the outset by a lack of ability to actually change.

The strange thing is, that’s not how it’s presented. What we should be doing is leading with this, fundamental cultural aspect. “Can your organisation change?” we should ask. “No? Well, don’t bother reading further, don’t install any new software or engage anyone until you feel you can. Then, once you’re confident, we shall talk.”

Makes perfect sense, yet again and again, we start from the point of view, nay forlorn hope that this time, things might be different. We read the white papers, we engage the consultants and we find, yet again, that we can’t be like Jimmy or Jill down the road, you know, that person who seems to be able to do everything.

And, meanwhile, organisations that are able to change keep on doing so, and wonder what all the fuss is about. At least until they reach a certain point, having believed they would not be susceptible for so long they took their eye off the ball. At which point, they become much like any other. And round we go again.

No articles this week, as normal service is still being resumed. A very happy new year to you, and thanks for reading.

Jon

01-12 – Bulletin 11 January 2019. The Nature of Incremental Legacy

Bulletin 11 January 2019. The Nature of Incremental Legacy

Of Mice and Trains

“Innovation,” I once said, “is like a mouse running on the roof of a moving train.” Suffice to say that (as often happens, but I have learned to deal with it) my remark was met with a blank look. “You see,” I started, and then realised that, like all good miners, I needed to know when to stop digging.

Until now. You see, there’s always more someone can do. If someone comes up with a great idea to, say, completely change how we approach booking overnight stays, than before long someone else will offer a service to help with the booking process, or offer a post-stay clean, or, well, you get the picture.

And, as the original service commoditises, the bolt-on services become the differentiator. Or, to go back to the scenario, as the train becomes the rails, the mouse becomes the train. The cycle continues, with new mice ready to sprint along the top of the carriage, at a relatively faster speed.

I really should stop digging before the analogy loses any semblance of credibility (How can the mouse eat? What if it is blown off by a sudden gust of wind? Where is the train going anyway? Etc). This incremental nature drives how one wave of innovation can seed another, and of course feeds the agile, “be prepared to change” thinking.

Meanwhile, another, related hypothesis that I have been banding around over the decades is that nothing ever really goes away. We have this idea that technology acts as a tsunami, sweeping away everything that goes before it… but in truth, old tech tends to stick around. You know, that stuff we call ‘legacy’.

An interesting, yet ultimately pointless debate whimpers on, around how so much time is wasted managing existing technology estates, leaving insufficient time for innovation (essentially, how can you simultaneously be a mouse and a train driver?). Pointless because, sure, it would be good to have more time… but what we like to write off as ‘legacy’ is actually better termed ‘reality’.

Once we have created things, we have to look after them, live in them, keep them well-maintained and efficient to operate. For sure, we may be able to manage just as well, if not better, with less stuff: a good clear-out leaves room to think, even if it feels like a waste of time overall. We need the things we have…

… even if we get someone else to manage them. Two other debates spring from this: first, the nature of outsourcing in a business, in terms of how to give to others things that they are better at, so we can get on with what we are good at. Staff canteens, for example, or indeed, cloud-based infrastructure.

The second debate involves what we want to innovate on, and how to afford the cost of innovation. Existing infrastructure (whatever it is) will have a cost of maintenance and improvement: we can get this down, but we can’t do away with it. Meanwhile, innovation also has a cost, which is more around how much effort we want to allocate towards it.

The bottom line is that these two costs do not have to be linked: indeed, they should not, as doing so suggests that one can in some way impact the other. Rather than an IT budget which robs Peter the train driver to pay Paul the mouse, the two need separate philosophies. Breaking the link could be the single most important thing any organisation makes on its path to innovation.

01-20 – Bulletin 18 January 2019. When is a skills gap not a skills gap?

Bulletin 18 January 2019. When is a skills gap not a skills gap?

The only time I have ever heard the term ‘lemma’ used in anger was in my second year at university, in my (I think) T22 lectures around the theories of computation. I can’t remember the name of the lecturer but I do remember admiring his large, bushy beard… sadly it was not enough to distract me from the fact that I rarely had a clue what he was talking about. Another word I remember him using was ‘intuitively’, generally placed between two completely incomprehensible statements. Perhaps I should have concentrated more: I do remember thinking that, if only I could understand what it was he was saying, I might be better off.

Nonetheless, the notion of lemmas stuck; as did the minor linguistic epiphany about a dilemma being the juxtaposition of two opposing ideas. Every time I hear the word dilemma, I proudly tell myself about this wonderful feat of etymological prowess. I did try to tell others, but it fell on strangely deaf ears. I know, right? To the point: this entire digression came to me when I was thinking about one example of a di-lemma (even if it is not necessarily a dilemma. I will quickly move on).

Technology, we are told, is going to put a bunch of people out of a job. I won’t google for a link right now, but articles on this are legion (to the extent that I felt pressed to write a counterpoint, also somewhere out there in the ether). The principle is that automation does away with both manual and intellectual labour: following the usual, attention-grabbing headline, most articles suggest that people will (have to) find new work to do. My many beefs with this perspective are irrelevant, but could be summarised by noting that the same writers were probably wrong about the death of books as well.

Meanwhile, however, there seems to be no halt to the need for skills. Alongside cultural issues preventing change, a lack of knowledge and expertise in <insert technology area here> is generally stated as a top-three reason slowing down progress. Now, I’m not being so trite as to suggest that all them poor blue- and white-collar workers can ‘simply’ become programmers. However it does strike me as interesting that the hive mind can hold both perspectives in its virtual head without noting any connection or conflict between them. And I do wonder whether this need is as wrong-footed as the previous one.

How so? An interesting thought experiment is to look back on how we might view the now, from the perspective of a few decades’ time. Some might suggest that we will have achieved the Singularity by then, which I doubt for a baker’s dozen of other reasons. But whether we have or not, the chances are that today’s world will be marked as being pretty primitive compared to what’s coming. Not only will the the platforms we depend upon have become much smarter and self-managing, but also, the ways we use technology will be more mature and sophisticated.

Example: a Facebook friend pointed out how the “ten-year challenge” was interesting not only in how people were more savvy about the potential risks to privacy (“You’re just enabling facial recognition AI to get better trained, guv”), but also, how the topic could be written about and understood by a broad audience. We will look back on this period as akin to frontierlands, ruled by lawlessness and corruption as we discovered just how powerful technology could be. And then, we emerged from a state of naive acceptance of abuse, to a place where it was blindingly obvious what was right and wrong.

In other words, both technology and we will become more savvy. At the moment we’re still in a state with tech where we talk about ‘involving the business’ even though ‘the business’ is already more than involved. And there’s a larger point: many of the skills we think we need are to do with coping with the technological mess we currently live within. My hypothesis is that technology will become both more capable and less intrusive, doing away with the need for (say) social media “experts” and allowing us to get on with tasks that are a bit more rewarding. Putting alternative scenarios such as Skynet aside, that may mean we find the skills we require are the same ones we always needed.

01-25 – Bulletin 25 January 2019: On the insight, opinion and defensibility of industry analysis

Bulletin 25 January 2019: On the insight, opinion and defensibility of industry analysis

Two analysts walk into a bar…

It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between an industry analyst and someone you might meet down the pub. Not just because analysts do tend to enjoy the conversations, surroundings and other accoutrements of that great, British watering hole (though always in moderation, naturally). But also, it might be said that some of the opinions, recommendations and other pronouncements could just as easily come from the old soak at the end of the bar, as someone who makes a living from so-called ‘insights’.

Before anyone takes affront at this clearly goading statement, I’ll make a comment of my own: that I am guilty as charged. I can claim that, while I have in-depth knowledge about some things, I have on more than one occasion been asked about something I know less about. What to do? Through experience I’ve learned to back up most views with a data point or two (“Make it defensible,” as my old colleague Dale might say), but I haven’t always adhered to this rule.

Despite this clear need to put fact before, during and after opinion, a second point is that we, or at least I, don’t always know why we/I know things. Analysts have the luxury of spending an awful lot of time looking into what’s going on and as a result, can start to get a smell, a frisson or an uneasy feeling about something that is going on. Add that to having seen a certain pattern taking place in the past and, well, before you know it you’re keynote speaking and putting ‘futurist’ on your twitter handle.

Okay, I haven’t done the futurist thing. But case in point is where we are with technology platforms right now. ‘Platform’ is a great term as it means everything and nothing, defined more by what people do with it than what it is. The past couple of decades have seen open source, cloud, mobile, agile processes and a whole bunch of other things driving ‘the platform’ which have enabled success just by using them — pretty much every one of them there startup companies has benefited from both of these, just by using them even as older companies have been slow to do so.

That’s just a thing, a well-documented one at that (indeed, you can read several books about it. Chances are you won’t, nobody does, they just buy them and read the first chapter. But that’s another story). But back to my point: my tummy is telling me that the Pareto principle is done with, and the point on the law of diminishing returns curve is kicking in, where it is no longer enough to just do the thing. Symptoms abound, from Amazon opening (robotic) shops to Uber testing out (robotic) cars.

Can I prove it? No, of course I can’t, not with hard evidence — we’re talking about things that haven’t quite happened. But, like the bloke in the pub, I have been talking about it with peers, testing it, finding out whether it holds, ahem, water. Maybe with a splash of lime. Evidence will emerge, one way or another, at which point your normal analytical service will resume.

Extra-curricular: Super-Awesome - The Musical

Nothing to see here other than the fact we are moving to a ‘reading’ stage. Watch this space and let me know if you want more information.

Thanks for reading and all the best, Jon

February 2019

02-01 – Bulletin 1 February 2019. On Terminology Refresh from OO to Microservices

Bulletin 1 February 2019. On Terminology Refresh from OO to Microservices

Old Wine In New Skins?

And then, I read a recent interview which talked about Rapid Application Development, Object Orientation, 3-Tier Architecture and Test-Driven Development. Of these only the latter appeared as a term this side of Y2K, and no doubt its origins are from before it. And, as I told the author and interviewee, “having been steeped in the DevOps and platform-based world for the last couple of years, it’s quite refreshing to read something which uses (let’s say) more ‘mature’ terminology.”

There’s a strange phenomenon going on in everything around DevOps, CI/CD, microservices, Kubernetes etc, which is that it is framed as something new at the same time as re-inventing the wheel — the challenge is to work out what really is new, in this case it’s probably mostly about dynamic orchestration into scalable cloud-based architectures using a modular approach.

Earlier this week I gave a talk on all things digital, not least the notion of Fail Fast which, done right, can trace its origins to Barry Boehm’s spirals of the Eighties. Meanwhile, architectural practices around Kubernetes/containers/microservices etc harks back to Yourdon and Constantine’s principles from 1975, as well as prior work around Modula etc.

Meanwhile the current “Shift Left” and “By Design” rhetoric (two sides up the same smaller peak) align with Test-Driven Development, which fits with best practices around writing unit and integration tests I was taught in the Nineties (not that many were that disciplined, in my experience).

Two thoughts on this. First that it’s unnecessary to rub anyone’s noses in it, more that such principles clearly still apply. But second, this isn’t just about doing that “I’ve seen this all before” thing, because this isn’t a simple case of re-inventing the terminological wheel. Rather, it’s important to spend a bit of time to work out what has changed in the current context; then, them old principles can be applied back.

For example, the point at which Moore’s law + “industry standard” x86 architecture outgrew a single machine and made the idea of multiple emulators on a single machine viable, that changed some things (we call it virtualisation) but didn’t affect basic notions of modularity, nor how to keep on top of complexity.

Meanwhile however, this latter point is why I tend to give short shrift to people who talk about ’serverless’, ’no-ops’ or ‘functions as a service’ in terms of doing away with everything that went before: the economic arguments about “one day you’ll just write lines of code and the environment will take care of the rest“ make swathing assumptions about architectural complexity, modularity, testability and so on.

It’s not that we need hard boundaries around our code (which of course don’t exist anyway, as per Turing, everything is a Turing Machine, the rest is about representation of choice) but more that, we need theoretical constructs that make it easier to control and validate the software-based complexity that we create. Objects, modules, microservices, virtual network functions, it doesn’t matter what we call them but they all fit into that goldilocksian category of not too big, not too small.

The bottom line is that BS can be both “new and improved” and “it’s all the same” - both are wrong. I could go on — I’ve been watching with interest activity around Kanban, that lean/agile change management approach, and thinking about how it overlaps with DevOps and other philosophies (the answer is, by quite a lot). Definition, it would appear, is largely in the eye of the beholder: perhaps that should be the subject for another newsletter.

Thanks for reading, Jon

02-10 – Bulletin 8 February 2019. On the Internet of Things, and when is a market not a market?

Bulletin 8 February 2019. On the Internet of Things, and when is a market not a market?

Don’t question the number

One thing I’ve noticed in this topsy-turvy world of estimates and opinions is just how diverse they can be. A cursory glance at Internet of Things market size predictions from 2015, 16, 17 and 18 (hat-tip to Louis Columbus for rounding everything up so neatly every year) shows two themes. First, how it is difficult to identify a baseline (are we talking consumer IoT or Industrial IoT, is the latter the same or different to IoT in manufacturing/utilities, etc etc).

But second, how wildly different the figures actually are. “Gartner predicts 6.4B connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30% from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020,” said one 2016 article. But wait, a year earlier, we heard that “The number of connected devices is projected to grow from 22.9B in 2016 to 50.1B by 2020.”

Now, this is not the moment to pitch Gartner against the World Economic Forum: no doubt both would say, “read the small print” in which case we could go into some kind of “my definition is better than your definition” posturing. I’m not sure why such comparisons are rarely, if ever made; perhaps we fear some kind of response, or (worse) perhaps nobody really cares anyway.

What? Am I really saying that such huge efforts of market sizing fall upon deaf ears? Not precisely; equally I know just how many times I’ve sat through a presentation with some huge figure attached to a market area, to think to myself, “I guess that’s quite big, then.” Sizing a market defines a market; once the exercise has taken place (and the market is defined), the size becomes less relevant.

Which is why I don’t think anyone ever really questions the figures. Once we have a market, or an industry, or a solution space or what ever you want to call it, once it has a life of its own, in some ways it defines itself as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or simply as something nobody ever got sacked for talking about. In this case, probably the most important consequence is for chip and networking manufacturers, as they justify their strategies to investors and indeed, analysts — which makes for a strange feedback loop.

Which is interesting in this case, because it may not actually exist. Eh? Aren’t I shooting myself in the foot, given that I’ve written reports on the topic? Let’s think about this. First, computers have two choices, either to sit outside of the rest of the world, or to be in some way embedded: that isn’t new. Second, sensor-based monitoring and remote control have existed since the invention of the thermostat, or RADAR, or (insert your preference here): not new again.

So can we really talk about a ‘market’ based on the continuation of either of these themes? Back in the day, when I was spending more time on this stuff, I argued for a closed-loop model, i.e. if you can’t sense, analyse, decide and influence a connected device, you probably haven’t got IoT. The rest is just more sensors, which might be worth measuring in itself but it possibly wouldn’t command the kinds of figures ($520B, according to Bain last year) to make for a ‘market’.

Like it or not, the industry needs ‘markets’. We may not agree with them, in which case we can write things that disagree (and in a strange way, endorse the conversation). They may outlive their usefulness, if they ever really existed at all (cf current rhetoric around cloud/hybrid/multi-cloud; I’m also reminded of predictions around ‘smart phones’). At least we can all take solace in the fact that the market for markets is growing at a CAGR of 30% Y/Y, and looks like it will continue at least unto 2030. Whatever that means.

More Smart Shift: The information fire hydrant

The next big section in Smart Shift covers how software builds upon the massively powerful computer architectures we see today. First off (following a digression into the golden age of steam, with a mention of my old colleague and ferry master Rob Bamforth), I look at the vast volumes of information we have been generating.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

Cheers, Jon

02-15 – Bulletin Friday 15 February 2019. Looking beyond the bill of virtual rights

Bulletin Friday 15 February 2019. Looking beyond the bill of virtual rights

Complicity in the Information Age?

Life is full of contradictions, and we are all big bags of wind and cognitive dissonance. Okay, that’s not fair, I can’t speak for everyone: I am a big bag of wind and cognitive dissonance, and the rest of you can make your own minds up.

Sometimes our^H^H^Hmy contradictory behaviours are very clear, to the point of hypocrisy: coffee shops cover several favourites of mine, such as the way that we carefully get our cards stamped even having just paid what must be marked up at ten times its material cost; we stand in line for an astonishing amount of time to watch someone froth some milk; and then there’s the callously hipster-ised decor against the environmental impact of coffee cups. But use coffee shops we do, or I know I do.

And don’t start me off about flexatarianism. But yes, behavioural economics — a.k.a. “working out what we are actually going to do, as opposed to what we think we should or would do” — is a fascinating area.

Looking back, the bulk of this newsletter over the past year or so has been focused on the contradictions, imbalances and accepted behaviours of how we use technology in the corporate world. It’s a two-edged sword, it’s influenced by things we all understand but only discuss down the pub, and so on. That’s fine, as far as it goes, and I thank every one of you who reads it and offers the occasional piece of feedback.

Meanwhile, however, technology is having a pretty big impact on society as a whole. It’s not hard to argue that it social media has changed the nature of democracy; the algorithmic nature of marketing sails close to the wind; whole new forms of addiction, fraud and other ills have emerged which could not exist without technology to support them.

The overall position is that technology is ‘just’ a tool, which delivers more benefit than it costs. I often use the example of the iron age, which enabled the creation of both plough shares and swords: would we rather not have either, even if we could have avoided our own ability to discover the smelting process? Thinking even more deeply, would we rather not be innovative at all?

These latter questions are perhaps the most fundamental. We can’t stop progress, one might say; but more than that, we can’t stop the main cause of progress: human inventiveness. What we can do is recognise the ramifications of applying consequent innovations into a chaotic, complex and already-corrupt global culture. To do so thinking it’ll all be alright is more than naive, it is foolhardy. Yet foolhardy we are, living the digital dream even as we watch its worst consequences play out.

I have long said that GDPR is a law two decades behind its time, solving the problems of yesteryear. Don’t get me wrong, the fact we now have corporations being held to account for how they deal with our data is a good thing. But it is not the only area of technological impact. Lawmaking is incredibly slow, meaning that an obviously wrong act such as ‘upskirting’ is treated as a new piece of legislation, taking a legal cycle to implement rather than it being framed as a broader breach of privacy.

The result is an opportunity cost, as we focus on individual situations rather than looking at, and dealing with technology’s broader cultural impact. This goes beyond governance by design (as advocated by Smart Shift): I believe we lack what might be perceived as a collective conscience, or ethical framework, to which we our particular society can align, and from which governance frameworks can emerge. Contradictions and cognitive dissonances such as the illiberalism of trolling or pubic shaming, for which no legislation currently exists, should be more than the subjects of journalistic and pub-related debate.

And indeed, we shouldn’t let our natural tendencies towards cognitive dissonance to shy away from what has already unfolded. Or at least, I shouldn’t — I can’t speak for anyone else. I’m telling you the plot but at the end of Smart Shift I advocated for a declaration of virtual rights, which set out what individuals can expect from the information age (I was not the first to do so, though I did get in before Tim Berners-Lee). If Western society is to continue to function, we can, and should, and need to go further than that, to understand our virtual responsibilities, what is acceptable and what is not, and then align to such principles in our lawmaking. I remain optimistic that we can do so, but to succeed, we first have to start. Not sure what comes next from me, other than a will and a focus.

Smart Shift: The information fire hydrant

Okay, I’ve already spoilt the plot but you’ll have to wait for the denouement. In this section I draw on conscientious objectors and the Tower of Babel to explore the volumes of data we have been creating, and indeed my favourite ever analyst faux pas — IDC’s notion that the world would run out of computer storage. Oh and ‘Hadooponomics’.

02-22 – Bulletin 22 February 2019. Fake letters from cyberspace. Oh and AI.

Bulletin 22 February 2019. Fake letters from cyberspace. Oh and AI.

Okay, I admit it, I have failed. In the first ever of these bulletins I let hubris get the better of me and suggested they might reflect Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America, which would report on the happenings of the day and add a little observation… whereas I have tended to lead with observation, and occasionally throw in a note of happening. It’s a fair cop.

As I flick though my weekly browsing history, I find a number of themes emerge. First, that people using computers still seem to be beset with the same old problems. One of my friends’ hard drives died without them taking a backup, while another was struggling to rescue data from a defunct Macbook. Which makes me wonder just how much we have advanced.

Speaking of advancing, we’re not that different to how we were according to a Register article entitled “Secret mic in Nest gear wasn’t supposed to be a secret, says Google, we just forgot to tell anyone.” So, yes, a Nest device incorporated a microphone. As the article notes, “A decade ago, Google “mistakenly” put Wi-Fi sniffing into its Google Street View cars, which slurped data from people’s home networks as the cars drove past. The “accident” had been patented earlier.”

I’ve also been reading a fair amount of world news. I confess to having become one of those people who opens his news app every morning, just in case something cataclysmic has happened… but usually finding that it’s pretty much the same minor (relative to full scale war), yet notable sequence of steps on the road to catastrophe we seem to be on. Not with a bang but a whimper, eh? I remain optimistic about the future, but pretty flummoxed about the present.

Flummoxed, indeed, by nature of the discourse about how technology and society are interacting right now. We’ve somehow arrived at a point where a singular group of voices can have a massive impact, it’s happening on all sides of that political spectrum and beyond. Some see it as the arrival of online mob rule (and I learned a new word: ochlocracy) but that doesn’t seem to capture it somehow.

I’m not going to talk much about this stuff, but given how the nature of discourse has changed, it clearly has a bearing. To this outsider it appears that many online articles available today are written by people with an agenda, which (when coupled with the kinds of echo chambers we have created) go through a period of self-reinforcement until what emerges is an evangelist. Personally, I feel very strongly about my uncertainty faced with the complexity of life, and I don’t want it undermined by having to take a position.

Funnily enough this reminds me of way, way back, when I was a programmer for Philips and was reading up about how much we were abusing our food chain — specifically factory farming and hormones applied to meat. I chose (and I still choose) to avoid such food products; back in the day, I was questioned about this to such an extent, “Why don’t you just become vegetarian then?” that in the end, and for over a decade, I did succumb to this strange kind of inverse peer pressure. It’s perhaps not that different to the take-a-position-if-we-want-to-or-not environment we find ourselves in today.

The result is that it is never enough to take anything that is written on face value. To whit, whilst googling about echo chambers, I found something called the Echo Chamber Club, which had the intention (as far as I can make out) of providing a forum for discussing controversial topics. The ECC wrapped this time last year, as its editor Alice Thwaite was doing her masters. She’s still writing — here’s a piece on the mutual recognition — as far as I can tell on the notion of building bridges and finding common ground.

Which seems like a good place to start. I also picked up on some threads by Jason Gots about the nature of radicalism, in this case on the left but I don’t believe the principle is party political. And meanwhile, I was pointed to Frank Furedi’s article about modern anti-Semitism. Furedi doesn’t mince his ‘radical democrat’ position, which if I’m not mistaken tends more to the right.

So, what have I learned? Somewhere in all of that is tech, in its role as amplifier and instigator uncontrolled and unharnessed. As a final read, I can recommend CB Insights’ article “How AI Will Go Out Of Control According To 52 Experts” — which does a good job of bringing together multiple positions so that the reader can boil it all down and make their own mind up. Or maybe just cherry-pick the views that reflect their own: it was ever thus.

Believe it or not, I am trying to make sense of it all, but the answers as yet elude me.

Smart Shift: An algorithm without a cause

Interviewing Augustin Huret was one of the most surprising experiences of my career, not least because the interview was punctuated by him taking me from La Defense to the Eurostar terminal at (what felt like) high speed. You know that scene in the Matrix, right? Anyway, Augustin’s claim to fame was to bring his father’s machine learning algorithms to market, through both enhancing them and simply being there when the cost of compute fell to a low enough point to make them viable. So, what if we could process any quantity of data in so-called ‘real time’? This section takes a look.

Thanks for reading as ever, Jon

March 2019

03-01 – Bulletin 1 March 2019. Amazon Dash and the Art of Self-fulfilling Prophecy

Bulletin 1 March 2019. Amazon Dash and the Art of Self-fulfilling Prophecy

It’s been four long years since Amazon first launched its Dash button… and yes, if you put a comma after ‘launched’, this does work to the tune of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U but that’s not important right now. More relevant is the fact that the button has ceased to be, has shuffled off this mortal coil. It is no more.

Of course some will say that it was never going to work, even as Amazon cites apparently plausible reasons for its demise. To be frank, neither position is on particularly solid ground. Probably the German ruling earlier this month tipped the balance against the plucky devices (bans are like that), but most likely is that the company took a punt on something, and then decided to focus on other things.

Like Alexa, for example. Or indeed, any of the thousands of initiatives the company has underway. Fail fast is all about deciding what to cull, so that (like any good gardening project) others might thrive. This “suck it and see” approach is pretty much what defines most of the innovation we see today.

Strangely however, we still operate using mental models that pretend otherwise. When Dash was launched, it was going to be a definite thing, no ifs or buts. And indeed, two years ago it was still being presented as a success story. This makes sense: nobody’s going to buy something that is just being put out there in case someone might like it.

No, sir. Any new product has to be presented as the best thing since sliced bread - or indeed, if Indiegogo has anything to do with it, “Sliced Bread — Reinvented”. A fait accompli, a game changer, a paradigm shift. Which is really, really interesting as it plays with our brains. We can either look into whether the new thing really can work, or trust our instincts, or indeed, just go along with it.

Few people have time to do the former. In Dash’s case, this would involve having a deep knowledge of the fast-moving consumer goods supply chain, right down to what products fitted the “aw, dang, I’ve just run out and I need more in 24 hours” model. My guess is, not many, but that’s me trusting my instincts so what would I know (as James Governor once remarked, “I don’t buy it, so nor should you”).

The third option is what any purveyor of a new product or service hopes: that we all say, yeah, looks legit, let’s have a go. While this may sound glib, our entire industry is constructed on the basis of enticing early adopters, creating a sufficient head of steam such that, when initial goodwill runs out, enough momentum exists to carry the new thing through the rough times before others pick it up.

The model, characterised by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, has been honed to the point of pseudo-science but interestingly, it relies on people believing it is true whilst ignoring the possibility that, just perhaps, people might not want the thing that is being presented to them. This matters less than whether a successful launch has been achieved.

I’m at a risk of losing myself on this thread, covering as it does the triumph of belief systems over reality, so I will try to round things off. We, as an industry, have created a dream factory: follow a certain set of steps if you want to change how people think, and therefore get them to adopt your latest innovation. But more than this, we have come to believe that the dream factory is something real.

We’ve created notions such as Early Adopters — ostensibly the more advanced thinkers, the more agile, people who get where the puck is going to be. At the same time, this group are the magpies, easily distracted lovers of shiny things, who will potentially adopt whether or not the something is actually useful. Particularly, if I may, if it looks good on a CV.

Back to Dash, I don’t believe it ever had to succeed, no more than any other initiative. There’s no climb-down, no heads will roll, that was never the point. That’s not how success happens and we all know it. Yet, the next time Amazon, or anyone else makes an announcement, it will be presented in such a way that ignores this fact to the point of denial, fooling nobody and everyone, just like last time.

Smart Shift: Opening the barn doors - open data, commodity code

This section opens with the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and looks at the nature of open data and source. “While neither software nor data asked to be open, they each have reasons to be so,” it says — how interesting it is, to revisit this in the light of more recent privacy abuses.

Thanks for reading! Jon

03-10 – Bulletin 8 March 2019. New, accidental cloud native empires are emerging

Bulletin 8 March 2019. New, accidental cloud native empires are emerging

I had an interesting call on Friday, a review which broached the concept of imposter syndrome. Which, given that I was speaking to some experts in this particular field, was quite something to behold. “We’re worried that we haven’t got anything new to say,” they said, to my astonishment. “That’s OK,” I told them: “You can just employ some the the standard tricks industry analysts use to look clever when they haven’t a sausage.”

I say this without embarrassment — who in a position of technology industry influence hasn’t been asked about a topic they only have a vague idea about, only to give (without a pause) some apparently sage response? Ah, just me then. Now I’m embarrassed.

To whit, that whole cloud native thing. I’ve struggled with this topic, not least because there appears to be two types of people in the world: those that get it absolutely, and those who don’t get it at all but would like to. If you’re a technology-based software startup, you will probably fall into the former camp, and if you are what we might term a ‘traditional enterprise’ (i.e. everyone else) you may well represent the latter.

Given just how much ink has been dispensed in the name of, “Hey, you, yeah, you old company! You need to transform! Be like Uber! Or you will fail!”, this communications barrier deserves a bit of scrutiny. As an industry we have our fair share of buzzwords, so one also needs to cut through that. And I am sure there’s plenty of imposter syndrome flying around, and indeed, people making stuff up.

So, what have I learned so far about this gap? My current thinking is that provenance is everything. Whereas traditional organisations may well have existed before IT was even a thing, a lot of the new breed coalesced around a (hopefully) good, technology-based idea.

If software or service vendors, many germinate on a petri dish such as GitHub, developing a freemium, then potentially a pro service on top. This explains why there’s so many of the blighters: it’s a bit like a version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where every notion can be turned into software. This has created a cloud-native ecosystem which doesn’t have, and therefore cannot perceive, doing things any other way.

Such companies, and indeed people have been happily engaging with each other through good times and bad, trying to make their way. When someone more enterprise-y comes along, the latter are made very welcome even if they are a bit slow. And all this traditionalist group has to do is “be cloud-native” and it can reap all the same rewards. Come on in, the water’s warm!

Like everything in life, however, this is just a phase. The bright sparky young startups have come into existence because they could, at this moment in time, but the kinds of challenges they are having to deal with are less and less about the functionality, and more and more about the service. Equally, we are moving towards a place where standardisation and governance are going to become more of a thing.

The consequence is that startups are inevitably going to become more corporate, even as more corporate organisations start to pick them off. We’re moving out of the brainstorming, fan-out stage and into a fan-in. Already we’re seeing acquisitions and the uncertainty that comes from them, and we are on the brink of seeing leaders emerge.

Interesting times. It’s highly likely we shall see some of the current legions of software startups rise to the top — possibly no more than a handful. I’m reminded of the early noughties, when companies like CA, IBM and BMC were buying just about everybody… it took another couple of years before they started to retire all but a handful of the technologies they had in their portfolio.

So, what comes next? A small number of very rich people, and a bunch of others that will go play golf for a while before it all goes round again. Or maybe I’m completely wrong… but I don’t think the current situation is sustainable. In a few years’ time we’ll all look back at when cloud native companies were still independent: “Now look at them, they’ve gone all corporate,” we’ll say. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

03-17 – Bulletin 15 March 2019. On Rubik’s Cubes

Bulletin 15 March 2019. On Rubik’s Cubes

Innovation is spatial, and success abhors a vacuum. Sorry, I just had to write that down because, as I was thinking about what to write this week, it suddenly came to me and made perfect sense. Now all I have to work out is what the heck I was on about.

What an interesting industry to work in. Back in the day, I chose to do a computational science degree largely because I found it interesting, but with no real clue what it was all about. If someone had said to me that everything was going to depend on computers in a few decades, I might have paid more attention to my studies and less to the art of pool playing. Ah, hindsight. I might also have bought a few shares.

Back in the day, though, the future was by no means clear. A trend towards ‘open systems’ was happening; personal computers were finding their place; but the big old tech companies still held a great deal of sway. I could list them but most have gone. And meanwhile, every single possible new direction was presented as a game-changing paradigm shift.

It was, and continues to be, difficult to separate the signal from the noise, the correct predictions from the elephant’s graveyard of possibility. On the upside, I have come to realise that neither matters as much as what I shall characterise as the spatial nature of innovation. Aaaaand, here we go.

Why does a good idea happen? Sometimes it is because it is so brilliant in itself, that it gains instant recognition — like the Rubik’s cube, for example. In tech, such examples are the absolute exception; more likely are examples that grow with a kind of groundswell, as the solution responds to a previously unresolved need.

Most of the “game-changing paradigm shifts” that we see fall into this category, from RESTful interfaces to tablet computers, cloud computing to social media. The notion of a groundswell has been documented before. However I’ve not seen, hear or read anything about the nature of the new spaces that we create with innovation, and how what some see as success are actually more of a land-grab.

I think Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg get this, which is why they have looked to take as much as they could, at any cost, before anyone thinks to impose boundaries. For Bezos, it’s all business, driving his “Day 1” philosophy, a strategy which still looks like it has a way to run. For Zuckerberg meanwhile, it has been about playing fast and loose with privacy. He’s been getting it in the neck recently, but so what? His empire (and fortune) has already been built. He expanded to fill a space, and (in the short term at least) is unlikely to be pushed out.

I could have named other names, but pretty much every big cheese in the industry has achieved success by following this approach. Under Steve Jobs, Apple created an exclusivity-based space but did not succeed at its social networking efforts, which has meant it can now bang the privacy drum. Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica’s rapid rise and almost immediate fall followed the same tactic.

I know, I’m in danger of stating some self-evident principles of marketing, but there’s something deeper going on than just defining a market segment, pushing it through ad campaigns and thought leadership, getting an analyst firm to name it and then running with it until the world gets bored. That’s not the same as a new innovation leading to the creation of a part-technological, part-cultural void which is hungry to be filled.

In terms of predictions, let’s take Artificial Intelligence, which is currently experiencing precisely the stuff listed in the previous paragraph. However, we are yet to see behavioural changes caused through some mainstream adoption of AI: these will create a new space, which some, currently unnamed organisation will fill. I’m guessing the same will happen with a still-to-be-developed use case of Blockchain.

This makes things less about being in the right place at the right time, and more about being able to recognise a vacuum and do something with it. Sure, it’s a good business tip — “Go where the dark matter’s going to be” or somesuch — but it’s also a fundamental missing piece from our lawmaking and governance. As long as we miss this, our national and international rules, codes of conduct and general conscience will be constantly behind the curve.

Smart Shift: Thanks for the (community) memory

This week’s excerpt is all about peace, love and the starting point for much of what we see as the ‘open’ aspects of technology. “While this debate will run and run, the dialogue between innovation and community looks like it will continue into the future.” As also the darker uses of technology: while this bulletin does not directly cover events such as the devastating and evil shootings in New Zealand, I am racking my brain at how it could be directed towards the light.

03-23 – Bulletin 23 March 2019. Cybersecurity vs complexity

Bulletin 23 March 2019. Cybersecurity vs complexity

You can’t manage the universe molecule by molecule

It’s an old adage, that it’s easier to break something than to build it. Or maybe I just made that up, but it rings true (and I have many years of experience with lego to back it up). Case in point: a cybersecurity breach.

I could cite Facebook’s recent admission (following a leak) about passwords being stored ‘in clear’, but that’s just one in a long series which serve to demonstrate that, however hard you try to get everything right, all it takes is to get one thing wrong and the house of cards comes tumbling down.

Cybersecurity has changed, over the years, but this fundamental principle has not. Once upon a time, we relied upon ‘fortress’-style approaches such as defence in depth — protect the perimeter and the insides will look after themselves — but these were plagued with insider threats and admin errors, challenges caused by configuration issues and flaky software. And, indeed, complexity: it was repeatedly proven impossible to close all the doors, lock all the windows and seal all the plumbing.

I know we relied upon such approaches, as I was repeatedly asked to give presentations about why the model no longer worked. Pictures of Jericho, of walls coming (a-)tumbling down were my go-to content asset, together with some boxes joined together with lines of course, and a curve which tails off toward the top. You had to have one of those.

Then, we arrived at the place where there are no walls, where you might as well be wandering naked in the desert for all the protection traditional system security might give you. It’s about at this point where I was asked to write a book about security architecture, which somehow needed to straddle the perimeter-based old world, and the unbounded new. It kind of succeeded, though whether it struck the right balance or just sat on the fence, I am not sure

In this wall-less world, complexity is king: it has moved from an “entropy of the universe will get you in the end” status to becoming the norm. Back in the day, a starting point for securing everything was to know everything you had (or at least be able to wrap something around it). This is now impossible, not only because you can’t manage everything, but because everything goes all the way down.

Case in point: I’m reminded of Intel’s Spectre and Meltdown issues, during which it was revealed that today’s processors have a processor within, running a customised Linux operating system: get to that and you have the keys to the kingdom. Technology really has become like Stephen Hawking’s Turtles All The Way Down anecdote, with each level of turtles being subject to the same level of vulnerability.

Which leads to a bit of a challenge as, after all, you can’t just give up. Even if it only takes a small thing to mess up everything you have done, and it is impossible to keep on top of everything you have, and even if you could, you couldn’t hold all the detail on it anyway. Some are advocating for the cybersecurity equivalent of early warning systems, which may catch when something is about to happen; this goes back to back with recovery processes (i.e. the least you can do is have a plan in place for when all goes wrong).

Others talk about security by design, which is about putting security features into stuff from the outset, rather than trying to bolt them on later. This sounds great, but (and it’s a big but) doesn’t take into account the interactions between stuff. Back in my programming days, the hardest bugs to solve were the ones that feel between two stools — an uninitiated or mistyped variable over here would cause a problem when passed over there. In today’s world, where anything could talk to anything, the potential for such weaknesses is obviously (not wanting to overstate) “quite big”.

Is there an answer? I think there is, in that one can look after one’s own sheep before worrying about the rest. I can create (well, I can’t, but one can) create a loosely scoped, anything goes technology-based innovation, or I (bear with me) can create something similar, but within which I have been very careful about all the pieces that make it up. That’s a kind of architectural approach, at least in terms of level, though ultimately it doesn’t matter about what the architecture is; what matters more is whether I (quiet at the back) am in control.

In other words, even in this astonishingly complex world, keeping it simple could be key to keeping it secure.

Thanks for reading, Jon

Smart Shift: The return of the platform

If you want a poorly thought through and trite literary reference, look no further than this chapter’s nod to (author) Thomas Hardy’s Return Of The Native. But I digress. The platform economy is as much a story of corporate power, as any altruistic tale of innovation. It was ever thus.

03-29 – Bulletin: 4G vs fixed in the office

Bulletin: 4G vs fixed in the office

We are each the elephant in the room

I’m not going to lie, I’m a person of routine. Despite being able to live an essentially freelance lifestyle, I still get up on a weekday morning at a certain time, I go to an office in town (yes, I have an office in town) by 9.00am and I get on with my working day.

I would also, if I could, subject myself to the vagaries of being subservient to work — at the end of the day, I would struggle to leave on time — were it not for the fact that I share transport, and would therefore find myself short of a lift.

Based on three decades of working with others, I don’t think I’m unique on either count: what’s fascinating is how our need for consistency often plays against our ability to ignore when we are being taken for a ride (or indeed not, if I miss mine).

We are stuck in certain models. To whit: the office I from a marketing agency has a broadband line of, well, let’s call it sporadic quality. Despite being in the middle of a town: while my home village now has two fibre options, Cirencester’s main street has none. I know, right?

More interesting (for the purposes of this bulletin) than this clear failure of service provision, is the fact that we have been going along with it despite the availability of alternatives. For the record, the 4G signal in my second-floor office is both consistent quality and high bandwidth.

I have never had a problem with the mobile data signal, indeed, I have used it when the broadband has been down. So, why have I never thought of, you know, ‘just’ switching over and going fully mobile? It’s a question I, and the agency owner, have been asking ourselves.

To his credit, Adrian (for that is his name) is currently testing a 4G hub from EE: the prices have dropped to tens of pounds per month, for hundreds of gigabytes, so it would be rude not to. At the same time, we have agreed between us, it makes the “but it’s not a fixed line!” part of us squirm.

Which is pretty crazy. Whole swathes of the world, particularly what us decadent westerners refer to as ‘developing’, rely entirely on mobile rather than fixed lines. Possibly one of the most disruptive innovations still to happen, that of 5G-powered IoT, is (well, obviously) based around mobile.

And yet, still, part of me feels ‘mobile’ is in some way less adequate than ‘fixed’, even though I am here, day after day dealing with the consequences of dodgy broadband. To repeat, I don’t think it’s just me: indeed, I think this psychological block behind much technological inertia.

The point is that it’s real: one can (by all means) tell me that I’m dumb for being so stuck in my ways, but that doesn’t actually achieve much. There’s an enterprise link to this, in that so many of our corporate decisions, or indeed, lack of them, are going to be psychological.

What to do? I’m not absolutely sure, beyond recognising that people aren’t good at change. If companies accepted this from the outset, they could save a fortune in change consultants, a.k.a. people brought in at vast expense when things turn out to be harder than initially believed. Just a thought.

Smart Shift: Society is dead, right?

Enough about technology: Smart Shift moves its focus onto how tech has impacted what we do (spoiler alert: the following section will be about who we are). First, we cover the technological breakthrough that begat all others: the wood cut.

Thanks for reading! Jon

April 2019

04-07 – Bulletin 5 April 2019: On visibility vs observability, collaboration and tree hugging

Bulletin 5 April 2019: On visibility vs observability, collaboration and tree hugging

Natural Language Killers.

I’m just back from São Paulo, where I was hosting a travel technology conference. Don’t ask me how I get into these things: I sometimes feel like Mr Benn, the cheery chap from the children’s series who walks through a magic door and into his next adventure.

But I digress. Knowing the value of such things, I gave my introduction in Portuguese; I also had my presentation slides translated (thank you Vanessa, Rodriguo, Paula and team). Which led to a number of discussions about the meaning of words.

I try not to use jargon, I really do; when I find myself doing so, I endeavour to explain it. But sometimes, what I assume is a standard phrase, widely adopted, turns out not to be the case. Take, for example, ‘ecosystem’ — which in Brazil is as likely to have ecological, as business connotations.

The phrase concerned was: “Embrace the ecosystem.” Makes perfect sense, right, particularly in this networked, open, collaborative age? For sure, in principle, but it could just as easily read “Hug a tree,” which wasn’t quite what I was trying to get across.

That was only part of the issue, as the words weren’t directly replaceable. It wasn’t just the jargon but assumptions about context — if someone wasn’t aware that a collaborative network of suppliers existed, for example, should they really be advised to embrace it?

In the end, I went for “Actively engage in open partnerships” (or indeed, “Esteja aberto em suas parcerias). I was aiming for a spirit of proactivity, an open-ness to new forms of collaboration. All good, I hope it came across. Even if one participant did say, “You could have just used ecosystem.”

All of which is a long-winded introduction to a word I have only recently come across: that of ‘observability’. As I have written before, the world of cloud-native startups has emerged separate from that of enterprise IT: it is natural, therefore, that it has its own terminology and indeed, jargon.

It is also natural that such turns of phrase should be used in the belief they are some way normal or well-understood. I paraphrase but “organisations need observability” was pretty much the gist of what was said. Sounded legit, I thought, hoping that I would understand more as the conversation went on.

And indeed I did. It is a thing, that in the world of cloud-based, distributed applications, it can be very hard to know which bit of which microservice is doing what. So, if the whole application is running slow, the challenge is knowing where the problem is.

Observability, then, is about knowing what is going on, where, in a cloud-native application. There’s a neat explanation here, which uses Twitter as an example. The article goes on to say how observability is more than just monitoring, which is all well and good. But.

And there is a but. There’s a hidden assumption in the middle, that the challenge is unique to these new-fangled, cloud-based applications. For sure, they are pretty amazing — the fact I can get a live feed from a globally accessible messaging platform is incredible.

Yet old-fangled applications can also be complex and highly distributed, requiring notions of, well, observability. Trouble is, they don’t use the term; they don’t even frame the problem in the same way.

In large-scale enterprise applications, the approach is more around “end-to-end service management.” That is, the pieces making up the delivery of a service should be trace-able, from user interface right down to the server hardware, so that problems can be solved when things go wrong.

Clearly, massive overlaps exist between the two notions. But they illustrate how difficult dialogues between cloud-native and traditional enterprise groups can be. Each might think (as I did, I confess, a little bit, with ‘ecosystem’), “Surely they’ll understand what I mean, it’s obvious, right?”

A long time ago, when I co-wrote ‘The Technology Garden’, we established a core tenet of IT delivery as “Establish a Common Language.” At the time we were talking about common terminology between the different parts of the business and IT; the same applies to our bifurcated technology industry.

Enough said, for fear I might introduce some jargon. Perish the thought.

Smart Shift: The empty headquarters

In this section, we look at how business is moving from the physical and tangible, to the virtual and invisible. Which sounds a bit like a song. Perhaps it is.

Until next week, Jon

04-12 – Bulletin 12 April 2019. Alexa, please explain “Explainability in AI”

Bulletin 12 April 2019. Alexa, please explain “Explainability in AI”

A funny thing happened to me as I hosted a webinar last week. Grosso modo (as they say in French), we were talking about the complexities artificial intelligence when, jokingly, I suggested that we could ask a bot to explain it. “Alexa, explain AI,” said a panellist. We chuckled; moments later, a message popped up on my iPad, from a listener: “You just made my Alexa sit up!”

Of course, I was unable to resist this clear opportunity. “Alexa, play Breakfast in America by Supertramp,” I said on. “Yep! Playing out now - good choice,” came a response. Achievement unlocked — controlling someone’s playlist via live internet TV. I know, right? Behind my typically calm, sober facade, I was giggling like a school kid.

I shall try to avoid the distraction of ‘going off on one’ about the potential security risks of such functionality (“Alexa, open all the doors!” shouted through the letterbox) — though it does remind me of the time when computer hardware used to be delivered with all the doors left open, and it was up to the administrator to close them — turn off rsh, anonymous FTP and so on. No doubt these pesky devices will need the same.

Distraction mostly avoided. Back on the AI track, and indeed explaining things, several recent discussions have turned to the need for AI to explain itself. Following some client work last year, I’ve been following the rise of ‘explainability’ in AI: witness the emergence of a new piece of jargon that feels just like a normal word, at least to people who have used it for a while (and cf ‘observability’ from last week’s bulletin).

Explainability in AI, or indeed XAI (You want more jargon? We got it!), has quickly become a mainstream topic due to repeated examples of potential bias in its results. I say ‘potential’ not through any unconscious bias of my own — though I have plenty — but because we lack the information we need to know which elements are actual bias, vs which are not.

Explainability goes much further than justifying why a particular conclusion was reached: it enables us to identify flaws in both inference and training. Inference is largely the domain of the algorithm, basically, we can use a sharp or a blunt instrument to cut the data we have; whilst training is about the data set.

So, yes, guess what? If you train up your image recognition on white faces, you will be less able to identify non-white features. But without explainability, you won’t know which features were undistinguishable due to algorithmic bias in inference; which were down to a lack of suitable training data; and which were ‘simply’ because the software was crap.

The debate in this area is complex: for example, do we need to understand how an algorithm reached its conclusions before we can trust it, as this article suggests? I’m not convinced, as I’m more concerned with why than how; I also think there’s a spectrum of usage models between complete denial of the outputs of any algorithm, and wholesale, automated adoption of what it says.

In addition, we need to be careful not to treat explainability with the same level of hype as we seem to apply to AI as a whole. If one starts from the point of view that we are approaching the singularity (in which AI is as smart as the human brain), then we have reason to panic… but we are decades away from that.

Don’t get me wrong: examples like the algorithm-driven targeting of political ads on Facebook are enough to give us cause for concern. Now I think of it, the Alexa point is linked — in that we allowed our first iterations of AI to just work, but as ever, the poor nephew of governance is having to catch up, running behind the cart of cabbages like Oliver Twist.

As I write this, I notice that explainability may have to be written into US law: critics are suggesting that such a move could “limit the benefits” of AI. I don’t believe this is the case: if we can work out ways to discover amazing things about the data that we hold, we should also be able to say how our algorithms reached the conclusions. Or indeed, offer a legal dispensation for an algorithm which demonstrates clear benefit without bias, for example in a healthcare scenario.

Such a position would leave humans in ultimate control. Whatever our foibles (and indeed, biases), that has to be a good place to start.

Smart Shift: Music, books and the Man

In this week’s excerpt from Smart Shift, we look at the nature of streaming services, and their impact on music, video and book publishing. The bottom line: artists are earning more than ever, but there’s more than ever of them.

Feedback welcome, as always.

Thanks for reading! Jon

04-21 – Bulletin 19 April 2019. Let’s talk about IT security… oh, let’s not

Bulletin 19 April 2019. Let’s talk about IT security… oh, let’s not

The art of changing conversations

I’m not going to lie. It’s not the 19th of April, it is indeed the 21st and I’m sitting in the garden in the shade. Where better to ponder the world of tech: I am reminded of the time I took myself off from an event in Nice, sat on the beach for a while and finished a report. “Of all the things to do on a beach in Nice, you chose to write a report,” someone said to me. My reply: “Yes, but of all the places to write a report…”

To business, and so to conversations. Markets are conversations, that’s what the Cluetrain luminaries told us (oh, I miss those optimistic, even if abjectly naive times); or in the parlance of sales, people buy from people. Within dialogues, words have alchemy: what we call charisma is often an artfully turned phrase, delivered with confidence.

The sometimes fast-moving world of tech offers a fascinating petri dish for the power of conversation. Get it right and you can perhaps change the world, that’s the theory. In reality, our verbal interactions more often hinder than help, as we trip each other up, debate irrelevancies or indeed, stymie progress by not saying anything at all.

Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated, than in the IT security game. Nobody wants to pay for security, apart, that is, from a minority of paranoid types who see scary stuff everywhere (it doesn’t help that it really is there, if you look for it). No surprise that many of this group end up working as IT security professionals.

Meanwhile, the rest of us want to continue our naively optimistic journeys, on the basis that bad things only happen to other people. I’ve written before about how the best time to get money allocated to security is the day after a breach. We literally wait for the horse to bolt before we buy locks for the door.

All of which makes the job of security marketing just that little bit harder than other areas of tech. There’s no direct business benefit, however hard we bang the “you can take more calculated risks if you are better secured” drum; equally, it’s difficult to make security cool and aspirational, like (say) cycle helmet design; so security vendors are forced to resort to other conversation-changing tactics.

At one end of the process we have, “Let’s get the analysts and press to say how important it is.” I’m not saying that tech security firms are better at PR than other vendors, but in my experience they certainly have more appreciation of the need to be talked about in the right way.

Or indeed, the wrong way, as any way is better than no way. On the topic of breaches, one company’s disastrous security story offers cautionary gold dust, the foolishness of one (Talk Talk pops into my head) to be hollered from the rooftops in the hope that others might listen. In the absence of a real breach, why not create a near-miss scenario to generate coverage — such as handing out “Music CDs” outside London stations, which actually create a “You’ve been pwned” message.

This need continues into the “internal sale,” that is, the part of the conversation where someone working for a company needs to convince his peers, or boss, or boss’s boss, to allocate the funds. I’m not a betting man but I’m guessing more use is made of security-related magic quadrants (that Gartner tool for saying, “Look, mate, you’d be stupid if you didn’t get some of this — and here’s a shortlist of companies that can do it”) than in other areas.

Each of the above requires constant rejuvenation. Right now we talk more about cybersecurity rather than IT security: I stuck with the former because I’m a curmudgeon, who is also worried he might be misusing a term that he doesn’t understand as well as the old one. Nonetheless I understand the benefits of giving industry segments and terms a refresh, if it helps to keep them being talked about.

All of this to make a conversation happen when nobody wants to speak. Thinking back to my own experience of post-breach security budgeting, a common question from my Finance Director was, “Do we have to have it?”: if I couldn’t answer with absolute certainty or charismatic guile (I was never very good at either), then no money would come.

It was the case then and is still the case now, which is a significant factor in my view that we need to build security into products rather than add it on later: simply put, we won’t do the latter, which makes the former all the more important. In the meantime, our marketing representatives will continue to use every tactic in the book to make a dialogue happen, in the knowledge that otherwise, it simply wouldn’t. It was ever thus.

That’s all for this week. Happy Sunday, and thanks for reading.

All the best, Jon

04-28 – Bulletin 26 April 2019. On transformation, word processing and Jacuzzis

Bulletin 26 April 2019. On transformation, word processing and Jacuzzis

There’s a moment in the seminal, moving and poignant film Trading Places, which for some reason pops into my mind every time something emerges as new, improved, reinvented, reimagined or otherwise presented as untouched and serene from the tumultuous storms of innovation. The moment comes as Eddy Murphy’s character Billy Ray tries out a Jacuzzi bath for the first time: “When I was growing up, if we wanted a Jacuzzi, we had to fart in the tub,” he says, to the discomfort of Randolph and Mortimer Duke.

To whit, peer programming, which is not such a novel concept these days (Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming approach is 23 years old this year). When I started as a programmer a decade before, we simply did not have enough computers to go around, so myself and Mike worked together on a shared workstation, debugging code and solving problems with a fair amount of banter and just a soupçon of astonishing competitiveness. The result: we got quite a lot done.

Fast forward to today and we see similar concepts being repackaged as discoveries: I don’t have a problem with that, as each generation needs its own epiphanies. More of an issue is how we seem intent on creating the situations in the first place, which need such moments of joyous, simplificatory release in response.

To whit: word processing and textual information exchange. This should be a problem space which, once solved, doesn’t need need re-solving; but as such, acts as a pH test for the ebb and flow of technology as a whole. Word processing was one of the first tasks to which computers were set: a logical merger between the typewriter and the ability to store and retrieve data. It was, and should still be, that simple. And yet.

And yet. When I was put in charge of the hardware and software being used for a complex software project, one of the first conundrums I hit was the licensing of the Interleaf desktop publishing package. Interleaf was comprehensive, powerful and de facto for even the simplest of memos; it was also expensive, with the result that people spent periods waiting for a license before they could get on with their working lives.

This was, of course, insane. I advocated (or at least tried to advocate) the use of text editors for memo creation; I even created templates with a textual representation of the company logo. Strangely, people preferred to wait, prioritising form over function. I should add that these were days before email: the notion of the ‘memo’ still had its place.

The point is, I’m not sure we have progressed that far. In today’s world, we fafe a plethora of choices as to platform, tool and feature; at the same time, each is looking to add a variety of bells and whistles to avoid being outflanked by the competition. Alongside Office 365 in all of its online/offline versions, we have Google’s toolset; elsewhere Apple and a variety of other providers bring their own, not to mention the staggering number of online platforms — Wordpress, Medium and so on.

From a writer’s perspective, each is like trying to listen to to some quiet jazz in a shopping mall: any attempt to get words down on a page is bombarded, creative signals drowned in noise. Or the words themselves become locked into some provider’s private universe, with who knows what terms and conditions. Lost completely are the most obvious notions of “write something down, share it more broadly, be able to find it later.”

Without turning this into a rant, I think such realities characterise where we actually are: technology remains a complex, rapidly changing jungle of possibility, and we are a long way from arriving at a point where we can get on with the job. This is neither good nor bad; it is, however, worth putting it back to back with the fact companies, and people, are told they must change if they want to keep up. Perhaps it is not they, but technology, that actually needs to get its act together.

Smart Shift: (Over)sharing is caring

In not unrelated news and weaving in the Mormon Church and the Coastline Paradox, this week’s smartshift looks at how we have been creating large quantities of data about ourselves, and handing it over to online corporations. Go us.

May 2019

05-05 – Bulletin 3 May 2019. Security vs risk, and monkeys writing Shakespeare

Bulletin 3 May 2019. Security vs risk, and monkeys writing Shakespeare

Show me the money

Before I continue, I was saddened to learn this week of the death of Cyril Freedman in 2017. I doubt you will have heard of Cyril: I worked for him a few years back, as technical lead at a medical startup he co-founded. I remember him saying how the first company he started involved a table and chair, a telephone, a notebook and pencil. I remind myself of this frequently, particularly when technology seems only to be adding complexity to an otherwise simple situation.

I’d also like to say thank you to all those who comment on my bulletins. If you are interested, I send it out to over 300 people weekly, a third of whom read it. It’s a nice number of people I generally know and rate, and generally the feedback is “Keep ‘em coming,” which is pretty much the reason I do. I did receive a couple of specific responses to the 19 April newsletter, about IT security:

Ian: “Actually its a risk process. And it is a continual process in some organisations. And it’s tested, frequently. Because of the day zero issue nothing is foolproof, but a lot of people are not as complacent as they once were.”

Graeme: “Whilst technology built with security considered up front would be welcomed, I suspect it stifles innovation and so we’ll always rely on the patching and 3rd parties to provide security.”

On the first point, yes, thank you Ian, that’s reasonable: all sweeping statements are doomed, including this one. Having worked for both government and financial industry clients, it would be folly to suggest that organisations don’t ‘get’ risk. It’s a difficult thing to measure: if you ask someone whether they care about security, they would of course say yes but then we have a case of, “don’t watch the mouth, watch the feet.”

And meanwhile, the point illustrates why I’m a huge advocate of communicating security risks in business terms, to the board. If one says, for example, “We need mechanisms to prevent anti-phishing attacks,” the obvious answer is “Why?”; however, if one says, “3 of our nearest competitors have suffered financial losses of <insert figure here> due to anti-phishing attacks,” the decision then comes down to the board as to whether they see the risk as acceptable. All businesses take risks, so it becomes a question of adding IT security risks to the pot (a.k.a. risk register) in the clearest way possible.

Which brings to the second point about security stifling innovation, which to be fair, is also about risk. Innovation cannot exist in a vacuum… well, it can, but taken to extremes we are with analogies about monkeys typing Shakespeare. It makes a modicum of sense for our innovation efforts to be directed, focused and measured, delivering on both efficiency and effectiveness criteria; it also makes sense that we want to remove whatever might slow innovation, for example overbearing security tools and practices, at the same time as maximising the quality of the outputs such that we don’t just add costs down the line.

As my old friend, mentor and value management guru Roger once told me, ultimately it will all be down to money, or at least financial measures. Which makes sense: so the question becomes whether we try to do things right first time, versus accepting a longer term risk (and potential cost) as a way of making something happen at all. Sometimes (business) success is about audacity, but this needs to be balanced against failure caused by out-and-out recklessness.

All of that, and I never got round to the introduction I meant to use for this week so I am going to shoe-horn it in at the end. It is, at least, about money: perhaps one of the most fun things I have done in recent years was a presentation I gave for Hyland Software, in which I re-enacted the famous scene from Jerry Maguire, darting back and forth across the stage to replicate the conversation between the Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. Whether the audience was enthralled or bemused I have never found out, but I loved doing it… perhaps not everything can be measured in monetary terms.

Smart Shift: The Dark Arts

Confession: I must have quoted this paragraph from John Brunner a dozen times in white papers and reports, through the years. This week’s section is (funnily enough) all about security, from Stuxnet to Snowden. “The only war going on is one for the soul of the Internet.” But can it be won?

Thanks for reading, Jon

05-10 – Bulletin 10 May 2019. Forget Pareto: let’s talk about why digital transformation is a lie.

Bulletin 10 May 2019. Forget Pareto: let’s talk about why digital transformation is a lie.

Putting the horse before the cart

Epiphanies can come from the strangest of moments. There I was, half way through drafting a bulletin and I suddenly realised, no, it’s all wrong. Or it’s all right. Or whichever, but it’s going to be OK. Shame really, as I was quite enjoying writing about the Pareto principle and how, from a consulting perspective, it never needs to be proven — faced with backlogs of challenges and options, prioritisation will always the right thing to do.

But then, I recalled the moment back when I was preparing a presentation for O’Reilly a couple of weeks ago, and I remembered that I had planned to let my mind be blown. How so, I hear you say. Well, I say, I hope you are sitting comfortably. Then I will begin. Spoiler alert: it’s about the untruth that lies at the heart of digital transformation.

So, here we go. You know how people are always looking for cool analogies to explain why it is important to change? Often, they will use the example of the saddlewright, or indeed the carriagemaker that went out of business because they failed to recognise the arrival of the motorcar? Ah, says the presenter, you don’t want to be like that saddlemaker, do you, not in these disruptive times? You want to move to where the puck is going to be, rather than carrying on as though change wasn’t happening, right?

Right. But wait. That was over a hundred years ago. So, might I ask, what is it with people suggesting that change, or dare I say transformation, was something new, and/or purely technology driven? Yes, I get that the combustion engine is technological, but so was the steam train. How far back do we need to go, before things generally stayed the same from one generation to the next?

Now, perhaps I am making too big a deal about this. I would be happy to take that, if it weren’t the case that the entire consulting (and to be fair, technology) industry is making a very big deal out of this. Transform or die, we are told. Digital Darwinism is the name of the game, and only those who evolve quickly will survive.

So, here’s the clever bit. All those who say change is important are correct; and yes, it is catalysed by technology right now. But the need and propensity to be agile, lean, dynamic is not a technology-centric idea; rather it comes from the business needing to be more competitive, to differentiate, to remove inefficiencies and waste, and to respond to the evolving needs of

customers. Ah but, you say, these are all being influenced by technology! Ha, got you! Yes, indeed. But the need for the business to adapt exists in its own right, independently of the symbiosis between what we do and the tools we use.

Not convinced? As evidence for the defence, I present Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.’s 1981 book In Search of Excellence, which collates the principles used by successful organisations. First on the list is “a bias for action”, driving change into the organisation from the top. It doesn’t matter what the catalyst for change may be — regulation, geography, demographics: what matters more is the ability to react to it. And incidentally, the second principle is to be “close to the customer”. It’s like they invented the principles of startup success, who knew.

I’m not just trying to make some philosophical point here; rather, it offers a better starting point for setting business strategy. Digital transformation mantras start in the middle, suggesting how it’s worth looking at how technology can create new opportunities; at the same time (and as I’ve written before), it leads to discussions of how real progress requires both agility from the top and cultural change across the board. However, to accept the reality that it was always about being dynamic puts the (beautifully saddled) horse before the cart: dynamic organisations are better able to adopt, and adapt to digital technologies, or anything else that might come their way.

The manifestations of this switch in thinking are legion. I’m hearing repeated examples of how even advanced technology adoption is resulting in the same old issues emerging: examples such as silo-ed data lakes, or the need to rationalise the multiplicity of DevOps processes, both come from a place where people are trying to do the same thing over and over again, rather than thinking adaptively at a senior level. Dynamic thinking organisations can not only react; they are in a constant state of reaction, able to pivot when need be even if it means making some pretty dramatic decisions. For some reason I’m reminded of Microsoft, first when it embraced the Web, and second when it embraced the cloud.

I think I’ll stop there, point made and all that. If I had one wish, it’s that we stopped talking about digital transformation, or any other form of sudden shift; and rather, help businesses recognise that the key to success remains the same as it always was, which is to make, and act on decisions. Not all organisations are good at this, for sure. But if I wanted to spend my consulting dollars, it would be on mentoring the organisation on how to become better able to change (whatever was the technological or other mantra of the day).

Becoming agile is so much more important than becoming digital, with a final caveat: as long as the wider world adopts these short-term transformational views, it is worth playing along with them. Sure, tell the markets you are transforming digitally; but if you want your business to be around in ten years, make sure agility is leading, not following.

Smart Shift: The Two-Edged Sword

Speaking of change being nothing new… “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.” Thus spake Nikola Tesla in 1926, closing off this chapter about what technology has brought us, for better or worse.

Thanks for reading!

All the best, Jon

P.S. Thank you to those lovely readers who told me that you are looking at this with images blocked, so you are not showing on my stats. And thank you to you for reading as well :)

05-19 – Bulletin 17 May 2019. On personal epiphanies and Schrödinger’s AI

Bulletin 17 May 2019. On personal epiphanies and Schrödinger’s AI

There must be a law somewhere which states that epiphanies have to be personal. That would explain the feeling that businesses never really learn the basics of, say, agility or how to build software right: each generation has to work it out for themselves, possibly through a-ha moments following periods of trauma.

What’s strange is how we don’t really acknowledge that to be true. We do talk in terms of organisational maturity (there’s a four-stage model for everything), but we don’t recognise that new people can take things back a step or two, as they haven’t learned what the more ‘mature’ might see as the basics.

As such, we normalise where we are, and take for granted that others might share our understanding. Case in point is artificial intelligence, which (as is very apparent) is currently seeing a surge of interest. Or is ‘it’, given how AI means different things to different people? I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to quite a few folks over recent months, which tend to fall into certain camps.

For the uninitiated, AI tends to refer to software algorithms that follow a two-step process: first is to ‘learn’ some rules from a large set of data (e.g. what a cat looks like) and the second is to ‘infer’ information from new data (e.g. “That’s highly likely to be a cat”). The way these algorithms work is, the more data they get, the better they can infer stuff.

So, no, it’s not really intelligence per se, but it’s still pretty handy. Academics have been doing it for years, using various forms of algorithm (such as neural networks): in general the goal is to improve how such algorithms work, oh, and write papers about it all. This thinking exists both inside academia and in business, as that is where AI expertise is most likely to come from,

Outside of academic types, there’s a couple of epiphany-type situations that emerge. The first is how organisations are moving from discrete AI projects to a notion that AI operates like a service, to be applied as and when useful. I’ve seen this a-ha! shift in consulting firms, I’ve seen it manifest as the issue of ‘silos of AI’, and I’ve seen it discussed in terms of how DevOps principles can be applied to AI applications.

A second sudden realisation comes when one starts thinking about whether one can have confidence in the results of a given AI application. AI is both probabilistic (again, “That’s highly likely to be a cat”) and vague — algorithms don’t necessarily know why they have reached a certain conclusion. So-called ‘explainability’ (yes, there’s a term for it) comes in response to very real issue: it’s one thing to mis-identify a cat; it’s another to, say, rule out women from job searches.

On the point of dodgy results, there’s various reasons why it might happen: learning data quality/quantity, algorithm effectiveness or other factors might all play a part. Without explainability, it’s difficult to know the cause. But anyway: the result is an ohmahgawd moment, when all that squeaky clean AI looks like any other bit of flawed software. It’s like that moment after a purchase when you realise, yeah, it’s just a car. Whilst epiphanising, one might even say, “it’s just garbage in, garbage out, innit?”

Clearly (from my anecdotal experience), to the initiated, AI’s potential bias is a very real and challenging issue, and explainability offers at least part of the response. To those not so far down the track it is a bit like car accidents or (cf last week) security breaches, in that they only happen to other people, are not as important as doing the clever suff, etcetera.

Perhaps the bottom line is a choice: either we can impose a need to think about bias and explainability through (legal) governance, or we can adopt a wait-and-see approach in which people work it out, and have epiphanies, by themselves. Given the possible results of the latter approach (amounting to misdiagnosis for undefinable reason), I personally would prefer the former.

Thanks for reading, Jon

P.S. More Smart Shift next week.

05-27 – Bulletin 24 May 2019. Technology platforms and all that

Bulletin 24 May 2019. Technology platforms and all that

Terminological topics

Is software development an engineering discipline? It’s certainly nice to think of it in that way. Indeed, it’s a topic I covered in the first article I ever wrote, back in 1994 — titled Craft or Science? Software Engineering Evolution. “This article presents how far software development has come, explaining how, although software engineering not yet a truly “engineered” process, it is certainly en route to becoming so,” I said. And indeed, it remains en route.

At it exists in this nether land, at one end highly mathematical and at the other, decidedly abstract, the world of software lends itself to a variety of ill-defined, yet still valid concepts. For an extreme example of this I remember an old colleague, Martin, talking to a client about how to measure a successful user experience. “It needs to be, you know, hm,” he said, delivering a very positive “hm”. I know, right? Completely vague. Yet “hm” became a touchstone for the rest of the conversation.

And so we find ourselves bandy-ing around words such as ‘experience’, or ‘architecture’ or whatever, none of which can ever have a concrete definition because they are not being built on a grammatically complete foundation. Speaking of which, we have ‘platform’, at once a word that makes perfect sense and one which is too generic to mean anything at all. It’s been around for a while: at the risk of digressing (heavens, no!) it was one of my first job titles.

As a pre-amble, something you may find if you live in a foreign country for any length of time is that you start losing grasp of your mother tongue. After we had spend a year or so in France, we would find ourselves speaking Frenglish, or worse, a mode of speech which would make no sense in either language. I’m racking my brain to think of an example but trust me, it caused house of fun.

When I found myself responsible for the software development environment (hardware and software), I was given a title in French (Responsable, Gestion de Moyens Logiciels) and asked to come up with my own in English. Naturally, the title Platform Support Manager seemed to make perfect sense, even though it didn’t make any sense at all. Sure, I was supporting the platform… no, I wasn’t, that makes it sound like I was carrying some wooden structure on my back. But I was supporting the plate-forme of tools.

Platforms have become more popular: we are, today, in the ‘platform economy’ in which companies can rise from nowhere and scale rapidly based on cloud-based infrastructure and open source. Just a handful of years ago, the term was used slightly differently, referring to companies who provided all the software elements corporations might need. I remember, back then, having a ‘debate’ about whether Microsoft was a platform company; I was told it wasn’t. Microsoft was certainly trying not to be, at the time. But it just made sense, to me, to think about it in that way.

More recently I’ve been thinking about how to break the terminological deadlock around ‘digital transformation’ (and apologies for banging on about it as I get my thinking straight). I’m starting to believe the answer lies once again in the notion of platforms, but this time in terms of how enterprises think about their IT infrastructures. I could say more, but I appear to have run out of space and besides, it probably deserves a blog of its own, without the clutter of reminiscence.

So, for once, I will stop. Thanks for reading!

Jon

P.S> You know I said ‘More smart shift”? I lied, sorry! There’s always next week…

05-31 – Bulletin 31 May 2019. The importance of being dumb

Bulletin 31 May 2019. The importance of being dumb

Let me tell you a secret

I’ve been working for 32 years this year. It seems hardly possible: not only do I wonder where the time has gone, I also wonder if anything I have to say can still be relevant. But don’t worry, I have a cunning plan. Simple in execution, planning and indeed, thought.

Across the years and particularly in recent times, I’ve learned a technique that has, and is still, serving me very well. In a nutshell: act dumb. I can’t even claim it was my idea. The original concept came from Denzel Washington’s lawyer character in The Philadelphia Story, as he would ask, “Explain this to me like I was a three-year-old.”

Doing so has several advantages. The first is that it puts the onus onto the person explaining things, without being threatening. The second, without a doubt, is that is a great way of covering up that I really don’t understand what the person is saying. I first learned this when I came back from my period of hiatus as an analyst, where for a good while it appeared that the world had indeed moved on. Infrastructure had become hypercomposable, software was epic-driven and microservices had replaced any notion of stacks.

Perhaps, I wondered, all the issues had been resolved, that IT and the business (and indeed, IT and IT) were having a party oh, and the lion had lain down with the lamb. At the same time, I had a nagging feeling that no progress had been made at all.

The notion of saying “I don’t understand” came quite early in the process of re-acclimatising myself with technology. I tried it first as an admittance of defeat, then (when the world didn’t collapse around me) I tried it again. It helped that I was largely ghost-writing, so I didn’t have to keep up any pretence of expertise.

After a while, it became something I did, and I still do, every time. I’ve found it is more than just a handy trick. In fact, it puts me into the mindset of someone who really doesn’t know what the great and the good are talking about. Which is more people than one might think.

There’s two things you can do wrong as an analyst (that is, on top of the astonishing arrogance, travel demands, high fees and all that). The first is to believe that because something is being talked about, everyone understands it already. In this industry, full of 1984-esque doubleplusgood newspeak, nothing could be further than the truth.

It’s not just the nouns but the philosophical stance. In my current research (watch this space), I have found that a number of vendors have dropped their own terminology in favour of what is being termed Value Stream Management. The trouble is, Google searches (and indeed, their own web sites) often still use the old ‘positioning’; and meanwhile, we’ll always have the “I’m VSM and so’s my wife” charlatans.

Industry analysts act as a proxy to decision makers who don’t have time to work out what the heck is going on. This means, if analysts can’t make sense of something, the people they represent don’t stand a cat’s chance. And let’s not beat about the bush: obfuscation is a useful marketing technique.

I did say two things, didn’t I? The second, then, is to make the assumption that because something has been talked about for a while, everyone probably already understands it, and indeed is already doing it. Cloud, for example, may be ten years old (at least in the shape of infrastructure as a service) but some organisations may still be dipping their toes in and are looking to understand the basics.

The need for clarity is a lesson that can’t be learned too often. Very recently, I was asked to explain DevOps by a non-technical colleague. As I did so I realised just how much jargon I needed to unwrap and dispense with. The whole notion of DevOps assumes you have already existed as a Dev and come up against the challenges of Ops, for a start; it also takes for granted concepts of agile software development, none of which are intuitive (if they were, everyone would do it by default).

So, yes, there is always room to act dumb. Or perhaps, not to feel dumb when asking the world of tech to explain itself. There’s enough complexity in the world already, without creating more.

Smart Shift: The Quantified Identity

Finally, the next chapter in the series, covering self-surveillance. Who knew big brother was each and every one of us? Oh and a little riff on beacons (the old sort) and Voyager.

Thanks for reading!

Jon

June 2019

06-08 – Bulletin 7 June 2019. The Art of Anecdotal Evidence

Bulletin 7 June 2019. The Art of Anecdotal Evidence

Pies, damn pies and charts

As just about everyone I know knows, I’m in a band. I never meant to be, it just kind of evolved, out of a ukulele based collective that friend and fellow podcaster (see below) Simon co-set-up. The “never meant to be” element is relevant, as I find I’m learning new things, not least how to sing in front of large audiences, but also the notion of an audience of one.

Performing is by its nature a little bit (okay, a lot) narcissistic: delivering artistic and creative things into a vacuum is no fun for anybody. At the same time, it is a complete lottery: sometimes you get the adrenaline rush of a huge, animated crowd, and sometimes you get what a friend refers to as a ‘paid rehearsal’ in which nobody is paying much attention.

At times like that, I have found, sometimes just one person will be actually enjoying what the band is doing… at which point, in my head at least, they become the audience. I can think of a gig we played in Swindon a couple of years ago, where one chap was nodding, singing and enjoying every moment. I have no idea who he was, never seen him since but for two hours, he was who I was singing and playing to.

And that was enough, no, more than that: it’s a real privilege to offer the gift of a tune or two, and to have an appreciative smile in return. And… and now I find myself wondering how to relate this point to technology. It all made so much sense half an hour ago, when I started writing this thing.

In my line of business, over the past decades I have spent quite a lot of my working life answering questions for people. I subscribe to the Einstein principle — I might not always know the answer, but I probably know someone who does so I can find out (and often, the person asking may just need a bit of help to answer their own question).

I have also spent my days surveying, researching and writing about it all. And making plenty of mistakes along the way, and hopefully learning from them. One mistake is, of course, to take anecdotal evidence as something quantitative: a problem exacerbated by the social echo chambers we inhabit.

I’ve been seeing this a lot recently, as I have consorted with the kids from the cooler end of the tech spectrum — those we might call ‘cloud native’. For this group, notions of collaboration, iteration, of trying something and getting it out there, are the norm, to the extent that they may well be surprised to find that others don’t follow that, straightforward and productive path.

Meanwhile, I still liaise with many people who work in what might loosely be called ‘enterprise IT’. In this group, linear thinking is the most likely approach to succeed and it can be very hard to convince people otherwise. I remember a corridor conversation at a large government department, where I singularly failed to convince a colleague why waterfall approaches weren’t always going to be the best option.

Perhaps never the twain will meet, perhaps not; trouble is, if you look at IT trends as a whole, you will end up with an amalgam of both, or a view from one side or another. It is almost impossible to get a high-level picture of how, in many large organisations, the mind might be willing but the body is weak; or how individuals may have the right idea, even if their teams and groups are still lagging.

Which brings to the audience of one. Again and again, I see research telling organisations what they should be like, rather than engaging with them individually and determining what might work for them. It’s the dark secret of consulting: the ‘thought leadership’ may tell decision makers to “disrupt or die” but the day to day activities of change are much more mundane.

What can we get from this? That quantitative research will always be wrong? Not so fast. Research offers a useful starting point to have a conversation, to engage on points of similarity, to help someone get a view on the broader context of their industry or domain. At the same time, it should almost always be rejected in favour of finding out what the specific organisation is actually like.

Smart Shift: Augmentation in progress

In this week’s section I bring in Wim Wenders’ film ‘Until the End of the World’ to introduce the topic of Augmented Reality. “What we learn from such films, in general, is that the fight remains between good and evil, between acts of immense inner strength to overcome situations of utter peril.” It was ever thus.

Extra-curricular: Getting Away With It Episode 7 - Post-Lechlade Festival Blues

Speaking of bands, podcasts and indeed, small audiences, Simon and I actually managed to bank another episode of our GAWI (as we have come to call it) podcast. It includes mention of headlining in a beer tent, barfing waltzers and strange phrases, Huawei and Google, scanning for skeletons in concrete, tech giants breaking industries… and a poem from Simon.

06-14 – Bulletin 14 June 2019. Why do we assume the Internet will ‘just work’?

Bulletin 14 June 2019. Why do we assume the Internet will ‘just work’?

The connectivity disconnect.

I was recording a webinar yesterday. For the uninitiated, this is the closest I will ever get to being on telly: an hour of sitting around a table chatting in front of cameras, to be broadcast to the world. Well, narrowcast: the audience tends to number hundreds rather than thousands, but heck, it feels like what telly might be like. They sometimes even have makeup.

It’s amazing what can be done this days, with a few HD cameras, skilled operators and a network connection. What’s that you say, a network connection? Yes, you know, that bit that absolutely has to be there, otherwise nothing can work. I know, obvious, right? Less obvious is why we tend to take the network so utterly for granted.

The Internet is a clever beast. It’s built on the back of protocols that assume the worst: data packets can be re-sent if not received, or routed in multiple directions in case of failure. Like Kevin Costner’s futuristic (yet ill-fated) postman, the message has to get through. Yet the way we have configured things, we generally connect across a single wire — making for a single point of failure.

To whit, the webinar had to be postponed (for only minutes, in the end) as a ‘network problem’ was resolved: no connection, no webinar. I’m not saying the world needs redundant (as an aside, which idiot decided that the same word would mean both extra and superfluous?) networks; rather, I can pretty much guarantee that nobody gave the network a moment’s thought up until that point.

After all, it should just work, shouldn’t it? That certainly seems to be the thinking of the many metro-Californian types I seem to speak to, who present tools such as Google Docs as a straightforward alternative to desktop office applications. I don’t hate Google Docs. However… (and yes, this sounds like a moment where I now reveal my prejudices)… however, I would like it a lot more, if it worked in environments where network connections were sporadic.

Such assumptions pervade the thinking of a large number of people for whom infrastructure is ‘just’ a platform (a.k.a. anyone who works in software, sorry guys). The network operates quite differently to other infrastructure elements: in that golden triangle of processing, storage and communications, the relationship between the first two and outcomes tends to be linear — the more you have, the better the result.

For the network however, the relationship is both linear and binary. Scale it up and down by all means, but also act in the knowledge that it can either be present, or not. In this way, it has more akin to power than other kinds of resource. (Cue philosophical diversion… I feel a picture coming on… I need a whiteboard… and, back in the room!)

It is also fantastically complex. Deep down, data networks do their very best to exploit the laws of physics: if you see the difference between a theoretical ‘digital’ broadband signal wave and what actually gets sent down the fifty-year-old piece of copper between your house and the box down the road, you start to appreciate the challenge. “How far can we push this thing” is a familiar concept for low-level network engineers.

At higher levels, protocols for data transfers, for streaming, for signalling and one-off events, vary according to both the type of information being transferred and the equipment being used. There’s some fascinating work taking place around ultra-low bandwidth networks, which can support minimal needs (“your cow has a temperature”) with equally low demands on resources.

In other words, networking constitutes a series of trade-offs, trying to get the maximum out whilst minimising risk of failure. We like to think of data networks as single streams of light, but in reality they are like million-lane highway interchanges, each of which has to manage tractors alongside juggernauts, motorbikes with skateboards.

Upon which sandy basis, we build our castle-in-the-cloud existences. As with the webinar yesterday, it was interesting to note the final advice: that any internet-centric approach needs to consider connectivity above anything else. Basically, if you can’t connect, you’re stuffed: this should be so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said, but in reality, precisely the opposite is true. We take our networks for granted, and this needs to be called out.

Smart Shift: We are all makers now

Speaking of resources we could not do without, where would we be without the lowly screw? In this chapter we think about manufacturing and the rise of Alibaba, the Internet of Things and 3D printing.

Thanks for reading! Jon

06-21 – Bulletin 21 June 2019. The dark side of progress and the case for industry-scale ethics

Bulletin 21 June 2019. The dark side of progress and the case for industry-scale ethics

Beyond the echo chamber

We are in the fourth industrial revolution, so we are told. Disrupt or be disrupted. Jobs will be lost. No they won’t, but they will change. Kids are smarter than their parents. Science is always right. Resistance is futile.

Some of this may be true — I don’t think anyone nobody meant to unleash the transistor onto the world as a bad thing, any more than I believe that the designers of Facebook algorithms or Twitter streams planned to unlock such bias, or such anger. Nope, no siree, I don’t think any said group thought about such stuff at all. Which is the point.

I have a theory about this, by the way, one which I hope is objective… though objectivity seems in very short supply in the current narrative. We are all driven by agendas, complacencies, instincts and I spend a certain amount of time pondering what my own are, and how they will (or do already) manifest.

Back to the theory. The technological centre of gravity lay first with the governments and researchers, then with the corporations, then with the young and forward thinking… and then, i.e. now, with the generations and demographics that were never consulted about any of it.

And they are coming back in spades. There’s a local Facebook group I am party to, which (with no sense of irony) is called “Local Town for Local People.” It is renowned for people complaining about things, often the same things (potholes, bad driving, the lack of respect…) it also has some great threads about old photos.

In said group, voices that might be considered ‘progressive’ are in a minority. I don’t believe the thousands-strong group is so because it overly respects a certain sub-group of the town; rather, it is representative of the actual conversations that, until recently, happened behind closed doors, in pubs and on street corners.

Welcome to the real world, progress. And welcome to the backlash against traditional, top-down behaviours from anyone in power: if everyone has a voice, then you’d better start listening to it. In the past, charismatic leaders could get lucky by aligning with the zeitgeist; today, anyone can do it if they are prepared to listen.

I’m not a super-great fan of jingoistic populism, but nor am I an advocate of complacency or assumptiveness. It probably is the case that the nature of democracy is changing, as opinions can be gauged (and people engaged) at a much finer level of granularity than before. And the debate, as nasty, bully-laced and mob-ruled as it can become, is taking place in public.

But still, the creators of technology continue as if all that is nothing to do with them, as if progress was unassailably a force for good, as if the next set of superpowers the industry was about to unleash were all about the positive consequences, and let’s not worry about the negatives, shall we?

I’m not sure I’m any better, for the record. I might bang on about governance and the like, as though I actually care, but do I really? Am I no better than someone in the alcohol industry or gambling industry saying, yes, we really think people need to be careful with this stuff, but you know, personal responsibility eh?

And this is one area I need to recognise the inherent bias in the systems we create. In driving technology business through positive case studies, we create an echo chamber of our own, in which the positives fill out the narrative with only a little bit of space left for what might go wrong.

I’ve talked about governance by design before, but perhaps we need to go further than that, to a notion of industry-scale culpability. I’m not saying the tech industry is inherently bad; I am saying that this notion that it is inherently good is wearing thin.

I’m not sure what the answer is; but I do know that the notion of ethics is largely consigned to individual efforts, and not to mega-trends (the hammering that Facebook is currently getting is the exception, not the norm). As an industry we have great power in our hands and with great power comes great responsibility.

Smart Shift: Is that a drone in your pocket?

In this section I cover all things autonomous, from driverless trucks to drones. I’m looking forward to self-driving pizza: you heard it here first.

06-28 – Bulletin 28 June 2019. On the constancy of learning

Bulletin 28 June 2019. On the constancy of learning

Where did it all go wrong? A reader and old friend called me out last week: “You have officially become a grumpy old geezer,” he told me, and quite right too.

Aspiring analysts take note, you can get an awfully long way with cynicism, which is right and proper given how much of the industry seems to be driven by naive optimism and assumptive hype.

Nonetheless, it can become more then a little wearing to be cynical all the time, like some end-of-bar bore who has seen it all before. “It’s just management,” one might say, or “It’s never going to work.” Etcetera.

There’s a fine line between pointing out the weaknesses in a position, and just being a bore. And besides, sometimes things are not as simple as they appear: generally, there will be a reason why the same things seem to come round again.

Often it is because they aren’t the same things, not quite, so it becomes a case of working out what the differences are. Microsoft had the tablet computer form factor nailed long before Apple, for example… but it didn’t have Jony Ive (and a thousand others) to smooth the lines and bring in the requisite minimalism.

A second reason (which I have covered before) is that every generation needs to have its own epiphanies. And thirdly, sometimes, something happens that causes everything to have to be sorted out from scratch.

Example: management of software artefacts. I was at the DevOps Enterprise Summit this week, and was lucky to be party to a number of fascinating conversations… one of which revolved around this topic. I know, right?

In my first job, almost 32 years ago, I was a programmer, which meant writing lines of code. Rather than having everyone doing their own thing in a corner, all that code was managed using a tool called SCCS — source code control system, if I recall correctly.

Did I say it was 32 years ago yet? But it makes sense, right?, to have a place to manage all that code-y stuff, otherwise the situation would be a bit chaotic, right? When I left my programming job, I became a software configuration management specialist, which was all about this stuff. Call me dull but I quite like it.

Quiet at the back. and fast forward to 2019, when a conversation with major financial institutions is about how important it is to manage source code… and how bad they are at it. They never meant to be, but the problem just, kind of, snuck up.

So, we have choices at that point. Call them all idiots, which is of no help whatsoever (and removed the log from thine own eye). Listen cynically to the epiphanies, in the most patronising way possible. Or indeed, think about the root causes of what made a bunch of smart people end up in a singularly un-smart situation… which might help do something about it.

I have been thinking about them, and my money is on… the Web. What started as just a bit of markup language (that’s the ML in HTML) has become the backbone of many software applications and services.

In turn, just as nobody bothered to manage web pages as though they were code, so we ended up with a massive set of programs, none of which anyone thought would need to be managed as software. And now, here we are, where that point is obvious but knowing it doesn’t solve the problem.

Sure, let’s be cynical, but (as with many things happening today) it was a lone, quiet voice that saw it coming in advance.

All the best, Jon

P.S. Apologies (even if none are needed) for the brevity of this edition but I am in the midst of moving house. Analogies abound, if only I had time to write them all down.

July 2019

07-06 – Bulletin 6 July 2019. On why technology is not a journey, and lasagne

Bulletin 6 July 2019. On why technology is not a journey, and lasagne

This gets a bit meta

There’s a game I play pretty much every time I see a technology-related announcement. Case in point, last week I saw something from a vendor which pretty much said, “Now with extra security!” (I am racking my brains who it came from, but no matter, it was reasonably standard). To the game: turn the sentence around and see what thought processes that triggers — in this case, “You mean, before, it had less security? What the heck?”

To be fair, it’s not just me. Many years ago I was particularly taken by a cartoon involving the lasagne-eating Garfield, watching the ads on television. “New and improved! New and improved!” the ads blared out. “To think that, up till now, it was all old and inferior…” the cat opined.

Three dimensions spring to mind. The first is that, yes, it’s just advertising: each release has to be presented as better than before, otherwise people won’t buy it. The second, that the tech industry is changing and progressing, making improvements inevitable and welcome. And the third is that, yes, the previous generation of the product or service really was a bit rubbish.

To shift it up (or down) a level, the whole thing reflects the weight we put on the current narrative. “It’ll be nice when it’s finished,” I sometimes say, without actually joking: behind the humorous facade is a genuine belief that whatever technology has planned for us, this is not ‘it’. We are not there by a long chalk, yet, and strangely, we try to act as though we are.

Nor do I particularly believe that we are on a journey of some form, though it clearly does feel that way. A journey implies some kind of general direction and route; whereas the progression of technology is more like participating in the multi-dimensional bastard offspring of Cards Against Humanity and the Mousetrap Game. For sure, we are moving, but with no clear grasp of the rules, or what is around the next corner.

In large part, we accept the change that is happening to us; or we ignore it; or we wring our hands about it: the one option not available to us is to stop using it, for fear of being considered a luddite or for the simple reason that we quite like it, really. And thus we rely on more superficial narratives that carry us forward, that keep the money flowing, that help others get their heads around it all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m feeling neither negative nor cynical. I am, however, feeling that we are acting as the passengers of complexity theory, focusing on the knowns as the unknowns are too much of a challenge. Some pretty deep questions pervade, not only in terms of ethics or governance (which I bang on about often enough) but also, for example, on the nature of augmentation versus automation, the impact of insight on responsibility, the ability to game our natures, the alignment of interfaces and personality.

I could drill into each of these (indeed, ahem, watch this space) but more important is the fact that they should be part of the more general narrative, but they aren’t, not really.

<* I recognise several weaknesses in this argument, in that I am of course looking for some kind of philosophical perspective on technological progress. First that of course, people are discussing these things: I’m just not party to those conversations. And second, what we might call the framing effect: another issue I’ve seen frequently, where someone stumbles upon a way of looking at things and then, post-epiphany, can’t understand why the rest of the world just won’t do the same BECAUSE IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT. But anyway…*>

Simply put, we could be modelling the kind of outcomes we are trying to achieve from the use of tech. I’m reminded of the Security By Design lobby, which says grosso modo that we should be thinking about security needs at the very outset of creating something new. More broadly, I’m wondering whether, with a few flipcharts and post-its, we can get to a kind of “this-is-a-set-of-principles-we-can-all-adhere-to-by-design” model which goes beyond notions of security, trust, governance yadda yadda and gets closer to an alignment with who we are.

I don’t think the answers would be obvious or immutable. but at least we could have something to build towards, rather than the current acceptance that technology is something to be accepted as delivered, whether we like it or not. Often (case in point: social media) the answer will be both, but then at least we can make more informed choices.

07-12 – Bulletin 12 July 2019. On framing, specialisation and provenance as code

Bulletin 12 July 2019. On framing, specialisation and provenance as code

Crunching in the shoes of others

I was starting to think I was becoming a bit of a one-trick pony with this bulletin. You know, a bit naive, over-optimistic, potentially ranty and vague (or in the words of the immortal Neil Ward-Dutton, not very crunchy). All of these things may be the case but I recorded a podcast this week that brought it all into focus.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m the lucky host of a podcast for GigaOm called “Voices in DevOps”. Lucky not only because it is a topic, or field, close to my heart; but also because I learn so much from the guests, each of whom’s job is to answer one simple question: what is going to make DevOps work in the enterprise?

Some guests take a view based on their own background: so, for example, I’ve discussed a product management mindset on a couple of occasions, and other times the conversation has turned to data and measurability, or collaborative best practice. Meanwhile I’ve been able to test out my own theories, for example around the Guru’s dilemma.

On a couple of occasions, such as this week, the debate has turned to how provenance influences how the situation is framed: essentially the meta-level of the above paragraph. So, for example, if you have a room full of people with a development background, they may take the view that everything can be programmed, and therefore should be.

On the first point, mathematically, they are not wrong. One of the late, great Alan Turing’s principles was that any complete formal language can be used to specify any other complete formal language (or to put it another way): in other words, you can express anything you like as a program. The second point leads to the enticing “as-code” notion, for example expressing infrastructure, security, test scripts as code.

Trouble is, just because something can be done in a certain way, that doesn’t mean it should. My guest this week (David Torgerson, of Lucid Software) warned against the danger of employing programming generalists, rather than specialists in other areas — such as, let’s say, database engineers. Yes, and indeed, you can express a database structure as code.

However, I was reminded of another conversation I had with Neil W-D, who has a knack of making things very crunchy very quickly. We were talking about the nature of programs or process steps to impact data and state, and vice versa, to the extent that the two intertwined. “What, you mean like, “is it a wave or a particle?”,” he asked. Yes, that’s precisely what I meant, if only I could have been crunchy enough.

In my experience, programmers do not always make brilliant database engineers and vice versa: actually, in my own personal experience, I’m happy to write programs but I find myself wanting to leave the room quickly if every I am faced with a spreadsheet… which, yes, makes being a research analyst a challenge sometimes. And don’t start me off about expenses.

But, to David’s point, we need people of both types, and a lot of other types to boot. Horses for courses, different problems require different brains, teams should be cross-functional not only because we need a variety of skills but because we need a variety of minds (which is also the root of my thinking about needing to pay more than lip service to ideas around diversity).

Without talking too much about the topic at hand, DevOps blessing and curse is that it has been led by developers — it is DEVops and not devOPS at its origin. Which leads to another strange notion, that operations can be automated out of existence, which is clearly an idea from somebody who has never worked in a data centre (cf yet another of these newsletters).

That’s all, really, apart from recognising our own preferred framing , and ensuring that we don’t see it as the only view. We can all benefit from walking in the shoes of others from from time to time, or risk believing that they don’t need to exist.

Smart Shift: The truth is out there

In this section we go from loyalty points to virtual cash, following the rise of Bitcoin and its supporting platform, Blockchain, and we look at its applicability to the music industry and other domains. “It’s not about the money,” says anyone who thinks it is about the money.

Kicking off with Superman and Kung Fu Panda (see what I did there), this section

07-22 – Bulletin 19 July 2019. AI vs Jobs, take two

Bulletin 19 July 2019. AI vs Jobs, take two

The pessimist’s guide to the future

I start this week with a couple of resolutions. Or rather, aspirations — they only become resolutions when I actually do them. So:

Resolution 1: to start collecting links about what I read, so I can actually connect to it and turn my idle opinions into commentary.

Resolution 2: turn my idle opinions into commentary.

Meanwhile, we are stuck with idle opinions, but with a bit of solidity behind them. This week, I noticed an article about the dangers of being optimistic about AI vs jobs — the optimist’s idea is that automation eats away the dull stuff first, leaving the more interesting stuff which has to be a good thing, right?

I’ve written from an optimist’s perspective myself, but I have taken a different line. Many jobs only exist because of our desire to both feel useful, to get value from one another and to cope with complexity. On this latter note, to whit:

I was chatting with Adrian (from whom I sublet my office) this morning, about the amount of waste in corporations — or to put it another way, the pointlessness of meetings. People spend (perhaps) a third of their time sitting round tables or on conference calls, much of which gets in the way of getting things done.

So, yes, complexity. We spend time tying to understand things, trying to get other people on board, to agree a shared approach — all of which gets in the way of actually doing something. I read once that the most successful people are those who make decisions, even if the decisions are wrong, as indecision is a bigger killer of progress.

In other words, we already waste a great deal of time doing jobs, and somehow we get away with that. I have a funny feeling that even if we automated a raft of things we currently do, we’d just carry on working (potentially more) inefficiently to fill the time we had saved.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s particularly optimistic at all. Anyway, tune in next week for an altogether more considered and link-strewn bulletin.

Thanks for reading, Jon

07-28 – Bulletin 22 July 2019. On air gaps, cloud hopper hackers and breaking Google

Bulletin 22 July 2019. On air gaps, cloud hopper hackers and breaking Google

All Plaxo’s fault

Anyone remember “air gaps”? The notion was, and remains simple — if you don’t want a computer or its data to be hacked, don’t connect it to a network; to transfer data, stick it on remove-able media (for example, an external hard drive) and export it from one computer, then import it to the air-gapped other.

Why wouldn’t you, as a way of protecting your more sensitive stuff? A thousand reasons, not least that the time taken to export/import is too great. Or is it? I have to say, I am wondering, given news such as the Reuters investigation into Chinese ‘cloud hopper’ hackers, who first compromised some of the bigger service providers (looking at you, IBM and HPE) and then went after their clients.

The hidden message at the heart of the article is, organisations feel they have no choice but to connect all of their systems to the global network we call the Internet. “Teams of hackers… penetrated HPE’s cloud computing service and used it as a launchpad to attack customers, plundering reams of corporate and government secrets for years,” say the authors.

But what if it didn’t have to be so? Are we really in a situation where every single thing we digitise has to be considered accessible to, well, everybody? I’m not so sure of the answer: of course if we make it inaccessible, we can’t get to it remotely either; of course data integration offers many advantages; of course we should be able to put security mechanisms in place that actually work.

At the same time, however, I wonder if we have managed to convince ourselves that everything needs to be connected, by default and without exception, and we should deal with the consequences even if we are no good at doing so (or indeed, we don’t get round to it); or indeed, expect third parties to do a better job than us, even if they show they cannot.

I picked up one article last week which suggests that they know they cannot, either: that Google pays large sums of money to people who can find security holes in their code. The term used is “reward” though I can’t help thinking that we should be saying “pay-off” — it’s almost a reverse-bribe, made official and announced in advance.

I spend an inordinate amount of time writing about how people should get better at cybersecurity, and rightly so because they, that is we, should. But while we are not so good, perhaps we should not be so blasé about what data we allow to swish around.

It’s almost as though we have given up. I was suddenly reminded of Plaxo, that address-book-sharing app that pre-dated Facebook (founded by Sean Parker, who was ousted from the board and who then convinced Mark Zuckerberg not to let himself get into the same position — we all know where that has ended up). Connect everything, and teh world will be a better place! was the theory, anyway.

Which brings to other reasons for air gaps. Doing anything on a computer these days sometimes feels akin to trying to get a day’s work done in a fairground. I remember, back in the day, when I would get something done, then actively connect to upload it, catching up on any downloads at the same time. It felt quite peaceful, and no doubt still would.

I’m not saying we should switch everything off, or indeed, disconnect like heroes in a dystopian novel — just that it would be nice to have a choice. Uncoincidentally, I’m talking to a few companies right now that offer various forms of network segmentation, so you can create private connections across cloud-based microservices.

Perhaps this could be extended to work between yourself and your stuff: just putting it out there.

Thanks for reading, Jon

P.S. Thank you to Ian for the ‘cloud hopper’ story.

Breaking Google

From Davey Winder

https://www.ft.com/content/3ba7fc12-8205-11e9-a7f0-77d3101896ec

Internet of things sparks race to replace the battery, by Jessica Twentyman

And then I was suddenly reminded of Plaxo.

Ian sent me this:

Inside the West’s failed fight against China’s ‘Cloud Hopper’ hackers

August 2019

08-13 – Bulletin 9 August 2019. On microsegmentation and guardrails, and requirements as code

Bulletin 9 August 2019. On microsegmentation and guardrails, and requirements as code

We are all surgeons now. Sorry, I mean programmers

Hello, and welcome to this week’s bulletin.

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time talking to people about microsegmentation recently. I didn’t mean to, however, it would appear that purveyors of microsegmentation products are like buses: nothing for ages, then three come along all at once.

What is microsegmentation, I hear you ask. For a start, it’s a word that means a great deal to those who know what it means, and just about nothing to anyone who doesn’t… whenever a new term comes along, it never ceases to amaze me when I watch the ease with which it is used.

“Trans-notionalism is all the rage,” we say, within minutes of having heard the term and, potentially, whether or not we actually know what it means ourselves. I’m not sure if this is driven by disdain, fear or ignorance, but it certainly isn’t a desire to help others get on board.

Anyway, microsegmentation. A word which could mean many things, depending on context. If I say ‘networking’ it starts to shimmer in front of the eyes — oh, right, yes, network segmentation at a micro-level? That makes sense.

Which is kind of right, but then again, not really. Microsegmentation is actually about network security: you can define specific routes around a network, which (I guess) you call segments. You define them, generally, at the application level, which means you don’t have to reconfigure the network each time.

So you could, say, declare that service A, B and C could talk to each other. The notion then implies that nothing else can see (via encryption) what happens between the three. Quite handy if (say) you wanted to gather information from a network of weather sensors, without anything else seeing.

So, “secure network segmentation, defined at the application level” might be a good description. Clearly this is too long, as we have microsegmentation instead. I’m not sure of why the “micro” is there, other than to make it sound a bit more snazzy.

It’s a good idea. Which begs the question, as so often in tech, why didn’t it happen before? The answer is, it kind of did, but it kind of wasn’t exactly right, for several reasons. First, as mentioned, network segments were traditionally configured at the network level. By network engineers.

Which kicks off a whole raft of issues, not least that it means you need to talk to network engineers. Don’t get me wrong, network engineers are great people, some of my best friends are network engineers. But having to communicate with someone else is always going to slow things down.

And what if you want to change your mind? We’re in an age where everything is supposed to happen fast, and iteratively, which making up new things every day. Ideally, you can do things faster if you give more of it to the people building applications (the developers), and let them make the decisions.

It’s good theory, but it falls down on two counts: one, that the developers will know what to do, and two, that all infrastructure today is magically simple, and requires little intervention. I’ve talked about the latter in a previous bulletin (TL;DR “It’s very complicated and can go wrong”).

As for the former, the microsegmentation approach allows for network engineers, and indeed security experts, to set what is possible, before giving away the keys to the kingdom: they can define usage policies, or in today’s terminology, “guardrails” to ensure developers don’t break anything.

Taking a step back, we can perhaps see why microsegmentation is emerging as a seemingly new thing, given how it could, notionally, have existed decades ago. First, it is as much about the eroding boundaries between technologists as anything. As with Network Function Virtualisation (NFV, also discussed before), our digital mechanisms are increasingly software-based.

This means they can be dealt with by developers, though it is not necessarily the case that they should be. Just because everything can be programmed, that doesn’t mean that the group referred to as ‘programmers’ are the best placed to direct everything. We wouldn’t imagine this to be true for healthcare decisions; nor is it the case for network configuration.

We may be arriving at a juncture where most things can be software driven, but are also reaching a point where software becomes the basis of communication, and not the consequence. If this sounds like I am going off on one, I am probably not explaining myself properly so let me try harder.

We need all the groups of people we have, security and infrastructure expertise, business and financial acumen, science and artistic endeavour. Software will infuse all such things, indeed, it already does but it is disjointed. But how about I, as (say) a healthcare person, could set out what I wanted and express it in terms that could then be programmed?

What this leads to is a common way of expressing needs. The whole field of requirements management has emerged over decades due to the complexity of translating needs into code, and we are a long way off simplifying that. A start, however, is to recognise our applications as transient, as a way of doing something right now, rather than as an end in themselves.

I will leave this here. If you have read this far, I would welcome your feedback. One thing is for sure: we are going to need a whole bunch more words.

08-23 – Bulletin 23 August. Automating operations and what's in a name?

Bulletin 23 August. Automating operations and what’s in a name?

Left brains and right brains

At a recent developer event, I happened to participate in a discussion about the role of what we call “operations” that is, managing and running IT systems, networks, storage and all that. The view, universally it appeared, was that operational IT was on the brink of being automated away, therefore rendering such roles redundant. Discussion turned to the fact that other roles would be available, so nobody needed to worry about jobs.

Which was nice, but irrelevant. Because IT infrastructure is not going anywhere. It only occurred to my flummoxed self some way through the debate, that the quite senior, enterprise-based people involved were largely on the development side. I have been characterising these as the right-brain creatives, largely directed by innovation, aspiration and other uplifting motives.

Meanwhile, on the operational side are the left-brain types, who need to work with reality and whose fault it will be if things start to fail. And fail they do, for reasons nefarious from power shortages to software bugs, and everything in between (it is completely relevant that the origin of the word ‘bug’ was based on a real insect, crawling across a circuit board and causing it to short).

Wait, I hear the visionaries say. It’s all about orchestration now. Work things out up front, write it in configuration files, throw it at the pristine racks of servers and it will just, you know, happen. That’s all very well, and I’ve been to the co-located data centre facilities with minimal staff where, indeed, it does all seem to be auto-magical.

Ramifications of this approach are that the configuration work still has to happen, even if specified in YAML (sands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language. Don’t ask). Such work can be given to Site Reliability Engineers, a new super-race of individuals that are absolutely bloody brilliant at defining infrastructure so it will just work. I’m pretty sure that’s the spec.

Or it can be allocated to developers, who, as we all know, love (and I mean LOVE) to spend their time doing things that aren’t development. “If only I could spend more time defining my target infrastructure,” said no developer I have ever spoken to. Okay, sorry, I’m being glib. The point is, however, that the job has to happen, even if the interface moves.

There’s more. In terms of day to day, keeping the lights on operations, much of the effort goes into dealing with consequences of poor, or incompatible decisions. These can be, variously, badly architected solutions; applications being used for things they were never intended for; prototypes becoming live products because of shortening timescales; and so on.

Many such challenges are as likely to happen in software, as in hardware. Ops people can suck their teeth for a reason: it’s because they will remember last time a certain thing was tried, and how badly it went for everyone involved. If you speak to someone shaking their head and looking negative, it isn’t because they were born that way, but because they have learned to be so.

We do have some potential hope coming from the latest, greatest trends in tech: I’m speaking about containers, microservices and all that (for the uninitiated, this means defining applications as a set of highly portable modules which can be run anywhere). With such models comes standardisation of everything ‘below’, which leads to less incompatibility, etc etc.

However these ideas have a way to go. The Kubernetes container orchestration service may become de facto, for example; but it doesn’t yet have everything it needs to support storage, networking or security, nor is there a generally agreed approach to building a Kubernetes application. We may be standardising one thing, but the rest is still very much to be dealt with.

And then, perhaps all we will have done is shifted the problem. With Kubernetes you can build fantastically powerful, yet complicated applications, buts of which could be running anywhere. And so, guess what, people will do just that, even when it is completely the wrong thing to do. And they will do it badly.

And when they do, somebody will need to be there to pick up the pieces, to work out where things stopped working, to isolate the problem and to feed back information that can prevent it from happening again. Who knows what they will be called, these clever people: something like “operations”, perhaps. No doubt in five years’ time, rooms of experts will tell us that such roles are on the brink of being automated away.

And round we shall go again.

September 2019

09-15 – Bulletin 13 September 2019. On the depth of learning and embracing frequent failure

Bulletin 13 September 2019. On the depth of learning and embracing frequent failure

New wine in snake skins

One of my favourite books was, and remains, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis (yes, I cried when Reepicheep went over the sea). And one of my favourite passages is when Eustace is turn into a dragon. From a note (I think) he learned that, to become human again, he needed to shed a dragon skin (like a snake skin) and bathe in a certain pool.

So, he tried. He shed a skin, but it wasn’t enough. So he shed another, then another, bathing each time, but each time he emerged a dragon. Somewhat unexpectedly, Aslan the lion happened upon him: it’s not working, said Eustace. That’s because you are doing it wrong, said Aslan, who took out a huge claw and cut through Eustace’s many skins like an onion. That time, he emerged from the pool a boy again.

A couple of times in my career, I have been quite convinced I know it all… working back from the punchline, only to discover, quite uncategorically and without mercy, that I seriously do not. The first came just after I had been over-promoted to the point of deep stress, when working as an IT manager for a subsidiary of Alcatel.

Alongside the coping strategies and very real learning I was picking up on the job (I have, essentially, dined out on that experience ever since), I came to the conclusion that I had this management thing nailed: I doubted was anything else to learn about keeping saucers on sticks, running meetings, facilitating, time management or anything else administrative.

I then joined Admiral Management Services, a company whose ethos gave short shrift to any such idea of grandeur. Yeah, whatever, was the attitude: take some minutes and be a good boy, would you? Learning the hard way (failing fast and frequently), I unpicked everything I thought I knew and re-knitted it into some semblance of genuine best practice. Which I have also dined out on ever since.

The next big moment of big-headedness came a couple of years into my analyst career, when (at the heights of the dot-com) I thought it a really good moment to set up on my own. The lows of the dot-bomb followed almost immediately, mirroring both my feelings of utter incompetence and my bank balance. So many lessons learned, not least, cooking on a shoestring.

I didn’t mean to say all that: I was only going to talk about my memories of being in (what felt like) financial difficulty: any money we had was always in the wrong place, cheques bounced and bills went unpaid, with banks gleefully adding their fees to any debts incurred. I wasn’t going to say that either: I was only going to make the point that getting back on track didn’t just take extra effort: it took extra effort beyond what I thought extra effort meant at the time.

Like Eustace, sometimes the problem goes far deeper than we have the ability to understand. Not least in questions of learning, particularly when we come to it from a position of knowledge. Surely, people understand what is being discussed, we say, or can understand it as long as we explain it correctly. Even if they are a bit behind. And so, in areas of so-called ‘new thinking’, we can have whole conversations without realising that what we are saying is of very little relevance.

I’m coming to think this is the case for my own current area of specialism, DevOps. Even as I discuss how to make it work better (a.k.a. ‘to scale’), I have my good friend (and practitioner) Andy’s words ringing in my head: that nobody is really doing it, they just say that they are. Perhaps to get the analysts off their backs. It’s not just DevOps: the reason we can keep saying the same things about best practice, webinar after webinar, year after year, is that people still don’t get it.

To whit. I’m not sure what the answer is but based on my own experience, perhaps part of it is to recognise the fact that we are a lot less mature than we would like, as organisations and as people. And we need to deal with this as Eustace, not superficially but digging really deep, getting right down to the base, beneath layers and layers of traditional practice.

Not to do so will cause us to reinvent whatever we are talking about, for a number of reasons. First to avoid boredom — you can only hear people bang on about the same thing so many times, before cognitive filters push it into the background. Second because it loses its effectiveness as the world moves on. And third, because lovely marketing and PR people want something new to talk about, in the name of differentiation or thought leadership.

These days I have come to realise that ‘knowing it all’ is a false summit, a thinking person’s Tower of Babel. Rather than embracing my own inadequacy and giving up, I’ve found a joy and freshness in learning: in essence, I’ve come to terms with my own, valid feelings of imposter syndrome. Perhaps we could all do with recognising that we don’t all get it, neither at a superficial nor deep level.

There is no shame in this, as such an admittance is the first step in actually working out what the heck is being discussed. Like Eustace, we can all benefit from digging particularly deep in terms of what we don’t know, understanding the problem we are trying to solve before applying the latest iteration of solutions.

Thanks for reading, Jon

P.S. I said these bulletins would be more factual from now. This one isn’t but I’m on holiday, so sue me.

2022

Posts from 2022.

September 2022

09-22 – Bulletin 25 October 2019. On building a firmer foundation, and wibbling

Bulletin 25 October 2019. On building a firmer foundation, and wibbling

My kingdom for a platform…

Humans are magpies: we love shiny things. Trouble is, one of the curses of the technological revolution is that we have become inordinately good at creating them, in both hardware and software, and we can’t help but be distracted by them.

Consider for example, publishing a book. For hundreds of years, this was the domain of the few: authors such as Dickens relied on magazine publishing first and foremost, whereas now, “why don’t you self-publish” opens the door to a complex and overlapping variety of platforms. In audio and video, the story is the same, as it is in cloud computing: AWS has built a business by offering every possible option.

The result is a feeling of bamboozlement for the few, even as the many succeed. It also distracts from the point: I don’t think technology addiction is as big an issue (though it is big) as time people waste in their billions, lured into low-level procrastination via technological tools.

We want to produce, but in doing so we find ourselves consuming, forgetting what we came here for. At home, we call a certain moment in the supermarket “going into a wibble” when, overwhelmed by options, we end up standing, slack-mouthed, in the middle of the aisle. Completing the shopping becomes the challenge, and meanwhile ‘they’ have us exactly where they want us, helpless in their grasp.

I’m coming to believe that recognising this phenomenon, and other behavioural displays, is essential to plotting a route through this. Distraction, deflection and false debate has overtaken our politics only because we are not yet sufficiently hardened to it (in a nutshell, we are all being played). We’ll work it out, and when we do, these will no longer be such powerful weapons to be used against us.

Gosh, that went a bit dark. Meanwhile, I finally managed to scrabble enough… oh wait, I just need to take a phone call from someone who is offering free alarms to people living in my area… that actually did just happen, now where was I? Ah, yes, I finally managed to scrabble enough wherewithal to get the final chapters of Smart Shift online. In a nutshell, technology needs to be handled with care.

The landing page is here, and you can read my retrospective thoughts on it here. Bottom line: don’t let anything get in the way of what you want to do.

All the best, Jon

09-22 – I'm worried I don't have imposter syndrome...

I’m worried I don’t have imposter syndrome…

What a difference a year makes. This time last year, I remember it well, the feeling of being unable to sustain the weekly newsletter I had been writing. Work had taken an unexpected turn, in that one client had a stream of activity that was growing like topsy. It was all hands to the pumps as we looked to get on top of it all — somewhere along the way, I was given the rather snazzy title of VP of Research.

Nothing has changed. Throughout lockdown, things have stayed as busy as ever. We were very lucky in one way: when the company was relaunched a few years ago, it did so without expensive offices in downtown San Francisco, preferring to focus on delivery. The business is multi-location, multi-timezone and works on the basis of trust, that people aren’t off playing golf when they should be working. Turns out, looking at recent circumstances, that people in general are pretty trustworthy, if you give them half the chance. Every barrel has bad apples, etc, but the point stands. 

So, yes, super-busy but nonetheless I’ve had time to reflect. Not least on my area of focus, which is how software is developed and deployed into operational use. There’s a massive irony here. My first job was as a programmer; I later ran tools and infrastructure for development teams; I went on to advise some pretty big organisations on how to develop software, and how to manage data centres, servers, storage, networking, security and all that. I’ve written books about it, for heaven’s sake — so how come, when I came to focus on this area again, I felt so out of my depth?

I’ve been tussling with this question for the last couple of years. Part of the answer is down to the fact that languages (including programming languages), mechanisms and tools change, as do infrastructure targets. Declarative and event-driven approaches are generally beyond me: you can put me in the category of someone who can write Pascal in any language. People change, and so do ways of thinking, of interacting. Which is why I felt even more out of place than usual, when I went to a GitHub Universe conference (they should have a special corner for old farts, with, I don’t know, ink pens to play with or something). 

However, I’ve seen patterns emerge, patterns which have both eased my fears, and given me the opportunity to give something back. Back in the Nineties I was working at the forefront of what we might call ‘the agile boom’ — a time in which older, ponderous approaches to software production, with two-year lead times and no guarantees of success — were being reconsidered in the light of the internet boom. The idea was, and remains simple: take too long to deliver something, and the world will have moved on. 

I’ve watched as methodologies have evolved, as programmers have been positioned as the kingmakers, as yet more books have been written, each claiming to have discovered some secret of unprecedented success, or a way to avoid inevitable failure. Look at Netflix and Amazon! Look at Blockbuster and Kodak! No doubt, these success and failure stories are real, but need to be tempered with the fact that four fifths of technology startups fail, whatever clever techniques they’re following. And meanwhile, many of the biggest, oldest businesses in the world lumber on. 

Aided by online information sharing, the world has become lifestyle-oriented, with new and improved always preferable to whatever was happening before — and the tech industry has not escaped the grasp of faddishness. No wonder I was feeling out of place, as I probably wasn’t the target market. Meanwhile, beneath the surface lies a simple truth, that such short-termism means missing out on fundamental elements such as planning, setting strategy and so on. And the spin-off result of doing lots of things very fast, is to generate a lot of complexity which then needs to be managed. 

Ah-ha, I thought to myself. It’s no surprise to me that we’re seeing what we might call ‘a wave of governance’ start to envelop the world of software development, as short-term perspectives are reconsidered in favour of getting things right first time. There’s buzz-phrases for this, of course, such as ‘shift-left’, which is about thinking about quality and security earlier in the process. Looking for governance-related topics to write about, I actively chose to align with the world of Value Stream Management (VSM), which essentially brings business process optimisation to software delivery. I paraphrase but that’s close enough. 

Do I think that software should be delivered more slowly, or favour a return to old-fashioned methodologies? Absolutely not. But it is right and proper that current approaches should mature to take longer-term goals into account. I know that even our most darling of cloud-native mega-businesses are now struggling with the complexity of what they have created — good for them for ignoring it while they established their brand, but you can only put good old-fashioned configuration management off for so long. 

So, yes, I’ve moved from a state of imposter syndrome to one in which I feel I can contribute some of the older lessons. And the good news is, it’s not just me that can do so. Many older, larger companies I have spoken to feel similarly out of their depth, like they can’t compete with newer organisations. For sure, they can’t suddenly become carefree startups; however they can recognise that many enterprise-y practices (such as aforementioned strategy and planning) are actually a good thing, which can be woven into new ways of delivering software. Put simply, as newer approaches evolve and mature, they become more appropriate for enterprise use. 

I’ll leave that thought there, other to say: don’t feel you have to be down with the cool kids, they haven’t got everything right and still have plenty to learn. That’s as true from a corporate, as an individual perspective. 

Someone, Somewhere — The Whole Of The World

In other news, I’ve written a song. It was quite cathartic to write and develop - you can hear it here. I’ve entered it in a local music competition if you like it and want to vote - it’s song number 34. 

All the best, and perhaps see you next year if not before. Thanks for reading,

Jon

November 2022

11-11 – First, apologies. Not for this being the first bulletin for two years (I will come to that), but for the people who responded to the last one in September 2020 and never got a reply. Your emails have been languishing in my inbox ever since, ever-hopeful I might get my act together. Well, now, I have; or at least, I have once more. We shall see if this becomes a regular thing.

First, apologies. Not for this being the first bulletin for two years (I will come to that), but for the people who responded to the last one in September 2020 and never got a reply. Your emails have been languishing in my inbox ever since, ever-hopeful I might get my act together. Well, now, I have; or at least, I have once more. We shall see if this becomes a regular thing.

I am, actually, quite hopeful. This isn’t going to be a “everything’s different now, I’m sorted” kind of squirmy rationale, but rather, an observation on the state of online publishing. In my own case, I had multiple self-hosted and aaS Wordpress sites; I was testing out Medium; I had this very newsletter on Mailchimp. And meanwhile, LinkedIn was yoo-hooing for my time, as were several Facebook pages and online groups. All that notwithstanding that I write for a living, as a hobby, and as a raison d’être. 

Note, this wasn’t people asking me to write stuff, I wouldn’t be so “don’t you know who I am” about that. Rather, the business model of all these places is that, to get eyeballs, they need user-generated content. Nothing new there, I know; but I would point the kind reader to the very real consequence of content-oriented paralysis, probably not all that different to the yoghurt-related stumblings we all experience in supermarkets. 

All of this ably documented by psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book “The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less”. I have’t read it, truth be told, as there’s simply too many other books on similar subjects, and I wouldn’t know where to start. And equally, it’s one of those books that is so neatly summarised by the title that it doesn’t need to be read. Sorry Barry, and sorry too to the author of the 80/20 rule (though Mr Pareto is probably due a few royalties there). 

In a Medium post on September 20, pretty much two years to the day that I wrote the last newsletter, I wrote, “Too many places to write, too many subsequent feeds, integrations and synchronisations to manage. In result, nothing gets done.” I realised that I needed to stop caring about where things were to be published (and such things as cadence, building audience etc), and focus primarily on the act of writing. 

I’d love to say this came to me as an epiphany, as I sat overlooking a sunrise on a distant beach. The truth is somewhat more mundane: I was actually facing several database limit warnings from my hosting provider, as my main Wordpress site had been inundated with Spam and I hadn’t been clearing it out. For reasons unknown, any subsequent efforts to do so were unsuccessful - so I decided to export, delete, and re-import the lot. Little did I know that the various plug-ins I had installed over the years would conflict with each other: the import failed, and I was forced to think again. 

Cue allegorical thought: whist I hadn’t been the smartest in not testing the import before deletion, for those who don’t know, this is a common cause of technological change in organisations large and small. We’d all love to think that IT strategy is set from the top for well-debated reasons, or let by smart engineers looking towards continuous improvement. Sure, these things happen, but equally often, IT teams are left scrambling to solve a problem caused by an inadvertent change, with consequences linked to unexpected dependencies. Truth, and as my old colleague and friend Tony might say, “It’s not the backups that matter, it’s the restores.” 

So, I was stuck with a very large XML file, unreadable by Wordpress, and containing the past twenty years of my writings. Hmm. Fortunately the past couple of decades, fuelled by open source and more general online behaviours, have resulted in all kinds of scripting languages and libraries, available to even those with now-limited hands-on experience. In not many lines of PHP, I was able to extract the meaty parts of the XML file into separate RTF documents, which I then imported to my preferred writing tool, Scrivener.

Interestingly, they amounted to 480,000 words, which isn’t a bad corpus of ramblings. Equally, and when faced with having to post each one back online individually, I realised may of them didn’t merit publication - it’s not as if everyone wants to read about my re-installation of some early version of Linux, is it? And equally equally, I realised I finally needed to get on top of what I published where, so I could start writing again, rather than spending my time “maintaining content”. 

So, gone was the self-hosted Wordpress (I created a new site and almost immediately got spammed - bye!). Gone also was the public Wordpress - I reused my script to pull multiple other articles into Scrivener. Gone was Substack, which I’d recently created with a misplaced notion that a new online destination might be just what I needed to get things going again. But in their place were Medium, which seems to be a reasonable place to host general content, LinkedIn for sharing more tech-related materials, and then a small, neat personal web site as a shop window, or mausoleum depending on which way you look at it.  

And that’s that. As a result I’ve been able to re-upload about 100K’s worth of old stuff (of 480K: how’s that, Pareto?), sharing as I go on various socials, and now - phew! I can get on with writing. What about the internal choice, I hear you say? I was going to add something about the existential nature of what to write about, but even as I write this, I realise that is less important. By unblocking the pipe and letting the writing flow, that’s a large part of the problem solved. I’m not even going to worry about whether anyone wants to read it, not for now. 

There - some allegorical thoughts, but most of all a release to get on with the job. I would add “extra-curricular” at the end of this missive, but it hasn’t really been very technical, has it? I will mention that, as part of this release of orthographical tension, I’ve taken the opportunity to start revising and uploading Smart Shift, my history of tech and its consequences, so watch that space; along with the decision to get other part-written and complete stories online. Hooks to all of these at my web site if you are interested. 

There we have it, and thanks for reading,

Jon

December 2022

12-04 – Bulletin 2 December 2022. The System Is the System, whether we like it or not

Bulletin 2 December 2022. The System Is the System, whether we like it or not

Sir Galahad: Camelot!

Sir Lancelot: Camelot!

Patsy: It’s only a model.

Working in technology has an addling effect on the brain. Despite decades of trying to ignore the Kool-Aid, its residue has still established itself a beachhead in my mind, has created just a little furring in the pipelines of my thinking. Even as I look at the world, see its continued stumble forward into what I hope is a more enabled, empowered future, I want to believe the visions of a better place I receive on an almost daily basis. Everything will be better, cheaper, greener, I’m told – and while I know it isn’t simple as that, I want to believe the superfice, to take the bold statements on face value. I really do.

The problem isn’t that it is all made up; more, the challenge is how to tease what can be achieved, from what is being presented. Don’t get me wrong – I know we need a vision. As humans, we’re only likely to respond if we are excited enough to buy into what’s being presented.

We also love a charismatic speaker, who can make everything sound possible. I know I do – I still remember buying three bottles of some cleaning product from a man outside a hypermarket in Paris, just because he was so good at telling me how good the product was. The punchline isn’t even whether it worked, when I got it home; it’s that I never found out, because in all the excitement, I’d temporarily forgotten that I rarely clean my car. The three bottles sat on a shelf in the garage for at least a decade before they were disposed of. No, I’m not proud of this.

In business, it’s a challenge, isn’t it? Every organisation needs a vision, needs leadership, needs all the oompf it takes to make its employees want to get up in the morning. And similarly, the tech industry thrives on cranial energy, generating its own cryptocurrency by way of synaptic power. Without excitement, there would be no industry – and therefore no innovation, no breakthroughs, no digital transformation (there’s the K-A kicking in). I’ve written before about annealing, in which metal amalgams are heated so that they flow together, before cooling to form a hardened alloy – this is simulated annealing of the senses, just without the cooling.

The challenge is when it – the vision – doesn’t actually map onto an achievable reality. I remember one person I used to work for, who did a pretty good job of painting a picture of what the future was going to look like. “Trouble is, he’s started believing his own bullshit,” said a colleague. True or not, that’s the danger – if our own thinking (singular or corporate marketing) jumps some figurative shark, then we arrive in a nether-nether wasteland of unachievable goals.

Hyperbolic statements about the future are one thing, but similarly imaginary realities about the present are quite something else. We can all be skewed by our own perspective and experience (to the extent that we can believe everything is fine just because we are). Denial is a dangerous thing, and denial of reality is doubly so.

Some of this boils down to straightforward systems thinking. I’m not greatly experienced in this area so bear with me, but one thing I have learned is that it is a question of scope. If you look at manufacturing plant, for example, it takes in trailer loads of stuff at one end, and similar trailers line up at the other to take away its mass-produced outputs. You may have a great idea that it could be doing something completely different, but it won’t, any more than a car could double as a parachute.

And so it is in business, which takes in whatever it likes – widgets or liquids, ideas and concepts – and outputs something people will want to pay for. Organisations today are tussling with how to deliver on the promise of the technological age: they’ve been told that digital transformation implies some wholesale change in business models, a starting from scratch, a reinvention. I’m completely up for it, sounds great – but for two things. The first is that every single new organisation I have seen, as it scales, creates similar structures and has similar cultural/political elements as every other, past or present.

This is debatable. We have flatter structures, matrices, self-managed clusters and so on. But they all still have meetings, silos, career ladders, inter-departmental politics and the rest. No magical structure exists which somehow misses out our human traits, habits and foibles.

The second issue, a corollary of the first, is that making any change will inevitably hit a wall of, potentially insurmountable resistance. You can do what some are currently trying, which is to remove half the staff and keep your fingers crossed that you still have a business at the end of it. Or you can work through the well-founded principles of change management and make the adjustments that are actually feasible, and palatable for your organisation.

The digital transformation mantra may well have been “transform or die,” citing Kodak, Blockbuster and the like; but there’s even greater potential for “transform and die” – it’s funny how the tech industry chooses to ignore the demise of its own business empires (Yahoo! And Myspace, anyone?) even as it keeps telling other industries how they need to get with the program.

What’s the answer? I hate to get dull about this, but it reminds me of my days as a business analyst, where we followed a pretty boring, three-step methodology (even the word makes me want to yawn) when it came to business change. First, understand the as-is situation; then, define a to-be situation; then put together a plan for getting from one to the other. Insert “low-hanging fruit” and “stakeholder buy-in” and you’re pretty much done.

So, yes, to as-is and to-be. The point here is that, unless you’re going to take a leap into the unknown, you need to know what you have, before you decide how to change it. The art of the possible has to accept reality as it stands, working with the existing system rather than creating a new one (nota bene, the latter option exists: it’s called setting up a company).

To finish on a piece of good news, even such an approach requires vision, leadership and indeed, charisma to deliver. There’s plenty of milage to be gained from adopting technology in new and exciting ways, without feeling obliged to replace the farm with a casino in the sky. In fact, in the longer term, perhaps more so.

Apropos of vision vs reality, here’s an article I wrote this week about the “Journey to the Cloud” mantra costing organisations money, as it skews their technology strategies and causes them to spend more than they should, whilst achieving less benefit than they hope. I proffer “multi-platform architecture” as one way of thinking different. Here’s my post on LinkedIn about it, I’d welcome any thoughts you have (there or here!)

Thanks for reading,

Jon

2025

Posts from 2025.

May 2025

05-20 – On principles, in principle

On principles, in principle

Well, hello again.

I do like principles. Over the years I have spent my time looking for patterns in structures, in processes, in behaviour. To be fair, I can’t help myself — as a kid I used to do it with wallpaper, or the light shapes cars made as they passed (didn’t we all, before TV begat the wealth of multimedia channels we have today). From time to time, I’ve written them down — back in the late Nineties, for example, i documented how all processes could be defined as lines, V’s and loops.

Anyway I’ve collected a few of them, some adopted or borrowed, some epiphanies, some emerging from solving a tricky problem. I reckon I have another ten years in this game, one way or another, so now’s a good time to start distilling them down, making sense of them — if others can learn from my a-ha moments (and mistakes) then, great.

Here’s my current top seven from a tech perspective, and more broadly:

Orientation before action — know where you are, before deciding what to do. A very personal one, this.

Align with complexity — we’re not going to fix (or even understand) it all, and we can’t pretend it’s not there.

Plan forwards, map backwards — a corollary, as well as reflecting the first habit: start with the end in mind.

Architect not too large or too small — Goldilocks got it right, particularly when it comes to structure, data and process.

Deliver often and early — getting stuff done is about divide and conquer, and then get something out there.

Manage everything as a service — so powerful, this, as it enables traceability. As true for restaurants as applications.

Recognise value above all — ultimately, success comes when benefits outweigh costs, the fundamental equation.

I don’t know whether these will distil down to three, or whether I will end up with hundreds, time will tell (speaking of time, that has to be a principle in itself: I am increasingly convinced it is the most valuable commodity we possess). But it’s a good set for now. I fed them into Larry the LLM and asked what they shared: intention, it said, which was a pretty good answer. Not mine, I was thinking balance, but “intentional equilibrium” has a ring to it.

I don’t know where this is going, perhaps this will just be the latest sporadic bulletin from the steppes of rural England. Still, it’s now coming from a new, self-hosted web site, where I have collated the (literally) thousands of posts I’ve written over the years, as well as books, poetry and everything else. Thank you for sticking with it, and we’ll see what the next few years hold.

Cheers, Jon

Cheshire Cat

Posts published in Cheshire Cat.

1999

Posts from 1999.

April 1999

04-01 – Government launches IT White Paper

Government launches IT White Paper

Perhaps the most important elements we can glean from the government’s white paper “Modernising Government”, are the milestones it sets for the availability of its electronic services. The first is that 25% of government services should be available online by 2002. The second sets a target of 2008 for all government services to be accessible electronically. Pragmatic application of the Pareto principle – the 80:20 rule – is required to ensure that the most useful services (in terms of both utilisation and benefit) are included in the 25%. In this way the needs of most individuals and businesses should be met, and the costs of delivery of government services, should be dramatically reduced within three years. A lot, however, is dependent on facilities to access such services. Will the government run electronic and paper facilities in parallel? Will this be seen as the moment when the possibility of information haves and have-nots became reality, with connected citizens being ever better informed and better able to access services than “the great unwired”?  Proactive steps will be necessary to avoid this.

The 2008 deadline might be “realistic,” as noted by Ian Taylor MP at the launch of IT-Director.com yesterday evening. However, when the time comes it will be very difficult to judge whether the government of the day achieves the target. The eWorld is commonly known to be changing at a pace of dog years; it is also recognised as an enabler of vastly different ways of working and living. It is likely that the services provided by government will change significantly over the next decade, particularly as it becomes clear that the internet is a vehicle for even the most insignificant to have a voice. Hence, even if the government of the day meets its goals, it is likely that whatever is achieved by 2008 bears little resemblance to that which was initially planned.

(First published 1 April 1999)

04-01 – IT-Director.com launched by Bloor Research, Certus and Silicon News

IT-Director.com launched by Bloor Research, Certus and Silicon News

Yesterday evening, the realities of how business will operate in the 21st century were very much in evidence at the House of Commons launch of IT-Director.com. Speakers Ian Taylor MP, Paul Cooper of British Gypsum, David Taylor of Certus and Robin Bloor of Bloor Research, all described how co-operative approaches, such as those enabled by IT-Director.com, would become essential elements of business success.

Robin Bloor, CEO of Bloor Research, described the role of IT-Director.com as a provider of “instant analysis” to its subscribers. This was noted by Ian Taylor MP as a key facet of the online service, acknowledging he was delighted that it would be available to members of the house. David Taylor, President of Certus, explained how IT-Director.com and Certus intended to provide a triangle of communication between end-users, vendors and decision makers. “IT-Director.com will help us provide a quality IT service to positively support business goals,” he noted. Paul Cooper, IT Director at British Gypsum, stressed the role of the future IT Director as focussing on business requirements and issues, whilst promoting and facilitating the use of IT. Continuing the co-operative theme, Certus also announced the launch of its 4th R campaign, involving businesses working with education to enable the next generation of IT-literate employees.

(First published 1 April 1999)

04-01 – Open Goal for Microsoft

Open Goal for Microsoft

Why do Microsoft want to open their source? The answer is that they probably don’t. For one thing, it is unlikely that the Windows code is particularly pretty. Any software that has gone through the same number of reincarnations as Windows is likely to contain plenty of redundancies, inconsistencies and downright errors. There are tens of thousands of seasoned developers that will be going over the stuff with a fine tooth comb the moment it is released to look for problems. Undoubtedly they will find and gleefully report them to the baying (and burgeoning) anti-Microsoft camp, adding to the company’s already tarnished reputation for quality. Given the current climate, it may be that the software giant has no choice but to surrender a little of its projected image of perfection. A little lesson in humility is not such a bad thing, once in a while.

(First published 1 April 1999)

04-09 – ISAs and Legacy Systems

ISAs and Legacy Systems

ISAs are quietly posing a significant problem to the IT departments of financial services companies. There are several factors for this. First, ISAs are essentially a management vehicle with which a customer can manage a variety of investment types. The implication for IT is that legacy systems which could previously be run standalone now require to interoperate. Similarly, business processes, for example for savings and for investment customers, are having to be merged. Second, the complex rules governing ISAs were only available in draft form until very recently, hence organisations have had very little time to implement ISA facilities in their applications. Together these factors are causing much of grief, not to mention cost. It could be argued that the ISA situation will be beneficial, as it encourages companies to integrate their legacy applications and, in the process, provide a better overall service. However, what with the Year 2000 and the Euro, it is probably an additional headache they would have been glad to do without.

(First published 9 April 1999)

04-09 – The Art Of War

The Art Of War

The Web is changing the world, in peace and, so it would seem, in war. All sides of the conflict, plus external agencies, are using the internet more than ever to aid them in their tasks. If the rumours are true, for example, systematic hacking of both military and civilian sites is becoming expected as a weapon of war. At the same time, as in Rwanda, relief agencies are reported to be using bulletin boards to help reunite refugee families. Donations to such agencies are now accepted online. News agencies are broadcasting up to the minute information, in a range of formats and languages, to a global audience. As with all tools, the internet cuts both ways.

(First published 9 April 1999)

04-12 – Global Village Voice

Global Village Voice

BT is launching a voice-over-IP service. Read this statement, now read it again. British Telecom, the organisation providing telephone and dial-up services to the vast majority of the British public, is launching a service which enables its users to communicate via the Internet at the price of a local call, wherever in the UK they may be situated. Admittedly, the service is only open to customers of BT’s own ISP. Also, it is known that Internet telephony still suffers from quality issues remeniscent of patching a call to a less-advanced foreign country ten years ago. But still, this move by BT is a milestone in the inexorable rise of the Internet. What we are seeing is the convergence of technologies and this has several implications. Given BT’s acceptance (and endorsement) of voice-over-IP, the question raised is that of relative cost. Subscription to BT’s ClickFree service is now free, and two BT ClickFree subscribers can call each other at local rates as long as each has a PC. In other words, users of telephone handsets are going to be discriminated against – these unfortunates will still have to pay the price of a long-distance call. This overhead will become difficult to justify as quality improves and hence more and more people start using the Internet for voice calls.

BT, like other telcos, has already responded to concerns on call pricing, with the price gap between international calls and local calls decreasing. This is fair enough, as most of the costs of a call are derived from enabling a connection to the local exchange and subsequent billing of the call. BT will be keen to keep its revenue streams open for as long as possible. Ultimately, though, the costs of both national and international calls will have to bow to the pressure of the Internet.

(First published 12 April 1999)

04-12 – Sailing the Shifting Sands of Silicon

Sailing the Shifting Sands of Silicon

One of the issues faced by hardware manufacturers is knowing which technologies and markets are a stable enough foundation on which to base a business strategy. Recent reports are an indicator of this, from IBM’s report of a $1 billion loss for its PC division, to Compaq’s shock earnings announcement today. Stable foundations are elusive, but companies have no choice but to continue their efforts to identify, encourage or even create points of sufficient solidity on which to develop and market their products. Even if some organisations, such as Dell and Gateway, have business models which are demonstrably successful for a while, it is clear that no one company has the monopoly on predicting the future.

One company which may be getting it right is Hewlett Packard. HP has a hard-earned reputation as a provider of quality, technologically sound systems and equipment. Unfortunately, it has also gained a reputation of being a little dull and it has become left behind in the systems race. There are signs that all this may be changing. Last month, HP announced it was spinning off its testing and measurement division. The company is now announcing a range of computers to be targeted at the e-commerce market. The new N-Class servers will run Unix as well as NT, proving the company’s strategic commitment to this operating system. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the servers are designed to be upgradable to Intel’s Merced 64-bit, RISC-based processor, due out next year. Hewlett Packard are not just aligning themselves with Intel’s strategy: HP is being instrumental in the development of McKinley, Merced’s successor, and are developing a number of key components of the chipset required by McKinley.

This approach is low-risk, considering that other parts of the industry (including Microsoft) are endorsing Intel’s 64-bit architecture. At the same time, HP appear to be injecting more pizazz into their product marketing. In doing these things, they are positioning themselves as a major player in the systems battles of the future. Who dares, might just win this time around.

(First published 12 April 1999)

04-14 – Applications - Rent or Buy?

Applications - Rent or Buy?

The chances are you have not heard of Corio, however you will have heard of British Telecom. These companies are linked by a common objective - to provide application services to customers over the Internet. Corio, a Californian firm, is linking with Peoplesoft; BT has struck a deal with SAP. There will be many providers of such services, making enterprise scale applications such as these available to customers that could not otherwise afford them. Smaller scale applications can also be rented out over the Web – for example Yahoo already provides email and scheduling and is reported to be considering providing word processing facilities.

The advantages of application outsourcing are numerous – for example,  capital costs and administration overheads are enormously reduced and customers can take advantage of the newest releases of applications. Downsides are yet to be fully appreciated as this market is still in its inception, but are likely to include problems of interoperability between local and remote applications, issues with service level maintenance and difficulties in changing suppliers. Just as with outsourcing of IS departments a few years ago, perhaps the biggest problems will stem from the legal wrangles which will inevitably arise as customers find the service is not all it was hoped for. Application outsourcing, whilst appearing extremely attractive, should be treated with the utmost caution until its benefits and costs have been fully appraised.

(First published 14 April 1999)

04-14 – Internet Value – Business Sense

Internet Value – Business Sense

Nobody really knows what the Internet is worth, but whatever its value, companies which have successfully invested in the Web are reaping its rewards to the detriment of those left behind. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology yesterday, Bill Gates underlined his predictions of ubiquitous Internet usage by saying that “Billions of dollars of market valuation are based on knowing how quickly this [Internet uptake] will happen.” Organisations unable to exploit these cash flows are proving the losers. For example, Merrill Lynch came in 12th in the US last year, down from 8th in 1997, relative to other securities companies setting up Internet IPOs. Merrill blamed the “less-than-constructive” advice of its (former) Internet analyst, but it must bear the cost.

Smaller companies, too, are suffering as they find that the Web does not wait around for the late arrivals. Bob Geldof’s flight reservations site deckchair.com, announced last September but not launched until today, will pay the price: the unique features it touted six months ago, such as flight availability, personalisation and online booking, have become standard on a wide variety of travel sites. The Internet is a club with little respect for its members: it remains to be seen whether deckchair.com is arriving too late to join.

(First published 14 April 1999)

04-14 – Linux - Immature but happening anyway

Linux - Immature but happening anyway

The open software movement has long been seen as a David, able to topple the Goliaths of greedy corporations and sluggish standards bodies. In reality, better parallels might be derived from the natural world, where myriads of chaotic organisms work together, over time reducing old orders to rubble and creating their own. It happened with TCP/IP, which was considered the de facto standard by the masses long before it was grudgingly adopted by the big people. It shall happen, indeed it is happening, with Linux.

Despite its ready adoption by the technical community, it has to be said that Linux is probably not ready for mass-market rollout. As a Unix derivative, Linux is too complex to be given to “just anybody.” Efforts are underway to change this – Caldera Systems, for example, are launching an easy-to-use Linux but even they admit it isn’t ready to be pitched against Windows. Linux also lacks the applications support of Windows, a fact acknowledged by Red Hat, another Linux distributor.

Yes, Linux is immature. However this does not seem to be preventing a desire for its adoption across the industry. In a recent poll of 3Com customers, 50 percent of respondents requested support for Linux, a fact which has caused 3Com to rewrite its Linux strategy. Other companies are experiencing the same upsurge and are responding accordingly. It is unlikely that the Linux bandwagon is a fad: rather, the global technical community is responding to the potential of a robust, flexible, free operating system. Experience shows that, once this level of consumer interest exists, it is unlikely to go away despite the best efforts of the giants to subvert or ignore it.

(First published 14 April 1999)

04-16 – For Banking, the Future is Online

For Banking, the Future is Online

A spokesman for NatWest said yesterday that Internet banking was a “luxury service” and that NatWest would not be closing any high-street branches. There are two ways in which these remarks can be interpreted. Firstly, that NatWest do not see the Internet as something which will significantly affect their business. This interpretation goes against the grain – the Internet is speeding up trends which are already well-established, such as the market’s acceptance of telephone banking. It is very likely that in the future, a significant proportion of banking transactions will be undertaken without a branch visit. Such a vision is difficult to realise at the moment, as the provision of facilities is dependent on customer adoption and customers are notoriously conservative. However, it is only a matter of time before the UK consumer decides that it is, indeed, more convenient to dial a number or type a Web address rather than try to find a parking place on a busy street in office hours. The second way to interpret the remarks is that NatWest are discussing the short to medium term. We must hope that this is so: when the use of online and telephone service reaches critical mass, no business will be able to avoid its effects.

(First published 16 April 1999)

04-16 – The Sun is Shining Again

The Sun is Shining Again

SUN Microsystems, it would appear, can breathe again. SUN have never been unsuccessful, not in monetary terms; however in technological terms the last few years have been a little tense, to say the least.

Not so very long ago SUN was the provider of choice of Unix workstations and servers. The mainframe was dead, so it was assumed, and the lower end of the market consisted largely of PCs running MS-DOS. The workstation market was virtually sewn up, with users finding the term SUN as synonymous with workstation, as Hoover was to vacuum cleaner. Need to develop software? Use SUN. Need to run a CAD application? Use SUN. They had it made.

Things started to turn sour for SUN when Windows 3.1 was launched. Within months, the costs of workstation hardware and software seemed all too expensive relative to the apparent cheapness of a PC running Windows applications. IT managers, used to running PCs, saw cost savings and very quickly the de facto desktop became the PC. SUN were on the run.

Smaller companies might have buckled under the joint pressures of Intel and Microsoft, but somehow SUN have refused to let go. Recognising that the desktop battle was lost, Scott McNeally turned his full attention to the still lucrative server market. His timing was both fortuitous and impeccable: within months the World Wide Web had left the launch pad and a whole new, rapidly growing server market had been created.

SUN have not had it easy over the last couple of years but with equal measures of good luck and judgement they have transferred their brand. SUN is now the Internet server of choice: its alliance with AOL is ensuring a continuation to both its revenue stream and its reputation.

(First published 16 April 1999)

04-22 – Quantity is not the only answer.

Quantity is not the only answer.

IDC are predicting a shortfall of 600,000 networking professionals across Western Europe by 2002.  This figure is based on an expected requirement for 1.6 million network staff, given current trends. Phew. This is scary stuff. It gets worse: if the situation is not rectified, say IDC, we could be in for a European slump as businesses fail to leverage their growing success and existing assets due to inadequate infrastructure. Dark days are ahead, it would appear. Or would it?

There exist a couple of factors which, together, might augur a less bleak future. The first lies in the past, it is something we have always know. Motherhood, if I may. The second is a direct result of providing global connectivity, in which network professionals have already played a significant role.

So to the first point. IDC rightly say that training and development needs are becoming acute. However it is well known in networking circles, as in others, that real experience has far greater value than the classroom learning by rote that is becoming commonplace for vendor-sponsored certification programmes. The ability to answer a multiple choice questionnaire, a networking engineer does not make. Street knowledge and management experience tells us that some individuals, qualified or otherwise, are worth their weight in gold-plated terminators. We know who they are – they come in, they diagnose, they tweak and go away again, leaving us to wonder why so many features of networking equipment remain undocumented. Identify these people within your organisation. Treat them well, pay them well and keep their skills current. Involve them in infrastructure design decisions and strategic rollout programmes. Or leave them in the workshop, but don’t be surprised when your network management policy is jettisoned because people are too busy fighting fires.

The second point is newer and requires a little more thought. There has been, indeed there is being, an explosion in connectivity caused by the convergence and standardisation of communications technologies - we call this internetworking. The internet is bringing with it a raft of new options and opportunities to businesses. For example, applications outsourcing enables smaller businesses to take advantage of enterprise applications with minimal administration overhead. Secondly, telecommuting is happening more slowly than predicted, but it is globalising: it is now possible to outsource services (from managed call centres to point secretarial work) to companies and individuals literally on the other side of the globe.  Such outsourcing of both systems and services is implicitly cutting the requirement for local infrastructure, hence the need for engineering support can be reduced leaving businesses to concentrate on their core offering.

Smart businesses will be worrying about the future, inevitable skills shortage in network staff. Training and development programmes are essential, but so is looking after incumbent staff. The smartest businesses of all will be looking to profit from all the opportunities presented by the internet revolution. Good luck to them.

(First published 22 April 1999)

04-22 – The hidden cost of Internet Real Estate

The hidden cost of Internet Real Estate

Wallstreet.com was sold for 1.03 million dollars. What, the company? No, just the name, to a Venezuelan casino. The purchasers don’t think they are crazy, so good luck to them. Across the Atlantic, the premium on a good “.com” name may be seen as worthwhile, but may have some impacts back on the old continent.

Despite the existence of national addresses such as .co.uk and .co.fr, the .com domain is accepted as the domain of the global enterprise. 90% of words in the English dictionary are now registered as .com domains, as the prediction is, “if you want soap, go to soap.com. If you want flights, go to flights.com.” This may or may not be true but it certainly makes sense and seems to be being borne out by patterns of Internet usage, hence the high premium on the better terms. The downside is that the majority of .com addresses are registered to US companies. So, if you want flight tickets, you may end up paying an American company for the privilege. European businesses may lose out to US companies purely because of Web serendipity. This may not be a problem for most European companies – the french will, for example, go to “savon.com” rather than “soap.com”. But watch this space – American entrepreneurs will not take long to wake up to the commercial opportunities they are at the moment too busy to cover.

(First published 22 April 1999)

04-22 – Turbulent times for IT stocks

Turbulent times for IT stocks

If we needed any more proof that we are in the midst of a huge wave of technology change, we have just had it. IBM have made a stonking profit, shattering analysts’ predictions. But there’s more – Lucent, another old dinosaur, has done it as well. Compaq and HP are down but SUN is up, Informix is up, Unisys is up. What’s going on? Simple. Companies which are successfully leveraging the Internet, either by providing the technologies to support it or by using it as a business tool, are winning. Companies which fail to tell a coherent eCommerce story, or which fail to exploit the capabilities the Web provides, are losing out. Sure, the world is more complex than this simplistic view might suggest, but even with other factors taken into account, companies big and small are finding it very difficult to buck this trend.

(First published 22 April 1999)

04-26 – Coming soon to your screens ….

Coming soon to your screens ….

Surely most exciting developments on the Internet at the moment are those relating to multimedia. Well, let’s face it, these developments would be exciting if we could take advantage of them. The possibility of a full surround sound audiovisual experience, broadcast directly from the Web, is, frankly, non-existent at the moment. Even with a leased line, the closest we can get is a low-quality, stop-start audio stream. Having said that, we all know that the bandwidth will increase and the technology will improve… but even then the chances are that what we want (streamed, high-quality full-screen video) will remain a distant mirage for some time yet. We do, at least, know that it will come. It is a good job that the technology is not yet ready, because if it were possible right now, it is probable that most of us wouldn’t be quick enough to do anything astounding with it. We have 3-5 years of slack before the immersive multimedia wave hits – will we be ready?

(First published 26 April 1999)

04-26 – Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam

Spam is back in the news again. Not special american processed meat, as I’m sure you know, but unsolicited email. How this won the name “spam” is lost in the mists of dog time, but it shares some characteristics with its namesake – instantly recognisable, unavoidable and often without taste. So – whilst Software Warehouse is saying that it probably can’t take Insight to court for spamming the former’s customers (with a dubiously obtained database), the European Parliament has voted against an anti-spamming amendment to the eCommerce bill.

In fact, in a funny way, it is Software Warehouse (or their ISP, Planet Online) that should be in the dock as well as Insight. According to UK Data Protection law, the keeper of personal data is held responsible for its upkeep and security so, in a case like this, they should carry the can. There have been several cases in the past, however, of information being obtained form ISPs, which are a common target for hackers. It is probably unfair to expect any ISP to somehow be able to secure this information when there is a global network of internet junkies conspiring together to look for security holes. The odds are undoubtedly stacked against ISPs.

It is probably also true to recognise that spam is a global problem. The Internet is too complex to be shored up against the distribution of unsolicited information from any far-flung corner of the world-wide web.

Given the current inevitability of spam, however, we should not sit idly by - legislation is still necessary. National and international laws currently lag far behind the technology curve, but efforts should continue to ensure that this gap is closed. Long arm laws, which enable prosecutions across international boundaries, are being implemented in the US and this concept should be extended to our own shores to counter the web’s global nature. Information misuse laws need to be modified and extended to take into account the new possibilities afforded by technology. The biggest problem here is one of timeliness - law-making cycles should permit the development of a flexible, responsive legal framework which keeps its currency against a fast-moving technological background. Otherwise, unscrupulous users of the Internet will be permitted to keep one step ahead of the law, conducting injustices without ever committing a crime.

(First published 26 April 1999)

04-27 – IT Security doesn’t have to be Rocket Science

IT Security doesn’t have to be Rocket Science

It is worth reading Silicon.com’s headline that the UK government is exposed to hackers. Firstly, it says that security firm NTA monitor found that 31% of .gov.uk email servers were running flawed software. That’s the scare-mongering bit. It goes on to say how NTA monitor discovered this – by sending emails to the servers to identify which software the servers were running.

It is commonly known in IT security circles that the best way to identify security holes is to use the same techniques as the hackers. Indeed, suites of tools are available which act as “auto-hackers”, which run ensembles of simulated hacks to find weaknesses. Some of these tools are available for free, from organisations such as CERT. The question asked is, but can’t the hackers get hold of the tools as well? Of course they can. The principle is that hackers know this stuff anyway, so IT managers should also be informed. This is why IT managers are duty bound to use such facilities and close up any holes they may find. Otherwise the hackers will do so instead. Illegal access becomes no more difficult than running a few scripts and reading a log file.

(First published 27 April 1999)

04-27 – Network Computing has its place

Network Computing has its place

The Network Computer, launched with much hype and applomb by Larry Ellison four years ago, is widely believed to be dead following only minimal success. What killed it? Although the Windows camp was largely responsible, through products such as Citrix Winframe and Windows Terminal Server, the advent of web browser-based applications should also take a share of the blame. Or should that be credit? As SUN’s I-Planet announcement demonstrates, the Network Computer or NC is, and always was a myth.

I-Planet is a software package which runs on a server to enable applications and databases to be accessed through a Web browser. Browsers are becoming established as the standard device interface to the internet or intranet, hence the I-Planet concept is sound. SUN is not the only company to see that the browser-enabled, thin client approach is worth developing: most vendors, including SAP and Peoplesoft, are scurrying to web-enable their applications.

It is this facility any different to the NC architecture? No, of course it is not, in principle, but the NC concept is far too flexible to be limited to single device type or hardware. All browser-enabled devices, from PCs to PDAs, mobile phones to set-top boxes, should be seen as Network Computers. Other architectures have their place, for example thick clients for graphics intensive tasks, but the thin, browser-based client will be the best approach for a large number of applications. The NC might have died, but its spirit lives on and on.

(First published 27 April 1999)

04-27 – Signs of Internet Immaturity

Signs of Internet Immaturity

Three young, exuberant individuals in the US are landing up in court following a spoof press release concerning the availability of high-speed communications bandwidth. This unfortunate April Fool incident, in which the joke seems to have turned on the jokers, is just one example (there were unfounded stock rumours being posted on message boards last week) of immaturity being seen on the internet. This is not really about the childishness of the people posting the information. We all need a sense of humour. No, this concerns the current state of the internet and the resulting gullibility of its users. Hey, it’s not their fault. The electronic superhighway needs us to be reasonably open to just about anything happening – there are so many advances in technology and capability that we seem required to suspend our disbelief for a good few years yet if we are to benefit from its potential.

Unfortunately, this leaves us open to confidence tricks, both humorous and malicious. So what should we do? We should move forward with open minds, learning as we go to take advantage of this new medium. Should tricksters try to hold our naivety to ransom, they should pay for their actions. But we should allow a little flexibility to deal with the occasions when undergraduate tomfoolery catches us out.

(First published 27 April 1999)

May 1999

05-04 – ECommerce Crisis

ECommerce Crisis

A crisis, it is said, is a problem with no time left to solve it. It may be triggered by external factors, such as losing a job or winning on the horses (and it’s a harder pill to swallow when the cause of our pain is that our wildest hopes have been met), but its causes lie most often in the past and creep up unawares. When dealing with a crisis, it is first necessary to admit fallibility: only then is it possible to start coping with the hand that has been dealt. We are all individual, sayeth Brian, but we are not immortal and we are all subject to the same patterns of behaviour as out peers. Even the stages of coping are predictable, to an extent – consider those identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, for people coming to terms with terminal illness – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages have been applied, in one form or another, to everything from dealing with herpes to coping with mediochre golf. It may be that the stages are not exact, but then this is not an exact science. The stages are a gross simplification of real life, but they are still recognisable to the majority of those who have lived through “difficult times”.

Why am I saying this? Well, lets look for some parallels. Despite the powerful BPR rhetoric of the past ten years, do we look about ourselves and find a brave new world of mature, evolving, learning enterprises? Nope. It is fair to say that, although the headcounts are reduced and we are more reliant on bought-in services than before, not much has changed. To be fair, huge efforts are often made, for example reorganising corporate structures, merging with the competition and investing in call centres. But generally, these investments occur because the decision makers’ hands are forced by external factors such as increased competition and Y2K. It is no secret that the biggest blocker to business change is “resistance to change,” and the forming, storming, norming and performing mantra of organisational change bears a remarkable resemblance to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages.

Whatever we want to call it, the Internet, the Web, eCommerce is just one more external cause which is going to trigger business crisis. Fundamental change we will see - it is already happening in the states and will come over here as inevitably as disco dancing and the skateboard. This is not just another stateside fashion, however – this is unavoidable change on a global scale. There is a fundamental difference between this and previous industry-shaking events.  The first off the blocks, if correctly prepared, is appearing to win the race. Time is becoming crucial: companies which procrastinate are losing market share. This well-documented trend is an omen for us all. What is also interesting is the other side of the coin, where companies have been victims of their own online success – for example the computer systems of eTrade, the online brokerage, suffering a number of outages due to the volume of people accessing the site. eTrade has survived (with a mere 25 thousand complaints) but other such companies have not been so lucky.

Admittedly we are not in crisis yet, not quite. The percentage of UK business conducted online is at 0.5%, so there is no need for unmitigated panic. The trends and supporting factors suggest that in ten years time a large proportion of business will be conducted online. We can wait until external factors force our hands, or we can start a process now, remembering that the stages we will go through a re largely predetermined. Sure, we need our denial phase. It is a time during which we assimilate the facts, assess the consequences and come to terms with the fact that nothing will ever be the same. Better that we start the process now and still leave time to reorient our businesses and profit, yes benefit, from the eCommerce revolution. We cannot make the revolution happen, and neither can we predict or plan for every eventuality. However, by forcing our own hands and coping with the consequences, we can at least orient ourselves so we are facing in the right direction when the time comes, for example by building business relationships with possible partners, or implementing the open, secure, scalable architectures which will be necessary for online access to our systems. Surely this is preferable to doing nothing in the blind hope that nothing will come of it, or worse seeing the policy of wait and see become wait and watch others succeed.

(First published 4 May 1999)

05-10 – Agnostic to what’s in the box

Agnostic to what’s in the box

An agnostic is a person who does not know if a god or gods exist. Hence, as Microsoft continues its march into the hinterlands of consumer devices, it has a battle on its hands. Microsoft’s recent alliance with AT&T signals its “bullishness” (a word which the company is very attached to) about its entry into the internet set top box market. As discussed in Friday’s analysis, its rationale is to put Windows CE onto 5 million of these devices. The fray is already joined by Sun with Java and Symbian with EPOC – AT&T’s position is now unclear. What a battle there will be. But it will pass largely unnoticed by the mass market.

Microsoft’s Windows 95 announcement was a marketing coup which has never been bettered, winning the hearts and minds of millions of PC users. Can you imagine being able to announce a new mobile phone or laser printer in such a way? No. Device technologies don’t lend themselves to such stunts, as their users are largely oblivious to what goes on inside them. Internet set top boxes will enable access to the web without needing consumers to back one technology or another. In any case, it is likely that the choice of set top boxes will largely be decided by the service providers - the ISPs, media companies and cable companies. This is a fact already being exploited by Microsoft, for example through their Telewest alliance announced today. Indeed, as discussed today in “IT infrastructure for free”, the chances are the boxes will be given away or incorporated in other devices such as the TV set. IT vendors may have god-like status in technological circles, but in the greater, unknowing world they are less likely to be recognised as such. Microsoft’s battle is not so much against the other giants in the industry, but it is a fight for brand recognition in a mass market of disinterested consumers.

(First published 10 May 1999)

05-10 – IT Infrastructure for free

IT Infrastructure for free

So, BskyB are to give away satellite receivers for a song (or a forty pound connection charge). This announcement may have come as a bit of a shock to those poor punters who have just shelled out hundreds of pounds. Fortunately for them, the broadcaster is to freeze their subscriptions to make up. In any case, in this converging market, the news should not come as a surprise.

Let’s think about this. Again and again, we have examples of technology and services being given away for free. Look at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the now-ubiquitous mobile phone (which has been consistently offered at several hundred pounds lower than its cost of manufacture). Reasons may vary – in all cases the suppliers are looking to win market share which they can exploit later or leverage for other products, in some cases costs are recuperated, at least partially, through subsequent subscription costs. A company in the US is even giving away PCs for free, but considering that these can now be built for the cost of a mobile phone, this approach should not be unexpected.

Given that this trend is to continue, we are likely to see ever more imaginative approaches to making money out of the internet, both to cover costs and to make a tidy profit. Revenue will come from advertising and customer profiling (click trends), sure. Money is also to be made by hosting the channels through which “real” goods and services can be purchased, such as travel bookings and car servicing. Tomorrows entrepreneurs will have to think of ever more esoteric ways of extending and exploiting this medium.

In the meantime, both businesses and consumers are likely to profit from the situation. It might be wise for anyone about to make a major investment in IT takes stock of what is likely to be made available for free, such as email access or extranet services. At least it should enable us to harden our negotiating stance.

(First published 10 May 1999)

05-10 – The demise of the call centre

The demise of the call centre

Over the past ten years call centres have boomed, and for good reason. Cost savings have been made by centralising customer service operations, optimising business processes and locating staff in areas of cheaper infrastructure and employment costs. How sad, then, that the internet has come along and wrecked all that good work.

How can this be? Call centres have a variety of functions, but one of their chief objectives is to manage the interface between customers and computer systems. Want to book a flight? Call our travel centre and we will type your details into our system and book it for you. Want to check your balance? Give us a call. But wait. What if you could also access such functions directly, through a Web browser, without you needing to be held in a queue and without the need for someone to take a call. Interested? Then you will understand why the demise of the call centre has been predicted.

Call centres are not dead, or even dying. However the need for call centres to take care of mundane, routine enquiries is rapidly going away. As says Tom Black of the Smith Group, this trend will accelerate with the arrival of digital, interactive television and the set top box. Call centres of the future are likely to be smaller and more focused on sales activities and proactive customer support, integrated with online services. Call centre strategists should consider provision of customer services using all access devices, not just the telephone.

(First published 10 May 1999)

05-11 – A Safety Basis for Y2K

A Safety Basis for Y2K

So, the Channel Tunnel is going to shut on New Years Eve, 1999. This has been decided following concerns about the interfaces between Eurotunnel systems and those of the National Grid and their equivalent in France.

Developers of Safety Critical Systems are a breed apart, and they have to be. These are the people that build the systems which run our trains and control nuclear power stations. The underlying rule seems to be “avoid grounds for litigation,” which is a rather crude way of summarising what is a complex systems development field. There is very little room for error – the blasé, “bugs are inevitable” attitude which appears to pervade the rest of the IT industry is replaced by huge attention to detail at every stage of the development process. During design, systems are considered not just in terms of when things go right, but also in terms of effects when things go wrong. An interesting fact, often overlooked, is that many systems have a safety critical element and would benefit from adopting some of these considerations.

If the Eurotunnel systems experts have decided that the tunnel should close, they will have done so following a detailed safety assessment of the risks and their knock-on effects. Most Y2K work is now complete or is being completed but much of this work is based on the risk to the systems involved. Managers of systems which are not considered “safety critical” would do well, even at this late stage, to consider the ramifications of their systems going wrong before they blithely let them run over into the new millennium.

(First published 11 May 1999)

05-11 – Arranged Marriages to rule eSpace

Arranged Marriages to rule eSpace

There has been a proliferation of recent announcements about company tie-ups, for example Microsoft and AT&T, IBM and C&W, and HP, SAP and Qwest. As can be seen, these alliances are cross-sector, normally involving a hardware company, a software company and a communications company. As the alliances have been formed to take advantage of the expected trends in business use of technology, they are a fair indication of the vendors’ opinions on what is likely to happen over the next couple of years.

There are several “givens” here. First, that a significant amount of business will be conducted using the internet as a medium. This will be both business-to-consumer, via a Web browser, and business-to-business, for example using email as a transport for inter-business information such as purchase requests and invoices. Second, that computer systems in different companies will communicate with each other directly, avoiding the need for human interaction and speeding up the supply chain.

The question is, what are us Europeans doing about it? Recent surveys, such as the poll by PhoCusWright of major European airlines, indicate that us europeans are behind the curve. Now we have a choice here. Either the future of business is on the Web or it is not. We at Bloor believe it is and there is substantial evidence to support the fact that businesses which do not embrace new technologies will be at a disadvantage, in terms of both efficiency and cost. In the UK, consider LIFFE, which has only been able to turn around its fortunes by endorsing what it previously rejected. LIFFE’s near-demise was blamed on complacency; others will claim ignorance. In either case, though, for some businesses that do not take on board the internet (together with the new opportunities it offers), the result will be the same.

I know, I know. Here we are again, harping on about eCommerce. A question for you then – are we exaggerating the situation? Or are you well aware of the threats and opportunities posed by the Web? How are you planning to take advantage of these “new media”? We’d love to hear your feedback.

(First published 11 May 1999)

05-11 – Time is running out for Iridium

Time is running out for Iridium

A few weeks ago I wrote about the uncertain fortunes of Iridium, the satellite phone company. Trouble is, time is running out. The satellites only have a space life of five years, following which they must be replaced: Iridium’s business model is based on making enough money to justify the continuous relaunch of new orbiters to replace the old.

Iridium need to identify new markets for their services, as mentioned before. But if they take too much time doing this, they will generate insufficient funds to sustain their phenomenally expensive infrastructure. Leave it too long and the whole lot might come tumbling down, in more ways than one.

(First published 11 May 1999)

05-12 – Gigabit over copper? Never say never!

Gigabit over copper? Never say never!

Broadcom has just announced a new chip which, it is said, enables Ethernet data traffic on copper (and that’s the clever part) at 1000 bits, or one gigabit, per second. A number of people in the industry said it couldn’t be done, but it has. It was only a matter of time, really – just as modem speeds have far exceeded the 300 bit “maximum” originally mooted, so the potential of copper wire has been pushed way beyond initial expectations. This is good news for all those organisations which have flood wired their offices with Cat.5 Universal Twisted Pair – their investment (and their topology) is protected.

The question is – do we still need fibre? Probably not to the desktop, even for high-bandwidth requirements such as streamed video, and maybe not in the machine room either. For example, Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop boasts transmission speeds of 800K and is being pushed as the plumbing for the storage area network, a topology which separates storage devices onto their own token-based network. Tokens can slow things down, so a number of storage manufacturers are proposing switched FCAL, which enables better use of the bandwidth. But why bother with fibre at all, when the same job can be done over existing copper, only faster?

One thing is for sure. The IT manager’s job can be made easier if designing a network architecture is based around network partitioning for performance, as opposed to partitioning by device type. If all devices share the same network protocol, for example using the Ethernet 10/100/1000 family, then this becomes a real possibility.

(First published 12 May 1999)

05-12 – Linux on trial

Linux on trial

What is the Linux phenomenon? Repeated announcements (including two on Silicon.com today) show more and more companies, vendors and end users are adopting this freeware package. What are the reasons? And isn’t this mass migration to a seemingly unsupported piece of software a little dangerous?

Different camps have different reasons for adopting Linux. For some, particularly IT-literate end-users, Linux is a free training bed – it runs Unix commands, comes with free compilers and a host of other software that are an ideal entry point to IT. Vendor adoption is two-way – some are “listening to their customers’ needs,” as they say, but others are porting to Linux merely as a marketing ploy – after all, porting from Unix to Linux is relatively straightforward. Businesses really are using Linux – a number have built Linux-based systems as mail servers or as a cheap entry to the Web.

This is where things are getting interesting. A vast number of people are taking a look at Linux for their non-mission-critical neeeds, and as they do so they are discovering that the rumours are true about Linux stability. Common sense is coming into play, for example how much support do end-users really get for commercial operating systems? As with the X-files, Linux users note, the support is out there. Techies from the Unix world (who, admittedly, are a little biased) note the fact that a number of essential facilities on that platform, such as Xwindows, were also freeware – that is, public domain software, which is entirely different to freeware. Honest. In other words, Linux is becoming acceptable. And as this happens people are starting to trust Linux for their non-trivial applications. Some of this trend is unavoidable, as Web interfaces and email servers move from being “windows to the world” to being eCommerce gateways. But IT managers are becoming more and more comfortable with the cheekie chappie operating system that was downloaded by the placement student.

There are still plenty of things missing from the Linux jigsaw – in particular, there is still only limited application support and multiprocessor capability still has some problems. These facilities will come, and in the meantime there are plenty of other opportunities for IT managers to see for themselves the benefits of running a secure, stable, free operating system.

(First published 12 May 1999)

05-13 – £50M for NHS IT – Plan wisely, spend wisely

£50M for NHS IT – Plan wisely, spend wisely

It is sometimes too easy to be critical about government spending announcements, so let’s not be for a moment. The money, if it is new, should be welcomed. Trouble is (and I’m still not being critical), IT projects tend to expand to fill the amount of money allocated to them, and hence should be prioritised at a higher level. Whilst difficult to see how the critics can say “it is not enough,” it is also difficult at this stage to know whether it is adequate.

Rather than considering spend, at this stage, the NHS should be defining IT strategy at the highest level. This will enable the appropriate spending decisions to be made based on real priorities. The strategic objectives should share the same values as the NHS, namely to provide an integrated, national, accessible infrastructure which makes the most of modern technologies such as the Internet. In fact, it would be quite stunning if such a strategy did not exist already.

(First published 13 May 1999)

05-13 – Cable, digital, set top box. Cable, digital, set top box

Cable, digital, set top box. Cable, digital, set top box

This is becoming a bit of a mantra. More digital TV alliances have been made over the last day, this time between Microsoft and C&W, and AOL with a whole bunch of hardware and digital TV providers. At the risk of stating the obvious, things are hotting up.

Real soon now, as the saying goes, digital TV is going to get popular and all those predictions analysts have been making for years will come true. At least, that’s the assumption being made by the giants and the little people amongst the vendors (and they’re putting billions of dollars against this horse). The Internet really, finally, will leave the domain of the propellorhead and enter the mass market. Your grandmother really will be sending email and checking bus times on the browser.

Fortunately, contrary to previous expectations, it seems (as reported on silicon.com) that Europe is catching up the US in terms of internet access. At least, business executives over here are using the Web nearly as much as over there. European users results in European internet entrepreneurs. So maybe, just maybe, when the dam does break, we won’t find ourselves entirely dependent on stateside services when we should quite reasonably be depending on our own.

(First published 13 May 1999)

05-13 – See the future – read my palm

See the future – read my palm

The announcement by 3Com at Networld+Interop, concerning the use of PalmPilots with a wireless Internet connection to access network management information. Just might be the start of something really big. That’s really big, and not just for network management staff.

Sure, such facilities (and 3Com do not have the monopoly on this) will be of great benefit to network operators, particularly those working on distributed networks across multiple buildings. Currently these poor individuals have to rely on a remote terminal or, worse, have to wait until they get back to the control room to update the records, only to find that a second fault has occurred back where they have just come from. Maybe I exaggerate – pagers are in common use these days, but a handheld wireless terminal would be a real boon.

3Com have expertise in both handheld devices and wireless networking, and are using both to enable a whole new set of applications, the potential of which is exciting to say the least. It is not hard to think of other markets than network management for a wireless, Internet-enabled PDA, from warehousing to shopping – markets which 3Com, with other vendors hot on their heels will be keen to exploit.

(First published 13 May 1999)

05-14 – Adrenalin keeping the online hermits going

Adrenalin keeping the online hermits going

Apparently, the four individuals living “by the net alone” for four days are having the time of their lives. Some are being more successful than others at catering for their basic needs (one poor chap is clothed in pajamas and socks still), but all are enjoying themselves.

What is the internet about? It is about getting access to vast quantities of information, a lot of it obsolete, irrelevant or wrong. It is about being bombarded by emails from friends, foes and people you have never hear of. It is about goods and services being provided online, with varying levels of service competence. Most of all, as all these examples attest, it is quite simply a new communications medium – and we all love to communicate.

(First published 14 May 1999)

05-14 – Microsoft Open Source is missing the point

Microsoft Open Source is missing the point

It is reported that Microsoft is still considering opening its source code, osensibly as a response to the “threat” from Linux. However, there are some gaping differences between the two camps’ concepts of open source.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft president, gave a very clear perspective on Microsoft’s position – that some parts of the Microsoft source code could be published or licensed to enable applications to be built more quickly. In other words, if you can see what the code is doing, you can understand it better and use it more wisely.

The approach to development of Linux could not be more different. Here, the Linux source is released in its entirety \i{for development}, so that anyone who wants to modify the code can do so. Changes and extensions to the code are fed back and accepted (or otherwise) in a subsequent release. In other words, there is an open software development process in which the ability to read the code is only one element.

The thought of allowing others to actually modify Microsoft code still seems a little alien to Mr Ballmer, who is promoting only a very restricted definition of the “open” concept. Whilst the Microsoft move might seem relevant to the strategists, it is unlikely to cut much ice with the developers on the ground.

(First published 14 May 1999)

05-14 – New laws for the online community

New laws for the online community

An interesting element of the Richard Tomlinson situation is the perception that the internet is somehow beyond the law. There are two factors to this. The first is that the internet, being global, spans international boundaries and hence leaves room for activities which are illegal in some countries to be conducted remotely from other countries. This is not dissimilar to the current situation in online gambling. The second factor is that the new facilities provided by the internet are causing new situations which, though immoral or antisocial in theory, do not have any corresponding legislation to make them illegal in practice.

The one thing we can say is that this situation will change. Cases have already been successfully brought under the terms of the “long arm” laws being implemented in some US states, particularly against copyright restrictions. The UK government, amongst others it is assumed, has noted the need for international legislation to restrict the misuse of the internet. Of course, the situation is still in a state of flux but things are firming up – it is now possible to see, at least, that global agreements are required to enable some national laws to be enacted across international boundaries.

Without taking a view on Richard Tomlinson’s position, it is possible to see that he has been exploiting weaknesses in international law exposed by the internet. His case is high profile – there are plenty of others. The sooner these weaknesses have been dealt with, taking into account the international conventions to protect the individual and with the necessary agreement of the international community as a whole, the better.

(First published 14 May 1999)

05-28 – Bizness as usual for Microsoft

Bizness as usual for Microsoft

Yesterday in Paris, Microsoft relaunched its eCommerce strategy under the banner “eCommerce for all”. Apart from presenting the strategy from a European perspective, nobody expected much difference from the first launch, two months ago in San Francisco. However, things move awfully fast in this business, and it was clear that the strategy was significantly firmer than when first announced.

The building blocks were the same – Microsoft Commerce Server, BizTalk server and MSN. Commerce Server is “websites with transaction management” – an essential element of setting up an eBusiness site. BizTalk server is the XML interpreter and integration layer, to enable business applications to communicate across the Web. MSN, back in its third (or is that fourth) incarnation, is now an eCommerce portal.

What has changed? For a start, the marketing may be the same but the technology appears a lot more advanced. It is possible to start believing some of the dates in the roadmap - currently product betas are expected in the summer. Real issues are being addressed, like how Exchange and Biztalk server will work together, for example to deal with eCommerce transactions via email. Another change was a small change of emphasis – Microsoft will be “stewarding,” rather than controlling, the standards effort required to define the XML schemas for vertical markets such as Finance, Retail and Healthcare. This gentler approach is to be welcomed – whilst it is recognised that big companies such as Microsoft and SUN have a major role to play in setting standards, it is a relief to hear that they are prepared to give up those standards to more appropriate bodies, when the time is right. Let’s face it, Microsoft’s reputation in this arena is less than pristine.

Still disappointing was the rollout plans for MSN commerce in Europe. Expected early next year, this leaves us Europeans significantly behind if we want to take advantage of MSN’s services. Having said that, maybe its not such a bad thing – it might leave time for a non-US company to step into the breach.

(First published 28 May 1999)

05-28 – IBM goes in Deep

IBM goes in Deep

On the 24th May, IBM announced it was spending $29 on an initiative it is calling the Deep Computing Institute. Deep computing is the flipside of pervasive computing – just as we expect that computer-ettes will be embedded in everything that can take a power cable (and probably a few things that can’t), so will there be the megacomputers which push the limits of technology to solve computational problems currently way beyond our reach.

As with most research initiatives in the past, there is unlikely to be one big benefit. Rather, there will be lots of smaller benefits – new technologies which can be build into existing models, new standards, approaches and architectures. Either way IBM should be applauded for investing in programmes which will be of benefit to the whole IT community, not just IBM.

(First published 28 May 1999)

05-28 – TANSTAAFL, but we'll throw in the starter

TANSTAAFL, but we’ll throw in the starter

The article on Silicon.com about operating systems being given away for free has an element of truth. The fact is, all companies (IT and otherwise) dealing with technology are in an experimental phase. Given the fact that everything has a cost, the question to be answered is “what should be given for free to gain subscribers, and what should be paid for?” There will be different answers for different sectors. In retail, information and value-add service will probably be the major “free” differentiators. In the mobile world, provision of handsets has always been at an initial loss to the telco – this is a model being adopted by BskyB and OnDigital.

In the software and services world, things will be different again. At the moment nobody is really sure what will be given for free and what will be paid for. Maybe operating systems will be given away but like everything else they will have to be paid for somehow, perhaps through paid subscriptions to the services they enable. It is likely that there will never be one answer to this. Rather, business models will be chosen on a tactical basis depending on what people are prepared to pay for and what the competition is doing.

(First published 28 May 1999)

June 1999

06-07 – Baan’s battles not over yet

Baan’s battles not over yet

Baan hasn’t made a profit for a while but battles on, determined to be one of next year’s success stories (it seems to have written off this year) with a new approach and new product lines. Baan is keen to shed the image of being an ERP company and is moving into e-commerce, focusing on the business to business sector. In our opinion this is a wise move - ERP as a market-leading technology is dead, becoming just one of many applications which need to be linked and co-ordinated via the web to optimise and automate business relationships and transactions. The only mistake seems to be that Baan still believe in lock-in. “The majority [of organisations] … preferred to buy all its products from a single vendor,” claimed Baan. This said, the “majority” have no choice but to run a variety of products from different vendors. It is likely that companies which promote integration and interoperability, such as Concur, will steal a march on single-solution vendors. Baan better watch its flanks.

(First published 7 June 1999)

06-07 – Microsoft at the Perly Gates

Microsoft at the Perly Gates

So, Microsoft are to “extend Perl to take advantage of Windows capabilities”. Well, well. We saw it with Java, we saw it with HTML – in both cases, the company were quite rightly accused of taking an open standard and extending it to lock users into the Windows platform. It may be that their approach to Perl is different – goodness knows that Windows lacks a scripting language of any merit, so the logic of porting Perl to Windows is clear.

Can we give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt? Put it this way. If Microsoft are to be trusted with yet another standard, namely XML, then they need to have quit their old “standardisation” tricks. Perl can be the test case: we watch their every move with eager anticipation.

(First published 7 June 1999)

06-07 – The science of appliances

The science of appliances

You heard it here first - the up-and-coming buzzword is “appliance”. So what is it? A variety of sources seem to claim the term for their own – even in their relatively closed community, storage manufacturers differ in the use of the term, ranging from single-function filer to fully-fledged messaging server. Recent estimates suggest that sales of “information appliances” will outstrip PC sales by 2003. Pretty interesting, considering that a definition for the term is, to say the least, vague.

To better understand what is going on, it is worth looking from the two viewpoints that manufacturers seem to have adopted. First off are the systems manufacturers, who are used to seeing large metal cabinets which often contain whirring motors and fans. From this perspective, the appliance is seen to possess the characteristics of a washing machine – large, white, floor-mounted, single function, easy to program. The second viewpoint is that of the handheld device manufacturer. To these companies, appliances are very small, ergonomic and multifunctional, looking much like a mobile phone.

At the end of the day, it’s all semantics – one person’s appliance is another’s device. All so-called appliances of the future should possess certain characteristics to distinguish them from the systems of the past. They should be as low-maintenance as a fridge, as appropriately designed as a magimix, as easy to use as a phone and as easy to replace as a digital watch. We shouldn’t care what’s going on inside the box, what operating system is being run or what the processor bus speed is. Wishful thinking? Well, we’ll just have to see.

(First published 7 June 1999)

06-09 – Amazon’s laws of the Jungle

Amazon’s laws of the Jungle

Amazon is getting bullish. No, okay, it has always been bullish. Amazon is getting very big and bullish. The still-to-make-a-profit company has made a spate of investments recently, and not just in its in its traditional over-the-web, commodity markets. It has also commenced selling downloadable music and it has even set up an auction site. It is putting itself in direct competition with the big guns both online and offline, and from eBay to Wal-Mart the competition is rising to the threat. Not content with local battles, Amazon.co.uk has put itself head to head with W.H.Smith Online, with both now offering 50% off books from their own bestseller lists.

Amazon has grown fast and clearly it must act fast if it wants to stay ahead in the game. It is a big game, however, and there is a danger that Amazon spreads itself too thin or makes too many enemies. In the litigation-friendly US, we only have to look at what is currently happening to Microsoft to know how competition between retailers can be a battle in both the storefront and the courtroom. In the words of Sun Tzu, “do not fight a war if you have to fight on two or more fronts”. In Amazon’s case, the numbers of fronts are mounting and there are more than two dimensions to the fight.

(First published 9 June 1999)

06-09 – Information Overload is a Distraction

Information Overload is a Distraction

A recent survey by Pitney Bowes found that the majority of workers are interrupted by communications technology every ten minutes. For “communications technology” read voice mail, email, telephones and mobiles, pagers and (probably) the beep from the calendar manager. This survey confirms the results of other surveys, such as the Avery survey which found that information overload through use of these new media was preventing the job from getting done.

We are, sadly, still at the stage of being driven by these technologies as opposed to driving them. It has been generally accepted that communications technologies hold the key to efficient, knowledge sharing organisations but our use of these technologies still borders on the primitive, as like Pavlov’s dogs we respond to the sound of a bell by switching off from what we were doing. There will be a huge market in the future for intelligent information-sharing and communications facilities, and the sooner it comes, the better.

(First published 9 June 1999)

06-09 – Office 2000 is out – but is it in?

Office 2000 is out – but is it in?

Microsoft has launched Office 2000, 15 million copies are sold already and it’s still only 1999. The product reviews are excellent, thus far – the individual applications that make up the O2K family are being judged, once again, as the best in their field. Microsoft appear to have it all sewn up. Good news for Microsoft? Well, that depends on your perspective.

First off – Office 2000 continues a line of partially integrated productivity applications based on Microsoft Office 4.2. When Office 4.2 came out in 1993, magazines ran comparisons with WordPerfect Office and Lotus Smartsuite, usually drawing the conclusion that any of the above would do the job, but Microsoft had the edge. Organisations bought office suites by the truckload, with the brand usually dependent on the incumbent word processor. New releases of suites from the different suppliers brought with them new features, enhancements and bug fixes, each time making the new versions a more attractive purchase than the old - when the suite wars reached a crescendo, organisations “rationalised” to Microsoft and it was all over bar the shouting. The point is this. In 1994 we had a very capable set of office applications which gave us the facilities to do 95% of the job (bar, admittedly, the functionality now available in Outlook). It is now five years later and, whatever the functionality now available, it is questionable whether we need it at all. A word processor is, was and always has been a word processor.

It is clear that Microsoft recognise that if they want to ship O2K, they need a new spin. As stated on Silicon.com, “the software is intended to promote a ‘web work style’ for ‘knowledge workers’ who need to share information.” Reading between the lines, and looking at Microsoft’s other announcements yesterday, the plan is to sell Office 2000 as an element of facilities enabling collaborative working, for example document sharing. Fair enough – aside from the (still perceived as niche) document management market, this is an area which remains largely untapped.

Microsoft are guaranteed a packet of O2K sales, at least in the short term. But in the longer term the jury is still out. As a purchaser, if you see Office 2000 as an application set, the question is, do you need to upgrade from your existing, functionally rich suite? And if the suite is to be used as part of a collaborative working environment, is your organisation ready to exploit the potential of your “knowledge workers”? Aye, there’s the rub. Microsoft are stepping into new territory with Office 2000, and it is anyone’s guess what the future holds for the suite.

(First published 9 June 1999)

06-12 – Commerce Electronique? Ja, bitte!

Commerce Electronique? Ja, bitte!

Us anglophones might have a hard time with this but it’s a fact. English is not the most spoken language on the planet. And, despite any impressions we may have to the contrary, it won’t be the most used language on the Internet either.

Let’s face it, we’ve seen this before. There was a day when we though that all software in the world was written in English and, besides, anyone that was IT-literate was probably bright enough to speak two languages. When we went to export our products to the continent, to our chagrin we found that the potential user base would much prefer the software in the local language, and that competitor products already existed, written by our overseas friends for their own local market. Grudgingly, we had to admit that IT was not a UK/US phenomenon. And neither, shockingly enough, is the Internet.

By 2005, it is estimated, 57% of all Internet sites will be in a foreign language. Unlike currency, where convergence seems to be the trend, language use is diverging. This is very interesting. Yes, there is a global pool of customers out there, but they are expecting to be communicated with on their own terms (they are the customer, after all). It is likely that successful sites will be multilingual – indeed, if you’ve looked at sites in other countries, you may have noticed that a large number of sites exist in at least two languages. UK companies wishing to exploit this huge market of consumers, take note.

(First published 12 June 1999)

06-12 – Sony gets Music Shops Online

Sony gets Music Shops Online

In the prediction game, it is reassuring to see some projections come true. The effect of the Internet on retail, for example, has been a subject of much speculation: in lunchtime discussions, most will have suggestions as to what might work, but few if any have the monopoly on the future.

Sony’s announcement today is a case in point. In association with Red Dot, Sony are to distribute their back catalogue to high street retailers via a dedicated ATM network. Customers will be able to select an album and have it pressed while they wait. For customers this is excellent news, as retailers will be able to carry a much broader range of albums; for retailers and suppliers, the future is equally bright because neither will have to manufacture or carry unnecessary stock. For these reasons, t is exceedingly likely that other media firms, such as Polygram, will follow suit.

What will the music retailer become? Well, we are back to speculation again, but it is likely that the physical store-front will stick around for a few years yet. Music retailers will still be dependent on getting the punters through the door before they can make a sale, and in the absence of pure product the focus will likely move to added value services and branding. Megastores with coffee bars, for example, are already in a position to serve as trendy places where customers can gather to discuss and possibly buy what’s on offer. We expect to see more of this but what do you think? Let’s meet up at Virgin, do lunch and talk about it.

(First published 12 June 1999)

06-12 – The Internet is going, to Worms that is

The Internet is going, to Worms that is

We might still be waiting for Cyberspace, but as far as electronic phages are concerned, Science Fiction has well and truly become hard fact. William Gibson was credited for the former but the concept of viruses and worms first reached popular fiction ten years earlier, in the novel “The Shockwave Rider” by John Brunner. Quote: “It could take days to kill a worm like that, and sometimes weeks”. This situation has been all too apparent recently, starting with Melissa which has spearheaded a whole new wave of viruses such as the most recent (and the most damaging), Worm.ExploreZip.

Viruses have had several forms since their early days. Most commonly, they used to “infect” executables and would propagate themselves when the executables were run (as well as offloading their ‘payload’, with whatever consequences that might have had). Recent examples have been as Word or Excel Macros, and now we have a new breed which exploits weaknesses in our email. There will be software patches and virus recognition updates, all well and good. Or is it?

The problem lies in prediction. Solutions to viruses come after the event, and in the case of Worm.ExploreZip, it is likely that several weeks will pass before it is eradicated. How does it work? It appears as an email attachment, and if it is run, it accesses your Exchange or Outlook address book to forward itself to anyone it can find. Was this problem predictable? No… well, possibly, someone just might have been able to work out a scenario such as this, preferably before the hackers did.

This isn’t a Microsoft-bash here. It is quite likely that similar problems exist in Lotus and Netscape products, to name but two. Users of non-Microsoft messaging, for once, can be thankful that they weren’t using the de facto products. However, lessons should be learned for future generations of all products which use the Internet as a communications medium. For example, as applications providers XML-enable their software, they should be asking the question “What’s the worst possible thing that could happen to someone using my software?” Risk scenarios should be developed, evaluated and countered. We can be sure that, if they’re not doing this, plenty of others will be. Nobody’s directly to blame - to quote John Brunner, “The medium is the mess-up.” All the same, vendors should be doing everything they can now, rather than leaving us overdependent on antivirus companies who have no choice but to provide solutions to problems only after they have occurred.

(First published 12 June 1999)

July 1999

07-01 – Linux fails at the OS Corrall. So What?

Linux fails at the OS Corrall. So What?

Recent benchmarks have shown Linux running less quickly than Windows NT. This may seem significant, but it is not. Linux is open source, developed lovingly by the doves of the IT world. It is a product, it might be argued, and it does pose significant competition to comparable products such as Windows NT. It does not, however, behave as a product. It does not stand up to cost-benefit analysis, because it does not have a financial cost. Different models must be applied.

Die-hards of the Linux community would say that the reason Linux is successful is because of the huge numbers of idealistic hackers who are prepared to make something beautiful. They’re wrong. Linux is moving mainstream because the vendors see it as an opportunity to make money. In any business, there are some things that are given away for free and others which are paid for. With the technological advances that are currently being made, new business models have been invented which take advantage of this. But it was ever thus. The huge advantage of Linux to vendors, is that it is already free – vendors can give away something for nothing, but at minimal cost to themselves.

Interestingly, it was Microsoft that demonstrated how powerful the “give-it-away” model could work, with its free distribution of Internet Explorer giving it the lion’s share of the browser market from a standing start. Explorer is still free, and will probably remain so – a small, calculated cost by the Microsoft camp. Did anyone run performance benchmarks comparing Microsoft and Netscape? Yes. Did anyone care about the results? No. Businsses were more interested in protecting their existing investment, getting something for nothing or trying to avoid lock-in.

The mistake we can make with open source, is to think that one day it will have to be paid for. Some things are for free because they oil the wheels. Service in a retailer, local newspapers, meals on aeroplanes are free at source with their real costs being factored into other goods or services. Open source is an enabler, as it encourages the broad acceptance of technology, with all the money-generating spin-off opportunities that it may cause. And this is why open source will remain.

(First published 1 July 1999)

07-01 – More e-Baa than e-Business

More e-Baa than e-Business

A group of farmers in Wales are setting up Direct Welsh Lamb, a web site which sells lamb direct to the consumer. Whatever your philosophy on food, you will never see a clearer example of how eCommerce stands to benefit both producer and consumer.

Direct Welsh Lamb was set up as a direct result of the farmers being ever more squeezed by the corporate world of supermarkets. Rather than go out of business, the farmers looked for alternative ways of selling and hit on the Internet. There are several factors which may prevent the success of this venture, not least that the company itself may not be able to cope with the demand that it creates, but where it goes many other businesses are following. Interestingly, research and experience is showing that the “personal customer experience” is far greater than that, of traditional shopping. In this case, for example, consumers are in direct, daily (if required) contact with the producers of the goods. There are no middlemen and so it is difficult to sidestep blame; also, the competition is only a click away – responsibility heightens and hence so does quality of service.

Supermarkets will continue to have a role, but this role is set to change dramatically over the next ten years. Once the channel of communication has been re-opened between producer and consumer, it will prove very difficult to close.

(First published 1 July 1999)

07-01 – The sad truth about ADSL

The sad truth about ADSL

If the rumours are true, BT is on the point of rolling out ADSL services in the UK. ADSL presents both a problem and an opportunity to BT, the company which pretty much “owns” the link between the local exchange and the household. BT has come under fire in the past for not going the (literal) extra mile for its consumer customers: suitable pricing models for home use of ISDN, for example, were a case of too little, too late. ADSL provides a new opportunity for BT to demonstrate that it can provide cost-effective, high-bandwidth services to SoHo and consumer alike.

Issues remain, of course. Firstly, BT are unlikely to be in a position to manage a national migration to ADSL in a short timeframe. For a start, there is an infrastructure rollout cost for BT, to enable its local exchanges. Also, and maybe most importantly, there is a benefit tradeoff. ADSL is only appropriate for customers requiring high-bandwidth digital reception – this translates to internet users prepared to pay the cost of the access device and the subscription. Although we all think fast access to the internet would be a good thing, how much are we really prepared to pay for access from the home? Until there is a critical mass of customers, BT will be loathe to roll out the service in a particular area.

Secondly, there is the bottleneck issue. The internet acts a lot like a hard disk and controller – it has seek time, access speed and throughput as its major characteristics. Surfers can employ ADSL to increase local throughput but can do little about access speed, for example to a poorly connected site. Seek time is still largely down to knowing what we are looking for or how to find it. When designing a computer system, a lot of effort is made to “balance the bottleneck” – that is, to ensure all components work together so that no one component is slowing down all the others or is underutilised. The internet still has a long way to go before all of its bottlenecks are balanced.

BT will inevitably roll out ADSL, but probably more slowly than the commentators would like, even though the full benefits of fast internet access will not be realised for a good while. What does this mean for the consumer? ADSL should be considered in the round, as one of a number of protocols for data transmission on telephone wire. It will not be the only mechanism, just as the telephone line will not be the only medium – to get the fullest picture we must think of wire, cable, fibre, satellite and wireless and the variety of protocols they support. The biggest issue will ultimately be cost and there is currently such a diverse set of pricing models that it is difficult to gauge the relative benefits of each. This will change, but in the meantime ADSL is more likely to begin with a whimper than a bang.

(First published 1 July 1999)

07-04 – Local loop open for competition

Local loop open for competition

OFTel, the UK Telecommunications watchdog, has announced that BT’s monopoly on the local loop has come to an end. It is still unclear about what this will mean in terms of implementation. It seems that two options exist: either BT can sublet its existing services to outside companies (in much the same way as electricity can be bought from a number of companies, despite the provider remaining fixed); alternatively, other organisations can provide alternative backbones to which the local loop equipments can connect. As with ADSL, one thing likely is that any rollout of new services will be slow, at least in the short term. The longer term is more positive, particularly for non-metropolitan areas which are more likely to benefit from new services than they would have been if everything were left to BT.

Lest we forget, though, there is a pretender in the wings. Wireless communications do not currently support the necessary bandwidth for data communications. With a new standard ratified by the ITU earlier this year, however, it is only a matter of time before the necessary equipments and infrastructure are put in place. Add ingredients such as Bluetooth, a local wireless standard which will transform home networking, to the pot and things become very interesting indeed. If the fixed line operators do not get their act together over the next couple of years, others will be happy to step in and take the business.

(First published 4 July 1999)

07-04 – XML – the common language is half the battle

XML – the common language is half the battle

Articles of recent news point to both the crisis and the opportunity offered by XML, the eXtended Markup Language which looks set to be the standard language for business to business communications. First, IBM and Rational have announced that they are hooking up their software development environments via an XML bridge. Second, Oracle has announced an XML interface to its 8i database management system. Both show the importance of metalanguage standards, or the lack of them.

The first article is an example of what is possible if such standards are in place. The Object Management Group has ratified both the interchange mechanism and the metalanguage definition, in the form of XMI and UML respectively. The net result is that two applications know how to communicate with each other and they also understand what is being communicated.

How different things look in other sectors, as indicated by Oracle’s modus operandi. XML contains tags to represent specific types of data. Oracle have taken a low level approach, providing an engine which can be configured to recognise the tags in XML content, enabling it to remain standards-independent. This differs from Microsoft’s approach, which has involved setting up a standards body to define the tags. Complicated? Yes it is. The net of the absence of standards has been a free for all, with different vendors trying to impose their own standards by strength or stealth (and Oracle and Microsoft are just two of many players in this game).

Eventually, one side will win and the other will lose. What a shame. As the software development community has already demonstrated, the benefits to all players of having standards in place are great. The stakes are high, admittedly, but it is likely that the costs of the battle will far outweigh the benefits, to all but a few.

(First published 4 July 1999)

07-04 – Yahoo bows to people pressure

Yahoo bows to people pressure

After a not-so-long-running dispute, Yahoo has finally agreed to the demands of its Geocities users. Following Yahoo’s acquisition of Geocities, the organisation attempted to enforce its own terms of service on the many thousands of Geocities homestead owners. It may have expected a backlash, but it certainly didn’t anticipate the scale.

Considering Yahoo’s Web heritage, this lack of foresight on Yahoo’s part is remarkable. First off, Geocities existed (and, indeed, continues to do so) on the back of its user community. To fail to consult the community which is the very reason their for existence might be considered folly. To attempt to take away from this community, what could easily be considered as a online right, starts to defy belief. Secondly, let’s think about what Yahoo were attempting – to gain copyright over the individual Geocities Websites. It is difficult to imagine a scenario where the wealth of site owners would agree to this.

It should be noted that the principles behind the two organisations – Geocities and Yahoo – are very different. Yahoo is a portal organisation, letting its users access services at the cost of enduring banner ads and spam. Geocities is a hosting organisation, providing free facilities to its users with the cost (in advertising) borne by individuals browsing the sites. Clearly, one does not easily map the Geocities model to that of Yahoo. A fact that Yahoo is learning to its cost.

Yahoo is still not giving in, not fully – it has left the door open for more battles in the future. Ultimately, this is a lesson in net power – one which all organisations intending to exploit the Internet would do well to take note of.

(First published 4 July 1999)

07-14 – CA SANITI illustrates the problem with management frameworks

CA SANITI illustrates the problem with management frameworks

Enterprise management frameworks, since their inception in the early nineties, have been seen as the ”ultimate answer” to the questions posed by managing the applications, hardware and network devices that make up our corporate infrastructures. This would be true if the world stood still, but unfortunately it does not.

CA announced yesterday an initiative for the management of Storage Area Networks, known as SANITI or SAN integrated technology initiative. Essentially this equated to enabling the management of SAN hardware by CA’s UniCenter management framework.

Once again, it would appear that devices are rolling onto the market while framework vendors are struggling to keep up. No date has been given for the release of SANITI, though hardware vendors such as Compaq and Hewlett Packard are already shipping their SAN devices. Network managers must also plan time to reconfigure their management architectures to take account of the new devices.

Unfortunately, it will ever be thus. Increasing use of the Internet, wireless devices and the arrival of appliances to the market at an ever increasing rate are coupling together to transform our infrastructure topologies and make obsolete our modes of operation. For example, uptime is only one criterion to be judged for an E-Commerce site – throughput, response time and transaction management are also issues to be addressed against a backdrop of new types of application such as application servers.

Investors in enterprise management software should recognise that such frameworks can only solve part of the problem, and that deployment is not a one-shot operation. Best of breed approaches can help, but go against the “one size fits all” policy which goes towards justifying the inflated price of frameworks. Frameworks can help, particularly to manage the integrity of the core infrastructure. However they cannot be expected to keep up with all developments in the domains which they are supposed to be managing.

(First published 14 July 1999)

07-14 – IPV6 picks up momentum at last

IPV6 picks up momentum at last

Five years ago, the doomsayers were predicting that before long, the number of available IP addresses would reduce to a trickle. Back then the solution was said to lie in IP version 6, which replaces the 32-bit addressing scheme with a 128-bit scheme.

The prediction of the demise of IP version 4 – the current standard for internetworking – never quite went away. The forecasted end-date is now 2003, and the solution, as ever, is still IP version 6. V6 also comes with increased capability for reliable routing and performance, and is touted by some as the enabler for the convergence of broadband and packet switched networks. Now, with the launch of the IPV6 forum, the standard for the next generation of IP networking seems ready to lumber into reality.

The future is not necessarily going to be reached without some pain, as hardware devices currently running IP V4 will have to be changed over to the new protocol. While commentators predicting a worse catastrophe than Y2K might be overstating things (we have not, after all, seen the full might of the Y2K monster as yet) it is clear that a lot of work will need to be done. One reason why the IPV6 changeover should cause less pain than Y2K is that it is clear what needs to be done. All devices currently running an IPV4 protocol stack will need to run an IP V6 stack. If they cannot, then they will need to be replaced otherwise they will not work. This is a simpler equation than attempting to identify the compliance of code to avoid data corruption: either devices will work, or they will not. What is less clear is the approaches to be adopted by device manufacturers for the V6 changeover. While most punters can see the benefits of the new addressing scheme (despite the incomprehensible addresses relative to the simplicity of the current standard), they are the ones having to bear most of the pain for what is, after all, an initiative fron the device manufacturers.

We will expect to see significant support from vendors to enable their customers to make the jump to “the new internet”. In particular, devices from now non-existent companies (merged away by the larger players) should be supported to the same extent as newer devices. Some pain (and associated cost) is inevitable, but like Y2K, so is the change. And to think we were all going to take a breather after the millenium celebrations were over.

The IPV6 forum can be found at www.IPV6forum.com

(First published 14 July 1999)

07-14 – Jiro clarifies SUN’s open intentions

Jiro clarifies SUN’s open intentions

Yesterday, SUN announced the launch of its Jiro initiative, which aims to provide a cross-platform standard for the management of storage devices. So what’s it all about?

Essentially, Jiro refers to the provision of a set of Java APIs for storage management such that applications can access storage resources directly, regardless of what operating system is being run. Jiro does not provide storage management functionality (such as that from Veritas), nor does it affect the underlying storage protocols or architectures. Rather, it acts as a middle layer, enabling applications to work with resources without having to reinvent code.

Jiro runs on the Java Virtual Machine, and this is how it retains its machine independence. Jiro also depends on Jini, the SUN directory initiative, for a number of services including discovery of storage resources.

It would probably be a little harsh to accuse SUN of sinister motives, but J-based software standards would seem to be moving into domains far removed from the original ambitions of Java. The JVM is essentially a stripped down, free operating system: through JVM extensions such as Jini and Jiro, plus application support through the Enterprise Java Bean specification, Java is starting to encroach on areas which are worth a lot of money to certain players. Such facilities, it could be argued, reduce the need for an operating system to a device-specific microkernel – maybe they don’t yet, but there is every reason that they will in the future.

In fact, the net result of Java-based “open standards” is to encourage commoditisation of operating system software and hence to reduce its relevance. This, clearly, increases focus on both the developed applications and the underlying hardware. SUN’s market is clearly the latter; it is fascinating to see how many applications vendors are also buying into this vision. Consider this: Microsoft were sued for modifying Java to encourage use of their own operating system. But can Microsoft sue a standards body (which is the ultimate home of the Java-based family) for promoting “standards” which directly encroach on its own territory? Of course it can’t. While we welcome the arrival of cross-platform resource management from the application development standpoint, we would do well to remember that there is more than one way to rule the IT world, and SUN’s aspirations are no different to anyone else’s.

(First published 14 July 1999)

07-16 – 8i reasons to go Oracle

8i reasons to go Oracle

When is a database not a database? When it is also an application server, a development environment, a search tool and a Java Virtual Machine. It would appear that Oracle customers find the bolt-on features a side issue to the database’s core competence – that of scalable, performant information management. It is difficult to gauge whether the movers and shakers within the company are too worried – indeed, as Oracle’s market share continues to rise, the success of the new features (or otherwise) would seem to be of only minor importance. For now.

Oracle’s “additional features” are far more than that. A three-layer architecture comprises the user interface, the application layer and the database and Oracle 8i has something to offer in each layer. Considering Oracle’s moves to strip down the operating system (with Raw Iron, now known as its Information Appliance), it is possible to imagine an IT development and operational system consisting of no more than hardware and Oracle software. 8i is not a database with add-ons, it is an application environment with an information store.

Hey, they’re all doing it. Just two days ago we showed how Sun’s J-based strategy was putting the squeeze on both the OS and the application architecture. SUN haven’t produced JQL yet, but the bets are on that they are thinking about it.

So what are we seeing here? The Internet has resulted in new concepts, paradigms and other architectural clichés upon which applications may be built. Things are stabilising fast – the thin-client, three layer architecture, centralised on the server, is becoming the de facto approach. Vendors from all disciplines are keen to move into this newly formed space and make it their own. The standardised, stable world of applications servers is no bad thing for systems implementors but will inevitably spell a horrible death for many vendors who are currently converging into the same space. As with the hardware market, the increasingly stable architectural boundaries become the battle lines and it is a battle from which there will emerge few winners.

(First published 16 July 1999)

07-16 – Apache grows up – and up

Apache grows up – and up

It is not only Microsoft’s admittance to be running Apache on some of its MSN Web servers that indicate the growing maturity of the server software. The loosely knit federation of Apache developers have formed the Apache Software Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation which aims to continue Apache’s development in its open source vein.

Apaché’s maturity is bolstered by its global takeup. According to a recent survey, Apache is, now, the software in use by over half of the world’s Web servers. This trend is set to continue, as the formation of the ASF will be seen as good news for the corporate world. It can be a difficult decision to take as an IS manager, to use the industry standard (and free) Apache, or to follow a traditional model of buying licensed software which comes with a nominal offer of support, services and upgrades. The reality is that the Apache community is as good at supporting its software as any corporation but making the leap to public domain software is seen as a bit like voting for the Green party, in some circles.

Where will it end? There is always the chance that, once Apache has captured the majority of the Web Server market, it starts to charge for services. Considering the formation of the organisation (and even if it keeps its promise to avoid profit) it seems difficult to believe that the ASF will be able to avoid making money in the future. These are unlikely to be through direct sales of the web server software itself, more through leveraging the Apache brand. For example, the organisation could sell added value service or, most likely, sell new software packages that build on the Apache brand. Indeed, if Apache was floated, it would be likely to make millions on the strength of its brand alone.

(First published 16 July 1999)

07-16 – PC-on-chip spells end for consumer hardware costs

PC-on-chip spells end for consumer hardware costs

It’s all coming together. A number of announcements, from NatSemi, Microworkz, Tiny, AOL, MSN and SEGA to name but a few, are indicators of convergence in (or on) the consumer market. Let’s look at them.

- National Semiconductor unveils the Geode, which combines PC functions onto a single chip. Proposed market: set top boxes, mobile phones and handheld devices.

- Microworkz plans to distribute its sub-£200 iToaster PC through Dixons

- Tiny Computers in the UK start giving away PCs to subscribers to their newly-launched telecommunications service.

- AOL and MSN offer free PCs to users taking out a three year subscription to their online services.

- SEGA announce that their Dreamcast console will have Internet access.

What does all this mean? NatSemi’s announcement equates to reducing the cost of PC-type devices to well below the current level. Microworkz’ iToaster is a set-top-box lookalike PC which demonstrates the way the technology can be taken – interestingly, the iToaster runs Linux, mainly (it is understood) to avoid the increased cost that would be incurred if a commercial operating system was being used. Tiny are giving away a £300 PC, which is as good an indicator as any of the maximum amount of material which can be “given away”. AOL and MSN demonstrate the head-to-head battles that are going to be fought by the internet giants – indeed are already being fought, exchanging hardware for mindshare. SEGA’s announcement is indicative of the scale of the convergence, as the games console becomes as powerful as a PC (if not more) and sports similar functionality.

There are plenty more announcements from the past few months which could be quoted, all indicating service providers giving stuff away, hardware getting cheaper (and therefore easier to give) and different devices – consoles, receivers and computers – becoming one and the same. To extrapolate only slightly, we can see consumer hardware giveaways becoming the norm over the next 18 months. This appears good news for the materialistic amongst us, but only because the situation is being judged relative to the recent past where such hardware would cost well over a grand. In fact, consumers have short memories and will come to expect such deals.

What is likely to cause more of a stir are the shockwaves expected to reflect back onto the industry itself. Hardware manufacturers are already seeing their profits cut to the bone as they compete for volume sales. Convergence suggests that previously ring-fenced groups of manufacturers will find themselves pitted against each other. Their markets will be less and less directed at the consumer, however, they will be selling to the service providers. Here, also, we expect the current shakeup to continue. Resellers could be the worst hit, unless they reorient their channels – peripheral devices such as printers, imaging devices and storage have a longer life, but pure PC sales will be damaged significantly.

The bottom line is that the computer and service infrastructure will, in the future, have little more than gadget value to the consumer market. People will purchase what they consume and need – food, clothes, bricks and mortar, the latest film. IT will act as an enabler for these purchases and will take its cut from their suppliers, but the time of buying PCs for their own sake is virtually over.

(First published 16 July 1999)

07-31 – Hotmail hacked, but who's to blame?

Hotmail hacked, but who’s to blame?

Yes, it is highly embarrasing to Microsoft that their Hotmail service, currently with over 40 million subscribers, was broken into by a bunch of hackers. The fall-out from the incident is, as usual, indicative of Microsoft’s reputation, both concerning the security of the Microsoft software that Hotmail runs and the inability of MSN to inform its customers that anything had happened.

The wider issues of this incident are just as telling. First, given the fact that the computer industry has been in existence for at least thirty years, the question must be asked concerning why the so-called global class systems are still open to attack. This boils down, unfortunately, to the global IT community’s acceptance of mediocrity: the theory and practice of computer security is well undcerstood, but its implementation is often seen as non-core functionality. Products have come to market too soon, have been rolled out without sufficient attention to security issues and have been left to evolve into the complex morass we now know as “infrastructure”. Even today, new versions of operating systems software are released without being properly tested. We all know this but we foolishly accept it as the norm.

In many organisations, clearly including Microsoft, security has become a firefighting exercise: it would appear that concerted attacks are likely to succeed. The Internet has not caused the situation but has exacerbated it, by giving outsiders access to unsuitably configured corporate systems and by providing novices with access to a wealth of up-to-date information about security weaknesses and how to exploit them. All this serves only to undermine Internet confidence - with reason, users are unwilling to risk even their personal credit card details by exposing them to the Web. Despite this, however, companies continue to over-expose themselves by ripping a hole through to the Internet from their private networks, using inadequate security software or poorly configured firewalls as weak protection.

Let’s face it, we knew it was a risk to trust Microsoft with our email, just as it would be a risk to trust any organisation. Maybe one day we will be able to sue for breach of trust - this might be locking the door after the horse has bolted, but could force corporations large and small to treat security with the importance it clearly merits.

(First published 31 July 1999)

07-31 – Sun's rising Star to catalyse device revolution

Sun’s rising Star to catalyse device revolution

Things have moved on since the first reports of SUN Microsystems’s acquisition of Star Division. It surely is too much to ask that the giant took our advice, but it would appear that our suggestion, that this was far more than a battle for office automation market share, was uncannily accurate.

In the article where we first commented on the acquisition, we put it in the context of Microsoft’s decision to move its policies from a PC-centric position to “great software.. on any device”. Fair enough - the advent of better bandwidth, both inside and outside the corporation, coupled with the continued drive to push down TCO (promoting re-centralisation onto enterprise servers), inevitably points to a thin client future. Microsoft, as a software company, wants to reposition itself to take advantage of this new landscape, by selling operating systems and office software which support the thin client paradigm. Recent announcements concerning Office 2000, coupled with the existence of cut-down versions of the applications for handheld devices, reflect this.

And then, here came SUN Microsystems. SUN is a hardware vendor who has consistently used third party software to promote the sales of its platforms (remember the encyclopedia-like Catalyst catalogue?). Then, as now, SUN’s main interest is in selling hardware: whilst conceding that it has lost the battle for the desktop (a battle which, as indicated by Microsoft’s changing mission, is going away), SUN is concerting its efforts on server hardware. As a calculated move to increase server sales, SUN are to give the StarOffice software away - a move which (considering its high quality) may well make significant in-roads into Microsoft’s market share, just as Linux and Apache before it.

Clearly, whilst Scott McNeally will undoubtedly derive pleasure from cocking a snoop at Microsoft’s share of the desktop software market, this is not their main target. The future backdrop of IT, it is well recognised, is the Internet, which will be the communications medium for delivering all kinds of services to consumer and business alike. We would expect companies such as Yahoo and AOL to capitalise quickly on the free availability of the server-based version of the Star software, known as StarPortal, which will enable them to roll out word processing, spreadsheet and other facilities in addition to their existing email, scheduling and information services. This opens the door to use of set top boxes, handheld devices and even mobile phones for more than just web browsing: SUN stands to make money from the increases in centralised processing power that this new model suggests.

There are still some shortfalls in this approach. The issue of consumer bandwidth is still not resolved: even given StarOffice’s modular approach, there will be an inevitable download overhead each time a new or updated module is required. Security is of equal concern: recent events concerning Microsoft’s Hotmail service (see companion article) are unlikley to encourage individuals to give service providers access to their documents and spreadsheets. Even given these short term weaknesses, SUN’s announcement is clearly a major step on the way to mass market adoption of a device-accessible, internet-centric IT world.

Oh and, by the way, I wrote this article using StarOffice, downloaded this morning as I was deciding what to write. One day all software will be this way.

(First published 31 July 1999)

07-31 – Thor poses Open Source threat to Windows 2000

Thor poses Open Source threat to Windows 2000

Timpanogas Research Group (TRG) announced yesterday its plans for an open source, NDS-compliant directory for Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Linux. This is significant, not only because of the direct impacts it could have on the directory-based world. TRG have a reputation for building bridges between NetWare, Windows and Linux. Despite a “professional” relationship with Novell, TRG have a reputation of developing products which can be used to migrate away from Novell. It would seem that, this time, the company is turning its sights towards Microsoft.

Clearly the move to implement NDS-compliant, open source directory software is a blow to Microsoft. The first versions of Windows 2000 will not contain a fully functional version of the much-touted (and awaited) Active Directory software which, despite being announced over two years ago, will still miss the initial Windows 2000 release deadline. Administrators wanting to make full use of the directory functionality will have to wait for the Janus upgrade to the operating system, unless they are prepared to consider the increasingly attractive option of adopting (or continuing with) an NDS-based solution.

Companies such as TRG are not the only ones to benefit from Microsoft’s absence. Novell itself is focusing its efforts on its directory products (as reported in IT-Analysis.com earlier in the month. In partnership with Compaq, Novell have also released a “directory appliance”: it is products such as these which will make moving to an NDS-based solution increasingly attractive.

So what of the indirect impacts? Announcements such as these are indicators of where the open source community is moving, away from its traditional home ground in the academic community. TRG are a commercial organisation whose motives are driven by profit, loss and a desire to get at the big guys. In giving away software, TRG are increasing the chances of its adoption but also are launching an attack on the profit margins of Novell and Microsoft. This trend is unsustainable but may be seen as a David-against-Goliath tactic in the short term: as the giants battle it out, they would do well to watch what the little people are doing.

(First published 31 July 1999)

September 1999

09-01 – Cisco keeps its focus with IBM deal

Cisco keeps its focus with IBM deal

Cisco’s drive towards world networking dominance tool a step forwards yesterday when it purchased the best parts of IBM’s routing and switching technologies and patents, for an estimated $2 billion. Cisco has rarely been out of the news over recent weeks due to its procurements of technology companies – this latest move should be seen within the context of its overall strategy.

The networking market, it is generally agreed, is in a state of flux. The keyword is convergence – the advent of technologies such as Voice over IP means that IT systems, networking equipment suppliers and telecommunications companies are constantly treading on each other’s toes while they define their position in the market. Companies such as Lucent, Alcatel and Nortel Networks see the key to be to amalgamate networking and telecomms. Following some hefty buys, they are now remodelling their internal organisations, not without some difficulty as the two markets have traditionally followed very different business models. Cisco has, for the moment, adopted a different tack, namely to concentrate on acquiring networking companies and technologies which help them to grow into the telecomms space. This, more organic approach is likely to cause less internal grief but means that they might lag behind when trying to meet the needs of “pure” telecomms.

All of the companies recognise the value of services. This is a trend which can be seen across the technology industry, with vendors from application development tool suppliers to networking equipment manufacturers keen to capitalise on what is clearly still a growing market. IBM’s own model is clearly a good one to follow: IBM have grown their services arm within the last three years to a multi-billon business. Again, Cisco has chosen not to go with the networking flock: while Nortel Networks and Lucent have their own services arms, Cisco are partnering with companies such as IBM and KPMG.

Cisco’s policy is a sensible one, namely “do what we do, and do it well” whilst growing the company into new technology areas and using partners for non-core business. It remains to be seen whether this strategy will be world-beating, but the alternative can result in a company growing too fast without being able to assimilate its constituent parts (as demonstrated by Alcatel a couple of years back). Interestingly, it is a policy which is also paying off for IBM: the deal with Cisco enables it to focus on its core businesses, namely as a computer manufacturer and a services provider.

(First published 1 September 1999)

09-01 – Mac is back with new Pentium-killers

Mac is back with new Pentium-killers

What an incredible turn-around. Over the past year Apple’s share price has more than doubled, quarterly earnings figures continue to beat analysts expectations and with yesterday’s announcements of new machines, the seismic turnaround in the company’s fortunes looks set to continue. Why?

New machines were unveiled yesterday with a claimed performance of three times faster than the fastest available Pentium III. The availability of such powerful, well-designed PCs will help convince the marketplace of the viability of the products both as a platform for now and an investment for the future. This is, however, only part of the reason for Macintosh Corporation’s return from the ashes.

If the PC industry was about technology alone, we would all have Macs. They were the first to the market with an intuitive interface, affordable networking and WYSIWYG (remember that?) output. Unfortunately, big Mac screwed up big time: it was slow to recognise the arrival of the PC (big and clunky though they were at the time) and it was slower to react when PC clone and component manufacturers pushed the prices down. PCs became affordable to the mass market, and Macs did not. Wintel won and Jobs lost. End of story.

But not quite. There was a time, not so long ago, where it was assumed that we only needed one sort of computer. It was called a PC, it ran Microsoft software and, well, that was that. Microsoft on Intel was considered the safe bet. This time is still here, but it is nearing an end. Everyone recognises it: look at Microsoft’s new corporate tag line “great software… for any device” – no mention of PCs. The device world is nearly upon us, with the one-size-fits-all PC being just one of many device types, including thin clients, mobile phones, PDAs, toasters, fridges… and Apple computers. Yes, that’s it. It is becoming OK to not have a PC. This is the real reason for Apple’s turnaround: the software is available, the performance is there and the company will be around in a year or so, so why not get an Apple computer?

Of course, Steve Jobs is to be credited for not letting the company lay on its back with its legs in the air. Bill Gates injected new life into Apple by committing to make Microsoft applications available for MacOS. There are lots of reasons why Mac is back, but the most fundamental reason of all remains, because it can be.

(First published 1 September 1999)

09-01 – OS vendors on the Merced starting grid

OS vendors on the Merced starting grid

We have said repeatedly in the past that Merced is likely a test bed technology, enabling the potential of the Intel 64-bit architecture to be established and paving the way for McKinley. However this is unlikely to prevent the inevitable operating system wars.

Merced silicon had barely left the fabrication plants before the rumour-mill started up. Currently the lines are being drawn between a 64-bit version of Linux and a Windows 2000 beta for IA-64. HP-UX and Monterey, both Unix flavours, are next on the list.

What can we expect to see? The most likely event is that Intel’s own release plan will determine the release plans for the operating systems. Microsoft has already announced, for example, that its 64-bit operating system will be available at the same time as Merced, “before the end of 2000.” Likely there will be similar announcements for HP-UX, Monterey and even Linux which will need a marketing push to position itself effectively against the Microsoft and Monterey spinning machine.

Then, there will be the inevitable betas and delays. It is Microsoft who are the most disadvantaged here, as Monterey, HP-UX and Linux development for IA-64 is already underway but Microsoft will not be able to fully commit resources until after the release of Windows 2000. Sure, developers will be working on 64-bit prototypes, but Gates and Ballmer are unlikely to risk W2K delays by reallocating developers elsewhere. Finally, we will see the inevitable benchmarks and bakeoffs, with each vendor, consortium or community demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that their OS is the best.

There are several factors which will decide the success of the operating systems in the IA-64 space. The first is time to market: any delays will severely jeopardise the market’s interest. The second is application availability, which is less and less of an issue even for Linux. The third is down to marketing and acceptability. Here Microsoft is very strong but Linux is carving its own credibility. HP-UX is likely to have support, not least from the Hewlett Packard user community, but it is unlikely to be “the one”. The riskiest player has to be Monterey, which despite strong backing from the vendor community, may well end up as the Unix also-ran.

Overall, then, interesting times ahead. Obviously for us commentators, who capitalise on the gossip that this situation will generate. Also, though, for the vendor community, who even now may be staking the future of the company on which of the operating systems is likely to dominate. Finally, the user organisations have a clear decision to make, but will probably prefer to wait until the dust settles before linking their IT strategies to any specific operating system.

(First published 1 September 1999)

09-02 – Intel and IBM bring processing to the network

Intel and IBM bring processing to the network

Capitalising on the flurry of interest generated by their recent demonstrations of Linux and Microsoft operating systems running on real 64-bit silicon, Intel have announced a new foray into the networking chip market. And biting their heels are IBM, fresh from selling off a bunch of network technologies to Cisco. It makes sense.

Intel’s “niche market” is the Internet, where it aims to address the spiralling need for new services and network functionality. Existing products are very much about the lower layers of the stack, performing network-level functions such as routing, compression and bandwidth management. Higher level functionality such as management, voice/video processing, multimedia and graphics handling is usually addressed by operating system or application software. This separation is for two reasons: the first is that “this is how it has always been done” and the second (which derives from the first) is that network processors are currently limited in what they can do, being mainly ASICs in which the functionality is hard coded on the chip.

What Intel have proposed is a hybrid device which is optimised to work with networking hardware. The device is known as the Internet Exchange Processor or IXP. At its core is a StrongARM processor which is surrounded by a number of RISC-based microcontrollers. This means that the devices can be programmed to support both lower level and higher level services: the obvious advantage is that the programs can be more easily upgraded to support new technologies and service requirements. Also, a significant load is taken off the core processing capability of the machine. The IXP is designed to be linked with other IXPs, promising terabit throughput.

IBM have rushed out a similar announcement, clearly caught on the hop by Intel. How wrong we were yesterday, to say IBM were defocusing from network devices! Instead, it seems, the sale of technology to Cisco allows them to concentrate on network processors. This move is interesting: having lost the CPU battle to Intel, IBM see a fresh battlefield for the two companies, on which the winner is by no means decided.

The move by Intel and IBM makes a lot of sense. Technologically, the addition of serious processor capability to networking devices is long overdue. Both companies have the skills to integrate processor technologies with network technologies, plus both have the R&D budget to pay for their development. From a business perspective, Intel are not directly competing with the network equipment manufacturers, at least not yet, and as a result have forged alliances with a number of vendors. In this case, it is chip suppliers such as MMC who are the most likely to suffer as the Ciscos and Newbridges jump on what may well turn out to be another “Intel Inside” bandwagon. IBM are already building network devices such as routers and switches so the chances of partnership are limited. Winners and losers aside, the development is likely to be of benefit to end users, not least through the old stalwart of increased functionality and performance with reduced costs.

(First published 2 September 1999)

09-02 – Solaris tightens Merced screws on Microsoft

Solaris tightens Merced screws on Microsoft

In our recent story about the Intel 64-bit architecture, we neglected to mention one operating system vendor who has, until recently, politely avoided showing its true colours. Highly unusual behaviour for SUN who has now announced a Win-beating timetable for its flagship operating system, Solaris.

SUN’s plans are for a release of Solaris for the IA-64 simulator “some time this autumn” – this is based on the assumption that most development will be carried out on the simulator for the immediate future. As we discussed, it is highly unlikely that Microsoft will have much to show before the middle of next year.

Microsoft have had a lot of wind in their sales [sic] in the past, which has caused end users to wait for Microsoft releases rather than use available products from other vendors. This was true of applications software, when users had already invested in Microsoft operating systems. It seems most unlikely that the same will hold true for operating system software. The other differentiator was price. Inevitably, OS pricing will be driven down, both by the commodity nature of the IA-64 OS market and by the fact that at least one, namely Linux, will be available for free. Application availability was never really an issue on the server.

It appears that the biggest software company in the world may, already, have missed the boat.

(First published 2 September 1999)

09-02 – System I/O fabric to transform computing architecture model

System I/O fabric to transform computing architecture model

Peace has been declared, it was announced yesterday, between the vendors involved in defining a replacement for the PCI bus. In fact, so much attention was paid to the avoidance of battle, that the potential of the proposed technology was missed by most.

The keyword is “fabric”. System I/O is a fabric-based architecture which enables any device to communicate to any other device. Harware switching is used to enable far higher throughput speeds than previously available, from 2.5Gb to 6Gb per second – this compares with a measly 132Mb per second from PCI. This is all well and good, suggesting that PC devices such as processors, network cards and memory will no longer be limited by bus bandwidth (particularly as the 6Gb top end will probably be extended in the future). Two points have largely been missed, however.

The first is that the system vendors are not the only organisations experimenting with switched fabrics. One notable group is the storage community, for whom the switched fibre architecture is key to the SAN strategies of most companies (including StorageTek, Compaq and HP). What interests the storage vendors is the ability to link switches (by fibre) over long distances: currently, the maximum distances between switches are touted as between 10Km and 50Km. How might the System I/O fabric benefit from long-distance interconnect? For example, a single, conceptual device, running a single operating system could in fact be a pair of mirrored devices, each with its own processor, disk and memory. The processor, disk, memory and graphics card become devices in their own right which, with the inclusion of a switched fabric with a fibre interconnect, could be physically positioned anywhere in a 50km radius but which could be configured dynamically to make best use of the resources at a given time.

The impacts go both ways, so…what impact will the System I/O fabric have on the SAN community? Do we need both types of fabric? How will they interact?

A second point is the inclusion of IP version 6 in the System I/O specification. This effectively removes the need to consider system components as part of the same machine, virtual or otherwise. The Internet is currently IP V4, but IP V6 will be included in most network-ready devices in the future. The potential is clear – that the system bus replacement, System I/O, becomes an integral part of the Internet infrastructure. How this will happen is still a matter for speculation, but the potential this has, of moving us into a device-based world in which bandwidth is a forgotten issue, is clear. Given that System I/O is likely to be one of the most important enabling technologies we have seen, it is only to be hoped that the new consortium can come up with a snappier name.

(First published 2 September 1999)

09-03 – From Kidneys to Iridium shares – what will eBay auction next?

From Kidneys to Iridium shares – what will eBay auction next?

eBay kidneys are back in the news again. A similar tale, of an auction being pulled as it broke the rules, concerned Iridium. Such stories, hoaxed or unlawful, serve to illustrate the huge potential of auctions to sell, well, anything.

You will probably have seen the newest eBay kidney story by now (there was another attempt to sell a kidney in May, which was also pulled). As the “product” was removed from the site it had achieved a value of $5.75M. Pretty good for a body part, but probably worth it to someone. As for the Iridium tale, apparently Iridium had already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy prior to an opportunists’s attempts to sell their shareholding on the auction site. The Securities and Exchange Commission, not amused, requested that the offer be withdrawn: this was agreed, despite the “shares” no longer falling within the SEC’s jurisdiction. Of course, auctioning shares may leave you flummoxed – what is the stock market itself, if not an auction house? This serves to illustrate that people are prepared to auction, well, absolutely anything at all. And this is the crucial point.

As discussed in eRoad, a Vision Series report from Bloor Research, the auction is one of two mechanisms that are growing to eventually replace existing markets. The other is the pure market, which exists to sell products with a clearly defined value. Where the value of a product cannot be predefined, it must be turned over to the market where its value will be defined at the point of sale, that is, the auction. These two markets are not mutually exclusive: sites such as \link{www.lastminute.com, Last Minute} are profiting from the fact that the prices of travel products fluctuate wildly as they approach their sell by date. The success of eBay, and the rushed creation of me-too sites across the globe, are testament to the viability of auctions.

As the two stories above illustrate, however, the legal frameworks which govern auctions are not yet fully geared up. This is a global issue – for example, there is understood to be a thriving black market trade in third world body parts. The Internet may be the great liberator but it also opens the door to misuse on an unprecedented scale. Off-world banking is already being mooted: coordinated action is required before auctions are put out of the reach of even international law.

(First published 3 September 1999)

09-03 – Microsoft faces Hobson’s choice for W2K

Microsoft faces Hobson’s choice for W2K

Microsoft’s most recent announcements concerning Windows 2000 release date are unsurprising. Coupled with the delays to the most recent developer release, the Seattle company are insisting that the product is on schedule. What is most telling is that nobody seems to mind.

As usual, the media campaign is a combination of promotion and expectation management. Microsoft are emphasising quality, and seem to have separated the concepts of “final code” from “released product”. But let’s add some common sense here. Rule One of software projects: you cannot compress development time. Time and again, less experienced managers try to turn eight months into four only to find that that, like a tensed spring, the required time jumps back to the initial estimates. It’s true, try it. The only thing that can reduce a development schedule is reduced functionality or, heaven forbid, reduced testing.

So, what are Microsoft’s options? The first is to remove some functionality from the product, but that would be a marketing disaster. It has been done before, of course (hence the telling reputation of Service Pack 1). The second is to risk releasing incompletely tested software onto the market. Of course, this is a strategy known to most vendors, not just Microsoft: release 1 of any product is, generally, avoided by all but the most desperate. The third is to claim a code freeze at the end of the year, then continue development until shortly before the release date. This, employing the term “code chill” rather than code freeze, is again common practice but risks reducing testing time (again) and removes any slack that may be left from the system.

Microsoft are faced with a stark set of choices. The baying wolves of the IT industry will jump on the slightest misfortune of the software giant, so it will be treading very carefully over the next few months. But what of the end user? The advice is clear, and would be the same for any new product of this scale. Take your time. Evaluate the product (and others) in a realistic environment, making sure that it works with existing and planned architectures and configurations of other software. Listen carefully to the experiences of early adopters, and learn from them. Fortunately, the signs are there that end users are adopting exactly this approach. They are “waiting and seeing,” or planning upgrades only when their existing configurations will no longer be adequate. Y2K is, funnily enough, a helpful distraction: no-one is likely to rush into anything in January 2000.

It is extremely likely that Windows 2000 arrives late, incomplete and buggy (but don’t get me wrong – I’d be delighted for this to be proved untrue). Whilst Microsoft will struggle, yet again, with the blows to its reputation that this will cause, the vast majority of potential users will be unaffected.

(First published 3 September 1999)

09-03 – Open Sky’s wireless PDA future leaves Microsoft out in the cold

Open Sky’s wireless PDA future leaves Microsoft out in the cold

Competition in a market is a good way of encouraging innovation and keeping control of costs. But what do you do if you don’t have any competition? In the Wireless PDA space, 3Com’s answer would appear to be – buy some.

3Com have a share in Open Sky, a joint venture with Aether Systems, Inc. Open Sky’s goal is to provide a US-wide wireless infrastructure to support handheld devices in general, not just to the Palm VII. Its two-pronged approach involves, firstly, linking up with existing mobile carriers and secondly, involving partners to develop modems and software to enable existing devices to talk to the ether. Whilst the initiative remains stateside only, this partnership approach is more likely to result in a european service than 3Com’s existing wireless service, the single-company Palm.net.

The move is interesting because, effectively, it pitches OpenSky against Palm.net. It is difficult to see how Palm.net will compete with OpenSky: the former requires a Palm VII, currently costing nearly three times the price of the chepest Palm (the newly released Palm IIIe) and it is unlikely that the price of the modem will make up the difference. Palm.net service costs are notoriously high, and likley to be put to shame relative to OpenSky’s fixed rates. On the eve of its national rollout of Palm.net, 3Com have taken a calculated risk – the greater good is to establish a market sector for the wireless handheld device, and the Palm VII/Palm.net combination cannot do it by itself. For credibility, the market needs to extend to all flavours of handheld, Palm or otherwise. Enter Windows CE.

Here is the fundamental element of 3Com’s risk calculation. It must establish a market, a move which is unlikely to succeed if it is linked to any one flavour of PDA. However it wants to retain its early bird advantage over the Microsoft camp, which makes up the lion’s share of the competition. For this reason, Open Sky has announced that it will be supporting Windows CE by autumn of next year. 3Com are relying on the rapid acceptance and uptake of wireless handheld devices, and will do everything they can to encourage the end user to come on board. There’s the rub – the company will even pitch against itself to create and win the market before Microsoft get a look in.

This strategy is fraught with risks. Corporate America is likely to be smarting for a couple of months after Y2K, which could dampen the acceptance of wireless. The success of the Palm was driven by the end user and not the IT department, however – this is a fact that will have been in 3Com’s calculations. In addition, of course, mobile phone manufacturers are not standing still, and the fruits of the Symbian alliance are to be yielding forth in the near future. Despite all this, 3Com probably feels it has no choice – it has to steal the initiative, because the risks of not doing so are even greater.

For the moment, from this side of the pond we can only watch. But we watch with interest.

(First published 3 September 1999)

09-08 – Is today the day the doomsayers have their picnic?

Is today the day the doomsayers have their picnic?

9-9-99. The six character string used by mainframe programmers tens of years ago to signify “end of file” is sending shivers down the spines of the same people today. Oh yes, I wrote a few of those programs, they say, dispelling any thoughts that this might be an overhyped media myth. As with the big Y, nobody has been able to predict with certainty what the effects of the 9-9-99 problem will be. Today, the waiting is over.

Certainly the issue is being taken seriously from some quarters. According to \link{http:\\www.silicon.com,Silicon.com} for example, the UK coastguard has chartered extra tugs to bale out ships whose ageing navigational systems are caught short.

As industry watchers, we shall be following today’s events with interest, not only because they will be of concern in themselves. The realities of the 9-9-99 problem are the best thing we have to predict the events at the end of the year. We are sceptical that nothing will go wrong, indeed we are amongst the more pessimistic observers. Today’s events will enable us to gauge what might go wrong, what the impacts might be and what needs to happen to resolve the effects. Like a fish-eye lens, Y2K will be a distorted amplification of today’s events, large or small. Lets just hope they are small.

(First published 8 September 1999)

09-08 – ISPs get tools to help SMEs compete in online economy

ISPs get tools to help SMEs compete in online economy

According to Forrester Research, small businesses’ share of the Web, in terms of revenues, is expected to decline from 9 percent this year, to only 6 percent in 2003. Bleak words indeed.

These predictions are understandable considering that the larger firms are more likely to have the resources to get themselves onto the Web. Even then, the inevitable shakeup of retail organisations is likely to spell doom for many small businesses. Is this just Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the future? Unlikely, as this is happening already both because of and despite the Internet. At the same time, however, the Web presents an unprecedented opportunity for businesses large and small: it is the great leveller in which all are equal. This is true, at least, for those companies which are online.

Today’s Internet shopper is becoming more discerning. It is not enough for a site to present a long catalogue of products and a telephone number for orders (although this has been a successful model in the past). Customers want sites to be fast and fun, informative and interactive. Such added value is raising the hurdle to newcomers whose first attempts at establishing themselves online are often proving less than successful.

Initiatives are underway to help resolve this. One set of tools, from Bondware, is directed at ISPs. The tools provide the set of functions to that the discerning surfer has come to expect, including chat rooms, newsfeeds, member pages, ad management and a host of other facilities. The most attractive thing about the package is the price: at $6000 for the basic license (which allows for 25 commerce sites), the cost of entry is lowered considerably, enabling the service providers to provide low cost service to their subscribers.

The advantage of this approach over the competition, for example, Microsoft’s Small Business Server, is that it is designed for ISPs who are the natural focus, in terms of providing both technology and experience, to help SMEs onto the Web. It also promotes continued development and competition, as ISPs can develop the range of services they provide, enabling companies to pick and choose from a number of ISPs. The other advantage is, of course, that it is available now.

(First published 8 September 1999)

09-08 – Killer App for voice recognition – don’t hold your breath

Killer App for voice recognition – don’t hold your breath

IBM’s newest version of ViaVoice signals a change of tactics for their voice recognition software. The product is to have improved recognition, better user-friendliness and additional features including Web surfing facilities. Will this release prompt the acceptance of VR? Unlikely, not yet.

There are three areas which we can see as benefiting from this technology. The first is dictation. Speaking, ultimately, is a different communication technique to writing. Some dictate letters, but most prefer to write them directly. Will this change? Unlikely, particularly in today’s already noisy offices. Imagine the hubbub of everyone talking inanely to their machines. As I write this, I contemplate using a microphone rather than a keyboard: even with 100% recognition, I cannot see the attraction. Maybe that’s just me. The second area is to provide an interface for users with physical disabilities. There is a clear benefit here, to certain users. Even so, neither of the two areas are sufficient to give killer app status to recognition software.

The third area is in commanding the computer. This is where the potential lies, but unfortunately not in its present state. The ability to launch an application, or even surf the Web for that matter, by voice commands is unlikely to be any more than a fad. Voice recognition will sit on the bench, as it waits for the technology which will launch it into ubiquitousness: intelligent agents. Once computers are capable of following natural language commands, then the time will be right for their communication by voice. For computers, read the whole of the online infrastructure. For example, “Take me to Amazon. I want to buy the latest John Grisham novel,” is an sentence I could imagine speaking out loud, either to my computer or directly to my phone.

The issue is one of time. The recognition software quality is almost there but the ability of the IT infrastructure to make sense of our utterances is not, in terms of both indexing the information “out there” in a sensible fashion and providing the resources to exploit it. Neither is it a priority, so it is likely that voice recognition has a wait on its hands before its perfect partner comes along.

(First published 8 September 1999)

09-08 – Mainframes lead resurgence in software tools

Mainframes lead resurgence in software tools

It is old news that mainframe companies are experiencing an uplift in their fortunes. As the mainframe re-invents itself as the workhorse of the Web, the drive to competitive advantage is causing vendors to light the fires under the slumbering development tools market.

Let’s take an example. Amdahl’s hardware revenue figures for last year beat expectations by 202%. Quite a turn-around. Now the company says that interest is increasing in its ObjectStar development environment. ObjectStar is an integrated collection of tools to enable mainframe applications to be developed – tools include screen and GUI builders, a rule-based engine for business logic and wizard-like facilities to support the generation of common functionality. Whilst the product has a reasonable existing customer base, whose licensing revenues have supported the product’s continued viability, efforts to promote ObjectStar were largely killed off eighteen months ago when they failed to generate sufficient new customers. Things have remained flat until now, with both existing customers, and new prospects enquiring about the product.

Why should this be? The answer, says Chris James, Marketing Manager for Software and Services at Amdahl, is the drive towards competitive advantage on the Net. This makes sense: it is one thing to use an off the shelf package for internet site development, or to select a mainframe over a smaller server to ensure that the volume of transactions can be handled. However, it is the additional services which can set one Web site above the rest. These services need to be defined and implemented at a rate which the packaged tools could not possibly keep up with: in other words, they require bespoke development. At the same time, eCommerce is driving the requirement for an unprecedented level of integration with external information feeds and back end systems, new and legacy. To deal with this level of complexity, whilst developing added value functionality in an ever-decreasing timeframe, companies are turning to development tools with renewed vigour. Particular interest will inevitably be garnered by enterprise RAD tools such as ObjectStar.

A few words of reality. There does not exist, anywhere on the market today, a fully integrated development environment which takes into account the full spectrum of needs for Web Site development. Areas such as site editorial, management of external components, monitoring of statistics and configuration management are still the domain of a disparate set of tools which remain disconnected from the “core functionality” of application serving and transaction management. This situation will change: the renewed interest in development tools will, in the short term, lead to promotional campaigns for existing products. In the medium term it will also spawn advances in functionality as the suppliers attempt to leap-frog each other to corner the burgeoning market.

In a way, history is repeating itself. There is nothing happening here that did not happen during the CASE “revolution” of the late seventies and early eighties. We will see the market consolidating, silver bullets flying and the inevitable disappointments when they do not solve all ills. We will also see a new generation of software tools which, used correctly, can enable businesses to reap the rewards of the Web.

(First published 8 September 1999)

09-08 – Nor.Web left on the wayside of the superhighway

Nor.Web left on the wayside of the superhighway

A surprise announcement yesterday revealed Nortel Networks and United Utilities’ intentions to pull out of their Nor.Web joint venture. What does this mean? Well, nothing, probably.

The joint venture existed to develop and promote the Powerline technology, which was much-lauded when first announced a couple of years ago. Several deals were struck, for example with electricity companies in the UK, Germany and Sweden, and interest was gathering in the US. Everything was rosy, then, well, technology just passed Powerline by. ADSL was the straw that broke this camel’s back, but the writing was already on the wall when the ITU ratified the latest bunch of wireless communications standards several months ago. Bandwidth is on the increase by default, as technologies for mainstream bandwidth provision (for example through phone lines and across the ether) continue to develop. Such advances render the development of new technologies to provide additional bandwidth, exploiting niches such as powerlines, largely unnecessary.

Digital Powerline, in any case, was facing an uphill media battle. Fears surrounded the emissions created due to the very high voltages required to transmit the signal over the high tension wires. Although this was not the direct cause of the decision, which was made for cost reasons, a spokesman for United Utilities confirmed that this was a factor.

Nor.Web are currently in discussions with their existing customers as to the options for the future. It is possible that the technology finds a buyer, who may well be able to make money out of it. If this is not possible, the demise of Digital Powerline is unlikely to cause more than a ripple in the Internet pool.

(First published 8 September 1999)

09-08 – NT Pragmatists strip Microsoft naked

NT Pragmatists strip Microsoft naked

It’s official – the shiny outer surface of Microsoft’s marketing machine is no longer the basis on which organisations are formulating their IT strategies. Thank goodness for that.

According to a survey by the NT Forum, which showed 40% of respondents already beta testing Windows 2000, only 30% had any plans to upgrade to Windows 2000 in the next twelve months, relative to 80% last year. Do I need to repeat that, or did you catch the significance already? It is easy to speculate on what has caused this apparently slating turnaround. Is it Y2K looming higher than expected in IT managers’ eyes? Is it that the world is to adopt Linux wholesale, no longer needing the costly alternatives? Whilst the first question may be a factor, our sources tell us a far simpler story.

Lets work back from the answer, which may be stated quite simply: there is no one answer. Despite Microsoft’s attempts to the contrary, to tout NT as the only operating system that we would ever need, the reality always was, and shall always remain, quite different. Back in 1997, Microsoft missed its chance to kill off Unix once and for all, by demonstrating the scalability of NT. The audience were expectant: Wintel had already trounced the pretenders to the desktop throne and was widely expected to do the same to the server. Indeed, a significant number of IT strategies at the time were flying the Windows flag wherever they possibly could, and were waiting patiently for Microsoft to take over the rest of the world. However, in the end NT scalability failed to convince the sceptics, the media and even the end users. This was the beginning of the end for Microsoft’s buy once, use anywhere mantra.

More recently, the Internet and eCommerce have uplifted the fortunes of mainframe and high-end server manufacturers (see the related story on IT-Director.com). The mainframe market, which refused from the outset to just roll over and die, is being reborn. It is not currently a market which gives NT a look in. What is now clear is that we will need mainframes for the highest availability and performance, we will need mid-range servers for more affordable back-end processing. The scale goes all the way down to the embedded software devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. Each has its own specific needs and hence requires the most appropriate operating system support. The dream, held by IT managers and promoted by Microsoft, of a single OS running everywhere, has become sadly jaded. The nine versions touted for Windows 2000 (as reported here) are testament to this fact.

There is no one answer: this is coupled with the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to throw away existing technologies to replace them with the newest, best thing. IT Managers are becoming masters of the morass – pragmatists for whom the goal is to integrate the best of the old with the best of the new. Upgrading only when necessary, replacing when budgets allow, these folk have evolved to listen more to the needs of their business than the hype of the vendors. Microsoft are seen for what they are, as a software company with some good products which can fit into the overall IT portfolio of an organisation. And that’s just the way it should be – the question is now, how long before the Seattle giant accepts its place.

(First published 8 September 1999)

09-09 – Apple at the gates of dawn

Apple at the gates of dawn

I like Apple. Always have, but then that’s because the technology has always been more important to me than the marketing. Apple’s demise hit hard, particularly when they had such good products. But now they are coming back.

It took Windows a good ten years to catch up with the Macintosh in terms of usability, but finally with Windows 95, it did. (OK, there’s a debate we could have there, but you get the point.) Unfortunately, in the meantime some particularly foolish management decisions priced the unclonable Mac out of a market which was growing like billy-oh. The company has suffered for its foolishness, but it is fair to say that it can leave such errors firmly in the past. The company is re-emerging – not as a gorilla that vandalises everything in its path, nor as a niche supplier with little to offer, but as a player in the game, with sufficient following and reputation to give customers confidence. Its new products are sexy and powerful, the software is there, the innovation is there and what is more there is a new track record developing which augurs well for the future.

For these and other reasons, Apple has seen its share price increase by 40% over the past month alone. Advance orders of its new laptop, the iBook, are running at 140,000 already and there are plans to launch it in Japan within the next month or so. Can nothing go wrong for the reborn company?

Of course it can, and it would be folly to suggest otherwise. However, this market is as much about keeping one step ahead of the game as anything, and for the moment, Apple appear to be doing exactly that.

(First published 9 September 1999)

09-09 – Argos misses the decimal point

Argos misses the decimal point

It looks like Argos, the UK retail chain, may be sailing into murky electronic waters over the next few months. A few days ago, a mistyped catalogue entry on the Argos website led to hundreds of customers ordering Sony televisions at three pounds a pop. The company are now refusing to honour the orders, as (in their own words) this was an obvious error. The question is, are they liable?

This question would be difficult enough to answer even without the complication of the Internet, due to the complexities of commercial and contract law. The underlying model of the retail sale is, however, relatively simple and it is this which will be used as the basis for both sides of the case. According to Taylor Walton, a legal firm which specialises in eCommerce law, there are three elements to a retail sale. The first is the “invitation to treat,” which corresponds to an entry in a catalogue or a price on a shelf. The second is the acceptance of a payment. If a payment is accepted, this leads to the third element, namely the completed contract. In other words, once a payment has been accepted, for example through a credit card transaction, then the company which made the initial offer is liable to deliver the goods.

Reports in the press suggest that Argos is to fight any suits (and indeed, threats to sue have already been made), by saying that orders were made but would not be accepted. Sure enough, a quick browse of the Argos web site shows that customers are invited to make “orders”. However, once a customer has compiled an order, they are then requested to make a credit card payment and hit the “purchase” button. Hmm, sounds like a sale to me, but who am I to say? It is probably best to leave this to the legal experts, who stand to make a pretty penny out of this debate whatever the outcome.

Unfortunately for Argos, precedent would suggest that they stand to lose. Many in the UK will remember the Hoover competition which offered free holidays on the purchase of a washing machine. The company was forced to honour its pledges, almost bringing itself to its knees in the process. Supermarkets, too, have had their fair share of problems due to misadvertising prices. The Walkling case, for example, resulted in a family claiming (and receiving) £30,000 worth of goods. This was due to Sainsbury’s policy of letting customers keep the goods and get their money back if they found that an item was mis-priced. Another example is of an enterprising customer buying £5000 worth of beer at Tesco, then going directly to the customer service counter and asking for their money back – and getting it. The service representative is reported to have commented that the lucky customer “didn’t do as well as a chap in our Stratford store,” or words to that effect. It is understood that Sainsbury’s have now changed this policy, but Tesco, to date, have not.

Whatever the outcome, it is clear that the Argos case will be watched with interest from around the globe. One thing it illustrates is that on the Internet, nothing happens by halves – the hundreds of TVs were “sold” in a matter of hours, before Argos corrected the error. It could be said that all publicity is good publicity – even articles such as this will encourage prospective customers to visit the site. Indeed, I would wager that even now, bounty hunters are scouring the online catalogues for typos.

(First published 9 September 1999)

09-09 – Dell gets the Acquisition bug

Dell gets the Acquisition bug

Dell made its first acquisition yesterday, which clearly marks the beginning of something big. Dell’s purchase of ConvergeNet for $340M is the first step on a long road for Dell, which will see the company take on the storage market and, very likely, come away with a sizable chunk.

At the moment, Dell is saying that the move does not affect its existing partnerships. For example, the company is quoted as saying that there is “no impact in existing relationships” with IBM and Data General, who supply disk drives and storage systems respectively. Similarly, Network Appliance, whose storage appliances are rebadged by Dell and sold on, does not foresee any direct impact at this stage. As pointed out by a source from within the company, ConvergeNet are a SAN supplier (or would be, if they had released any products yet) whereas NetApp are a Network Attached Storage (NAS) manufacturer. The two models can live side by side in harmony, said the source. Fair point.

However it is unlikely that Dell will stop here. Dell already works with tens of partners, of whom ConvergeNet was one. Further acquisitions will no doubt be announced, each, knowing Dell, enabling the company to take new technologies and skills on board without causing a major impact to their operational capabilities. No doubt, they will have learned a number of lessons from watching Compaq’s purchase of Tandem and Digital – ironically, Compaq is probably Dell’s major target for competition in the storage space, just as with the PC market where Compaq will still be smarting from losing the top spot in US PC sales to its rival.

This organic approach to growth will be coupled with Dell’s world-beating sales engine, not to mention their brand. Dell will win market share in the same way that they did in the PC arena, by putting service at the top of the list and by creating a supply model which, with its rapid turnaround and low overheads, is the envy of the market. Sooner rather than later, Dell will find itself in direct competition with its suppliers and partners, with the result that some relationships will have to change. But this is unlikely to distract the new Goliath as it drives towards its goals.

(First published 9 September 1999)

09-09 – Microsoft’s Cool shades preach Java doom

Microsoft’s Cool shades preach Java doom

Unsure how to present this, let’s start with the facts as we have them. On The Register, it was noted that Microsoft are to release a programming language called Cool, whose aim (it is reputed) is to kill Java. Questions abound – what does it entail, will it succeed, and ultimately, do we mind?

Cool is not a language, rather it is a “series of extensions to C++”. This is the nub of the matter, as Java is ostensibly a simplification of C++. As an ex-C++ programmer I can say that its curtailment is probably a safer bet than its extension. It was always astonishing to see how convoluted C code could become (I wonder if the convoluted code competition is still running?) That is, of course, until C++ came along. If C could be astonishing, C++ could be truly unfathomable. Java has been described as “C++ without the hard bits” – this is only part of the story, of course, but it paints the picture. Despite this, of course, there is plenty of extremely well written C++ around. Java has failed, so far, to push it off its perch, and it is likely (look at COBOL) that both languages will be here to stay.

So – what are Microsoft doing? Provision of new facilities to the C++ community can be seen as a good thing. The language, by itself, is nowhere near as well supported as Java – just look at the vast range of class libraries now available, for free, for the latter. There is room for some catch-up, and Microsoft are probably right in trying to fill the gap. But Java-killer? Unlikely. There is far too much momentum behind the language. Just look at IBM’s policy of including a JVM with every platform they ship, mainframe to mini. Also, Java set out to achieve a particular end – to meet the needs of the Web. Okay, this is paraphrasing, but Java’s design enables it to be run as applets or applications on devices from phones to digital TVs. Things have moved on, of course, such as the Enterprise Java Bean specification which is as much an IT architecture as a language construct. Users now see Java as strategic – just look at the results of our recent Java survey to see this.

The other question, of course, is to ask whether we mind. Microsoft wants to be rid of Java for lots of reasons, none of them technical. We could be affronted by this, or we could remember that SUN’s initial launch of Java was set to remove Windows from its pedestal. In other words, this could be seen as a cynical attempt by a slick marketing machine to replace the cynical attempt by another slick marketing machine to replace a cynical attempt… you get the picture. At the end of the day, though, marketing will not decide this. Java is not going to die, and that’s final.

(First published 9 September 1999)

09-09 – Sega’s Dreamcast – millstone or milestone?

Sega’s Dreamcast – millstone or milestone?

Despite Sega’s first-to-the-market position for its next generation games console, pipping both Sony and Nintendo to the post, the forecast is not so good for the games company. But, hang on – what’s this got to do with IT?

The answer is simple. These machines are an indicator of the shape of things to come for consumer use of technology. They have two key features: TV access, and Internet access. They also have a price tag which is much more within the bounds of the mass market.

There’s been a major, but little talked about, problem with the home PC. The question has been, where to put it? Chances are, it will be in the spare bedroom, dining room, cubby hole under the stairs or office. However, a large proportion of the predicted uses of PCs are social activities – home shopping, chat, direct video or audio, and, of course, games. The games console bridges several worlds. It is accepted by the young, it is allowed in the living room and it is understandable by all. No boot failures or install problems plague it, it is reliable, resilient and quiet. The games market may well choose to shut out Sega, however successful it is in the short term. However, it may also close the door on the PC mass market. PCs have a place – data storage, hobbies, word processing. But as for their mass market potential, the future of the PC is far from sure.

(First published 9 September 1999)

09-09 – Transatlantic porn test case gets result – sort of

Transatlantic porn test case gets result – sort of

Anti-porn crusaders will be breathing a sigh of relief today, following the landmark judgement in a British court about a UK resident running a number of US-based porn sites from his home in Surrey. The case was part-victory, part disappointment, as the US involved party appears to have got off scot-free, and two of the sites are still up, running and based in Costa Rica.

This case serves to illustrate the state of the world legal system concerning Internet porn. In school terms, it’s a case of “not bad, could do better” – clearly huge strides have already been made but many loopholes still exist. For the moment, whilst the partial victory is better than nothing, it should only serve to increase the efforts required in all countries around the globe, to set global minimum standards and enable the interworking that is necessary to deal with the crimes. It is unlikely that the porn industry will ever be stamped out, but at the moment, the Internet offers an open invitation to anyone wishing to participate in this unfortunate trade.

(First published 9 September 1999)

09-10 – 9-9-99 – Reasons to be cheerful, or not

9-9-99 – Reasons to be cheerful, or not

Last Thursday came, with neither bang nor whimper. The press have jumped on the single reported event, namely a spreadsheet application being run in Tasmania. So – was that it?

I still remember the weeks leading up to the start of 1984. The sense of foreboding, that Big Brother really would set up shop and start rewriting history, was everywhere. Funnily enough, the feeling continued way into the years which followed, whilst at the same time there was a sense of loss, at disasters failing to happen. Last Thursday was like that – it came and it went, with very little to show, leaving the more paranoid amongst us wondering whether we were robbed.

Okay, nothing happened. We should still be vigilant, but then so should we always be – a crash is a crash, after all. The debate centred largely around whether there really was an issue – after all, argued some, September 9, 1999 can be written in such a variety of ways. Maybe they were right or maybe they got lucky, but who cares? No big bang, no domino effect, cause to celebrate or at the very least get a decent night’s sleep.

Now then, let’s get on with the real issue. 9-9-99 enabled plenty of companies and government agencies to test out their Y2K readiness plans (the results of which served to fill the press column inches reserved for any computer failures). Most plans succeeded, some failed (notably in the US Coast Guard – what is it about coast guards and dates?). The 9-9-99 problem may turn out to be fictional, but Y2K will not.

We know several things about Y2K as a fact: the first is that it is a real problem that some computer systems use two digits to store the date rather than four. We also know that substantial money has been spent trying to resolve the problems that it might cause. Most importantly, we know from our own sources that a number of so-called “compliant” systems, when retested, have reported an average of 30 non-compliance errors per 1,000,000 lines of code, most of which result in incorrect data being written to the disk. This isn’t the result of an over-active imagination or a news shortage, it’s there in black and white.

In the words of Tom Hanks, “We have a problem.” The only thing we do not know about Y2K is how big the impact will be.

(First published 10 September 1999)

09-10 – AmEx builds Blue bridge over Web payment waters

AmEx builds Blue bridge over Web payment waters

AmEx are the latest in line to attempt tackling a fundamental weakness in the world of eCommerce – that of making payments. Will they succeed?

Currently, Internet credit card transactions are seen by the consumer as being insecure. This perception maybe changing (albeit slowly), and possibly be more than a little misplaced relative to, say, giving card details over the phone. However it is still one of the major reasons cited for slowing the uptake of eCommerce. The other, equally important reason is that credit card payments are expensive, effectively setting a minimum purchase value of about £5. A raft of initiatives have been attempted, such as microcharging through eCash. To date, however, none has won the hearts and minds of the Web population.

AmEx have partnered with a company called eCharge to launch a hybrid service known as Blue, providing both smartcard and credit card facilities and Internet transaction mechanisms. With regard to the latter, the service is said to be more secure than traditional credit card mechanisms; also, it is notably cheaper to run, per transaction, than its credit card equivalent with merchants actually to be given a discount for using it on the Web.

What may set this trial apart is that it is not a trial. This service is a launch, available to consumers across the US. It is far more likely to have mass market appeal as it is aimed at the mass market; also, it is instantly attractive to Web retailers through its reduced cost. Unfortunately, we could not find any sites actually using the new standard on the Internet. If you build it, they will come, maybe.

(First published 10 September 1999)

09-10 – HP bring DVD+RW a step closer

HP bring DVD+RW a step closer

DVD may be taking off slowly in Europe, but it is still taking off. The reason may well be this simple – what do we do with all that space?

Hewlett Packard has announced its DVD+R/W drive, which will be available in the UK from the end of November. The price is not yet announced, but the SCSI device is expected to come on the market at about £500. According to HP, the device will be able to read existing DVD-ROM disks, but current DVD players will not be able to read disks written by the DVD+R/W. This is not due to technology incompatibilities, rather it is a software issue. HP are currently in discussions with other DVD-ROM manufacturers to see how the situation can be resolved.

Despite the continued improvements in these technologies (the spindle speed is on the up, for example), DVD has so far failed to take the European market by storm. A recent survey, from analyst firm Strategy Analytics, showed the European take-up of DVD to be lagging behind the US, expecting 4% of european households to own a DVD, compared to 11% in the US. Why is this?

DVD disks can store 3Gb of data on each side – that’s a total of 6Gb, giving each disk the capacity of 60 zip disks. The potential for DVD is huge, both in the corporate markets and for consumers. All it lacks is the Killer App. CD-ROM is largely adequate for most uses, and while I would be delighted to replace all those MSDN disks with a single platter, it is not that much of a problem to me. Similarly, at home, most european computer and video users are still content with CD-ROM and VHS. It is only a matter of time, of course, before our information appetites overwhelm the capacity of the lowly CD, but in the meantime we are quite content to wait and let the prices drop a little.

There remains the outstanding issue of the ongoing debate between DVD-RAM and DVD+R/W. These are competing, incompatible technologies, but there is an inevitable market for DVD+R/W as the disks will be (software glitches aside) compatible with existing DVD-ROM drives.

So – no big bang for DVD in Europe, not just yet. Despite this, the future seems bright for DVD – the market is expected to grow exponentially over the next three years. HP is leading the pack with its products so, given its good reputation in the removable storage arena, the company seems well placed to deal with the rush when it comes.

(First published 10 September 1999)

09-10 – W2K gets first UK deployment

W2K gets first UK deployment

Microsoft announced at the end of last week that the University of Leicester had begun a deployment of Windows 2000, to replace its Novell Netware installation. Although clearly a showcase piece, it should still be watched with interest.

The network is to be rolled out this week to an initial 500 PCs. By Autumn next year, this number will be increased to 2,000 PCs and up to 7,000 remote sessions. 7 Compaq servers will be used, with 4 main servers, an SMS server, an Exchange server and an SQL server. The version of Windows 2000 to be rolled out will be Release Candidate 1. Our advice to all comers has been to pilot the operating system before rolling out, and to watch what others are doing: the Leicester project, while still not enterprise-scale, will doubtless provide some useful insights (not least the merits of rolling out pre-release software). Of particular note is the new security functionality – we would expect the student population to test this to the full.

For the monthly update, see The University of Leicester Windows 2000 web site.

(First published 10 September 1999)

09-10 – Waitrose ISP – now we are truly free

Waitrose ISP – now we are truly free

It is unsurprising that another UK supermarket has joined the free ISP fray. It is interesting that Waitrose are to give phone revenues to charity. What is unique, however, is that Waitrose are not to charge for support.

The UK free ISP market is already burgeoning. Tesco, Virgin, W.H. Smith and a host of others (from newspapers to football clubs) quickly followed a trend started by FreeServe, the now-floated spin-off of electronics retailer Dixons. Whilst free ISPs have been slated for providing a lower quality of service than their paid-for equivalents, the truth is that ISP quality varies widely across the board, paid for or otherwise. It is probably true to say that, in these early days of the Web, people are more accepting of non-optimal service than they will be in ten years time. The fact remains that for a substantial proportion of the UK population, the quality of service that free ISPs can provide is good enough.

The major downside of all these services is that, to date, they have charged for support at a premium rate, for example 50 pence per minute from tesco.net. Now this is nothing personal, as I have worked on both sides of the helpdesk fence – the support role is thankless, problems are often difficult to solve and, to cap it all, customers can be downright rude. From a customer perspective these services can be inefficient and bureaucratic, which wouldn’t be such a problem if the clock wasn’t ticking at a penny a second. To take a recent example (which, honestly, I wouldn’t mention if this Waitrose article hadn’t come along), I called the support desk of a major supermarket free ISP to inform them that I was receiving the email of another subscriber. Following a good five minutes on the phone, I found the procedure for dealing with this situation. Being a community-minded eCitizen I wouldn’t have minded spending the time, but I was riled at being charged at least three quid to help them sort out somebody else’s problems. Get the picture? If support is free, fair enough, but if we are paying then we expect our absolute money’s worth. Don’t we?

Waitrose are offering an email bureau service, which provides for “unlimited email addresses, accessible anywhere in the world” according to the press release. This service, which is still being developed, will be unique in that it allows customers to access their email either from a POP-3 compatible client (such as Microsoft Outlook), or directly from the Internet à la Yahoo or Hotmail. This is a major differentiator which allows users to get the best of all world for Internet access. A major concern to JKD, the company responsible for developing the Web site, and ITG, the service provider, is the recent media storm about Microsoft’s Hotmail service: every effort is being made to ensure that such back doors are not left in Waitrose’s email facilities.

The target audience for the service is the profile Waitrose/John Lewis customer, namely the broadsheet rather than the tabloid reader. Several reasons are touted for this – firstly, it is in keeping with the middle-to-upper class Waitrose branding. Secondly, the keenest users of the Web tend to be from “the thinking classes”. These reasons are only valid for the site content – it is very likely that the thought of free, unlimited support will have a much wider appeal.

The gesture to charity is an interesting one. It will be good for the image of the site, as well as giving customers the feeling that they are giving to good causes, without them having to lift a finger (this will probably appeal to their target audience). It is also good for the charities, of course! But where do Waitrose expect to make their money? This is where things get really interesting.

Waitrose is a supermarket launching onto the Web. It is setting up as an ISP in order to attract prospective customers to its site. Ultimately, though, its revenues will come from its capability to sell its own products via the Web. This, like Iceland’s announcement a few days ago (which included free delivery of goods bought through its site), demonstrates the sea change that is occurring in the supermarket-ISP arena in the UK. The battle is joined: over the next months, expect to see Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury, ASDA, Safeway leap-frogging each other with a host of new services, not to get users signed up to their ISP but to get real customers buying real products.

(First published 10 September 1999)

09-21 – IT Directors – hold your heads high

IT Directors – hold your heads high

According to a survey published in yesterday’s FT, IT Directors and CIOs have more reason today than ever to feel valued. The traditional stereotype is of a person thrust into the job of directing corporate IT, faced with huge pressure to deliver solutions whilst lacking sufficient knowledge of either the business or the technologies required to support it. This would be coupled with having only limited authority to achieve any objectives, let alone strategic ones. According to the survey, published jointly by the London Business School and Egon Zehnder International, the IT Director role has become “one of the most demanding in the corporation,” with at least half of the working week spent on non-IT activities such as defining business strategy. Hurrah.

We are delighted by this development and we will change our stereotypes accordingly. We do have one minor concern, though: the result is such a direct contradiction to those of the past that it seems too good to be true. There’s one other tiny, tiny point – we still know many IT Directors that are harangued by the business, viewed as without teeth and, privately, rather worried that the pace of technology is far faster than they can keep up with. So – what is the full story? We await the full results of the survey, which will be published by the time you read this. In the meantime, we would be delighted for any feedback you might have, anonymous or otherwise, on the condition of the IT Director. Is it all so rosy? If you are an IT Director, you work with one or for one do, please, let us know.

(First published 21 September 1999)

09-21 – Oracle, HP and Siegel – picking up the CRuMbs?

Oracle, HP and Siegel – picking up the CRuMbs?

CRM is, frankly, a triumph of marketing over substance. The danger lies ahead for the main players, who may have forgotten to worry about the potential damage they could do to their reputations, let alone those of their customers.

Why so? Let’s clear some cobwebs which may be obscuring the true CRM message. CRM is the blanket term applied to “front office software”, i.e. software which may be used to develop, manage and deal with people with whom a company needs to interact. This definition is dubiously vague, a fact which has been exploited by vendors of anything from sales automation, help desk, marketing and call centre software packages. The war of words is ongoing, as the big players such as Oracle and Siebel slug it out to win market share. Bizarrely, it isn’t the products that are being pitched head to head, it is the marketing messages. As it happens, the word is (from the Yankee Group) that the punch-fest is cutting little ice with the end user, who is making decisions based on what the package offers. This makes sense – we are not talking about a product with reasonably standard interfaces and functionality, but an array of very different products which must be decided on their own merits.

On to the second point. The danger of selling on hype alone is that the substance will most likely disappoint. We would strongly advise anyone from making a decision about a CRM product to define the requirement very carefully before making any decision. This is obvious motherhood, but is worth re-emphasising as CRM product lines have come into existence rather rapidly following a bout of market making from analysts and vendors alike. ERP packages, on the contrary, had a more solid foundation constructed before the marketeers got hold of it (and even then, were not painless to implement). A further worry concerns the quality of the products. In the rush to gain mind share before market share, it is possible that products will be cobbled together using half-suitable components and some window dressing on the user interface. Information has come our way to support this hypothesis: we can only advise decision-makers not to rush into any purchase before both functionality and product quality have been verified as adequate.

After all, we are not just talking about the reputations of the vendors. CRM automates the interface to the customer, so any failures will be starkly visible outside the user organisation. As we are advising against hype, neither do we want to over-hype the risks. All we would say is look before you leap: know what you want and ensure that you will get it, before you sign the CRM bottom line.

(First published 21 September 1999)

09-21 – SNIA Comes to Europe

SNIA Comes to Europe

The spirit of co-opetition was well and truly alive last week at the inaugural International Membership Development Conference of the Storage Industry Networking Association. With title like that, is it any wonder we talk in acronyms. So what’s it all about?

The goal of the SNIA is “to develop specifications which … form the basis of standards to enable compatibility among storage networking products”. Essentially, this is about software standards, not hardware: for a start, the SNIA wants to remain device-agnostic, not wanting to tread on the toes of existing hardware standardisation efforts such as the Fibre Channel Alliance. Secondly, hardware technologies are moving very fast: the SNIA sees its role as defining a device-independent layer which will continue to be valid well into the future. In practice, this means that the SNIA is running a number of initiatives, including:

- working groups are responsible for defining specifications in areas such as device management and (storage network based) data management

- conferences and marketing activities are planned to enable the storage networking message to be broadcast to the wider community

- an interoperability lab is to be developed, which will enable manufacturers to test their equipment and their software against certification criteria (SNIA-marking, perhaps)

Overall, the aim is that devices from different manufacturers will not only be plug-compatible, but also they will be able to communicate with each other and be managed centrally. For example, a goal scenario would be that two storage devices from different vendors could be used to provide storage for a single application such as SAP.

What is interesting about the work of the SNIA is that it has been set up to solve specific issues that have arisen through the development of networked storage, both SAN and NAS included. Rather than being driven by the marketing departments or the standards bodies, both of whom have had a tendency to deal with possibility rather than reality, the SNIA has its work cut out to solve problems, for example of interoperability, which exist today for managers of heterogeneous storage networking devices. The downside is, of course, that the wider community will have to wait before any SNIA-marked products exist. The first results are starting to come out of the working groups, for example common interface modules and SNMP MIBs are appearing, however it will be a good six months before we see anything turned into lab-tested products. There is, of course, a sense of urgency coming from the SNIA camp so we can hope for some concrete products to be ready for the post-Y2K thaw.

The SNIA already boasts a powerful membership. Board member companies include Veritas, EMC, StorageTek, Sun, HP, Quantum, Compaq, Dell, IBM and Microsoft. Also, the organisation, which has traditionally gained income from memberships, now has serious sponsorship money behind it and claims to have “the mindshare of the industry”, all of which stands it in good stead for the future. The SNIA appears to have its act together and its willingness to have an international (or global) presence is to be welcomed, as it has in the past been seen as a West Coast club. Prospective members should visit the all-new SNIA web site.

(First published 21 September 1999)

09-24 – Free domain names – a quick thrill

Free domain names – a quick thrill

Two significant changes are occurring in the world of domain names. The net result is that the cost of top level domain name registration will be next to nothing. Exciting news. Strange, though, that within a few years domain names will become a thing of the past.

What are these changes? The first is that a West Coast startup known as iDirections is to offer domain names for free. The basic cost for a registration company is currently down to $18: this cost, and the cost of iDirections own infrastructure, will be covered by advertising and promotions, presumably on the website of the domain name registrant. The second development is that Network Solutions, keeper of the keys to the central register of domain names, expect to have installed software which will enable direct access to its database: this could mean that the registration cost itself will drop to zero. One way or another, the chances are that domain name registration will be free by the end of the year.

This is very good news for all those that wanted a Web site with a distinctive domain name. It will not only benefit smaller businesses (for whom even $70, the going rate for a domain name for the punter, seems a bit steep), but also individuals who will be able to establish themselves with a clear Web presence. The net effect (no pun intended) will be that all the remaining nouns in the English dictionary, plus a significant number of non-english words, will be mopped up.

There are two reasons why this might matter less than it initially appears to. These are intelligent agents and directory facilities. First, let’s talk about intelligent agents. The fact is that dot com names have never been particularly user-friendly. It is a wonder to me why the IETF or the W3C did not bring out a more natural language version of Web site naming. For example, wouldn’t it be preferable to type “amazon books” in the browser, rather than “amazon.com”? You might not think so, but my grandmother would. Domain naming is a temporary aberration, which will go away as soon as there is something better. That “better thing” will probably be the use of intelligent agents.

Have you tried Google? I can recommend that you do. If you have forgotten a URL, then you can go to Google.com (excuse the anachronism), type the name of a company and hit “I’m feeling lucky”. The chances are that Google will take you to the right site. Now, let’s think about this. What, for example, is the domain name of Hewlett Packard? www.hp.com – easy one. What about CGU Insurance? That’s www.cgugroup.com. BBC? www.bbc.co.uk. Get the picture? Things aren’t always as obvious as they might seem. Google can help, but it is the “middle man” – wouldn’t it be preferable to avoid the extra step? That’s where the most basic of intelligent agents would come in, enhancing the browser by providing an implicit search facility. Propellor heads may prefer the dot com names, and (to be sure) a number of businesses are dot com named from the word go, but it is clear that the general population would prefer to stick with the names they know. More advanced intelligent agents are expected (once the XML revolution kicks in) to be able to search on products, amongst other things (for example, delivery costs), so just having the viagra.com domain will not be enough to guarantee business.

The second reason is that of directory facilities. Having “a good noun”.com as your name may well be a way to guarantee business, as (it is well documented) the average web user is just as likely to guess an URL as try to look for it. Hence travel.com, drugstore.com and music.com are all benefiting. In the longer term, though (and again, this will be a product of XML), punters are just as likely to say “give me all the travel sites that sell package holidays to the south of France”. The high premium on the domain name will quickly fade, hopefully not before the site owners have made a pretty penny.

Clearly, the gist of this argument is speculative, however sites like Google and AskJeeves are already demonstrating that natural language questioning is becoming an option and that the right URL doesn’t have to be the key to the kingdom. Companies profiting from domain name registration, or the domain names themselves, should make their hay while the sun is still shining.

(First published 24 September 1999)

09-24 – Software pricing to plummet – is Linus Right?

Software pricing to plummet – is Linus Right?

Linus Torvalds went on record at the end of last week saying that, within 3 years, software prices will have plummeted. So – is he right? The answer, it would seem, lies in the value which that software represents.

Value, so goes the adage, equates to benefits minus costs. Traditionally the main use of computing power has been seen as to reduce costs. More recently, the advent of the Web has enabled businesses to dramatically increase benefits. By itself, IT is pure cost, so it must be pitched against the resulting cost savings or the increased business that it enables.

Given this, the charges for software, hardware and services already varies significantly. In the City of London, for example, the consultancy fees for a newly-launched, software package were anywhere between £2,000 and £5,000 per day. Why? Because the package, once installed, could save a hundred times that amount: every day that the package sat in its box was money down the drain. The premium on IT-related goods is often well worth paying, or at least it has been to date. The question begs to be answered – how long will these good times roll for the IT industry?

We are still near the beginning of the electronic age. Every year, brand new technologies come with a single guarantee: that they will change the way we work. Telephones, radio and television, computers, fax machines, graphical terminals, email, the World Wide Web, mobile communications, each has played its part. We recognise the advantages of each new generation of products, we purchase and participate, we move up to the next rung of the technological ladder. Despite all the advances, though, how far have we come? Linux, for example, is based on operating system principles and a language which were industry standard in 1969. As for software, Object Oriented languages have been around for at least that long. Package software still has some life in it: the ERP (back office) market is now largely sewn up, so suppliers are turning their attention to the front office with CRM. Couple this with supply chain management and business intelligence, throw in platform support, and the question begs – what business problems remain to be solved? Once this stage is reached, the advantages will be gleaned from the relative qualities of each implementation.

There are still some major advances to be had from IT. Over the horizon is pervasive wireless networking, followed by terabyte solid-state memory. Software to manage the vast amounts of information flowing through the ether will keep a premium for as long as the quantity of information remains unmanageable. There will always be a business benefit in doing things better than the competition – just look at eBay’s recent failure to cope with the volume of transactions, or Hotmail’s security problems. For the medium term, IT in general, and software in particular, will hold its price where it can directly guarantee business advantage.

At the same time, the infrastructure tide is rising and things below the water level tend to have a fraction of the worth of the applications they support. For example, it is not a coincidence that most open source packages, such as compilers, operating systems and web servers, deal with infrastructure issues. It is also unsurprising that Microsoft should give away Internet Explorer 5, or that CA should bundle its Unicenter network management framework. The tide will continue to rise: the products included in this category will include databases, document management facilities and workflow engines. Today we are seeing office suites and programming environments become freeware: already a user can equip an office with a full range of IT facilities without having to spend a penny on software. Products are given away for all kinds of reasons, both commercial and emotional: for StarOffice, for example, it is probably both. Once a product has been given away, it cannot be reclaimed; if the product is already adequate, it undercuts all similar products now and in the future.

Fair to say, then, that the cost of certain kinds of software will plummet. However, do not be taken in: this is a ploy by the vendors: even likeable Linus has a vested interest. Vendors don’t do anything without a reason, for example, they hope to damage their competition or attract you to other elements of their product line. Make the most of the opportunities as they present themselves, then, but remember TANSTAAFL: there ain’t no such thing as a free license.

(First published 24 September 1999)

09-28 – MCI-WorldCom – Sprint to a finish?

MCI-WorldCom – Sprint to a finish?

The possible takeover of Sprint hit another obstacle this week, as the market showed its disgruntlement. Shares in the MCI-WorldCom dropped by 4% on Monday morning alone, to $75 1/16 – things quietened down since then but a dollar was wiped off the share value by end of play Tuesday. And now two companies are saying that the merger could be off at any time. Things are not looking good.

It all boils down to wireless. MCI WorldCom has seen its market pulled out from under its feet over the past year, as the mobile market has well and truly established itself. MCI’s main competitor, AT&T, is a strong player in the mobile market whereas MCI doesn’t have any wireless capabilities. Several players without the long pedigrees of the traditional communications providers, such as Sprint, Nextel (which has also been an MCI acquisition target), Voicestream and PowerTel, are carving up the airwaves: at the same time, due to operational efficiency and better technology, they are able to offer services to corporates at prices that MCI cannot touch. The rhetoric of Bernard Ebbers, CEO of MCI WorldCom, that the company “does not need a wireless business right now” does not match what his feet are doing, namely grasping at an opportunity to buy itself back into the multi-channel future of communications.

Whatever happens, it appears, there will be a storm. If the deal succeeds, it will have to ride out the likely disagreements of both the Justice Department and the European Commission, not to mention the fall-out from its sell-off of a chunk of Internet backbone to Cable and Wireless. It is strongly possible that the merger, if successful, would involve a sell-off of Sprint’s own Internet backbone unit. At the same time, the deal would blow a crater in the landscape of the whole, global telecommunications industry – alliances would need to break and re-form to take the merged company into account.

Should the deal fail (and it is likely that it will), MCI risks losing considerable corporate custom to its competitors, who are already able to provide a more comprehensive portfolio of services. It is difficult to see where the company would go next: Nextel is an option, though things failed last time around. Other companies lack the scale necessary to provide MCI with an integrated offering, although they could be the foundation stone it needs for the future. The communications giant may end up all dressed up with no place to go.

(First published 28 September 1999)

09-28 – MSN is open for discussion

MSN is open for discussion

Microsoft has launched its MSN online communities in the UK only a week ago. It’s still in beta but already has over 3,000 subscribers. Not bad going.

So – what’s it all about? Essentially, the online community concept has changed little since the golden days of the bulletin board ten years ago. As Microsoft themselves point out, however, this is less about technology and more about reach, as the “3,000” figure above illustrates. The main component of the MSN online community is a discussion board which may be configured by its administrator. This person, like the participants in the community needs to be signed up to the MSN Passport facility, which provides a user profile. The administrator can set up the community’s front page, can define the language, whether it is open to private or public membership, the content standard (e.g. adults only) and so on. Prospective members can be vetted, if required, following which they are open to participate by posting messages and sharing files. A handy feature is the photo album – for example, families can operate a private community where they share holiday snaps or pictures of the little ones.

This would appear a reasonably standard implementation of an online community – even with the language support (the main competition, Yahoo, is currently in English only). Typically it is what is planned that gets interesting. The main features on the horizon over the next few months are provision of a calendaring facility (so community members can fix events) and, most interestingly, integration with both online and offline tools such as Outlook Express, Microsoft Messenger and even Web site building facilities. This integration trend its to continue – for example commerce facilities are in the longer term plans and even voice integration is “on the scope”. Not bad for a free service, but where will MSN make its money? In the short term, this will be primarily through advertising and sponsorship opportunities. MSN have not been particularly profitable in the past, but apparently now the company has been setting hard sales targets to, at least, make the company pay for itself. These targets are set to rise.

So, have MSN got it right? There are no guarantees. First off, what we are seeing at the moment as something new (which it clearly is not) is likely to appear pretty primitive within a year or so. What Microsoft have worked out is the importance of an underlying framework – as the facilities evolve, they will benefit from having something solid to plug into. For MSN, this hinges around the Passport facility for individuals, but there is nothing similar for organisations unless we include Microsoft DNA. MSN has reinvented itself several times in the past, as an entertainment portal, a consumer portal and now as an infrastructure for online communities. Despite the bad press the company has received for not getting it right first time, Microsoft has little choice but to go with the flow, copy the competition and hope. The competitors – AOL/Netscape and Yahoo to name two, are already proving that Microsoft’s dominance in the desktop market doesn’t mean diddley squat in this new, vaguely defined battle for the hearts and minds of the online masses.

(First published 28 September 1999)

09-28 – Ohh, James… is that a Jornada in your pocket?

Ohh, James… is that a Jornada in your pocket?

It seems appropriate that scenes for the latest James Bond film, “The World is not Enough,” should be filmed at Motorola’s brand new, state of the art Integrated Circuit fabrication plant at Swindon, UK. It is equally comforting that handheld PCs should take centre stage in the film. We are up to date - things have come a long way since “Sneakers” showed an Excel spreadsheet as the front end to a Cray supercomputer.

Of course, there is one over-riding reason why HP and Microsoft were so keen to get the Jornada 430se into the frame. Product placement is seen as a hugely powerful technique for reaching the consumer market and CE-based handhelds are, after all, a consumer product. Or at least, they are becoming one. 3com’s Palm (now an entity in its own right) has focused on meeting executives’ needs (rather than their desires) – it is only recently, with the launch of the Palm V, that a sexy design has been taken on board. The target for CE devices, whilst starting life as competition for the Palm, has now moved to the mass market. The new Jornada, for example, is a Game Boy grown up – it does all that boring stuff, like scheduling and email, but one look at the literature shows that the features at the top of the list are the colour screen, the hot processor and the support for MP3.

The race is on between Palm and CE. Recently, with companies like HandSpring, Palm have started to inject some competition into their own market. The bottom line for Palm is – “it does everything you need”. There are tales of people investing in colour devices, for example, then coming back to Palm when they were fed up of shelling out on batteries. The CE community, however, are aiming straight at the jugular of the gadget man. Where better to promote this image than with the king of them all, the brits’ very own 007? Such battles have been fought before – sometimes it is the gadgety that wins; sometimes, like with the black and white Game Boy, “what you need” turns out to be the more compelling argument. As for me, a self-proclaimed gadget junkie, I’m hanging on a bit longer. Integrate a camera, mobile phone and voice recognition capability and I’ll be sold. Until then, like (I suspect) the majority of the market that CE is attempting to tackle, the high price of the fully functional devices give me ample cause to wait.

(First published 28 September 1999)

October 1999

10-11 – eCommerce in the UK RPI – a final call to arms

eCommerce in the UK RPI – a final call to arms

Last week, the UK government announced that it would be including online shopping statistics as one of the sources of information it uses for its retail prices index, once of the principal measures used to determine inflation. This is a move which will be seen as overdue by some and maybe irrelevant by a few luddite diehards, but which cannot be ignored by the vast majority of organisations in the UK, which have so far failed to use the Internet for anything more than brochureware. According to a recent Economist survey, the UK lags 2 years behind the US in exploiting the potential of eCommerce. That’s one heck of a long time in dog years, the rate at which the Internet is understood to be moving. Plus, given the global nature if the Web, the issue becomes even more stark: by the time the UK gets there, the market may well already be sewn up.

This article does not want to spew out the usual FUD. Let’s face it, we’ve heard it all before. “The Internet is here, embrace it or die.” True or not, there’s some good money to be made online – EasyJet, for example, has already sold over one million airline seats, online. We’ve been scared enough, however – the question is now – what can we do to profit from the Web?

The answer to this question has three, mutually dependent parts. At the top level they may be considered as:

- the business strategy covering, for example, how can I align my organisation to best profit from the Web? What products and services should I offer, and what markets should I target? Who are my customers and suppliers?

- the technical strategy – what are the most appropriate technologies to meet my needs? What can I use to implement something quickly and gauge the reaction of the public so I can move on?

- the operational strategy – how can I resource the 24x7 operation that my online service requires? Have I the necessary pieces in place to provide the best possible customer service?

All of the above need to be addressed simultaneously to make a success of the Internet. Too often, still, it is the technical issues that are tackled first (“Give me a Web site!”) without giving due attention to the business and operational issues. Each of the above has a responsible party – the CEO, CIO and COO – who must work together to draw up a coherent eCommerce strategy.

There, that’s it, now it’s over to you. The intention here is not to scare or patronise. No FUD here, just a single question. Does your organisation have a strategy for exploiting the Web? If not, you may be resigning yourself to watching from the sidelines while others steal the rewards.

(First published 11 October 1999)

10-11 – HandSpring will fuel device revolution

HandSpring will fuel device revolution

When the bunch who designed the PalmPilot quit 3Com to form their own, rival organisation, we wrote about the likelihood (and benefit) of injecting competition into the non-CE handheld market. Little did we expect, however, the wow factor that HandSpring would manage to inject into their product range.

Essentially, the HandSpring Visor is a PalmPilot with style. The basic model comes with a USB connection to speed up transfers and the more advanced version comes with more memory and a choice of colours. Not to be knocked, this – look what it did for the Apple iMac. No great shakes so far – a Palm clone with a couple of additional features.

Where things start getting interesting are, as they say on Blue Peter, “when we turn this one over.” On the back of the Visor is an expansion slot which looks not dissimilar from that of a Game Boy. Indeed, games cartridges are one thing that the Visor claims to support (although I could find no references to backwards compatibility). Expansion modules are plug and play – the drivers are build into the cartridge so they are ideal for the non-technical and technical alike. For the IT professional, executive or wired individual the selection of cartridges mooted is already impressive – GSM and land modems, voice recorders, data acquisition devices and MP3 players are already on the cards. Extensibility is the best option in this fast-moving world – there is some protection against obsolescence given the ability to plug in new technologies (say, Bluetooth) when they come.

What is really amazing about the Visor is the price. With launch prices beginning at $149, 3Com’s Palm subsidiary will be forced to follow suit (never mind the CE device manufacturers) probably leading to a sub-$100 product from one or the other before long. It is hoped that the expansion modules have similar pricing strategy, i.e. cheap – the second hand market in such cartridges is likely to boom, if for no other reason the devices will be easy to post.

Ultimately, what will prove to lead HandSpring to its holy grail is the extensibility. No other palm-held device has an expansion capability, a fact which is likely to cause expansion device manufacturers to flock to HandSpring and give it sustainability. At the moment, the Visor is launched in the US only – over here we shall be looking out for early adopters among the BA Executive Club members.

A final point – what of CE? The battle is still on, and the ultimate future of either device standard (PalmOS or CE based) cannot be guaranteed. It is true that Philips left the CE fray last week “due to poor sales”, but it is equally true that Compaq, Casio and HP still appear to have their full weight behind their CE devices. The fact remains that the PalmPilot was one of the unexpected success stories of the 90’s and, in the short term anyway, HandSpring look set to replicate that success.

(First published 11 October 1999)

10-11 – MCI gets hands on Sprint

MCI gets hands on Sprint

In the largest corporate takeover in the US ever, MCI WorldCom agreed to shell out $129 million in a merger which will bring wireless communications into the portfolio of the telecomms giant. Bernard Ebbers, WorldCom CEO remarked on his surprise at the size of the deal, stating glibly that “I thought I agreed to much lower numbers.” As we noted in our previous previous analysis of the merger talks, however, Ebbers is renowned for statements which disagree with the reality of the situation. In this case he clearly felt the steep price was worth it. The question is, what now?

The biggest hurdle that the betrothed giants face is the regulators, both in the US and Europe (where MCI are still clearing up the mess caused by a previous deal with Cable and Wireless). The companies have stated their intentions to keep the various elements of the businesses together, describing as “prudent”, for example, their intentions to have more than one Internet backbone. Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen but is unlikely - sooner rather than later, the merged corporate will have to decide which of its backbones is strategic, as it will not be able to route the same traffic over both.

The road is both long and pitted, however clearly this is a deal which MCI Worldcom decided it could not afford not to make. Fair enough – the wireless world is advancing at a cracking pace, with mobile phones mooted to outnumber land phones in Europe within two years, and with deals being brokered all the time (like Bell Atlantic Corp and Vodafone AirTouch setting up a new US mobile company). Worldcom risked being left further behind with every week that passed. It will be interesting to see how much of their current merger strategy remains in one piece by the end of the year.

Following a fall to $68.5 after the announcement, MCI Worldcom’s share price rallied to $76.88 by the end of last week.

(First published 11 October 1999)

10-12 – GTE launch carrier-class VoIP service

GTE launch carrier-class VoIP service

Telecomm 99 in Geneva this week saw the launch of a Voice over IP service from GTE Internetworking, aimed at telcos, ISPs and Internet Telephony companies. The question is, will they bite?

Voice over IP has long (in Internet time) been a possibility but has always been hampered by theoretical (and practical) issues of reliability. Essentially, this is to do with moving from a circuit-switched network (where devices link together to provide a guaranteed bandwidth path from end to end) to a packet-switched network which divides information into chunks, which are routed across the network and reconstituted at the other end. This, latter technique, used by the Internet Protocol, offers few guarantees about latency (the time the packet takes to arrive) or reliability (whether the packet gets there or not) in the network itself, with mechanisms being implemented in the devices at each end to, for example, acknowledge receipt of a packet. For telephone users this lack of guarantee equates to the possibility of pauses in conversation and drop-outs where parts of the conversation are lost. Those are the downsides, but on the upside we have the huge potential of cost savings to telephone user and telco alike, as the cost of sending information over the Internet is greatly reduced compared to traditional leased lines.

So, will the telcos bite? The two reasons why they won’t are fears about the reliability issues and the overheads of moving services to a new supplier. In order to guarantee a high level of service, GTE are implementing a IP network dedicated specifically to the service, plus a technique coined “Intelligent Route Diversity”. This refers to a number of services including load balancing, dynamic routing and failover to the (circuit switched) PSTN should the reliability falter. In other words, GTE Internetworking have covered their bases. They are not routing packets over the Internet but dedicating Internet technology to provide bandwidth channels over which they have more control. Brian Walsh, of GTE Internetworking, told us that the company was achieving sub-100 millisecond one way latencies, well below the 200 millisecond target agreed to be “undetectable to the human ear”. This should appease the service providers: if not, they have the additional guarantee of re-routing traffic to the more conventional PSTN.

GTE Internetworking are likely to emphasise the cost reductions that telcos can achieve employing IP-based bandwidth for voice calls. Walsh noted that companies could expect savings of up to 25% off charges within the US, with greater savings possible on international services. It may be that, with PSTN competition already cutting prices to the bone, many companies find they have little choice but to quell their fears and head for VoIP.

(First published 12 October 1999)

10-12 – Moore’s Law not a barrier to progress

Moore’s Law not a barrier to progress

According to Paul Pakan, an Intel semiconductor scientist, we are approaching the limits of Moore’s Law which states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months. This should not, at least in the short term, provide much of a hurdle for progress. How can we say this? Well, for several reasons.

First of all, as an obvious point, Pakan notes that the limitations will start to bite in 2001 and beyond. However this is not the crux of the debate. Hardware technologies have been far and away in advance of software technologies ever since Bill Gates determined that 640K of RAM was sufficient for the fledgling PC operating system DOS. Software, in general, is inefficient and burdensome, using up chunks of hardware resource for the simplest of manipulations. Should software vendors discover that the hardware resources upon which they rely are not infinite, then they might be tempted to develop more efficient designs. Embedded software developers have worked within their bounds with excellent results, and it could be argued that the top end of chips required for next generation mobile devices will be sufficient for most needs.

This leads to the second point. To make the best use of limited resource requires a well-designed architecture. Thin client is becoming the approach which is recognised as best for both application partitioning and consequent manageability. The capabilities of the end user device may require to be limited not only because the hardware has reached its limits but also because the application architecture requires it.

Finally, we have so far neglected to mention the huge leaps forward in hardware design, not only concerning the physical construction of chips but also the designers’ abilities to create on-chip components which exploit the underlying hardware to the fullest extent possible. We only have to look at how processors such as those from Intel, AMD and ARM have been constructed, with features such as intelligent instruction look-ahead and multithreading, to see that the transistor size is only one (albeit important) facet of chip design.

As noted on the Register, “the sooner they can get quantum and/or optical processors to work, the better”. In the meantime, however, there is plenty to be keeping both hardware and software designers busy, and plenty of progress still to be made, with the technologies we have available today.

(First published 12 October 1999)

10-12 – Vendors poised to tear down the Broadband wall

Vendors poised to tear down the Broadband wall

The broadband revolution is only a hair’s breadth away. Barriers to its inception are about to be removed. A tidal wave of services will ensue, transforming how we live and work. It looks like the electronic future will be in time for the Millennium, after all.

The last pieces of technology are clicking into place, overcoming the two main obstacles which may be summarised as a lack of bandwidth to connected devices and a lack of suitable protocols to enable services to be delivered. These technologies include:

- 3rd generation wireless protocols, enabling high-bandwidth delivery to mobile phones and wireless PDAs.

- Roll-out of broadband technologies such as DSL and Cable, removing the low-bandwidth local loop from the equation.

- Creation of protocols such as WAP to enable wireless devices to access Internet-based services.

- Creation of devices sufficiently small, powerful and function-rich to take advantage of these technologies

- Creation of service-level protocols such as Jini and eSpeak to enable applications to communicate.

Most of these components exist as functioning prototypes and are being demonstrated at Telecomms 99 in Geneva this week. It is only a matter of time before they are delivered into the mass market, enabling such vapourware concepts as videophones, media streaming to the home, integrated messaging and phone-based eCommerce to become reality. Telecomms companies, hardware and software vendors are teaming with retailers, banks and content providers to achieve the dream and we have reached a point where it is only a matter of time before this happens.

The real test begins when the products and services begin to be rolled out in anger. It is likely that, the sales model will follow that of the mobile phone market, at least in Europe where phones are given away subject to taking a services agreement. This time, however, there are a raft of potential mechanisms given the variety of service providers. For mobile phones, the service for which customers were prepared to pay was the voice call. In the future, we will be able to cover the costs of hardware by, for example, committing to use E*Trade for our stock trades, or to use Blockbuster for our video stream.

In any case, it is highly likely that the availability of broadband bandwidth to the device will lead to an upsurge in the services available. Already companies such as Thomas Dolby’s Beatnik.com are intending to use the Internet as a delivery channel, superseding the need for anything other than cache storage on the wireless walkman. The currently reported glut in European bandwidth may well be quickly drained by the new generations of eCustomers who find the concept of pre-recorded music and video, frankly, old-fashioned.

(First published 12 October 1999)

10-13 – Linux and NT – The myths exposed

Linux and NT – The myths exposed

There’s been a lot of press recently concerning Microsoft’s recent presentation of its Linux Myths web site. By coincidence, and to right the wrong expressed by Microsoft that “Linux Needs Real World Proof Points”, Bloor Research published today the results of its operational comparison between Linux and Windows NT.

The report was based on a study of both operating systems from the standpoint of how they operated in practice to support real applications. It was possible to rank the products according to the following nine criteria: Cost/Value for Money, User Satisfaction, Application Support, OS Interoperability, OS Scalability, OS Availability, OS Support, Operational Features and OS Functionality. The products were also ranked according to appropriate usage, in the following areas of application: File/Print server, mixed workload server, Web server, mail server, database server, groupware server, data mart, application server and enterprise level server.

The results of ranking the products showed Linux to be superior to Windows NT in seven of the nine categories, by a significant amount for some and by a short head in others. The comparison by application type came down less strongly in favour of Linux, with each operating systems seen as optimal for certain applications. Bloor Research found neither product suitable for use as an Enterprise Level Server.

Clearly the Windows NT – versus – Linux debate will run on and on, particularly with the launch of Windows 2000, which will see a significant number of additional features to the operating system (not least its ability to be reconfigured without being rebooted, which has long been the bane of NT systems administrators). Linux remains, above all else, free and capable of supporting a wide range of uses, although it is clearly not suitable for everything.

Microsoft are learning a hard lesson with Linux, namely that there is more to life than product marketing. Five years ago there was the NT versus Unix debate, which the Unix community appeared to be losing until Microsoft attempted to tackle the issue of enterprise scalability and convinced no-one. This gave the end users a new set of perspectives, that it was OK to use the right operating system for the job and that the concept of a single OS which could run on the smallest device up to the largest server was inappropriate, not to say unachievable. These perspectives hold true today: NT is suitable for a variety of tasks, but remains inadequate for a whole set of others. At the end of the day, any comparison will

(First published 13 October 1999)

10-13 – Travelocity ups gear and merges with Preview Travel

Travelocity ups gear and merges with Preview Travel

The recently announced merger between Travelocity and Preview Travel spawned the world’s third largest eCommerce site by revenue, following Amazon and eBay.

Travel ranks as one of the most appropriate services to sell over the Internet –the deal is, essentially about agreeing contracts for services which will be delivered at a later date. The Internet is a far better medium for selling travel than brochures and guidebooks could ever be – it provides an integrated service so, for example, a prospective traveller can book a hotel, rent a car and book flights and receive a consolidated, clear itinerary covering all aspects of the journey. What is more, it is much easier to provide additional information over the Web, for example sites are gearing up to providing multiple views of hotel rooms, longer descriptions of localities and information about local hotels. Coupled with this, Web operators are able to significantly undercut high street travel agents, for whom the future would appear, well, bleak.

Having said this, we see the largest growth area for Internet travel services to be in the corporate space. Thus far, Travelocity’s services have been targeted at the consumer. We expect to see partnership arrangements between Web travel companies and ERP vendors, particularly companies such as Peoplesoft who are advancing the principle of end-user self service within an organisation. The concept is simple: allow the end-user to arrange their own travel within an automated tool which knows the limits of each user, then ensure the existence of an audit trail so that any usage (and abuse) is logged and reported. In this way the inefficiencies inherent in internal company procedures are significantly reduced.

Despite Travelocity’s projected size, the battle for the online travel segment is far from over. The merging of Travelocity and Preview travel’s user communities will not be trivial and is likely to cause weaknesses in the combined company’s system architecture. Weaknesses can lead to failures, and we know how seriously these are treated by the online press and user communities alike. Also, competitor sites such as Expedia and LastMinute are unlikely to roll over and die. LastMinute, with its reverse-auction business model, is one to watch in particular. Finally we should not forget the Web presence of the “travel fulfilment” companies – BA, AA and the like. One of the prime capabilities of the Internet is to displace intermediaries unless they can demonstrate real added value. This fact will be the ultimate litmus test concerning the successful future (or otherwise) of today’s third largest eCommerce company.

(First published 13 October 1999)

10-13 – Y2K’s winter to freeze SMEs

Y2K’s winter to freeze SMEs

Two recent announcements gave an indication of the likely winners and losers at the turn of the Millennium. First off, the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) stated that all high- and medium-impact companies in the financial sector were on schedule to complete, or had already completed their Y2K readiness programmes. In another announcement, according to Silicon.com, a study by the Cutter Consortium has found that 50% of US companies were planning a spending freeze on IT equipment between now and the end of the year.

In both cases, the companies which will be most affected are the small-to-medium sized enterprises or SMEs. The FSA report included only 400 out of a total of 8,000 financial services companies in its medium-to-high impact categories. The remaining 7,600 are the smaller companies who, if they have Y2K problems, will impact on a lesser number of “stakeholders” – depositors, policy-holders and investors. Unfortunately these are also the companies which lack the financial resources or in-house IT skills to evaluate the risk and deal with any suspected Y2K weaknesses. UK Government brochures, while well-written, only demonstrate the complexities involved in testing every PC, router and PABX for compliance, not to mention any outsourced services. For companies who have not started this process yet, the remaining 100 days are likely to be insufficient.

Similarly, it is the SME vendors who are likely to be most affected by any spending freeze. Again it is a question of resources – the larger companies have both the financial know-how and the hedged funds to carry them over until the predicted thaw at the end of January next year. Smaller companies do not have the luxury of digging in and waiting: most will survive but there will be plenty that do not.

Finally, on a lighter note (as we are accused of preaching too much doom and gloom about Y2K), it would appear that even the least prepared will steal a march on PLN, Indonesia’s national electric board. When asked by an Indonesian newspaper about it’s Y2K preparedness, a spokesman for the board replied “We can observe what happens (at midnight 2000) in Western Samoa, New Zealand and Australia and still have 6 hours to make plans.”

(First published 13 October 1999)

10-14 – ASP's – The Age of the Information Power Hub

ASP’s – The Age of the Information Power Hub

The momentum behind the ASP movement is such that it seems to be only a matter of time before we see all software being provided ‘off the wire’. The Application Service Provision model refers to the predicted rental of applications, which are accessed via the Internet using a standard browser as the front end. At least, this is the initial model: in the future it is expected that customers will be able to integrate ASP services into their own applications. Both models make perfect sense. Consider, for example, the ERP market which has long been the exclusive domain of larger companies which can afford the inflated list price (and associated consultancy) that an ERP implementation can entail. ERP companies have been forging alliances with telcos and ISPs (for example, SAP with BT) to give smaller companies access to applications which are preconfigured for a given market, for example retail, warehousing, engineering and the like. Not only is the cost of entry reduced, but also support levels are touted to increase, compared with the likely levels of in-house resource.

This is a model that makes perfect sense, for vendor and customer alike. The economies of scale that can be gained from these larger installations yield clear benefits to the vendor, which can be translated to a greatly reduced per-user cost. As the ERP market has largely become saturated, vendors have been looking for a way to tap smaller organisations: the ASP model is just the answer. ISPs, too, are looking for ways to differentiate their own services from others’ and also for ways to bring in revenue as the basic connection costs reduce to zero. ASP services enable ISPs to offer far more capabilities to a much broader range of organisations, and also to make money, a factor which is becoming an increasingly difficult given the burgeoning competition and the disappointing revenues gained through advertising.

The emergence of the ASP industry is to a great extent being enabled by the pace of technology. Previous technological limitations, which effectively prevented the real time access to applications over the Internet, have been eroded. This is primarily down to greater bandwidth coming online at cheaper prices, but is also down the capabilities of both hardware and software to support a far greater number of potential users. Solutions now exist to meet the security fears of most, or at least to reduce them to acceptable levels.

No longer will the end user be buying, installing, configuring and supporting software. Rental is the name of the game and it will dramatically change the industries involved. The computer and telecom industries are on the brink of a step change. The models for distribution are mutating, leading us into an age where the computer industry will resemble that of the electricity utilities, providing farms of processors, storage and preconfigured applications all dedicated to serving the world with data and software.

As you might imagine these changes will be far reaching and the customers will be the last to learn, but their position is changing too. In the future, software users will fall into one of three categories. Anyone whose business has an information element (and that goes for most) can become an ASP, from pharmaceutical and genetic research companies to organisations which decode and manipulate video streams. A company will either be an ASP itself, an ASP customer, or a combination of the two where it not only uses the software of others but also build and deploy their own solutions as rental services.

(First published 14 October 1999)

10-14 – HP eases itself into NAS waters

HP eases itself into NAS waters

Following its announcement in September, Hewlett Packard demonstrated its SureStore HD Server 400 range of NAS devices which are due for release on November 1.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices enable disk storage to be connected to a LAN, employing thin server technology to provide the basic minimum of an operating system required to serve files to LAN clients. The market for NAS has been widely predicted to grow rapidly over the next five years. Figures from DataQuest, for example, estimate the market to reach $10 billion by 2003. Even if it only attains half that, this is seen as an opportunity which storage vendors can ill afford to ignore. The current main player is Network Appliance, whose NAS devices sell for about $20,000 apiece. NetApp was ranked at #4 in Fortune’s fastest growing companies listing, testament to the potential of this technology. Put it this way – the company does not make anything else.

HP have signalled that it wants more than a slice of this pie. Its intention is “to dominate the NAS market”. Time to market has, however, limited the range of devices that the company will be selling, at least in the short term. Initial products will support between 27 and 108Gb of data and will only be accessible from Windows NT clients and servers. Costs lie between $5,000 and $10,000.

So – does the NAS market merit all this excitement? The answer is, probably, yes, but not for the reasons that are being touted. NAS devices are seen as a solution to the requirement of adding storage to a network, quickly and simply. Yes – they can do this. However the real advantage lies in the fact that storage processing and application processing no longer have to be run on the same box. Storage-specific devices, attached directly to the LAN, are inherently more manageable than multi-purpose servers as they do one thing and they are optimised to do it well. Anyone who has attempted to reconfigure a set of general purpose servers (for example, “we want to move the users onto this box, consolidate the databases onto this box and use this box as our messaging server”) knows the loops that have to be jumped through to achieve their aims. Specialised devices do not solve this problem, but they do limit it happening in the first place.

There is one issue that is not being addressed by any of the NAS vendors at present. Just as NAS is seen in terms of storage rather than in the context of an overall IT architecture, so we still lack the tools to enable us to manage the distribution, accessibility and availability of our information assets. It is an unfortunate reality that storage requirements will always outstrip our capability to increase capacity, so the longer term solution must lie with better management of information as well as increasing the basic resource. NAS can only ever be part of the answer.

(First published 14 October 1999)

10-14 – W2K no Y2K

W2K no Y2K

We were unsurprised (and a little relieved) to see Steve Ballmer’s expectation management concerning the end of year shipping date for Windows 2000. In our September article, Microsoft faces Hobson’s choice for W2K, we expressed our concern about interim deliveries slipping with no apparent impact on the final release. The logic (and experience) suggested that either quality or functionality would have to be reduced, neither of which were acceptable options to the user community. Oh good, honestly prevails. We no longer have a fixed date for the product, but at least we can be comforted that the product will be reasonably stable.

Despite this, it seems that the prospective users of W2K are not champing at the bit for the new OS release. Gartner figures suggest that 70 percent of existing servers will not be upgraded until the back end of next year, when the second release of Windows 2000 is slated. There are several, obvious reasons for this, not least Year 2000 itself – few existing Windows NT users have a compelling reason to upgrade the operating system in the short term. The upgrade will involve significant reconfiguration of existing servers, and reconfiguration is the last thing that IT managers want to deal with early in the New Year. In our last article, we recommended IT managers not to jump early, but to wait and see what were the realities of Windows 2000 in terms of its stability and functionality.

The operating system market is likely to evolve significantly over the next six months. Gartner’s write off of Linux, for example, seems to contradict the fact that every day sees new vendors allying with the Linux community in one way or another. What seems truly strange in all of this is the continuing idea that there really is a one-size-fits-all operating system. Despite the fact that most IT departments have been running heterogeneous environments for the past twenty years, companies still tout themselves as “the one,” be it for hardware, operating systems or application software. The reality is, and will probably always remain, that there are twenty or so vendors whose devices and packages need to work with each other, now and in the future. This reality is the basis of middleware, EAI and indeed most of the eCommerce market. Ballmer himself confirmed this yesterday at the Planet 99 conference when he referred to XML as the glue “to stitch together work from different vendors”.

The world has moved on from “no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM, Microsoft“ or whoever. This is a fact acknowledged by the captains of the IT industry as they promote interoperability and standards. However they are still failing to walk their own talk. Windows 2000 has a place, as do a variety of other operating systems and thin server devices. To sit any one product on a pedestal is to deny the reality and the opportunity of using the best tool for the job.

(First published 14 October 1999)

10-15 – Anyone for eTea?

Anyone for eTea?

Few examples than this one offer a clearer impression of how the Web can change the way the World does business. According to Bloomberg, a site is to be launched early next year which enables tea producers in Africa and Asia to trade tea with UK-based tea companies.

The tea market in the UK has both consolidated and dwindled since its heyday. 40 years ago, tea auctions dealt with up to 150,000 tons of tea per year whereas last year a mere 24,000 tons were sold. The reasons for this are mainly to do with tea auctions moving to producer countries, such as Kenya. The result has been that only the bigger players (who can set up bases abroad) still remain in the game, with smaller companies having to work through the two remaining UK-based tea brokers.

The Internet looks set to change all of this. An online auction would enable tea producing companies, large and small, to work directly with smaller companies in the UK. Intermediaries would be required only to manage the auctions (hence the site) and for shipping, meaning that the costs of working through such players as brokers would be greatly reduced. It is no surprise that the company intending to set up the site is a brokerage company, Thompson Lloyd and Ewart Ltd. The company intends to run the business in parallel with its brokerage.

Using the Internet as a transport mechanism, online trading would enable costs to be reduced and savings to be passed on to producers and customers alike. In fact, what is happening is a return to the more traditional modes of trade, with small traders dealing directly rather than relying on the few companies that remain since “value” became the catchword and consolidation the practice. The Internet is the great leveller, reducing the costs of both entry and ongoing business, allowing large and small to compete on the same playing field.

What is more, the Internet is global. Tea trading has occurred in the UK because it always has, but this no longer needs to be so. Suppliers to tea-drinking markets around the world will be able to profit from the global accessibility of online trade in a way not possible before. Who knows – they might even start drinking it in Boston.

(First published 15 October 1999)

10-15 – Dream is over for UK ISPs

Dream is over for UK ISPs

Just as the world was looking to the UK as leading the way in the free ISP market, the ISPs appear to have dropped the baton.

Let’s take some examples. Currantbun.com, the News International ISP being offered to readers of the mass-market paper The Sun, has been canned to be replaced by Bun.com. Freeserve shares are now worth less than the IPO price. AOL UK subscribers are threatening to walk out on the service provider. To cap it all, Screaming.net has been indicted by the consumer programme WatchDog with paper evidence of customers being charged for so-called free services.

What is going on? Well, in reality, the dream could not sustain itself. The fact is that there is no verifiable revenue model for free ISPs, as Freeserve has discovered to its chagrin. Given this, all that is left is the promise of market share or, at least subscriber share. “Get me the list of subscribers and then they will be my captive audience for whatever comes next.” Trouble is, as we all know, the audience is anything but captive, particularly when the ISP can offer very little that is not being given away elsewhere on the Internet. The site provides news? Well, so does the BBC. And so on. Also, “whatever comes next” hasn’t come, at least not yet. We expect ASPs to be a huge market, initially for businesses but ultimately for consumers as well – however this is waiting for the bandwidth bottleneck to be removed. We also expect online shopping to take off but so far it hasn’t given ISPs a differentiator over anyone else. The fact is that the model is the wrong way around: a free Web connection is a bonus to be provided to customers of a given service, rather than getting a motley band of subscribers together (I include myself in this) and trying to sell them anything under the sun.

ISPs in the UK started the free trend and now have little choice but to deliver on it. This they will only be able to do when they offer a truly differentiating range of services to the UK consumer. In the meantime, we can expect a continuation of the turmoil that we are witnessing right now.

(First published 15 October 1999)

10-15 – What’s in SUN’s sights next year? Microsoft, of course.

What’s in SUN’s sights next year? Microsoft, of course.

With earnings at 33 cents per share, SUN finished its first fiscal quarter of Year 2000 beating analysts expectations by 2 cents. With its ISP successes, Java story and now StarOffice, the company would appear to be full steam ahead for a successful year.

SUN is, at the end of the day, a platform company. It wants to ship hardware, and not just any hardware. Despite having more or less launched the open systems movement in the eighties, SUN systems look pretty proprietary. Sure, they run Unix, but it is still the case (despite efforts to the contrary) that SUNs are used to develop and run SUN applications. The miracle of a single operating system flavour never happened – indeed, the closest we might get to that is through Monterey (which is ostensibly IBM’s AIX ported to 64-bit Intel with SCO technology) or Linux, which (let’s face it) is a phenomenon happening despite the best efforts of the major vendors. Remember when SUN refused to allow the Linux sources on SunSite, its download portal? Enough said.

Despite all this, the SUN platform has become “the enterprise platform of the Internet”. This has far more to do with marketing and alliances than technology, though admittedly the high-end of SUN hardware has grown up to encompass the kind of transactional capability that we expect of eCommerce sites. What of Java? The programming language has achieved widespread acceptance (according to our own figures, 28% of programming job ads are for Java, compared to 38% for C++ and the gap is closing), however one of Java’s essential strengths is its portability so it cannot be seen as one of the technical drivers towards using SUN. All in all, a pretty slick campaign, in this phase of technology where managing the mainstream is at least as important as having a good product.

So that’s SUN’s first goal met. Given the way the Web is going, SUN would have to make some pretty big mistakes to lose its market share. Microsoft won the desktop and, with Windows 2000, will make more inroads into the departmental market, but the enterprise will remain a Windows exclusion zone for the forseeable future. On to SUN’s second goal, which is dubbed self-protection by the senior execs of the company. Truth is, though, that the company smells blood. The next big battle to be fought is for Application Service Provision – providers, or ASPs, are ostensibly ISPs who cannot make any money through a basic connection and hence who are looking round for differentiating sets of application services that they can offer. At the client end, the operating system is unimportant as it is likely that the majority of applications will have a Java-based front end. Server-side, however, a decision will need to be made over which, compatible set of applications can be provided. As always, this boils down to “should we run a Microsoft configuration, or not?” ASPs will want to offer the set of applications which are most appealing to their customers. At the moment, despite most of their functionality being ignored, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint are the de facto desktop applications. This may be for no other reason than file compatibility, but ASP customers are unlikely to move to a set of services which cannot read their existing files.

Enter Star Office, which reads MS Office files like a native. It is unlikely that SUN see Star Office as a strategic application. More realistically it is a non-application, intended to remove differentiators from the Microsoft-based offering. Microsoft apps need Microsoft OS need Intel hardware, it’s that simple. If SUN do not challenge the perception that MS Office is essential, then the corporation may end up losing a sizeable part of its ISP business. It is interesting to note Scott McNeally’s recent comments concerning the his doubts about Microsoft breakup – given the size of the prize, it is likely he would prefer one big target to lots of little ones.

(First published 15 October 1999)

10-25 – ASPs – how IT can learn from the Comms guys

ASPs – how IT can learn from the Comms guys

If the rumours are true, Application Service Providers, or ASPs, are going to dominate the way in which IT services are procured and delivered. At Bloor Research, we have reason to believe the hype. As for the vendors, they have a stark choice to make. Some are embracing the ASP model whole-heartedly, whilst some are hedging their bets.

Networking and comms vendors are in an enviable position concerning ASPs, for two reasons. The first is that they stand to gain whatever happens. The provision of application functionality over the Web, requires a networking and communications infrastructure capable of sustaining a multitude of reliable data pipes between an organisation’s internal networks and the outside world. As it becomes business critical, no longer will the Internet connection be under such tight constraint, either by budget or by policy. Besides, ASPs are only one area which requires an enhanced networking infrastructure: there are plenty of other usage models, not least business to business eCommerce, which will ensure that the networking revenue stream is protected. The second reason is that ASP capabilities are defined primarily by which technologies networking vendors are able to deliver. Application and systems providers are dependent on networking providers, a fact which can be exploited by the latter.

So, what about the traditional IT companies – the manufacturers of systems hardware, systems and application software? Some, such as IBM, SUN, Oracle and Microsoft are adopting the ASP model wholesale. Of course, the industry giants can afford to develop themselves in the ASP market with much less risk than smaller players. This week, Microsoft announced a partnership deal with Cisco which will enable small-to-medium sized businesses (typically sub-100 staff) to use Microsoft software over the wire. It is likely that more and more vendors will jump onto the ASP bandwagon, however in doing so they are likely to miss one fundamental point.

The ASP model is currently seen as a facility to deliver applications across a network, thus reducing costs. This view is valid, in the short term, but it ignores the full potential of the ASP concept. Once applications can be delivered, then they can be combined and assembled in previously inconceivable ways. Communications services, application services and business services will all be delivered in the same way, enabling even more combinations. This kind of shake-up is already being experienced in the telecommunications marketplace, as convergence finally starts to happen. Issues faced by these companies include how should a properly managed service be developed, provided, and most of all billed for. These, same issues are to be the bane of the ASP: vendors prospecting for a chunk of ASP real estate will do well to watch the successes and failures in the comms market, and learn from them.

(First published 25 October 1999)

10-25 – Coppermine braces itself, without Rambus

Coppermine braces itself, without Rambus

Yesterday’s announcement by Intel concerning the copper-based version of its Pentium III chip has one major objective: to knock AMD off its perch. AMD’s flagship product, the Athlon processor, currently claims the high ground as the fastest PC processor. The importance of this position is as much to do with marketing as anything, however so is the whole of the IT business.

The popular press, at least in the UK, has warmly received the Athlon, as have the vendors IBM, Dell and Gateway. These factors led to AMD’s better-than-expected financial importance reported a fortnight ago. Intel has already swept away a number of chip companies, such as National Semiconductor, who have found it difficult to fund the levels of research and development necessary to keep up. Not so AMD who have proved themselves capable of beating Intel at their own game.

Both Intel and AMD’s processor marketing is geared around “being the best”, and neither is likely to let the other get away with being top dog for long. AMD announced the opening of a new fabrication plant, in Dresden, last week which will be capable of manufacturing the next generation Athlon chips – pre-production versions have been running at 900MHz. The two companies are likely to leapfrog each other to the 1Ghz holy grail, and the first to achieve this at a production scale is likely to gain huge kudos as a result.

Intel’s announcement should be seen in context – it is playing the game for which it invented the rules. The only downside for technologists is the absence of Rambus support from the launch. As we reported in August \link{http://www.it-director.com/99-08-06-2.html,(see article)}, Rambus has some advantages particularly for the Server. While this is a blow for some PC makers who were planning to ship the new processor and chipset together (and who will now have to wait), it remains to be seen whether this will affect the market as a whole.

(First published 25 October 1999)

10-25 – Sun sets up autonomous Forté, completes its Java portfolio

Sun sets up autonomous Forté, completes its Java portfolio

In a similar fashion to IBM with Tivoli and Lotus, SUN is to give Forté a semi-autonomous status. The Forté organisational structure will report into the head of software at SUN, however there will be no moves to change the internal organisation of the division, beyond establishing the communications channels to enable Forté to work with other parts of SUN’s organisation.

This is clearly good news. Forté is in the right place at the right time with the right products, reasons why the company was so attractive to SUN in the first place. Forté recognised that its traditional market, of bespoke enterprise application development tools, was insufficient to guarantee the company’s future success. With Fusion, it moved into the Enterprise Application Integration space; more recently, with SynerJ, it released tools to support the Java 2 Enterprise Environment or J2EE. Forté’s original vision, of producing scalable, reliable platforms for enterprise development, has been retained and enhanced to meet today’s demands. Now, it seems, the organisation will be able to retain this strategy as it moves forward into the future.

Sun Microsystems is a canny company. Still recognised primarily for its hardware, it has quietly been building up a software portfolio based around the unexpected success of Java as an enterprise language. This fortune is as much down to IBM as anyone, nonetheless Sun have been putting in place the elements it needs to benefit directly from Java. Since its acquisition of NetDynamics, through its developing relationship with AOL/Netscape to the more recent purchases of Forté and NetBeans, Sun have assembled the portfolio of products it needs to start generating real revenue from the Java language. Services will also play a big part, but these would not be possible without the comprehensive set of products that Sun have now at their disposition.

(First published 25 October 1999)

10-26 – Loi 495 – allez le source ouvert!

Loi 495 – allez le source ouvert!

Open source received a boost this week, as two French senators proposed a law concerning the use of such software by national and local administrative systems. The driver is one of freedom of access to the software, but the issue is more likely to be one of cost. As reported on \link{http://www.theregister.co.uk,The Register} yesterday, a \link{http://www.senat.fr/grp/rdse/page/forum/index.htm,discussion forum} has been set up on the issue. And the feedback is good.

Comments such as “Un pas vers la démocratie électronique” (a step towards electronic democracy) give an indication of some of the feedback, however this is coupled with fears about the impact on business. It is worth reflecting on what such a move might entail, should it be adopted.

First of all, the imposition of such a law implies that open source is here to stay. There are plenty that believe that it is, but others say that it is an interim stage, made possibly by government subsidy of academia and the political manoeuvres of companies. (Personally, I believe that old software technology can be given away, and new technology developments need to be paid for, but that’s opinion, not analysis). However, given the existence of open source, the question moves to one of delivering value.

Value is benefit minus cost. Benefit from software may be derived from its functionality and ability to interoperate with other packages. Costs are financial, but also relate to intangible costs of procurement, implementation and maintenance. Costs also relate to risk, driven either by security or safety criteria. So – what are the impacts of the open source model? Clearly there is a bottom line cost reduction. The intangible costs require a little more attention: an open source package can lead to reduced cost only if it offers similar functionality to existing packages, whilst reducing the costs of implementation and maintenance. This is the area which is less clear, and which must be judged on a package by package basis.

The issue might stop there if it wasn’t for the appearance, over the horizon, of the ASP. Application Service Providers are to do for software what outsourcing did for IT departments, namely take the responsibility away and enable companies to concentrate on their core business. It may seem a logical step for public organisations to adopt open source where it can, but an even more logical move is to pay a provider to supply software services over the wire. In this way, an organisation can concentrate on its functionality requirements without being distracted by issues of package cost, interoperability or maintenance overhead. In this way it is for the ASP to decide what packages to buy, and whether or not to use Open Source products. The ASP market is still in the crib but, for any organisation wanting to keep control of costs whilst gaining access to the best services, it may well prove to be the answer.

(First published 26 October 1999)

10-26 – Orange dreaming of a WAP Christmas

Orange dreaming of a WAP Christmas

UK mobile telephone operator Orange is to launch a Wireless Access Protocol service in November, ready for the Christmas rush. The up-front services will be basic, but given the general excitement about WAP this is unlikely to be the case for long.

The WAP forum was launched by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Phone.com, with an aim to make information-based services more accessible to the mobile user. The forum now has nearly 200 members and is on the brink of real products, a number of which were demonstrated at Telecom 99 two weeks ago. Orange’s new service will be based around a WAP-enabled phone from Nokia, with initial information services including sport, news, weather and a business directory.

What is really, really interesting about the Orange service is the charging mechanism for services, or rather the planned charging mechanism. Initially, WAP data calls will be charged at less than the price of a voice call, however the plan is to cease charging for the connection and to start charging for the services themselves. Basic services will remain free, but according to Rory Maguire, Strategic Relations Manager for Orange (quoted on Excite UK), basic content would remain free but “premium content” would be charged.

This is fascinating stuff as not only does it turn the existing mobile phone charging model on its head, but it also flies in the face of other, wire-based Internet services, who already give away a great deal of what we might term “premium content.” Consider share prices, for example. It used to be the norm to charge Web users a subscription before they could access share prices. The model then changed, as this information was given away by portal sites (suchas Yahoo) as a way of luring custom towards other, advertised services. Money could still be made, however, from the share deal. Now, however, services are setting up which do not even charge a fee for the share deal, as it is reckoned that hedging the funds and bulk dealing is worth far more than the fifteen quid transaction fee. In other words, the tide is rising: whenever there is a higher level way of making money, the lower levels become given away. There is a caveat: as you move up through the levels, you need more information (and expertise) – in the share dealing example, the free trading is only open to “experienced traders.”

So – what we have is two rules:

Rule 1 – a service will be given for free as long as the supplier of the service stands to gain

Rule 2 – if the customer needs help, then such help is also a service, which must be paid for unless covered by Rule 1.

These two rules should come as no surprise as they are the twin pillars of retail pricing, understood and applied instinctively by customers and suppliers alike. If buying a car, for example, we do not expect to pay for the advice, guarantees and so on. If we buy a car from a trade outlet, we will be able to get the car more cheaply but at the expense of having less advice, expertise and guarantees to go on.

Orange may intend to charge for premium WAP services. Indeed, they are ideally placed to do so as they control both the data feeds and the billing mechanisms. However when doing so they should take the rules into account.

(First published 26 October 1999)

10-26 – VDSL beats back Broadband bounds

VDSL beats back Broadband bounds

The fat pipe is getting fatter. Very-high-bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL) technology promised by Alcatel and Texas Instruments promises bit rates of up to 60Mb per second. And this is no pie in the sky, sometime over the next five years technology. Sample VDSL chips are already being shipped to equipment makers, with products expected some time next year. Compare this to VDSL’s little brother, Asynchronous DSL (ADSL) which can only (only!) deliver 1.5Mb/s.

Applications for VDSL already being discussed include running exclusive digital TV channels – for example a corporation may obtain a training channel with a predefined programme, direct from the digital broadcast site. In fact, what we are seeing is the stretching of the boundaries of the managed service – a video feed is one application, which will be coupled with voice and data feeds to give a truly comprehensive managed service. It is surprising that no-one has mentioned virtual reality which, even if it remains a niche hobby, will benefit hugely from the bandwidth.

Oh, but hang on. This really is pie in the sky, at least as far as the UK consumer is concerned. It is widely understood that in some parts of the US – Boston, for example, cables are being laid like they were going out of fashion and ADSL is getting its own display area in Radio Shack. Meanwhile, back in Blighty, we have a pseudo-monopoly in the guise of BT which has just finished an ADSL trial and is expected to offer a reduced service, well, maybe one day, at least in the London area. In the UK, we can dream about the advanced capabilities that new technologies such as VDSL will enable. However the reality is likely to remain virtual for a good time yet.

(First published 26 October 1999)

10-27 – Future of UK Enigma site continues to confound

Future of UK Enigma site continues to confound

All is not well at Bletchley Park, the World War II code-breaking centre, former stamping ground of Alan Turing and location of the world’s first programmable computer, the Colossus. Controversy centres about what should be done with the site. Once again, it seems that Britain is failing to deal with its IT heritage, let alone its wartime memory.

What’s going on is, unsurprisingly, an everyday story of folk. The battle lines were drawn two weeks ago between the old guard of Park trustees (seven out of the twelve) and Christine Large, who was brought in as chief executive to oversee the process of bringing the currently dilapidated park and outbuildings up to scratch. Mrs Large’s plans to transform the park into a modern museum, conference and education centre were seen as too ambitious for the trustees who were wary of the site becoming “a high-tech theme park”. Following a series of wrangles and a vote of no confidence by the trustees, Mrs Large was sacked from the board, only to be reinstated last Thursday.

If this wasn’t complicated enough, Mrs Large has rejected the reinstatement offer unless a new Board of Trustees is created. This is not an outlandish suggestion, as the Board itself recognised the need to disband and reform in May this year. Six months later, the impression is that the Board are reluctant to follow this through.

To an extent, the reasons for this and the current situation are less relevant than the consequence, which is that nothing is getting done. Time and again we have seen personalities get in the way of progress, in this case towards recognising our heritage. As with the failure to procure the funds to build a statue of Alan Turing himself, we are stymieing our own potential to get things done and, in this case, to broadcast to the world our own successes. Britons are experts at hiding lights under bushels – humility is a good thing, but so is recognition.

People need to have visionary focus and to act accordingly. From this perspective it would appear that Christine Large is right – there is no point in returning to the post of Chief Executive if the current composition of the Board is likely to put the brakes on every step of the way. For the sake of our IT and wartime heritage, we wish Bletchley Park the good will and commitment it needs to ensure it is developed with both sensitivity and vision.

(First published 27 October 1999)

10-27 – Xerox’s 18-month European Plan

Xerox’s 18-month European Plan

Following the company’s seven billion slump in value caused by its less-than-successful Q3 announcements earlier in October, document company Xerox explained themselves this week.

Despite the company’s huge customer base (with over a million customers in Europe alone), its main problems (so say Xerox) were due to its out of date and badly targeted sales strategy, which was focused on the direct sale (even when dealing with the largest corporate deals) to the detriment of other channels. Also, the company was organised on national lines, with “each country operating its own fiefdom”, according to William Goode, Deputy Managing Director of Xerox Limited.

Xerox have every intention to change this, in fact they have been spending the past eighteen months consolidating its European operations, for example opening call and manufacturing centres in Ireland. The company is also setting up two new organisations: the Industry Solutions Organisation (ISO) will concentrate on major accounts, and will be organised by sector across Europe, whilst the General Marketing Organisation (GMO) will take over the direct channel. Initial sectors for ISO will be Manufacturing, Financial, Graphic Arts and Public Sector; the organisation will also encompass Xerox’s professional services organisation, named ICSI. The showpiece of these efforts is a pan-European SAP implementation which will support all of its back office operations. When it is complete, in eighteen months’ time, it is destined to be the largest single-instance ERP implementation in the world.

For the committed Xerox customer, these developments are likely to be good news as they will result in better account management and more co-ordinated services. For Xerox itself, the company is moving into the IT space from being an office equipment company, and stands to benefit from the opportunities that this offers – not least the marketability of the showpiece SAP implementation. Despite all this, the timescales are still very long and some pieces of the puzzle lack definition, for example the shape of the sales and marketing operation remains unclear. Also, the ongoing changes are likely to impact on the company’s ability to take advantage of any opportunities, at least in the short term. From the customer perspective (and as an ex-customer of Xerox), organisational change is nothing new for Xerox, so customers are likely to keep their counsel until they see real benefits coming through.

All in all, Xerox is still making money and the company is orienting itself to be better positioned for both its markets (which are, more and more, IT related) and its customer accounts. No change was not an option. It is just a shame that it is all taking so long.

(First published 27 October 1999)

10-28 – Micromuse setting their sights high

Micromuse setting their sights high

Enterprise Management software company Micromuse saw its shares soar by 30 percent as the company announced a doubling in its fourth quarter revenue at the end of last week.

From lowly beginnings in London, UK, the company launched on the Nasdaq in February 1998. In the early days, the company had a strong relationship with BT. The company has stuck with telecommunications as one of its core markets, a move which has stood it in good stead for the proliferation of ISPs and the eCommerce revolution.

Micromuse’s core product is NetCool, an event management system which is designed to enable events to be received from any device. This simple principle has allowed the NetCool product to be extended across a whole raft of protocols and device types, including SNMP devices, databases, WAN/Voice devices and TCP/IP protocol connections. Application interfaces (e.g. for SAP) are currently being considered.

Based on this core product, Micromuse have driven their product range in two directions and it is this which is getting the analysts excited. The first is NetCool/ISM, which simulates web site requests in a variety of protocols and feeds the results into the NetCool framework. This enables the monitoring of Web site performance, from the basic request-response level up to more complex series of transactions. Monitors can be situated anywhere in the world (to gauge international differences in performance) with the results fed back into a central NetCool installation. The second product is Impact, which uses historical records, configuration information and external databases to build an information set to aid the resolution of a given fault. Impact won a “best in class” award at NetWorld InterOp this year.

The market for Web-oriented management tools is burgeoning, with a variety of old and new players jumping on the bandwagon. Micromuse have a head start, in that they have worked in the comms space since their inception. They understand the issues and they already have an enviable set of customer and partner relationships including AOL, AT&T and BT. The NetCool/ISM product is based on the company’s existing platform, which is a differentiator from Tivoli, for example, and which isn’t a possibility for newer vendors such as FreshWater. Investors are already sitting up and taking note, all of which paints a rosy future for Micromuse.

(First published 28 October 1999)

10-28 – Thin server appliances drive OS shakeup

Thin server appliances drive OS shakeup

Bringing ease of installation and administration, thin servers look set to steal a sizeable proportion of the server market. Market analysts are predicting that between 3 and 8 billion dollars will be spent on such devices by 2003. For speed, usability and cost reasons, thin server manufacturers are keen to keep operating systems as scaled down as possible, prompting an inevitable shakeup in the OS market.

What is a thin server? Also referred to as a server appliance, a thin server is a server which does a limited number of jobs and does them (at least, this is the intention) extremely well. Examples are:

• Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for file management, manufacturers including Network Appliance and Hewlett Packard.

• Email servers, from Compaq and Mirapoint,

• Web Proxy servers, from Novell (using Compaq hardware),

• Database servers, from Oracle.

The thin server model is attractive to the IT Manager, for two reasons. The first is that it enables additional resource or specific functionality to be added to a network simply and effectively. The second is that it moves away from the multi-purpose server model, where servers often have conflicting demands and incompatibilities posed by the different packages they run. The target market for thin servers is seen as the small business with less than a hundred people, but this need not be the case: Yahoo email, for example, boasts the logo “powered by Network Appliance.”

As for the operating system, there is no consensus on an ideal platform for a thin server. Neither should there be – the thin server operator is more interested in the functionality than the platform, which is largely hidden. Network Appliance devices use a proprietary kernel, flavours of Unix are visible in both Mirapoint and HP’s offerings, Compaq’s email servers run Microsoft Exchange on NT and Novell’s proxy, unsurprisingly, runs NetWare. Mentioning no names, this is nonetheless a blow to any software vendor whose marketing depends on promoting the relative advantages of its own operating system. In fact, the main issue for the OS vendors appears to be who can secure the best deals with the hardware companies. Not coincidentally, this trend bears a striking similarity to the Symbian/Palm/WinCE wheeling and dealing in the handheld and mobile device arena.

We have seen very little from Microsoft and Intel, since their thin server alliance announcement in April. Intel were hugely successful with their “Intel Inside” campaign, but this was as much down to their incumbent position in the PC market as anything. Just as with set top boxes, games consoles, mobile phones and PDAs, in the device-driven, thin server market it is unlikely that “WinTel Inside” will have the same cachet.

(First published 28 October 1999)

10-29 – Amazon grace under pressure

Amazon grace under pressure

Despite a huge increase in revenues from $154m to $356m, Amazon.com’s reported a four-fold increase in operating losses, from $21m to $79m. Amazon has seen increases in just about everything else from new accounts to repeat business, but is also seeing increasing pressure on profit margins, both from rising internal expenses and the inevitable external competition. Amazon continues to invest in new product lines and in new parts of the world. The question remains – how much longer can it keep up this momentum?

It is commonly held wisdom that it is healthy for dot-com companies to post a loss. The argument concerns the investment in the number of customers who use Amazon by default, hence the importance of both accounts and repeat business. However, the Web community is a notoriously fickle bunch. Just as Lotus never expected to lose its spreadsheet monopoly to Microsoft, so it seems equally unlikely that Amazon could lose its customer base. There are three ways in which this could happen.

The first way is system failure. Lack of service is very quickly jumped on by the Internet news, as eBay, eTrade and Charles Schwab have all discovered in recent times. eBay’s failures caused a reported mutiny of customers to Amazon; similarly, eTrade has lost custom to other online brokers, both through downtime and through processing errors (for example, those which caused potential Red Hat beneficiaries to lose out). The Internet does not take any prisoners: news of failure and retribution spreads like wildfire. Amazon’s systems are holding up well – they were designed for scalability and Internet access. However the same could be said for eTrade and eBay, of which the latter is famously hanging on by its fingernails to support its burgeoning community. Failure of a dot-com company results not only in customer flight but also shareholder concern, and this is the last thing any tech stock wants in the current, volatile market conditions.

The second route is competition. The Internet purchasing model is still very much built around lock-in, such that it is easier to stick with one supplier than move to another. Amazon’s one-click purchasing is an example of this. Moves are afoot, however, to make it simpler to deal with a variety of supplier sites: Snaz.com, for example, offers a multisite shopping basket for exactly that purpose. To water down lock-in is to do the same to Amazon’s key performance indicators of customer retention. Amazon may choose not to play, but this could have the effect of locking the company out, of siting Amazon outside the mall, as it were.

Thirdly, we have the unknown quantity. Amazon exists by virtue of riding the Internet wave long before other companies knew it was coming. Much as we like to speculate, none of us really knows what the next wave will be. Plenty of so-called giants have been washed away by the tidal waves of technology, and Amazon is no more immune than any other company.

Some are saying that the really big hitters are still to join the fray. Companies like WalMart are on the point of launching their Web strategy – this may happen with a whimper, but it could well be with a bang. Industry and financial analysts alike have so far been unable to predict how things are to turn out. This is certainly no time for dot-com companies, Amazon included, to get complacent.

(First published 29 October 1999)

10-29 – Mobile gives Voice Recognition its killer app

Mobile gives Voice Recognition its killer app

Slowly but surely, voice recognition technology is gaining maturity. It may still be in the domain of the comedy club, but will soon form an integral part of the services and devices that make up the IT infrastructure.

There are currently three sectors for voice recognition technology. The first, and best known, is PC-based voice recognition, aimed mainly at the consumer market. Whilst this is achieving some success in the Far East (largely due to the difficulties in providing keyboards for eastern character sets), it is still a niche market. As discussed in \link{,our previous article}, dictation and navigation are not powerful enough reasons for the large-scale adoption of products such as Dragon Dictate and IBM ViaVoice. The second sector is the embedded application sector, in which specific products such as medical and manufacturing equipment are enhanced to include voice input. Thirdly, we have telephony-based products. It is this market which is evolving the most rapidly, and from which the popularisation of voice recognition will occur.

Many communications companies have had their own voice labs for several years, aimed mainly at “enhancing the telephony experience”. As comms and IT have converged, these technologies have been applied to computer applications. For example, last year Lucent announced a pact with Unisys, in which Lucent’s technology would be used to develop an integrated speech recognition software package. Start-up companies such as SpeechWorks and Nuance have been set up with the objective of providing voice-enabled application development tools. So far, the results have been fair to middling: in general the best results come from the systems with limited scope (such as eTrade’s and BT’s voice-driven stock systems). Herein lies the danger: prospective customers remain skeptical, while there is a lack of installed systems with sufficient wow factor to sway them.

In line with the test of the application development industry, component-based development is the adopted direction of the major players. SpeechWorks have released a comprehensive set of Java and ActiveX applets to recognise common structures such as names, addresses, dates and so on, as well as applets for standard applications such as SAP. Similarly, a few days ago Nuance released their first set of voice components, as Java Beans.

Voice recognition is no longer about the quality of the recognition engine, as this technology is sufficiently advanced and improving all the time. Rather it is about the ability to automate dialogues which may occur between end user and machine. Just as with the Web, the voice caller can very easily get turned off by requests for irrelevant or badly ordered information so usability becomes a primary issue, a fact recognised by SpeechWorks’ own development methodology. We are likely to see a number of voice-controlled applications in the future, based on the component model, and the chances are they will become acceptable as their quality improves and their numbers increase. The death of the touch-tone interface is an imminent and welcome consequence of this (though it should be remembered that the bad press of DTMF is as much down to the interface design as the technology). Call centres are the primary market for this: call centre managers will find voice technology indispensable in achieving their “improved service, reduced costs” mantra.

Even so, this use of voice technology is still concentrated more on the enterprise than the individual. The real, mass market, killer application for voice comes with the merger of the mobile phone, a device which we are used to talking to, and the PDA, a device we are used to looking at. The recent announcement by IBM and Nokia serves to illustrate the potential of the technology, which will one day come as standard in handheld devices, particularly as it includes the definition of an XML-based standard for voice. Agreed, a truly portable voice solution which relies on the power of the device alone is a long way off, however advances in wireless technology mean that the recognition can occur on the server side rather than on the device itself. In the keyboard-unfriendly mobile world, the use of voice for navigation and search becomes the better option. Voice entry will sit alongside text and pointer entry, with each being used in the most appropriate manner.

For voice recognition vendors, the future is bright for those that ignore the skeptics and embrace the broadest possible vision of the future. Recognition engines and application development tools are both OEM markets, suitable for the systems integrators. There does exist a third market, which bears a striking similarity to the Web site development market currently occupied by products such as NetObjects Fusion and Microsoft FrontPage. As voice-enabled mobile devices gain presence, site developers will require tools to enable the receipt of speech commands. There are very few players in this space at the moment – SpeechWorks is one of them. However there is still plenty of time for the other voice recognition companies to catch up.

(First published 29 October 1999)

10-29 – UK Govt PC plans miss the mark

UK Govt PC plans miss the mark

It is interesting to compare two recent announcements, that of the UK government offering PCs at low cost to low income groups, and that of the new wave of Web-ready appliances to hit the markets next year. Essentially, this is about bridging the current and future new business models for consumer IT. The old model states that IT facilities in the home are centred around the PC, wherever it may be situated. The new model, of ubiquitous IT, says that a spectrum of computing devices will exist throughout the home.

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown expressed his desire to see up to 100,000 refurbished PCs rented out to low income families for a fiver a month. This move has caused controversy over who would pay the phone bills for Internet access. Also, it could be argued that a 486-based PC is still adequate for the Web, and these are virtually being given away today in second hand magazines. Still, the principle of making low-cost computer facilities available is sound.

Meanwhile, it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that Dell, Compaq and Gateway would be launching Internet access devices next year, none of which would run Microsoft software. These devices are to be priced below the cost of the PC and it is likely, if their popularity grew, that the prices would tumble. Here we are seeing the kind of devices that could be given to subscribers of internet services, possibly even undercutting Gordon Brown’s offering of £5 per month. Web devices will not be able to run the same variety of software as the PC, however for most people sufficient facilities will be available directly Web portals such as Yahoo and MSN.

There is life in the PC yet, but in two years time it will not be the only device that people use to access the Web. Fears about an information underclass caused by a lack of computer facilities may be premature.

(First published 29 October 1999)

November 1999

11-22 – DNA points to chasm in the law

DNA points to chasm in the law

Oh dear, oh dear. There are few areas which show how woefully inadequate the law was to meet the needs of this information age, than the subject of DNA data. As recently discussed on Wired, for example, only 3 states in the US have laws prohibiting the unauthorised release of DNA material which could be used for testing. Similarly, in the UK DNA testing looks like it will quickly become the norm. These weaknesses, coupled with the unseemly rush towards DNA testing, suggest something needs to be done fast to ensure that civil liberties are protected.

The human genome project is progressing stunningly well, so it seems likely that the whole of the DNA structure will be identified and mapped within ten years. Such advances are impressive, as are the benefits of such research. As usual, however, the protective measures against the misuse of such information lag behind the research. There will be an inevitable period where, in certain areas, Joe Public is at a disadvantage relative to the early adopters of the new technology. One such area looks set to be law making itself.

Several questions arise. Like the unauthorised taking of fingerprints, can officers legally take tissue samples without consent? Like with the debate over ID cards, would those people refusing to participate be treated differently to those that consent? As the capabilities of DNA testing are developed, exactly what information should be made available to the police, for example genetic defects or genes which indicate violent or other tendencies? This is not meant to be a Luddite diatribe, but the fact remains that many, many questions remain unanswered, and all the while technologies are improving and policing organisations are looking to how they might benefit.

It is nigh time to open these questions up to broader debate. Police authorities and law enforcement organisations worldwide would seem to be ahead of the wider public on these issues, who would do well to catch up.

(First published 22 November 1999)

11-22 – Real Time Linux to become a Reality

Real Time Linux to become a Reality

For Linux to take over the world, it must prove itself viable in several, as-yet uncharted territories including desktop, enterprise server and embedded platform. Whilst it still has a way to go in all these areas, an announcement from Lynx suggests that a solution for the embedded platform may be nearing readiness. Lynx expects to release BlueCat Linux by June of next year. This version of Linux will be able to support embedded and hard real time applications (as opposed to pseudo-real time applications) and will be released as open source.

What is significant about this announcement is that Lynx is already a vendor of a POSIX-compliant, real-time operating system and so clearly has some experience to bring to the party. Secondly, the whole issue of embedded systems raises the question of “What’s in the box”. Embedded systems are not visible to the user of the device concerned, and it is this user that is the most susceptible to marketing. Selection of which embedded OS is based on a number of factors, including functionality, manufacturer credibility and access to trained staff. If Lynx can successfully prove itself relative to these three factors then it may have enough to go up against the more marketing-oriented approaches favoured by non-Linux vendors.

It is both unlikely and unreasonable that Linux would take over the world. Microsoft have already proved beyond doubt that the concept of a one-size-fits-all operating system is fatally flawed. However Linux has already proved itself as a capable, general-purpose operating system. If Lynx can demonstrate its credentials in the embedded market, this will further reinforce acceptance of open source Linux in other areas.

(First published 22 November 1999)

11-22 – Silver Surfers fuel UK Net growth

Silver Surfers fuel UK Net growth

It is generally agreed that surveys should be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly when commissioned by organisations standing to gain from the results. As results from three surveys appear on the same day, it is interesting to compare the findings.

First off, High Street banker Barclays commissioned a survey from NOP, which concluded that 41% of people surveyed were willing to switch to Internet banking within a year. It also noted that 36% of over-65s said they would like to bank online.

Second, a survey by Continental Research found that despite 11.1 million people use the Internet regularly (once a month or more), only 1% of all retail purchases were being made over the Web. It also found that average and lower-income families were being left out.

Third, a Which?Online report concluded that more than a million people over the age of 55 are regularly using the internet, primarily as an information source but also to chat.

Of course these are selected highlights of summaries of the surveys, however it has to be said that the different results bear each other out. Particular interest has been garnered by the “Silver Surfer” category. To date, it seems that insufficient attention has been paid to the group of people with more time, and maybe more wisdom, on their hands. Here is proof if any were necessary, that the Internet is more than a technology for the information-hungry whizz kids of our time.

For commercial organisations such as banks and retailers, the raision d’être of the Internet is to make money. While the current reality is that 99% of consumer cash is still being bagged at traditional outlets, the potential exists for a substantial percentage to be transferred to Internet-based transactions. Buoyed by the proof that the Web exists for more than just the propeller-heads, companies are trying every trick in the book (and plenty of new ones) in their attempts to garner a better ion of this market. This is currently geared around Web sites: fresh from another round of high street branch closures, for example, Barclays has announced new features to its online banking service. Sainsbury’s, the beleaguered supermarket chain, has also stated its wish to “launch, develop and own the best portals” in the food, drink, home and garden categories of Internet shopping.

The fact remains that nobody really knows what will trigger the consumer majority to start online shopping on masse. An exponential curve is assumed, but this will not be without significant effort on the part of the commercial organisations to make it so. It is unlikely, for example, that the PC-based Web site is the epitome of what can be done with the Internet. Bandwidth is still a problem which is likely to limit mass market adoption for another couple of years at least. Finally, the vision of most organisations remains sadly limited – Barclays’ list of online banking features falls well short of the blueprint for online banking described by Patricia Seybold in her book “Customers.com”.

Overall we have a way to go yet. Initial excitement and take-up by the hard core will undoubtedly give way to a wider adoption, but both technology and functionality need to improve substantially before this will happen.

One last word about “average and lower-income families.” Various initiatives have been announced, such as Gordon Brown’s PC rental scheme, but they all ignore one significant fact. The Internet is as much about reducing costs as it is about increasing profits. Central government will, sooner or later, work out how much it could save by providing Internet access to all. If this is coupled with the ongoing cost reductions in equipment and connections, then those on lower incomes should be able to take their place in the early majority, when it comes.

(First published 22 November 1999)

11-23 – Bluetooth is going not going to change the local networking landscape… yet

Bluetooth is going not going to change the local networking landscape… yet

At least that was the conclusion of major vendors of the technology, blaming software and interoperability issues for delays in bringing products to market. Despite this initial disappointment, companies are still moving full steam ahead with Bluetooth. So what is it, and how will it affect end users?

Bluetooth is a short-range wireless standard designed for communications between electronic equipment. The standard has been agreed by the majority of hardware manufacturers (including Ericsson, Intel, Lucent, Nokia, Toshiba, Philips and Sony) and software vendors (including Microsoft). It therefore looks set to exist, which already a major hurdle cleared for any technology. A number of applications have already been indicated for Bluetooth, including its use as a replacement for wires or InfraRed connections between devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. It has quickly become clear that the potential for this technology goes way beyond this limited view, however. Home networking has now been recognised as a valid target for Bluetooth, not for fridges and toasters (which, lets face it, has met with significant disbelief) but for HiFi units, televisions and other electronic devices used around the home. The second area which is likely to receive attention is the Small Office/Home Office environment, as Bluetooth demonstrates its capability as a replacement for local networking and the general proliferation of wires in these environments.

There is one significant element of this development which makes Bluetooth an inevitability: it is targeted at equipment manufacturers and hence is likely to be included on any electronic platform that is suited for the purpose. Like the InfraRed ports that the technology is designed to replace, Bluetooth will be an integral part of the device. The difference is that it will actually be used.

Software may be holding up the development of Bluetooth devices, and it is software which will slow down its acceptance. Higher-level mechanisms such as Jini or Universal Plug and Play are still necessary to enable devices to identify each other and to open secure communications channels. Without these, Bluetooth will still be appropriate for a limited range of applications, but will be prevented from achieving its full potential.

(First published 23 November 1999)

11-23 – Chip development goes up a level or two

Chip development goes up a level or two

Despite fears that Moore’s law is running out of stem, recent semiconductor announcements suggest that there’s life in the old technology yet. First off, scientists at Berkley University, California, have developed a transistor that is four hundred times smaller than those currently available to chip designers. Second, the Semiconductor Industry Alliance (SIA) released its technology roadmap which indicated that future gains in scale would be based on integrating multiple silicon and packaging technologies on a single chip. Finally, last week IBM announced how, using developments in chip layering, it had developed transistors which stood vertically on the chip’s surface, rather than laying flat.

All these developments add up to the suggestion of a rosy future for integrated circuits. Given the fact that the Berkeley development will not be patented so to enable “the widest possible usage,” and the existence of the SIA as a cross-industry body of competing vendors, the future looks even brighter. Most significant is the coupling of the IBM announcement with the plans of the SIA, as together these suggest integration of many device types, including displays, processors and audio equipment, onto a multi-layered, multi-component, single chip foundation.

It is unclear how much potential for innovation still exists in silicon but these developments should keep the ball rolling for a good five years, by which time research in other areas (For example, nanotechnology or Hitachi’s memory chip research) should be starting to bear fruit. Again, integration is the key: by the time the new generation of devices starts to roll off the design station, they will be able to slot right into the connectivity and packaging developed for the older generations of integrated circuits.

(First published 23 November 1999)

11-23 – IP becomes carrier protocol of choice

IP becomes carrier protocol of choice

Some interesting figures have come out of BT, who is investing half a billion pounds in their IP networking backbone. BT will be increasing the IP points of presence from 14 to over 100 nationally, and intend to implement the separation of Internet from voice traffic at local exchanges.

The trend towards Internet traffic from voice traffic is visible across the carrier marketplace. Nortel, for example, announced recently that it would be integrating IP routing capability into its transmission devices, with two effects: the first was that separate IP routers would no longer be necessary and the second was that all traffic, including both voice and data could be transmitted using IP. Another example is GTE, who recently announced a dedicated Internet for voice traffic to give customers the cost reductions of IP coupled with the performance guarantees of a dedicated network.

By bolstering its Internet access capability, in the short term BT are taking a strain off their voice backbone. However they are also preparing themselves for the general migration to IP traffic from voice traffic. It has generally been agreed that IP will be the protocol for all traffic types which use the global carrier infrastructures, voice, data or otherwise. Remaining questions are more a matter of “when” and “how” than “what if”.

Given BT’s monopoly position in the UK, BT’s announcement has some some interesting impacts on dial-up Internet users. First, consider the modem link to the local exchange. Modems are required to convert digital data to within the ranges required for the voice carrier network. If BT are demodulating and sending such data directly onto the Internet from the local exchange, it becomes questionable whether modems are necessary at all compared to DSL-based mechanisms. Second, the question arises as to whether BT are exploiting its privileged position as “owner” of the local exchange, by extending Internet access to the local loop thus offering potentially better performance to its own subscribers than to users of other ISPs. This remains to be seen, as it is quite likely that other carriers’ equipments are also to be installed in local exchanges.

Overall, announcements such as this are steps along the way to the Internet becoming the global communications network for all media including broadcast media. Local and global carriers need to position themselves for this inevitability, whilst being careful to not overtly exploit the advantages of their incumbent position.

(First published 23 November 1999)

11-24 – Can Linux workstations change SGI’s fortunes?

Can Linux workstations change SGI’s fortunes?

Desktop Linux may not be a reality just yet, but as far as Silicon Graphics is concerned it is going to have to be as the company is staking its future on it. SGI recently admitted that it had failed to find a buyer for its Intel-based workstation business. Fresh on the heels of its announcement of an attempted sell-off of its Cray supercomputer product line, the company could really have done without more bad news like this.

Silicon Graphics lost the plot a long time ago, admit sources from inside the company. Faced with the ever-decreasing sales of its proprietary, Unix-based workstations and servers, the company launched itself into high-end NT-based workstations based around a customised hardware architecture. In doing so it fundamentally misjudged the workings of the PC market, by giving itself insufficient differentiation from other vendors to justify the price premium. It also continued to focus on its traditional markets where it should have been aiming squarely at the corporate mass market.

The newest desktop strategy from SGI is to concentrate on the provision of Linux-based PCs. The company recognises that application support is still weak, but are prepared to take the short term risk. Also SGI intends to open up parts of its OpenGL graphics code to the Linux community.

Clearly, though, Silicon Graphics are adopting Linux because they have very few other directlions in which they can go. What is interesting is that while it remains unclear whether the strategy will succeed, it is clear that it gives a general boost to the concept of desktop Linux. The company can exploit its desktop Unix heritage to ensure its Linux workstations have the usability and ease of administration required for the desktop. It is highly likely that SGI will focus on the performance of desktop Linux, again an area which will benefit the movement as a whole. The biggest unresolved issue remains application availability and it is possible that SGI will be able to leverage its relationships with application providers to help resolve this.

There will be a future for desktop Linux. It remains to be seen whether the same is true for Silicon Graphics.

(First published 24 November 1999)

11-24 – Directory services lead Novell out of the mire

Directory services lead Novell out of the mire

The turnaround in Novell’s fortunes can now be said to be completed. In a year the share price has doubled, the growth rates for directory-based products have doubled and the company profits have virtually doubled. The company has clear strategy, popular products and a fast-growing consultancy arm. All change for Novell, who many were consigning to the junk heap of IT history only a few years ago.

It seems still recent that Novell were bullishly acquiring companies and products such as Tuxedo, WordPerfect and UnixWare (Novell’s name) in their drive to compete directly with Microsoft. Within a year it became clear that the strategy was failing and measures were taken including the sell-off of all the products that the company had been so feverishly collecting. Drastic action was necessary as the share price fell like a stone and the company was derided for a lack of focus or coherence. The company decided to fix their sights on NetWare and its directory service product NDS.

With NDS, Novell has set its sights on being the directory of the Web. Recent announcements concerning the open source release of parts of NDS will most likely be targeted at supporting this ambition. The company has been remarkably successful so far, down to its own marketing success and, it has to be said, Microsoft’s incapability of bringing its much-touted Active Directory to market. Originally presented in 1997, AD will now form part of Windows 2000 which will not be released until February of next year.

Companies rise, and so can they fall. Over the next few years Novell still faces an uphill struggle before it can truly say it is at the top of the directory pile. Microsoft will undoubtedly attempt to steal the company’s flag once Windows 2000 has been released, and this is a threat which Novell will be taking most seriously. Even so, there is still a huge market for directory services which, based on current performance, the company stands every chance of capturing.

(First published 24 November 1999)

11-24 – Microsoft: the lighting of the long fuse

Microsoft: the lighting of the long fuse

The brewing legal storm for Microsoft has remarkable similarities to that already experienced by the tobacco industry. Class action suits have already been filed in Alabama, Louisiana, California and Ohio and there is every chance that more will follow. The probability is that the different cases will be consolidated, suggesting another legal battle which will cause more than a few headaches to the software giant.

There are two main differences with the tobacco industry, neither of which are good news for Microsoft. The first is that the defendant is a single company rather than an industry – yes, individual companies were targeted but this still led to a dilution of the overall thrust. The second is that there are no vested interests relative to the tobacco debate, which pitched smokers against non-smokers as much as individuals against companies. In the Microsoft case, the situation is much simpler – individuals and organisations want some of their money back as they feel that they have been overcharged. This isn’t about proving risks to health or substantiating research, this question has a yes-no answer which many feel has already been addressed by Judge Jackson.

Clearly a huge amount hinges on the final conclusions of the antitrust case, which may not be known until next year. Should the parties decide to settle then a final answer may not be reached, meaning that the class action suits will have to start virtually from scratch. In the meantime, investors are hanging on as long as possible to what is clearly a good earner, monopoly or no. It could be argued that settlement acts only in the interests of Microsoft as it does not resolve the fundamental issues of the case. Should the Judge reach a final ruling then Microsoft will appeal, taking the case to the Supreme Court if necessary. In the meantime, both the company and its investors can continue to milk the cash cow.

It is unlikely that other legal disputes will be able to reach any conclusion prior to the closure of the antitrust case. US lawyers are stunningly persistent when they smell money, however, and Microsoft cannot shake off the powerful scent. Legal organisations will try every possible approach to getting their clients’ hands on the cash: it may take several years but sooner or later, like with the tobacco suits, a case will succeed. Once the breach is opened, investors will hang on as long as they dare before they take the money and run.

(First published 24 November 1999)

11-25 – Chip wars come to a head, just in time

Chip wars come to a head, just in time

The leapfrogging of AMD and Intel towards the elusive goal of a 1GHz 32-bit processor looks close to reaching a conclusion. According to The Register, Intel will use a semiconductor conference in early February to demonstrate such a chip. However if rumours from AMD are true, Intel may find themselves pipped to the post.

The ongoing thrusts and parries of the two organisations are having several effects. First, AMD has managed to re-establish itself as a processor provider worth considering. A number of the major PC suppliers, including Dell, are starting to take chips from AMD. Gateway withdrew from using the company but there is information to suggest that the two organisations may be re-opening the channel. Success breeds success and AMD now look like they have achieved the kind of critical mass that is necessary to keep up, or even overtake, the erstwhile leader. The second knock-on of the knockabout has been that customers have benefited greatly. Prices have been forced down while new products have been released at an increasing rate.

The question arises as to whether this pace of innovation can be sustained. Or does it? Given the intensity if the x86 wars, it is possible to become oblivious to the other changes that are occurring in the IT industry. The fact is that we are on the brink of an explosion of diverse and innovative devices, with interface compatibility but a broad ranging base of software and hardware. All of the main players are recognising this with Dell releasing its WebPC next week, Microsoft changing its mantra to “great software.. on any device” and Intel making a broad range of investments to give itself a lead in the device explosion.

The next year will prove most stimulating, for one thing it should spell the end of the processor wars which have seen off a number of vendors including NatSemi, Cyrix/IBM and Motorola to name but a few. The closing of this chapter will enable the other players to rejoin the fray, and innovation and partnerships will prove more important than processor speed and MIPs. An important milestone it is, however the success story of the first past the 1GHz post will quickly leave the marketing collateral and enter the annals of IT history.

(First published 25 November 1999)

11-25 – Compaq provides litmus test for OS debate

Compaq provides litmus test for OS debate

If ever there was a single company which could illustrate the complexities of the current Operating System debate, then it would be Compaq. The company is pulling back from NT on Alpha and is offering existing customers an array of options for migration or replacement. Customers can stay on Alpha and choose a free upgrade to OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix or (already free) Linux, or they can get 90% off the cost of a new Intel/NT system.

There are two things we can get out of this. The first is that Compaq, having done considerable homework, is unable to reach any conclusion about relative benefits or customer preferences for the four platforms. Of course, some are perceived as “mainstream,” “niche” or “just arrived,” but overall the company has been forced (though it is unlikely that Compaq would use that word) to offer a choice. This paints a considerably different picture from that suggested earlier this year, which saw NT/Intel and Tandem being the two platforms that the company would promote above all others.

The second point is that the results of the migration, which should come to light over the next six months, will provide a deep insight into the state of the operating system market. It is tempting to believe that customers will choose a migration to another NT platform as they already have skills in this area and given the popularity of the OS. The migration comes with a not insignificant hardware cost, however, and for various other reasons customers may be tempted to keep their existing hardware and change the operating system.

It is to be assumed that there will be additional costs associated with application upgrades, plus the labour and downtime costs of the migration itself. It seems unlikely that many will choose this route, unless they are dissatisfied with NT. Of those that do, maybe the most interesting data to come out will be the proportion of customers that choose Tru64 Unix over Linux. Clearly Compaq will be pushing Tru64 Unix, in which it has a major stake, hard. Success for Linux could well force new changes on the whole Unix OS landscape.

(First published 25 November 1999)

11-25 – Zero cost IT – only...

Zero cost IT – only…

The current debate about costs of IT equipment and services illustrates the stage we have reached in the technology revolution. Microsoft, for example, have been accused of price fixing; Oracle of abusing their position when setting license fees. Now, on Silicon News, it is claimed that IT services companies are overcharging their customers. So – what is going on?

What we have here is the simplest value equation. In the past there has been a huge perceived value attached to IT. Relative to the manual systems and processes that mainframe processing represented, it was possible to justify spending vast amounts on such facilities. Similarly, new markets developed (and continue to develop) in parallel with technology advances – in the early stages, the price premium is set based on what the end customer is prepared to pay, and in order to recoup the costs of research and development by the vendor. Alongside all of this has developed a need for services, experts in the new technologies or people with past experience of making the necessary changes to organisational and technical infrastructures. Companies have been spurred on by the carrot of reaching new markets or the stick of keeping up with the competition. The internet has resulted in a new wave of this phenomenon, new products at premium costs and newly trained “experts” in the field.

Each new leap of technology will cause organisations to reappraise how they operate and what products and services they offer. Where product and service suppliers have come unstuck is down to one of two reasons. Either they failed to deliver, or they maintained the price premium long after the perception of delivered value had changed.

Failure to deliver is perhaps the most obvious and hence the easiest to describe and comment upon. Products may fail for a variety of reasons, from low quality to over-hyped functionality. Services may also fail, for largely the same reasons. At the earlier stages of a new technology adoption, partial failure matters less as anything is better than missing out on the race. Later, though, the picture is different: late adopters rarely stand for shoddy products or performance.

Price maintenance is harder to judge because it is based on perception. The competition in the hardware market has forced manufacturers to push the bangs per buck ratio ever higher. The copybook of many software vendors is not quite so clean: the price of Microsoft operating systems for example, have gone up rather than down over the past five years. Competition in the hardware space is not matched among software vendors who are often rightly accused of being less innovative and more grasping than their hardware counterparts. Initial demand for point services (for example, how to tune financial packages for best results) has commanded staggering rates, but this is to be expected. Services vendors often justify the maintenance of high prices based on the principle that “it was expensive, therefore it must have been right”. However there is little or no proof of any correlation between the two.

There will be several technology leaps over the next few years, in particular the current eBusiness movement, the revolution in broadband communications, device-based computing and Application Service Provision (ASPs). The costs and benefits of each of these are currently still being understood but it is to be expected that the costs of products and services will be pitched relative to the perceived value of the prospective user base. Older technologies, already perceived as commodities and whose R&D costs have already been recouped, should be priced at a substantially lower level.

(First published 25 November 1999)

December 1999

12-07 – Microsoft: Java comatose, W2K holds key to bypass operation

Microsoft: Java comatose, W2K holds key to bypass operation

Java, Java everywhere, such was the vision of Sun when it first launched the language. Java has gone through several incarnations, initially targeting embedded systems and then aimed squarely at knocking Windows off its monopoly perch. These days the battle cry is for the enterprise – a raft of powerful players such as BEA and IBM have been lining up behind the concept of Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) running on application servers. But they are not there yet, according to Microsoft, who is seizing the opportunity to get to the higher ground.

To bolster its armoury against Java, Microsoft commissioned a survey of 3,000 developers across Europe, from independent market research company Romtec. The findings make interesting reading, particularly as they compare usage of Microsoft technologies and Java/Corba technologies. Across the board of different types of developers, Microsoft COM/DCOM technologies were shown to be holding their own. A growing number, currently running at between 25 and 40% of companies (depending on sector) were shown to be using these components. Users of Java beans, however, lay at around 5-10%, a figure that has remained relatively constant over the past three years. And as for EJBs, developers of EJBs, these barely registered on the scale.

Microsoft advocates will be encouraged by the findings. COM is growing, Java is stuck in the single figure percentage points. Of course, it is likely that Java flag-wavers will dispute the findings – either rebutting the figures with findings of their own, or bringing up the point that these are, after all, statistics which by nature cannot be trusted. Indeed, Bloor Research published a Java survey of its own earlier this year, which conflicts with the Romtec survey. But it is not the intention here to dispute who is right or wrong. The question is – what if Microsoft are perceived to be right?

There was one very interesting fact that came out of the Romtec survey. This was, year on year, a substantially greater number of development houses planned to adopt Java-related technologies in the next year. Year on year, it would appear, the adoption of Java may have been put off. Anyone who has worked in a development shop will know the difficulties of delivering existing applications and will recognise this conflict between hope and reality.

By focusing their efforts on enterprise applications, Microsoft may well be cutting Java off at the pass. There is a general feeling that Windows NT and its associated technologies have proved insufficient for Enterprise applications, and have preferred to adopt platforms from the likes of Sun, IBM and BEA. Java has a reputation for being slow but its suppliers build on the tradition of delivering true enterprise environments, hence the expectation of EJB application servers is already positive. Soon, however, Windows 2000 will be trotted out of the Microsoft stable. All signs are that it is performant, available and, most of all, scalable enough for the enterprise.

If Microsoft can hang in there for another three months, they will be in a position to influence the “real soon now” school of Java adoption. That is, those development shops that would love to adopt Java if only they could find the time, and a suitable project, to do so. With surveys such as the one quoted here, the software giant will explain how it has the skills base and the incumbent position already. “You’re right,” development managers will say. “Why change – after all, the MS environment is now mature.” Java shops and developers alike may throw their arms up in horror, bemoaning the closed environment, the upward-spiralling license costs and, most of all, the weakness of fellow developers who fail to adopt the J-vision and succeed only in lining the pockets of the world’s richest man.

So – is this truth or fiction? Ultimately it doesn’t matter. In this topsy-turvy, technological world Microsoft have shown in the past that how marketing skill is at least as important as good product. Even as the jaws of the US justice system attempt to close on the software giant, Microsoft may demonstrate yet again that its message making proves too much for the evangelism of the other camps.

(First published 7 December 1999)

12-07 – Nokia forges Europe’s mobile future, threatens the silicon boy wonders

Nokia forges Europe’s mobile future, threatens the silicon boy wonders

Nokia became Europe’s most valuable company yesterday, as its net worth pipped BP Amoco at the post. Not bad for a Nordic TV manufacturer. Almost as staggering is its prediction that cellular subscribers will triple to one billion over the next three years, based on the adoption of the cellular Internet, where mobile phone users access Internet services through the Wireless Application Protocol WAP.

In case it wasn’t recognised already, Nokia looks fixed to be setting a number of standards, not only for mobile phones but also for PDAs and ultimately for computing devices. Why? Because they are all part of the same infrastructure. This is why Nokia is so fascinating. Consider:

- With Ericsson and Motorola, Nokia has brought WAP to market without a glitch, to the demise of 3Com’s WebClipping and Microsoft’s MicroBrowser technology

- With Palm and Symbian, Nokia has settled on the next generation of OS for its devices, sidelining Windows CE and giving both Palm and Symbian every reason to be cheerful

- Again with Ericsson and others, Nokia has been instrumental to the success of Bluetooth which (despite teething problems – no pun intended) looks set to bypass other wireless local networking protocols, for example from the likes of Apple.

Just as information is power, so it is that in the information industry, he who sets the standards rules the world. While the gorillas of the IT industry have been fighting trench warfare in the standards game, the mobile manufacturers have been co-ordinating their efforts in far more gentlemanly co-opetition. These companies are fast becoming some of the most powerful in the world and their size, and their ability to co-ordinate efforts, gives them the potential to trounce the bickering upstarts of the silicon age. As the worlds of IT and communications continue to converge, the next standards battles will give the IT incumbents such as Microsoft, SUN and Oracle a true run for their money.

(First published 7 December 1999)

12-07 – Where lies the future of Web advertising?

Where lies the future of Web advertising?

Hmmm… advertising, advertising, advertising. As illustrated by the launch of the latest Real Networks’ server software, this subject continues to garner attention, particularly in relation to the Web both as channel for and a focus of advertising. It is worth highlighting certain issues that are coming to light based on the nature of the Web as an interactive, ubiquitous medium.

The interactive nature of the Web is only starting to be exploited as far as advertising is concerned. Banner advertising is the most visible form of display, but (and this is surely common knowledge now) organisations can pay to have their names appear at the top of Yahoo’s search list. Adverts can be couched using the traditional methods of sponsorship, but it does not stop there – competitions, surveys and partnerships between organisations are all becoming valid forms of getting an organisation’s name and message across.

It is already common (but not common enough, maybe) for adverts to be targeted depending on a user’s country of origin, stated preferences or logged behaviour. Advertising is part of a pre-sales process which may be managed using Web-based applications: advertising systems will be linked with marketing systems and relationship management facilities to enable a smooth pull-through of the prospective customer. Of course, with interaction, there is risk: it comes as no surprise that advertisers such as Conducent are (probably illegally) collecting details of users’ computers, or that Amazon intercepted customer emails. Such is the Web.

The second point is that the Internet is everywhere, or at least it will be. Despite continuing efforts to preserve existing channels of communication, eventually the Internet will replace the radio, the television and the telephone. Telecommunications providers have accepted this, cable companies have accepted this. This does not mean that traffic will move from one network to another, rather that all networks are becoming internet-based. In the old world, there was the channel such as the radio station, the billboard or the magazine, and there was the advert. In the new world, the distinction between channel and ad is no longer valid, as it is equally possible for an advertiser to host a radio service as a radio site to host ads. On television, a click on the remote control will take the interested party through to the sponsor’s Web site.

For all of these reasons, it is logical to assume that advertising, as a pure form of communication, is on the way out. Traditionally the ad has had a life of its own but it will increasingly be tied into other forms of marketing communication that eventually lead to a sale. The advert is an entry point into a process: if it is seen as such, it can be better targeted and more closely followed. As punters we should be glad, as companies reduce the splattering of irrelevant banner ads and turn their attention to focused direct marketing. The downside is, of course, that such organisations will be more in tune with our needs and weaknesses, and as such are far more likely to succeed in selling to us.

(First published 7 December 1999)

12-22 – 3Com – first the strategy, the rest will follow

3Com – first the strategy, the rest will follow

When 3Com bought US Robotics in 1997, it was unsure what to do with the PalmPilot product. Rumour has it that the decision was made for the company as 3Com executives found they could not do without the device, which became an essential element of meeting room apparel within a short space of time. Realising it was on to a winner, the company hung on to the Palm product line, a decision which has paid huge dividends for the company. Last week 3Com announced it had filed to sell shares in Palm Computing, in an IPO which is generating great interest across the board. The decision has been seen as good for Palm, but where does it leave 3Com?

Let’s look at 3Com’s current position. The company announced its second quarter results two days ago, seeing a fall in both earnings and revenues of just over 4%. According to the financial analysts, this was largely down to a 20% drop in sales of its networking equipment products and modems. Also, despite beating analysts’ expectations on earnings per share, 3Com warned that third quarter earnings would fall to 24 cents per share, 8 cents below predictions. Observers are using terms like “stumbling,” “struggling” and “challenged.” The sell-off of Palm is seen as a positive move as it will enable 3Com to focus on its core business, but some say that it is a lack of focus in this area which has dogged 3Com from the start.

Despite all this, 3Com do seem to be getting it together. The company has launched its e-networks strategy, in which it positions itself as a provider of core building blocks for the converged voice, video and data markets. This move is not just about networking equipment – applications software and services will also play a big part in the overall picture. The recent $100M stake that the company took in wireless applications company USWeb/CKS, as well as the positioning and feature sets of products like its NBX family, are illustrative of how 3Com is moving forward with this strategy.

3Com is moving away from battles it knows it cannot fight, such as sales of “pure” networking equipment. Instead it is setting its sights on the new frontiers of convergent technologies, applications and services. While this new landscape shows all the signs of offering lucrative opportunities, which the company is perfectly capably of exploiting, it is still very much in the future. It will remain so until bandwidth issues have been resolved, and standards and tools for application communications, security, directory services and management are not only set but also adopted across the technology industries. This presents quite a barrier to be overcome: for 3Com’s sake it had better happen sooner, rather than later.

(First published 22 December 1999)

12-22 – Novell bets its future on ASPs

Novell bets its future on ASPs

Directories are dull, but not to Novell as the company is betting its future on them. The future of the company hangs in the balance – if it gets it wrong, it could be consigned to IT history. If right, it could sweep the landscape of IT like a forest fire. The question is, which is it? And the answer may be found in Application Service Providers, or ASPs.

In our opinion, the arrival of broadband communications will signal new models for using IT. ASPs are an indication of the way things will go, with the rental of applications which are accessed over the Web. However this model of ASPs is just the beginning – many different types of service, including communications services, information feeds, application services and business services, will be integrated and provided to businesses and consumers alike. This is the vision, but it is currently hampered not only by bandwidth constraints, but also by a lack of a set of facilities without which the ASP model cannot function. These are billing, management, security and, of course, directory services.

Directories will play a central role in the service provision model, as they will hold information about all the who, what and where of the service infrastructure. With products like Novell’s NDS the mechanisms for directory already exist; however they have not yet been adopted on a sufficiently widespread basis. Novell is betting that they will, and when companies start to pick a product, it wants NDS to be the de facto choice. This is why Novell have started giving away sections of NDS to the open source community, hoping that this will speed its adoption.

What could go wrong for Novell? In a word, Microsoft. Active Directory is currently waiting in the wings for its moment of glory, however this will come in the next few months. In the meantime Novell are attempting to get as big a head start as possible. With NDS release 8, the company has already established a reputation for the product as stable, performant and well-supported by the growing ranks of qualified administrators. This week’s announcement by Information Week, that NDS 8 would be their product of the year, can only have been icing on the cake for Novell, not to mention the recently broken deal with CNN Interactive. Novell’s biggest threat may also prove to have too many other battles to fight, particularly as the portability across many platforms is a clear differentiator for NDS over Active Directory.

Given the way IT is going, it looks like Novell have read the runes correctly. The company is positioning its flagship product at the heart of the Internet, and it will take a substantial knock to remove it once it gets established. ASPs may still have a way to come, but when they do, Novell will already be there.

(First published 22 December 1999)

12-22 – Y2K – believe us, we’d rather be wrong

Y2K – believe us, we’d rather be wrong

So that we can keep our last missive before Christmas full of seasonal cheer and good tidings, we thought we’d better round up the doom and gloom stuff on the penultimate news day for IT-Director.com before the Millennium. First off, is Y2K fact or fiction? Let’s look at some recent news stories, which may make up your minds.

- the US State Department announced on Monday that it would suspend visa processing at embassies worldwide, for the first two weeks of January. The reason cited was “Y2K issues.”

- On December 13, Wells Fargo & Co. sent 13,000 renewal-notices to its customers with the year 1900 printed on them. Apparently the error was down to a supplier forgetting to change the date on its printing machines.

- In June, a Y2K test caused four million gallons of raw sewage to be spewed onto the streets of Van Nuys, Southern California.

- A food distributor has discovered that its computer system was tossing out items that expired in 2000, thinking they had sat on the shelf for the past 99 years.

These are a selection of real events. A more speculative report from BSC Consulting in the UK has said that the world is categorically not ready for the challenges of Y2K. The reason it gives is that, despite the huge efforts that have been made, “many governments and business programs have been a mixture of incompetence and complacency.” The report also points out that significant problems will be caused due to the interconnectedness of compliant countries with others which have not resolved the problems. All talk? Well, maybe not. The Y2K readiness survey recently published by the United Nations’ International Y2K Cooperation Center stated that “because some businesses, schools, and governments will not be sufficiently ready, they, and some of the people who depend on them, will suffer economic harm from Y2K-caused errors. These local impacts will range from minor inconveniences to the loss of jobs.” The IYCC’s overall assessment may be summarised as “many Y2K errors, moderate impact.” Unfortunately we are getting mixed messages from the IYCC, who reported more recently that “health care services worldwide are at the greatest risk for Y2K disruptions … hospitals and the health care sector in general have been the slowest worldwide to ready themselves for the new year, and … some nations may be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the problem.” This perspective sounds a little more than the “moderate” point of view espoused by its Y2K readiness survey.

If these reports, produced by bodies with hands on experience, are to be believed then all will not be well in the Millennium. Even if the problem does not manifest itself in “complacent” Western countries, the in its survey IYCC warns of humanitarian crises which could have at least an indirect impact on just about everybody. Don’t get us wrong, we would love the harbingers of Y2K doom to be proved foolishly false, however we also think that the current levels of complacency are as misplaced as the visions of Armageddon.

What will happen? Nobody knows… yet. But New Zealand, the first industrialised nation on the dawn of the new Millennium has volunteered to keep us informed. Updates on Y2K issues will appear on http://www.y2k.govt.nz/, as they occur. Also, the IY2KCC’s own Web site will be host to a by-country breakdown of Y2K status. The European Union web site may be found at http://www.ispo.cec.be/y2keuro/year2000.htm. Finally, for the sceptics out there that believe that either (a) there is not a problem, or (b) we can trust our institutions to resolve it, it might be worth looking at the paper by Peter De Jager on the origins of the Y2K problem, at http://www.sciam.com/1999/0199issue/0199dejager.html. Clearly, according to the paper Y2K is a complex technical issue which is difficult to resolve even with the best will in the world.

Many years as a software tester are reason enough for myself to err on the side of caution when it comes to computer-related issues. Y2K is probably the biggest “computer-related issue” that the world will see for some time, and it is certainly the most important to date. Doom or dawn, it would not do to move into the new Millennium with anything other than a note of caution. I won’t be bothering with bunkers, but I shall be watching things very carefully as the New Year starts.

(First published 22 December 1999)

2000

Posts from 2000.

January 2000

01-07 – AOL-TV brings forth embedded Linux – by stealth

AOL-TV brings forth embedded Linux – by stealth

Web TV has been long-predicted but, so far, has failed to stoke up the interest of the mass market. With the launch of AOL into the market, this looks set to change. And it looks like, where AOL goes, Linux is destined to follow.

At the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, AOL showed off its interactive TV services which it is to launch, with satellite company DirecTV. The AOL solution is to use rebadged set-top boxes from Philips Electronics and from Hughes Network Systems. AOL intends to leverage the 20 million subscribers it already has, based on which (if it plays its cards right) it should secure it a substantial proportion of the 30 million US households predicted to be using interactive TV by 2004.

All very well and good so far, but – where’s the Linux link? There is currently one element missing from AOL’s portfolio. The current devices do not yet have the capability of caching live TV broadcasts such that they can be paused, rewound or just watched at a later date. Both Philips and Hughes intend to include such facilities in the future, and are licensing technology from TiVo to this end. TiVo products are based on a PowerPC architecture running (you guessed it) an embedded Linux kernel.

Should AOL’s strategy go to plan, the positive knock-on effects for Linux could be staggering with millions of consumers using devices with “Linux inside”. Consumers who turn to AOL are unlikely to care what operating system is running in the set-top box. Manufacturers and software vendors will care, indeed they will be watching with baited breath. Despite Linux’s strengths as an embedded operating system, its success in the consumer market will be more dependent on manufacturers’ preparedness to use the platform. Given a successful launch by AOL, other large-scale manufacturers will likely jump on the bandwagon: once established, there will be little that other companies can do to prevent the success of embedded Linux as a platform. Coupled with Intel’s recent announcements, it would appear that the future dominance of Linux on embedded devices is unassailable.

(First published 7 January 2000)

01-07 – Tokyo Joe suit starts the legal ball rolling

Tokyo Joe suit starts the legal ball rolling

“Moments of glory, desires, wealth, in the end all an illusion.” So proclaims the home page of Tokyo Joe, the darling of the Internet stock market. With four separate charges of fraud currently being filed against him, it would appear that the online stock guru is being hauled back to reality.

Amongst other things, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused Tokyo Joe of “scalping”. According to the SEC, TJ took advantage of his influential position to talk up the price of stocks, and he encouraged others to buy whilst selling his own share holdings. In addition he is said to have kept his own trading activities secret from his own clients and lied about his track record. Damaging charges indeed.

Whilst it is unclear whether the Tokyo Joe is in fact guilty as charged, or indeed whether the charges can be made to stick, this case serves as a landmark for the currently under-regulated area of Internet stock trading. As this case indicates, the legal issues surrounding dealing in eStocks are still very much on the drawing board. This is acknowledged by TJ’s lawyer who claims that his client had “legitimately taken advantage of legislative loopholes,“ according to The Independent. Hence why it is a good thing that the SEC has launched this, its first suit concerning Internet stock trading. Much of legal activity relies on precedent: while it is unclear what the outcome of this particular case will be, its results will provide at least a small stepping stone to future cases.

The Internet has left the law at a standing start. Its positively anarchistic nature can be said to have driven innovation in Web time, not to mention a potential new world of global free speech. Despite this, an appropriate legal framework is necessary to counter against the inevitable abuses of the system and its users. All in all, by raising the suit against Tokyo Joe, the SEC have taken an important step.

(First published 7 January 2000)

01-25 – At Linus’ Transmeta, Crusoe finds its Friday

At Linus’ Transmeta, Crusoe finds its Friday

If the recent surge of interest in handheld computing devices is anything to go by, it looks likely that Transmeta have found the goose that will lay their golden eggs. According to a survey by analysts NPD Intelect, December retail sales of plamtops grew by 169% compared to the same period in 1998. What is more, this success was not confined to the cheaper end of the scale. Sima Vasa, vice president of technology products for NPD Intelect, was quoted on News.com as saying that “Consumers are willing to pay a high price for the total mobility of personal digital assistants,” with the result that high-end devices were also seeing expanding sales. Overall, Palm was the winner, gaining an increasing share of the market.

All of this is pretty good news for Linus Torvalds’ new venture, Transmeta, which has barely been out of the news since it announced its Crusoe chip last week. Crusoe uses a technology known as Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW), which dramatically reduces the size of programs but requires software to prepare the instructions for the chip. This software-hardware combination is what is garnering the most interest: because it works in software, the code preparation or “code-morphing” also enables Intel instruction set to be used without fear of infringing Intel’s hardware based patents. Despite Transmeta’s clear targeting on Intel’s market share, analysts concur that the giant has little to fear just yet.

There have been many projects researching how instructions would be better structured and fed to processors, but so far none have reached mass-market appeal. Sometimes things work because the time is right – consider the take-off of the Palm Pilot following many failed attempts by the competition. In Torvalds’ case, it is his personality that is creating the wave that he rides – when he first announced his intentions, few could resist seeing what the demi-penguin could come up with next.

On the subject of Linux, it would appear that the little man has not forgotten his offspring. Several extensions to the Linux kernel have been made to support the Crusoe chip, and Transmeta are fully behind efforts to bring embedded Linux-based devices to the market. This could raise interesting issues of conflict of interest – should Linus remain responsible for what goes into the kernel? We shall leave this debate for another day.

Crusoe chips, to be manufactured by IBM, are currently running at around the 500MHz mark but there is a 700MHz version on the horizon. The first customer for the chip is Diamond Multimedia, already noted as trendsetters through their launch of the Rio MP3 player a year ago. Diamond will be using the first chips off the production lines in their forthcoming WebPad device. These chips are reputed to support Linux only, so it looks like this could be the first example of a Linux handheld.

Overall Crusoe will give technology a boost by showing that other architectures are viable and, indeed, prefereable when used inside devices. So – it’s good news for handhelds, good news for Palm, good news for Transmeta, and good news for Linux. So who is losing out? Well, all of these developments put the squeeze on any platform which is trying to get into the space. If press coverage is anything to go by, it looks like “Powered by Windows” may well become one of the forgotten taglines of early 2000.

(First published 25 January 2000)

01-25 – British Telecom – looped around a rock and a hard place

British Telecom – looped around a rock and a hard place

At last – the local loop looks like it is to be opened up to competition. A set of draft guidelines, published \link{http://www.oftel.gov.uk/competition/llu30300.htm,here}, were released by Oftel on Friday which set out the requirement for BT to open up competition to its “last mile” by June next year. 2001 could be a good year for telecommunications users in the UK, but maybe not such a good year for BT.

Essentially, this boils down to one of the few remaining areas in which BT can be said to hold a real monopoly. This is the wire between the local exchange and the end-user socket on the wall: the socket, the wire and the exchange are all currently owned, managed and charged for by BT. Plans to change this have been in train for some time, but a timetable has not been forthcoming. Not, that is, until now.

The effects of this change will be far-reaching. According to the Register, which very kindly summarised the main points of the guidelines (which, let’s face it, wouldn’t win top prize in a clear English competition):

“Among the conditions announced … is BT’s requirement to provide unbundled loops to other network operators, to permit the co-location of equipment at its local exchanges, and to provide any necessary services to open up the network to competition. It will also give Oftel the power to set the price for these services.”

Given the current challenges that BT is facing, from quarters such as free ISPs and government announcements about reducing telephone charges still further, this is one extra problem that BT could really do without. Inevitable it may be, but pleasant it is not. What is worse, the companies lining up to threaten BT’s monopoly position (from telcos like AT&T, cable providers such as NTL and ISPs like Alta Vista) are, in general, global players with few restrictions on what they can and can’t do. BT still faces a number of restrictions on its own practices: it is still unable to deploy cable services and, according to Oftel, is facing increasing pressure from the international calls market.

BT expressed fears about being bought following its recent share price falls – this may be the best bet for a company that is seeing its monopoly replaced by a regulatory framework which may leave it unable to compete. BT has been slow to move in the past, and its privatisation needed such a framework, but the world has moved on. The June 2001 date marks the end of an era for BT; it should also mark the beginning, with the company free to compete against some of the world’s largest communications companies. Even if its bonds are broken, these are battles which the company is not guaranteed to win.

(First published 25 January 2000)

01-25 – Linux consortium brings new weight to embedded debate

Linux consortium brings new weight to embedded debate

Fears about the fragmentation of Linux may well prove unfounded, if the goals of the newly formed Embedded Linux Consortium are realised. The alliance, which includes such big names as IBM, Motorola and Red Hat, has set its sights on the rapidly growing market for embedded devices such as Internet appliances, set top boxes and PDAs. The advantage of Linux – price – may well prove to be the clinching factor to ensure the success of the platform.

Why price? The fact is that devices are a box-shifting market. Device vendors are used to the extremely tight margins associated with such products, largely caused by the fact that they are aimed at the mass market where competition is vicious. Anything that can be done to shave a few cents off the price of a device which costs £100 or less, is seen as a good thing, so what could be better than a platform which is entirely free of licensing costs?

Also, Linux is already proving that it is capable in this area. It can offer pseudo-real-time capabilities in a small footprint. There may be fears about its memory management capabilities, but if these are true then they are likely to be addressed. Such is the nature of open source.

We are already seeing products which are running Linux under the bonnet (hood, to you transtlantic cousins). In our \link{http://www.it-director.com/ts/linux/index.html,Linux technology spotlight} we mentioned digital video recorders TiVo, which are to be licensed by some of the major players in the satellite TV space. More recently, at CeBit Samsung announced a Palm-a-like PDA which runs Linux.

Fears about the future of Linux have centred around its fragmentation – its open nature means that developers are able to develop it in a variety of directions, which may or may not be compatible. This is a real fear, particularly as the variety of platforms for Linux continues to diversify. However announcements such as this one go some way towards dispelling the fears as the evolution of the operating system can be dealt with by the organisations as a group, acting in co-opetition.

Gartner group recently announced that Windows CE would overtake PalmOS as the PDA operating system of choice, by 2002. In the light of this announcement, they may wish to change their minds.

(First published 25 January 2000)

01-25 – Microsoft delays aspirations to be gatekeeper of the virtual enterprise

Microsoft delays aspirations to be gatekeeper of the virtual enterprise

The IT industry is rife with stories of companies trying to emulate previous world-shaking innovations, with varying levels of success. Lotus tried to follow 1-2-3 with Notes, mainframe IBM brought the personal computer to the masses. The continued need to innovate is driven by a desire to stay in the game and to appease shareholders, whose skill at abandoning faltering companies would put ship-rats to shame. Microsoft has made repeated forays outside its traditional PC market space with varying levels of success. In media streaming, it is beginning to look like the company may dominate, through a recently brokered arrangement with Liquid Audio. Elsewhere the future is not so certain - examples like MSN and CE serve to illustrate how Microsoft may possess the goose that lays the golden eggs, but not the underlying technology.

A test case is coming round with the now-delayed launch of BizTalk Server, Microsoft’s long-promised engine for XML-based eBusiness communications. The product is over six months late in delivering to beta testers, with the probable launch date being autumn 2000. The reason, say observers, is that the competition is already ahead of the game. According to a recent report on Cnet news, the missing link is the connection with business processes. This is the ability to link the communications required between organisations with the higher-level business logic, for example ordering a product or handling a customer request. Products from HP and Vitria, for example, already support such a linkage. It could be argued that Microsoft’s competition is looking through the right end of the telescope by building business logic before trying to automate it. The bottom-up approach used by BizTalk Server is not a good starting point with which to handle the myriad complexities of modern business. Microsoft insiders claim that the BizTalk architecture is changing to take this into account – the question is now, whether the competition can capitalise on the delays which ensue. One point in Microsoft’s favour is its ownership of Visio, the de facto tool for business process modelling among many business analysts – it remains to be seen how the company will exploit this advantage, for example by providing a Visio interface to BizTalk.

For Microsoft, its aims for BizTalk are far more than just sales figures for a business communications tool. This represents the battle for the gates [sic] of CyberSpace – in the virtual enterprise, business success will be built upon communications and it is likely that a single company will end up the de-facto standard. The playing filed is currently empty, but soon corporate IT shopping lists will include the item “XML-based business communications facility”. Microsoft would very much like to replace this phrase with “BizTalk Server” in much the same way that Hoover and Coke have done in the past.

Microsoft has ridden the PC revolution with enormous skill and dexterity, becoming one of the world’s most powerful companies in the process. Even now, it seems unlikely that the dream will fade - the PC is moving into the machine room and Windows 2000 looks set to buoy up the share price for some time yet. However, outside the kingdom where the PC holds sway Microsoft’s less successful ventures should serve to keep the company firmly on the ground. Ballmer and “innovator” Gates are not gods, but mortal men who are no better at predicting the future than anyone else. There are no guarantees, particularly for a company which may see itself divided into three or more parts before the end of the year.

(First published 25 January 2000)

February 2000

02-03 – Free-PC is dead! Long live the free PC

Free-PC is dead! Long live the free PC

Not every good idea stands a chance of working in these topsy turvy-technology days, as discovered US startup Free-PC. The company was bought last November by Emachines who put the final nails in the Free-PC coffin by relinquishing all rights and responsibilities to the computers that had been handed out as part of the “free” deal.

Why the Free-PC model failed is a matter of economics and timing. Economics because the company founit could not generate the advertising revenue it required to cover the costs of giving out hardware. Timing because, well… have you seen what is just around the corner?

Samsung have just announced a disposable PC, which is likely to be based around Intel’s “system-on-a-chip” codenamed Timna. The device will be completely sealed and will retail at around $200. That’s pretty cheap for a PC.

Historians may well determine that Apple was to blame. When the iMac was released onto an unsuspecting market, the punters rushed to purchase a computer which was self-contained and, above all, simple to use. The trend was followed quickly by PC suppliers such as Dell, Compaq and AST, all releasing non-user-serviceable computers in rapid succession. Once the trend was started, products such as the one announced by Samsung became inevitable.

In the here and now, it is worth taking the wider view into account. Samsung’s move signals the removal of the final barrier from public perceptions about the nature of the PC. It is a device, just like all the other devices which are coming to litter our lives – the mobile phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, games machines and the like. As such it will take the same characteristics; this change of status signals the death of the PC as we know it. Out with the expensive computer which requires frequent, complex administration; in with the affordable, low-maintenance device. As such the PC looks set to be treated as any other device: to be sold, low cost, bundled with other deals such as subscription services and software packages. In the UK the hardware is often given away with such bundles: for examples, the latest mobile phones may command a premium of £100 or so, but last year’s models are given away as a sweetener.

Free-PC may have had the right idea, but as so often with technology, they came to the market too early. Come Christmas next year, when Samsung’s disposable PCs hit the shelves, the time will be right for companies to take advantage of the free PC model. By then, the chances are we will have stopped thinking about the PC as “the mainframe in the dining room” and it will take its rightful place alongside the rest of the gadgetry.

(First published 3 February 2000)

02-09 – EU W2K case puts cart before horse

EU W2K case puts cart before horse

There is always something to be said for planning ahead, but if the early reports from ZDNet UK are anything to go by, it could be that the European Union is take this a little too far. According to the reports, EU competition chief Mario Monti said that Windows 2000, the latest release of Microsoft’s flagship operating system, may be breaking EU antitrust law. A probe into the issue is planned, following “allegations that Microsoft could extend its dominance to server operating systems and electronic commerce”. Interesting allegation, but for two points. The first is that W2K is not a new product. Secondly, it is extremely difficult to work out how such a hypothesis could be tested in advance.

Windows 2000 is due to be launched in just over a week, undoubtedly with as much aplomb as the marketing muscle of the mighty Microsoft can muster. The OS, touted as “the business operating system for the next generation of computing,” is being presented as something new. However this perception is out of step with the facts. W2K is an upgrade of Windows NT. It may be much-enhanced for scalability and availability, transaction management and interoperability, but it remains an upgrade. Windows 2000 it may be to you and I, but to the developers and internal staff at Redmond the product is referred to as NT5.0. It is not, therefore, true that Microsoft are moving into areas which the company previously had nothing to do with. Indeed, had the operating system been able to support “enterprise-scale” applications five years ago it might well have won the Unix wars and the rest would be history.

The antitrust case that is underway in the US does not question the fact that Windows grew to be the dominant operating system. What it deals with is how Microsoft used their dominant position to stifle competition in other areas, such as Web browsers, by including them with the operating system itself. It is here that the EU may have a point: by including Microsoft Transaction Server as part of the operating system, it could be said that the company is exhibiting anti-competitive behaviour relative to other application server vendors (such as BEA, IBM and SUN). However, there are many application server vendors that support a number of platforms other than NT, and have already created a sizeable market. This is not the gorilla company stifling the activities of a bright young start-up; rather it is one company presenting its offering to an already-crowded market, of which both the evolution and the outcome are far from certain.

It is always worth keeping a watching brief on major companies to protect the markets against anti-competitive behaviour. However, in the IT sphere in which fashion plays as big a part as technology, it is impossible to determine in advance who the winners and losers will be. Windows 2000 is unlikely to sweep the world in the same way as its desktop sibling, for many reasons of which the most important is that Microsoft is no longer perceived as the only platform in the eyes of the board. Mainframes have survived the onslaught of client-server, Unix (with a little help from a softly spoken Scandinavian) is as popular as ever and new types of device are coming onstream every day. The context which helped Microsoft to world dominance no longer exists, and as illustrated by Palm, Linux and AOL, the company does not have a guarantee of success in every market it targets. The EU’s crystal ball is as opaque as everyone else’s: in IT, no company has a monopoly on predicting the future.

(First published 9 February 2000)

02-09 – Java overtakes C++, takes number one development slot

Java overtakes C++, takes number one development slot

It’s official – according to a survey by Bloor Research of over 40,000 job adverts in January, Java has taken the top slot in development language skills, with 36.8% of all programming job adverts in our sample now specifying Java. This figure is just ahead of demand for C++ skills. Meanwhile demand for VB and C are holding up with perhaps a tendency to decline, both hovering at around the 25% mark. These latter skills are still in widespread use but the slight decline suggests that we will start to see a drop in their use in 2001.

To use a well-worn phrase, of course there are lies, damn lies and statistics. A previous survey (reported on IT-Director) showed that the requirement for Java-based projects was holding static relative to Microsoft technologies. It has to be said, however, that a survey of the job market does present a pretty clear picture of exactly what is wanted right now, as opposed to projections and anticipated requirements. According to the ads, Java is what the world is using today.

It looks like Java’s position is becoming unassailable. Object orientation and component-based development are flavour of the month, both in the Microsoft camp (with COM) and the Java community (with Java beans). Non-OO languages such as C and Visual Basic are losing out to the brave new world of objects. C++ is still very popular, but it seems inevitable that it will go the same way as the other languages and Java will steal the field. Why? Because Java has already become the most popular teaching language at Universities. Because it is available on the largest number of platforms. Because it is of strategic importance to some of the largest IT companies, including Sun, IBM and Oracle. And because, once it moves ahead of other languages, it will build on its own success.

Fifteen years ago, few would have predicted that developers would still program in third generation languages such as the ones discussed here. The brave new world was one of self-generating code and dynamically customisable applications. Such visions remain pushed ever-further into the future; in the meantime, it looks like Java is set to rule the roost.

(First published 9 February 2000)

02-09 – Look at me, Mum! I killed eBay!

Look at me, Mum! I killed eBay!

Denial of service attacks have always had an uneasy relationship with other types of security requirement. The main reason for this is that they do not directly impact on that all-important corporate data: nothing is lost, corrupted or revealed to prying eyes. Hence, in security policy definition and implementation, such attacks have often been given a lower priority than they deserve.

This point has been starkly illustrated over the past few days, as a number of major commercial Web sites have succumbed to denial of service attacks. On the 7th February, Yahoo was the first to be bitten. The next day Amazon, Buy.com, eBay and CNN were all brought to their knees for anything between one hour and three hours. While it is not clear whether the attacks were all caused by the same group (as nobody has yet indicated responsibility), it is clear that copycat attacks are inevitable over the coming days and weeks.

Why would somebody want to bring a Web site to its knees? There are as many reasons as there are Web sites. Everything from cyberterrorism to (ironically) disgruntlement with the service, from anticompetitive behaviour to sheer high-jinks can bring a person or group to assault a site. Now that the simplicity of such attacks has been revealed, using “innocent” computers to host a Trojan Horse program which, at a predetermined time or on command, will send a stream of requests to the targeted site, the attacks look set to move into the mainstream of security problems. Given the arrival of broadband communications technologies which enable home computers to keep “always-on” connections to the Web, the pool of relatively insecure devices which can be used as proxies looks set to increase. Denial of service attacks are harder to prevent than they are to cause: the best measures tend to involve the inclusion of tools which can spot this kind of behaviour and either alert the appropriate person or instigate a suitable response.

Above all, denial of service attacks serve to illustrate the fragility of the electronic infrastructures that we are building, if they are not properly constructed to take into account all possible security and privacy measures. The attacks are not only damaging to the bottom line of the businesses they hit, but are bad press for eCommerce as a whole. So far it looks like investors are prepared to ride the storm and stick with the dot-coms, but given the looming issues of the long term financial future of such companies, the tar-brush of denial of service is one which organisations such as Amazon could do without.

(First published 9 February 2000)

02-14 – IBM strengthens ties with Rational but keeps the agnostic faith

IBM strengthens ties with Rational but keeps the agnostic faith

There’s something about IBM at the moment. According to repeated announcements, the company is embracing new technologies, forging alliances and striding headlong into the future with all the gay abandon it can muster. At the same time, reading between the lines, IBM is doing exactly the opposite – holding on to the old, keeping the competition sweet and, above all, ensuring that it does not close off any options it may have. In these turbulent times such a risk-averse position may be wise, despite falling short of the visionary attitude that we could hope for from the largest computer company in the world. A recent example is IBM’s stance on operating systems: Linux is the future, but so is NT, AIX, OS/390 and any other you care to mention. More recently the focus has been on development tools or, more specifically, Rational’s suite of application development products.

Rational first got into bed with IBM in July last year, forging a strategic alliance that would “help customers accelerate the development and deployment of e-business applications,” according to the press release. In practice this meant the provision of an XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) bridge between Rational Rose and IBM’s Visual Age, with both tools continuing to be developed and promoted. It has taken the two companies a full six months to deepen the interoperability between their toolsets - last week’s announcements, “strengthening the alliance,” were the further integration, via another open standard – WebDAV – of VisualAge with Rational’s ClearCase and ClearQuest configuration and change management tools.

IBM’s slow agnosticism can only be frustrating for Rational, despite the clear potential revenue stream for the company that the alliance can make. The bridges between the products are all open standards that are being adopted by the majority of tools providers including Microsoft, Sterling and Princeton Softech. Hence Rational may be being given a head start on the other vendors, but ultimately the aim is that all platforms will interoperate and exchange information. Rational’s frustration, founded in its desire to leverage the relationship before the other vendors catch up, was hinted at by Eric Schurr, senior vice president of Marketing and Suite Products at Rational, when he said that “this [recent announcement] is evidence that the IBM-Rational relationship is more than a paper relationship.” This begs the question – was it just a paper relationship in the past?

In the relationship between IBM and Rational, it is the latter that stands to gain the most. Unlike IBM, Rational cannot afford the luxury of covering all its bases. Its product set is limited to the relatively closed world of application development, whereas IBM can offer it safe passage to the Shangri La of eBusiness. Tools providers have always faced the squeeze – this is a situation which will not change (if anything, it will become more difficult, as Microsoft exploits the most valuable resource that is Visio – you heard it here first). Frustrating it may be, but without such relationships it is difficult to see how Rational will succeed.

One final note about WebDAV, or “Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning.“ This standard has been ratified by the IETF and has the support of Software Configuration Management vendors and Document Management vendors alike. I have long been of the opinion that the two disciplines represent two routes up the same mountain. It is very good news that an interchange format has been agreed between the two camps: Hopefully we shall see some merging of their related disciplines before too long.

(First published 14 February 2000)

02-14 – Lastminute.com provides an IPO acid test

Lastminute.com provides an IPO acid test

Almost a year after the company initially revealed its intentions to float on the stock market, Lastminute.com announced at the end of last week that it would be floated on the Sock Exchange and the NASDAQ some time next month.

The company is valued at around £400 million. The question is, is it worth it? As with all Internet IPOs, nobody really knows the answer. However the mutterings that IPOs are overvalued have become a chatter. A couple of weeks ago, the Financial Times reported that speculators were unsure about whether the company would achieve this valuation when the time came. Unfortunately for Lastminute.com, the only real test of IPO success is to just do it and see. The company has one chance: it may succeed, and then again it may succeed less well.

There are three kinds of Internet IPO.

• The first is for companies that provide the fabric of eCommerce – such as CyberTrust and CommerceOne.

• Second, we have Web businesses – such as Amazon, BlackStar, TicketMaster and Lastminute, who use the Internet as a direct revenue stream.

• Third we have the accumulators of potential revenue – Portal sites such as Freeserve and Yahoo!, who grow their eyeball business prior to exploiting their subscription base for profit.

Of the three, the fabric providers are most likely to succeed as they are the most tangible, making a profit whether their customers – the other providers – succeed or fail. Least optimistic is the third category, who may be unclear about how to turn potential into revenue (hence the difficulties suffered by Freeserver last year). Lastminute.com sits in the middle category: the chances are that the company will turn a profit, the questions are how much, when and who are the competition.

Unfortunately for Lastminute.com, competition is the one thing of which there is no shortage. Travel is a land of huge opportunity for me-too companies, which differentiate themselves on the scale and the level of the service offered. A recent contender, for example, is LateRooms.com, which claims to have 1500 hotels signed up to its site. Travel sites in general are subject to the vagaries of the online consumer – the competition really is only a click away. Customers will vote with their feet – my own experience a few months ago is that, whilst the offers on Lastminute.com were good, the breadth of choice was not. This may have changed but remains an indication of the rocky road to be travelled by a online bookings company attempting IPO.

(First published 14 February 2000)

02-14 – Microsoft gets back to its UNIX roots with Interix

Microsoft gets back to its UNIX roots with Interix

Given the current polarisation of the UNIX/Linux and the Microsoft/Windows camps, you could be forgiven for disbelieving Microsoft’s UNIX past. Today, IT history has chosen to quietly sweep under the carpet the fact that Microsoft played an instrumental part in bringing UNIX to the PC, a heritage which subesquently bequeathed Minix, then Linux. Quietly forgotten, but true. Today, with Microsoft’s announcement to integrate Interix with Windows 2000, it looks like the software giant has decided to take a leaf out of its own history book.

It was back in 1979 that Microsoft and The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) collaborated to develop Xenix2, which was the first UNIX implementation for the Intel 8086 chip. Development was later handed over to SCO so that Microsoft could concentrate on its single-user operating systems in the form of DOS and Windows 2. Xenix2 gave rise to SCO UNIX, which became OpenServer, merged after a fashion with UnixWare and is now being integrated with AIX to spawn Monterey.

More recently, in September 1999 Microsoft acquired Softway Inc., developers of Interix. This product started life as OpenNT to replace the inadequate POSIX system that was bundled with Windows NT. From the outset the intention was to give companies the ability to more easily port applications from UNIX to NT, by providing a UNIX layer that runs on top of the NT kernel. The trouble is, Software did such a good job of developing Interix that the OS layer has passed compatibility tests of the Open Group, keepers of the keys to UNIX.

As it is, Microsoft are keen to distance themselves from their heritage. On its “Linux Myths” web page, for example, the company states disparagingly that “Linux fundamentally relies on 30-year-old operating system technology and architecture.” The line is (to quote Garfield) that Windows 2000 is new and improved, UNIX is old and inferior. So – why, oh why, in the shape of Interix, is Microsoft investing so heavily in UNIX?

The answer, according to Microsoft, is that by providing mechanisms which bridge the gap between the UNIX and Windows NT platforms, companies will migrate from the former to the latter. This is a tactic which has worked in the past, for example with the provision of facilities in Microsoft Office to read and write competitors files. Companies such as Lotus and WordPerfect provided read-only mechanisms and found to their cost that users were turning to Microsoft as a result. Interix, too, is a two-way bridge and Microsoft’s tactic, though proven, is not without risk. For a start by supporting a UNIX layer the company is, in some way, validating the existence of UNIX. Thirty-year old technology or no, says Microsoft, it runs perfectly well on top of our kernel. So it should, for that matter, and so will it run perfectly well in other guises such as Linux, Solaris, HP-UX or AIX. Secondly, Windows 2000 is already under pressure from a number of fronts. Linux is one example. Also, commentators are recommending that the new OS goes through a purgatory period prior to its more widespread adoption. Finally there remains the looming shadow of antitrust case, which is having knock-on effects in Europe and elsewhere.

This is not the first time that Microsoft has played the UNIX-for-Windows card. Last year, for example, the company teamed with Mortice Kern Systems to provide a set of Unix tools for NT. Like it or no, and despite Microsoft’s best efforts to shake it off, the reality is that UNIX will remain part of the landscape for the foreseeable future. A product like Interix may prove to be an asset, not to lead the company to world domination but to keep it in the game.

(First published 14 February 2000)

02-16 – Transport and environmental groups stress real impacts of eCommerce

Transport and environmental groups stress real impacts of eCommerce

In a report on BBC radio this morning, a very unusual event happened. A transport organisation, representing goods delivery services in the UK was in agreement with an environmental organisation, namely Friends of the Earth. Now traditionally, these organisations have been fighting tooth and nail, pitching economic argument of goods transportation against its environmental impact. So, what caused this seemingly unprecedented event? The answer is eCommerce, or the effects of it.

We techno-ostriches tend to keep our heads firmly stuck in the electronic sand, forgetting that with a large proportion of eCommerce transactions there is an associated fulfilment process. Even something as neat as a CD or book still requires to be transported to the sticky hands of its purchaser. As we turn to the Web more and more for our purchases, the amount of goods to be transported is inevitably going to increase. For example, companies like Tesco in the UK and Peapod in the US are starting to see success in online supermarket shopping. The models are still to be thrashed out, but the trend looks inevitable.

For the consumer, the electronic shopping Nirvana may be very attractive. Just click on a few buttons and, within a couple of hours, bags full of heavy groceries arrive at the door, accompanied no doubt with a smile and a wave from the delivery person. The realities being stressed this morning were delivery trucks clogging up the back lanes, duplicating journeys being made by competing companies in the rush to win each other’s business. In addition, the point was made about what would the now-liberated customers be doing with all that extra time? Probably spending it in the car, off to some leisure activity or other. The hyper-efficiencies of the virtual hypermarkets might well result in a hyper-gridlock.

Now environmental groups have a reputation for doom-mongering, but transport groups have not traditionally held this role. The fact that both groups agree is sobering indeed. As Robin Bloor said in eRoad, “eCommerce is coming, ready or not.” The tidal waves of change are already having many impacts, not all of them pleasant. However, it should be noted that both organisations are a little guilty of mapping tomorrow’s plans on today’s realities. IT will not only change the way we buy, but also the way we distribute goods and spend our leisure time. Supermarkets may well become warehouses, but might the corner stores become depots? Has anyone considered how letterboxes may need to change, or the possibility of overnight deliveries such that groceries are on the doormat, fresh for the day ahead? What s probably most important here is that we all sides enter the debate, transport and environment, IT, business and consumer, such that we can make the best of what is coming whilst protecting ourselves from the pitfalls it may present.

(First published 16 February 2000)

02-18 – Microsoft Windows – the Gates left open

Microsoft Windows – the Gates left open

Microsoft has been quick to backtrack from claims by a certain W. Gates that the company is prepared to open up the Windows source, if it would prevent the break-up of the company. Is this the kind of innovative idea that Uncle Bill wanted to focus on, when he resigned as head of the software giant?

Oh, the underhand nature of journalists. When is off the record off the record? Clearly not just after the videotapes have stopped rolling, as illustrated in last week’s televised interview between Bill Gates and Bloomberg. According to the transcript on Bloomberg’s web site, “After the on-camera portion of the interview was completed, Gates was asked whether the company would be willing to open the Windows source code in order to settle the case, and Gates said “yes.” He then added, smiling, “if that’s all it took.” ” Unfair tactic or no, “yes” is a pretty fair indication of what the great innovator was thinking.

We have discussed the potential perils of Microsoft opening up the Windows source, if nothing else for the scrutiny it would cause. Taking a pop at M$ is a common pastime in the IT industry, so just imagine the howls of delight from hackers and hopeful hecklers, as they find potential security flaws, weaknesses or just plain bad code. Like Greta Garbo without makeup, there are maybe some things that just shouldn’t be made public.

The bigger question is whether there is really room for two open source operating systems. I’m not including Solaris in this debate, because whether it is truly open is questionable. The issue lies between Windows and Linux: people want Linux because it is free, stable and perfectly adequate for a large number of uses; they want Windows because it runs all the right applications and because it is what everyone else is using. If Windows is opened, there is nothing to stop (indeed, just TRY to stop them) the open source community from linking the two OS’es. WINE, the Windows emulator, would be dropped like a stone, after all, why emulate Windows calls when you can have the real thing?

Open source Windows is a logical development as it equates to the rising tide of commoditisation in software. Mobile phone users would not expect to pay extra for the software that runs on the phone; rather, there are a certain set of expected facilities that are delivered with any device, and the OS is one of them. Traditionally, we have paid for PC operating systems and (grudgingly) upgrades, but as products like WebPads from Samsung and Diamond illustrate, the line between PCs and other devices is diminishing and so must the pricing models. It is a fact that Linux is being chosen as an embedded operating system for a wide variety of devices, from video recorders to the aforementioned WebPads, because it does not incur software licensing costs. Microsoft knows that it can only really establish itself in the device-driven market if it cuts its licensing fee structure to the bone, or if it drops it altogether.

Microsoft is in a quandary as it grows out from its desktop PC home ground. As it moves upward into the server space, where premiums are currently higher, is risks incurring the wrath of its user base due to the higher licensing costs it is demanding. Downward, the company’s success in the device space is dependent on it making the product much cheaper, or even free. This “Open-Windows” thing may solve these problems, by enabling the company to concentrate more on applications and services, but may also cause some problems of its own. Either way, it is an issue that is unlikely to go away.

(First published 18 February 2000)

02-18 – PointCast – Did it fall, or was it…

PointCast – Did it fall, or was it…

This is the way a once-darling of the wired world ends – not with a bang, but a whimper. PointCast is finally giving up the ghost, calling it quits, coughing its last. Nobody notices, nobody cares. The most tragic thing is, the technology it espoused is alive and well. Where, oh where, did things go wrong for PointCast?

Founded in 1992, PointCast was credited for beginning a revolution in Internet usage and was quickly copied by the likes of Microsoft with its Active Desktop channels. However, the dream quickly tarnished as the bandwidth requirements for pushing Internet content to the desktop overcame a number of companies’ capabilities, preventing email and “normal” Web browsing activities from taking place. Back in the mid-nineties many organisations were discouraging Internet access at all, as it was seen as distracting individuals from their work. Network Managers banned access to PointCast, the share price plummeted and the company was, eventually sold for a song. Consider this: at the height of its popularity the founder of PointCast, Chris Hassett is reputed to have turned down an offer of $450 million from James Murdoch of News Corporation. In December 1999 the beleaguered company, reputedly losing $2million a month, was bought by Idealab who wanted to use the technology to deliver advertising to customers of its eWallet software. Today the company, now merged with Launchpad to form EntryPoint, is on the brink of launching a new product but there is no guarantee of success now that the hype has gone.

So, where did things go wrong? At the highest level it is possible to say that the technology did not deliver on the hype. The IT industry is one of the best at delivering solutions without feeling that it needs to worry too much about the problems it has to solve. Push technology, like other technological also-rans (such as Document Image Processing and Satellite phones), was a solution without a cause, sold as a new way of working without due thought being given to how it could fit in with established practices. In itself, Push is an enabler, which comes at a cost of bandwidth and administrative overhead. Where the cost-benefit balance has been struck, Push is now establishing itself as a perfectly acceptable solution to a whole variety of problems, such as:

• Automatic distribution of software updates to end-user desktops, as illustrated by Marimba

• Online video-on-demand, for example online training which can be delivered on demand or following a predefined schedule specified by the customers - Multimedia Solutions, Inc. are having some success here

• Download of information to PDAs in idle time, which can then be accessed offline, for example through the service offered by AvantGo.com.

PointCast had the technology right, but aimed its sights at the wrong market. Corporate users, ultimately, had better things to do all day than configure and trawl through the wealth of information they were receiving. They could also do without watching their machines slow to a crawl once every ten minutes, as updates were received. Sure, all these things were configurable, but even that took time. If anything, this is an example of the fickleness of the Web community – in the end PointCast failed because its users couldn’t be bothered with it.

Whilst all this is a shame for the now-defunct company (and particularly for its founder), it is not the end of the technology. Push will continue to find niches where it can render itself indispensable and hence lucrative, for example in corporate information portals (keep an eye on companies like SageMaker). Once Internet bandwidth constraints are removed over the next year or so, Push technology will gain ground in providing real-time video news and sports feeds, consumer video rentals, audio channels and so on. It is no coincidence that this list overlaps with services currently provided by broadcast media. This *is* broadcast, with a difference - it is user selectable in real time. After all, what is Push and Pull, if not supply and demand?

(First published 18 February 2000)

02-18 – Web travel companies on the back foot

Web travel companies on the back foot

The US travel industry looks set for the heart of the sun, in a looming battle that looks set to generate as much heat as light. Three opposing forces are joining the fray – in one corner, we have the Web travel companies; in the second, the traditional travel agents that the Websters are so successfully undercutting. Last but by no means least are the airline companies themselves, that have risen to the challenge of the Internet and have set out to be a case study in disintermediation. When these three warring parties come together, what a battle there will be!

According to the bricks-and-mortar travel agents, the groups which are threatened the most by the Web, the last straw came when a number of airlines, not content with running ticket sales from their own Web sites, agreed to join forces and set up a travel portal. Cries of “permanent and irrevocable damage [being] done to the competitive process,“ were enough to see ASTA, the American Society of Travel Agents, rushing off to the Justice Department to file an antitrust complaint. Ironically enough it is not the independent travel agents that the airlines have in their sights, but the established Web travel portals such as newly floated Expedia and its main competitor, Travelocity. The question is, can the airlines compete with online companies without being accused of anti-competitive behaviour by independent travel agents? The answer is no, which leads to the inevitable collision course ahead.

The airlines may be facing a barrage of criticism from the independents. Maybe it is true that a consortium of airline companies will form, resulting in price fixing and “less value to the consumer,” as the mantra goes. However airline agreements are nothing new – OneWorld is one example, and there are undoubtedly plenty of others. Let us remember one thing above all: the airlines did not cause this. They are faced with the same set of opportunities and threats as the rest of businesses and they are reacting accordingly. Consider this: five years ago, nobody spent money on travel over the Web. Last year about 1% of the travel - $2.2B – was purchased online. This is expected to grow to $17B by 2003. The Web is anti-competitive, it breaks all the rules and, worst of all in the US, there is nobody to sue about it.

Slowly but surely, individuals and organisations are realising that online travel is cheaper than travel purchases from travel agents. Traditions are difficult things to drop: for example, when an analyst colleague was flying over to a recent briefing in Colorado, he was discussing ticketing systems with an analyst from another firm. When our man compared his agent-provided ticket price with the online cost that the other analyst had obtained, he realised he could have saved £200. Even analysts can be slow to react to the changes, but what this proves is that travel agents are living on borrowed time. Speaking both as observers of the IT industry and as consumers, we watch with interest the developments in the travel industry. The Web is creating winners and losers and, so far, nobody has been able to come up with a hard and fast set of rules as to what is going on. Not changing is not an option, which is a fact that traditional travel agents would do well to remember.

(First published 18 February 2000)

02-23 – Alcatel joins the new generation networking crowd

Alcatel joins the new generation networking crowd

Was anybody wondering about a slow-down in the consolidation of networking equipment vendors? If so, such thoughts may be premature, as demonstrated by Alcatel’s $7.1 billion acquisition of Newbridge Networks yesterday. The move adds a much-needed component to the Alcatel portfolio, namely presence in the Internetworking market. Not that Alcatel lacked products in this space, however it has lacked – how should I say – IP mindshare.

All this looks set to change with the acquisition which will enable Alcatel to go up against the giants of “new generation networks”, namely Lucent, Nortel Networks and Cisco. Alcatel is a company that has grown dramatically through acquisition. When it was first privatised, it concentrated on growing its multinational presence by the purchase of, and partnership with, European and US vendors such as SEL in Germany, Telettra in Italy and Sprint in the US. More recently it has set its sights more closely on mobile and data networking companies, such as Xylan and, of course, Newbridge. Newbridge has been hoping to be bought for some time. Despite successes a few years ago, its more recent past has not been so healthy. Speculation started in November last year, with include Ericsson and Nortel. Apparently these companies walked away from the table over the past few weeks leaving only Alcatel, who have accepted the mantle with confidence. Unfortunately the shareholders are not so sure – Alcatel’s share price has dropped four percent to 227.9 euros following the announcement. This is unlikely to perturb the company, which is no stranger to market volatility – following a profit warning in October 1998, the share price dropped 40% to a low of 68 euros.

Alcatel should not be underestimated as a communications equipment provider. Its greatest strength lies in the breadth of the products and services it offers: for example, in 1999 it carried 35% of the worldwide ADSL market – a share that increases to 52% in North America. Alcatel has major stakes in wireless and satellite communications, not to mention terrestrial and submarine cabling. All of this puts the company in an ideal position to appreciate the nature of convergence – data availability any time, anywhere and across any medium. The company has been maligned as an old-fashioned, “traditional European” company which is slow to change and slower to innovate. If this was ever true then it most certainly is not now – over the past few years the company has refocused, restructured and risen to the challenges that are faced across the networking industry. Europe has reinvented itself over the past three years as a hub of communications innovation and development, with companies like Nokia and Vodafone leading the way. Other technology companies based in Europe, such as Alcatel, are now able to bask in the glow that has been created.

Alcatel is placed to provide end-to-end solutions in ways that few other companies can approach. The company provides mobile phones, ADSL cards, set-top box chipsets at the client side, plus access systems for all of these devices and more, plus the underlying global connectivity. Perhaps Lucent can come closest to this soup-to-nuts vision, but even if this is the case, Alcatel remains one to watch.

(First published 23 February 2000)

02-28 – Do you Yahoo!? Go on Murdoch, you know you want to

Do you Yahoo!? Go on Murdoch, you know you want to

It is now six weeks since AOL and Time Warner announced their intentions to wed, throwing the industry into turmoil. But which industry? This is the question that is making things so hard for other companies to follow suit. AOL is an ISP, a Portal, a software company and a service provider. Time Warner is a news organisation, a film studio and a publisher. Not to mention the wide variety of other interests that the two companies now share. Orrin Hatch, the US Judiciary Committee chairman, was quoted on News.com as saying that the deal could have “profound public policy implications”. Too right – it creates a company the like of which the world has never seen.

Driven by fear and loathing as much as by the smell of opportunity, many others are keen to follow the lead that AOL Time Warner have set. One such example is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which has revealed that it is holding preliminary talks with Yahoo!, the portal company. News Corp has – or had – many similarities with Time Warner, owning film studios, television channels and publishing companies. But what of Yahoo!? Is the company right for News Corp? We would argue no, not in its current form, but it shows potential.

The problem with Yahoo! is easy to spot when it is positioned next to AOL. The two companies were never seen as rivals because, simply, they were not: Yahoo! was a portal, and AOL was a global ISP. Despite having teamed with AT&T and Mannesmann to provide Yahoo!Online, the company is not renowned as an ISP – indeed, as these partnerships demonstrate, it is not. AOL, however, most certainly is an ISP with global reach. Yahoo!’s lack of its own ISP presence is a weakness for the company, as it means that it has less control of its potential customer base. An individual may have several ISPs, but is likely to retain one as its primary access to the Internet. However, to most, Yahoo! is one online resource amongst many.

The AOL Time Warner merger demonstrates the coming together of three components, all of which are essential. The first is the communications channel, akin to the Web portal or the TV station. The second is the information to be transmitted or published. The third is the underlying technology – the communications network. It is this network which is lacking to both Yahoo! and News Corp – the latter has an enviable satellite service in the shape of Sky, but this is not to be the dominant communications channel.

An alliance between Yahoo! and News Corp can be successful, but only if it is followed by investment in a communications infrastructure company. This could either be a wireless provider or a land-based provider but is most likely to be a combination of both. It is unclear at this stage whether the combined News Corp/Yahoo! would be the suitor or the target of such affections. What is clear is that only the resulting corporation would be sufficiently powerful to take on the giant that is AOL Time Warner. Suggested tie-ups between News Corporation and Yahoo! can only be steps on the way.

(First published 28 February 2000)

02-28 – Ford, GM, Daimler put business at the helm of technology

Ford, GM, Daimler put business at the helm of technology

A week is a long time in this topsy-turvy technology world. Just last Monday (in “Oh, no, not another marketplace”) we were bemoaning the fact that Ford and General Motors were going it alone by setting up independent eProcurement marketplaces, a model that we do not see as sustainable. By the end of the week the two companies announced their intentions to collaborate with a third, Daimler-Chrysler, to develop a common exchange for automotive transactions. The collaboration will take the form of a new company with its own identity, which will offer services to all automotive manufacturers and their associated companies.

Now it would be wonderful to believe that the world’s largest automakers had changed their minds based on the advice of IT-Director.com, but sadly we cannot make any such claim. Last week’s announcement will have been based on a great deal of discussion and negotiation between the companies and their representatives. It will have been going on in parallel with the deals struck up, for example between Ford and Oracle, or GM and Commerce.One. It is currently unclear about which technology companies will be the winners (or losers) in the still-infant venture, however winners there will be, big time. A single market will require single sources for primary technologies, such as hardware, transaction management and application software.

What is perhaps most fascinating here is that the businesses involved are seizing the nettle of defining an electronic environment in which they are all prepared to work. Traditionally this role has fallen to technology companies or standards bodies, with businesses being involved to agree the form of any dialogues but not the environment itself. This move by automotive companies is unprecedented, not only because of the level of collaboration it requires but also because it puts them in front of the technology companies. “We’ll sort out the bigger picture,” the car makers are saying, “and we’ll be in touch.”

This change should not be underestimated: it is a major sea change in how technology is defined and used. It suggests a growing understanding, on the part of businesses, of the capabilities of technology. It also suggests a maturing of the technologies themselves. “What” – i.e. the exchange – is less the issue than “how” and “when” it should be implemented. Finally it indicates a transferral of power, from the companies providing the enabling facilities, to the companies wanting to use them.

The decision by Ford, GM and Daimler-Chrysler may mark a watershed but it is not over yet. As we indicated in the last article, there will be a consolidation and standardisation of marketplaces not just within industries but across them: specific exchanges, such as aircraft spares, car parts or electronics raw materials may be kept separate for practical purposes but will be based on the same underlying standards and technologies. The power of business to drive technology should not be underestimated, nor should the power of the consumer: the Internet has already given ample demonstration of how customers vote with their feet.. These changes in the power base between technology and business, business and consumer are happening now. Traditionally, the IT sector has kept its position through hype and gadgetry, exploiting the FUD factor to the full, but the monopoly that such companies have held on technological understanding is coming to an end. It may be difficult at this stage to predict what the impacts will be: all we can say is that they will be deeply felt.

(First published 28 February 2000)

March 2000

03-03 – Cable, wireless and now the servers: C&W goes ASP

Cable, wireless and now the servers: C&W goes ASP

There seem to be two options on the cards for telcos today: consolidate or specialise. These options are not mutually exclusive, particularly for companies with an interest in keeping abreast of the latest developments.

One such company is Cable and Wireless. Despite a fair reputation as a telecommunications carrier, the company has thus far failed to make much of an impression in the Internet space. This all looks set to change with the announcement that C&W are to set up “the largest Web hosting centre in Europe.” The centre, which is to be located in Swindon, “will have the capacity to host every Web site currently running in the UK.” Whether this will still be true when the site is complete is unlikely, but so is the chance that C&W will host all of the sites in the UK. It is clearly the company’s intention, however, to grab a sizeable share of the hosting market, both nationally and internat9ionally. Similar sites are being set up elsewhere in Europe, in the US and in Japan.

So – what’s it all about? Hosting is such a passive word, hardly doing justice to the potential of such sites. The current model is that companies can run their Web sites on C&W servers, paying for guarantees of service such as availability and performance. In the future, this model will become much more complex, with infrastructure service providers partnering with providers of commerce services, application services and business services in order to provide a one-stop service shop for the eBusinesses of the future. C&W know their strengths – with a telecommunications background, they are ideally placed to provide infrastructure services with the necessary service guarantees. Once established as a hosting company, partnerships will prove the key to C&W’s continued success. To quote one film, “build it and they will come.”

Cable and Wireless are now the seventh largest carrier of international traffic in the world. This is not to be sniffed at, but neither does it give the company a place at the top table. By moving into Web hosting, C&W are lining themselves up to catch the next wave – that of service provision. This specialisation is a logical step for a company which does not want to become an also-ran of the communications revolution. By doing so, C&W are making themselves an attractive proposition for the global content-and-delivery giants such as MCI WorldCom, Vodafone Mannesmann and AOL Time Warner. To specialise can also be to consolidate.

(First published 3 March 2000)

03-03 – For Palm, it is just the beginning. For 3Com…

For Palm, it is just the beginning. For 3Com…

Yes, yes, the Palm IPO has finally happened, and it was all we hoped it would be. At $53 billion Palm, Inc. is now valued at nearly double that of its proud parent, 3Com. The road ahead may be rocky for the fledgling company: nobody, not even Palm, can claim a monopoly on the future of mobile devices. As for 3Com, it success at nurturing the company which now holds a 70% share of the handheld market may be overshadowed by the difficulties it faces following the Palm IPO.

First, to Palm. Against all odds, some would say, the company has succeeded where the likes of Netscape and Lotus failed. It has taken on the company with a reputation for standing on the shoulders of giants, the “innovator” that is Microsoft, and it has won – despite a less functional product, a less glamorous interface and a far less effective marketing machine. IT observers have used their best hindsight and determined the reasons why Palm has been so successful, but the truth is that nobody really knows. Whether it is down to battery life, weight or Zen, the fact is that the punters prefer Palm.

The future is likely to be less predictable than the past – we can say this with some certainty. Just because Palm owns the lion’s share of the PDA market, this does not guarantee its future success. It is not so much that the competition in the PDA space is fierce. Rather, the PDA space is a transient thing, involving collision rather than convergence with other technologies such as wireless technology and portable computing. Already the company is feeling the heat of its mobile rivals and does not always appear to be jumping in the right direction. As we covered \link{http://www.it-analysis.com/00-01-13-2.html?its,here}, Jean Baptiste Piacengino, Product Line Manager for GSM products at Palm Computing saw a differentiation between PDAs and mobile phones, a line which we do not feel it is valid to draw. Symbian’s Quartz platform, which combines standard palmtop functionality with Web access, mobile telephony and Bluetooth facilities, was launched a CeBit as an indication of the kind of pressure that Palm would soon be facing. Other factors are at play, too: the mobile phone market has a far-greater reputation for product replacement than the IT-based PDA market. The two products may end up the same, but the purchasers may opt for devices from mobile phone manufacturers rather than from PDA makers, through force of habit.

Palm is unlikely to be resting on its laurels, and this fight is unlikely to ever be over. We only have to look at the turnaround of fortunes at UK-based Psion to see that, even if Palm lose a round, there is still plenty to play for. A huge strength for Palm is in the massive range of applications it supports – existing users may be loathe to give up the apps they know, not to mention to transfer the data that the device may store. There may be difficulties ahead for Palm, Inc., but the company is as in a good a position as any to overcome them.

Meanwhile, what of 3Com? In some ways, the sell-off of Palm is a good thing as it will enable 3Com to focus on its “core business” – whatever that means, given the current, chaotic IT landscape. However, Palm has played a large part in the recent success of Palm – the PDA division made up 13% of 3Com’s 1999 revenues. This is not to mention the lift it is reputed to have given to the overall share price, even prior to to announcement of the Palm sell-off.

3Com has a reputation for solid strategies, but has not always been so successful at making them happen. The company’s bread-and-butter market of network cards and modems is now crowded with low-cost manufacturers, leading 3Com to refocus its efforts on the converging worlds of telephony and networking. Here, however, we are back to crystal ball gazing: the company is entering new territories that do not guarantee success to all comers. It is unlikely that 3Com will fail: the company has a reputation for innovative products and is striking partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Samsung to help it along. The separation of Palm may well be what 3Com needs, as it can now get down to a business it understands. However, it has to be said that 3Com’s base is far shakier than that of Palm, as the latter already has substantial momentum and presence in its own markets.

3Com’s launch of Palm sees the birth of two organisations, both of which will be subject to the whims of technology’s Lady Luck. Palm has come out of the gate with new products and an enviable market presence, leaving behind a 3Com that knuckle down and make something of its renewed focus. Neither company is guaranteed success, but both stand to gain from their new status.

(First published 3 March 2000)

03-03 – Thomson Travel: there’s life in the old dog yet

Thomson Travel: there’s life in the old dog yet

At the end of last week, UK travel operator Thomson immediately followed its report of sliding profits (down 38 per cent on last year) with the announcement of a £100 million Internet strategy. In Friday’s Independent newspaper it was reported that analysts saw this as “too little, too late,” when positioned against the rising web stars which are Lastminute.com and Travelocity. In this game, though, it ain’t over until the well-proportioned lady sings, and we would like to point out a few points in Thomson’s favour.

The whole disintermediation concept is proving very difficult to follow. It seemed that intermediaries would be the first casualties of the Web revolution. Then it became apparent that new types of intermediary were starting to turn a sizeable profit – these are the transaction infrastructure providers such as Tibco and CyberSource, not to mention security, directory, billing and other service providers. Now with the clear success of the travel sites, it is obvious that intermediaries are here to stay – at least on the Internet. Companies that still lack a Web presence are quite right to be losing sleep.

Thomson’s main strength lies in the fact that it is not really a travel agent at all. High street outlets such as Lunn Poly are little more than a front for the wide variety of Thomson holidays, sold under different company brands. In other words, it is its own intermediary and it has real products to sell. To see why this is a strength, we only have to look at the proposed alliance between US and international airlines, to set up a portal for air fares and effectively cut out the middle man. A similar alliance between package holiday operators would certainly put the squeeze on the Lastminutes and other pretenders.

Second, we must emphasise the importance of the over-used phrase “the competition is only a click away.” In my own experience, when hunting for a last-minute weekend stay in London, I found Lastminute.com lacked the choice of other, similar sites. It was also – heaven forbid – slow, the navigation was non-intuitive and the end result cluttered. Even the best players in the game, new breed or old hands, can fail – to offer the necessary services, or to offer them in a way that turns off the prospective customers. Thomson have as much chance of success as anyone else.

Finally, nobody has the monopoly on the future. Financial analysts are making the best guess on how dot-coms should be valued and while it is generally agreed that many are priced way above what is reasonable, nobody is prepared to say which ones. The dot-com crash may come, and the pure clicks-and-mortars are not guaranteed to beat the companies they are trying to oust. The Web is a channel for products and services: it is true that it is indispensable, but ultimately it is the products and services which will determine the success of a company, and not the channel. Thomson cannot afford to miss out on the Web: to succeed, it must establish itself as an eCommerce player, and the quality of its web presence must be second to none. Given that it achieves this, its future will once again be down to the attractiveness of its holidays, and its ability to deliver them.

(First published 3 March 2000)

03-28 – Big Cis hits the top

Big Cis hits the top

Well, Cisco Systems have done it and suddenly hardware is ruling the roost again. The company’s market valuation rose yesterday to $555 billion, overtaking Microsoft which fell to $541 billion. For a company that has not been known for grabbing the spotlight, this really is quite a coup.

Cisco has, in a way, been the poor nephew in what is a very rich family. Certain companies caught the technology wave of the eighties and nineties and left their compatriots behind. Here we are not talking about the Oracles and Suns, although such companies have done exceedingly well in their own areas. There are a handful of firms which have become the de facto standard, and they have done it globally. These are Microsoft, Intel and, well, Cisco.

While it is easy to spot why Microsoft and Intel did so well, riding on the back of an IBM PC clone which undercut the young and arrogant Apple, the picture for Cisco is more hazy. Once there were many vendors of networking equipment, but despite the best efforts of the competition one rose up above the rest. It is difficult to say why this was – probabilities point towards the company’s early realisation that it was not selling equipment, but infrastructures. However it happened, Cisco has grown and grown its market share by continually developing its products and moving with the flow. Unlike most other networking companies, it has not grown through mergers, rather it has favoured stringing acquisitions of smaller companies, buying key technologies and expertise rather than direct market share. This strategy has clearly worked.

Cisco has seen its biggest rivals merge and merge again, to no avail. Back in 1994, Synoptics and Wellfleet merged to form Bay Networks and “give Cisco a rival,” according to a San Jose Mercury News article of the time. In 1998 Bay and Nortel then got together, ostensibly to challenge Cisco. They’re still at it - recently Nortel Networks made an \link{http://www.it-analysis.com/99-11-10-2.html?its,announcement} which, threatened the company, would bring Cisco to its knees. Of course, it didn’t. Cisco overtook the second most valuable country in the world, General Electric, a few weeks ago and now it has overtaken Bill Gates’ empire.

What is perhaps the most remarkable is that Cisco has grown into a leader not only in networking but in telecommunications, a market which is not known for sharing business. The company’s technology-agnostic stance is a key driver to this: the problem to be solved may be the unrelenting growth of the internet, but the solutions are legion – be it LAN or WAN, the best technology wins and no option is ruled out, be it ATM, frame relay, xDSL, or Ethernet to name a few. This approach has kept the company flexible, enabling it to grow into new markets through its reputation in networking. As the world goes IP, the world is choosing Cisco.

Where now for the world’s most valuable company? Onward and upward is the answer. The desire for infrastructure is speeding up rather than slowing and at least for the next couple of years, new developments are bringing new challenges which Cisco will be priming itself to exploit. The rise of mobile may open some chinks in the company’s architecture, which will be interesting to watch but there is plenty of growth in big Cis yet.

(First published 28 March 2000)

03-28 – Directory sky hook too late for Novell?

Directory sky hook too late for Novell?

Novell was due for a shake-up and now it has had one. It was only a matter of time before the company moved its focus once and for all, away from its operating system heritage and into a directory-based future.

In Salt Lake City yesterday, Novell unveiled a new strategy that can be summed up with the d-word. The Internet has been the reason for Novell’s current instability – the market for a commercial network operating system kind of goes away when the whole world has standardised on a NOS which is available for free. Faced with a shaky set of results, the company has had little choice but to put its business firmly where it has been seeing the most success. No surprises that this should be back on the Net.

We have written about this before. We have had high hopes for Novell. The NDS technology is good, the vision is right and, up until recently, the market was wide open for a directory product. The only competitor – Microsoft – was so late with its Active Directory product, first announced in 1997 and finally launched with Windows 2000 a few weeks back, that all Novell had to do was occupy the space. How very, very easy life can be sometimes.

Novell seems to suffer from a most unfortunate sense of timing. In the end Microsoft proved stunningly accurate about the launch date of W2K including Active Directory, so Novell cannot claim that they did not know.

There are a couple of points in Novell’s favour. The first is that the product is tried and tested. Most pundits are recommending that W2K is allowed to bed in for a while before it is adopted more generally – this may throw Novell the slack it needs. The second point is that the company, having dropped its baggage, is free to work with whatever leads to its success. The company’s recent Linux announcements for its directory services are an indication of this – it is unlikely that Microsoft’s Active Directory will run on anything other than a single operating system.

Novell still stand a chance of success. There is no question about the importance that directory services will start to play as the Internet evolves to become a virtual services infrastructure. Given the fact that Novell have lost its lead, whether it is NDS that is chosen may well prove to be mainly a question of slick marketing. Whatever it does, Novell had better do it fast.

(First published 28 March 2000)

03-28 – Online photo clubs – the killer app for SSPs

Online photo clubs – the killer app for SSPs

Yahoo! has joined the growing band of portal companies to offer online photo album services. The Yahoo! Photos site offers 15 megabytes of free Web space in which users can upload, share and even have photos printed and mailed back. The growing interest in this sort of service is doing more than threatening the high street photo services. It is also bringing Storage Service Provision, by stealth. And if the companies want this, they’d better start pulling their socks up.

There are now a good handful of companies offering online photo management, with big names including AOL, Kodak and Hewlett Packard. Services do not depend on the ownership of a digital camera – with Kodak’s service, for example one can send a 35mm film and the company will notify by email when the photos have been posted to the site. Digital camera owners can benefit from online albums to which photos can be uploaded and shared with friends and family. It all makes some sort of sense.

So far, we are informed, the service has yet to make too much of a stir. This may not matter, as factors such as bandwidth and the availability of digital cameras will affect it in the short term. The potential is there – companies are currently setting out their stalls and grabbing mindshare, so as to take advantage when the time comes. It seems that, once people start building online albums, it is relatively easy to get hooked and once the expectation is there the market will grow considerably.

Where things get interesting is that expectations are starting to be placed on the portal companies as service providers. For example, it is assumed and expected that there is some form of disaster recovery policy. Yahoo’s terms of service disagree – quote: “YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT: a. YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK.” Not too good if you lose the family photo collection, really. This is an indication of the shape of things to come: if companies want to be leaned on for services, then they’d better start understanding what the nature of services are.

(First published 28 March 2000)

April 2000

04-28 – Sony goes Symbian: whence Palm?

Sony goes Symbian: whence Palm?

Sony shocked observers at the end of last week with the announcement of a collaboration with Texas Instruments and Symbian in order to produce a next generation mobile device. The announcement moved Sony squarely into the mobile mainstream, at the same time as raising the question – what happened to Palm?

In November of last year Sony and Palm announced that they would be collaborating on future versions of “the Palm Computing platform,” a.k.a. PalmOS. Palm would integrate Sony’s Memory Stick technology, whilst Sony committed to use the Palm architecture as a basis of “handheld consumer electronics products,” according to the press release. Last week’s announcement by Sony, TI and Symbian raises the obvious question about where next-generation wireless phones sit alongside handheld consumer electronics products, and what happens to Palm as a result.

It may well be argued that handheld computers and PDAs are different. This has certainly been Palm’s stance in the past, as we have already discussed in a previous article. However, as we argued, this position does not align with mainstream opinion as WAP phones and devices such as the Nokia communicator demonstrate that the merger of the two technologies is already with us. If Sony thinks the former, that never the twain shall meet, then Palm may already have a fight on its hands to keep its relationship. If PDA and phone are two sides of the same technology then the battle may already be lost for Palm.

Palm may not be too bothered, with a reported 75% of the world’s handheld computer market, but this figure is misleading. Again, if phone and PDA are kept separate then Palm is on relatively solid ground but if not, then the statistic should be put relative to the number of mobile phone users there are in the world – this would put Palm well into the minority. Ultimately, if sources inside Palm are to be believed, the company is more interested in growing its applications portfolio and becoming a platform company than it is in hanging onto its hardware base. This agrees with the alliance formed between Palm and Symbian, in which Symbian provide the underlying kernel and Palm provide the “user layer”.

Overall, then, all may not be lost for Palm. This is just one alliance amongst many and on the ground there is little to suggest that Palm’s success is waning. Sony’s collaboration with Symbian may be a disappointment to Palm, whatever they say, but rest assured there is life in the old dog yet.

(First published 28 April 2000)

04-28 – Will USB become the system bus of the future?

Will USB become the system bus of the future?

It is a surprise that nobody thought of it before. A flash memory device in the form of a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector – plug it into the hub and it becomes near-instantly accessible as a drive on a Windows 98 system. This is exactly what a Japanese company - Shin-Nichi Electronics (SNE) – has done with the launch of the Thumb Drive. Though touted as a competitor to Sony’s memory stick rather than the beginning of a more general trend, it doesn’t take much of a leap of faith to see the potential for such a form factor.

In fact, somebody did recognise the potential of the USB port as more than a cable connection. Over a year ago Aladdin Systems were giving out free samples of its eToken, a USB-based security dongle. This device, which can be carried on a keyring, can be used as a smartkey holding authentication and encryption information about a specific user. At the time that the eToken was launched, Aladdin was worried about the potential uptake due to the relative newness of USB. Today, there isn’t a motherboard or a laptop which does not have at least one USB port.

There are several advantages to these tiny USB devices – they are extremely light, portable and robust, and due to their plug-and-play nature they can be used by the least computer literate. Not to mention the fact that USB is rapidly becoming the interface technology of choice for PCs and peripheral devices such as PDAs and digital cameras. Now, with the advent of flash memory supporting half-decent data volumes, the USB-based form is becoming appropriate for peripheral storage. This move towards USB could have significant impacts on other interface standards, both outside and inside the box.

Efforts to build the internal bus of the future are lumbering forward, driven by the Infiniband consortium which was formed by the merger of two industry associations, Future I/O and System I/O. Infiniband offers gigabit transmission speeds managed by a switching fabric, all well and good. USB 2.0 products will only be able to support 450Mbps when they become available in the latter part of this year. While Infiniband may be compelling for PC based servers, it is highly probably that USB will become the interconnect standard of choice for client and consumer devices. There is a drive towards integrated client PCs such as those from Hewlett Packard and Compaq (based, it should be said, on the iMac architecture) which consist of sealed PC boxes which can be extended using USB-based peripherals. Wyse has taken this one stage further with its Thinovation initiative. All of these devices have a common factor – they all rely on the expansion capabilities provided by USB.

USB is more than a connection standard, it is becoming a means by which cheap, extensible computing appliances can be constructed and exploited. Devices such as the Thumb Drive and the eToken, coupled with USB-based modems, cameras, wireless networking and other peripherals are the shape of things to come, driving down the cost of computing whilst increasing its flexibility both in the workplace and in the home. To bring things full circle, Sony’s PlayStation 2 may support Memory Stick but it also includes two USB ports. It is difficult to believe that, of the two interface types, Sony’s proprietary solution will take over from a standard that is rapidly gaining global acceptance.

(First published 28 April 2000)

May 2000

05-01 – Microsoft – down, not out, but not in neither

Microsoft – down, not out, but not in neither

Following the Microsoft trial has become an obligatory part of the job description of anyone in IT. There are two reasons for this. First, there are few individuals that have not had their jobs changed in some way by Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL Server or any of the other products in the Microsoft portfolio. Second, there are even fewer people that would not accept even a fraction of a percent of Bill Gates’ fortune. Even so it is difficult to see what impact the ultimate ruling will have.

For those who missed it, on Friday Judge Jackson revealed a “proposed Final Judgement” which, amongst other things, advocated the breakup of the company into two businesses. This was supported by a share ownership restriction meaning that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer could only own shares in one or the other of the two companies. “Ha, that’ll show ‘em,” will have been the thought that ran through the minds of Gates-and-Ballmer wannabees across the globe. After all, this is a personal issue however well disguised in corporate legalese it may be. Other provisions included protection for companies which had given evidence against Microsoft in the trial, a levelling of the playing field for PC manufacturers that OEM Microsoft Windows and restrictions on Microsoft’s ability to use Windows to promote its own products over anybody else’s.

So what does it add up to? Let’s start with a couple of stories. Once upon a time there was a king who believed he was buying cloth so cleverly woven that only the most intelligent could truly see it. Once upon a time there was a company which so cleverly marketed their products, everyone in the world thought they would answer all their problems. Six or seven years ago Microsoft was such a company, the undisputed pretender to the IT throne. IT decision makers across the globe were implementing one-word IT strategies – “let there be Microsoft” – as they truly believed that they had found a company offering the silver bullet. In the former tale a little boy shouted “that man’s naked!” and all hell broke loose. In the latter, the many cries of “Microsoft is not the only answer!” have, in the most part, fallen on deaf ears. Even those that believe in Microsoft’s diabolic nature, begrudge that it is better the devil you know.

All good stories have a moral. The king’s new clothes may be summarised as saying “never trust a salesperson”. The Microsoft story has an additional moral, “know what you want.” Fair to say that, in most parts of the world, Microsoft is no longer seen as the keeper of the silver bullet. We have learned our lessons and it is for this reason that we may rest assured that, whatever Microsoft may have succeeded with in the past is no indication of the company’s continued success in the future, court case or no court case.

(First published 1 May 2000)

05-01 – Phew! ISP’s found not liable for email content

Phew! ISP’s found not liable for email content

In these days of information overload, it seems a bit of an anachronism to expect an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to be responsible for the content of messages passing through its site. Not to mention the fact that the ISP may not even be the origin of a message, merely a step along the way. Fortunately, a court in the United States ruled yesterday that one ISP – Prodigy Communications Corp., was not liable for its “failure” to spot a threatening email passing through its servers. It has to be said that this must come as a bit of a relief for ISPs across the globe where, though internet laws may not yet be internationally binding, legal precedent is everything.

The email in question was sent by an (as-yet untraced) person pretending to be Alexander Lunney who was fifteen at the time. Young Lunney’s father sued for damages as soon as it was revealed that his boy’s details were being taken in vain – it is this damage claim which has now been quashed. This is the upside – the downside is that the impostor will probably never be traced.

Fair to say that cyber law has quite a way to go. Still grappling with the vagaries of eCommerce, it now has to deal with the problems of the wireless Internet. For example in whose jurisdiction is an off-world bank account? The recent MP3 copyright case may show how existing laws can be adapted to the cyberworld (as does this case) but it is fair to say that unheard-of situations are being invented every day and, no doubt, exploited by those that fail to see the difference between unethical and legal. Consider, for example, the merger of contract-free, pay-as-you-go telephone services (available in the UK) with the Wireless Internet – such facilities may offer true anonymity, with all of its strengths and weaknesses.

Every development marks a whole series of opportunities, coupled with ever more complex threats - the technological sword cuts both ways. We are already a long way off having a stable, relevant, global legal framework for the Web: before this can come about it will be necessary for things to slow down a while. This seems unlikely: the way things are going the technology revolution is still accelerating and has a good few decades in it yet. In the meantime rulings such as this one show that common sense is still a valid legal currency. Long may it continue to be so.

(First published 1 May 2000)

05-05 – Tele2 – a niche wireless solution for the corporate masses

Tele2 – a niche wireless solution for the corporate masses

It was unfortunate that Patricia Hewitt, eCommerce minister and Member of Parliament for Leicester West, had to go into hospital at the end of last week for a knee operation. Otherwise she would have been available at the launch of Tele2’s innovative wireless Internet service, which she has been closely involved in for some time. So - what’s it all about?

Tele2 have developed a hybrid radio and microwave-based Solution which offers high-speed, always-on bandwidth. End-user customers install a “squarial” which connects to an Ethernet-based LAN device. The squarial communicates via radio to a local access node, which in turn is linked via microwave to a base station. A standard configuration for a small town is one base station and seven access nodes. Tele 2 are currently offering a service of between 128Kbps and 1Mbps, with users being charged for the amount of bandwidth they require and the amount of data they transfer in both directions.

What is interesting about Tele2’s offering is that it is relatively easy to deploy and offers a high level of communications quality. Tele2 are actively advertising on \link{http://www.tele2.co.uk,their Web site} for landlords and small institutions to permit an access node to be situated on their (preferably flat) roof. The node requires only a mains connection and is no more than a foot high. Given this, it sounds ideal for business parks and campuses, not to mention smaller, less accessible towns. The high bandwidth, relatively low cost and the always-on capability has resulted in a number of trials of the technology for security cameras in car parks and service stations. It is also of potential benefit for organisations that want to run Web sites in-house, rather than outsourcing them to external ISPs.

Because the service is packet switched and is purely aimed at data users, it does not need to be backwards compatible with voice communications facilities. The downside is that end users still need their existing voice or ISDN lines but this may change in the future when Voice over IP reaches maturity.

Prior to the launch, Tele2 has been running a Pilot service in the Reading area of the UK, which is currently supporting 500 connections. The launch involves Leicester, Leeds, Bradford and Nottingham, with a wider launch planned for September. Tele2 is focusing on the corporate space, but its target market is clearly the smaller organisations which cannot afford the equivalent bandwidth from land-based services.

It is in keeping with the present speed of technological change, that new, innovative ways of using technology should appear. Tele2’s technology and business model will broaden the reach of high-speed Internet and, if done right, will give the lumbering roll-out of land-based, broadband technologies a run for their money.

(First published 5 May 2000)

05-05 – We are all to blame for the I Love You virus

We are all to blame for the I Love You virus

If you didn’t know by now that there was a new virus about, you must have been on holiday in a place where the technology has yet to reach. Once again, some bright sparks have used their skills of innovation and techncal expertise to ensure that they will have something to tell their grandchildren about. Once they get out of prison, that is. The poor, misguided youths have the FBI on their tail and it seems like only a matter of time before they are hauled before the international courts.

Don’t get me wrong. Clearly any human being that intentionally wreaks havoc on the scale that this recent attack has seen, is a weeping sore on the face of society and should be removed. There remains a nagging doubt, however – what bunch of idiots would design anything so fragile that a few students could put it out of action for days, particularly something on the global scale of the World Wide Web? Let’s face it, park benches are these days made out of concrete and fire-treated wood to protect against the expected acts of mindless vandalism that they will experience. Why do we not treat our fragile, Internet-based computing infrastructure with similar caution?

As with so much to do with technology, the answer is one of convergence. The hugely stable, resilient Internet was designed separately from the application suites and email systems, which were originally designed to run on closed corporate networks. It was a small step to design gateways which enabled email systems to exchange information over the Internet, but a giant leap would have been preferable. What we have ended up with is a mentality which says “Oh dear, I am getting email from a whole variety of unpleasant sources, and I can do nothing about it.” Nobody is taking responsibility, not the Internet Service Providers or the application vendors or the end users. All, however, are culpable. Mechanisms have existed for years to permit computer systems to be secured and sources of emails to be checked. The majority of the world’s computer users accept an operating system on which the end user is essentially the super user, and applications with only a minimum of security checking set up by default. There is the argument about whether the user is to blame, whose involvement is necessary for the I Love You virus to spread. But what chance does the hapless user stand, when every feature and function of the system is left wide open and accessible?

Some will be saying that Microsoft should be held in some way responsible for the spread of this latest virus, as it is the provider of the operating system (Windows), the application (Outlook) and the programming language (Visual Basic) amongst other things. But this is missing the point. Microsoft has provided what customer demand has sought. Admittedly the company can guide requirements and expectations but it cannot decide them – if users want poorly secured systems, they will get them. In the past we could perhaps claim technological ignorance but this line is starting to pale. No more excuses – as a global IT community, we must either act to implement systems that really meet our needs, or forever live in the shadow of being held to ransom by some bunch of mavericks on a faraway isle.

(First published 5 May 2000)

05-05 – Web users may be going up, but service quality is not

Web users may be going up, but service quality is not

The UK Net population may be on the up, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for the quality of the services that said users are getting from Web sites, according to the results of two separate studies. The first, reported on \link{http://www.zdnet.co.uk,ZDNet UK}, was from Internet measurement firm MMXI Europe. MMXI found that, in just six months, the number of Internet users in the UK as risen from 7.8 million to 9.2 million – that’s a rise of nearly a million and a half. Meanwhile, on \link{http://www.theregister.co.uk,The Register}, a study commissioned by Sunrise Software found that, though 55% of companies noted that Web-generated enquiries were on the up, only 40% offered facilities for customers to email or otherwise communicate via the Internet.

It was not so very long since the Financial Times ran a mischievous little test in which it sent information request emails to the address provided on the Web sites of the major corporates. Only a minority of companies responded.

Clearly companies still do not get it. Most (if not all) major businesses now have Web sites, but this seems to be more through luck than judgement as companies are still not entirely clear what it is all for. The well-documented evolution of a Web site, from brochureware, through online catalogue and basic transactional, up to eCommerce site, should not need to be repeated (though we would be happy to provide a full explanation, should anyone request it). The Web is more than “just another Sales channel” – it is an integral part of an organisation’s business processes, branding and reputation. Companies which are leaving such vital information such as email details for information requests of their Web sites, are doing more than just missing out on prospective customers (a number of whom would rather look for another Web site than make a call or write a letter). They are sending the message that they are difficult to deal with, slow to react, unfriendly and backward. Not too good really.

Now for the good news. The Internet really does offer huge rewards for those that exploit it successfully. Provision of email details is one part of the story – the Web site of an organisation should be designed with the same care as the marketing collateral, the sales training and the management of operational services. The Web is the company’s shop front, and it opens onto the world. As the number of Internet users continues to increase, organisations still have the choice of risking lost business through inadequate Internet facilities. However there will come a point at which the risk becomes a reality and companies with shoddy Web sites will not survive. This isn’t a “get online or die” message, rather it is noting that the Web site is a fundamental, integral part of each and every business. Put simply, companies with the best Web sites, coupled with the best products and services, will do better than those without. Your choice.

(First published 5 May 2000)

05-11 – G8 jaw, jaw, jaw about Cyberspace law

G8 jaw, jaw, jaw about Cyberspace law

It’s good to talk, agreed delegates at last week’s computer crime conference in Paris. Attendees from G8 nations - the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States - spent three days discussing the issues surrounding computer and internet-related crime. Nothing concrete came out of the talks, apart from a general commitment to international co-operation to combat the growing threat. But that is already a good start, yes?

No. The agreement reached by the delegates was to co-operate more fully, a process that is long overdue in starting. What is missing is any concrete actions coming from the G8 concerning exactly how cybercrime is to be combatted. At the same time, chinks are already appearing in the international armour. As reported on Silicon.com, different countries favour different approaches: for example, the European nations have already signed up to a Council of Europe treaty that favours tighter laws and regulations. However the US prefers self-regulation to form the basis of the fight against cyber crime.

Of course, the problems faced are not easy ones to solve. The problem is that cybercrime, like everything else technology-related, is raising its ugly head in most unexpected ways. The “traditional” view of computer-related crime, immortalised in “The Cuckoo’s Egg” by Clifford Stoll, involves seasoned hackers breaking into government computers and selling the uncovered secrets for drug money. The real world has moved on however. Consider, for example, the denial of service attacks on high profile eCommerce sites (eBay, CDNow and the like), or the students breaking copyright laws by exchanging MP3 versions of their favourite CD tracks. Consider the “I Love You” virus, purportedly the most expensive criminal act that the Internet has seen so far. It appears that the fragility of the Web is under far greater threat than the unauthorised access to company or personal data. The arrival of mobile and always-on, high bandwidth technologies will no doubt bring with them whole new weaknesses to be exploited. For example, there is a strong possibility that the convergence of PDAs and mobile phones will result in a new breeding ground for denial of service worms. What is more, the arrival of always-on Internet connections will open the threat of attack to PC owners across the globe. Personal firewall manufacturers will have a field day.

The main problem is one of catch-up for the institutions. Legal practices and international conventions are way behind the technology curve. With the current political set-ups, this looks unlikely to change. Let’s face it, if it takes over a year for Strasbourg to draft new guidelines for the expenses claims of Members of the European Parliament, what chance do we have of getting the G8 nations to agree on a global cybercrime framework before technology has changed the landscape beyond recognition? In corporate law, too, the world is moving too fast - consider the Microsoft trial, where the anti-competitive acts committed a few years ago are now hopelessly old hat. We need an internationally agreed, slick, flexible process of communication and mitigation of the threats posed, as they start to become possible and not after the events which will undoubtedly occur. One thing is for sure: the time for talking is well and truly over.

(First published 11 May 2000)

05-11 – Storage Networks - the storage space goes ASP

Storage Networks - the storage space goes ASP

The fog surrounding the Application Service Provider (ASP) market is starting to clear, as companies move away from the traditionalist view and start to demonstrate solutions that reveal the real potential of ASPs. One such company is Storage Networks, a company that is coming from “over there” to spread the word about Storage Service Provision “over here”.

So - what is an ASP? At the moment there seem to be two prevailing views. ASPs are generally accepted to be concerned with delivering “applications over the wire” where an application can be any software package. A more specific model is that being touted by enterprise package vendors, such as Oracle, Siebel and SAP. For these companies, the ASP model is a means of marketing their products to the Small to Medium sized Enterprise customers that have been unable to afford such products as an outright purchase. With a rental/lease-based ASP model, smaller organisations can benefit from such applications and, of course, vendors can benefit from reaching a previously tapped customer segment. Taking the two views above, the ASP model is both an architecture and a business model.

With a bit of imagination however, ASPs can be much, much more. Rather than considering ASPs as applications that can be served, the model should cover the provision of the widest possible variety of services. Services can be arranged as a stack, with lower level communications, storage and processing services serving higher-level information, application and business services. This view has already been discussed from a theoretical standpoint in the IT-Director.com ASP feature. Now, real examples of its use are coming onstream, not as valiant attempts by niche technology players but through companies who are already reaping huge rewards from the model.

One such company is Storage Networks, which offers a managed raw storage service to other ASPs. Storage Networks has implemented fibre-based Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) in 36 US cities. Each MAN is used to connect a variety of types and configurations of storage equipment (for the technologists, Storage Networks is running both SAN and NAS equipment over the same fibre infrastructure). These configurations are then used to provide raw storage, backup/restore and data replication services to Storage Networks’ customers who pay a fixed monthly fee per Gigabyte available. The company is launching a service next week in the UK, and intends to be in ten European cities by the end of the year.

All is not roses in the storage camp, not least due to the fact that the different storage vendors have yet to standardise on a single mechanism for managing storage. Storage Networks’ customers can monitor their own virtual store through a read-only interface and can request repartitioning or increased bandwidth. All such requests are funnelled back to a management centre where updates are made using the proprietary software of each vendor. Against this backdrop, the other issue faced by companies such as Storage Networks is the accelerating requirement for storage. The company is finding out that despite the continued improvements in disk sizes and data rates, storage supply is only just keeping up with demand.

There are clearly still some problems to be over come in the storage market, but let us not be distracted from the fact that the underlying trend is towards provision of storage as a service. Such facilities go way beyond the 10Mb of disk space currently allocated by ISPs, often with little or no guarantees of service levels. What we are talking about here is the evolution of IT towards enterprise scale, performant, available facilities that are delivered as a utility rather than in a crate. Faced with the increasing cost and complexity of technology, the service provision model is one that few organisations will be able to avoid forever.

(First published 11 May 2000)

05-19 – Love and viruses: the upside of crying wolf

Love and viruses: the upside of crying wolf

Security software companies have been accused of hyping up the potential risk of new viruses. It stands to reason: the more dangerous it is out there in cyberspace, the more we shall turn to trusty virus detectors, firewalls and other protection mechanisms. It’s all good for business. With the ongoing saga of love bug viruses hitting the news over the weekend, even the protection software vendors are starting to get uncomfortable about the dangers of over-egging the viral pudding.

According to Dan Schrader, chief security analyst at Trend Micro (reported on News.com), there is a fear that all the noise and stink created around the love bug risked making the whole issue fasde into the background noise. “If we cry wolf often enough, they’ll tune us out entirely,” said Schrader. This may be true, but at the same time there are positive signs that the PC proletariat are starting to understand the nature of such things as malicious attachments. After all, these new worms are not like viruses of old, which would infect executables without any outward indication of their presence. It is understandable how, say, a utility or game could be passed from one computer to another, carrying the virus with it. This did not have to be malicious – there have been several instances of viruses being passed on the cover disks of magazines. However, malicious email attachments require user intervention, namely a double click on an attachment that is a virus in all but name. It isn’t buried in the middle of a harmless program – it is a program in its own right, relying on a lack of caution on the part of a user. If having a lack of caution is a crime, I daresay we are all guilty (who did not double click on an email from a friend last Christmas, containing the message “Have a look at this!” and the attachment “Elf bowling.exe” or somesuch?)

This is where crying wolf is working in our favour. Far from being turned off by the constant media blare about the latest variant of worm X or Y, a large number of people have been on the receiving end of such malicious programs. I, for one, received two emails from acquaintances saying “do not open anything I have sent you! I was on the receiving end of the I Love You virus.” I have certainly been a little more cautious when opening unexpected executables or VBS files (Visual Basic Scripts). Not that I have yet received any of the latter, but you know what I mean. All the media attention in the world cannot interest us as much as some real experiences: there are few organisations that were unaffected by the recent attacks, and as a result both organisations and individuals are becoming a lot more savvy.

As is discussed elsewhere today [link to G8 article], we cannot fully predict the vulnerabilities that will be opened up by new technologies. However signs are encouraging that the water level of eNouse is rising. We are getting smarter – hopefully we shall learn fast enough to beat the next generation of viruses before they happen. After all, the solution is just a double click away.

(First published 19 May 2000)

05-19 – Monterey on borrowed time

Monterey on borrowed time

Every now and then, industry observers have to stick their necks out and this is one of those occasions. No ifs, no buts – Project Monterey may be nearing its release date, but it will find that it has only a short life span. Why, oh why, I hear you ask, is the flagship OS to be left by the wayside? The answer is simple – Windows 2000 and Linux will make Monterey an irrelevance.

Project Monterey was launched a couple of years ago as a joint project between SCO, IBM, Sequent, Intel and Compaq. The plan was (and still is) to produce a Unix operating system for Intel’s IA-64 platform. The intention was that the Unix-based PC server would become as much of commodity item as the Windows-based PC client – a standard supported by the majority of hardware manufacturers and software vendors, with the resulting economies of scale for suppliers and customers alike.

As usual, in the duration of the project, the technology world has changed. There are two major changes which should be looked at. First, we should consider Microsoft. At the inception of Project Monterey, Microsoft was on the back foot when it came to server operating systems. Attempts by the company to demonstrate the scalability of Windows NT were not impressing the new generation of infrastructure customers, and Unix was becoming the OS of the Web. Microsoft has taken its time and now, with Windows 2000, it is in a position to fight back at least at the lower end of the server market.

Second, Linux has moved from academia to the mainstream, winning mindshare as the commodity operating system that Monterey had designs on becoming. The strength of Linux’s position is in the fact that it has been ported not only to IA-64 but also to just about every platform under the sun. Last summer it was already being reported that Monterey consortium members, whilst remaining bullish about Monterey on IA-64, were tellingly quiet about porting the new OS to other platforms. The attitude to Linux could not be more different: last week, for example, IBM announced that services and software were now available for Linux on the S/390 mainframe. According to CRN News, Greg Burke, VP of Linux for S/390 saw this step as a revitalisation of the S/390 platform and of mainframes in general. This line just doesn’t tie up with IBM’s current stance about Linux being an interim step for customers wanting to move to higher end systems running AIX or Monterey – after all you can’t get much higher than a mainframe. Try asking Mr Burke when Monterey will be available for S/390.

Ultimately it will be the customer that decides, and it is here that we are already seeing the last nails in Monterey’s coffin. According to the Register on Friday last, Fujitsu Siemens already has around 60 customers who are trialling 4-way Itanium servers based on the IA-64 architecture. And what about the operating systems the prospective customers are choosing? “Most users want Windows 2000, others ask for Linux but hardly anyone is interested in Monterey,” said a source from Fujitsu Siemens. Telling stuff.

(First published 19 May 2000)

05-25 – From blue screens to screen blues for handheld manufacturers

From blue screens to screen blues for handheld manufacturers

Not so long ago, the bane of computers was the blue screen of death. Today, the world has moved on – handheld manufacturers are more concerned about having any screens at all, or at least ones worth looking at. Hewlett Packard are red-faced over the fact that their new PocketPC-based device can only display 4,000 colours, whilst Palm are facing supply problems of their own. These are exactly the sorts of events that cause shake-ups in the industry.

First of all, let’s look at Hewlett-Packard. The manufacturer with a reputation for the highest possible quality was embarrassed to admit that its new handheld had been beset by design problems. According to News.com, a 16-bit component was accidentally substituted with a 12-bit component, meaning that the number of colours that can be displayed has been constrained to 4,000. This is an order of magnitude less than that expressed in the marketing literature. It is quite a surprise that Hewlett Packard should let this one through. It is also an indication of the reality that is faced by all technology companies developing complex products, where even a small error can have enormous consequences The message is: buyer beware, don’t believe the marketing. Despite the fact that this error has not involved the king of hype, namely Microsoft, this may be just too much reality to bear coming as it is just at the moment when the company is pushing hard its new PocketPC platform. This release of the now-defunct Windows CE is “new and improved,” covering the tracks of poor synchronisation, bugs and usability problems that beset previous versions of the software. The last thing the Seattle software giant needed was further evidence of technological weakness, even if this time it was not the cause.

Palm has had its own share of display problems – this time, due to supply being unable to keep up with demand. This is not just an issue for Palm, but for the whole LCD market, particularly with the need for enhanced screens for WAP phones and other electronic devices. Let’s face it, today if it hasn’t got a natty screen it’s probably not worth having. Plus, if it wasn’t enough to have screen shortages, Palm has had problems sourcing sufficient Flash memory. At the moment it is still possible to find Palm handhelds on the market, but some companies are already out of stock and are taking back-orders. Interestingly no problems have yet hit Palm clone manufacturer Handspring. Maybe the latter had a stock surplus due to its initial difficulties in managing the glut of requests for the devices when they came on the market a couple of months ago. Also, the Handspring device does not use Flash memory. It could just be that the fault lies with Palm, being unable to manage its own supply chains. Whatever the case, the danger signs should be flashing for Palm, which cannot afford to trip over and lose the lead to an increasingly slick competitor from Microsoft and its partners. If Palm is having screen shortages now, it needs to get its act together before the summer, when a lowering of LCD prices will fuel a new boom in their use.

Palm still holds the lion’s share of the market, but the next few months will be make or break for the handheld manufacturer. Ultimately the company could be living on borrowed time as smarter, more functional mobile phones start to replace the need for handhelds. So far, Nokia, Ericsson and the like have shown only partial interest in borrowing technology from the handheld market, with Symbian as the main contender. The next six months will be very interesting indeed, and neither Palm nor Microsoft can afford to make any mistakes.

(First published 25 May 2000)

05-25 – Is it time for a socially responsible Internet?

Is it time for a socially responsible Internet?

This week, a Paris court judged that Yahoo.com – that’s the US-based firm, not the French subsidiary of Yahoo – was in breach of French laws concerning the sale of materials with racist overtones. What is more the company has two months to prevent French surfers from accessing any auctions of Nazi memorabilia and other items deemed racist. Ouch.

Of course, this is not the first time that auction sites have been condemned from hosting the sale of unseemly stuff. In November last year, eBay was taken to task by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre about its auctions of memorabilia which “glorify the horrors of Nazi Germany”. Indeed, according to this week’s New York Post, eBay was back in the spotlight, as it removed from sale the charred remains of what was reputedly a gun salvaged from the former Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

At first sight it appears that auction sites are attempting to have the butter and the butter money, as they say in France. eBay does not permit Nazi memorabilia to be sold on its German eBay site, as that contravenes German law. However the Waco gun was removed from the site due to eBay’s policy on not allowing gun sales. The two cases reveal a significant difference in policy. In the Waco gun case, spokesman Kevin Pursglove was quoted as saying “eBay won’t host any gun sales.” However in the case of the German memorabilia, Pursglove was quoted (this time on \link{http://www.zdnet.com, ZDNet}) as saying “We expect eBay users to adhere to the policy and guidelines of the country in which they are living. It is not our role to police compliance.” So it is unclear whether eBay is prepared to take a moral stance on the items that are auctioned, or not.

What is also unclear is the matter of jurisdiction. The French law suit has effectively said that a US company is not permitted to make available materials to French citizens via the Internet. This ruling is virtually impossible to implement and, indeed, its validity is unclear. Just as it would be possible for un Francais to telephone a bid to an auction in the US, so such a bid can be made over the Internet. It is difficult to see how the auctioneer can be held responsible for the actions of the prospective bidders, particularly across international boundaries. Even if successful, it is even harder to see how such rulings can be enforced. As noted by President Clinton in the \link{http://www.mercurycenter.com, San Jose Mercury News}, trying to police the Internet is “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

Ultimately, auction companies that want an international standing will require certain, globally accepted standards to be upheld. The example of eBay suggests that it is applying national laws in its offerings to individual countries, but it is applying its own (apparently Californian) moral standards across all its sites. The definition of “globally acceptable” may be a tough nut to crack – for example, even Barbie Dolls might offend the sensibilities of certain nations – but nonetheless a line has to be drawn between what is acceptable and what is not. Companies such as Yahoo and eBay may claim immunity from such standards, but if so they are not walking their own talk – Yahoo, for example, has been accused by civil liberties groups of “outing” authors of offensive postings on its chat boards (sometimes without even a complaint being made). Such companies are either proactively responsible for what is happening on their sites or they are not – they cannot have it both ways.

(First published 25 May 2000)

05-25 – Microsoft SOAP on the ROPEs

Microsoft SOAP on the ROPEs

Hmm… very interesting. Microsoft seem to be keeping its SOAPy hands firmly to its chest. SOAP, or Simple Object Access Protocol, is a technology standard announced by the company as part of its DNA initiative. Essentially it involves using XML as a communications language to enable object and component services to be accessed remotely, for example over the Internet – a kind of long-distance remote procedure call. Great idea, but now Microsoft seems to be balking at the principle of opening up a dialogue (as it were) about this new “standard”.

There are several reasons why Microsoft does not want to reveal its hand at this stage. For a start, SOAP is not ready for use, indeed it is little more than a twinkle in the company’s eye at this stage. If Microsoft was to reveal all it would be opening itself up to both ridicule and idea stealing. Let’s face it, there are plenty of people that would not be able to resist having a pop at the software giant, it’s a way of getting a bit of payback for the extortionate costs of the software over the years. As for stealing of ideas, imagine what would have happened if SUN had released details of Java to the IT population before it was fully fleshed out? There would have been no shortage of companies prepared to copy and even patent the fledgling ideas. Okay, there are the positives. Of Java, more later.

On The Register yesterday a second suggestion was raised. SOAP is to be an instrumental part of Microsoft’s Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS), also known as MegaServices. Detail about these is sparse but the oft-quoted example is of Microsoft Passport, which can be used as an authentication mechanism for any internet-enabled application. Other MegaServices could include transaction management, payment/billing, inventory and so on. Clearly some mechanism is required to access these services. SOAP is the ideal candidate, coupled with a communications handling mechanism such as the Remote Object Proxy Engine or ROPE. Now, suggested The Register, SOAP is being kept quiet not for its own sake but for the sake of NGWS, upon which Microsoft’s whole future may depend. Having seen Microsoft’s fears that the ongoing court case may kill NGWS, this may well be true.

There is one more reason why Microsoft are being reticent about the detail of SOAP. As we’ve already mentioned, SOAP is following the same path as Java and with good reason – like Sun, Microsoft do not want to lose control of the “standard” once it appears. Why? Because, to Microsoft, SOAP is a Java killer and more – the company has set it sights on the whole EJB/CORBA caboodle. With an XML-based standard for application intercommunication, why bother with the layers of complex interfaces that have evolved around the Java spec? That’s the marketing theory anyway – the reality is that, with ROPE, Microsoft are re-inventing the request broker in their own image and hoping that its adopters will squeeze those nasty competitors out of the picture.

We’ll just have to see how it gets on.

(First published 25 May 2000)

June 2000

06-01 – Cybercafes reach the farmers of India

Cybercafes reach the farmers of India

If there is one thing that India has got, it is railways. With railways come both stations and many, many thousands of miles of straight track, the latter including channels for telecommunications cables. Just north of Madras in the Bay of Bengal, a pilot project has started which will link five stations to the Internet by the end of June. BBC News tells us that, at each station there will be a cybercafe, with Internet terminals available for rent on an hourly basis. Perhaps more importantly, one of the stations will act as a wireless base station providing Internet services to up to fifteen households.

From one perspective, what we are seeing here is how existing technologies can be combined innovatively to spread the reach of the Internet. Like Tele2 in the UK, which uses a combination of radio, microwave and land-based services to provide high-speed Internet access to business parks, this is about combining technologies in the most cost-effective way. In a way, each technology is competing against the others, encouraging progress and exerting a downward pressure on costs.

In addition there is a more important process at play here. Technology does not exist for its own sake, but as an enabler. To coin a cliché, the Internet is the great leveller, both for businesses and for individuals, and that is what will give countries still at the trailing edge of technology some freedom to catch up.

Not that India has anything to be ashamed of, of course. We have already written about how the second most valuable software entrepreneur in the world, Azim Premji, has built his fortune on India’s ability to provide high quality software at a lower cost. Similarly, Indian companies such as Hexaware have shown how innovation does not need to be at the expense of software quality. All the same, Indian cities have many advantages over its rural communities. The Great Leveller is now turning its attention to this divide.

What can the Internet offer the rural population of India? The answer is simple – education. The wealth of information resources offered by the Internet, and the form in which these resources are offered, go hand in hand: the Internet never sleeps, and computer-based software never loses patience. Furthermore, once the connection is in place, the majority of resources are available for free.

There is still plenty to be done – this project is a pilot, after all. Many villages only get electricity once or twice a day (again, a problem to which technology may well have the answers). Internet resources may not be entirely suitable in their current form (but could be made suitable, once the need exists). Educational organisations used to working in one way may well find that it is worth their while supporting the efforts of this project, rather than supporting educational processes directly as they have in the past. One thing is for sure - the tendrils of the Internet may reach around the globe, but it will not truly be a global phenomenon until the world’s population has access to it. The Great Leveller will not rest until old and young, rich and poor, city, and country, West and East, are afforded equal access to this fundamental resource

(First published 1 June 2000)

06-01 – NetSanity brings one-stop publishing to the Web

NetSanity brings one-stop publishing to the Web

As we claw our way out of the primeval swamp of technology, we are hitting a wave of diversification. The move towards appliances and devices may have its attractions but it also brings a series of problems with it. One of these is how to handle the range of forms that information must take to reach this variety of devices. As always, where there is a problem there will be a start-up which claims to have found the solution and in this case it is NetSanity.

NetSanity’s primary goal is to bridge the gap between information display on the Web Browser and on WAP-enabled smart-phones. There are several possible solutions to this, depending on where one thinks the problem should be solved. NetSanity have gone back to what it sees as the origin of the problem – the stage of preparing the information for publishing. The company offers a one-stop publishing solution in which organisations can prepare their information in an agreed structure based on XML. NetSanity then provides an ASP-type that which takes the information and delivers it to the supported range of formats and devices. As well as HTML for browsers and the Wireless Markup Language (WML) used for WAP phones, NetSanity supports other formats including SMS which can be delivered to existing mobile phones and pagers.

A rather clever part of NetSanity’s offering is the preference facility it gives to browser and phone users. Rather like (the sadly passed away) PointCast, NetSanity provides a console (termed the SmartBar) that offers a selection of content – news, sports results and the like. However the user’s preferences are not stored on the device, rather on the server so users can keep up to date whether they are using a WAP phone or a Web browser. Preferences can be managed on a per-device basis – for example, a user may wish to see only the headlines on a WAP phone but the full story on the desktop.

NetSanity is keen to stress that it is more a conduit than a service provider. Its prospective customers are the content and service providers themselves, who can turn to NetSanity to get their message out to a wider audience. The model appears to be working: the company has already signed up Nokia to trial a NetSanity-based service.

The future target of NetSanity is to support the drive towards mobile commerce and location-based service provision. Both of these goals will pose new challenges for the company, as it will not only be the information which needs to change but also the processes and transactions involved. Even if NetSanity succeeds in the short term, it will face an even bigger hurdle later on. Whatever the case, it is good to know that innovative companies such as this will continue to exist for as long as there are such hurdles to overcome. The giants will not be able to do it by themselves.

(First published 1 June 2000)

06-01 – SurfTime: BT drops the Beach Ball

SurfTime: BT drops the Beach Ball

After much speculation and some ribbing from friend and foe alike, it looks like the end is nigh for BT’s SurfTime Internet service. Despite a relaunch effort last week, even spokespeople inside the company are seeing the writing on the wall. So – where is it all going wrong for BT?

According to BT, “SurfTime is the new way to use the Internet without paying call charges.” Unfortunately, this is wrong on two counts. SurfTime may have been new when is was first touted last year, but today a number of ISPs and other communications companies, such as Amazon, Freeserve and NTL, offer similar services. BT’’ offering may now be competitive to these other providers, but it is not free – it costs 19.99 for a 24-hour service and 5.99 for evenings and weekends, plus (read the small print) users may pay an additional charge for the ISP service they connect to. Okay, there are no charges for individual calls, but a flat fee for the month does not really qualify as “without paying” in anyone’s language.

SurfTime’s launch on Thursday last week was followed a ruling by Oftel which requires BT allow other telcos to allow unmetered access to the Internet. Essentially, this will force the company to release its iron grip on the “last mile” between the local exchange and the home, at least for Internet access. This will cause whole new levels of competitions which, over the next few months, look set to cause BT to replace SurfTime with something competitive. BT has been competing before, but against rival technologies: this time, it faces competition on the local loop, which has proved unassailable in the past.

What is more, a little research on The Register discovered that, though BT announced 20 ISPs supporting the SurfTime service, 17 of these belonged to the same service provider - Affinity Internet. Hardly a ringing endorsement. A BT spokesman was quoted on ZDNet UK as saying “If neither ISPs nor the public want it, it will die a death and so be it.” If that’s painting a gloss, we’d love to hear what BT spokespeople are saying behind closed doors.

What we are seeing here is the dying throes of a very old company, which has already announced a strategy to release it from the shackles of the past. BT has reached a point at which it can no longer rely on momentum to bring in profits, as proven by its less-than-successful results announced a month ago. The company’s new ventures should stand it in good stead for the future, as long as it is prepared to act as one of the new generation of communications service providers and not as an old-style, monopolistic telco. It is right that Oftel has acted to level the playing field, at least for unmetered Internet access: we wait with interest to see how BT will react. Any decisions it makes over the next couple of months could well seal the company’s future.

(First published 1 June 2000)

06-07 – DOJ separates Windows from its reason

DOJ separates Windows from its reason

Sometimes the simplest of statements can hide the most complex of matters. Take this one, for example: “The separation of the Operating Systems Business from the Applications Business.” As the whole court case was started on the basis of the line between the two being less than simple to define, it is worth delving a little into the detail: what, in technical terms, is the planned breakup said to entail? We need look no further than clause 7 of the final judgement. To quote:

“Operating System” means the software that controls the allocation and usage of hardware resources of a computer.

As far as the judgement is concerned, the operating systems business need concern itself only with the OS as defined above. The term “computer” is given a pretty broad definition, including PDAs, mobile phones and set top boxes (but, noticeably, not games consoles). Even broader is the definition applied to the term “Application”, comprising anything else you can think of. Which leads us to a very interesting situation, very interesting indeed.

First of all, Microsoft is currently shipping versions of its OS family with a whole raft of facilities that go way outside the scope of the definition of “operating system”. These include such high-level features as transaction servers and email facilities, but also lower level software such as calculators, media players and even text editors. The judgement considers all of these as “applications”, to be assigned to the applications business. The Microsoft OS business has been allowed a license in perpetuity to all “applications” which it currently sells as part of an OS package (apart from the browser, that is). In the future, it appears that it will be free to develop new applications but each will be under the scrutiny of the compliance committee. This makes things messy for the company, to say the least – after all, who decides when something is part of the operating system or not? For example, is internetworking software part of the OS? If so, what about secure internetworking software, such as encryption/decryption? Is a music player part of the OS – after all, it drives a hardware element of the computer.

The second issue is one of bundling. Microsoft is currently a customer facing organisation, delivering operating systems and applications that work in harmony. However it is the applications that are of more interest than the OS. Computers are evolving into devices and appliances – essentially sealed packages that perform specialised functions. Think of Network Attached Storage or Email appliances, or the EasyPC sealed PC initiative that has spawned the iPaq and NetVista, or even set top boxes and internet phones. All of these are manufactured from both software and hardware components, and the user of each is encouraged to ignore what is happening under the bonnet. In other words, the only way the OS can gain attention is by self-promotion, à la Intel Inside. Microsoft’s success has been helped by its appeal to the business end user and consumer alike. However the proposed division could hide OS for good behind an application fascia, forcing the company to become a pure OEM business – a far harder market to keep sweet than its traditional stamping ground.

Microsoft’s OS business may be permitted to develop new applications of its own, but it will have a standing start. It could buy its traditional competition (how ironic, if the new company acquired Corel and Borland), or start from scratch. One thing is for sure, it cannot survive on the strength of selling nothing but operating systems – the market is too slow and the potential for innovation is limited. The breakup of Microsoft will see two companies leave the Redmond fold – one is an applications business with good potential for growth, one is an operating system company that needs all the luck it can get to stay in the game. Windows owes a large part of its popularity to the availability of applications: without the latter, the former cannot survive.

(First published 7 June 2000)

06-07 – NEON’s iWave bridges the business process divide

NEON’s iWave bridges the business process divide

World religions are defined by some as “different ways up the same mountain” - a phrase that could also be applied to the ever-converging domains of IT software. The border between enterprise packages and bespoke applications is becoming ever more fuzzy, and the question is moving from whether to build or buy, towards how to achieve business solutions with both. At the same time, the business (by which we mean all non-technical elements of an organisation) is playing an increasing part in defining technical solutions. In fact, in a number of areas there is little division between the two: take, for example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in which business capabilities are largely dictated by the underlying technology services.

One of the keys to resolving the increasingly disparate portfolio of applications has been the provision of integration software, a family which includes middleware, messaging and, more recently, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) packages. This latter group does what it says on the box - it provides a means of communication between enterprise applications such as CRM and ERP packages. It is widely admitted that EAI companies have their work cut out, largely because the scale of the problem is far greater than can be resolved by simple means. Analyst firms report that EAI is in its infancy - it may be able to deal with standard integration paths between common applications but can flounder when faced with more difficult environments.

Rather than attempt to be all things to all applications, one vendor is adopting a different tack. NEON Systems, responsible for the software which has enabled Thompson Holidays to power its Just web travel service, is to extend its iWave range of EAI software to support business processes. This merits a little explanation.

iWave Integrator is a many to many EAI product. In other words, it can be used to enable communications between multiple enterprise applications. The product currently supports the gamut of CRM and help desk products, so if for example a customer service call was being dealt with using Peregrine, a request could be passed to Siebel to provide the customer’s sales history. iWave does not use a hub approach, rather a management console permits the registration of different packages and platforms.

iWave Integrator works by allowing the registration of a number of objects that are supported by a packaged application (such as ‘customer’, ‘order’ and so on) and the definition of a number of verbs which can be associated with each object. For example, ‘customer’ may support ‘create’ and ‘delete’ as well as more complex verbs such as ‘make purchase’ or ‘change address’. Thus far, however, each application is acting as a separate entity - either of the packages, or none, can act as “master”. All that is provided is a means of communication between the two.

Now, get ready for the exciting bit. What if, rather than using these objects and verbs as a common language for packages to communicate, they were used to build business processes in their own right? This is exactly what NEON Systems are doing. A new facility, to be known as iWave Business Flow, is on the launch pad: this enables the graphical construction of workflows that can then be executed using the objects and verbs of the packages available. In one fell swoop, the EAI platform has become a tool for combining package functionality to define and automate business processes. This is powerful stuff.

There may still be some weaknesses in NEON System’s approach and products. iWave Business Flow has not yet been released, and its first version is likely to have its limitations as first versions do. Also, iWave Integrator currently lacks connectors for the wide range of packages a fully-fledged EAI environment should be able to support (such as SAP, Peoplesoft, Broadvsison and the like - although we are assured that these will be available within the next few months). Nonetheless, iWave is an innovative facility that bridges the gap between package integration and application development. It uses ‘objects’ and ‘verbs’ as its terminology, but it could so easily have used ‘components’ and ‘services’. Furthermore, the iWave portfolio includes an Interface Development Kit which permits the creation of bespoke interfaces to legacy or hand-crafted applications.

The different approaches taken by IT software may well be different sides of the same mountain, but what they boil down to is delivery of software functionality that automates business processes. Coming from an EAI position, NEON Systems seem to have grasped this fundamental and looks prepared to run with it. We can only hope that the iWave products, when they come fully integrated with a workflow engine, live up to their aspirations.

(First published 7 June 2000)

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06-08 – Encryption: Should the RIP bill rest in peace?

Encryption: Should the RIP bill rest in peace?

The debate over the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) bill rages on, according to Silicon.com, but at the end of last week a lone voice appeared on the scene to welcome its measures. At the heart of the bill is the issue over encryption keys, or access to them: as it mentions on Silicon.com, individuals could be jailed if they cannot produce an encryption key for data sent over the Net. This measure does appear a bit harsh, considering that flushing non-electronic evidence down the toilet as the Police hammer down the door is not yet treated as a jailable offence.

The lone voice in question was Frank Coyle, IT director at John Menzies. To quote: “We cannot underestimate the threat to businesses from organised crime using the Internet. I think we have to try it. At the moment we have nothing, and that puts the initiative in the hands of organised crime. If the government did nothing it would be accused of being inept.”

So – where does the truth lie? So far an impressive array of organisations have lined up against the bill. Specifically, the British Chamber of Commerce, the Data Protection Commission and the Institute of Directors, not to mention numerous civil rights groups and seventy percent of respondents to a recent Silicon.com poll. Facing these massed ranks are the UK government (specifically, the Home Office) and Mr Coyle (not to mention the remaining 30% of Silicon.com pollsters).

Organisations against the bill are pretty clear in expressing their worries. Business organisations fear the damage that the encryption key measure might do to UK business, particularly in the light of Britain’s attemopts to become an eCommerce hub for Europe, if not the world. Other organisations are expressing concerns about the disregard for the basic human right of innocence until guilt can be proved. Possession of an encryption key is not a criminal act, it is argued. The third argument is that the measures, draconian as they appear, will have little or no effect on cybercrime.

Meanwhile, the government’s fears about patrolling an encrypted Internet also appear to be well-founded. What with the European Union relaxing export restrictions on encryption technology, there is a real danger (in the eyes of the government) that existing surveillance methods will become inadequate or worse. In Japan, for example, 1024-bit keys are now de rigeur: even the current generation of supercomputers would take months to crack the simplest of messages encoded in this way.

The issue of encryption is fraught with hazards. It is undoubtedly true that strong encryption would hamper attempts to track down criminals that use the Internet to communicate. What is also true, however, is that even today, technology is providing workarounds for such criminals, such as the (legal) practice of steganography which involves hiding encrypted communications in other files such as video clips.

Whilst it may be true that new laws are required to deal with new types (and means) of crime, we must not throw the legal baby out with the bathwater. The organisations that are crying out for this bill to be repealed (or at least, amended) are not just local pressure groups, but national organisations which represent our industries and our rights as individuals. It may well be true that strong encryption prevents surveillance, even to the extent that a tried-and-tested law enforcement technique becomes relegated to history. True or not, this is no time for the government to panic and implement a law that fails to achieve its objectives and causes a great deal of damage in the process.

(First published 8 June 2000)

06-14 – Cheer up, Lou – $2.1 Trillion should ease your pain

Cheer up, Lou – $2.1 Trillion should ease your pain

Lou Gerstner is a worried man. According to a leaked internal memo posted on The Register, he is fretting about many companies’ apparent seduction “by the lure of the magic market-cap wand.” He is worried that organisations are seeing the Web as key to the electronic city, as a license to print money. His fear is that organisations are not looking beyond eBusiness to other, equally fundamental changes in the global market economy. Oh dear, oh dear. Well, he may choose to seek some solace in a report just published by WITSA (That’s the World Information Technology and Services Alliance), an international consortium of 40 IT trade organisations. Among the findings of the report was the fact that global IT spending topped $2.1 trillion in 1999. Now that should give even the dour Mr Gerstner something to grin about.

It may be that Lou has a point. There is plenty of evidence that companies are e-Nabling e-Verything with the hope of huge returns, or at least the fear of losing their existing places in the market. Organisations like our own are quick to point out that businesses without an eBusiness strategy might as well pack up and go home. Are we wrong to suggest that the Web is changing business? No, not according to Gerstner. “Don’t get me wrong,” says Lou. “I’m convinced that eBusiness really is changing the entire basis of the global economy.” In other words, don’t ignore the threat and the promise of eBusiness. But don’t let it cloud the other, ongoing changes in stock markets around the world. And (perhaps most importantly) don’t think that any old eBusiness strategy will yield huge returns. Call us old fashioned, but we’re hoping that the Boo.com debacle burst that particular bubble.

The New Economy might be dangerous ground for businesses in general, but according to WITSA it is being very kind indeed to the technology sector who, let’s face it, stand to gain whether the businesses they supply succeed or fail. In the nicest possible way, it’s a bit like arms dealers who sell to both sides and clear off quick before the bombs drop. This is certainly the picture painted by the WITSA report, a summary of which is available \link{http://www.witsa.org,here}. Furthermore, the report paints a “bullish” picture of the future, with a prediction of $3 Trillion annual IT spend by 2004. The drivers it indicates are:

- continued expansion of the Internet, fuelled by wireless, broadband and the device explosion

- privatisation of government-owned businesses

- adoption of eBusiness facilities such as vertical electronic marketplaces

- harmonisation of international law concerning the electronic economy

- emerging markets, such as China, India and Brazil.

All in all, technology companies have a great deal to smile about, particularly companies such as IBM which are ideally placed to take a slice of the pie just by continuing on their present course. We are sure your feelings were heartfelt, Lou, but we don’t imagine you will be losing sleep for too long.

(First published 14 June 2000)

06-15 – Spam ban, thank you Ma’am

Spam ban, thank you Ma’am

It all sounds so simple. Late last week the US House of Representatives’ Commerce Committee agreed to support a bill that could make the problem of unsolicited email, or spam, a thing of the past. According to \link{http://www.theregister.co.uk,The Register}, central to the bill is the requirement that spammers include a valid return address in their emails – this alone could be sufficient to deter the majority of their number.

Spam is as big a problem as ever. It was reported on News.com last week that a recent study found ISPs and free email services were capable of blocking up to 73% of unsolicited email. The downside is that the 27% figure refers to an ever-increasing pile of junk email, with spammers becoming increasingly determined to get through the Net. On a positive note, the anti-spam measures were not found to be preventing a single kosher email from being delivered.

So – why should a simple measure like the return address make such a difference? There are several reasons. First of all, as mentioned, the measure is likely to put potential spammers off. It is one thing to spam anonymously, but to move out into the open is an entirely different matter. Second, with the existence of a source of the email, it will be easier for the recipient to take steps to prevent further emails from the same place. The address can be blocked, or reported to the ISP or to an anti-spam organisation, or even flamed with a few hundred responses. Third, by making anonymous unsolicited email illegal, the case can be brought against individuals more easily than under present laws.

Of course, there will be nothing to prevent spammers from continuing to use insecure servers as through-routes for the thousands of messages that they send. The method is simple: dial up to an ISP, set mail.acme.com (where Acme have an incomplete or incorrect security configuration) as the mail gateway, then fire a thousand or so emails at the Acme server which then forwards them to the destination addresses. After a while, disconnect from the ISP, reconnect to a different ISP (with a different IP address) and do the same thing. Tracing the initiator of such emails is virtually impossible at present. It can be hoped that the number of servers that leave themselves open to this kind of attack is dwindling as sites become more security savvy, either before or after finding themselves victims.

Unsolicited email is a product of an insecure global network, weakly legislated and poorly policed. Things will probably get worse before they get better, for example as the mass rollout of ADSL provides a new pool of insecure computers which can be used as unsuspecting host for spam forwarding. It will take a combination of better legislation and tighter computer configurations to make spam a thing of the past.

(First published 15 June 2000)

06-15 – Sun Storage: the future is bright, the future’s Purple

Sun Storage: the future is bright, the future’s Purple

One of the big surprises about Sun’s recent storage announcement was that it was now making more money out of sales of storage devices, than of servers. Now that’s food for thought. Clearly, this is the factor that has spurred it on to go head to head with companies more traditionally associated with the pure storage market, notably Compaq, HDS and EMC. Sun have announced a new storage strategy and a new product line, the flagship of which is the StorEdge T3 – code name Purple – which fits 300 Gb in a box the size of a desktop computer.

Sun’s StorEdge range is designed to plug into AIX and Windows NT networks as wel as Sun’s own Solaris environments. Linux support is also planned - the goal is to provide open, scalable storage to work in heterogeneous environments. Having said this, fifteen years ago Sun was one of the first companies to apply the “Open Systems” label to its Unix-based workstation and server products. In this context, “open” meant, “can communicate with other Unix systems.” It is worth delving a little into what Sun means by open storage – look no further than Jiro.

Jiro (previously known as StoreX) has been on the cards for a long time – a good couple of years, if memory serves. Essentially Jiro provides a set of interfaces to enable heterogeneous storage systems to be managed, configured and allocated as a single, virtual hierarchy. The StorEdge range of products will be Jiro-enabled and, as Sun’s \link{ http://www.sun.com/storage/index.html,Storage web site} proudly boasts, “many technology industry leaders support the Jiro effort.” This includes companies like Veritas and Legato, who together have the storage software market pretty much sewn up.

Trouble is, Jiro isn’t the only storage management standardisation effort in town. The Storage Networking Industry Association (which can be found \link{http://www.snia.org,here} is looking to provide exactly what Jiro supports. Similarly, the Distributed Management Task Force is also working on storage management standards. The good news is that the two organisations are working together. So what of Jiro? Companies like Veritas freely admit that they are standards-agnostic and they are supporting the work of SNIA and Jiro, not to mention efforts of other organisations such as the Fibre Alliance. Companies such as EMC and Sterling (now part of CA) have also proudly presented their storage management facilities, all the time actively supporting the standards bodies.

All in all, storage management standardisation is not a pretty picture. No doubt, as with Java, Sun’s idea of an open standard is one that Sun has the casting vote over. Jiro may have its technical merits and it may have the buy in of other organisations, but it appears that the possibility of a truly open storage environment is a long way off yet.

(First published 15 June 2000)

06-15 – Telecomms unbundling – watching the watchers

Telecomms unbundling – watching the watchers

The UK’s telecomms watchdog, OFTEL is between a rock and a hard place. Back in March, it confirmed that the 1st of July 2001 loop was to be the “absolute deadline” for the unbundling of the local loop. At the same time however, PM Tony Blair was in Lisbon signing up to a pan-European agreement that fixed the deadline for the end of 2000. Now it is looking like the EC will hold OFTEL in breach of directives that are hastily being drawn up to carry forward the Lisbon agreement. A storm is brewing, and it looks unlikely to be the last for poor OFTEL.

This will not be the first time OFTEL has fallen foul of European directives, but the third. The watchdog has already been held to account for its less-than-agile approach to competition in the mobile market, not to mention an ongoing issue surrounding carrier preselection, that is the ability to use another telephone company without entering additional digits at the dial tone. As if it were not enough to be accused of sluggishness by the EC, when it acts, it is accused of pandering to the incumbent telco BT and penalising UK businesses in the process. At the end of last week, OFTEL’s attempts to kick-start the stalemate over the xDSL rollout were met with incredulity by some members of the Spectrum Management forum, set up by OFTEL itself to keep momentum in the unbundling process. Already, OFTEL is expressing fears about missing the unbundling deadline and this is without taking into account the fact that, according to the EC, it has already slipped the date by six months.

Not everything that OFTEL has done has been seen as such a bad thing, however. The decision made at the end of last month, that BT SurfTime was uncompetitive as BT did not offer a wholesale version of the product, was hailed as a “victory for consumers,” according to \link{http://www.zdnet.co.uk,ZDNet}. ISPs can now re-sell BT’s SurfTime in whichever way they choose: this will effectively open up the market to a whole new wave of unmetered access deals. This has both up- and downsides – on the upside, prices will come down still further than the currently offered deals; however the complexity of the market will no doubt increase, while the quality of service may drop in the short term anyway.

Whatever the final date for unbundling, be it Christmas or the middle of next year (and we rather suspect the former, after all Tony Blair is never wrong), the pressure gauge will rise and OFTEL will have no choice but to accept its share.

(First published 15 June 2000)

06-22 – IBM’s voice recognition grows up

IBM’s voice recognition grows up

We knew that Ozzy Osbourne’s talents were diverse, but we didn’t expect to see him popping up as general manager of IBM Voice Systems. Okay, it is a different chap but somebody who associates himself with the hard rock icon must be either barking mad or know exactly what he is doing. Judging by IBM’s latest announcements in voice recognition, we would suggest the latter.

IBM has announced a complete revamp to its voice strategy, which reflects and confirms the direction taken by the IT market as a whole. Essentially, the technology landscape is moving away from the fat client architecture using general purpose PCs, towards a structure that concentrates hard processing on the server and performs certain specific functions on embedded chips in client devices. These two areas – thick, general-purpose servers and thin, function-specific clients – provide the model upon which IBM is to base its strategy for voice recognition in the future.

It has to be said that something had to give. As an advocate of the potential for voice recognition for many years, I felt obliged to run through the learning mode of IBM’s latest release of ViaVoice. After over an hour of reading sections of (most appropriately, I must say) Alice in Wonderland to my computer, I then attempted to dictate an article. The results ranged from the hilarious to the baroque – progress was slow, not helped by my own, frankly puerile giggling at some of the phrases that were generated. Great dream, but the reality sadly lacks. More success has been seen by companies such as SpeechWorks, which concentrate on specific, server-side areas such as telephone share trading or flight checking, but even these have been subjected to the mockery of the general public. Even assuming that the ability of computer software to interpret the spoken word does become a reality, the fact is that we do not speak as we write – dictation is difficult enough to beg the question – why bother? Which is why IBM’s strategy makes a lot of sense. Let’s look at why.

IBM is focusing on two areas. The first is the server, in which (like SpeechWorks), the aim is to integrate speech recognition into enterprise applications. According to \link{http://www.news.com,News.com}, planned for autumn release is WebSphere Voice Server with ViaVoice Technology, a suite of tools for helping call centres better use the Web. Also to come is a product that will enable Siebel users to integrate voice calls and Web-based queries. In addition, IBM announced a partnership with Internet speech specialist General Magic that is to target voice for eCommerce applications. The second area of focus is the embedded device: IBM is to release embedded ViaVoice, a Java-based software development kit which is targeted at PDAs and mobile phones as well as in-car devices and the like. According to W. S. (Ozzy) Osbourne, IBM is positioning its technologies as a framework for others to use rather than trying to go direct to the end-user.

Why is IBM’s strategy sound? To believe this, one first has to accept that voice recognition does have a future, albeit more focused than the generalised “human-talks-to-computer” model. Given this, on the enterprise IBM is concentrated on specific application areas such as call centres - no doubt, with limited vocabulary though enterprise servers will have the processing power required to support more general recognition. On the client side, IBM are facilitating voice features to be built into devices, rather than implementing such devices themselves – it is likely that product developers (such as Motorola, likely to bring out an in-car facility) are better placed to identify and develop workable applications for voice.

IBM is not dropping ViaVoice, but they are recognising that the shrink-wrapped market is never to be a major target for voice recognition. Rather, they are focusing on areas that make good business sense and also give these still-young technologies a better chance to shine. Even then, it will be a while before voice recognition manages a reasonable interpretation of the lyrics of Mr Osbourne’s namesake. Not even IBM can do everything.

(First published 22 June 2000)

06-22 – Microsoft registers www.NewStrategy.NET

Microsoft registers www.NewStrategy.NET

The IT industry is a strange one sometimes. On Thursday last week, Microsoft pulled the covers off its gleaming new strategy, an announcement that it has been building towards for many months. Products incorporating the fruits of this strategy will become available next year, which begs the question – what was the previous series of big strategy announcements all about?

Let’s work back from the answer. Last week Bill Gates announced .NET – an Internet-centric vision that sees Microsoft’s current product lines as being the building blocks for a seamless, global computing environment. As reported on The Register, we get Office.NET, Windows.NET and MSN.NET for starters (and you can work out the rest for yourselves). Products will be .NET-enabled by bolting on XML-based interfaces. The whole thing begs a few questions.

First off, there are issues of (if I may) a techno-architectural nature. It is one, relatively straightforward thing to draw a blueprint diagram of the “ideal” architecture for Web-enabled applications. There aren’t that many ways to skin that particular cat, at least not in theory. In practice however, things get a little more complicated for two reasons. Yes there is the issue of legacy – “this is not a green field site,” say the consultants, no doubt earning plenty of money in the process. There is also an issue of global complexity. Microsoft has drawn up a reasonably comprehensive framework of its own but it seems to be dependent on a couple of factors – that the whole world adopts it, and starts from scratch to do so. Either factor sounds just a trifle infeasible. Let me stick my neck out here: the way of the future will be one that supports the heterogeneous mass of complexity that already exists (and there is more on the way, what with Mobile and all). Single-company solutions, however elegant and widely adopted they may be, cannot succeed.

The second issue is one of strategy versus product. At the beginning of last year, Microsoft launched BizTalk, an XML-based framework to support business communications. XML is becoming a bit of an overachiever however – business-to-business traffic is not enough for the megalomaniac language, which (as SOAP, in partnership with Microsoft and now IBM and Sun – see the link?) is being touted to be the format for communication between application components as well. Trouble is, Microsoft may well be quick to see the exponential potential of XML, and are changing their strategy on a monthly basis to fit. However the products are forever trying to catch up with the vision. Not long ago, delays were announced to BizTalk Server to include support for business processes, another conquest of the XML strategy. BizTalk Server may be out after the summer but by then, may well be eclipsed as companies hold out for BizTalk.NET, unlikely to be available for at least six months.

There is one more question that must be asked – is the .NET strategy anti-competitive? Of course it jolly well is. What Microsoft has done is pulled together its own product lines as building blocks to act as a foundation for the future of the Web. The company is between a rock and a hard place: clearly, the future lies in the integration of today’s applications and operating systems, however Microsoft does not wish to concede that customers should have a choice of different platforms. Keen that its own portfolio should be used in preference to others, the picture the company paints is exclusively Microsoft. This is a flawed perspective, which will ultimately cause the Seattle giant more problems than it solves. It looks like the future holds plenty more opportunities for Microsoft to change its strategy.

(First published 22 June 2000)

06-28 – European tech investment rides the storm

European tech investment rides the storm

There has been much in the press in recent months about the dot-com bubble. It either burst, or is looking decidedly leaky. In either case, it doesn’t seem to have affected the continuing rise of interest, and injections of capital, into the European technology sector.

According to a report in Tornado Insider, a pan-European survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers saw venture funding in technology companies up 70%, to 6.8 billion euros. Overall, about five thousand individual investments were made with an average value of 1.4 million euros. Unsurprisingly, the largest share of investments went to software companies, with business to business eCommerce and Wireless companies both proving popular. According to the PwC research, the trend is continuing upwards in 2000. So - what was all that about a shake-down in technology stocks?

According to Marco Rochat, the change may not show up in the trend charts, but it is still profound. “We don’t think the market crash has changed much, just where the money is going,” said Rochat. Reading between the lines, the technology bubble may well not have burst, but one bubble certainly has - that of throwing money at all possible ventures, in the hope of making some fast returns.

We have recently seen what we hope are the last vestiges of this practice, which is as doomed as it is foolish. Recently, we heard reports of potential investors saying, “put money into the mobile space. Don’t ask questions - just invest!” Scary stuff, as it is based on the fundamentally flawed assumption that new companies in this arena are more likely to succeed than to fail. The message that caused the tech stock crash earlier this year was that there was no guarantee of success, not even for high-profile players. Having learned the lessons, discernment and foresight are the qualities that venture capitalists are bringing to bear. Companies are springing up which enable the quality of ideas, the strength of products and even the capabilities and skills of the staff to be tested before any investment is made - it can only be considered surprising that VC’s were not making these checks in the past.

The technology roller-coaster ride is thrilling, and there are great rewards at stake. However this does not prevent investors from looking before they spend. It is telling that, even given the additional care that is being taken prior to funding decisions, the same number (or greater) of investments are being made. This can only mean one of two things - either a careful eye is enabling companies from investing in the good companies rather than the less-good, or the start-ups themselves are coming to the table with more than a good idea, enthusiasm and flair. Either brings an increased maturity to the game, which will add to the stability of the market in general. Long may the trend continue.

(First published 28 June 2000)

06-30 – Ain’t the PC dead yet?

Ain’t the PC dead yet?

There’s only a few drink cartons and strips of gaffer tape to indicate the presence of PC Expo, which came to a close at the end of last week. One of the debates it spawned was whether there was any future in the Personal Computer: the answer, was of course, as diverse as the IT market itself. Essentially there are two camps, the gadget freaks and the PC diehards: ho would ever have thought that PC companies would be the ones looking staid, next to the new generation of technology companies?

A major strand of activity at PC Expo was caused by companies such as Palm, Handspring and Sony, all touting there wares as the future of technology. Certainly there is a place for the device – there may be more PCs than there are handhelds, but the latter is about to merge with the mobile phone which has already overtaken the PC in worldwide sales. Given the rate of churn in the mobile phone market, in two years time there will e few phone users who do not have PDA application functionality on their phone.

At the same time, PC manufacturers were quick to explain how the market for PCs is going full steam ahead. Based on current statistics the prediction is for 1 billion PCs to have been sold by 2005. According to a study released last month, one of the drivers for PC sales is the PDA – users require a central repository for the data that is spread across multiple devices. Enter the PC, in its role as “the mainframe in the living room.” Trouble is, there are a couple of factors that the report appears to have missed.

The first of these is broadband technologies. Ralph Martino, VP of strategy and marketing for IBM’s personal systems group, was quoted on \link{http://www.news.com,News.com} as saying that broadband communications, in both the wired (xDSL) and wireless (UMTS) forms, would provide a backbone making the PC even more indispensable. Trouble is, broadband is also the enabler of a new technology model – that of the Application Service Provider or ASP.

Individuals and businesses with broadband Internet access be turning more and more to services available over the Web. The reason for this is simple cost-effectiveness: it will be cheaper to do so than to buy and install the applications. Broadband games users, for example, will not have to purchase a copy of a multi-user game before going head to head against their pals; rather, they will put in a credit card number and start to play. The end-node device need only be capable of receiving and displaying the graphics.

Maybe the debate is centring on the wrong topic. Many PCs wil be sold in the future, but they will be very different from the ones we use today. The self-contained units based on the Easy PC initiative, produced by companies such as Dell and HP, are an indication of what is to come. Further indication came at PC Expo, with IBM’s impressive demonstration of a watch-sized PC. The PC architecture may never die, and why should it? It may not be optimal, but it is a perfectly reasonable basis for computing. What is already on the slab, is the need for expensive, complex, noisy, error-prone combinations of hardware and software, either in the home or in the office. This model of computing has never worked, and the sooner we can get it in the ground, the better.

(First published 30 June 2000)

06-30 – Guess how Clinton signed the Digital Signature bill?

Guess how Clinton signed the Digital Signature bill?

A major piece in the security jigsaw dropped into place at the end of last week, as US President Bill Clinton travelled to Philadelphia to sign a bill give electronic signatures the same legal status as handwritten. Quite why he had to travel all that way in this wireless world is quite beyond us, but all the same the Signature signature (sic) represents a very important step indeed.

Anyone who has attended security conferences over the past few years will have realised that there is very little left for the technologists to do. Most of the major problems – authentication, non-repudiation, encryption and the like – were solved years ago and the biggest problem facing security vendors is now how to ensure the adoption of such technologies. One of the main blockers to this adoption process has been the legal basis of the digital signature itself.

Digital signatures employ a public key mechanism. Two keys are used, one private which is used to encrypt the message, and one public which can decrypt it. The rather clever effect of this pairing is that, if a message can be decrypted using a person’s public key, then it must have come from the person as nobody else could have encrypted it. Hence we have the concept of non-repudiation – it becomes possible to guarantee the source of a message.

Security facilities are built into email systems, transactional systems and vertical applications, but they have not been getting the use they deserve. For example, the only emails that we have seen using digital signatures, have been those coming from security vendor companies. This lack of desire has been due in part to the all-or-nothing principle – if nobody is doing it, then nobody does it. It does, however, open up a weak link in the chain: it is possible to hold up an email as evidence of a commitment, but it does not provide a legal basis of its own. Also items such as contracts still require to be signed and posted, or faxed, before they are acceptable: both options are slower and more onerous (and costly) than a purely electronic means. That is, until now.

Once again of course, it will be necessary for other countries than the US to adopt the measure before it will really kick in. This will happen – it is only a matter of time. When it becomes possible for parties to agree contracts and other transactions electronically, the final nail will be hammered into the coffin of paper-based communications.

(First published 30 June 2000)

06-30 – Sun’s second thoughts about Open Source Solaris

Sun’s second thoughts about Open Source Solaris

Sun is developing a bit of a reputation for raising expectations to the highest levels then sheepishly admitting it cannot carry them through. It happened with the standardisation of Java, when Sun lodged the Java specification with standards body ECMA before withdrawing its application a few short months later. It looks likely to happen with Jini, the much-touted plug-and-play standard for devices which has thus far failed to deliver a product. And last week, it was the turn of Sun’s open source initiative, on the rocks only five months after it was announced.

What’s the problem? In this case, it seems to concern the scale of the task. There are nearly ten million lines of code in Solaris , and Sun did not feel it could just plonk it onto the mass market without “making it user friendly” first. It is understandable that massaging ten million lines of code would take a while, but a couple of questions remain.

The first is – what is so unfriendly about the code? Fair enough if this equates to adding a few copyright notices and generating an HTML code browser (à la Java). Less reasonable is if the code needs restructuring or additional comments to make it readable, or worse – are there parts of the code that are currently too convoluted to see? This brings us to the second question – surely a plan was put in place in January, so what has changed to delay the plan? It may be that, on investigation, Sun realised that the problems with the Solaris code were going to take longer to solve than they expected. Now, it may be that this is an attempt to overstate the issue – us commentators are always looking for a wound to rub salt in. But the fact remains that Sun is having to lower expectations about when and how it releases its code to the open community. Probably the biggest issue is this: Sun has realised that, given the profile of Solaris, there will be a horde of points-scorers ready to identify weaknesses, bugs, design faults and security holes in the code and Sun must do everything in its power to minimise any risks.

Sun’s code giveaway will come, but more slowly than was previously announced. Sun are likely to hit their Q3 target, but only for certain sections of the code. According to Anil Gadre, Sun’s vice president and general manager for Solaris software, “the other thing we are finding out is that maybe people actually wanted certain parts and not the whole thing.” Sun is therefor considering releasing the code in a piecemeal fashion. Gadre’s remarks sound a little like Sun is hedging its bets (use of the word “maybe” is the giveaway), and will be a good fig leaf if the time comes to stagger deliveries of the code. Sun will release the code sooner or later, but more with a whimper than a bang.

(First published 30 June 2000)

July 2000

07-06 – EC to Microsoft: We just don’t trust you

EC to Microsoft: We just don’t trust you

Just two days after denying the Wall Street Journal news report claiming that the European Commission would block Microsoft’s investment in a UK cable company, both parties confirmed on Friday that this was indeed the case. According to The Nando Times Microsoft no longer plans to up its stake in Telewest Communications plc, a deal which would have seen the giant investing $3bn to gain control of the company.

Microsoft has never been cagey about its real intentions when investing in cable and other communications software. The plan has always been to develop new markets for the sale of Microsoft software and products: the company knows full well that the cash cows of the PC market will dry up one day. However we are talking about one of the biggest corporations in the world here, and it has got a bit of a reputation for being over-bullish. Hence the anti-trust case which is still running its course, and hence also the stance of the EC which is determined to do what it can to ensure Microsoft does not engage in anti-competitive practices.

It is easy to take a pop at Microsoft but at the same time it is worth considering the other side of the argument. In blocking the deal the EC has effectively prevented a US firm from making a $3bn investment in Europe. This is an indication of the kind of muscle that the EC now holds – without the details of the case we can only hope that the decision was made wisely, and quite clearly it is not something that can happen too often before it starts to damage the economies of the member states. Equally clearly, the EC is so fearful of the monopolistic might of Microsoft that it is prepared to step in and act.

The message that comes through loud and clear is that it is not over yet for the software giant. We have said in the past how the company’s every move would be subject to the most intense scrutiny – having been found guilty of abusing its position (albeit subject to appeal), most onlookers will watch each deal with no little cynicism. The failure of the Telewest deal is indicative that the EC has teeth, and that Microsoft’s corporate future can be compared to walking on eggshells. Bill Gates has already expressed his worry that the DOJ ruling will limit his company’s ability to innovate. Even before the antitrust case reaches a conclusion, it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost. The road ahead could be rocky.

(First published 6 July 2000)

07-06 – Oracle’s NC relaunch – Its not about winning, its about taking part

Oracle’s NC relaunch – Its not about winning, its about taking part

Guess what? An Oracle spin-off company is to launch a new type of computer, called the Network Computer. Hang on – haven’t we heard this before? Let’s just check the facts before we go on.

Oracle first attempt at the NC came in 1996, hot on the heels of the negative press the PC was receiving. Total Cost of Ownership was the name of the game – the PC was turning out more expensive than its list price had implied. It is academic whether Larry Ellison was driven by a brave new world vision or by a desire to kick Bill Gates while he was down: in either case he failed. Microsoft’s Zero Administration Initiative may have been a fig leaf, but it served to allay the overhyped fears of the time. In any case, the momentum behind the Windows-based PC has proved unstoppable.

We knew in November last year that Oracle would be relaunching the NC. Surely the company can’t still be chasing the rainbow of preventing its greatest rival from taking over the world? It is fair to say that the landscape has changed considerably over the past four years – the Internet has arrived and shaken up IT vendors, end-user businesses and consumers alike. You’ve read the stories before, involving great riches but – oh look – some failures too. You know that the future lies in devices and appliances, and that anything goes in the thin client world of the browser-based Internet. You know that services are moving more and more online, what with eCommerce hosting, electronic marketplaces and the stealthy arrival of the Application Service Provider or ASP. Against this background, Oracle’s NC has become an Internet access device, a Net appliance promising a low-cost point of entry to the Web. The question is – will it succeed?

There is no shortage of companies bringing consumer Net appliances to the market. Companies like Netpliance, who only last week increased the price of its I-opener device from $99 to $399, not to mention Intel and Emachines are all sure that a market exists for “pure” net devices, that is computers which can do little but access the Web. One thing is for sure: this market can only exist if consumers have high-speed Internet access – this may be true for cable or ADSL connected users, but these are not yet in the majority even in the United States. In the UK, ADSL trials may have started but the general roll-out is not expected to complete before June next year. In the meantime, companies such as The Free Internet provide 0800 ISDN access for a one-off yearly payment. The second issue is whether the range of services currently offered on the Internet is an adequate replacement for software packages on the PC. Online games still require users to install software; the Microsoft standard word processor is not yet available to consumers over the Web.

For organisations with a budget, such as corporates and government/educational establishments, the NC model starts to make more sense either for companies running a server-based computing model or for those trialling ASP services. Even then, a Citrix-style model is currently needed to ensure that all required applications can be provided over the wire: this model will not suit all comers.

There can be no doubt about the validity of the thin client model. What is less certain is the maturity of the server side of the equation. Even once thin client becomes the dominant model, there is little reason why Oracle should win the lion’s share of the device market as one of the key factors is the interchangeability of devices. Oracle may well succeed in increasing the momentum behind Net appliances, but it is unlikely to claim the market for itself.

(First published 6 July 2000)

07-06 – Web service: still no cigar

Web service: still no cigar

Oh dear, oh dear. Some of the largest corporations in the world have had a year to make improvements, but cannot yet claim to deliver the level of service that is expected of them. At the end of last week, \link{http://www.theregister.co.uk,The Register} reported a Rainer UK study into web responsiveness of the UK FTSE 100 and the US Fortune 100. By “Web responsiveness” read “how long it takes for a company to respond to an email sent via its Web site.” The conclusion of the study was that “40 per cent of the leading UK and US public companies are failing to take the Web seriously as a communications channel.” The results included the following:

·       Of the 200 companies, 148 provided a reasonable Web-based contact mechanism. Of these, 113 responded to the contact email within 30 days

·       The most responsive companies sent a reply in an order of minutes, with pole position being taken by the UK’s National Power

·       The three companies that took over 20 days to respond were all technology providers – Colt Telecom won the wooden spoon, followed closely by SBC Communications and Dell Computer.

Stephen Waddington, managing director of Rainer in London, was reported to be appalled by the findings of the study. “Two in every five of the Fortune 100 and FTSE 100 Web sites are little more than corporate wallpaper,” he claimed.

Waddington was right to be appalled. The Internet has been taking some stick in recent months, with some major casualties of eCommerce proving that clicks-and-mortar ain’t necessarily going to win over bricks-and-mortar. It is becoming abundantly clear that the success stories of the future will be those companies that can run successful businesses in both the physical and virtual domains.

It is fair to say that email is not the be-all and end-all of eCommerce. The cliché “the competition is only a click away” refers to difficulties purchasing goods and services, rather than getting a response to a electronic enquiry. However, this survey is a good indicator of the integration between clicks and bricks. A year ago, eCommerce was seen as a mechanism for reaching out to the global marketplace. Six months ago, it was driving the need for back-end application integration. Today, eCommerce is recognising what many businesses have always known - that customer service is the major differentiator. Companies achieving sub-hour response times on queries have clearly had the wherewithal to acknowledge this and to do something about it. The other companies have a stark choice: to learn the easy way, from surveys such as this, or the hard way as customers vote with their mice.

(First published 6 July 2000)

07-14 – MCI WorldCom and Sprint run into the sand

MCI WorldCom and Sprint run into the sand

All is not well for either MCI WorldCom or Sprint, as the failure of the proposed merger between the two companies,. has left each in danger of being taken over. While this may be not such a bad thing for Sprint, whose smaller size and mobile technology capability make it an attractive addition to the portfolio of any major carrier, it can only be seen as damaging for Bernard Ebbers’ company. Coupled with the outages at its MAE West facility that sent shock waves across the Net, last week was not one of the best ever in MCI WorldCom’s history.

Not that the deal was very likely to go ahead. As we reported \link{http://www.it-director.com/99-09-29-1.html,here} in September last year, the deal hit rocky ground as it left the starting blocks. At the time MCI WorldCom was already in trouble with the EC over its takeover of Cable and Wireless, and the proposed takeover of Sprint caused an immediate hostile reaction from the Department of Justice. The final decision by the two companies came Thursday last week, two weeks after the DOJ started the legal process of blocking the $120 million merger.

MCI WorldCom must be devastated. The deal with Sprint would have added to MCI’s portfolio some capabilities that the company wanted to enable it to keep its position as one of the major US and international telecommunications companies. The deal is mobile: Sprint may be the number 3 long distance carrier in the US, which is the reason the DOJ wanted to block the deal, but this is not what attracted MCI WorldCom which urgently needed a slice of the burgeoning mobile market. Now the merger is off, the company must think again at the same time as steeling itself against a raft of takeover bids of its own (not to mention a share price which has dropped over a third since the merger was first announced - down to $47 from $75). BT has been rumoured to be considering a purchase, as well as NTT and Deutsche Telecom.

Where next for MCI WorldCom? If it was not bought first, maybe it would consider buying Orange if the latter’s deal with France Telecom runs into the weeds. This would at least give the company some mobile capabilities, albeit not as extensive (or as geographically attractive to the US-based company) as would have been the case with Sprint. All is not lost but it will be a good few months before MCI WorldCom can put these events into the past.

(First published 14 July 2000)

07-14 – Microsoft for rent

Microsoft for rent

If it’s Microsoft, it’s good, right? Well in this case it just might be. On Friday the company launched its software-for-rent strategy in which software licensing will be paid for on a subscription basis rather than as a one-off fee. This announcement is expected to be the first of a series that will align the company with the principles and practice of Application Service Provision (ASP), or the delivery of applications over the wire.

The main strengths of the subscription model for applications are based on addressing the current issues of software delivery and licensing. The current approach causes multiple versions, incompatible installations and (perhaps most infuriatingly) the need to pay for irrelevant parts of bloated software bundles. Let’s be honest here – how many times have you really used that copy of Microsoft Access? Furthermore there is the constant bugbear of having to pay for upgrades to packages in order to resolve bugs in previous versions. Wouldn’t it be great if, for a one-off, yearly fee we only have to buy what we want and all upgrades are free? Yes – if the price is right.

The only flaw so far in Microsoft’s strategy is the issue of pricing. In pilot studies, the company took the list price of a package and divided it by 24, effectively meaning that if you are likely to use a package for more than two years without upgrading then you might as well buy it outright. That sounds a bit steep to say the least – in other words, one advantage Microsoft will not be promoting over shrink-wrapped software is that of cost. Of course this does not have to be the only costing model. It should be possible to buy a package for a month, for example, or even for a minute (for example to open and print an attachment created by an obscure package). Certain packages – the obvious ones being word processors, spreadsheets, email and Web browsers, should rightly command a premium as they are them most used (but conversely, maybe should also be subject to quantity discounts). The fact is that the issue of cost has yet to be fully fleshed out, by Microsoft and everybody else. It is clear that different application types will need different models – for example it is unlikely that any corporation will be running SAP on a pay-as-you-go basis. However the definition of these models – and how they fit together – will take time.

Ultimately we see one of the greatest strengths of the ASP model to be one of granularity. Everything costs, but it should (as in, we need it to be) possible to pay for specific software functionality on an as-needed basis rather than through purchasing applications just in case. This is true for office applications, enterprise packages or anything else. Over the next few years, hopeful vendors will attempt different ways of enticing corporate customers to invest in their own approaches. The customer, or the business case, shall decide.

(First published 14 July 2000)

07-14 – Red Sun is rising on Linux

Red Sun is rising on Linux

And the conclusion is – Linux will not conquer the desktop or the laptop, but will win on embedded devices. This isn’t idle speculation: let’s face it – when a significant number of electronics manufacturers from the World centre of such products line up behind Linux, then the rest of us should take note.

Linux isn’t necessarily doomed on the desktop. Indeed, it might well have faced a rosy future if it wasn’t for the question: “what is the point?” The world has already chosen an operating system and hardware architecture which, whatever its faults, is proving adequate for most uses. Linux will not succeed on the desktop any more than, say, Windows 2000 – neither gives a user sufficient additional value to merit the swap. There will always be advocates for desktop Linux but the mainstream has already flowed one way downhill and would take some pushing to get it down a different route.

On embedded devices, however, we can see a different story. The advantages (and disadvantages) of embedded Linux have already been covered, but advantages do not a product make. How different the world appears when companies like Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Mitsubishi and so on – 23 of them in all – line up behind the operating system. This isn’t one company setting a strategy to give it USP against its competitors, or a hopeful start-up looking for a niche. The message is clear: Linux is a perfectly adequate operating system for us to use in our devices. So much so, that we want to work together to make it even better.

Sony has been one of the loudest advocates of Linux. Already it has announced its support for the Linux-based TiVo video appliance, which can store up to 30 hours of TV programming. On ZDNet in March, it was noted that a Sony representative revealed the intention to use Linux in future generations of the Playstation. “We needed a stable operating system,” explained tongue-in-cheek Phil Harrison, of Sony Entertainment America Inc.

So – what is enticing Japanese companies down the open source route? The obvious reason is cost – apart from the obvious research and development investment, there is no charges for licensing Linux which brings down product costs significantly (compared to licensing, say, Microsoft or Palm products). The second reason is the chicken-and-egg argument of choosing what everyone else is using. This is what makes it clear that embedded Linux is being taken seriously – everyone is doing it. There may also be an element of Japan seizing the opportunity to leap-frog the US software industry, an area that has only had limited success for Japan in the past.

There is one other consequence of the Linux move. Leaving the PC industry aside, electronics companies have traditionally taken proprietary approaches to platforms. Take, for example, the games system market with each of Sega, Nintendo and Sony guarding their own platforms for their own games. With Linux at the core we may well see an opening up of such platforms, with differentiation being on brand and functionality rather than on available software. Whatever happens, there can be no doubt that Linux has won over a large and powerful proportion of the electronics industry. It may not win on the desktop PC but given its huge potential elsewhere – plus the potential for embedded devices to put the squeeze on desktop computers – it is unlikely to be too upset.

(First published 14 July 2000)

07-21 – eCommerce comes in from the cold

eCommerce comes in from the cold

The bubble that is eCommerce may have burst, but that does not downgrade its potential for companies new and old. This is the message that may be garnered from recent events, notably the closure of News International Network News service, the acquisition of CDNow by Bertelsmann and the go-ahead given to LetsBuyIt.com by financial analysts.

Perhaps it is the closure of the Network News office in London (with the result that 30 staff are being made redundant) that is the most telling. The intention is to roll the production online versions of newspapers such as the Times and the Sunday Times, back into the paper-based newspaper development. Clearly running Network News as an autonomous operation did not work, however we can rest assured that online versions of these papers will continue to be produced.

Secondly, Bertelsmann are buying the beleaguered CDNow for $117 million. CDNow’s shares have tumbled from $21 last July to the current levels of $2.8, and the company has been searching for a buyer since early this year. Bertelsmann will be keeping the CDNow brand going, but the company will become just a front for part of its eCommerce division. Ironically, CDNow also recently closed its London office.

Following last minute discussions, banks are now satisfied that the LetsBuyIt.com launch is worth the risk. By the time you read this, the company should have been launched.

Put all these three things together ans a pattern emerges. The launch of LetsBuyIt.com is an indication that, despite the negative publicity surrounding dot-com companies, there is still money in them there hills. The Gold Rush may be over but the gold mines are still profitable. What is interesting though, is the change of perspective. LetsBuyIt.com wasn’t given free rein, based on the (now disproved) assertion that being on the Web was a license to print money. The company had an uphill struggle to convince the banks that it was all worthwhile. The other assertion which can now be laid to rest is that dot-coms are the only way of doing business. Bother Network News and CDNow have found that their new-and-improved business models were no substitute for the old, established methods and both have now been brought back in line.

Things are not as simple as this of course. Bertelsmann has gone through substantial restructuring, not all of it successful, to meet the demands of the Web. However it has shown that it can compete. Similarly, by closing Network News, News International are saying “we don’t need a separate company for this – we can change ourselves to meet the demands of the Web.

This is all sobering stuff and is indicative of the maturity level that the Web has now reached. The promise of eCommerce remains, but not at the detriment of all that went before it. There is still room on the Web for the Bertelsmanns and News Internationals among the Amazons and LetsBuyIts, and vice versa.

(First published 21 July 2000)

07-21 – Unbundling on course, but so was the Titanic

Unbundling on course, but so was the Titanic

Unknown to its navigator, the Titanic was several miles off course when it ran into difficulties with ultimately tragic consequences, seeing its doom for the first time only as the mother of all icebergs loomed out of the fog.

Consider recent events surrounding handling of the unbundling issue. Both BT and Oftel are sending out mixed messages with respect to both opening up exchanges and roll-out of ADSL services. We only have to look at a single recent story on VNU.com to get the picture:

• “The EC has proposed a draft law requiring European Union member states to unbundle their local telephone networks by 31 December 2000”

• “Oftel … is “well on schedule” to meet the December 2000 deadline, even if unbundled services wouldn’t be widely available by then” – a contradictory statement in itself and one which falls short of EC requirements

• “A BT spokesman said the company is on course to meet the deadlines agreed with Oftel, and unbundled services would be working by 31 July 2001.” – another contradictory statement, considering Oftel’s “well on schedule” remarks above.

Other information in the press and on Oftel’s web site muddies the icy waters still further. Rival telcos are to gain only limited access to local exchanges between now and the end of the year, with up to a hundred to be made available for “pilot projects.” The concept of a pilot project does not sit well with that of a “limited service” – Oftel’s term to describe what would be available by year-end.

Clearly it is in BT’s interest to slow down the process in any way it can. ADSL is a key element as it is the “killer app” that will give subscribers real reason to transfer allegiances, hence BT can use any time it has left to roll out ADSL kit to local exchanges, giving its OpenWorld service the incumbent position (“Why wait months for the competitor service? Sign up with BT today!”) and also tying up valuable floor space in the local exchange. Let’s face it, no company with any nouse would open the doors to the competition before getting its own act together. Unfortunately for BT, past delays in its ADSL strategy have got the company into the situation it now finds itself. It is running out of time, and even the timescales it thought it had agreed were cut by six months in Lisbon.

Meanwhile, the competition are not just settling back and taking this. BT are treading a fine line, as if it can be proved (and it would not take much) that BT are damaging the business of other telcos, they could be sued for enormous sums. Companies considering legal action are Fibernet, Colt Telecommunications and Global Crossing; it is likely that others will follow suit.

So where’s the iceberg? The hard deadline is the end of 2000. Neither BT nor Oftel are happy with this, but they do not have much of a case. The EC will not allow BT to restrict its rivals as it is currently doing, nor will the competitors themselves. The difference with the Titanic is that the navigator did not know that the ship was off course, and nobody could have seen through the fog guessed the scale or potential damage that the iceberg could have. In this case, however, there is no fog, only a smokescreen from a company trying in vain to protect assets it no longer really owns.

(First published 21 July 2000)

07-21 – Would mad cows use mobile phones?

Would mad cows use mobile phones?

It’s niggling doubt time. Do mobile phones push out harmful radiation or not? Let’s ask the scientists. Trouble is, can we trust them? It isn’t a case of corruption, but contradictory evidence that is then used by our own, dear politicians to promote their own agendas. In the UK, the starkest example of this was the unfortunate case of “la vache folle”, as they say over the channel. British beef was so, so safe to eat that the then Minister of Agriculture even went on television with if daughter, who was “encouraged” to eat a beefburger on film. We know politicians are manipulative, but to see them stooping so low in public still comes as a shock, especially as pockets of the human form of the disease – CJD – have now been traced to production methods of baby food and school dinners. The over-riding conclusion that we have to reach (apart from the dubious nature of politicians) is that science cannot necessarily be trusted. The adage that “there is no evidence to prove a link” does not mean that there isn’t a link, just that we are too primitive to find one.

And so to mobile phones. To coin a phrase, there is no evidence to prove a link between microwave emissions from mobile phones, and brain cancer. Sure, the frequency used is that used by ovens as it coincides with the frequency of boiling water. Sure, heat scans of phone users show the area of the head around the phone is warmer than its surroundings. But – no evidence to prove a link.

It does not matter if the risk is small. While uncertainly reigns (and it always will, until a link is found), it is essential that any potential risk is seen to be minimised. We saw this with the BSE tragedy that followed the world-wide ban on British beef, in that thousands of cows were slaughtered. What we have not seen so far is mobile manufacturers working to minimise the risk of microwave emissions. Not, that is, until now.

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) in the US has gained agreement from mobile manufacturers to publish the emission levels of mobile phones. So far the only company to agree to the August 1 deadline is Ericsson, but Nokia and Motorola are said to be following suit. In itself, this may not sound like much but this step is a major one. In publishing this information, companies are opening a door to scrutiny. It is inevitable that an emissions league table will be published, and equally inevitable that phones with higher emissions will be rejected in favour of lower-emission phones. Over the years, phone manufacturers have been producing mobile phones with decreasing emission levels. Market forces will give added impetus to further improvements, such as the integration of additional shielding.

The mobile phone issue may or may not be a red herring, but following the BSE calamity we should have learned that trusting science at face value was not an option. Even if the risk is small, it is worth encouraging any move to reduce that risk still lower.

(First published 21 July 2000)

07-31 – Microsoft Windows for free

Microsoft Windows for free

Microsoft looks scarily close to becoming innovative. Sure, the ideas may have been developed elsewhere, but with its games console, set-top box and wireless appliance, the company is really making a go of it. The company previewed several new technologies at an analyst briefing at the end of last week. Meanwhile, at another briefing, Microsoft updated journalists on the operating systems state of play – very much in the Microsoft old school. These two lines of attack – old and new – will define the essentials of the company over the next few years.

Forget dot-Net, forget C-Sharp. All those big announcements make nice wallpaper, but they are not really where the action is for a product company. For Microsoft, shareholder value is about shipping product, and in the past it has to be said that they have been remarkably successful at it – more successful, indeed, than any other company in the world.

Traditionally, Microsoft has made its money selling three product lines: operating systems, office applications and development tools. It has wiped the floor with the competition in all three areas, but broad as this market may be, sooner or later it will be saturated. If we look at the operating system announcements, they are in fact (just like their predecessors) details of upgrades rather than anything new. The media player may be updated, the Web browser may support new forms of content but the underlying technology remains essentially the same. With the new release of WindowsME, aimed at replacing Windows 95 and 98, Microsoft are moving closer to a code base shared with Windows 2000 (and its own replacement, codenamed Whistler). Clearly this benefits Microsoft, but is unlikely to cut much ice with the end user. Even the recent forays into new look-and-feels have been little more than a rehash of the old. An OS is an OS is an OS, and that’s all there is to it.

It would be impossibly un-PC (sic) for Microsoft to ditch this model, particularly as there’s life in the old cash cow yet. To all intents and purposes Windows is Microsoft and to question it would be like the Pope denouncing Christianity. So – Windows is still very much strategic, but so is the “great software on any device” tag line – enter the new product lines.

By entering the domain of the appliance – the games console, video engine, wireless PDA or whatever – Microsoft is recognising one crucial fact. With appliances, nobody cares about what is under the bonnet, the external functionality is more important than the internal components. This is the rationale behind other companies (such as \link{http://www.it-analysis.com/00-07-14-1.html,these})using Linux – there is no operating system sell, it is the box that counts. Also, with Linux there is no operating system buy as it is license- and cost-free. Microsoft cannot compete at the OS level as others are giving it away, hence they are competing at the level of the complete device. This is a dangerous game – hardware margins are notoriously lower than software margins – but the company has no other choice.

By bundling Windows with the device, Microsoft is essentially giving it away. In doing so it gives itself an exit strategy from the oncoming drought in the OS space. Perhaps more importantly, it can move on without losing face – a necessity in the technology market, where image counts for far more than people give it credit.

(First published 31 July 2000)

07-31 – Napster movement goes underground, people responsible

Napster movement goes underground, people responsible

In the oft-downloaded words of the Carpenters, “It’s only just begun…” Napster may have until Friday to shut down its operations, but it doesn’t take much to realise that the injunction will not spell the end of online piracy of copyrighted materials. The judgement was against Napster alone, and not the individuals using it – according to \link{http://www.news.com,News.com}, this would require lawsuits to be filed against individuals. Similarly, peer-to-peer duplication products such as Gnutella, Centrata and Akamai (covered \link{http://www.it-analysis.com,here} are not affected as this would also require individuals to be pursued. It looks like, whatever happens in the future, individuals hold the key.

Let’s get one thing straight. Piracy of any creative work is a bad thing, as it is stealing from the livelihood of its creator not to mention the agencies that work on his or her behalf. These may be perceived as “the enemy,” capitalist men in suits who like nothing more than to make a fast buck off the backs of the innocent public. The major record labels and publishers do provide a necessary service – without them, for example, Harry Potter might still have been a manuscript languishing in the bottom of the drawer. All the same, recordings are priced high and the temptation to make copies of them has been too great for any of us. If there is anybody out there that has not, at some time, taped an album or a song off the radio, speak out! We want to hear from you.

Together, digital quality recordings and the Internet changed a problem that was seen as a necessary evil by the publishing industry, to one which could have catastrophic consequences. This is probably a reasonably accurate analysis, if the duplication and distribution of MP3’s were not stopped. The question is, can it really be stopped? One company – Napster – has gone down, but others (such as AppleSoup) exist. Is the RIAA going to sue every bunch of students that put together a few lines of code to permit peer-to-peer file sharing? Let’s face it, even an Instant Messaging facility and an email service is sufficient to allow an exchange of information on pirated files, not to mention the files themselves, which could be exchanged automatically using facilities such as ftpmail.

Sooner or later, attention has to turn from the pirating software to the pirates. In the UK in the eighties, a levy was put on blank cassettes to recompense recording companies for lost sales, however it is difficult to see what similar mechanism could be put in place for the Web.

Given the vagaries of human nature, it is possible that an honour system is the only one that will possibly work. Stephen King may have had only limited success on the first day of his online publishing venture but the idea is sound: download a chapter of my book, if you pay I’ll publish the next one. The only difficulty is that it is a one-shot operation – once the entire book is published, being on the Net it will be subject to the same issues as any other online work. The concept of a “second edition” goes out of the window.

As more and more people get online, and as connection speeds improve, the problem of piracy can only increase. This is inevitable, whatever lawsuits may take place – savvy students and others the world over are unlikely to take too much note of the results. If the recording industry wants results, it must appeal to the individuals responsible for both its existence and its possible demise. It may get results, but it will not get everything its own way.

(First published 31 July 2000)

07-31 – TANSTAA Free Internet Service

TANSTAA Free Internet Service

Oh, how the wired world must envy the UK! Over here in Blighty, we have free Internet Services, and what a wonderful place it is to be. Well, it would be if only such services worked. Unfortunately the realities are proving shockingly different to the hyperbolae.

Take LineOne, for example. This ISP was originally a subscription-based service, before adopting the “free” model where LineOne took part of the cost of the call to finance the service. In April this year, LineOne launched a joint venture with low-cost call provider Quip, in which £5 per month of telephone calls would qualify the subscriber for free Internet access. The initial service was swamped – users reported slow connections after many failed connection attempts: an infrastructure upgrade speeded up the free service but it continued to degrade and at peak times was almost unusable. The problems also impacted on performance for the “paying” customers. Two weeks ago, a letter was sent to the Quip subscribers saying free access would be terminated in September, and the original £20 cost of the Quip box would be refunded in call charges. So – no loss financially, just in time and effort.

Second we have Breathe. At the end of last week company took the shocking step of disconnecting some of its heavier users and cancelling their subscriptions, all in the name of customer service. A note was sent out saying that the service was discontinued and giving a web address for those affected to claim their money back, but – as one subscriber pointed out – how the heck do you get there, once your Internet connection has been cut off? This move is staggeringly insensitive and will most likely prove very damaging to Breathe’s business. Finally, users of one of the more successful free ISPs – \link{http://www.thefreeinternet.net,The Free Internet} – have been finding that the 0800 calls have been appearing as chargeable calls on their phone bills. Other horror stories, concerning free service providers such as Screaming.net and others, abound.

What is going wrong? There is the inevitable issue of service quality – in LineOne’s case, the company misjudged demand and failed to protect its existing subscribers from its new services. Having decided that its business model is fatally flawed, it looks like the company is extracting itself reasonably well from a situation it clearly finds untenable. As for Breathe, who has also suffered from service level failures, the reaction of the company against its customers absolutely cannot be condoned. It will be interesting in the extreme to see how the company puts this behind them.

The bottom line is the bottom line – there is nothing for free in this world. The business model of The Free Internet is, in fact, a subscription model and it is likely that this is the only model that can work: costs may be reduced to £50 per year, but they do not vanish completely. Companies giving the impression that they can deliver on the promise of 100% free services, will be found out sooner or later. Nice dream, nice dream.

(First published 31 July 2000)

August 2000

08-25 – CA shifts innovation from marketing to business strategy

CA shifts innovation from marketing to business strategy

Many companies exist by running two lines of products. There are the cash-cow product lines, which keep the company going through thick and thin, and then we have the showroom products that keep the company looking innovative and which give it a chance to compete in the years to come. For a software industry example we need look no further than Microsoft, which continues to reap the harvest of Windows and Office while announcing new strategies such as .NET to show how it is keeping up with the game. Less obvious, but similarly split is Computer Associates, which likes to portray itself as a future-looking company whilst all the while relying on its mainframe-based products to bring in the money. Unlike with Microsoft (which can guarantee a good few years of revenue from its older stable of products), the clock is ticking for CA. There comes a time for every company to make the new range of products strategic, and lave the older lines to wither a little (and perhaps, to die later on).

CA’s innovation USP is two-pronged. First up are is Neugents - software modules that use artificial intelligence technology to draw conclusions, such as the likelihood of a server crashing, or to draw out patterns and trends in business data. The second strand is 3D visualisation, as demonstrated through the wrap-around interface of Unicenter TNG (not to mention the acquisition of graphics company Viewpoint last summer).

The shine was well and truly taken off the CA logo a couple of weeks ago, as Sanjay Kumar took over from Charles Wang as CEO of the company. This unprecedented step (Wang has been CEO since the company’s formation) came as a result of a series of bad performance announcements and profit warnings. Kumar’s is stated to be to intensify efforts in the more innovative, growth areas of CA’s business.

Last week’s announcement of the release of the stand-alone package Neugents ii was the first of many that will no doubt see CA’s key differentiators being brought to the fore. To be fair on CA, the company announced months ago that it would be “componentising” its product portfolio – a strategy which (in the form of Neugents ii) is now starting to get results.

Over the next few months we can expect to see CA release new products to give it a real foothold in what should turn out to be exciting new markets. It would not come as a surprise for Kumar to take the unprecedented step of replacing the old, dependable approach to its mature product lines for one that is more slash and burn than weed and feed. However it remains to be seen whether he can turn around the behemoth and make it dance. Truth be told, for CA to be successful in the long term the real innovation will need to take place in the boardroom and not in the product catalogue. The CA well is drying up, giving the company little choice but to move the more innovative product lines to the centre of its business strategy rather than just its marketing.

(First published 25 August 2000)

September 2000

09-01 – How many Open Source developers does it take…

How many Open Source developers does it take…

There is certainly no shortage of companies offering up their products to the open source movement at the moment. Last week, IBM announced its plans to release the source code to its AFS enterprise file system to the “developer community.” A few weeks ago, as we discussed \link{http://www.it-director.com/00-07-03-3.html,here} Sun Microsystems admitted to difficulties in opening up Solaris. This relentless march of companies is delivering a growing stack of source code to the seemingly infinite resource pool that makes up the open source movement. The cathedral builders are handing over their plans to the bazaars, and the world will be a better place for it. That’s the theory anyway – in practice, as demonstrated by the recent announcement of a company-sponsored open source laboratory, it is the major corporations that rule the roost.

As far as we know there are no statistics concerning the breakdown of the open source movement into its constituent developer types. It seems reasonable that there are three categories:

- commercial developers, who are salaried workers tasked with the modifications for business reasons

- academic staff and students, with lectureships, research grants and undergraduate projects to spare

- miscellaneous others who dabble or spend their waking hours working on code.

The utopian idea of any of these individuals developing for the greater good of mankind is unrealistic: each has a goal in mind that may be commercial or personal. It is absolutely not be the case that every release, by a vendor, of code to the community is seized upon with delight and absorbed automatically into the great open source repository in the sky. Two facts are clear about the release of code – that it does not imply that a vendor is going to stop working on it (rather, that any work will be more transparent), and that there is no real loss of ownership. Just as Linus Torvalds still has power of veto over the Linux kernel, so Sun and IBM will still keep control over their own offerings.

In fact, when a large company “opens” its code, it amounts to little more than opening up its APIs. Sure, you can see the code and modify it if you like, but only of you are willing to take the time and effort to understand it in detail, not to mention construct the development and test environments necessary to enhance it. Anyone that has worked on file system development, particularly something as complex as AFS knows exactly how unlikely it is that anybody will understand the code, let alone want to modify it. In other words, IBM is nodding in the direction of the open source movement as a whole rather than facilitating anything in particular. Some companies may choose to download the code, and may even decide to build on it but it is unlikely they would do so without working in partnership with IBM. So – if it isn’t that generous an arrangement, what is it about? Making money, of course, though not directly.

There is nothing new here. Companies have been using the open source model for perceived competitive advantage for many years. Novell, for example, is releasing the source of parts of (note that) NDS in an aim to dominate the directory space against its main competitor, Microsoft. As we reported \link{http://www.it-director.com/99-09-01-3.html,here} Novell’s own bugbear is TRG, which offers a NetWare-compatible file system as a free download from its \link{http://www.timpanogas.com,web site}. This product is open source and comes with the thinly disguised aim to take away Novell’s market share. Similarly, it is no secret that IBM is putting its back into Linux, despite having perfectly workable Unix-a-likes of its own (and probably scuppering the 64 bit AIX replacement, Monterey, in the process). Its motives are to reduce the costs of infrastructure software and make life very difficult for companies who depend on such things for the bulk of their revenue.

Open source is not the sub-culture that so many would love it to be. This sub-culture exists, but it is by far a minority in an open source world that is controlled, as ever, by the corporations. The ultimate success of open source, to be adopted by the mainstream, will also be its doom.

(First published 1 September 2000)

09-01 – Marillion.com – turning the record industry on its head

Marillion.com – turning the record industry on its head

It is no secret that the music business makes a fickle bedfellow. Marillion may be thought of today, if at all, as the prog-rock group that had a brief string of folksy hits in the eighties before losing its hydrophilic lead singer and fading into obscurity. This popular perception is not shared by the ever-loyal following that the band still enjoys, however it has been proving increasingly difficult for Marillion to make any mark on the music mainstream. That is, until last month, when the band proved it still had something to sing about by using the power of the Web (sic) to leverage a major recording deal.

This is how it works. A band wanting to make an album gets an advance from recording company, to be set against estimated royalties. When the CD hits the shops, the first tranche of income is used to pay back the advance. Inevitably less popular bands have less negotiating power with the recording companies, hence advances (and good percentages) can be hard to come by. In addition, such contracts give very little flexibility in terms of how the music is released, or even what should be included on the album.

Even bands with a good following still need the advance – to cover the production costs, not to mention that the musicians have to eat. Like many bands that are fed up of living hand-to-mouth, Marillion has been puzzling over this conundrum – how to make an album that it knows it can sell, without putting itself at the mercy of the recording industry? The answer is as simple as it is profound.

In June this year the band members put out an appeal on their http://www.marillion.com web site}, and emailed their fans. The question was this: “If we asked you to pay in advance for the next album, would you do it?” The response was staggering – nearly five thousand respondents said they would, leading Marillion to take a leap of faith and go ahead with the idea. Estimates suggest that over £50,000 of advance orders have already been taken.

The benefits are clear. First of all, Marillion has been given the wherewithal to record an album, with the only commitment being to deliver a CD early next year. Marillion have no obligations to any record company, so there are no licensing issues and no limitations to what the band can do artistically. This leads to the second point. Effectively, what Marillion have done is shown that the album will sell – effectively, it already has. This puts them in a very strong position to negotiate for its distribution. According to Lucy Jordache, Marillion’s marketing manager, most of the major labels were keen to accept Marillion back onto their books before EMI won the deal. This time, without the shackles of the advance, the band has been able to put together a very nice package indeed.

In using the Web, Marillion’s goal was not to miss out the corporate middlemen, but to give themselves some security and a stronger negotiating position. This reflects the stance taken by Stephen King, whose recent publication of “The Plant” at $1 per instalment threatens to be “Big Publishing’s worst nightmare”. King was quick to agree that, though this might knock the publishers off their laurels, it would not completely destroy the publishing industry. At the same time it was seen as trailblazing for “midlist … and marginalized writers who see a future outside the mainstream,” according to the author. At the time Stephen King’s move was accused of being more hype than substance. However, few could deny that Marillion have managed to get tangible results from their online strategy.

In the words of the Marillion song King, “they call you a genius cause you’re easier to sell.” With bands and authors selling themselves over the Internet, the recording industry looks set for interesting times ahead.

(First published 1 September 2000)

09-08 – mCommerce – less big bang, more whimper

mCommerce – less big bang, more whimper

It would be dangerous to say that analyst firms make things up, but of two reports just out, one must be wrong. The first, from Forrester Research, puts the value of mobile transactions at £3.2 billion by 2005. The second, from IDC, says it’ll be £25 billion by 2004. If we’re not mistaken that’s a factor of ten.

It has to be said that neither figure is particularly small. The smallest percentage of Forrester’s estimated figure would still be a worthy addition to the revenues of any company. All the same, it is not enough to send businesses into a panic in the same way as, say, eCommerce has done. From Forrester’s point of view, the figure represents a mere 3% of online retail revenues – let’s face it, most businesses are still trying to get their heads round how they can get a slice of the other £95 billion. Even given IDC’s more inflated figure, mCommerce is still the icing but eBusiness is very much the cake.

Much would appear to depend on the form factor of tomorrow’s mobile devices. Mobile phones are small, neat and almost impossible to do anything with, other than make phone calls. Given this, mCommerce transactions need to be as easy and quick to perform as tapping in a phone number and saying “I’d like to order a pizza, please.” There are some obvious wins for mCommerce, for example online betting at crowded sports events. However many currently touted applications for mobile devices are deep pan pie in the sky – Robbie Coltrane may want to check his bank balance from his hotel room, but I can’t see the need myself.

The hype around mCommerce is exactly that – hype. Fortunately it appears that the bubble is bursting well in advance of it doing any serious damage. There can be no denying that location-sensitive services will become a reality and our fast-paced city dwellers will no doubt decide that the world is a better place for them. However this is the stuff of the future, and even then will not have a serious impact on the online transaction count. Here’s a simple exercise – list all the things you might need to buy when on one place, compared to all the things you might buy going from one place to another. One list is big and the other is small, right? QED.

Things will be different in ten years’ time, when UMTS broadband access is available to mobile devices. By that time it will be questionable whether most punters will know, or care, whether a given transaction is taking place from a land-based or a wireless connection. In the short term, the additional functionality being built into mobile phones will sit, and wait, until its users determine a real use for it.

(First published 8 September 2000)

09-08 – Sony - lies and on the take?

Sony - lies and on the take?

Let’s just get this right. The Sony PlayStation 2 has sold 3 million units so far, the US has just pre-ordered 1.5 million units and meanwhile, in the UK, only 200,000 of the things are going to be available for Christmas. The nice people from Sony are trying to tell us that this is not a marketing ploy and, frankly, we believe ‘em.

The UK pre-order launch of the Sony PlayStation 2 happened at midnight on Thursday last week. High street retailers such as Dixons opened their doors to bleary-eyed queues, determined that little Jonny would get what he wanted this Christmas. Consumers hoping to wait until after the weekend may well be disappointed.

According to Sony’s Playstation \link{http://www.playstation-europe.com/hardware/playstation2.jhtml), the European release date for the PS2 has been delayed to Novemer 24 “due to completely unforeseeable and unprecedented consumer demand for the PS 2 in Japan.” This may or may not be true – production is production. However its paltry rationing of the devices for the UK market smacks ever-so-slightly of “looking after one’s own.” Does that sound at all like sour grapes to you?

With what is currently the most powerful games platform (and, arguably, some of the best titles) out of all the console manufacturers, Sony are in a position to gamble with the consumer. By the time that the PS2’s nearest rivals, Microsoft’s X-Box and Nintendo’s GameCube, get anywhere near the market, Sony expect to have already shipped a good 10 million units across Europe, roughly half of what the company expects to ship worldwide this financial year. Competitors will arrive at the party only to find that the guests have already moved on (no doubt forming an orderly queue for the PlayStation3). Meanwhile, before the event, Sony can afford to pump up the prices (to £100 more than what is to be paid in the States) and justify an additional 25 quid for the right to buy.

Grumpiness aside, there can be no doubt that Sony is onto an absolute winner with its games console. The manufacturer is already a victim of its own success – fortunately it has no real competition at the moment otherwise it could have missed the boat. Ask any child which device he would rather had and brace yourself for the reply that will appear obvious to anybody under 20. “Why, a Play Station of course!” This attitude does not limit itself to the younger generations – we know plenty of seemingly mature adults who are holding out for this latest device.

How exactly the company has done it is unclear, but there can be no denying that (in the material world we call Europe) the PS2 is a thing to have. If it achieves nothing else, the arrival of the PS2 will set the minimum standard for games consoles. Bargain hunters, look out for older devices going for a song in second hand stores and online auctions, from January 2001.

(First published 8 September 2000)

09-08 – XML – in, out, in, out

XML – in, out, in, out

There were two seemingly conflicting reports about XML adoption last week - both appeared in UK IT rag Computer Weekly. The first trumpeted the fact that the Police in Scotland have decided to adopt an XML-based architecture for its main applications. The second dealt with the decision by the National Health Service (NHS) to stick with an EDI-based strategy. So, is XML right or is it wrong? Is XML ready or is it not? Perhaps most importantly, does the UK have a coherent strategy or does it not?

It is pleasing to note that the Scottish Police are not jumping straight into XML with both feet. A firearms licensing package has been built as a proof-of-concept system. This package is now to be piloted by Fife police force, before being rolled out across Scotland. Should the pilot prove successful, additional applications are planned including “command and control, personnel, custody, intelligence and crime management,” according to Computer Weekly. Already, sponsors of the firearms package are expressing delight at the fact that it took only 6 months to write, rather than the “six months … it would have taken in the past.” How very encouraging.

Meanwhile, south of the border the NHS is paining a different picture about XML. Far from the “flexible, scalable adjectives” being used in Scotland, NHS executives talk about XML being “uncoordinated” and less reliable than EDI. “If we go down the XML route now we would have to wait two years to get proper protocols,” said Rick Jones, author of a report into the use of XML for medical applications.

There seems to be a difference of perspective here. The Scottish Police are saying “let’s give it a go, nothing ventured, need the experience” and are having some good results. The NHS meanwhile are saying “not my job mate, it ain’t ready, we’ll stick with what we’ve got.” These approaches are diametrically opposed and only one of them permits the organisation concerned to keep on top of the new technologies. By burying its head in the sand, the NHS is missing out on more flexible, interoperable architectures, not to mention infrastructure and development cost savings and the potential for new applications.

It is worth mentioning a point made in each of the report – who is in charge. In the Scottish Police the forces themselves, driven by the Scottish Association of Chief Police Officers, decide IT strategy. Meanwhile in the NHS, it is the government Central IT Unit, Citu, that decides policy. It is fair enough that no organisation should be pushed into making technology decisions too early or for the wrong reasons, particularly if it relates to the health service. At the same time, it is unacceptable that the NHS rejects Citu’s strategy for reasons of “not invented here.” At the very least, the NHS should be prepared to adopt the XML strategy in principle, and to pilot it in non-contentious or low risk areas.

(First published 8 September 2000)

October 2000

10-11 – Bluetooth PANs the Wireless LAN

Bluetooth PANs the Wireless LAN

The arrival of Bluetooth, the short-range wireless communications standard, is moving ever nearer. Products are not due until the latter half of this year but the announcements are now coming thick and fast, with the IT majors now joining forces with the technology providers to make it happen. At the end of last week, for example, IBM announced it was partnering with TDK to develop Bluetooth solutions for its Thinkpad range of laptops. Despite the fact that TDK is not known as an IT company, it has carved itself a niche as a producer of networking devices that meet the standard formerly known as PCMCIA. Back in 1998 TDK was quick to pick up on the potential of Bluetooth, and has been supporting standards work and developing products ever since. IBM, too, has been an active proponent of the technology but has recently been pulling back from the production of networking devices. The result: IBM has a partner that can deliver, and TDK has a conduit for its products to die for.

The principle behind Bluetooth is simple. Devices broadcast a wireless “hello, I’m here” into the ether and listen out for any responses. Should one device detect another, the two will form a loose network, known as a Personal Area Network or PAN. PAN clusters can then form into a kind of super-PAN using hub units that act as a switch between different PANs. The active range of Bluetooth is ten metres: the intention is not to replace existing LAN technology but more to enable locally positioned devices to interact, for example a PC with a printer or a mobile phone with a PDA. If the standard had anything in its sights, it would be the infra-red standard IrDA but Bluetooth is primarily an innovation – it augments existing facilities rather than replacing them.

This is all well and good, but (and there is always a but) Bluetooth isn’t the only wireless technology on the block. There are a number of vendors who are indeed setting their sights on the LAN. These include Apple, which has already released its own wireless protocol. Most likely to succeed is the wireless Ethernet standard, behind which a consortium of vendors is already lining up. However, through the fault of nobody in particular, Bluetooth is proving to be the fly in the wireless ointment. The two wireless standards can, and do, interfere with each other making it difficult to run both PANs and wireless LANs.

Steps are being taken to minimise the damage. Symbol Systems, for example, has included frequency-hopping in its 2Mbps wireless LAN technology so that if interference is detected, it can be countered. This has all the hallmarks of a workaround, and apparently it does not work for higher data speeds. The current advice is not to use the two in the same part of a building: clearly this is not a rule which builds confidence.

Where to go from here? Data communications experience suggests that, when two or more protocols get together, some bright spark designs an interface between them. It may be that if wireless LAN devices can also talk Bluetooth, both standards can exist in the same frequency range. Ultimately the question arises whether more than one wireless protocol is necessary at all: time will tell but, even though the standards do not overlap in principle, it may prove unwise to focus too heavily on one technology.

(First published 11 October 2000)

10-11 – Geoworks WAP licensing – fast buck or insurance policy?

Geoworks WAP licensing – fast buck or insurance policy?

Geoworks, the company perhaps more famous for its small footprint operating system than its wireless credentials, has been coming under fire in recent weeks. Its crime is to enforce a patent, which the company holds on a part of the wireless protocol that is essential to WAP. So – is Geoworks on the make or is it protecting its future?

The problem started back in January, when Geoworks announced its intentions to introduce a licensing scheme for WAP vendors. On the surface the licensing scheme seems reasonable enough. Individual vendors wanting to make use of the Geoworks technology need pay a flat fee of $20,000 dollars per year. If the company in question earns less than $1 million dollars, the fee drops to $25, a veritable bargain it has to be said. It is with the service providers that things get interesting, as the fee equates to $1 per year, per service user. For a company such as Vodafone, which now handles over 10% of the world’s handset users, the sums would become phenomenal. It is unlikely that the larger players will pay the book cost for the privilege of using WAP but nonetheless Geoworks looks set to make a pretty penny on the arrangement. Stock holders certainly think so, with shares doubling in value on the day of the announcement.

Of course Geoworks is not the only company to bring up the issue of licensing. Indeed, the company is a pussy cat compared to some of the larger players in the WAP forum, namely NEC and Phone.com. As a smaller player, Geoworks commands more sympathy: with just over 100 people in the whole company, it cannot afford to be frivolous about its R&D spend. Neither does it have the luxury of giving away key technology for the greater, in this case wireless, good. On the make it may be, but Geoworks has few other options.

Despite the underdog stance, Geoworks has succeeded in putting the cat amongst the wireless pigeons. In an interview with IT-Director.com, Ken Norbury, General Manager of Geoworks in the UK, agreed that the stance was “upsetting to people not in the know.” This was a view echoed by the chairman of the WAP Forum, Greg Williams who said on News.com “I’m not saying at all that Geoworks [tried to take advantage of the process] … I think what they’ve tried to do was set a price that is fair and reasonable, as anyone would.”

When the annals of IT history are finally written, it will not be the actions of individual companies that count so much as the combined effects. The longer-term necessity for WAP is already being called into question. While Geoworks’ position is understandable, the licensing issue may prove to be the final straw for an already weakening standard.

(First published 11 October 2000)

Cloud Pro

Posts published in Cloud Pro.

2012

Posts from 2012.

June 2012

06-08 – The Problem Is Not Whether Breaking The Law

The Problem Is Not Whether Breaking The Law

Cloud Society: Case Law and the Cloud

Can legal frameworks respond to the TMI society?

When Hunter S. Thompson first wrote, “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught,” he clearly wasn’t taking into account the impact that technology would have over the following forty years, on both crime and its consequences.

Crime and Punishment

Crime is not absolute, and it never has been. We laugh at the incongruities of older legal frameworks and raise an eyebrow at the punishments still present in some societies, all the while feeling assured that whatever our cultures disallowed in the past, however draconian the remedies, we are (oh, so!) much more civilised now.

The fact is, however, that the human animal is no more criminal, nor noble, than it ever was. Each country creates its own legal frameworks according to factors including what its citizens feel able to tolerate at the time, the impact of any incidents and, indeed, the ease with which perpetrators can be caught.

In the UK, for example, it wasn’t all that long ago that it was illegal to be commit adultery, or even more recently, to be openly gay. Homosexuals didn’t suddenly stop being criminals in July 1967; rather, society (as represented by the government of the time) widened its goalposts to accommodate what it perceived as acceptable behaviour.

Meanwhile we have ‘illegal activities’ such as speeding – in quotes because of their utter variability by country. The motorway speed limit is set at 130kph (about 80mph) on the continent, or 110kph (70mph approx.) if it rains. Everyone breaks the rules. Last year the UK government proposed to raise UK speed limits 80mph on the basis of “restoring the legitimacy of the speed limit.” Yet critics agued it would simply mean more people would drive at 90mph – both standpoints highlighting the perception that the limit is seen as a guiding hand, rather than an absolute indicator of criminality.

Crime and punishment go hand in hand and similarly, punitive measures available to judges have changed over the years. We no longer have the death penalty in the UK, and the measure remains rightly controversial in countries where it is practiced. Punishment, be it a fine, incarceration, community service or whatever, aims to serve consequences to the convicted, recompense the victim and discourage anybody who might be considering a similar path.

As such, a punishment can increase for a similar crime if a judge, or government deems that additional discouragement is necessary – a situation we saw clearly (LINK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/jan/24/deterrent-sentences-edward-woollard) at the time of the 2011 riots.

Technology – the amplifier in the sky?

What’s all this got to do with technology? The fact is, against such a many-faceted, context-sensitive and interpretation-based background, we are quite suddenly able to catch a great many more folks at it. At the same time, society’s voice has become several decibels louder – and more reactive – by virtue of the all-amplifying Internet.

The former point goes to the very roots of how our legal system was set up. Of course some crimes lie way beyond the threshold of what might be considered ‘minor’, and the role of technology in taking the bad guys down is not to be underestimated. Equally, many minor crimes are already categorised as such, and dealt with accordingly.

A broader category of illegal behaviour exists, determined largely by society’s desire to influence the activities of its citizens. Speeding is one example; use of certain substances is another – as illustrated by various attempts to reclassify cannabis, for example. Some acts are not actually damaging in themselves, but pose a perceived risk – incitement, for example, or negligence. No absolutes exist in such cases; rather, a value judgement needs to be made which will tend to reflect the times.

Which brings to society’s increasingly loud voice. That individuals can make their views heard is generally applauded – activist sites are now able to case a much brighter light onto despots, dodgy dealings and indeed, miscarriages of justice. The media also pick up cases and run with them, whipping up interest based on the judgement of editors as to what their readerships might want, for better or worse. Faced with such a clamour, it is unsurprising that judges feel obliged to respond.

We’ve seen a number of examples in recent times that highlight the dangers of these converging factors. The case of Paul Chambers for example, whose ‘joke’ on Twitter about Robin Hood airport led to him losing his job and gaining a criminal record. No damage was intended, nor done, nor indeed likely – yet Mr Chambers was used as an example to others, for deterrent effect. The verdict is still in the courts, being appealed again after a High Court decision.

Or Jacqueline Woodhouse, jailed for 21 weeks having launched a racist tirade at an unfortunate victim, all of it captured on a mobile phone. The fact she was drunk at the time did little to help her defence. Or Liam Stacey, whose wholly despicable (and apparently alcohol-fuelled) remarks about critically ill footballer Fabrice Muamba earned the student a 56-day sentence.

Or indeed, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, the likely lads jailed for four years each for incitement to riot, having created the Facebook event “Smash d[o]wn in Northwich Town” in August 2011. The fact that no such event took place was seen as irrelevant by the judge; according to Eric Pickles, then Communities Secretary, “exemplary sentences” were necessary – his statement reflecting the general horror of the time, that such rioting took place.

Can we handle the truth?

While each of the above decisions is the topic of debate – indeed, that’s why we have courts of law, to enable such discussions to take place – they share several characteristics: that they only came to light thanks to the technologies we have in place; that they involved outbursts or misguided statements; that sentencing took into account the times in which the statements were made.

Another consequence is that – by design – the sentences influence society’s behaviour down the line. Surprising it may be to the interconnected, but many people are yet to discover the joys of social networking and are still to learn what is a nascent moral code about life online. We have still to agree, for example, what is acceptable and what is not – as illustrated by the tirade of unprintable, highly abusive language directed at Joey Barton following his recent on-pitch aggression, or indeed Louise Mensch simply for having the audacity to say what she believed.

Nobody was prosecuted for their participation in what amounted to blatant online bullying – no cases were brought. Maybe they should have been. But meanwhile, the prosecutions of others, sometimes simply because their statements can be interpreted according to laws drawn up long before the existence of the Internet, that most public of places, need equally careful consideration.

Not least because we haven’t even scratched the surface. Technology isn’t finished – indeed, in fifty years time we will likely look back and chuckle at just how primitive we were. New developments in face recognition, data aggregation and analysis, the increasing use of embedded cameras, each innovation offers new ways of finding things out, of capturing and sharing the moment, of linking one piece of information with another. Even today, for example, mobile phone companies hold all the information anyone needs to determine when any citizen has been speeding. All it needs is a sub-poena.

It’s not Big Brother we need to worry about, it’s the scurrying mass of little sisters, each with a tale to tell. Right now, many people still act like such innovations had not yet happened but it would appear that ignorance is no defence. To return to the case of Mr Chambers, it’s not just whether his act was ‘criminal’, but also the impact it has on anyone else who now feels a little less inclined to express humour in case it is misconstrued.

Raising the debate

Of course we all need to be responsible for our actions, online and offline; of course we need to take into account the victims; and of course we all want to live in a safe, just and open society in which the perpetrators of bad things face the consequences of their actions. Internet trolling (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-17900962), cyber bullying and other despicable online activities are no less crimes simply because they use the Internet.

However, even if we manage to avoid the surveillance society, we are being drawn inexorably towards a more transparent world in which the smallest actions can be logged. During this historically interim period in which technology is having such an unprecedented impact, we should be actively debating the legal side effects – in parliament if necessary – of that fact that we are all more publicly visible than we may understand, or indeed intend. Such deep questions as these require a full treatment, and we should not simply leave them to context-sensitive case law.

To end on a positive note, in the UK at least we can feel fortunate that we live in a more liberal part of the world – not every occupant of the global village is so lucky. For this very reason we need to take appropriate steps now, to ensure that we continue to benefit from such luxuries as . Otherwise, if Hunter S. Thompson is right, we’re going to need a lot of jails.

August 2012

08-15 – Sortage As A Service

Sortage As A Service

When did storage as a service fall into the trough?

So, industry advisers Gartner released their cloud computing hype cycle (LINK: http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/gartner-releases-their-hype-cycle-for-cloud-computing-2012-0241167) at the beginning of August. While these models are largely aimed at large organisations, it’s interesting to reflect on what they mean for smaller businesses and consumers.

I know, I thought, why don’t I put together the hype cycle picture for the little people? It would be much simpler, for sure – probably including software as a service (or online applications), social networking, hosted email and collaboration, hosted security and storage. Most of these, I thought, would probably lie somewhere along the ‘slope of enlightenment’, that is, generally accepted by those who found them useful, ignored by those that didn’t.

The only niggle was around hosted storage. It doesn’t help that I’m just back from holiday and, as usual, I have been a little trigger happy in the photographic department. I’ll spare the maths but 800 photos at 12 megapixels, plus a number of short HD films amounts to about 7 gigabytes, barely dipping into the space available on the cards in my two cameras. However, I confess that the question from a certain online storage provider: “Did I want to upload my photos into the cloud?” was met with a good-humoured snort.

It’s not just about the time it would take to upload all those pictures; a cursory glance at pricing models suggests that anything over 100Gb of storage would cost between 200-500 dollars annually. Moving from the individual to the business, the price goes up proportionately with the number of users – even with discounts, it quickly becomes cheaper to buy a small NAS. An appropriate point, you may think, to play the ‘horses for courses’ card – of course it is important to weigh the relative benefits and costs of hosted versus in-house services, and make decisions accordingly.

However for reasons of bandwidth and cost above all, it remains difficult to imagine ‘public cloud storage’ as anything other than a synchronisation or collaboration tool for a subset of corporate content. Given that the picture isn’t much different for larger companies, it is unsurprising that cloud storage finds itself free-falling into Gartner’s trough of disillusion. While the capability is given the benefit of the doubt (it will one day reach the plateau), hosted storage vendors may have to think a little harder about the services they offer, if they don’t want to become just another niche technology.

08-28 – Tiered Cloud Storage

Tiered Cloud Storage

Cloud Society: In the future, all storage will look like this

We all have a tendency to see things from wherever we are standing at the time. This human trait applies directly to technology adoption, leading sometimes to rash assumptions about acceptability (“They’re all going to love this!”). Other times, vendors and service providers come up with new propositions without realising just how profound their impact might be.

For a recent example we need look no further than Amazon’s Glacier launch (LINK: . This new service offers extremely low cost storage – down to 1 cent per gigabyte per month (LINK: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/) – with the trade-off that data may take a few hours to retrieve. While certainly not suitable for video streaming, it has a clear role in backup and archiving – the former for risk management, the latter to offload unnecessary data currently cluttering front-line systems.

This reasonably simplistic offering disguises its more profound nature, which may be summarised by saying: Amazon Glacier cannot exist in isolation. The downside of this statement is that the service provider is unlikely to see massive adoption, at least not initially – Amazon will not experience a sudden rush of customers who were already waiting at the door, wondering what to do with all those 50 gigabyte files they only needed to access sporadically.

As an offload mechanism, very low cost storage needs to work in tandem with other, more expensive storage types. This principle was captured by StorageTek engineers a decade ago, when they coined the term ‘Information Lifecycle Management’ or ILM. The central point was that information value has a decay curve – content and data loses value over time, with a resulting impact on how quickly it needs to be accessed. While this ‘long tail’ model may not apply across the board, it is relevant to plenty of data categories.

The result, as its advocates quickly found, was that the key to successful ILM was to ensure data could be moved as efficiently as possible. As data became less relevant it could be moved onto lower cost storage or even archived onto tape. If it became important again, or in the case of primary storage failure, it could be moved back.

Falling storage costs meant that many organisations did not quite deliver on the full ILM vision – put simply, it was easier to replace a storage tier than build an infrastructure based on migration principles; before long, marketing executives were looking for new drums to bang and the term fell into disuse. However the idea remains sound and if the runes are correct, it will no doubt see a resurgence following Amazon’s launch. For the service to succeed, there will be no option.

Indeed, the challenge goes far wider than simple archiving. The current lack of appropriate data migration capabilities could well be the reason why Gartner cites Storage as a Service as languishing (LINK: http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/iaas/cloud-storage/4367/cloud-society-when-did-storage-service-fall-trough) in the trough of disillusion. Meanwhile, the future success of synchronisation services such as Apple’s iCloud, as they grow beyond basic data to a broader range of content types, depends on a comprehensive yet low cost way of storing information online.

What are we likely to see? Almost inevitably, we can expect some kind of tiered model emerging from each provider, with integration between tiers. For example, Amazon’s S3 will need to offer a migration path to and from Glacier. Over time, the two products will become features of a larger whole, in which punters pay for access speeds and resilience features, not just volumes. That’s not a massive insight, more common sense.

Equally obvious is that we are moving towards a model in which capacity is considered to be ‘infinite’ – at least in terms of meeting requirements. Large and small businesses, employees and consumers all stand to benefit from an approach which charges according to need, rather than raw capacity.

Such a model also resolves the issue of locking in with a vendor whose costs quickly become prohibitive beyond a limited number of gigabytes. A service that charges according to what someone is using right now, as opposed to all the content they have ever created, is far more likely to achieve success.

It remains to be seen what such a service, involving automated data migration between different tiers of cloud based storage, becomes called when the marketing wonks and analysts get their hands on it. Whatever its name however, you heard it here first: get the data migration piece right and the rest will fall into place.

September 2012

09-21 – Bad Things Good Services

Bad Things Good Services

Cloud Society: when bad things happen to good services

Finally, cloud computing has had the reality check it needed, says Jon Collins

Cloud computing’s been in the news, and it’s not been pretty. First Amazon’s AWS service was rendered inoperable [LINK: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/07/02/cloud-computing-forecast-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-fail/) at the beginning of the summer, and then GoDaddy’s hosting services (along with thousands of web sites) were brought to their knees (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1379474/Web-chaos-Amazon-cloud-failure-crashes-major-websites-Playstation-Network-goes-AGAIN.html) by those dastardly chaps at Anonymous. Both nasty, both, might say the naysayers, both illustrations that the cloud can’t be trusted.

But such examples could be exactly what was needed. Many observers (including myself) have long argued that the cloud should not be trusted, not 100%, any more than you would 100% trust a car, or a contract, or a person in authority (and that’s relevant, given that some outages with Google services have been put down to human error).

Trust should never be an absolute, and neither should it be the only factor on which to base decisions. With the best will in the world, cloud service delivery also requires reliable bandwidth (which is frequently not the case, even in fixed locations), simplicity of administration and control of costs. None of which are guaranteed, nor necessarily anyone’s fault when things go wrong.

There’s simply no such thing as the perfect service – one which can be expected to just work, to deliver on requirements in all circumstances. Architectural decisions – that is, deciding where to locate technology to give the best results – are predicated on the fact that imperfection is part and parcel of the whole technology landscape. Falur prevention should be built into the architecture – if a service cannot be trusted, some kind of fall-back needs to be in place.

Indeed, the only people who were ever saying that cloud computing is ‘The Answer’ as opposed to ‘one potential service delivery mechanism that needs to be weighed against, and integrated with other options’ were, you guessed it, marketing executives that worked for companies promoting the benefits of cloud computing. They’re not wrong that benefits exist; they are in their rights to ignore or downplay other choices. Technology buyers and their non-tech-literate bosses would be naïve to think otherwise, and should plan accordingly.

So, yes indeed, read stories about this service or that service going out of action for a while and consider them carefully, not with a sense of disappointment but relief that a veil has been removed from the eyes of the decision making process. With eyes wide open, organisations can start to make the right decisions about where and how to integrate cloud services with their own in-house kit, to deliver a set of capabilities which – even if it can’t be 100% trusted either – can most closely meet the needs and all-too-imperfect realities of the business.

October 2012

10-01 – Cloud Society Broadband As A Barrier To Cloud Service Adoption

Cloud Society Broadband As A Barrier To Cloud Service Adoption

Cloud Society: Broadband as a barrier to Cloud service adoption

UK Broadband should focus on acceptability, not speed

Some interesting statistics lie buried on Page 40 of the Ofcom report (LINK: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/broadband-research/may2012/Fixed_bb_speeds_May_2012.pdf) into residential broadband speeds. Issued back in May, the detailed paper quite rightly applauded the 22% increase in UK average broadband speeds overall. “It is encouraging that speeds are increasing,” said Ofcom’s Ed Richards, as you would expect. The average is now 9.0Mbit/s, which (one would think) should be more than enough for most uses.

The fly in the ointment appears when one looks at the distribution of download speeds across the board. Over half of those tested have an average of up to 6Mbit/s, which illustrates that the headline figure is pulled up by a smaller proportion of homes which happen to have very high speed broadband connections, for example over fibre or cable. Only 37% achieve an average of up to 4Mbit/s, and 14% of those tested, distributed across the UK population, can only make use of 2Mbit/s or less.

Downloads are one thing – the “A” in ADSL2+ means “asynchronous”, and upload speeds tend to run at about 10% of downloads. In broad terms, a third of the connected UK population can upload data to the Internet at 300-400kbits/s, and a third of this group can upload at half that. To put the speeds into context, a basic video conferencing link requires 128Kbits/s each way, which uses up this latter group’s entire upload bandwidth.

In the context of cloud, the conclusion is stark. We can talk all we like about home working and the ability to get stuff done in coffee shops (the Wi-Fi in many of which will be dependent on a home broadband connection). But as with any other aspects of technology, cloud services need to ‘just work’, even as they are becoming increasingly bandwidth-hungry.

There’s a very simple factor at play here – that of lowest common denominator technology adoption. Work in a city-based office where bandwidth is no object, and you would be forgiven for believing that internal IT was no longer necessary and the future lay entirely in the clouds. Perhaps it does – but move outside of such an idyllic world and the varnish quickly dulls. If even one person in a 30-person team cannot access the facilities required to work, the entire team will suffer. So, as a result, facilities tend towards those that work, with the ultimate beneficiaries – end-users – pulling away from those that get in the way.

This isn’t a cynical rant, more a recognition that a threshold exists. Nobody’s really set this so I’ll take a flyer. According to the mathematicians at Zen Internet (LINK: http://www.zen.co.uk/business/online-data-backup/backup-solutions/data-transfer-times.aspx), transferring 1GB of data (about 15 minutes of HD video, for example) at 450Kbits/s would take about 5 hours – which is clearly too slow. Anything under an hour starts to be acceptable, i.e. about 2Mbits/s upload, or 20Mbits/s download. So, my thesis is that, for the full range of cloud services to be usable for home working, home broadband speeds need to reach 20Mbits/s for a significant proportion of this group of users.

Which, coincidentally, is about the speed the UK government is pitching as being ‘superfast broadband’ (LINK: http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/telecommunications_and_online/8129.aspx#superfast_broadband) – they’re saying 24Mbps, but its close enough. The plan is to roll this out by 2015 across the UK, but signs are this deadline is already slipping. My money’s on five years before the threshold is passed for the necessary proportion of the population. That is, to be clear, five years before many organisations can come to rely on remotely accessible broadband speeds for the range of cloud services they may want their employees to use.

Perhaps things will speed up; perhaps some innovative soul will come up with a way to use the network of copper cables criss-crossing the land in a more efficient way (for example, of the top of my head, by moving to asynchronous model above speeds of 10Mbits/s – you heard it here first). In the meantime, we shall all be forced to compromise, cloud services will disappoint compared to their promise and more gung-ho organisations my regret rushing too quickly toward an online-only approach. The UK government is already under the cosh (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19057875) to start delivering on its broadband strategy. If it really is interested in increasing GDP, the sooner it can bring the majority past a ‘minimum necessary’ threshold, the better.

10-24 – Future Of Books

Future Of Books

Cloud Society: The future of books is ‘free’ – after a fashion

Two announcements this month show how Moore’s Law and the cloud are having an impact in the publishing world, and illustrate what might be the shape of things to come as far as e-books are concerned.

The first comes from Berlin-based e-reader company, Txtr. The device vendor announced the Beagle a few days ago (http://gb.txtr.com/beagle/), a no-frills e-reader which will set punters back a paltry 8 pounds. That’s one way or another – reports suggest the device will be bundled as part of mobile phone contracts rather than being sold direct.

Meanwhile we have Amazon’s announcement (LINK: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/54342-amazon-launches-kindle-lending-library-in-u-k-germany-and-france.html) of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which gives Amazon Prime members access to over 200,000 books. To feed the library with titles, the organisation is looking to self-published authors to enrol in its HDP Select pay-per-borrow programme.

Put the whole lot together and we see a clear trend towards ‘free’, at the point of access at least. The fact that the Beagle can do very little (you need to set options on your phone before transmitting books to the device via Bluetooth) illustrates how the cost of cloud-based endpoints is tending to zero.

And the both the Beagle sales channel and Amazon’s library model share the approach of offering added-value services to existing subscribers – either of mobile phone or of retail services. It wouldn’t be a surprise at all if the two came together at some point – the ‘free e-book library with your mobile phone contract’ sounds blindingly obvious.

Of course the Beagle still has to be released, and Amazon continues to come under a fair amount of stick for its relations with publishers and self-publishers. While the business models may still need a tweak, nobody is questioning the continuing fall in e-reader costs and, equally, the online library model looks here to stay.

While this might not spell the death of the paperback just yet, the ability to access any book at any moment for next to nothing is coming ever closer.

November 2012

11-22 – A Little Definition Can Go A Long Way In It

A Little Definition Can Go A Long Way In It

Cloud in Public Sector Europe? If the shoe fits…

A little definition can go a long way in IT, particularly when terms are ambiguous or given multiple meanings. Case in point: a recent article in the New York Times. Titled “European Governments Staying Out of the Cloud,” it explains how Europe is therefore a less promising market than the United States for cloud services.

While there’s plenty of good stuff in the article, its arguments are diluted by the fact it talks about a cloud as a thing, rather than a set of characteristics (LINK http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/5006/cloud-society-can-we-really-predict-future-trends-cloud). Rather than reiterating those points, it is worth considering where Cloud is making sense to central and local governments, and where it is less so.

In the UK specifically, the Cabinet Office has two programmes underway – at a lower level, the Public Services Network (PSN) which is aimed at providing a shared networking infrastructure across public organisations. Certified providers are building services on top of this, which are to all intents and purposes ‘cloud-based’.

The second initiative is of course G-Cloud, in which (once again) cloud-based service providers can be selected for inclusion in a catalogue. “We can only see an up-side,” says John Glover, sales and marketing director at online collaboration tools supplier, Kahootz (LINK: http://in.kahootz.com/blog/bid/234436/2-years-on-where-has-the-UK-G-Cloud-got-us). Which sounds pretty positive.

Broadening to continental Europe, two factors are at play. First and for the record, yes, Europeans are notably more reticent than their US counterparts. We old-worlders are less keen to accept things at face value or try things out, which goes a long way to explain why start-ups tend to fare better in the US than over here.

Equally, Europe (despite efforts for better or worse since the war) lacks a common legal framework, particularly in areas such as privacy and contract law. What is lawful in one country may be completely illegal in another, as well as potentially being socially unacceptable.

All the same, public sector Europe is keen on Cloud for all the same reasons as everywhere else. A report from the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENSIA) highlights (LINK: http://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/risk-management/emerging-and-future-risk/deliverables/security-and-resilience-in-governmental-clouds/) ways in which Cloud can reduce risk – for example by increasing reliability, enabling business continuity and delivering levels of physical security would be lacking in many public organisations.

The same report lists risks including that all-important insider threat, given that data is accessible by a third party. Interestingly, the fear of third parties exploiting data for marketing purposes is not highlighted as a risk: while this is likely a simple oversight, it does suggest that the issue is not as troubling as the New York Times article is making out.

Of course, data confidentiality is being treated with a great deal of respect across the European public sector – not least in healthcare, but here the issue is less about whether organisations want to benefit from third parties delivering services over the Internet, and more whether they can meet local legislation and norms while delivering efficient services to their clients.

From the US standpoint, Europe may occasionally appear slow or behind the curve when it comes to new technology adoption. But in the case of the Cloud, it is a simple question of deciding when, where and how such new technology delivery models apply. Where they can, they will.

2013

Posts from 2013.

January 2013

01-01 – Cloud Society How'S Your Cloud Risk Appetite?

Cloud Society How’S Your Cloud Risk Appetite?

Cloud Society: how’s your cloud risk appetite?

It’s a new year and time for a new buzzword but risk appetite could be an important concept to companies

At the recent Business Cloud Summit held in London, I was fortunate enough to host a panel of lawyers.

One doesn’t normally see the terms ‘fortunate’ and ‘lawyers’ in the same sentence, so I thought it was worth elaborating why. As well as the expected topics around contracts, due diligence, data escrow (should things go wrong) and, indeed, involving lawyers in any large-scale outsourcing decision, one term bubbled to the surface: ‘risk appetite’.

To understand why this is so important, we need to revisit where cloud computing fits, or is going to fit, in medium and large organisations across the board. What’s pretty clear (I hope) to everybody by now is that cloud computing isn’t going to replace traditional IT. Even this perspective still treats cloud as a single thing; rather it is a sourcing option for a whole variety of service types, from pay-as-you-go hardware to advanced applications.

With an additional option in the mix, businesses have more choice as to how they are going to do things. Companies are complex, and what’s suitable for one department (hosted applications of the like of Office 365, say) may not be suitable for another. This reality will no doubt be the cause of many challenges in the future, in terms of integration and interoperability, management and support - or, in other words, the same issues that IT has always faced.

So, what’s different? One thing cloud brings to the party that differs from the past, is a reduced hurdle in terms of procurement. In olden times, the 4-8 week delay between decision and deployment created an artificial barrier which, as a spin-off benefit, meant everyone had time to think. These days, the first time IT managers may have heard of a new SaaS application may be when support gets a call complaining that it isn’t working properly.

And so, to risk, and the appetite for it. Cloud-based apps and services are not without their limitations - to revisit an old adage, “free services are worth what you pay for them” and their terms and conditions may offer little if any recourse if you lose information, as users of email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo have found out in the past. Similar devilry can lie in the detail of pay-per-use hosted services, not just in terms of data protection but also uptime guarantees and support restrictions.

All of these aspects add to the risks of taking a service on. That doesn’t mean that they should be ignored or avoided; rather, that their use needs to be tempered at the moment of decision, in terms of whether or not they offer sufficient guarantees to support the part of the business using them. Are they protecting personal information adequately? Have they safeguards in case of denial of service attack? What happens if their data centre is subject to fire, flood or theft? These questions, traditionally asked of IT, now need to be pitched at the provider. And quickly, before their use becomes entrenched.

This ability to make decisions based on a reasonably slick grasp of the risks is natural to all of us - indeed, we do it every time we cross the road. However, it is not traditionally how IT is done, and processes and procedures may actually slow down or blunt our abilities to respond. As we move into a new year, then, perhaps it’s worth revisiting how our own IT organisations deal with risks of cloud-based service delivery, and asking the question - is the current approach helping or hindering the business? If the latter, the role of IT itself may itself come into question.

01-01 – Cloud Society Online Porn Think Of The Parents, Not The Children

Cloud Society Online Porn Think Of The Parents, Not The Children

Cloud Society: online porn - think of the parents, not the children

The government has a problem with porn - it doesn’t like it. But that’s no excuse for ill-thought-out solutions

Haven’t we been here before?

Back in 2010, Ed Vaizey was telling anyone who would listen of his plan to block Internet porn, and was given short shrift by ISPs. At the time, they said it was unworkable. “There are many legal, consumer rights and technical issues that would need to be considered before any new web blocking policy was developed,” commented BT. 

So, nearly three years later, the policy comes round again - this time in the shape of telling ISPs to check a check box by default. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? As many have mentioned, mobile operators have had a similar mechanism in place for years. The other, equally “simple” demand is to block certain search terms.  

Let’s review: take a look at that fantastically frustrating ‘feature’ from Vodafone, T-Mobile and the rest, which blocks, well, just about everything. It blocks Yahoo, or has been known to - it did for me. It blocks blogs and other such sites which I happen to use in my line of work. Not only that but to unlock them, you have to put in credit card details. Oh no, wait - that doesn’t function, so you have to phone a call centre on a premium support number, at which point you give up. At least, I did. 

As for the blocking of search terms, there appears to be a discrepancy in terms of understanding what technology can actually do. Often it is a blunt instrument - as illustrated by the frustrations of the people of Scunthorpe about email filtering. Meanwhile, I was indeed horrified when one of my children typed “X Men” into Google at a very young age and got more than he bargained for. The fact that David Cameron thinks these issues are surmountable with “algorithms” (I wish they could be) demonstrates his (or his advisors) ignorance.

It is possible to take a stance about erosion of online freedoms, or to side with the idea that the Internet is above scrutiny and the world should just deal with it.

I’m not in either camp; I am a parent who is concerned about child protection. But realistically, if the proposed law goes through, it will add complication without delivering the supposed benefit. Call me a tired old cynic but this looks awfully like one of those times when a politician rails loudly against something to give the impression of action. 
Not least in response to the findings of the “Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection” published in April. It’s worth a read.

However compelling the case it makes however, it presents little understanding of how technology works - as if closing one door in some way makes the problem go away. 

Not least the statement: “We also heard that parents are not only concerned about access to internet pornography but also other forms of harmful content including cyber bullying, extreme violence, self- harm, suicide and pro-anorexia websites, while the issue of “sexting” or peer-to-peer sharing of intimate images is also of great concern.”

In other words, it’s not just porn that is the problem. What do we need to stop next? And virtually unmentioned in the findings (though discussed in the evidence) is the role of video. When it does come up, it also covers the topic of salacious pop videos. Is Justin Timberlake making porn now? What about mainstream films portraying sex scenes? What of Game of Thrones? 

Even if the opt-out measure comes into force, ISPs do not have the wherewithal to monitor video streams in all their forms and codecs. To get round the restriction, a content provider need only incorporate images in a video file. Or an encrypted powerpoint file. Or, indeed, in any format that they choose to invent overnight, that ISPs don’t monitor for yet. No, that isn’t giving ‘them’ ideas. ‘They’ know it already.

Perhaps most alarming about David Cameron’s lip service proposals is that they make that hugely flawed assumption that technology - and technologists - can make it all better.

The check box was only one of eight recommendations made by the panel, three of which covered provision of better education and clearer guidelines to parents. To whit: “The Panel concluded that while parents should be responsible for monitoring their children’s internet safety, in practice this is not happening as parents lack easy to use content filters, safety education and up–to-date information.” 

Yes, parents should be responsible for monitoring their children’s Internet safety. Technology can be complicated - its rapid expansion has created a jungle. But that doesn’t diminish the role of parents in any way. It is one thing (as some have suggested) that parents might become complacent if online filters are established. Quite another would be for parents to say, “Oh, that’s the ISP’s job,” even as content becomes more complex and difficult to monitor. 

Here’s the rub. If any parent is worried about their children accessing unsavoury material, they can and should take steps to minimise the risk. Keep the computer in a front room. Install filters. Check out ParentPort or the Safer Internet site. Pay for advice from a local computer person. Ask me  - I’ll very happily point concerned people in the right direction.

01-24 – Graph Search With Big Data, Everyone Will Be At It

Graph Search With Big Data, Everyone Will Be At It

Graph Search - with Big Data, everyone will be at it

Since Facebook launched its Graph Search algorithm on January 15^th^, pundits have been delighted, disappointed and horrified in equal measure. The “delighted” camp have been saying that, at last, the company has something with which to take on Google; more sceptical commentators have noted how the capability will not necessarily deliver on the hype.

Meanwhile however, articles have started to emerge which illustrate the potential for the tool – for good or ill. Such as Actual Facebook Graph Searches (LINK: http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/), which demonstrates how you can hunt for Tesco employees who like horses, or Italian Catholic mothers who like condoms. The possibilities are endless.

While may pundits (and no doubt their readers) have thrown their hands up in horror, the point that has been missed is, simply, it’s not just Facebook that can do this. Indeed, the whole premise of Big Data – to be able to use distributed processing and/or high-performance computing to run algorithmic analysis – is that it offers orders of magnitude greater insight than in the past.

It stands to reason. More data is publicly available than ever before, at the same time as organisations are collecting more and more personal data than ever before. A simple, yet compelling example was when I clicked a button saying I didn’t want to install a software product the other day. Had I not had a firewall running I would not have known that even the negative button-click sent a signal back to the vendor, which is right now logged in a database somewhere, indexed against my name, or my machine, or browser id.

They’re all at it – retailers, mobile providers, social networking sites, utilities, central and local government, indeed any organisation that has access to information is trying to get more of it, whether or not they know what to do with it yet. The insights that can be delivered may well be highly useful and beneficial.

Equally, they could be – as illustrated by the Facebook Graph Search, intrusive and potentially damaging. Consider – your mobile company has detailed records of the majority of your movements over the past few years. It knows exactly where you have been, and how fast you got there. There can be no better way of sourcing information about traffic jams than using the mobile network as a sophisticated set of sensors (shame this isn’t done). However, woe betide if you have been travelling significantly over the speed limit.

What’s to do? Even as the need for legislation is debated (and there are no clear answers here), organisations such as the Information Commissioner’s Office are relaxing the rules for ‘anonymised’ information sharing (http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/icos-new-guidelines-need-focus-aggregation-not-anonymisation) - in fairness, they have little choice. Meanwhile of course, the same organisation illustrated just how fallible it could be when it modified the cookie law implementation (LINK: http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/cloud-security/5137/cloud-society-privacy-law-and-way-cookie-crumbled) and left a hole big enough for a fleet of juggernauts to drive through.

While we can comforted that we live in a democracy which has the power to create laws to control any significant breaches of privacy or rights, it won’t be long before the data mountains around us can be mined on an industrial scale. The inevitable issues that will derive from this need to be understood and dealt with, and quickly.

March 2013

03-15 – Hadoop – Not The Answer

Hadoop – Not The Answer

Hadoop et al – not the answer, but they help to ask the questions

Few in the industry haven’t heard about Hadoop, that data management platform that lends itself to distributed environments. Rather than storing data in one big bucket, Hadoop enables data to be managed, stored and queried across multiple little buckets – that is, exactly the kind of architecture used by cloud service and application providers.

To say that Hadoop, together with its programming framework MapReduce, have taken the IT world by storm would be an understatement. While the underlying platform is open source, several major vendors including IBM, EMC and Microsoft have embraced and extended the platform as part of their own offerings.

As distributed data management becomes mainstream, it is taking a number of overlapping paths. In the first, the Hadoop platform is improved, optimised, built upon. We are seeing the emergence of proprietary alternatives such as Greenplum’s Pivotal HD, announced a few weeks ago, and an update to Google’s BigQuery service this month (LINK: https://developers.google.com/bigquery/).

Whatever the relative merits of proprietary vs open source (LINK: ) or pay-as-you-go, service-based solutions, the drive is towards making the data easier to access using, in general, SQL-like commands such as SELECT and JOIN. Perhaps Dr Codd was right after all (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/docs/oracle/10g/server.101/b10759/intro001.htm).

More importantly, a simpler data access mechanism implies lowering the hurdles to finding big things out of the big data pile. We are faced with mountains of information, much of which is growing faster than we know what to do with. Part of the challenge is human – the effort required to construct queries exceeds the amount of time available.

This will not be the end of the story however. Waiting in the wings are algorithms developed over decades, that are anxiously waiting to be unleashed on all that data. Autonomy’s famously Bayesian (LINK: http://www.director.co.uk/MAGAZINE/2011/5_May/mike-lynch_64_09.html) approaches were first conceived in the eighteenth century, and other models and mechanisms have existed for decades.

What we have lacked has been sufficient power to conduct large-scale analysis at reasonable cost – note that tasks that took 2 months and millions of pounds to run ten years ago, now take about 2 weeks and about 20 K’s worth of processing. You don’t need to be a computer scientist to extrapolate that one.

The ability to write simpler queries is a start, but it still puts the effort onto the analyst who needs to ask the right questions. What happens when Google, EMC, the open source community et al start integrating mathematically proven algorithmics, and adding simple access and query mechanisms to boot? “Here’s a bunch of data, find me all the anomalies and let me know why you think they might exist,” could be one such request. Or, for the more advanced class, “Where should we target our efforts?”

This is neither a criticism nor a request, simply an acknowledgement of what the current round of developments in the distributed data space will enable. It’s a no-brainer to suggest that some organisations (vendor and end-user) will be better positioned than others to take advantage of the inevitable. Right now however, the playing field is as level as it will ever be.

April 2013

04-01 – Oh My God 0.2

Oh My God 0.2

Oh My God! We killed the Internet!

“No, Mr. Sullivan, we can’t stop it! There’s never been a worm with that tough a head or that long a tail! It’s building itself, don’t you understand? Already it’s passed a billion bits and it’s still growing. It’s the exact inverse of a phage – whatever it takes in, it adds to itself instead of wiping… Yes, sir! I’m quite aware that a worm of that type is theoretically impossible! But the fact stands, he’s done it, and now it’s so goddamn comprehensive that it can’t be killed. Not short of demolishing the net!”

Tales of the Internet’s demise have existed since “the net” only existed as a in tales – illustrated by this excerpt from John Brunner’s novel The Shockwave Rider, written nearly 4 decades ago.

Brunner’s story didn’t’ stop there. In good life-imitating-fiction style, Xerox Research’s John Shoch adopted the term ‘worm’ to describe a program he had created to hunt out unused processor use and then turn it to more useful purposes.

While such worms occasionally got the better of their creators, it took until 1988 for such a program (known as the Morris Worm (LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm) to cause broader disruption, infecting (it is reckoned) one in ten computers on the still-nascent Internet. The worm’s unintended effect was to take up so much processor time, it brought machines to a standstill.

Since these less complicated times a wide variety of malicious software has developed with the intent to exploit weaknesses (software or human) in computer protection. From this nefarious foundation we have seen the emergence of botnets – networks of ‘sleeper’ software running on unsuspecting desktops and servers, which can be woken to launch distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

As botnets have been gradually found out and closed down by the powers that be, their creators have looked to more esoteric ways of running DDOS attacks – such as that which emerged last week – which echoed John Brunner’s prescient words in more ways than one.

What marked the attack on Spamhaus (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636) was not only its nature, in that it targeted the Domain Name Service (DNS) – part of the infrastructure underlying the Web. In addition, the rhetoric used to describe it. “They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down,” commented Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus.

So, should we really be worried? The jury appears to be out (LINK: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/27/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-worlds-biggest-ddos-attack/) concerning whether the core of the Internet suffered as much as some involved parties might have suggested (LINK: http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-knocked-spamhaus-offline-and-ho). While the London Internet Exchange, LINX was reputedly affected, it later claimed that the spike in traffic it had reputedly experienced was down to a data reporting error. Was it simply a PR stunt (LINK: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/03/29/links-29-march-was-the-internets-greatest-dos-attack-ever-just-a-pr-stunt/), as some have suggested? My big sister says its all rubbish, and she is always right.

There is no doubt that we have seen some pretty big outages across ‘the net’, but these can’t really be put at the doors of the bad guys. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all experienced downtime in their online services, but these have generally been due to human error or system faults.

Otherwise, despite the Spamhaus episode (or indeed, as demonstrated by it), the Internet has shown itself to be remarkably resilient. Key to its success has been its distributed nature in which, like a version of David Brin’s novel The Postman (LINK: http://www.davidbrin.com/postman.html), the message must always get through.

Indeed, this is the biggest factor in the Internet’s favour. For any cybercriminal to bring down the whole net, they would first have to have access to a single element which tied it all together – even DNS is by its nature distributed, and thus hard to attack.

While such ‘single elements’ do not really exist at the moment, a potential danger is that someone will think it is a good idea to create one. This may not be so far-fetched, if we think of how a Facebook outage quite recently took a number of popular sites (including CNN, Mashable and the Washington Post) down with it (LINK: http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/02/09/facebook-outage-takes-down-gawker-mashable-cnn-and-post-with-it/).

Indeed, providers are trying to get people and businesses to adopt their services all the time – all the big players would like nothing less. As we choose to adopt one service over another perhaps we should all consider whether we are putting all of our eggs into one basket.

Engineers can make the Internet as robust as they like, but if we all depend on a single service, we not only create a central risk but a magnet for anyone who has aspirations of bringing down the whole thing. Food for though not only for the creators of such services, but for all of us.

May 2013

05-10 – Cloud First Has To Be A Good Thing

Cloud First Has To Be A Good Thing

Seven ways to make the most of Cloud First

It had to happen, of course. As reported here last week (LINK: http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/public-cloud/5561/g-cloud-iii-goes-live-government-confirms-cloud-first-strategy), the Cabinet Office has (finally?) mandated that cloud providers should be given first bite of the cherry.

We’ve also questioned (LINK: http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/public-cloud/5564/cloud-first-policy-will-it-really-make-difference) whether the policy can be quite as effective in the short term, as our illustrious leaders would like it to be.

Will it work? We hope so, we really do. The potential benefits of cost reduction, improved efficiency and so on have the potential to affect taxpayers directly in the wallets, as well as helping improve public services. With this in mind, we offer our top tips on how to ensure the success of Cloud First.

Deal with the physical. “Cloud” is such a nebulous term – well, it is – that it starts to imply that the physical elements of information technology no longer matter. This couldn’t be further from the truth – network bandwidth and latency, storage allocation and proximity to processing, suitability of workloads, all benefit form an understanding of what’s going on under the bonnet.

If we could suggest where to start, it would be to review network sizing and contracts first, based on a forward, realistic view of data transfer needs across all expected services. A lack of network headroom and a restrictive contract could bring the whole thing juddering to a halt.

Remember the hybrid. It might be Cloud First but existing systems are not simply going to vanish in a puff of smoke, for a number of reasons. First, it simply won’t be possible for many legacy applications, which were never designed for cloud-based models. The costs of migration in many cases will be greater than the benefits, and indeed, in some cases there will simply be little reason to disrupt an existing system which is running just fine, thank you.

Most, if not all cloud suppliers are advocating, if not acknowledging the fact that some technology capabilities will remain in house for the foreseeable future, resulting in hybrid architectures that incorporate both hosted and in-house systems. From the perspective of the public body, this also means that the IT department is not going away any time soon.

Upgrade skill sets. Building on this point, cloud will not suddenly render in-house IT skills redundant – far from it. However there is another reason why public bodies need to upgrade skill levels – to take into account everything that the cloud makes possible.

The massive amounts of processing and storage now available ‘in the cloud’ create opportunities to develop new applications and services, for example based on massively scalable, ‘NoSQL’ databases, that can have a significant impact on public service delivery. Authorities that understand what cloud enables will be in a better position to spot opportunities to innovate.

Sort out cost attribution. Shared service models of any form – not just cloud – will always make sense in principle, due to the overheads of procurement. Why buy the same thing three times when it can be bought once?

The challenge with pay-per-use type models associated with cloud comes with working out who actually used a service, and then how to ensure the right costs are attributed. While technology can help, the real challenge is having the right roles, responsibilities and processes in place.

Consider the data risks. The way the cloud handles data is creating a minefield, with challenges including aggregation and its potential impact on personal privacy as well as simply keeping practices aligned with legislation and governance requirements.

We use terms like ‘data sovereignty’ to suggest that as long as we know where data is, we are better able to meet requirements. However this is only part of the story. All public bodies have a responsibility to assess the risks and ensure that the way in which they are handling data is in the public best interest, whether or not current legislation is sufficient (LINK: http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/saas/5330/cloud-society-facebook-analytics-just-tip-iceberg).

Take responsibility for due diligence. Cases like the collapse of hosting business 2e2 illustrate that a listing in the G-Cloud catalogue doesn’t give a supplier some kind of magic wand to protect against business failure. Given the impetus to work with smaller (and potentially less resilient) suppliers, this could be a growing issue.

Of course one solution is to avoid the smaller suppliers but this will not help either government policy nor the SMB sector. In fact the best option is to retain a level of due diligence in the procurement process, incorporating not just factors such as financial stability but also taking into account the fact that many smaller service providers are running on, and therefore backed by the service levels of larger incumbents.

Above all, be the boss. Of course, public bodies and local authorities can simply wait for suppliers to come up with the right answers. The real opportunity cloud presents – as often dressed up in terms such as “time to deployment” – is that new services can be tried, developed, upgraded and replaced with relative ease.

It’s not hard to see the potential chaos that could ensue if an organisation – public or otherwise – is allowed to adopt services at random, without any over-arching strategy. Equally, the benefit of the cloud model to organisations that are looking to become more agile, to innovate, to benefit from new services and even offer services to others, is immense.

The bottom line is that the success of Cloud First is inextricably linked to the public sector’s ability to make the most of it. While this may sound obvious in principle, in practice it requires public organisations of all sizes to internalise that there is more to cloud adoption than picking services from a catalogue. Get this right, and we all stand to benefit.

05-18 – Hana – Sap’S Bridge To The Clouds?

Hana – Sap’S Bridge To The Clouds?

Cloud Society: HANA – SAP’s bridge to the clouds?

SAP announced its HANA enterprise cloud earlier in May. Does it cut the mustard?

The past few years must have been quite a worrying time to be in the enterprise software space. From Cloud Computing being the sort of thing that vendors such as SAP and Oracle wrote off as mere marketing, it’s become a key element of IT strategy for companies of all sizes.

As so often happens in this business, Cloud doesn’t mean a fork-lift replacement of what has gone before, however. Despite the rhetoric from some quarters, the software workhorses of the business such as ERP systems and data warehouses are not going anywhere. Big companies still run their Business Suite applications as single-instance traditional stacks, either in house or on hosted hardware.

This is unsurprising. The highly distributed, ‘elastic’ nature of cloud-based software architectures might offer a suitable basis for the new generations of highly distributed apps we are seeing built today. However it is less well designed (or indeed costed) to support monolithic software stacks, as mentions (LINK: http://blogs.forrester.com/stefan_ried/13-05-07-hana_enterprise_cloud_pro_and_cons) Forrester’s Stefan Ried: “All SAP products are available on Amazon’s AWS; however, many SAP customers use it just for dev, test, and disaster recovery.”

In other words, we are ending up with both types of application architecture. As a result, not only are new technologies such as cloud services having to learn to play nice with existing technologies – including enterprise applications – it also means the same in reverse.

It’s against this background that SAP invested in what it calls HANA – an in-memory database architecture. The technology allows for some pretty serious number crunching at the same time as offering persistence – the geeky term for assuring that data will still be around if the computer gets switched off, for whatever reason.

For in-house systems, HANA offers a simple up-lift advantage –the equivalent of putting a Porsche engine into a Volvo. No doubt about it, organisations looking to speed up their business apps and analytics functions should probably take a look. SAP is certainly “all-in” – as stated SAP CEO Bill McDermott at this month’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, the company has made HANA its strategic platform for future development.

In-memory databases shouldn’t simply be seen as go-faster stripes on existing technology stacks however. One of the most exciting – and yet challenging – areas of Cloud is the way new architectures are being used to handle complex data sets.

Under the banner of NoSQL, key-value databases such as Redis and Memcached are being put to a wide variety of uses that need large-scale, real-time data management, from social networking to event processing. Meanwhile, Hadoop and MapReduce offer frameworks and tools for manipulating all that lovely data.

Given its “wow, that really is fast” data crunching credentials, HANA provides a bridge to such applications, as it can keep up with the information feeds they provide. Compelling in the extreme – as the bridge also crosses the divide between the way customers can be reached these days, and the way business has traditionally been done.

Building on these notions, SAP recently announced (LINK: http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/05/07/sunshine-on-a-cloudy-day) that it will offer HANA as a cloud-based service, upon which it will host its Business Suite and Business Warehouse customers as a managed service. “This is an addition to our strong on premise offerings and is significant in offering an additional choice of deployment to our customers,” commented SAP’s lead technologist Vishal Sikka.

The joint imperatives of building on a data platform such as HANA and shifting to a managed service model – together, referred to as HANA Enterprise Cloud – marks a pretty bold move for SAP. Not least in that some insiders are apparently having kittens (particularly those whose quarterly bonuses depend on license sales).

In addition, they move the core of the company closer to the cloud action. It may be, at some point in the future, that traditional ERP models no longer offer the best technological basis for running a business – they could be superseded by exactly the kinds of distributed, real time platforms we are already seeing achieve such success in other areas.

With HANA Enterprise Cloud however, SAP has created a conduit to whatever innovations take place. To avoid becoming an also-ran, it is of course up to the company to deliver some of that innovation from its own stable. At least, however, it is still in the race.

05-30 – Bbc Digital

Bbc Digital

BBC’s digital media fiasco – would the cloud have been a safer bet?

On the surface, the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative sounded so simple. The plan was to create a digital archive for raw media footage – audio and video – so that it could be accessed directly from the desktops of editors and production staff. This could save up to 2.5% of production costs, suggested the original plan, saving millions of pounds per year in principle.

In practice, the “ambitious” project got out of control. It was originally outsourced to Siemens in 2008 but was brought back in house in 2010. Two years later, in October 2012 the BBC Trust halted the project and kicked off an internal review. And last week, the corporation’s Director General, Tony Hall announced he had canned the whole thing. (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22651126)

In the event, the project cost £98.4 million over the period 2010 – 2012. The Telegraph’s William Foxton suggests that the previous costs with Siemens ran at around £150 million. (LINK: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100009142/we-may-never-know-the-true-cost-of-the-bbcs-latest-disaster-but-itll-be-a-lot-more-than-100-million/) While a proportion of that money may have been clawed back, even the way this was done looks grubby in that it was partly funded by ‘efficiency savings’. (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmpubacc/808/80805.htm)

An external inquiry has been launched (which involves spending money on PWC) as well as another inquiry – costing even more money – planned by the Public Accounts Committee. John Linwood, the BBC’s Chief Technology Officer, has been suspended on full pay.

In all, the whole situation has been a calamity, a tragedy and a fantastic waste of taxpayers’ money. At this juncture it would be far, far too trite to ask whether things would be different if the Beeb could have benefited from Cloud Computing, wouldn’t it? Surely an unfair question, given that five years ago cloud models were still in their relative infancy?

While big-budget IT projects may still have been the default course in 2008, by the time the project first hit the ropes in 2010 the potential of the cloud was much clearer. Elastic, scalable resources, pay only for what you need, accessible anywhere, the core features of cloud would seem to be tailor-made for the needs of broadcast media management.

The cloud model does work for broadcasting – as NBC found last year, when it streamed 70 live feeds of Olympic footage for direct editing by staff based in New York. Netflix has built a global business on it. Meanwhile, at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, the Beeb was forced to transfer videotapes by hand using that well-known high speed network – the London Underground.

We could give the BBC the benefit of the doubt and suggest that the cloud might not have been a valid choice for the BBC’s videotape archiving and access needs back in 2010. However, according to a National Audit Office report however, “Although it took the Program technology development in-house, the BBC did not test whether that was the best option.” In other words, nobody bothered to look.

In purely common sense terms this move was particularly dumb. To expect a technology specification to still be valid two years after it was conceived suggests a shocking failure of judgement. To consider its validity extending a further two to three years into the future, particularly given the amount of change going on at the time, beggars belief.

We are where we are, however. Of course – as has been written about extensively – cloud computing isn’t some magic bullet. In the broadcast scenario it would appear to hold many advantages over in-house systems, however. Not least that its elastic nature would allow for piloting of a new platform before broader roll-out. Even if it had failed, it would have done so at a much smaller cost.

Indeed, even if the project had bet on the cloud and still failed as spectacularly, it wouldn’t have to deal with the fact it has been left with a pile of near-useless hardware and software. The millions of license fee payers who have seen their annual fees thrown into the abyss might hope that the now-redundant technology might have some value on eBay. According to the BBC Trust’s Anthony Fry, it is good for little else. (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/press_releases/2013/dmi_letter.html)

Will the BBC at least consider the cloud as an option going forward? This is not yet clear. James Purnell, BBC’s newly-appointed director of strategy and digital has stated that, “In the future we are going to rely far more on off-the-shelf technology.” Which is a start.

Bandwidth may be considered the main obstacle, suggested the Beeb’s Chief Enterprise Architect, Harry Strover in November last year. “One file could take up to a couple of days to move into the Cloud,” he commented. This shouldn’t really be the sticking point – with today’s network architectures, the same bandwidth is available to both cross-site and Internet connections, at much the same cost.

Over the past few years, we have seen much written about the potential for cloud failure – no technology approach is perfect. But even while we are doing so it is worth sparing a thought for the alternative. As illustrated once again in very stark terms, the notion that building an in-house system is in any way less risky should be quite firmly put to bed.

June 2013

06-21 – Dpa Hiding

Dpa Hiding

Cloud Society: Is the Data Protection Act the silver bullet for cover-ups?

The tragic saga of an alleged cover up (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22997705 ) at a hospital in Morecambe Bay has brought the Data Protection Act (DPA) into stark focus. That the Act itself was misused in this incident is quite clear, as illustrated by the Information Commissioner’s own statement on the matter. “What appeared to be going on yesterday was a sort of general duck-out,” he remarked.

This is far from being the first time, however. The Act has been used repeatedly to hide information or give institutions a get-out-of-jail-free card, in examples ranging from the complex to the simply ridiculous.

In December 2012 for example, Durham County Council cited the Data Protection Act in court to object to providing the names of residents in a care home, who may have been able to provide witness evidence in an abuse case. The objection was overturned on appeal. (LINK http://www.qualitysolicitors.com/abneygarsden/news/2012/12/abuse-lawyers-win-ground-breaking-case-in-local-authority-cover-up)

Clearly in this case there was a need to balance the privacy considerations of care home residents with the need to ensure a fair trial. Equally however, the local council involved was seen as trying to cover up allegations of abuse by citing the DPA.

Some other examples are, quite simply, laughable. Consider for example how in 2010, the ICO had to explain (LINK: http://www.ico.org.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/practical_application/taking_photos.pdf) that it was not illegal for parents to take photos at school sports days, as – quite simply – the law was “unlikely to apply”.

And right back in 2001, the then-Ministry for Fisheries and Food was castigated for not providing data about numbers of livestock slaughtered following the Foot and Mouth disease outbreak. (LINK http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1331279/Maff-hiding-behind-law-to-conceal-true-picture.html)

Outside of government cover-ups, consumers and citizens are faced with repeated examples of DPA misuse when they have to engage with call centres. “Sorry, I can’t tell you that, Data Protection,” goes the mantra. This can lead to absurd interactions around consent, which can be used as a reason to hide a multitude of shortfalls in service.

In a recent, anecdotal but very real example, a person was told by one part of an institution that it could not access records held elsewhere in the institution. The need for a signed consent form wasn’t the issue – more the fact that the question hadn’t even come up for over a year, and now it was being used as a reason why no action had been taken.

It does all beg the question – has anyone actually read the DPA? Or are people – even at the highest levels – simply reading the term “data protection” and applying to it whatever meaning they see fit?

In a nutshell, the DPA refers to data handling and management processes – largely to do with computer systems, though this is not an obligation. The principles are here (LINK http://www.ico.org.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/the_guide/the_principles). The main focus of its 7 principles is:

• Does the organisation actually have a need to store the information?
• Is it only storing the information it needs to do the job?
• If so, is it keeping it safe, accurate and up to date?

Perhaps the greyest area around the Act is Principle 6, that “Personal data shall be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects under this Act.” It is here that an obligation to assure a person’s privacy can be seen to apply, particularly if holding or processing information might cause the person damage or distress.

It is the ultimate irony however, that more damage and distress seems to have been caused by misuse of the DPA to cover up or withhold information. Quite clearly, we need more than simple ICO opinion on this matter. If the privacy rights of those in powerful positions continue to be seen as more important than the rights of the people they are supposed to be looking after, we are in a sorry state indeed.

July 2013

07-12 – Why Can’T Our Financial Institutions Build Clouds

Why Can’T Our Financial Institutions Build Clouds

Cloud Society: What’s preventing our financial institutions from building IaaS clouds for themselves?

An industry event a couple of days ago, I bumped into an old friend who happens to be an active and experienced technology architect (his title is CTO, no less) working for a major investment bank. We discussed an interesting question: why aren’t top finance houses building their own Infrastructure as a Service clouds?

Now there’s cloud and there’s cloud, of course. We weren’t just talking about using virtualisation on commodity hardware for internal systems – plenty of that is going on already. Rather, the conversation turned to building what the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google have been able to build for years – that is, fully, dynamic, distributed infrastructures that can be turned to whatever use is thrown at them.

Behind the question lies an important constraint – that externally provided IaaS platforms can’t be used for the core functions of investment banks, for a variety of convoluted but important governance reasons. So if banks want to build on similar platforms, goes the argument, they will have to do create them themselves.

So, what’s stopping them? The answer, it would appear, is the conjunction of scale and complexity. To ‘do’ IaaS in any useful way requires creating a certain size of infrastructure - but at the same time, organisations have to take into account existing infrastructure and applications.

One thing banks have been very good at traditionally is creating new IT systems. Back in the glory days, I remember being told, it was simply easier to build a new system than try to adapt an old one. While those days may now be over (at least for the time being), the result is a smorgasbord of systems, an unmeasured quantity of which are mission critical.

The challenge for IT in the finance sector has always been for management to keep up with delivery. As we discussed, one of the biggest issues faced in finance organisations today is asset management. To paraphrase another old friend and colleague, analyst Tony Lock of Freeform Dynamics, “The first problem is that people don’t know what IT systems and services they have.”

This lack of knowledge derives from a historical lack of adequate process. Asset management isn’t the only problem for banks: in IT terms, there are systems to migrate, data to classify, DNS rules and firewalls to configure, the list goes on. And then the sheer numbers of people who need to be consulted along the way, each with their own strategic goals and even personal ambitions.

When we look at the operations of the ultra-efficient data centres employed by cloud providers, we see a zealot’s attitude to IT management – everything is controlled, managed, labelled to the N’th degree. In a way, Amazon got lucky (http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-partly-accidental/) as it implemented its elastic cloud infrastructure relatively early in its existence.

Given that such an approach isn’t so straightforward for decades-old institutions, what’s the answer? Perhaps it would be best to create an entirely independent infrastructure. That would require a massive amount of investment of course – as banks struggle to respond to the new capital requirements imposed by Basel III, funding looks increasingly unlikely. Indeed, exceptions such as Deutsche Bank and National Bank of Australia only (http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/177_117/public-cloud-or-private-banks-map-a-path-towards-both-1050188-1.html) prove the rule.

So, why do finance organisations not build clouds? Despite their ability to build what were seen as some of the most powerful computer systems on the planet the answer, quite simply, is because they can’t.

2014

Posts from 2014.

January 2014

01-01 – Cloud Society Internet Of Things Do Sweat The Small Stuff

Cloud Society Internet Of Things Do Sweat The Small Stuff

Cloud Society: Internet of Things - do sweat the small stuff

The so-called Internet of Things could be with us today - if we want to do the easy things first

As I headed back from the Cisco-underwritten Internet of Things World Forum event held in Barcelona this week, I was struck by some incongruities between what was being presented as the vision, and what is happening on the ground. 

When IoT was being discussed in principle, it was positioned as an object in its own right, a solution to an existing problem, a lofty destination to aim for. Top-to-bottom architecture diagrams were drawn, interspersed by pictures of the sun rising over a city skyline and an uplifting soundtrack. 

Whatever this IoT thing is, suggested the presentations, it would be huge. The term “Smart City” was used many times, implying visions of a plexiglass-domed Megacity One in which everything, down to the paving slabs and the hinges on doors, would be part of an exciting, citizen-friendly, safe and sustainable whole. 

Yet, from this starting point, the conversation would turn to specific examples which tended to be on a much smaller scale. And quite rightly too, might I suggest. 

Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for the Internet of Things. I wrote a report about it after all, and I am in the middle of writing another. But I find myself wondering about the old adage, “If you want to get there, don’t start from here.” 

Frequently the debate would turn to the kinds of issues that such an all-encompassing vision of things might cause. Privacy for example - and indeed, Big Brother was suggested to be alive and well in the Metropolis. Equally, challenges of integration, of management maturity, of securing such a complex beast were hotly debated. 

While the reality might be much more mundane, I would suggest that it is still just as exciting. A far better starting point for thinking about the Internet of Things is not as a tangible destination, but as a way of enhancing of what we already have. Rather than the starting point of “How can IoT be applied to healthcare” which results in discussions of smart hospitals, of patient privacy and so on, what about - “What would be the benefits of connecting monitoring devices that already exist, and augmenting some physical objects with sensors?”

I’m speaking from a little bit of experience as I’ve seen a similar approach being adopted before, back in my consulting days. When centralised network management was still emerging, network elements - routers, switches, terminal servers and so on - were largely controlled locally, for example via a console connected by a serial cable. 

The fun we had dredging through component catalogues to enable boxes to be wired together, to screen scrape, to add capabilities and update firmware so that all such devices could be brought under central control, I can’t tell you the half of it. Most importantly the benefits were huge, for example in terms of reduced time spent travelling between network elements, plus a centralised hub enabled decision making to happen faster. 

With IoT we’re seeing similar, but now we have the ability to process events far more cleverly, using modern derivatives of log management software such as Splunk. The base principle is the same however - start joining things up and reap the rewards. Only this time we can apply the same principles not only to the machines that go ‘ping’ but also to trolleys and wheelchairs, crutches and meals. And cups of tea - let’s move stories of cups of tea going cold because the patient couldn’t even reach them into the past. 

The power of the Internet of Things is right at our fingertips. We don’t have to imagine use cases - they’re right in front of us. Forget digging up roads - every plug connecting every appliance should be a smart plug, centrally controllable. Every heater should be a smart heater. Every car should be able to broadcast its location to its owner, every concert ticket should be impossible to forge, every tractor building a nutrient map of the field. All such examples can be explored without the need to consider, say, privacy implications. 

For sure, the Internet of Things is about far more than simple remote control - but it’s a good place to start. I have said that ‘true’ Internet of things is predicated on three pillars: smart devices, low-latency networks and a scalable processing, analytical back end. On top of these we will build all manner of clever services - that’s where real innovation will happen. Right now, one pillar is looking decidedly weak compared to the other two, however. Many of our devices simply aren’t yet smart enough: the only thing preventing them being so is cost, and this is falling quickly. 

So, here’s my top tip. For sure, enjoy the visionary take on IoT, and if you have a spare few million quid to spend on a new factory or office building, by all means kit it out with all manner of clever-geekery - a widening pool of vendors will be only too pleased to help. Keep going with the municipal pilots which can demonstrate the potential. But if, like the majority, you find these too high a mountain to climb, simply look around you and think about what you could do better with some sensors, some remote switches, some clever apps. 

Perhaps one day we will all be living in smart cities but right now, already, we are seeing a groundswell of smart, as prices fall and capabilities grow. It doesn’t cost much to participate and the benefits can be immediate. Even as we look to the future, let’s not forget the benefits of IoT can be found in the here and now.

2016

Posts from 2016.

September 2016

09-29 – Big Data Magic

Big Data Magic

Looking for the magical power of computers to harness data? You may wait a long time!

Amidst all this evangelism and hype (together with pop star examples of startups taking the world by storm) It’s sometimes worth assessing how things actually are, and why they are as they are. As I am doing so, currently, following a day’s session getting the latest from HPE Software on its strategy and approach for Big Data and Information Management. In HPE’s world, this means how it deals with structured data analytics and unstructured data management respectively, with overlaps in between.

Now, I’ve been monitoring the impact of technology for fifteen years now, having spent a similar period working in IT. Call me a kool-aid drinker but I’m left with an overwhelming feeling that it really has had a profound effect. At the same time however, some things have stayed exactly the same. We have seen companies come from nowhere, take the world by storm and then abruptly vanish. For every Kodak there is an Alta Vista, for every Blockbuster a Digital Equipment Corporation. And even as we are wowed by the Amazons and Übers, nobody knows which will still be around in 10 years, with the rest no doubt acquired out of existence.

Truth and fiction in big data analytics

To whit: big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and all that clever stuff that’s going to rock our worlds, if it isn’t already. According to the rhetoric, we’re heading towards a moment in which decisions will be automated out of existence through the use of smart algorithms. But just how true is this? Of course someone has to present such a singular (if you’ll forgive the pun) view of the future. It gives everyone else something to triangulate against, as do any luddite positions or disaster scenarios.

As with any set of polarised perspectives, logic would suggest that the answer lies ‘somewhere in the middle’, which is where prediction gets a whole lot harder. Part of the challenge lies in the fact that we are seeing changes not only in how IT is delivered but also in the kinds of business that result. We will always need manufacturing, power generation, transportation, healthcare, haircuts and manicures and a whole bunch of other industries, products and services. But rare is the industry that is not worried about the effects of so-called ‘digital transformation’ right now.

Insurers are concerned about the threat of data-oriented companies to their core underwriting business; retailers are pushed to the edge by online-only companies; banks face the buzz of fintechs that exploit their core services to deliver far better customer experiences. Meanwhile, utilities are losing the fight to control the increasingly smart home, and traditional car companies seem only to flounder in the face of a smarter generation of vehicle manufacturers.

Where’s the truth? Should established companies seek to get more out of their vast pools of data, or would such exercises amount to fiddling while entire industries burn? These are tricky questions, and nobody has a monopoly on the answers. HPE Software is taking a pragmatic view: it believes at least part of the response lies in what the company is calling ‘augmented intelligence’, which is as much a manifesto as a glib marketing phrase. It is our intelligence being augmented, you see – technology exists to serve our needs as (therefore) smarter beings, who can then build upon what the insights they are offered.

It’s about the information (and not the data), stupid

To understand better where things are going, I believe we can start from a reasonably solid foundation – that all companies are information companies. Indeed, they always were, ever since Joe the blacksmith developed his skills and knowledge about what shoe to put on what horse, and Freda learned how to discern a good from a bad payer.

Over recent decades, we have been generating data like it is going out of fashion, but so much of it is preventing us from being actually informed. We spend person-years of corporate time and millions of dollars trying to pull together disparate data sources, in the hope we might unlock the value that lies within. All companies thrive or survive based on the quality of the information they maintain about their customers, their back-office processes, their finances and supply chains. And therein lies the challenge, as this data-rich world is also and increasingly information-poor.

Speaking of Kodak, the digital camera analogy isn’t bad. We have gone from taking 24 carefully planned shots of a two-week holiday to snapping hundreds, or even thousands of photos, which we either painstakingly file over many hours or leave languishing on hard drives. It’s the same for insurers or retailers looking for the elusive single customer view. “If you can’t measure, you can’t manage” goes the adage, and rare is the company today that can successfully measure. If it can, chances are any such metrics will quickly be out of date.

Perhaps this issue will remain unresolved, at least for as long as we see generating increasing amounts of data as good, or inevitable. At the same time however, we can discern the characteristics of the ‘better-informed’ organisation. First, given the deluge of data faced by any organisation (large or small), just being able to make sense of it is already a good start. Success in this area amounts to basic hygiene factors, delivering capabilities in data integration, quality and structure. A failure in this area possibly also amounts to a breach of regulation, so it is where much attention is focused.

Second comes the ability drive the organisation with whatever the information is saying, not least just understanding the data, but then also being able to conduct more detailed analytics and start to make more predictive decisions. It strikes me that this is where many organisations are struggling with the wrong mindset, as they see information as something ‘out there’ which should be consulted on occasion, like the oracle (sic) up the mountain. The fact is however, that the oracle has come down the mountain, available for consultation at any point.

This gives us an additional hygiene factor, based on a choice: do you use data in your decision making, or do you still hit and hope, based on what you believe might work? As noted HPE ‘Distinguished Technologist’ Chuck Bear, “Look at two gaming companies with the same idea: the one that does A/B testing will get more market share out of it.” All companies have a choice – to make decisions based on the information they have freely available, or to increase the risk of doing the wrong thing. Organisations really can be their own worst enemies.

The third area is then to use information to learn and improve, to change and become more dynamic. Information is not static but is constantly changing, meaning yesterday’s insights could well be inaccurate or, indeed, wrongly framed. In healthcare for example, no doubt it made sense at one point to measure ‘bed occupation’ as an indication of utilisation – what it failed to take into account was the fact that as soon as the measure was used, it became skewed due to the changing behaviours caused by its measurement. For different reasons, the same consequence true for all industries, remarked HPE Software’s marketing VP Jeff Veis, “Most metrics are backward looking - we often see companies creating dashboards that put them out of business.”

To really mess things up will always need people

To be able to benefit from information, therefore, requires a level of human savvy that doesn’t look like it is going to go away: to put it bluntly, we can be remarkably thick when it comes to how we use information, and no amount of algorithmic automation is going to change that. Does this mean all existing businesses are doomed, and that start-ups will mop up? Not necessarily: even the most disruptive startups are going for lower-hanging fruit, exploiting the fact that big business, bizarrely, can’t engage with its customers in any new way without spending aeons of time in meetings about it. Yes, it’s dumb, but that’s where we are.

Equally, while some such ripe pickings may generate such huge revenues that they can create global businesses out of a relatively tiny investment, they are a symptom of the times. Because of the exponential nature of complexity, the higher fruit (and to switch food-oriented analogies, the bread and butter of big business) may be way further up than such examples suggest. What this means in consequence is that people, not computers, will remain a significant factor long after technology has commoditised – and that hygiene factors in how we use information will differentiate successful organisations from the less successful. To be clear, when we all have the same tools, the least dumb will win.

Perhaps one day computers will exist that can make absolute sense of the pools of data we continue to generate. And yes, machine learning and even machine deciding will increasingly come into the picture. But, as noted Chuck Bear, “There’s no magic algorithm that given garbage data, will give magical insights.” And we have plenty of the former right now, with more coming on stream all the time. “It’s very easy to get the simple stuff wrong, that will be true five years from now and in 500 years from now.”

So, yes, the shorter term will be more about augmenting our intelligence than replacing it, offering situational awareness and empowering people to make the right choices – there’s just too much in the mix for things to be otherwise. We are constantly processing more information than we ask machines to do, and we will continue to do so, even as we can stand on the shoulders of such giants. To think otherwise makes the worst assumption of all: not that computers can become as intelligent as us, but that they can prevent us from being stupid. That really would require some magical algorithm.

Freeform Dynamics

Posts published in Freeform Dynamics.

2006

Posts from 2006.

October 2006

10-03 – Aligning IT security with the business

Aligning IT security with the business

Outside in or inside out, threats have to be protected against both in business and IT. Organisations today are looking to adopt more holistic approaches to balance IT security delivery against the risk management needs of the organisation, explains Jon Collins.

Where next for the security industry? The more cynical of pundits (and I include myself in this) have referred to it as an industry of fire extinguisher suppliers. No! Unfair! Or is it? While this glib titling may have an element of truth, we have to see this in the context of information technology at large, and most importantly, of how organisations procure their IT assets.

The fact of the matter (and this has been proven many times over in our industry research) is that organisations tend to buy technology in a number of quite defined ways. At one end of the scale we have major infrastructure investments, such as the construction of a new data centre, or the acquisition of an enterprise application like SAP. Such high-visibility procurements require the full support of the company board, and indeed, need to be run as change programmes in their own right as numerous users and data sources are migrated to the new platforms.

At the other end of the scale we have more tactical investments. While IT budgets may be created for the year, money will tend to be allocated on a quarterly basis. Like charities, there are plenty of worthy ways that the money could be spent, each of which will undoubtedly benefit the people at the receiving end – the business end-users of technology. But equally, there is only so much money to go around so some projects go unfunded, generally these tend to be the ones that are harder to justify. Quite frequently, it is in this tactical area that we find security purchasing: it is any wonder then, when we ask what organisations already have in place, we see the simpler stuff (antivirus protection, VPNs and the like) at the top of the list, and the more complex much lower down? Put bluntly, organisations treat security acquisitions like fighting fires, so should we be surprised that their actions are partially to blame for spawning an industry of fire extinguisher suppliers?

The good news is that there are signs this attitude and approach is changing. Many companies and public bodies are starting to see security within the broader context of risk, and this is having a positive impact on both attitudes to, and procurement of, security-related technologies. This sea change is for a variety of reasons: not least, the US-led compliance wave, which has grown into the broader “governance, risk and compliance” movement visible in all parts of the globe, particularly but not only in the Financial and Public sectors. As organisations become more savvy about business risk, they are recognising that IT is a two-pronged fork: not only can it be the cause of many risks that ultimately impact the business, but also, it is the source of a certain set of tools that can help organisations mitigate risks across the board.

The result, of course, is that IT security is being taken far more seriously by many companies. This does not mean that the wallet for security products has been prised firmly open, however. Traditionally, IT security has dwelt upon issues that make the best headlines: such incidents have generally come from the outside and more likely than not, IT security companies and their PR representatives have leapt on them as examples of exactly what their products can protect against. Meanwhile however, we have seen from our research that the potential for some kind of misdemeanour coming from an insider is just as great. We know (largely from anecdotal evidence and extrapolation) that companies are loathe to tell the world when they have suffered an internal security breach, which means that story- hungry journalists are not generally aware when such things happen (indeed, in certain US states, it is now illegal to keep mum – a fact that security companies have been quick to capitalise upon). While such incidents may not be discussed, this does not diminish their importance, however.

The insider threat does not have to be some kind of corrupt or malcontented employee determined to bring his organisation to its knees. While this can happen, far more likely is that something will go wrong due to an error of judgement, or a bunch of fresher staff members goading each other on, or an accidental eavesdropping that leads to a confidentiality breach. There are plenty of potential examples – but it is perhaps easiest to think back to one’s own experiences – of leaving a mobile phone on a park bench say, or accidentally deleting that important file. Such issues, writ large, demonstrate the real nature of the threat that the organisation’s own employees – that is, thee and me – pose to the business. Because it can boil down to mistakes that are made in the course of doing one’s normal work, clearly, it becomes difficult to defend against them. How can one easily guard against an employee deleting data, when said employee has every right and privilege to do so?

Equally clearly then, the expanded nature of risk to cover both illicit outsiders and unfortunate staffers means we can no longer think about solutions in technological terms alone. We are seeing success where organisations are taking the broader view, not only of the risks but also of the protections – setting workable policies for acceptable computer use, say, or ensuring that mobile workers are also given security awareness training when provided with corporate kit. Yes, absolutely, security technologies have a part to play, but only within this wider context, and not diminishing or replacing it. To many of us this means breaking the habits of a lifetime. We are all (particularly in IT) attracted by the latest gadget or software package, but we must resist the temptation to see such baubles as “the answer” in its entirety.

Even if we manage to adopt the broader view, we are not out of the woods. Security – or to use a better term, risk management – is not something that can be done only once and then left. This is for a number of reasons, not least that organisational behaviours are changing almost as fast as the technologies supporting them. Simple changes can completely blow a set of security policies out of the water. The lowly USB stick for example, is both a huge asset to individuals wanting to share files, but at the same time poses an equally large risk, having reached a size where they could hold a company’s entire customer database several times over. Or consider blogs, which are a thoroughly useful collaboration mechanism, but can equally provide a mechanism to thrust corporate secrets into the public domain. The same dichotomies can be found in the business at large, for example as organisations try to achieve the benefits of managing multiple outsourcing suppliers or allowing flexible home working. Such establishments may well be looking to open up their corporate boundaries, not lock them down – but all the while, they will need to manage the risks inherent in doing so.

So, what’s the answer? Ownership is key – and that stretches from the individual acknowledgement that people are both part of the problem and part of the solution, right up to ensuring there is somebody in an appropriately senior position to take responsibility for all risks, both business and IT. Some organisations are already achieving this, and many others are looking to see how they might develop such a role, with such an authority, in a way that works for their own businesses.

The bottom line then, is that we cannot rely on simple solutions, technological or otherwise – but then, this was never a simple problem. Many organisations still have a way to go, but a good first step is to recognise that it can only ever be part of the answer, and for the rest we will need to take a long hard look at ourselves, and at our organisations. The goal of aligning IT security with business risk management may not be easy to attain, but at least we shall be facing in the right direction.

2007

Posts from 2007.

August 2007

08-09 – Thanks for the memory…

Thanks for the memory…

I’ve just bought some more RAM for my laptop, a 2 GB upgrade to be precise. Now, before I get into the ramifications (no pun intended), here’s some context. I’m of the generation that recalls trying to fit software into the smallest possible of orifices, and while I never really got on with assembler myself, I could understand the elegance of a well-put-together piece of code. Some of my then-colleagues continue the embedded programming challenge, these days trying to fit large-screen video decoding into the RAM equivalent of a matchbox, and managing to squeeze in a copy of space invaders to boot.

And so it is - you know what’s coming - that I find myself looking at my laptop screen and wondering exactly how Window Vista could manage to fill an entire gigabyte of memory, almost by itself.

Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but its worthy of a look. Right now, my wonderfully handy sidebar gadget is telling me that my computer is consuming 713MB of memory - which is on a fresh boot with only Notepad running so I can type this - Notepad takes up a meg, by the way. The other 712 is used up by processes that I have not invoked personally.

This is all a far cry from “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” as Bill Gates is reputed to (and later denied, but where’s the fun in that) saying. Indeed, that wouldn’t even support Notepad! But what exactly is the rest doing? A cursory glance at the task manager (5 Meg) tells me that, as a user, I am taking up:

• 25 MB for Skype (“Take a deep breath,” it tells me)
• 20MB for that “wonderfully handy” Windows Sidebar
• 10MB for Windows Explorer
• 8MB for Bluetooth
• 8MB for CSRSS - an RSS service perhaps
• 6MB for MSN Messenger
• 3MB for Samsung battery and display tools
• 3MB for Groove

Together with the nearly 10MB of various bits and bobs, that’s 93MB by my reckoning. Meaning that the other 600MB plus, is taken up by non-user processes. I could strip out about 30MB for the AVG antivirus and shield I’m currently running, there’s probably some processes that are part of other apps I’ve installed but the rest does look like it is part of the core OS.

I would say “phew” but I’m mostly sanguine about this. My processing is down at 3-5% as I type, meaning that whatever’s being stored, it’s not necessarily clogging up the system. There is the whole debate about poorly written, bloated OS code, which shouldn’t be ignored but equally, I’m sure there are a number of things I could switch off and save a goodly percentage; also, I am using certain features that have an understandable overhead, such as the search indexer (26MB). Ultimately however, while RAM may be cheap, I do feel slightly frazzled that quite such a large quantity of it should be required just to keep the lights on, and I’m not absolutely sure why “tuning” should be seen as a geek pastime, and not a core capability.

What other options exist? “Get a Mac” of course, and I am seriously considering this, not just to satisfy my feelings that memory should be treated as a precious commodity but for a number of other reasons. “Get Linux” is another possibility, but that’s usually back to the geeky-tweaky thing and it raises a whole bunch of compatibility issues. “Get a life and stop worrying about it” is where my thinking is at currently, particularly now I have gone through the “Get more RAM” option. All the same, I do find myself wondering, or indeed hoping, whether Microsoft is reaching the point where it will run out of things to add. The only thing I can think of round the corner is virtualisation, but I do believe that a well-written virtual layer should exist as part of the operating system anyway, in which case it could itself be part of the solution. Wishful thinking, perhaps?

In the meantime, should I bite the bullet and re-enable all those sexy Aero features? I think I’ll leave it just a while before I do, as I want to enjoy the feeling of that glut of memory just a little bit longer. It’ll be nice while it lasts.

November 2007

11-03 – Secure USB – the threat and the opportunity

Secure USB – the threat and the opportunity

Introduction

When the USB standard was first launched, few would have imagined the profound effect it would have on how we use computers and share information. Today however, we see a plethora of new, different kinds of device that benefit from the USB specification – not least flash memory storage, which has obsolete the floppy and all but replaced the CDROM as a way of transferring files, but also such esoteric uses as using the powered USB port to charge mobile phones and other handheld devices.

The simplicity of USB storage belies a number of quite serious security threats, however. Not least of course, that it is possible to shovel quite a load of corporate data onto such devices – which today can reach a size of 16GB plus. This may be done for malicious reasons, but more often it could be quite innocuous – an employee who doesn’t know which files he might need to work on over the weekend, may just dump the entire directory structure onto a USB stick. Woe betide, then, should he or she lose it on the way back home.

Risks such as these have led some organisations to take quite drastic measures to prevent the use of USB storage in particular, from disabling the device drivers, to (so the anecdotes go) super-gluing the USB ports on desktop computers. While such stories may be apocryphal, they reinforce the belief that USB is in some way a bad thing, and access should be prevented. This thinking leads to a dilemma in many IT shops – not least because USB storage has become an essential element of collaboration and file sharing, but also because USB has such a wide variety of other functions.

Reducing risks of USB storage

Despite being tarred with the brush of insecurity, the fact is that USB- connected devices offer opportunities to reduce a number of security risks. To catalyse acceptance of more advanced devices, we need to simultaneously quell the quite genuine concerns about the risks associated with USB storage. Let’s look at this first.

The ability to encrypt data on a USB device has been available for a number of years, pioneered by companies like M-Systems (Now part of SanDisk) and licensed via the brand DiskOnKey to the likes of HP and Apple. Essentially, such devices can be partitioned into insecure and secure areas, and an encryption chip on the device ensures that data stored on the secure area can only be accessed via a valid username and password combination. Such devices are almost impossible to hack: indeed, the circuitry is designed to burn out should attempts be made to break the encryption codes. Meanwhile there are endpoint security companies such as DeviceWall whose technologies support the encryption of data onto any device. In both cases, the result is that employees can have a single, locked down storage device both for passing of non-sensitive data, and for transport and backup of sensitive files.

There are several security benefits to such an arrangement. Of course data is protected against theft or loss (unless the thief has the password, of course!); also, it provides the basis of secure offsite backups, for example if an employee spends a lot of time outside the office it is good policy to recommend backing up data at suitable intervals. If there are concerns about the security of the computer being used (for example if working on a client site or in Internet cafes), then data can be accessed directly from the device. For further protection, some device manufacturers such as MXI are incorporating fingerprint readers directly on the device. A swipe of a finger replaces the need for a username/password, which is not only more convenient, but reduces the risk of theft even further.

Some devices can store not just data, but applications. The U3 initiative for example provides an application framework for Microsoft Windows computers so that U3-enabled applications can be executed directly from the USB stick; furthermore, when the device is removed, so are any traces of the applications and data involved. A wide variety of software is available, from apps such as OpenOffice, the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, to network diagnostics tools so (say) an engineer can arrive at a client site with his toolbox on a single thumbdrive which can be plugged directly – and securely – into a client computer.

USB devices as security tools

As well as features to help us work more securely with USB devices, there are also devices that exclusively provide security functionality. As a simple example, think of token-based USB plugs: these tend to be tight on storage capacity (running into the kilobytes rather than the megabytes), as their function is to manage encryption keys rather than data. There is the Aladdin eToken for example, or indeed, the RSA SecureID 6100 smart card in its USB form factor. While both come with handy tools to manage online usernames/passwords (or Web Sign On, in Aladdin’s parlance), the real strength of such devices is in the corporate environment, when they can be used to support two-factor authentication for logging on to the corporate IT environment.

Other vendors are loading different kinds of security functionality onto the USB device. Accario for example has combined application wrapping, strong authentication, virtual private network termination and a fingerprint reader onto its AccessStick product. As an interesting example of a use case, AccessStick is targeted at Citrix environments: put simply, you can go onto any computer anywhere in the world, and access your corporate IT environment, remotely and securely. A similar idea is behind the MobiKey product from Route1.

The logical next step is for the device itself to run security applications. One company, Yoggie, has launched a firewall appliance (the Pico) on a USB stick, which is in fact a Linux-based, Pentium-class computer running a range of end point protection applications. We expect to see a number of such devices appear over the next couple of years, potentially combining capabilities such as those sported by the AccessStick and the Pico, and making use of virtualisation to enable an entire, secured compute environment that can run on a single drive. While attractive, such ideas are yet to reach the mainstream as there remain technical issues, for example around the portability of the virtualisation platform.

What about centralised management?

There are clearly plenty of benefits to be had from security-enabled, and security-enabling USB devices. We know however, that one of main challenges associated with security is its management. Many of the devices mentioned here can operate in a stand-alone mode, that is, they can be configured and secured by the user. However, certain features require a level of centralised management – not just to administer such things as encryption keys and the like, but to control the devices themselves.

This is an area in which we are currently seeing a great deal of activity. SanDisk’s Cruzer Enterprise device for example offers a range of management features, including Active Directory integration, remote password administration and centralised updates. Not only this but, if lost or stolen, the device can be configured to “ping” its presence to a central management console, from where it can be disabled remotely. A number of the companies mentioned above, including MXI and DeviceWall, offer similar capabilities. While beneficial, it would be fair to say that this is an evolving market and there are still some challenges to be overcome – for example, agreement of a common standard such that all manufacturers can be singing off the same hymn sheet.

Conclusion

In the future, USB devices will continue to add new features and find new applications (the recent release of the TrackStick USB-based GPS module offers a whole new set of possibilities, for example). With all their potential however, the one challenge USB devices can never overcome alone is down to their small size: we need to take it as inevitable that the little blighters will be lost, misplaced, dropped down the backs of sofas, accidentally crushed underfoot or otherwise rendered inaccessible. Any security policies need to build in criteria not only for their appropriate use, but also the consequences of such loss. Perhaps they will become like car keys: while we have learned to treat them carefully, equally, we should know where we keep the spare.

2008

Posts from 2008.

March 2008

03-03 – Breaking the bounds of security

Breaking the bounds of security

Breaking the bounds of security

I went to a fascinating panel session a couple of weeks ago, where I and a number of other analysts were largely witnesses to a debate around the evolving security needs of the Chief Information Security Officer. These were no small fry – around the table were security chiefs from a number of blue-chip companies, including leading pharmaceutical firms and some of the better known financial institutions. What was most interesting was how far advanced was the thinking of the panellists – not least how their views were moving ahead of conventional, industry-led perspectives.

The pervading view was that the very basis upon which IT security is defined and procured needs to be reconsidered. Traditionally, the assumption has been that the organisation needs somehow to be protected from outside threats. While this perspective is being gently eroded over time by the industry as a whole, the panellists were of the opinion that the whole concept of an organisational boundary should be consigned to the past.

There were a number of ways that these opinions were expressed. One panellist, for example, described the policies surrounding use of remote laptops, and how they were extending the policies to computers inside the corporate environment. “If it’s good enough for computers connecting via the Internet, it’s good enough for computers connected via the LAN – why have two policies when one will do?” he said. Other panellists talked about their suppliers and partners: if the business requirement is to enable access to corporate systems by third parties, security measures are often more of a curse than a blessing, disabling rather than enabling productivity.

While we are seeing some of these themes reflected in our own research, there can be no doubt that the thinking in this area is moving very fast. Back in the mid-1990’s, the UK Government cottoned on to the fact that good security was more about risk management than risk avoidance – a concept that has fed into such standards initiatives as ISO 17799. It is only quite recently that such thinking has broadened across the wider majority of sectors, aided and abetted by the compliance wave. In recent Freeform Dynamics research for example, over 40% of the 324 respondents told us their organisations were enterprises adopting a Chief Risk Officer – this figure was over 60% in the financial service sector – which is quite a leap forward from a couple of years ago.

Meanwhile, IT companies with a focus on security – Symantec, CA and IBM for example – are responding to the risk management question. But who’s to say that by the time the industry as a whole has caught up, the needs of end- user organisations will already have moved on?

There can be no doubt that it’s time to move forward not only the debate, but also the technologies available to support these evolving business requirements. If security is to be considered as threat prevention, solutions will invariably be in the form of threat removal. While such a model may have worked in the past, today’s organisations are looking for security to be more about business enablement and risk reduction – and this will require not only different technology combinations, but also different approaches to deployment and operation. There will always be a need to counter threats – but within this broader context, and not for their own sake.

These are not the views of some California-based marketing team, but the realities of the today’s global business landscape, as told by organisations on the front line. From the industry perspective, it would be wise to sit up and listen.

03-03 – Dispelling the myths about SOA

Dispelling the myths about SOA

What exactly is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)? In this business which sometimes seems to take pleasure in making things more complex than they need to be, it can be difficult to tell. The IT industry has frequently been compared to the motor industry, with all of its innovation, commoditisation and general impact on the world at large. Just as valid perhaps is to compare IT to the earlier days of the pharmaceutical industry, before such obligations as clinical trials and, well, actually proving a drug could do what its manufacturer said it could do. For all the flashing lights and so on, our illustrious business has retained its fair share of snake oil salesmen (and nobody is immune to this – just remember Y2K).

Against this background, it is perhaps inevitable that such complex constructs as SOA should be castigated as over-hyped and under-achieving. The purpose of this article is to pick apart some of this criticism, dispelling some of the myths to help organisations take advantage of the benefits of SOA, without being distracted by the marketing hype. First however, it’s worth reviewing a bit of history. Without spending too much time wallowing in past nostalgia (of course the mainframe guys got it all right, deal with it), let’s recall from whence SOA has come – which of course is the same as working out why we are now in the position we’re in.

SOA is the conjunction, convergence or collision of several technological trends – to the extent that the forbears of each still believe they “own” it. Here are the major themes, though of course these brief categorisations do none of them justice:

• Object orientation and component based development – from which we
  have the principles of cohesive units of service, delivered through
  code via a defined, externally visible interface.

• Middleware and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) – giving us
  both the understanding and the wherewithal for applications to
  communicate, and dispensing with the idea of silo-ed apps that work in
  isolation.

• Internet-based applications and Web services – providing the globally
  accessible networking infrastructure and simplified, standardised
  protocols to enable units of software (apps, components, web scripts)
  to communicate with each other, wherever they are.

• Enterprise Architecture – bringing up to date and distilling the
  capabilities of business and systems analysis, process and data
  modelling, to understand business needs and map them onto IT
  capabilities in a way that treats IT as an interconnected framework,
  not as individual components.

All of these combine to provide facets of what we call SOA. Historically however, while each of these categories has seen much progress, against the background of a marketing-led IT industry, we have also seen a number of myths come into being around SOA. Let’s look at them.

Myth 1: SOA is a product

Of course (goes the cry), SOA isn’t a product, it’s an architecture, surely that’s what the “A” in SOA is referring to? This may be so, but (as should be unsurprising in this marketing-led industry that we live in), vendors have done what they can to define SOA in terms of what they can package up – otherwise of course, they have nothing to sell. That wouldn’t be a problem in itself necessarily, but the result is that SOA becomes a competitive stance, with one vendor’s SOA being better than another’s, and so on. In this case vendors and other pundits have chosen the wrong three letter acronym to try to hype.

Rather than trying to pump up SOA as a product, an alternative strategy can be to pick a product category and sell it as the SOA silver bullet: unsurprising that the four trends listed above are the source of many such products. We’ve seen this for example, with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which is an evolution of the EAI capabilities of the past. Useful it may be to support an SOA deployment, but ESB is not SOA any more than SOA can be simplified to something as tangible as ESB.

Myth 2: SOA is different to the past

As we have already seen, SOA is a point on a continuous evolutionary path, that builds on the key strengths of a number of areas of IT. While it does offer a logical next step, that doesn’t mean that SOA in some way needs organisations to throw everything away and start again – which of course, would not be an option for most organisations, even if it were necessary.

SOA offers a way to think about how application elements can communicate, a framework to enable this, and an approach to help us achieve such intercommunication in a way that will be the most useful. None of these elements are new – what is perhaps different is how we are thinking about them all in one go, rather than piecemeal.

Myth 3: SOA is the same as the past

Paradoxically of course, Myth 2 doesn’t mean that we want to hang onto everything that we relied upon in the past. The co-ordination we wish to achieve through SOA requires a level of joined-up thinking that encompasses all dimensions of IT, not just development, integration, operations or whatever. From their historical standpoints, certain groups have sought to define SOA in terms that make sense only for them – developers for example, which see SOA purely as a set of mechanisms or standards, or architects who see SOA as being more about alignment between IT and the business.

At its most fundamental roots, SOA starts and ends with the concept of “service” – which is the thread binding together all areas of IT and its delivery. For SOA to succeed, it is as much about the operational side of IT getting its house in order (to deliver services scalably and consistently, for example), as it is about developers and architects defining, building and integrating applications in a service-oriented way.

Myth 4: SOA has been and gone

This is a myth fabricated entirely by people who don’t see SOA as anything more than a marketing construct – which, for some peddlers of Myth 1 for example, it is. Overheard for example, was a conversation between IT marketing types: “What’s next? SOA is past its sell-by date, we need something new.” There have been others saying that SOA should in some way be superseded by other architectural constructs, such as (say) event-driven architecture, EDA.

Trouble is, SOA isn’t something that can go away, precisely because it is a logical, evolutionary step that brings together several strands of IT. If we were to move on from SOA, that would mean throwing away not just the term but all the best practices that have been learned over the past 40 years. And what of EDA? Absolutely it has validity – but it takes a product mindset (see Myth 1) to believe that architectural constructs should be mutually exclusive, or in some way competing.

Myth 5: SOA has to be enterprise-wide

There is a clear tendency to believe that SOA is appropriate only for the largest of strategic projects, or indeed, that to do SOA “properly”, it needs to be implemented as a broad framework across the organisation. This could partly be as a result of Myth 2, but equally Myth 1 has probably led to the belief that new, improved SOA should be the broom to sweep away all of the old, inferior architectural constructs that went before. SOA offers an alternative to silo-ed applications, but that doesn’t mean that all silos should be abolished.

This myth has been exacerbated by some IT architecture types, who would like to see enterprise-wide initiatives to define, model or otherwise capture the interface between business and IT. To counter this, a well-worn phrase in architecture circles these days is, “Don’t boil the ocean,” recognising both the impossibility and the futility of such a task. The alternative is to focus on achievable goals, using SOA as a framework to solve a specific set of challenges – the roll-out of a new application that needs to be integrated with a number of legacy platforms, for example. Setting tangible goals for SOA also sets an appropriate scope for what needs to be understood and modelled architecturally.

Myth 6: Business people don’t get SOA

IT’s habit to try to solve its own problems perhaps leads to the biggest myth of all, namely that SOA should in some way be confined to the technologists, and is not relevant or too complex for the business. Business people do “get” service orientation, if it is explained to them without being dressed up in techie terminology. Indeed, in recent Freeform Dynamics research, the majority of senior business respondents were either already familiar with SOA or thought it made sense when service orientation was explained to them.

Indeed, for SOA to succeed as more than an integration mechanism, it is vital that the business does understand what IT is trying to achieve. As already discussed, an architecture oriented around services can draw together a number of threads from all areas of the IT organisation, including its interface with the business. It is good to know, then, that as long as SOA is presented without technical baggage, we are pushing against an open door when we want to talk to the business in this way.

So, what can we conclude? While SOA may still be cursed with a number of myths, a final reality is that SOA is inevitable, a consequence of how IT is evolving. In the future, in order to achieve a successful integration between such areas as those listed above, we need (a) to think in terms of architecture, and (b) to consider the primary purpose of IT – to deliver services to its users – as the central tenet. Does IT need SOA? That’s unclear. To move forward, do we need to think in terms of an IT architecture and delivery mechanism that is, in itself, oriented around services? Undoubtedly – but rather than promulgating myths, it will only be by adopting clear vision of what SOA has to offer that we really stand a chance of achieving its promises.

03-03 – Experiences installing Linux on the desktop

Experiences installing Linux on the desktop

Experiences installing Linux on the desktop

It’s funny how you can find yourself transported back, when faced with a set of stimuli. Pick up and old book, listen to a piece of music or put on a jacket, and sometimes a wealth of memories and feelings can come rushing back. It can be slightly disorienting and it’s not always pleasant, but for me at least, it never ceases to marvel.

And so it was, as I was testing out the installations of a few desktop Linux products a few days ago. Before I go on, please note that this isn’t a feeble attempt to ingratiate myself with the Linux community – I was never that good a Linux hacker. I was around, however, for the first release of the Linux journal, and as an indication of how sad I am, it is perhaps of note that I still have it, filed somewhere.

Where the “memory thing” is relevant is that I found myself transported from the relatively cushy pastures of Windows, back to the frontier lands of Linux. The software has clearly come a long way in terms of functionality, usability, ease of configuration and so on, and it is a different world to ten years ago (when beta really meant beta!). The cultural vestiges remain, though, and so does the fix-it mindset I found myself using.

By way of example, allow me to work through my own experiences – first with Gentoo, and then with PCLinuxOS. I confess the time spent with Gentoo didn’t last long – I kicked it off first as I knew it was the one Stephen O’Grady used the most. I was also swayed by its claims of “extreme performance and configurability.” What was there not to like?

Sadly, I stumbled almost as soon as the installation started to kick up a fuss. The Gentoo installation disks provided on this particular magazine (Linux Format) offered a number of pre-built configurations, none of which wanted to install cleanly – that is, to go straight through to the graphically enhanced front end without a fuss. Like an untrained, flaccid muscle, a small part of my brain was quietly mumbling, “that’s OK, just install a cut down kernel, look at the configuration tables and compile something that’s good enough for now, so you can build it up from there, benefitting from the extreme performance without compromising on features.” At least I think that’s what it was saying, but I had spent too long in end-user-land to listen. After a few attempts, I canned it and went for PCLinuxOS.

This was more successful, unsurprisingly as it is designed more for the novice (did I really once hack Xconfig files?), but it wasn’t without issue. There were a couple of problems that were fortunately within my “novice” reach – first, that the “wizard” that was used to set up disk partitions would quite jovially continue on its way, even if no disk had been selected. As would the entire installation in fact, and it was only following the final reboot at the end of the process, that the system confessed that no operating system had been installed. For any Linux newbie, this would be a complete showstopper.

Having worked past this hurdle (and feeling justly proud, dare I say), the entire installation was pretty seamless. I could set up a user, configure and run programs, and generally compute what needed to be computed. As a comment, from the novice perspective there were perhaps too many things that I could do – I was interested but a little surprised to find that the OS came with a complete set of developer tools, for example. To me, the conundrum is this: if I were a developer, the chances are I would already be in a position to install a more clever Linux distribution than this one; if I was not, such capabilities only serve to distract and would make me wonder what purpose they serve.

The only thing not present was an Internet connection. I rather foolishly (so I thought) assumed that, while I might try to get my Belkin PCI wireless card installed, the chances are I wouldn’t be able to find a Linux driver for it. I was both right, and wrong: a “wrapper” driver was supplied, within which I could install the Windows driver for the card. A bit of tweaking and I could see the network; a bit more time spent playing with routing tables, and I could access the Internet.

This last point is not a trivial one, and again it goes to the heart of the difference of approach between the two mindsets, Windows and Linux. In the Windows world, internet connectivity should just work – if it doesn’t, the user has every reason to feel a bit miffed and call in the heavy guns. In the Linux world however, there seems to be an assumption that whoever is in front of the computer will have both the desire and the wherewithall to open the bonnet, run up the command line and have a bit of a tinker. For me it was both a delight and a challenge – the former as I already knew the right commands, and the latter as I had absolutely no idea what the command line switches should be. However, all of this assumed that I even “got” certain principles like routing tables, default gateways and so on.

There is no right or wrong in all of this, but even as I browsed, impressed, through the available programs, I was left with the feeling that desktop Linux still displayed its heart just a little too clearly on its sleeve. I know, this is only one distribution among many – but this is also part of the problem, as a first-time user stands as much chance of being turned off from the whole desktop Linux concept, as being turned on to it. I’m not talking about wholesale adoption strategies by enterprise IT shops: as I understand it, the growth of Linux acceptance in particular, and open source software in general, is equally dependent on a viral adoption approach – in other words, through “novices” like me trying things out and making a decision, yay or nay.

I’m in no way downhearted – I remain impressed by the comprehensive set of facilities I now have on the computer sitting beside me. I shall continue to explore and test things out, for a start I want to have a go with a couple of other distributions (I have a SuSe DVD on my desk, for example; Ubuntu is the obvious other), and see what additional facilities Linux offers over and above what my office worker mindset is used to. Just for now I shall stick with running Windows on my main PC, but never say never!

03-03 – First Look Blackberry April 2007

First Look Blackberry April 2007

I’ve been a reasonably happy user of the HTC Universal for some time now. OK, its built like a tank and weighs about the same, but it is the first experience I have had of a device that really does do everything I need. It also runs Microsoft Pocket PC, which is important yet not essential – I was a perfectly content Palm user for many years, and a Psion user before that. Still, I have grown rather attached to my clunky-yet-functional Universal.

Last week, I was given the opportunity to test one device I have not yet been exposed to – the Blackberry. It’s sitting next to me now, quietly confident, as any device would be if it had had the whirlwind romance with the business community that the Blackberry has experienced. Right now however, I’m feeling unconvinced that it will nuzzle its way into my working life, pushing the Universal out of the nest with a flick of its scroll wheel.

Why is this? I thought it would be best to write down what my first impressions of the Blackberry were, compared to the Universal, not least so I could review them in a few months time. If you’re interested in joining me on this journey, read on.

First off, the positives. Gram for gram, the Blackberry is significantly lighter than the Universal, sitting comfortably in the shirt pocket where the U feels like it would tear the thread if I left it there too long. To state what is perhaps obvious to all Blackberry users, clearly a great deal of effort has gone into design and usability – lessons learned from the Zen of Palm perhaps. It sits comfortably in either hand, and does what it is supposed to do (in this one’s case, read/write email and make calls), in a straightforward manner.

There are some great, innovative design features as well. Put it in its holster and it switches itself off automatically, presumably responding to a sensor in the case. The oft-touted thumb wheel is clever and simple to get the hang of, and the screen is clear enough and bright enough. Put simply, it does what it says on the tin. The contacts database is similarly simple to use and speedy in response, etc, etc. That’s not to say I found the interface totally intuitive, however. There’s one click more than I expected to open an email (small issue, but grates after a while), I find the keyboard a bit too small for my fat fingers, and there’s other, similarly small issues, but nothing that would prevent me from using the device.

What lets the Blackberry down is its versatility. While it is a brick, I was delighted with the U, to finally have a single device on my person. Its not just the device but the paraphernalia – chargers, connection cables and so on: when it came out it replaced my phone, my MP3 player and my PDA, and was sufficiently functional to allow me to leave my PC at home (I can view PDFs and Powerpoint presentations, for example). If I were to adopt the Blackberry, would I then need to get an MP3 player? What would happen when I needed to be hands free and I received a call in the middle of listening to music, on my bike say?

Meanwhile, I have my trusty Universal. Okay, the battery life is poor (though better since I was told to take out my cheap, power hungry SD card), it is slow to open the address book and needs an occasional reboot for no reason whatsoever. The email facility sometimes fails to connect… and yet, I can access multiple accounts (keeping work and home separate, say), I have access to a much broader range of applications (including Skype over the built-in Wifi), it has a properly usable keyboard, the Today screen tells me a summary of what’s coming up, and I can use it as a 3G modem with my PC. It should also be mentioned that the Universal integrates more smoothly with Microsoft Exchange – what you see in the pocket email application is what you see on the desktop, whereas the Blackberry’s main email window is a hotchpotch of emails that are in reality stored in a variety of folders.

In conclusion, the Universal really is the Swiss army knife of pocket devices, compared to the slick, James Bond gadget of the Blackberry. One is generally functional, the other excels in a much smaller range of functions. Perhaps it boils down to the kind of person I am – or put another way, do I really need all the features of the Universal, and am I prepared to forgo the simplicity of the Blackberry? Or, will I find that I reach for the Blackberry first, whatever I believe my general needs are? It’ll take a few weeks to find out; for now, and having finished this article, I’ll just be glad I don’t have to carry both of them around.

03-03 – Information at your Fingertips?

Information at your Fingertips?

Information at your Fingertips?

A long, long time ago, I can still remember… when, at University, we were taught about how computers were going to help people have all the information they needed, quite literally at the speed of electricity. Hum. It’s now twenty years later, and I don’t feel any more like information is at my beck and call, than I did back then. Indeed its the other way around – I feel beholden to information, rather than feeling it is beholden to me.

I don’t think I’m alone. In fact, I know I’m not – a research study we conducted at the beginning of the year showed that information access remains an area of weakness for many organisations. Quite ironic really, given that we supposedly work in “information technology”, that is, the technology of information. Someone, and I suppose we all need to put our hands up for this, isn’t doing a very good job.

But is it an impossible goal? Think: if you could tap into whatever information you needed right now, what would it look like and how would you access it? Its not an easy question to answer, and indeed, it is difficult if not impossible to do so without considering what facilities are already available to us. Every now and then I have a deep insight into my own information needs, for example when I am in a strange town, there’s nobody around and I really, really could do with a curry. Weren’t mobile software vendors telling us years ago that such a problem had already been solved? Perhaps its just me – the rest of the world are enjoying fine curries, laughing into their Singhas at having managed to keep the secret – but I doubt it.

It’s the same for business information. Whatever the reasons, many (if not all) organisations still struggle when it comes to pulling together whatever information is necessary for day to day activities. Again, there have been many promises over the years of how (say) we would be able to access a single view of the customer, or manage product information over the lifecycle. But, lets face it, if it is still a challenge to organise meeting room bookings – and indeed, in many places it is – what chance do we stand in achieving more esoteric goals. Even this is a simplistic view of the real requirement, as anybody who invites a potential customer for a meeting, only to be turfed out of the room by some irate jobsworth, will know.

So what’s the answer? To be frank, at this stage in the game, there isn’t one, not a simple answer anyway. Technology is changing too fast, and the complexities are just too, well, complex. With all the cool-yet-disposable gadgets, software packages and supporting chicanery we are the beta testers of the information revolution, in which the real battles are yet to happen.

This is not to be downhearted. One day, I believe, we will reach the tipping point of making technology work for us, rather than the other way around. First however, we must decide what we actually want.

03-03 – IT management gets personal

IT management gets personal

IT management gets personal

Here I am at the Symantec Vision user conference in Las Vegas. This morning we were treated to the keynote pitch “Ten Oxymorons of IT management”, its ironic that shortly after the Veritas acquisition (which I wasn’t fully happy about, from the enterprise perspective) I believed that the very term “Symantec Vision” was itself an oxymoron. I’m pleased to report that this view is changing, however.

Symantec has been viewed as a company that talks like an enterprise IT company, but acts like a consumer IT company. When I put this point to the CTO, Mark Bregman, he made the rather good point that it was increasingly important for the company to balance the needs of both sides. It makes sense: for security as with other areas of IT, our actions as individuals (i.e. “consumers”) can often have a profound impact on our IT capabilities as an organisation. It could be that we choose to complete a report on our home computer, or plug the iPod into the corporate desktop, or treat our personal mobile phone as a business tool – clearly, we need to marry consumer with corporate technologies if we are going to minimse the risks of such combinations.

It’s not just about avoiding the problems. During an animated lunchtime discussion, some of the potential benefits of marrying individual tools with corporate capabilities became clear. At the table were several Yankee Group analysts, Simon Robinson from The 451 Group, yours truly and Mark B. A conversation around data classification technologies (think: clever software that can work out what the data is for, and make decisions about it accordingly) moved onto the social networking technique of tagging (think: people labelling data according to what it really is for, avoiding the need to second guess) – would it be out of this world, for example, to imagine the backup software making backup decisions based on specific, user-assigned tags?

This raises several questions – not least, might the human factor introduce the potential for error, and might this increase the risks rather than reducing them? The answer to be frank is, I don’t know, but it would be a very useful conversation to define where people might be able to make individual decisions about their data, and how these decisions might be of benefit. Expecting humans to be perfect is not the answer, so introducing the human factor should not be treated lightly. However, the alternative – to expect a future, fully autonomic IT environment to be able to make all the decisions – is probably not the answer either. As said Andrew Jaquith of The Yankee Group, “humans are sloppy, but perhaps we should be embracing sloppiness.” With all the caveats of not leaping before we look, personally, I agree with him – and if Symantec can marry the best of humanity with the best of automation, good luck to them.

03-03 – IT security in a changing world

IT security in a changing world

IT security in a changing world

Predicting the future is always a challenge, particularly when it comes to IT. The history of computing is littered with attempts to define how things might look: the only characteristic they share is an innate level of inaccuracy. If we want to define IT strategy however, we must take a stab at what we think will happen. There are some, more obvious trends that can help us here – use of mobile technologies, say, or use of virtualisation. The harder ones to judge are more dynamic areas such as social networking and Web 2.0, or trendier, issues-based areas such as going green. Trying to decide whether such things are just a flash in the pan is perplexing, to say the least.

For security professionals, every big, new thing brings with it a raft of big, new risks. Gone forever are the days when security was discussed in terms of air-gaps and offline storage: the brave new IT environments of today are always-on, and always connected. The result is a conundrum: oftentimes, organisations choose to risk the potential dangers rather than battening down the hatches and constrain business. A simple example is the USB-attached storage device (a.k.a. the flash drive or iPod), which these days has the capacity to haul off a significant amount of corporate data, if not all of it. One CIO told us when his department conducted a USB port scan, they found over 600 different types of USB storage device attached to corporate desktops. Blocking access to these, however, would restrict how people share information, as well as being an administrative nightmare to manage.

While organisations may be choosing to accept the inherent risks of many technologies, this doesn’t mean they are blasé. In many case, companies are finding themselves restricted by a lack of security. Indeed, according to a recent Freeform Dynamics research study, they are limiting the adoption of such business-beneficial approaches as teleworking and workforce mobility, because they are concerned about the risks. So, the absence of a warm feeling about how risks are being countered, is actually holding organisations back. Not just this, but more and more these days security breaches are being treated as a failure of business governance, not just of IT.

What to do? If a lack of understanding is at the root of the problem, the solution is perhaps to mitigate this, rather than having sleepless nights about what might be. There are several things an organisation can do, none of which are specifically to do with technology: these include defining ownership of the problem, delivering workable policies that can change with time, and separating concerns between those that do and those that monitor. Most importantly, IT security needs to be treated seriously at board level, not for its own sake but because the lack of security is an inhibitor to business growth. A business-led, co-ordinated approach to IT security need not be difficult to implement, if it is pitched at the right level, and for the right reasons.

03-03 – Locking down to open up -- taking control of the enemy within

Locking down to open up – taking control of the enemy within

Locking down to open up – taking control of the enemy within

IT security tools have traditionally focused on preventing what we could loosely call “the external threat” – hackers, viruses, worms and so on. From the perspective of customer organisations however, this is only one part of the story. It is just as likely, for example, that an attack would come from an insider, a lowly clerk or disgruntled programmer having a quick browse round the HR file share to see if there’s any interesting files left visible. We know this is the case – when we spoke to 715 senior IT managers in October last year (“Enabling the trusted workforce”), they told us that inside jobs were almost as likely as indiscriminate pestering (viruses etc) and even more likely than targeted attacks from the outside.

While this may come as no surprise to the reader (who probably works for such an organisation, and who may well have experienced such incidents), it does beg the question why this has been less than attended to, in the past. We discussed this here (link to prev article), and noted that IT vendors are waking up to the issues and indeed doing something about them.

Employee-related risk is a moving target, however. The fragmentation of corporate systems makes it harder to keep control of confidential data, an issue exacerbated by the availability of portable storage such as USB sticks and MP3 players. Of course, it is possible to prevent such devices from being connected to corporate equipment, but that creates problems of its own – USB sticks sometimes offer the only way to get a file from A to B (say, from one person’s desktop to their laptop, in the absence of network connectivity); furthermore, actively switching off USB ports is an operational nightmare and is difficult to do without blocking access to other, perfectly valid devices (printers, say).

As new generations of IT offer new ways of working, they also create new security headaches: consider mobile devices such as the Blackberry, which may be a powerful asset but equally, can be easy to leave around. IT is unsurprising perhaps, that security technologies seem to be forever in catch-up. Equally clearly, the problem can never be solved by technology alone – even the most secure environment needs to be managed by somebody, who may or may not have their own fingers in the pie.

Put bluntly, few organisations are doing everything they could to ensure that the IT risks associated with their own staff are minimised. This is as much about procedure and policy as it is about technology. Only about a third of enterprise organisations actively screen their own staff as part of the recruitment process of example, and this number drops still further for smaller organisations. We’re not advocating a police state – the goal is understanding and management of the real risks, rather than trying to create jobs or undermine the rights of employees. However, one wonders if technology is sometimes being used as an avoidance tactic, as it is easier to go through the motions of locking down systems than it is to ask hard questions of one’s peers and direct reports. This is reflected in the research, as nearly 70% of respondents commented that policy and process related challenges were holding them back.

This is an important point, as the upshot of all of this is less to do with ending up with a nicely secure organisation – security cannot be an end in itself. Rather, it is more about reducing risk to the extent that the organisation feels comfortable to push its own boundaries, into domains such as remote working, better use of mobile devices, closer relationships with suppliers and so on. It is perhaps overstating things to say that security is an enabler; however few deny that concerns surrounding security are preventing organisations from moving in such directions. It is not ironic that those companies that seem to lock things down, are actually those who are better placed to open themselves up to new opportunities. In a world in which business agility, the ability to move with the times is becoming ever more important, that’s a fact worth remembering.

03-03 – Maid April 2007

Maid April 2007

A couple of years ago, I was hosting a session at Storage Expo. One of the presenters was from a major financial institution, and he was extolling the virtues of what was then a brand new storage technology, called Massive Array of Idle Disks, or MAID. Truth be told, there wasn’t all that new about the technology – it still involved racks of hard drives, big boxes with flashing lights, and all that. Where it differed was in one simple but quite fundamental way: that the hard drives, when not being used, could be turned off.

I had heard little about MAID between then and now, and indeed, had I given it any consideration I would probably have written it off as yet another technological also-ran (like RLX, the server blade manufacturer whose blades could also be switched off when idle). The premise seemed to be based around the word “massive” – i.e. you’d need lots of disks and a great deal of data, most of which you’d never use, before you’d start to see the benefits. And while companies might be able to identify specific applications to take advantage of such a configuration, the majority would probably be happy with what was more widely available.

Much can change in two years, however. For a start, the continued erosion of disk costs and higher capacities, together with the more general availability of Serial ATA drives (more bytes per buck than Fibre Channel) has caused many companies to think again about how they tier their storage – in particular, whether application owners can be convinced to migrate over to the cheaper disks. Second (and again due to wider availability of cheap disk), there has been the growing uptake of virtual tape – that is, disks that appear as tapes to backup and archiving applications. Third we have the wondrous power of the compliance wave (what a boost to the storage industry that was), requiring data items of various types to be stored for longer, and rendered more readily accessible.

Last but not least, and hot on the heels of Messrs Sarbanes and Oxley, we have the latest green fad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for anything that helps keep climate change at bay, and often more power efficient solutions are good for company economics as well. In marketing terms however, there is a green-painted wagon rolling down the hill, and its worth jumping aboard right up to the point that the wheels come off and attention gets turned elsewhere.

From a MAID perspective, all of these factors conspire to turn around what was once a technology looking for a killer application. The need to maintain large pools of data, much of it will never be accessed but equally, which does need to be kept reachable in case of demand, coupled with continued application consolidation and a need to keep power costs as low as possible, results in MAID becoming quite an attractive proposition. Virtual tape is a clear opportunity, but so is the more general requirement for longer term, accessible storage of content. There may still be application-specific uses, but there is plenty to suggest that MAID is more than a niche capability.

Indeed, there are other stated benefits, such as increased reliability (a counter to the unreliability of disks due to their moving parts, is to ensure the parts move only when necessary), the ability to pack the disks more densely (less power means less cooling) and so on. While the mathematics in favour, or against these benefits are still to be fully ironed out – for example, see the recent study (http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf) by Google – they should at least be investigated – particularly by storage managers who fear that turning disks off could increase the risk of disk failure. As it happens, it is power cycling that Google cites as having the potential to increase failures, which should be against the principles of a well-designed MAID system anyway.

MAID shouldn’t be seen as the panacea to all storage ills, and it is still a work in progress, particularly when it comes to assuring that the disks are used as efficiently as possible. Companies that deliver MAID such as COPAN Systems may have the hardware and base software in place, but they still need to address areas such as virtualisation, policy-based data movement and intelligent indexing. Most likely, these areas will be covered by the larger vendors (EMC, HDS) and through collaboration with specific software suppliers (Datacore, Njini, FAST Search and so on). Neither is tape, or even optical disk dead – both of these offer significantly better energy profiles than racks of constantly spinning disks, though with the management overheads of media handling. All the same, however, just as all of these technologies have their place in the storage architecture, so should MAID.

03-03 – Mapping my way to organisation

Mapping my way to organisation

Mapping my way to organisation

I’m probably showing my age by recalling that classic Rowan Atkinson after dinner speech, which starts: “Where … are we going?” After a number of increasingly convoluted questions, he terminates with: “And have we got a map?” Given the fact he was playing a crusty old buffer it may be fair to say that the sketch was timeless; as, funnily enough, was the advice he was giving.

It will come as no surprise to those who know me to say that I’m not among the most organised of souls. In Belbin terms my preference tends more towards the creative plant than the completer-finisher – though truth be told, this could be as much down to the relative ease at which one can arrive, sprinkle a few ideas and depart quickly, before the hard work of actually achieving something really begins. When it comes to knuckling down, I’m no shirk – but let’s just say easily distracted. Like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, I have been known to put as much effort (if not more) into perfectly crafted, multicoloured revision timetables, as doing any actual revision.

Always on the look-out for labour-saving devices, it can come as some surprise when one of them actually works. And so it was that I stumbled across mind mapping a few years ago, my first, jackdaw-like tendency to seize the opportunity to draw some more pretty pictures overwhelming any thought that they might actually be of help. After a preliminary stab, it was only when I listened to a couple of tapes by Michael Gelb that I really grasped the potential – and discipline – of mind mapping. With his smooth American tones I have the feeling that Mr Gelb could probably explain the art of fish filleting to seals quite convincingly, but whatever. I was hooked.

When I first dabbled in mind mapping, there was no real software tool that cut the mustard – which was fine, I had my multicoloured pens. I did try out a couple of packages at the time: there was MindMan for Windows, which at the time was little more than a drawing tool; there were also packages that enabled outlining of ideas – not least Microsoft Word, but also BrainStorm from David Tebbutt and programs like BrainForest for Palm – a product that I found so useful, it could well have seen me relying on the Palm platform to this day. Unsurprising for a flighty mind like mine however, I have never stuck with any single product, preferring to try new capabilities as time passed.

Mind maps can be used for a whole variety of things, but where I have found them the most useful is in getting my own life organised. I have recently been playing with the latest version of Mind Manager, version 7 (which happens to be the successor to MindMan), and I am rediscovering the strength of the core concept – the mind map – as a highly scalable graphical device. If (perish the thought) I suddenly remember a bunch of things I am supposed to be doing, I can add them to a map with relative ease, and use this as the basis for prioritisation. The same principle has applied when I have used maps for structuring reports or defining problem solving approaches: the map is a very efficient way to grow a corpus of information.

In practical terms, right now I have a complete picture of everything I’m supposed to be doing. There are a couple of features of the new product that really help me with this – the first is a single key combination to add priorities to map elements, and the second is a very intuitive map filter. If I just want to see priority 1 items I can do so, avoiding the more general clutter. It’s not perfect – it lacks the ability to review priorities in the light of what I should really be getting on with, rather than what I find most interesting – but it would take more than a software tool to enable that!

While I may be back on the hook, the question is – will I wriggle off again? The main weakness I have found with such products in the past is that they were great at visualising ideas, and outlining, but lacked capabilities when I wanted to grow them in new directions – such as moving from individual to even more complex maps, from personal to team organisation, or integrating better with the other tools I use to do my job. I understand these are the issues Mind Manager 7 is seeking to address, so the proof of the pudding will be how far I progress with the tool before I find it becoming a constraint.

To my mind, the “killer app” for mind mapping remains that it is a personal productivity device – I would advise against trying to roll it out (as a capability or as a tool) for anything broader, in the first instance. While I do believe that initially, individuals need to discover the potential of mind mapping for themselves, I can see the benefits of broader application, across the team or even the organisation – information can be presented in a map succinctly and readably even to the non-initiated, for example. Will companies become suddenly more profitable as a result of mind mapping? I doubt it, but then, in this increasingly socially networked world we live in, perhaps mind mapping techniques could offer at least part of the answer.

It’s always fun to speculate about greater things, but for myself, right now, there is only one question. Will I stick with it? To be honest I don’t know – but for the time being, it is exactly what I need.

03-03 – ODF vs OOXML -- views from the coal face

ODF vs OOXML – views from the coal face

ODF vs OOXML – views from the coal face

Standards Wars?

Long, long ago, in an industry far, far away, a number of large companies struggled to decide whether to adopt a document interchange format as a global standard. Debate was heated, not least because the format, OOXML, had been proposed by a single vendor, which already occupied an incumbent position. Some others claimed OOXML was bloated and buggy, proffering the ODF specification instead. Proponents of OOXML countered the claims of the ODF lobby by saying it was incomplete and underspecified.

And so it went on, until resolution was reached. The major camps reached agreement over key issues, the standard was ratified and finally, the IT world could return to normal.

Now, call me a cynical old hack who has probably spent a year too many in the industry, but I do believe we’ve seen it all before. Rather than use this rather privileged soapbox position to rant about commercial and other vested interests however, I’d like to take a different tack. Instead of asking, “Who cares?” in an offhand way, I thought it might be worth collating a bit of gen about how standards debates in general, and the ODF/OOXML debacle in particular, might influence the average corporate entity.

So, is it all just a fuss and kerfuffle created by IT vendors or is there some genuine requirement driving this? Based on your experiences in the past, what impact do you expect this latest locking of horns to have? We’d love to hear your views, and of course, we’ll feed what we discover straight back to you.

1. First, a general question about the importance of standards initiatives. How would you respond to each of the following statements, in your experience (1-5, 5=strongly agree):

   a. Standards initiatives are an essential part of an evolving industry

   b. Standards debates come and go, but have little impact on how IT is evolving

   c. Most standards follow the vested interests of specific vendors

   d. Standards efforts should take place outside the commercial realm

   e. Standards are a harmless distraction, just let them get on with it

2. Turning specifically to the issue of document interchange formats, is there an initiative to adopt a specific standard within your organisation?

   a. Yes, we have already adopted a standard

   b. We are looking to adopt as soon as the appropriate standardisation bodies have agreed a standard

   c. We are considering adoption, but there are no firm plans as yet

   d. We may consider adopting a standard at some point in the future

   e. We have no plans to formally adopt a specific standard for document interchange

   f. Don’t know/not applicable

3. What do you see as the business drivers for adopting such standards (check all that apply)?

   a. Our regulatory framework demands we adopt such a standard

   b. We require this for accessibility reasons, e.g. for staff with disabilities

   c. Standardisation can make us more productive as an organisation

   d. We require this to enable interchange with our suppliers and customers

4. Specifically, do you have any plans to adopt any of the following interchange formats:

   a. Open Document Format, ODF

   b. Office Open XML, OOXML

   c. Other (please state)

5. Finally, have you already adopted a corporate standard (de facto or otherwise) for office automation applications?

   a. MS-Office 2007

   b. MS-Office (older versions)

   c. OpenOffice

   d. Other (please state)

6. Have you any intention or plans to moving away from your current office platform?

   a. Yes, to the most recent version of MS-Office (2007)

   b. Yes, to a non-Microsoft product such as OpenOffice

   c. No

   d. Don’t know

7. Usual geog, ind, size

03-03 – PPC vs Blackberry -- second thoughts

PPC vs Blackberry – second thoughts

PPC vs Blackberry – second thoughts

Certain events can cause the need for a quick decision: it is strange how a single incident can completely upturn one’s perspective on things. It all started quite innocuously, as I was looking into changing mobile service providers. On offer was a Blackberry as part of a very attractive deal – even more attractive given that I could still use the new SIM in my existing, unlocked PPC device. Furthermore the Blackberry on offer was the 6800 – that’s the one which comes with all the bells and whistles such as an MP3 player – this appealed greatly to my inner magpie. As I saw it, this scenario offered the best of both worlds, enabling me to continue my “evaluation” indefinitely and get a sexy new device in the bargain.

But then, disaster struck. As I opened the cupboard in my office, it caught the cable on my Pocket PC and caused it to drop to the floor, landing awkwardly and, to my utter horror, wrenching off the charging socket from the device. It was the gadget equivalent of stepping off the pavement and breaking an ankle – and it immediately forced a complete reassessment of what had, until then, been a largely academic exercise. OK this isn’t quite the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, but you get the picture. What, I asked myself, were the deciding characteristics between the two devices for the business user? What would I miss, or couldn’t I live without – and what would I be prepared to compromise on?

The factor very much in the favour of the Blackberry is its usability when it comes to mobile email. I receive – and this is more of a curse than a boast – about a hundred emails a day, many of which require some kind of action. Having worked my way around the BB’s shortcut keys, I have reached the point where I can read, respond, file and delete emails quite speedily. The result is that, by the end of the day, I have managed to stay on top of the pile.

There’s a second “positive” to come out of this, which I’ve only just started to appreciate: that of the interactive nature of push email. I’ve long been impressed, if not slightly confounded by some of my colleagues that seem to be able to respond to emails as soon as I’ve sent them, leaving me floundering as I would be hoping that there would be a window of time before they got back to me. It’s a bit like playing multiple games of tennis at once – but some opponents are just too damn efficient at hitting back the balls. I now understand that there are a number of factors at play – not only are such people impressively organised, but they’ve also got into the “push email groove” which is an inevitable consequence of getting onto the front foot with their incoming messages.

The downside of course, is the reason why I had never enabled push email on my Pocket PC: it is always, inescapably there. The Blackberry has a clever feature that it can be set to vibrate when it is in the belt holster: the end result could be likened to a combination of electric shock therapy and Chinese water torture. Every now and then – counted in minutes – when a piece of email comes in, it is acknowledged by a discomfiting buzz to the hip. When sitting in a meeting, one is tempted to get the device out and take a look, which can be slightly off-putting for other participants – a bit like answering the phone half way through talking to someone else. If left, the device will bide its time before the next email causes it to buzz again. Try doing that for more than a half hour stretch and see if you don’t go mad.

There is a second issue with the Blackberry’s email functionality, namely that what happens on the Blackberry doesn’t always synchronize with what is on the server. The issue comes when making changes in the Outlook client on the desktop – if, say, an email has already appeared on the Blackberry and then it is moved to a different folder, it doesn’t always follow suit on the device. This is frustrating – the workaround is to copy all emails into a temporary offline folder in Outlook, delete them from the Blackberry and then re-instate them – but that’s hardly a long-term solution.

All this being said, when it comes to simple, effective management of incoming emails, the Blackberry wins hands down. Even with “push” enabled, the Pocket PC device I’ve been using has a clunkier user interface, with more key presses required and less predictive functionality (for example, the Blackberry will suggest a folder to file an email, based on previous choices). It is bizarre but true that I have had more problems downloading emails to the Pocket PC from Exchange than synchronising the Blackberry – indeed, to my mind this is unconscionable. I don’t care how clever is the protocol between device and server – if it doesn’t do the download, any clever features are pointless.

The other vital area that the Blackberry is unquestionably stronger, is in making phone calls. The best way I can think of putting this is that the Pocket PC acts like a computer, whereas the Blackberry acts like a device – the former requires me to keep tabs on running applications and ensure there is enough RAM free, whereas the latter just works. Dial a number, make a call, its not that hard – but the Pocket PC seems to make it so. These two things, put together, have swung the pendulum largely in the direction of the Blackberry: even with the synch issue and death-by-vibration, I have had to face the fact that for business use at least, the Blackberry provides the two essential functions better than I could expect on the Pocket PC. That’s not to be said that I won’t miss the additional capabilities of the latter, but on this occasion at least, productivity will have to win over power.

03-03 – Security as an inhibitor?

Security as an inhibitor?

Security as an inhibitor?

In the past there have been moves by the IT industry to promote security as a business enabler. Looking round many organisations, this is clearly poppycock – but what of security as an inhibitor?

The lack of security is inhibiting business growth

What to do? Its all very well protecting against threats, be they internal or internal. But, if there are fears about weaknesses in the existing infrastructure, it is unlikely that these can be solved with some product or another.

If we want a joined up approach to security, this needs to have a centre, a locus of control. Even if it is not centralised, it still needs co-ordination.

We need to move the debate forward.

03-03 – The Days Must Be Getting Shorter

The Days Must Be Getting Shorter

The days must be getting shorter – or perhaps we are getting older, but it doesn’t seem like yesterday when email was still considered to be just an option, certainly in the business environment. Like many technologies that have grown by individual demand rather than organisational imposition, email has crept up on corporations by stealth, becoming an essential tool before anyone cared to notice.

Which is a shame, because it’s pretty rubbish really, in security terms at least. Email is the IT equivalent of the ferret – useful in its place but never quite to be trusted, capable of the unexpected even when treated with respect. It (email, not the ferret) was invented in a time when computers existed in closed environments, and it has thus far proved itself to ill-prepared to cope with the brave, new yet dangerous, interconnected world.

But still, we use email. We have no choice, for so does everybody else, even to pass messages around the office rather than standing up and asking questions over the tops of the partitions. Of course email enables a great many things, but equally, it needs to be handled with care. It’s not just that it can act as a carrier for viruses, Trojans and other malicious content (malware): we have the issues of unsolicited messages (that can be connected to phishing attacks), unacceptable use (think: sending dodgy images to one’s mates) and fraudulent communications, as it is all too easy to set up an email account in someone else’s name.

While there are technologies to help protect email from the worst of the threats, we need to co-ordinate such deployments with our own efforts – things like awareness training, and the simplest of protective measures (setting a PIN code on your mobile device, for example), go a long way towards reducing the risks. If you want to know more take look at our email security primer, which collates the best of our experience from the field. If you have any stories to share, do let us know.

03-03 – What characterises a service?

What characterises a service?

What characterises a service?

A couple of weeks ago I was party to another event, this time hosted by IBM. At short notice I was asked to facilitate a session on defining services, which was interesting in the extreme as it very quickly became clear in the earlier sessions that there was no clear definition of what a service was – particularly as there were two types of people in the room – business analysts and technical architects.

So, I decided to take a different tack. Rather than trying to fix a definition of service, I thought we would go round the room and ask what characterised a “good” service. Here’s what we came up with:

• Value – the benefits of accessing a service should outweigh its costs

• Reusability – it should be possible to access the service repeatedly, with the same level of interaction and service quality

• Meaningfulness – it should be possible to describe the service in clear, relevant terms

• Autonomy – the service should be cohesive, i.e. clearly bounded

• Independence – the service should also minimise dependencies with other services

• Contract – the service should offer its own guarantees in terms of what it delivers, and how: such terms should be subject to prior acceptance by the service user.

• Uniqueness – the service should minimise overlaps with other services

With hindsight, there is possibly some honing that could be done with the above list – the difference between “Autonomy” and “Independence” for example, is not all that clear. What was interesting however, was that even as the debate raged around what a service should look like, there was relatively little controversy about what separated the wheat from the chaff. For organisations looking to develop their own service strategies, this would appear to be a good place to start.

03-03 – What on earth has IT got to do with gardening?

What on earth has IT got to do with gardening?

What on earth has IT got to do with gardening?

When Nicholas Carr posited “IT doesn’t matter” in 2003, he was making the point that current technologies are commoditising and therefore available to all. While this might be true, it is dependent on everything working correctly. There is another side to IT however; in many organisations, IT is more a bottleneck than a strategic tool, as layer upon layer of complex legacy has resulted in environments that restrict, rather than enable business activities. This leads to the question - if IT isn’t actually helping the business, what exactly is it there for?

While the ‘what’ of IT may be a commodity, the ‘how’ of it, specifically how it supports and sustains business activities and functions, absolutely is not. The killer is that business value can only come through the orchestration of whole ecosystems of technologies and service providers. As these become more and more complex, the focus needs to move away from the “what” and towards the “how”.

It is this emphasis, towards a sustainable model for technology delivery that considers the whole ecosystem of business and IT, and which works across the value chain incorporating technology suppliers, systems integrators, outsourcing and service provision, that led us to the central themes for our new book. Traditionally, technology funding separates projects from maintenance by an iron curtain: once a project is complete, there is little consideration how to fund necessary enhancements to ensure it delivers the necessary value. The assumption is that, once complete, deployed technologies will need only minor tinkering.

This assumption is fundamentally flawed. There has been much talk in technology circles about considering large scale technology projects is the same way as construction projects – building bridges or cathedrals, for example. While there is plenty to be gained from such parallels, the two paradigms diverge quite fundamentally once the project is complete. Apart from the ongoing checks that all is in order and the occasional coat of paint, a bridge is fixed in time as a monument to its builders, whereas for IT projects, the journey is only just beginning.

Like, for example, a garden. Gardens of all sizes benefit from being given due consideration at the outset, then being planned, architected and laid out as though for all time. You don’t have to be a gardener however, to know that things will start to change from day one – individual plants will grow and evolve of their own accord, even as they thrive and fall back with the seasons. Gardening is about so much more than just digging the ground and planting the seeds: it’s an ongoing, sustainable process of nurturing and pruning, allowing things to grow and cutting them, all the while ensuring that they continue to meet their central purpose – to carry fruit, provide a dash of colour or offer an attachment point for the hammock.

If the goal is sustainability, we believe there is as much to be gained by considering technology delivery as a garden: in doing so, we are quire deliberately setting our stall apart from the builders of cathedrals and bridges. Our theme is sustainable alignment between business and IT, and this needs more than just the project management skills or architectural focus that we can learn from construction projects. In addition we need to maintain excellent relationships with strategic suppliers, to focus constantly on the relationship between IT and business (not just at project kick-off) and to consider the whole ecosystem as a portfolio of value- adding capabilities, not just a set of discrete systems.

So, what do we actually mean by alignment, or by adding value to the business? In practice, we see three key focuses, namely improving operational business efficiency and effectiveness, managing risk and compliance, and supporting innovation. Each brings the same challenges - not least to balance investments to deliver the right mix of short-term and longer-term paybacks. Sustainability is indeed the key: in our research for the book “The Technology Garden,” we learned a great deal talking to business executives, CIOs and senior IT management and front line technologists, about how organisations can successfully achieve and sustain alignment between IT and the business.

What we ended up with could colloquially be considered “the six habits of highly effective IT.” Some will come as no surprise - the need for good IT governance, for example, or the effective practice of enterprise architecture. Others, like those mentioned earlier, can perhaps be seen as common sense – but only in hindsight. The difficulties come in knowing where to start, so we incorporate a roadmap for organisations that want to start down the track, together with an assessment model to help organisations understand where they are starting.

IT is not going to get any simpler: indeed it will become anything but, as applications become ever more distributed through use of service oriented architecture, as infrastructure benefits from virtualisation technologies and as access mechanisms become ever more mobile. However, we believe that the principles we espouse are timeless. IT matters a great deal to many companies, and as complexity grows, the need for principles such as those we espouse in The Technology Garden will only grow in importance.

April 2008

04-04 – Microsoft Bloat, Green and the Vista opportunity

Microsoft Bloat, Green and the Vista opportunity

Microsoft Bloat, Green and the Vista opportunity

Microsoft’s always going to have a hard time presenting a convincing green story for desktop computing. Its not that the story itself is un-sound: power-saving features are useful as far as they go, and Microsoft as a company is keen to be a good corporate citizen. The elephant in the room however may be summed up in a single, horrible word – bloat.

Microsoft’s story has been a fascinating one, one of the great success stories of the IT industry. There have been several key bets made along the way, which Messrs Gates and Ballmer have stuck to doggedly. This is not the place for a full précis of the Microsoft story, but it’s worth highlighting one of the bets: Moore’s Law, the principle (to paraphrase) that processor capabilities would continue to double ad infinitum.

In practice, this has been characterised by the long-standing truth well known by anyone who has spent the past couple of decades in the industry: that if you want to take advantage of the latest Microsoft software, you’ll have to upgrade your machine. The conversation has repeated with the same regularity as Moore’s Law itself – the bemoaning of how slow everything is running, and the wry nod from those who have seen it before.

Of course, this self-fulfilling prophecy has been of huge benefit to both Microsoft and its hardware partners – companies such as Intel. I very much doubt whether the Wintel alliance was deliberately stuffing software into the operating system just in order to shift more processor units, but one thing’s for sure – neither side was calling ‘stop’. We have even lived through the office bloatware wars, where Microsoft, Lotus and WordPerfect duked it out to see who could out-bloat the competition. (Microsoft won, as we all know)

The attitude throughout from Microsoft – and I know this very well, having asked them on various occasions – has been, “If you want to take advantage of the latest innovations, you’ll need to use the latest technology.” I remember a very public debate I had with Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s ill-fated “Get the Facts” General Manager where he told me that most desktop users wanted far more than just email and word processing. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.

And so, to Green. While Microsoft might not have been underhand in promoting the “new and improved” – it’s a technology company, after all – neither can the company claim to being particularly green. Fundamental to this is the fact that the power consumption of a device is only a small percentage of its overall carbon footprint. Bottom line: replacing or upgrading a machine undermines any benefits that can be had from ‘new’ power saving features.

What can Microsoft do about it? Well, perhaps that operating system that has been derided as the most bloated of the lot – Windows Vista – could hold the key. At the heart of Windows Vista lies a perfectly sound operating system. There are two issues however – the first is in disk space taken up by installed, never to be used apps; and the second is in the memory requirements for unnecessary run-time services. It should not be beyond the ken of the bright sparks in Redmond to bring out their own tools to monitor what’s really necessary, and strip out anything that isn’t?

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Trouble is, it goes right to the heart of Microsoft’s core philosophy, and fear – that people might stop buying its software if there is insufficient “new and improved” about it. That’s a fair worry – but it’s happening anyway, as we see Microsoft having to extend support (yet again, with hastily invented acronyms no less) for Windows XP. The same principles could be applied to Microsoft Office – which has already seen a usability overhaul with 2007, now, how about a performance boost? What additional benefits can be achieved offloading tasks to Windows Live services? Etc, etc, the list goes on.

It’s a changing world we are in. While Moore’s Law may continue to apply, many organisations are finding they have more than enough processor power on their desktops to do their day to day work. If Microsoft is really serious about greening the desktop, it has an opportunity to use its position to drive some fundamental changes. The question is, does it have the strength of character to do so? The alternative may be business as usual for Microsoft, but it certainly won’t be green.

04-09 – Securing SOA

Securing SOA

Securing SOA

Given that I’m currently at IBM’s SOA Impact conference in Las Vegas, I though it would be appropriate to post a blog about the security aspects of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). Judging by the amount of coverage given to security in the keynotes and analyst sessions, one might be led to think that security was not an issue; meanwhile however, one only need to have a cursory understanding of Murphy’s Law to know that security should not e taken for granted, in SOA or elsewhere.

So, what are the risks? There most obvious of these lies in areas such as confidentiality breach and service compromise. At its heart, SOA is about developing and delivering distributed computer systems - that is, software applications and components that communicate across a network. The potential for a confidentiality or service breach is therefore quite high, particularly if communications take place on the wrong side of the corporate firewall.

Risks such as these are well known and frequently documented, so I shall say no more here. Meanwhile, however, there are the risks involved in the development process itself. There has been talk about the “insider threat” in terms of the users of computer systems – people who, through stupidity as much a malice, can cause a security breach. Less consideration has been paid thus far on the developers of said systems. In SOA development environments there are a number of risky areas – not least of course on the code, which needs to be constructed in such a way as to minimise the potential for compromise.

There is also the data involved in the development process. SOA requires interface definitions to be published, but such interface data may well contain information that should b kept confidential – for example, specific business rules or even the need for them. And finally we have the security of the development process itself. A number of drivers including the continued reliance on subcontracted development resource requires vetting and monitoring of developers, such that the resulting code has not been written to be compromised.

What’s all this got to do with SOA? Truth be told, some of these aspects are true for all kinds of development, not just SOA projects. What SOA brings is the increased risk due to the distributed nature of the resulting software. In traditional development, the resulting application silos would likely exist behind the firewall, but with SOA there is no such guarantee. As many organisations start to move down the SOA track, they will need to ensure that they have the security bases covered in advance of application delivery. Should security be treated as an afterthought, as it has so often been treated in the past, it may already be too late.

04-09 – The Future of IT security

The Future of IT security

“What a nice, easy topic,” I thought to myself as I read through the email from those good people at Computing. “The Future of IT security” – how simple it would be to write something focused, straight and to the point, given that remit.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. There’s a quite straightforward way to write such a piece, along the lines of, “There will be threats, and they will be big threats. Organisations need to get their act together, understand the risks and implement mitigating strategies if they want to keep ahead of the bad guys.” Trouble is, such articles preach to the converted. There are three categories of organization: those who get security and who have ongoing risk management activities in place; those who get it but struggle to prioritise and implement appropriate measures; and those who think that if they keep their heads down, the bad stuff will pass them by.

For most, the future of IT security will be much like the present. We know for example that the bad guys are now following the money rather than the kudos: sure, there will always be people out there who prefer to call themselves ‘Cobra’ or ‘Hummerkazi’ who spend their waking hours decoding encryprion algorithms and looking for back doors into telephone networks. Meanwhile, there is an evolving economy building around the market value of credit card details and the ability to launch denial of service bots from unsuspecting (and generally poorly configured) home computers. While this needs to be taken seriously, to be honest it doesn’t look awfully different to last year, and neither will it change much in the next.

Meanwhile, we have the risks caused by our own employees, be they trough malice or stupidity. Strangely enough, internal staff have always posed the biggest threat to computer systems, even before product categories such as “data leakage prevention” were posited (ain’t it funny how the pundits only get round to recognizing a problem on the back of IT companies happening to have developed a solution, but that’s not important right now). I would suggest that, unless we all become RFID-tagged and have probes inserted into our brains to read our darkest thoughts, we shall continue to find it difficult to counter what some term “the insider threat.” And, thankfully, my vision of the future of IT security does not include any such mechanisms.

So, what does it include? As a starting point to think about the future of IT security, its worth reflecting on the future of IT as a whole. There are a number of trends that are driving how organizations are developing, deploying and operating their IT systems that will have a direct impact on security, including:

• Outsourcingand offshoring. The offshore resourcing market continues to mature, with Indian companies such as Wipro setting up in the UK and traditionally local companies continuing to expand their offshore operations. Risks range from difficulties in vetting offshore staff, and challenges of maintaining business information at offshore locations.

• Hosting and Software as a Service (SaaS). We are not seeing wholesale mass adoption of the SaaS model, with reason as it is still maturing for example in areas such as data integration with other corporate systems. Risks are similar to those of outsourcing, which from the data’s perspective is what it is.

• Service Oriented Architectures and Web 2.0. Both of these topic areas share the risks of being distributed systems architectures which may extend beyond the corporate firewall. As well s being open to confidentiality breach and denial of service, there are also questions around the publishing of interfaces onto corporate systems. In some instances, the interface itself may be company confidential.

• Virtualisation and data centre automation. Virtualisation offers a quick win for many organizations, which can consolidate applications down onto a reduced set of physical servers (numbers up to80% reductions are touted; we have seen 60% reductions in physical servers). While the centralized management of preconfigured virtual servers can reduce security risks, equally there is the risk of virtual server proliferation, and indeed the potential for mismanagement which could leave virtual servers more open to breach.

• Mobility and unified communications (UC). While UC may currently be an oxymoron, vendors are working hard to deliver on the idea of enabling us to communicate with each other a simply and seamlessly as possible. Like with any technology, UC is a two-edged sword and it is not hard to think up scenarios for its exploitation, for example UC-spam calls.

• Social networking. We are already seeing some of the security challenges that social networking can pose, in terms of privacy and identity issues for example. There are other risks nobody has yet (to our knowledge) pulled together composite identities of individuals across social networking sites, but this will no doubt come. While these are personal security issues on the surface, they have corporate implications for example in terms of duty of care.

What this list demonstrates is that “continued vigilance” is only part of the answer. So too is risk management: a good process for which, starting with business objectives and considering IT security in that context, should be a fundamental part of any organisation’s security strategy. But neither is ris=k management going to be enough, by itself. If there’s one thing that all of the above trends share, it is that they affect all parts of the IT architecture. These are not risks that can be mitigated by tactically acquiring some appliance, and plonking it into the server room.

So, what to do? If IT security is to be characterized by having a far-reaching impact, so we need to consider how the roles responsible for IT Security have a similarly far-reaching remit. We are already seeing this in some organisations: HSBC for example, has combined its IT security function with its business fraud function, enabling it to deal with both the business and IT issues from the same point.

Where does this leave the IT security industry? I have often characterized this as a fire extinguisher industry, which makes sense, if all people are doing is fighting fires. Challenges such as those above will require us to move to more of a prevention-based approach rather than a series of poorly funded coping strategies. And frankly, given that the trends are happening whether organizations want the to or not, the sooner we can get there the better.

July 2008

07-11 – New Wine, Old Skins?

New Wine, Old Skins?

New Wine, Old Skins?

Managing the risks associated with the new wave of technology innovation

What an exciting period of technology we are in. Following the millennium bug debacle and the dot-com bust, it almost seemed that the technology wave was slowing down, leading some pundits to suggest that IT was becoming a pure commodity, adding little business value. From this standing start, IT has become exciting again: as we discuss below, there are a number of developments that are significantly impacting organisations large and small. However, technology is a sword that can cut both ways. The purpose of this article is to consider what impact new technologies are having on our business lives, and what we might do to address the inherent risks.

To start with, we need to revisit what we mean by risk. There are many types of risk, and while IT may have some specific risks of its own (technical risks associated with incompatible or poorly patched software, for example), these often translate into risks that are directly felt by the business, such as:

• Financial risk – where business is lost, or unnecessary costs are incurred as business users are unable to get on with the job.

• Compliance risk – where the organisation becomes liable with respect to regulation or corporate standards.

• Reputational and brand risk – where an organisation faces bad press, with potential loss of business as a result.

The risk landscape is more of a jungle than a green field, however. Several examples of high-impact failures have not had the effect that might have been expected – while the Wifi blunder that caused the leak (or to be frank, the outright flood – 45 million records were taken) of credit card data from TK-Maxx may have resulted in $128M of losses to the company, but the retail organisation has not seen any significant impact on its trade. Meanwhile, the lessons from the HMRC incident where two CD’s of child benefit records (25 million of them) are still to be learned – to quote UK Information Commissioner Richard Thomas in April 2008, "It is particularly disappointing that the HMRC breach has not prevented other unacceptable security breaches from occurring.“

It is worth mentioning both of these examples to illustrate that the discipline known as ‘risk management’ is far more complex than that simple term might imply. Such complexities include understanding what exactly is meant by risk, where the real likelihood of business damage is to be felt, and perhaps most importantly, the fact that no organisation, large or small, is operating in isolation from what is a much larger, rather shaky ecosystem. It is against this background that the smaller business needs to decide its strategy for how it uses IT.

Despite the somewhat gloomy picture pained by examples such as these, there are still a great many potential benefits to be had from how technology is evolving. Right now a number of trends are driving considerable change across many businesses, such as:

• Broadband mobile technologies such as 3G wireless are becoming more affordable and therefore prevalent, these are running alongside higher bandwidth fixed broadband to homes and offices, and enabling a wider variety of home working and remote working practices.

• The Internet is increasingly becoming a platform for collaboration, with consumer-oriented social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace sitting alongside more business-oriented sites like LinkedIn and Ecademy.

• We are also seeing a resurgence in Web-based applications and online hosting facilities, driven by such organisations as Google. Microsoft and Amazon.

Behind all of this, no doubt catalysed by such advances but equally driving them, is a more demographic change across business, towards increased collaboration and open-ness. In general terms, we are seeing organisations of all sizes increasingly looking to move away from the traditional employer-employee hierarchical model towards more of a network-based approach where organisations collaborate on the creation and delivery of business services.

In retail this may be a more familiar story, where business to business (B2B) and supply chain activities are seeing more of an evolution than a revolution. In other sectors, such as the research side of pharmaceuticals, the collaborative approach is far newer. While smaller organisations are more likely to be brought into a collaboration rather than acting as the hub, there are still a number of new business opportunities to be had, aided and abetted by the use of IT. New opportunity yields new risks, not least because existing systems and processes were unlikely to have been designed with the future in mind.

Keeping up with technology change, and integrating the new with the old, is a massive challenge across the organisations we research. At a recent security event in London, a number of Chief information Security Officers (CISOs) from different verticals expressed that one of the biggest problems they faced was how the new risks caused by new applications and infrastructure, now had to be treated in the context of increased business collaboration.

We therefore need to consider risk both in terms of the changes we are driving, and the changes in which we are mere participants. In smaller organisations, the challenge is further exacerbated by the fact that there are less likely to be the skills or the bandwidth in-house. So, what to do? Given that there are no easy answers, how should such businesses put their best foot forward and reap the rewards of the business opportunities while still addressing the risks, so you don’t come unstuck in the process? From our research and conversations with a wide variety of organisations we have distilled a number of guidelines, as follows.

Make IT work anywhere. There are two technology-related consequences of the open, collaborative world we are moving towards. One is that much activity is taking place outside the organisation’s IT boundary, and a two-tier system which treats connected devices and applications differently depending on which side of the firewall they sit is becoming increasingly untenable. The second concerns the ‘who’ rather than the ‘what’ – business partners, subcontractors, consultants and so on are requiring access to corporate systems and data. This may bring up a number of questions around data protection, vetting and so on, but it is better to treat these up front, than sleep walk into later problems.

Manage access by identity. The increased fragmentation of the corporate boundary makes it necessary to implement other control mechanisms than just, “he’s inside the building, so he must be OK.” Increasing attention is turning towards the management of individual identities, and provisioning access and facilities based on role. This does not translate into buying an identity management system, as realistically, this is one area where technology is lagging behind the need. A good start however is to start documenting who has access to which systems and data, whether they are employees or partners. If you find this a challenge, then you may already be at risk.

Classify information by risk. The traditional approach to risk management involves gaining an understanding of risks, then treating them accordingly. Given what we have already seen however, this is akin to mapping the jungle: it is still important but it can only be one part of what is done. At the same time, activities around reviewing what information exists, how important it is to the organisation and how well it is protected, provides a different viewpoint which enables the subset of high-risk information to be treated as a priority. Some organisations are adopting a traffic light system as a starting point: what information do you have that would cause the business to fail if it were compromised?

Bring in the experts. The brave new world of online collaboration can also be applied to how we understand and reduce risk. It will always be necessary to run and maintain some security capabilities in house, for example, but it can equally make sense to look to how security can be delivered ‘in the cloud’. Equally, there is no honour in ignoring security risks, nor shame in bring in third parties who have a better grasp of how IT is moving forward. From our research we understand that the key to successful use of third party services is in the decision making process: adopting a business perspective enables more light to be shed on what skills add significant business value and should be kept in-house, compared to what should be sourced from third parties – the same applies to risk management.

More best practice, less policy. While policy is important, it often focuses on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’. Best practice is more about the latter – and in this context, we’re thinking about how risk management best practice applies to all aspects of IT management and delivery. This often boils down to review checklists – has a given application been security tested before it is deployed, for example, or has the code been peer reviewed? Has the consultant who has been brought in for a day, been cleared to access the information he or she requires? It is all too easy for what are often very simple checks to be forgotten; far simpler is to ensure that the default behaviour involves running through the appropriate checklist.

Guidelines such as these are not exhaustive, but they offer a good starting point for thinking about some of the challenges. At the same time, they should not distract from one of the key principles of risk management: that is, to be vigilant. An uncomfortable truth about IT-related risk is that whatever new innovations the technology world may come up with, each will in some way be exploitable by a spectrum of ‘bad guys’ – there are the relatively innocuous practices of building a picture of a prospective client by browsing around the Internet, and at the other end of the scale, seasoned hackers are using leading-edge technologies to launch focused attacks on high-profile individuals. Perhaps this yields the biggest lesson of them all: that, even if it ever was, doing nothing and hoping the risks will go away is simply no longer an option.

September 2008

09-25 – THERE IS MORE TO STORAGE THAN TECHNOLOGY ALONE

THERE IS MORE TO STORAGE THAN TECHNOLOGY ALONE

THERE IS MORE TO STORAGE THAN TECHNOLOGY ALONE

In principle, things are clear enough about storage efficiency. F, for example, cut through a lot of the rhetoric about Green IT in general, and Green Storage in particular, and we see a picture of reducing power, cutting costs and removing operational overheads. In some ways it was ever thus, but from San Diego to London’s Docklands, data centres are coming up against some hard stops. The problem has been building up for a while: “There’s no point in such-and-such vendor coming and telling me about their latest blade servers,” said one CIO to me a year or so ago, “when I can’t even get enough power into the room to run the things. I’ve tried to tell them but they won’t listen.”

The message is loud and clear. Having in many cases run out of capacity, IT needs efficient servers and efficient storage, and vendors are queuing up to demonstrate their own credentials. For a start, we are seeing a most welcome level of competition between vendors in terms of the cost- effectiveness and power efficiency of their base kit. In addition, there are a number of specific technologies that are enabling better use of storage hardware – we expect spin-down of disks to become a more general feature of the larger arrays for example, and solid state disks will likely also play a part in the storage architecture.

But there is far more to efficiency than a power-optimised hardware platform. Making the best, most efficient use of storage assets, needs software that can manage both the hardware platform, and the data that resides there. There are a plethora of options, from data classification, migration, archiving, indexing and de-duplication, all of which play their part. We also have storage virtualisation – this has seen limited success thus far, but looks set to achieve wider adoption over the next couple of years; we also expect more widespread use of provisioning technologies, such that storage can be allocated as it is required from the a wider pool of capacity.

Such technologies are all well and good – but what’s preventing organisations from adopting them? This is very much a carrot and stick question. When a business case for a new technology is being put together, either one must present a compelling explanation of business gains (the carrot), or an equally compelling reason why the procurement is unavoidable (the stick). Despite best intentions and long-term benefits, efficiency- oriented technologies must fight for priority with all the other possible procurements an organisation might wish to consider at any given pointmoment. And even if an efficiency-related technology may look attractive in principle, it then needs to be deployed in what is unlikely to be a green field (i.e. brand new) site.

On this last point, it has repeatedly been shown that without the right people and processes in place, even the best technology in the world can go to waste. This is not just about getting it right at the top: the rank and file have a major role to play when it comes to efficiency improvements (and furthermore, there is generally the will from front line staff to embrace such changesdo so, particularly if there is a perceived Green benefit). Where organisations sometimes fall down is in ensuring that employees are fully appraised of what is planned, at which point the front linestaff can feel ignored, and may offer up avoidable, unnecessary resistance as a result.

All in all, of course it is worth looking into what technical innovations exist that may make for a more efficient storage architecture. But there is more to storage than technology alone. By considering efficient storage within the wider context of more efficient IT service delivery, organisations are more likely to reap its benefits.

Jon Collins, Service Director, Freeform Dynamics leads a panel on Architecting for Effectiveness and Efficiency at Storage Expo 2008 www.storage-expo.com

December 2008

12-11 – Does Agile Development have a place in your organisation?

Does Agile Development have a place in your organisation?

‘Agile’ is such an uplifting, positive word, its no wonder everybody wants to use it. Manufacturers want to be agile, businesses want to be agile, and indeed, IT wants to be agile. In this latter context the term has been adopted to define a group of software development approaches that are, of course, agile. But beyond a general warm feeling about building more flexible systems faster, what exactly does agile development bring to the party?

We should start by being a bit more precise about Agile Development – but not too precise. Historically speaking, software development approaches have tended to fall into one of two camps – ‘structured’ and ‘the rest’. Those familiar with the developer side of the house will recognise the more structured approaches, which generally involves:

• Starting off with a requirements document and/or functional specification

• Doing some kind of software design

• Programming against the design

• Integrating and testing, first in parts then as a whole

Fair enough, perhaps. But, the detractors say, such approaches are far too slow and unwieldy: the rationale is that by the time the resulting two-year development cycles are complete, the world (and indeed, the system requirements) will likely have moved on. And so has evolved a counter-culture of alternative, ‘agile’ approaches, which tend to share a number of characteristics – proactive liaison with users, and frequent delivery of working software, being among them.

The value of agile approaches is clear in principle. When we undertook some research (http://www.freeformdynamics.com/fullarticle.asp?aid=460) into agile development earlier this year, we found there were certain types of project that would benefit from Agile approaches over and above traditional, structured approaches – notably those which have faster changing requirements, and for which rapid delivery is a priority.

All the same, there is no massive perceived difference in the quality of results from Agile projects, nor their timeliness, when compared to structured development projects. Rather, benefits are articulated in terms of increased collaboration within development teams, better awareness of timescales and indeed, more highly motivated developers.

What of the downsides? For a start, agile approaches are not just something you can pick up and run with. There is little room for error: timescales are divided into variously named short periods (e.g. ‘scrums’, or ‘timeboxes’), which are kicked off with a prioritisation exercise as to what is to be delivered, and finished off with a delivery. If something goes wrong, there can be a domino effect on other parts of the project. To all intents and purposes, agile approaches can be intense and rewarding, but the one thing they are reliant on is a level of structure and co-ordination.

Perhaps it is for this reason, one of the main criticisms of agile approaches is that they can’t scale. No doubt the advocates of agile approaches are reading this and shaking their heads – but given what we have just said, it is unsurprising that the challenges of keeping things going can become greater as projects get bigger. According to our research, having good communications is absolutely the key success factor for scaling agile projects beyond tens of developers.

To close then, here are some things to keep in mind as a CIO. While neither type of approach can claim to ‘win’, they both hold their own – and they certainly wipe the floor compared to less formal approaches. So, we have a situation of ‘horses for courses’. There are undoubtedly places where agile approaches fit better than more traditional structured approaches. However agile development is as much about a culture change as anything, however, and should not be undertaken without due care, indeed training and mentoring can help a great deal here. Agile is more a series of short, carefully linked steps than a journey, and it is worth putting one’s best foot forward from the start.

2009

Posts from 2009.

May 2009

05-11 – Moving IT security up the governance agenda

Moving IT security up the governance agenda

It has sometimes been said that in Information Technology, the emphasis has been too much on the technology and not enough on the information. This has been particularly apparent in IT security, that part of the IT industry seemingly constructed around telling us about all the things that could go horribly wrong, before rather handily proffering a portfolio of products to resolve the issues.

It could all be so different, we might like to think… but could it? Back in the day, when I had an IT department of my own, I learned just how hard it was to win budget for security related purposes. The question the finance director (and my boss) asked was very simple – “Do we really need it?” And if I didn’t have a cast-iron rationale, then the cheque book remained firmly closed. That was then, but the business case for IT security remains as difficult to articulate as it ever was.

Coupled with the fact that there really are bad guys out there – and yes, their attacks really are becoming more targeted – it comes as no surprise that the IT security industry exists as it does. From our research we know that the products that are more likely to be deployed, happen to also be the ones that are simpler to explain – either because the ‘threat’ really is obvious, or because certain products are generally accepted as being a good thing – anti-virus software is one example, firewalls are another.

All of this does distract from the fundamental point however, that IT security exists to mitigate business risks, not just counter specific external threats. For example, over the years we have repeatedly determined that the biggest threat comes from inside the organisation, either through ‘malice or stupidity’ of individuals. It does seem strange therefore that so much of security vendors’ attention is paid to what happens on the outside, even despite ‘technologies’ such as data leakage protection being rushed out in response to dropped balls such as the HMRC breach.

While the IT security industry’s priorities may be skewed towards what will sell, there are some distinct signs that the industry itself is moving away from the point product model. Arguably, the questions that IT security vendors originally set out to answer, such as what-needs-to-be-secured-and-how, are largely answered today: new technology such as virtualisation and software-as-a-service may bring new threats, but not significant new categories of threat. The result is that such vendors are spending more time working out how to make things work better, rather than what problems need to be solved.

Meanwhile, the ongoing consolidation of security vendors has resulted in integration challenges – both in terms of how security products integrate, and how they work with other systems and applications. Take IBM, for example. Until a year ago the company did not actively market its security technologies as an integrated portfolio, but the picture is very different today. We’re seeing similar stories from EMC with RSA, From Google with Postini, from Microsoft, Symantec and McAfee, and from smaller vendors such as Mimecast.

What we can draw from all of their stories is an acceptance that IT security is not an end in itself. Rather, it offers a means, whereas security of business information is the ‘end’. So, what are the outcomes we should be aiming for? It’s worth dusting off an old acronym which will be familiar to IT security professionals – Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Old it may be, but equally clear is that there is more to C-I-A than can be delivered by IT security alone.

Consider integrity. A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a panel on data integrity at Infosecurity Europe, and what became very quickly clear was that it was almost impossible to separate integrity from a security perspective, from more general concerns about data quality. Similarly, we can look at availability (report). While it may be academically possible to distinguish between service downtime from a denial of service or from a systems failure perspective, the distinction is moot for those poor people who can’t get to their data.

Cleary, we need to think beyond IT security if we are to consider – and mitigate – all the risks around business information. But where to start? The answer may well lie in the keyword ‘governance’ – that word which refuses steadfastly to be defined. Despite its elusiveness, governance appears in discussions around a number of IT topics, not least IT service management and information management, as well (of course) as information security. Governance also pops up in numerous conversations around business management, of course.

It is early days for integrating general principles of governance into business in general, and into IT in particular. However, it is clear that IT security stands a better chance of succeeding if it is treated as one element of an IT governance framework, which in turn needs tight alignment with business governance if it is to succeed. This may sound like a glib statement but it really isn’t. Having been involved in plenty of conversations through the years about how to raise IT security’s position on the agenda, the conclusion reached is that as long as it is seen as an end in itself, it will be doomed to fail.

Don’t get me wrong: there will always be a place for technologies to limit security threats, just as there will always be a place for door locks, seat belts and car immobilisers. However, in isolation, such things do not make us better drivers, nor prevent the occasional vindictive attack. It is only by seeing IT security within the overall context of IT and business governance, that it can succeed.

June 2009

06-24 – How secure are your applications?

How secure are your applications?

Locking the stable door before the horse bolts

Let’s be blunt. The fine heritage of application development has not traditionally incorporated the pre-emptive creation of secure code, i.e. programs that are built from the ground up to be secure. There are a number of potential reasons for this – not least that in the old days, before every system was connected (either directly or indirectly) to some kind of network, a certain code of conduct was assumed between developers, operations staff and users, that nobody would try to break anything. This ‘club rules’ spirit continues even now, despite repeated proof that such mindsets are, with the best will in the world, outdated.

Of course there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Military systems have long had to take security into account, and Commercial Licensed Evaluation Facilities (CLEFs) existed over a decade ago, whose task it was to try to break into bespoke applications using a variety of penetration testing techniques. These days, in the UK we have such certification schemes as CHECK and CREST (link: http://www.cesg.gov.uk/products_services/iacs/check/index.shtml), which are very much a continuation of this theme.

However, we are still far from the situation where such a thing as a ‘secure application’ is seen as the norm, rather than the exception. For a recent example of inadequate protections being baked in from the outset, we only need to look at Spotify (link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/04/spotify_breach/) but to be sure, there will be plenty of internal examples that are quietly swept under the carpet.

It would be too easy to have an alarmist rant at this point about the scale of the threat, the naivety of the people involved, the absolute need to respond to the issues right now – but that’s not really the point as change is in the air anyway. There are a number of reasons for this, which (as usual) boil down to a combination of legal changes (e.g. PCI DSS) drawing attention to the risks, vendors getting their acts together in terms of tooling, and the community at large warming to the idea of addressing the problem.

In a recent conversation with Tim Orchard at security consulting firm Activity, in answer to an open question, I was told that “We are definitely seeing a rise in demand for services around secure application delivery.” While the will may be there, the knowledge levels are patchy – “Some organisations that are better informed than others,” said Tim. This lack of understanding translates to a lack of will to build security in, at the outset of a development project. Of course, it’s not just security that gets short shrift – we saw a similar factor at play when we looked (link: http://www.freeformdynamics.com/fullarticle.asp?aid=373) at availability requirements (or lack of them).

It would be great to think that all security problems could in some way be magic-ed away through the use of security tools from the likes of IBM, HP, Fortify, Secerno or Qualys. Some of these tools help developers spot security weaknesses in code, whereas others look for run-time vulnerabilities. While there is undoubtedly a place for tools, they can only go so far – a common complaint is the generation of false positives, which then mask real issues when they arise.

Perhaps there really is no substitute for human intervention. “Tools are never as good as a manual pen tester,” Tim Orchard told me, “particularly when it comes to application logic flaws.” While he clearly had a vested interest to say so, I know from my own experience that he probably had a point. The issue is one of money – of course, we’d all love to get some top notch experts in, but in many cases the funding just won’t be there.

So, what to do? The answer probably lies in facing up to security as early as possible in the application lifecycle. I’ve said before that ultimately, security is a business issue – combining reputational risk and financial risk – and by considering applications in this context, it becomes more straightforward to identify what might go wrong and what should be dealt with as a priority.

Funding will always be an issue but engendering a more security-conscious mindset doesn’t have to be that expensive: it’s worth noting too that there are many free security tools out there, either built into development suites (e.g. Microsoft Team System) or downloadable from the Web. Security tools vendors would of course say that free tools are no substitute for what they offer, but they are certainly better than doing nothing at all.

July 2009

07-14 – Delivering on identity and access management

Delivering on identity and access management

Does authorisation provide the link?

At a recent panel event involving senior security managers and chief information security officers from a number of industries, Identity and Access Management came up as one of the top priorities. Participants gave a number of reasons, which can be distilled into three categories: more efficient and less fragmented delivery of IT services; facilitation of better collaboration with customers and partners; and the necessity to demonstrate compliance with data protection legislation.

All of which would be great - if only identity and access management hadn't proved impossible to implement. As one participant stressed, "We're five years down the line, and it still hasn't delivered." Worthy of note: that's not meaning, "delivered on its promises" mind, that's, "delivered at all." So, what is it that makes identity and access management so hard to do?

We can consider this question from both the IT and the business perspective. Considering IT in general, and security-related topics (such as identity and access management) in particular, the challenges faced in deploying such capabilities cannot be helped by our innate desire to concentrate on the 'how' rather than the 'what'.

Identity and access management requires two complex areas to be understood at the same time - first, the (rapidly changing) roles and requirements of a large number of individuals; and second, the diverse hotchpotch of new and legacy systems that may be in place. Wouldn't it be great if there could be a system to just resolve all of that? The answer has to be 'yes' - but while the requirements for such a system may be obvious in principle, the practicalities of implementation have defeated all but a minority of organisations.

It is understandable, and indeed desirable, that the IT industry has looked hard at how to resolve some of the technical and philosophical issues around delivering identity and access management. Initiatives such as the claims-based architectures espoused by the likes of Microsoft, together with cross-industry efforts such as OpenID, are to be welcomed. However the one thing they cannot do, is circumvent the complexities at the heart of deploying identity and access management on an industrial scale.

So what are the options? One can turn perhaps to the business, and insist that it gets its own house in order before IT automates what is required. After all, surely identity and access management systems exist to support such manual processes as role definition, access provisioning and the like?

It's here that we reach the nub of the matter from the business perspective: in a word, churn. As soon as any understanding is reached of who has access to what and why, such information almost immediately becomes out of date. Organisations large and small are dependent on pools of contractors and temporary staff; management roles change; hirings, firings, maternity provision and job shares are part of the fabric of modern industry.

Meanwhile, the boundaries of organisations public and private are today more like semi-permeable membranes than fortress walls. We see this in pharmaceutical companies creating innovation ecosystems, just as in borough councils and local health authorities looking to provide services and "deliver individual outcomes" to what is often a highly transient population.

From this standpoint, it is not absolutely clear what is the answer. However, we can perhaps identify where it may be found - not in the complexity of systems and applications that need to be accessed, nor in the constantly changing pool of people and roles that need to be identified and trusted. Rather, we could look at the interface between the two - or more importantly, the specific event during which authorisation is made between a specific individual and a specific service.

This is not proposing any magic bullet. Rather, by recognising the importance of this irreducible event, we can gain a level of clarity about what is at the heart of the problem – and the potential solution. Either it is possible to manage the event taking place at the moment of service provisioning, or it is not - but if the latter is true, no amount of clever technology is going to help.

Managing authorisations may hold the key, and for added impetus, we only have to look to legislation. Both industry-applicable regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley and national laws such as the data protection act require that authorisation of access to a given data set is in some way controlled. In other words, organisations have no choice but to make this happen: it's the law.

In order for identity and access management to succeed, then, we need to look at both the technologies available to facilitate provisioning of access, and the authority we vest in individuals to provision. For identity and access management to work, such capabilities need to operate as close to the point of authorisation as possible, such that the event itself can be captured.

This may be no easy task, but at least it provides a starting point - and let's remember, it isn't necessary to deliver everything, all at once. In conclusion, it is perhaps time to dispense with ill-fated attempts to provide blanket policies and approaches, however attractive they may seem at the outset. Instead, we can focus first on how to enable responsible individuals to provision access to higher priority systems and higher risk data. If and when this has been enabled, then other, lower priority systems can be brought into the fold.

From our research we know that there are no easy answers to complex issues such as this. But we would welcome any feedback, particularly concerning how to successfully deliver identity and access management. If you have any experiences to share, good or bad, we'd love to hear them.

October 2009

10-12 – Breaking out of the virtual pilot

Breaking out of the virtual pilot

Starting Gates or Flood Gates?*

The IT industry is full of bad habits, none greater than treating new technology areas as faits accomplis – which of course makes things a tad complicated eighteen months down the line, when organisations are just about deciding to adopt, but marketeers have already moved onto the next ‘big thing’. I remember overhearing a PR executive, a good few years ago now, saying how SOA needed a new name largely to overcome this issue of allowing people to actually do something with it without making vendors appear in some way backward. It was ever, and no doubt it always will be, thus.

Case in point: virtualisation. If the hype were to be believed, most organisations would be done by now – servers would be consolidated into neat arrays of racks and blades, drawing on a similarly neat configuration of fit-for-purpose storage operating as a single, flexible pool. What’s not to like? Nothing in principle, but the practice might take a little longer (probably a good thing for VMware, to be fair – if we were all finished, they’d have nothing left to sell).

In reality, most organisations are still to leave the starting blocks when it comes to virtualisation. Thinking specifically about server virtualisation, for example, while over 50% of larger (250-employee-plus employee) organisations may have adopted it in some shape or form, the majority of deployments are non-critical workloads or pilots.

So, we need to be careful. Virtualisation in general, and server virtualisation in particular, is not a done deal. We think we can speak with confidence when we say that it will be accepted as a mainstream technology, as (for a change) adoption is being driven as much by organisational ‘pull’ as by industry ‘push’ – not only because of the relatively immediate cash savings in terms of hardware, power and licensing that virtualisation can bring, but also for the operational flexibility and provisioning benefits (“Want a new physical server? No. Want a virtual server? Yes.”).

But let’s not run away with ourselves. Just because over half of the world’s organisations have some form of virtualisation in place, doesn’t mean it is already a mainstream technology. A number of hurdles still need to be overcome, some of which will be down to what happens when organisations do start to do more with it, and some to do with what vendors then provide as a response.

In a nutshell, much of this comes down to good, old fashioned configuration management. For example, lessons from early adopters suggest that the problems of physical server sprawl (which server virtualisation is reputed to resolve) can very quickly be superseded by virtual server sprawl – we can imagine similar scenarios for virtual storage, thin provisioning or no thin provisioning.

Thinking about management in the broader sense, there remains a way to go as well: there are management tools for virtual environments, and management tools for physical environments, but the twain don’t yet meet. Feedback welcome on this, but common sense suggests that for an operationally quiet life, it will be necessary to manage physical and virtual machines as a single pool using the same tools. This is not yet the case, which makes me feel just slightly jumpy – I know, they took away my screwdriver a long time ago, but stories about how virtualisation is being rolled out without due consideration of security, patching, asset management, licensing, business continuity and so on can’t help but do so.

This isn’t meant to be a stake in the ground so I can say, “I told you so,” in 18 months’ time. Rather I’m looking forward to when virtualisation moves from what it enables now – simplifying the existing environment – to what it can enable, namely offering a stepping stone towards more dynamic use of IT resources. In principle, a virtual server, and its associated virtual storage, need only exist for the time required to run a given workload – this could be years, or equally, days or hours.

To achieve this vision, requires first that the platform of virtualisation and management tools are in place, working together seamlessly. What’s the missing piece? When I spoke to David Greschler, Microsoft’s director of virtualisation strategy recently, he summed it up in a single word: ‘orchestration’ – that is, software running above the management layer, which can make policy-based decisions about what should be running where.

Before I get castigated in the comments let me say yes, indeed, this is precisely what is known in the mainframe world as ‘resource management’. And indeed, there are plenty of good reasons why a mainframe could operate as a server virtualisation platform, just as there are plenty of good reasons why an x86 platform could do the same. The difference now is the ubiquity of virtualisation – which will require orchestration to operate across computer systems, and indeed across data centres if the cloud vision (currently very much ‘push’) is to be believed.

So, virtualisation does indeed hold much potential. Hopefully it should be just like riding a bike, as hardware and operating systems evolve in such a way that it becomes part of the fabric (indeed, perhaps virtualisation will really have succeeded when we stop talking about it). But it is important we don’t get panicked into thinking we should already be racing along, before we reach the point it is safe to take the trainer wheels off.

2010

Posts from 2010.

January 2010

01-12 – Delivering on IT services

Delivering on IT services

ATFQ and other truisms

How easy it is to say that ‘IT should start with the business’? It’s one of those statements, like ‘customer is king’ or ‘always wash up as you go along’, that may indeed save time in the long run but which can be a lot harder in practice than theorists would like.

Like many truisms, this doesn’t make it any less important. But when faced with the hustle and bustle of keeping IT systems up and running day to day, it can be difficult to keep in mind that IT is a means to an end. Business users don’t necessarily make things easier – while tough to please, they can also find it hard to say what they want. I paraphrase but I can recall being told on more than occasion, “Requirements? Isn’t that your job to work them out?”

To be fair, medium sized organisations do have less of a challenge in trying to understand business needs than enterprise companies, simply because the former are less complex than the latter. This doesn’t always mean IT and the business are in for an easy ride.

I can remember one of my formative first jobs as an IT consultant, when I was brought in to help write a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a public body. What I didn’t know before I arrived, was that the designated IT department representatives weren’t actually talking to their business counterparts anymore, in the IT-business equivalent of a marital breakdown. I wish I could say I saved the day, but sadly all I did manage to coax out of the situation were a few response time targets.

Even in the best of cases, SLA’s are only one element of service delivery. We all know whether or not we are getting what we would perceive as ‘good service’, be it in a restaurant, a shop or indeed from IT. The challenge (as I’m sure anyone who has worked in hospitality or retail would profess) is knowing what to put in place to support the delivery of services, whatever their shape or form.

In IT terms this boils down to the infrastructure itself, and how it is managed and operated. In a previous article [link] we considered the architectural aspects of IT and how to deploy an infrastructure platform that supports the service requirements. What we haven’t yet talked about is how to decide what services are necessary, and how to ensure they are maintained.

While all organisations are different, business activities tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is activities that are, or can benefit from being treated in a structured manner; and the second is those that cannot.

Considering more structured activities first, these have been called various names at various points over the past few decades – including workflows, business processes and so on. Methodologies abound to identify and restructure such activities, with the goal of making things more efficient. And they also serve as the basis for understanding what can be automated – each task may or may not benefit from use of technology.

Forgive me if this is egg-sucking stuff, but in reality things don’t always work out that way. How many times have we seen applications that are used only in part, if at all, because they don’t actually fit with the way the business works? Of course, the business can (and sometimes should) change to fit with new capabilities provided by technology. But still, business activities should be in the driving seat.

For IT to support structured activities, it needs to operate efficiently – that is, as cheaply as possible. Interactions are largely transactional – that is, responding to specific service requests or updating specific information items. In the structured world, flexibility is a second priority to service levels – if IT is unavailable or inaccessible for whatever reason, the cost impact on the business can be very high

The second activity type – “everything that cannot be structured” – is no less important when it comes to deciding IT service requirements. We talk about collaboration tools, portals and information sharing facilities in this context, as well as mobile devices and other access capabilities.

For less structured activities, accessibility, flexibility and responsiveness are key drivers. There is no point at all for example, in having a world class customer management system if it isn’t able to cough up a phone number to the service engineer who is working on-site.

From a service management perspective as well, the type of management required depends largely on the type of service. Transaction workers in structured environments need similar structure when it comes to fault reporting and resolution, whereas more collaborative environments will probably build in several different ways of getting to an answer (“Can’t access the file? OK, I’ll email it to you.”)

At the heart of it all, however, lies a service mindset, which is difficult to teach. I can think fondly back to a number of colleagues who just knew that the quickest way to working out the answer was first to ask the right question. “Hang on,” said one, “Exactly what problem are we trying to solve here?” Even if we think we know what the business priorities are, it doesn’t take much to check in with someone who is well placed enough to say.

Assuming, of course, that the two sides are still talking. If not, it’s going to take more than an SLA to resolve that one.

April 2010

04-14 – Taking an architectural view of storage

Taking an architectural view of storage

Data storage may not be the most sexy area of IT, but it’s certainly one of the most critical. In theory, and from the outsider’s perspective, storage should just work without needing too much intervention, to respond to the following needs:

• Firstly, its role is to deliver data to applications and users consistently and efficiently: that is, as and when needed, at the required levels of performance and an appropriate cost.

• Second, storage should also be able to recover from failure situations. It is one thing when things are going right; quite another if things go wrong. Here we can think about backup and recovery as well as the ability to replicate between storage arrays, and indeed across sites.

• And finally storage needs to be manageable in a way that suits the people trying to manage it. This is not just about having visibility on what storage exists, but also to respond to changing conditions and changing requirements, preferably as automatically as possible.

Best practice suggests that such needs can be met by building a well-architected, well-managed storage environment. However, few organisations have ever had the luxury of implementing storage infrastructure from scratch. Indeed, most struggle with a number of generations of storage. While each might have been procured with the best of intentions, it has led to storage environments being far more complex than they need to be.

It’s not just about complexity, but the reliability of storage must also be held to account. Storage is one of the few areas of IT that relies on mechanical devices, and as such disk failure is a common theme in most IT environments. Indeed, some common storage technologies (RAID for example) exist largely to counter the fact that disks can, and will crash without warning.

Meanwhile of course, we are seeing continuingly high levels of data growth. Video and other forms of unstructured content, the democratisation of business intelligence, the increased demand for collaborative working and remote access, each is driving increased demand for raw storage. Data growth is exacerbated by many organisations having a ‘keep everything’ policy when it comes to electronic information. As well as being most likely illegal, this puts additional burdens on the storage infrastructure, not to mention the people and processes to support it.

Putting the complexity and reliability of storage together with the very real challenges of data growth does lead to a bit of a doomsday scenario. The question is, are any of the latest developments in storage and elsewhere, going to have an impact?

To cover reliability first, it may be that we are seeing the last generation of spinning platters, as solid state disks (SSDs) arrive at a point where they become cost effective enough to become the norm. While we are not quite there, the mood resembles that of the TV and monitor market just a few years ago, when flat screen displays tipped from being a luxury to an expectation.

Next we have storage virtualisation – which enables storage resources to be treated as a single pool, and then provisioned as appropriate. The phrase in vogue at the moment is ‘thin provisioning’, in which a server or application may think it has been allocated a certain disk volume, but in fact the storage array only allocates the physical storage required up to the specified maximum (which may never be reached). This makes for a lot more efficient use of storage.

Speaking of efficiency, another trendy term is de-duplication, in which only variations in files or disk blocks are retained, transferred, backed up or whatever. De-duplication can get quite complicated of course: for example, an index needs to be maintained of everything that is being stored or backed up, so that files can be ‘reconstructed’ as necessary. But it can have a considerable impact on the amount of disk being used – this also has a positive impact on reliability (less disks, less risk).

Other storage related developments worthy of note are on the networking side with iSCSI (bringing together block and file storage, a.k.a. storage for databases and unstructured content respectively), and at the higher end, the merging of data and storage networking using 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

While all such developments hold their own promise, they cannot solve the problems of complexity and data growth by themselves. To do so requires an architectural view of storage, but we know from various research studies we know that funding can be hard to come by, particularly when it comes to the business case for higher-availability features and management tools. In other words, the things that enable better-architected storage infrastructure to exist.

What to do? Perhaps the point is that it is never too late to get your organisation to think about storage in the right way. It may seem oxymoronic but even cost-saving initiatives can be used as a stepping stone. For example, while it still isn’t cheap (though it’s getting cheaper), implementing de-duplication might provide immediate savings in terms of bandwidth and latency reduction. However, by considering its impact a little more broadly, the bandwidth savings may now allow (for example) data replication to another site, making disaster recovery possible whereas in the past it was not.

Certain initiatives may not appear to be about storage initially, but quickly prove otherwise. For example adopters of virtualisation on both both server and desktop have discovered just how important it is to get the storage right up front. Virtual servers can quickly become the cause of storage bottlenecks, for example, and meanwhile, early adopters of virtual desktop infrastructure have learned how important it is to co-locate the storage used for user data, with that for the virtual desktops.

With such things in mind, it is difficult to see how the storage architecture will become any less important over the coming few years. The question is whether storage will remain the thing that gets thought about last, when it is already too late to do anything about getting it right.

May 2010

05-20 – Focus on business challenges, not technology innovations

Focus on business challenges, not technology innovations

The IT industry really does bring out the best and worst traits of human nature. Were we always quite so excitable about the latest big thing? It is difficult to tell, as historical records don’t tend to preserve the glee reserved for all things new and improved, whether or not they have any long-term advantage.

This is particularly relevant given that we are perhaps in one of the most inventive periods since the dawn of humanity – at least, that is how things look. While the jury is out as to the usefulness and ultimate value of many of our creations, the speed of ‘innovation’ has been accelerating consistently over the past 500 years, such that we have now reached a point where it is impossible to keep up with everything that is going on.

It is a very human thing, however, to want to keep up appearances. In the arts it is important to have an opinion on the latest show, film, or book, and our high streets are full of the latest must-have items. You can see where I’m going with this can’t you – yes indeed, our cuckoo tendencies to accumulate shiny things also spills over into how we view, and indeed select and procure IT systems.

We all know this, but many go with it anyway. Marketing departments in IT vendor companies spend their time working out how to make even the most humdrum of technologies look like the best thing since, well, the last best thing. Phrases like ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘game changer’ are used over and again, even though both speaker and listener knows that if the paradigm had shifted as often as predicted, we would have run out of games to change long ago.

Business leaders are subject to the same pressures – after all, in the words of the Matrix agent, they are ‘only human’. It was only a matter of time before a CIO would say to me that his boss had asked him when could he get some of that cloud computing. The fact that the question doesn’t make any sense (link: http://www.openreasoning.com/2010/05/but-is-that-really-cloud-check-out-this.html) is neither here nor there: businesses want to demonstrate they are up with the corporate Joneses, just as CIOs themselves want to have a few leading edge projects on their CVs. Analyst firms as well can be no better, as indeed, if things weren’t quite as exciting as everyone was making out, would we really need analysts to make sense of it all?

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of new and exciting things made possible through the use of technology IT. It has brought the world closer together, opening up whole new ways of communicating and collaborating, and so on and so on. The danger however, is that we are so busy looking beyond where we are for the next big thing, we don’t give ourselves the time to make the most of what we already have. Organisations don’t always need the latest and greatest technology to thrive, and there is a big difference between being flexible as a business and simply changing because that is what everyone else is doing. Far more important is that their requirements are clearly understood, and that the right tool is selected for the job in hand.

As my old boss Steve, a seasoned programme manager used to say, “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve here?” Okay, his language was a bit more colourful than that but the point still stands. As we look at the waves of so-called innovation and try to decide whether they have any relevance to our businesses, let’s first and foremost focus on the challenges we face, and how best to deal with them. In a couple of years time, when the dust has settled on the latest hyped-up bandwagon, if the challenges still remain then we won’t have been doing our jobs, even if the agenda item of “keeping up with innovation” has been achieved.

September 2010

09-06 – Storage management in three years time

Storage management in three years time

For today’s IT decision makers, bombarded with advertising and marketing from all sides about how everything is going to change, it is hard not to get caught up in the hype. At a recent event I attended, a senior IT guy told a number of his peers how his boss – the CEO – had been quizzing him about some of the latest developments. “When can we get some of this cloud?” he was asked – a question which could never hope to have a straight answer.

Storage managers are not immune from the pressures caused by marketing, while being faced with much the same realities as their peers elsewhere in the IT department. Storage virtualisation and thin provisioning, iSCSI, deduplication, data centre convergence through 10-Gigabit Ethernet, storage as a service, and so on are all (we are told) set to rip up the rule book when it comes to how we design, deploy and operate our storage environments. We are heading for a brave, exciting new world, where everything is going to be so much better managed, easier and above all cheaper than in the past.

If you ask exactly when this wondrous vision is going to present itself, the answers become more vague however. I’ve been asking this question for the past decade, and the answer has not really changed much – the general thesis is that we are looking at 5-7 years or beyond. In other words, just long enough ahead not to make a difference to what is happening today.

The reality, for the majority of organisations that we speak to, is that IT is not going to change that fast, or that much. Last week I was speaking to two storage managers representing two large financial institutions, and both concurred that life in three years time isn’t going to look particularly different in three years’ time, compared to what we see now, for a number of reasons. First, storage demands will continue to grow – as reflected in our research, data growth is currently the biggest factor affecting how we architect and procure IT systems in general, and storage in particular.

Another factor is that in organisations of all sizes, IT is just too complex to be replaced wholesale. As a consequence vendor case studies tend to dwell on the few exceptional organisations that really did decide to make sweeping changes to their IT – these frequently appear to include healthcare institutes somewhere in middle America, eastern European telcos and banks with names nobody has ever heard of. Who would not wish such organisations well – but such examples do not always translate for more mainstream IT organisations.

This is, of course, if it would make financial sense to make such sweeping changes in the first place, which leads to the third and perhaps most important factor – the cost of any change can frequently exceed the shorter-term benefit of making it. We know of a number of new technology areas at the moment – desktop virtualisation is one – where it is impossible to make a business case purely on the basis of shorter-term financial savings, particularly if the costs of storage are taken into account.

It is unsurprising then, that we should not really expect the world of IT to look that different in three years’ time. Certain technologies will undoubtedly become more prevalent: server and storage virtualisation is one for example, though we are still looking for proof points for whether there is life for virtualisation beyond consolidating existing servers and storage onto a smaller pool of hardware. Meanwhile, no doubt deduplication will gain a footprint, ultimately becoming more of an expected function of enterprise storage. Other technologies, such as 10-Gigabit Ethernet will be more of a slow burn, implemented following traditional data centre refresh cycles rather than sweeping through like a forest fire.

Is IT life really just going to be more of the same, however? Given how data quantity continues to grow, many of the above capabilities are more about keeping up than getting ahead, so will we just be treading water? Thinking of storage in particular, one area that may yet have its day is data classification and categorisation. The storage managers I spoke to mentioned the continuing pressures of compliance, and their desire to get smarter about what information they were storing, and how it was managed. Classification technologies have been available for some time, but they remain fragmented – tools available to classify information for records management purposes currently sit separate from tools for data leakage prevention, for example.

While it is perfectly valid to pay attention to new technology developments, then, it is equally important to consider them against the reality that corporate infrastructure is not going to look that different in a few years time, compared to how it looks today. There will always exist opportunities to make things better, to save money, to consolidate, integrate and rationalise. However, nobody should be duped into thinking that the latest raft of technologies are anything other than that – new capabilities which can be integrated with what has gone before, so as to keep up with the increasing quantities of data we have to deal with. While this may be disappointing to the evangelists, it should come as quite a relief for the majority of front line IT decision makers.

09-09 – Why should we care about UC?

Why should we care about UC?

Why should we care about UC?

Unified comms is a broad term, which has come to mean many things depending on who you ask. In practical terms it encompass a number of different components including presence awareness, directory management, single number, unified messaging etc. What you find when you talk to large businesses however, UC is a turn-off as they see is as a broad-brush solution that can be difficult to buy into. In essence it is about this set of components and making them work together better. Increasingly, the term UC is generally understood to incorporate these things.

Businesses are increasingly faced with is a fragmented communications environment, which has arisen through things being brought in piecemeal – Voice, Email, IM, Audio conferencing, Web conferencing etc. When you try to cross from one mechanism to another, things don’t work particularly well, which makes the way we work very inefficient, not just in operational terms but in terms of individual efficiency.

Overlaying unified comms makes things work together so much better – classic example is in a call centre, call with a query, “I’ll speak to relevant people and come back to you” – after which agent literally has to go around and piece information together, potentially with several iterations. Overlaying UC means:

• You can take the call

• Identify relevant people to help

• Contact them directly

• Potentially handing call over straight away

Whole thing saves a lot of time, resource etc. and increases customer satisfaction in that scenario.

Another valid scenario is how businesses evolving with home, remote, road-based workers – how to get them together for regular meetings, communicate, co-ordinate actions etc. You want a company meeting – non-UC – send out invites, check calendars, etc, get everyone together etc. In UC environment, use videoconference, hook into directories, dial them in very simply. From a business perspective this makes a lot of sense particularly given existing pressures such as travel budgets driving down, employee lifestyle choices and so on.

For the record, unified comms underpins collaboration, but it doesn’t just deal with collaboration, it also supports better business processes.

Fundamentally, the problem UC solves is to bring together communications tools. However this problem is not seen as sufficiently blocking to make businesses see it as a priority. However it’s not destined to forever be a nice to have – a key element is that it needs an underlying infrastructure, which in UC’s case is IP telephony. Organisations that replace their PBX’s at end of their natural life are most likely to switch to IPT, following which the benefits of UC are easier to reap. So, while only a minority of organizations may see UC as an end in itself, a much larger number are likely to move into a UC model by way of IPT.

Meanwhile, other angles include videoconferencing players like Polycom who are partnering with UC vendors (Avaya, Cisco). Compelling situation is dealing with travel budget issues through use of videoconferencing – at which point companies like Polycom will recommend that it is viewed as part of a broader solution set, we’re seeing that start to happen. So, rather than just buying tactical videoconferencing, can think about comms more strategically.

We also have the mobility angle – in particular, fixed/mobile convergence. For example, take a company where people are working on shop floor/office, they have a mobile and a desk phone, with cost implications. You can bring those together on a single number which can work both on- and off-site. FMC becomes an initiative which may be down to a number of drivers, including cost. But the components involved in UC – such as directory, unified messaging – are key to the success of FMC.

In other words, UC is fundamentally the set of technology components which enable communications to be undertaken in a far more co-ordinated manner that previously. Its use will largely be driven by responses to compelling events. Other examples could be Exchange upgrade, changing comms provider, changing working policies internally.

What about UC from a business perspective? Businesses don’t look at UC and see it as relevant. A number of vendors are getting more specific about where UC fits, e.g. Avaya is looking at business scenarios, Cisco is doing the same – e.g. looking at hospital scenarios, getting doctors together. Examples such as these make UC much more relevant to specific businesses. This makes UC far easier to demonstrate value – by looking at what’s the problem businesses are trying to solve.

All well and good, but once in place, if you carry on working in same way as before, UC can start to appear like it was a waste of time/money. UC is a new thing which also demands that things are done differently – if you don’t do that, it won’t work, so there’s got to be a real push to make best use of it (e.g. travel budget reduction competitions). Business processes might not be videoconferencing-friendly for example, discouraging use of technology.

More successful companies have gone broad, embraced more of the components and involved a greater number of stakeholders in the discussions. Doesn’t have to be company-wide but has to be broad reaching to make sense. Need to build in change management from the outset, pilot to broader roll-out etc. Treat as a programme rather than a project with appropriate level of authority. Once in place you’re stuck with it, so need to be right first time.

October 2010

10-20 – Training in a Cold Climate (v2)

Training in a Cold Climate (v2)

“Our people are our greatest asset” is one of the most frequently employed oxymoronic phrases of business. Of course it is true, as everyone knows how hard it can be to get anything done if ‘people’ are not working to their potential. Equally frequent however, are examples of businesses trying to get away without investing sufficiently in the skills and capabilities of their staff.

Cue training, which is often seen as the first thing to go when budgets get squeezed. In IT terms training can appear in a variety of guises, from technical skills for IT staff, through software training to enable users to get the most from their tools, along with more general education around topics such as security, project management, compliance policy and so on. To play devil’s advocate for a second, is any of it actually necessary?

It’s worth stripping things back a little and considering what exactly we mean by training in the first place. Where there are procedures, policies and best practices to be shared it makes sense that relevant people know what they are. Fundamentally (and there is room for a football analogy here) ‘training’ becomes quite simply telling people the laws of the game, otherwise they might take shortcuts that raise costs and effort or create avoidable risks elsewhere in the business.

This principle also holds true when it comes to technology training. From a number of research studies and discussions through the years, we have seen how the load on the help desk is unnecessarily high, largely due to ‘GUI errors’ – that is, gross user incompetence. The minimum-necessary principle applies, in that it is worth investing in the smallest possible amount of training with users up front – for example in terms of password resets and backup procedures – to avoid time-wasting support calls later.

The value of training can further be illustrated when it comes to areas such as security and compliance. If all users acted sensibly of course, many risks would be reduced. It’s not that people are stupid – more that the problems are complex. A few years ago, I ran a series of security awareness seminars for a government department. “Hands up if you back up your laptop,” I said: lots of hands shot up. “Now, keep your hand up if you keep your backup disk in the laptop case where it will get stolen,” I said. Only a minority of hands went down.

One problem is that the value of training can be perceived as difficult to assess, particularly when it is considered in awkward to define terms such as ‘productivity’. When we’ve researched areas such as security education with respect to mobile devices however, we’ve found that the number of breaches drops by an order of magnitude for organisations that train their staff how to use the systems. Of course, you might hope that a lost phone, laptop or USB stick is fortunate not to have any confidential information on it or that it is simply wiped and sold on in the pub – but is this something on which you are prepared to bet your business?

The recession may not quite be over, though the fact a good friend just managed to find a job after what he terms “155 days in the wilderness” is perhaps a harbinger of better times ahead. We know from recent research that training is once again trailing at the bottom of investment priorities when it comes to IT. Perhaps, as organisations start to re-evaluate their budgets in order to grow their businesses, they will look once again to investing in training as a basis of running an efficient, cost-effective organisation that really does put its people first and one that is altogether more productive.

Gigaom

Posts published in Gigaom.

2013

Posts from 2013.

February 2013

02-22 – The Problem With Identity

The Problem With Identity

The problem with identity

Identity represents not only our relationship with technology but also how we choose to present ourselves to others, and how data about us is managed. With complexity coming from all sides, how will we cope?

Introduction

At its heart, identity is a simple enough idea. It should be possible to create a way of representing someone that is sufficiently unique and hard to replicate that it can be used for the purpose needed – linkage to data, access to services, proof of affiliation or whatever.

From this relatively straightforward staring point things very quickly get complex however. In this short paper we look at the background and drivers to identity today, and what can be done to keep on top.

Identity used to be so simple… didn’t it?

The identity challenge has largely emerged from the information age. Prior to the arrival of computers, managing the relationships between people, data and services was manageable enough – passports, medical records, census forms, birth, marriage and death certificates, accounts and company records filled the space allocated to them.

While the joint notions of ‘paperwork’ and ‘bureaucracy’ (literally, desk-based processes) suggest that the quantities of material could occasionally become overwhelming, the ability to link people with records was not seen as a particular challenge. Trust was more easily granted, for example with a letter of introduction, a seal or a signature, and despite the occasional abuse the system functioned well enough. As far as we know.

The information age spawned three challenges. First, it became necessary to authorise access to computer resources, for example through the allocation of username/password combinations. Which in itself, doesn’t sound like an insurmountable challenge: here’s an application, here’s your details, off you go.

Indeed, in the old days, people were often allocated roles which dictated what they could and couldn’t do, and given interfaces to suit – such as ‘Data Entry Clerk’. As mere, subservient slaves to the machine, such roles left people little scope for anything other than being part of the data production line.¹

As computers and applications increased in scope and size, it became necessary to give people access to multiple systems – which created a raft of new problems. Single Sign On (SSO) was the term used to describe the desired goal – the ability to type one set of user credentials, and auto-magically gain access to all applications and data required.

Terminologically, SSO begat Identity Management, reflecting a recognition that both credentials and roles needed to be configured, updated, maintained. Bill Smith the Policeman needed to be treated very different from Bill Smith the social club treasurer. But still, as long as the challenge was about centrally managed computer systems, it remained surmountable.

The Internet threw a spanner in the works

Of course, we all know where things have ended up. Access to online systems (originally along the lines of bulletin boards) required people to keep tabs on their own usernames and passwords, a situation which grew exponentially when the wave of e-commerce, then the interactive web hit.

Today, people will have tens, if not hundreds of usernames and passwords. We’re seeing a continued path – more and more complex, as we try to manage multiple logins for work applications, online software and services, social sites, banking and phone PIN numbers… we have created for ourselves an impossible goal as nobody apart from Derren Brown could hope to remember every single one.

Governments are also reviewing notions of identity

The second dimension of identity is about. linking individuals with data.

The ability to link individuals to data is also a factor

Second, increasingly complex electronic records needed to be linked to the people with the minimum of error.

And third, more recently, we have seen the emergence of identity footprints.

We have each created for ourselves a drawer full of keys, without any real knowledge of what opens what door.

To resolve this we can talk about identity management… but the other side of the coin is that identity is being created for each and every one of us whether we like it or not.

But identity also emerging from how people using technology

That part still remains. But since Web 2.0, we are seeing people use technology as direct interaction tool, not just an asynchronous transport mechanism.

While such behaviours continue, an upsurge of individual behaviours are also taking place. The read-write Web and its successor, social networking have both enabled people to be far more interactive.

The relationship between people and technology is changing.

Which brings new questions about identity.

What about privacy.

And the two are overlapping.

As illustrated by the ability to log in with Facebook.

This is more than an innocuous facility, as it provides facebook with access to a broader set of interactions.

But it is also indicative of how we can take a certain persona and start to associate ourselves with it.

There exist challenges of fragmentation – it has become almost impossible to remember who said what to whom, where.. But also, of personality. It is harder and harder to present multiple images depending on where you are.

Every new person you add to Twitter has the ability to change what you might say.

When the pope tweets, are we seeing the real person? Unlikely.

Technology threatens to have a better grasp of who we are than we do ourselves.

And yet, the tools we have remain no more helpful than a transport, mere pipes. Even Facebook.

The idea of Sentiment analysis remains a tool for the advertisers and data miners, and not for the people who are using the tools.

What started as a simple mechanism to ensure only pre-defined people could access software applications and services has

They are better able to extract, reflect personality

And then to make decisions about it.

We are ending up with a sentient cloud – which can make decisions based on an understanding of people.

How to counter? If at all?

The right to anonymity. As captured by The Onion and illustrated by Facebook’s recent ‘win’ in German courts.

The right to be forgotten.

Perhaps it is not a problem but the discrepancy remains. For many these tools represent an identity crisis of the first order.

Where the various attempts to ‘do’ identity have failed, then, is in thinking that the key in some way represents the house.

Identity pervades everything we do and say online, just as offline.

The problem with identity, then, may ultimately be in deciding who we are.

1. In a way this reflects the ill-fated Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment. ↩

2016

Posts from 2016.

December 2016

12-02 – Ltdirect

Ltdirect

Case Study: London Theatre Direct, Tibco Mashery and the power of the API

A recent meeting I had with the theatre ticketing company London Theatre Direct (LTD) was a timely reminder that not all organisations are operating at the bleeding, or even the leading edge of technology. That’s not LTD itself, a customer of Tibco’s Mashery API management solution and therefore one already walking the walk. The theatres are a different story, however. Most still operate turnkey ticketing solutions of various flavours, making LTD’s main challenge one of creating customised connectors for each.

That work is now done, at least for London theatres, with the most obvious beneficiary being the theatre-going punter. “Customers could never find the tickets they wanted — they didn’t have much choice and there was limited flexibility on price, they could never get either cheaper tickets nor premium tickets,” explains LTD’s eCommerce head, Mark Bower. “With APIs in place, we can access millions of tickets. Every ticket is available, right up until show time.” As a result, more tickets are being sold, to the equal delight of producers and venues. Jersey Boys saw a 600% uplift in sales when LTD was plugged in, for example.

LTD haven’t just created a more straight forward booking facility however. This is the API economy, in which everything is a platform — so third parties, such as hotels and transport companies, can also plug into LTD’s service. These are early days but such tie-ups are inevitable. “30% of people coming to London will want to go to the theatre,” says Mark. “We can plug our service directly into in-room systems, avoiding the dark art of the concierge booking on a customer’s behalf.” And indeed, charging a premium to do so.

So far so good, but LTD believe that something that could be seen as simply online ticketing is actually far more profound. A theatre production is at its core a creative act, with no guarantees of success at the outset. “Theatre is not a one size fits all,” says Anne, marketing director at LTD. “You can’t walk into the industry and say, ‘I want this show to do this,’ that’s not how it works.” Rather, there needs to be a balance between the aspirations of the producer and the hard-nosed realities of getting punters in through the door and taking their money in return for their entertainment.

The world of theatre is not very forgiving. “Venue owners want bar sales and rent, and the minute the rent falls below a certain level, or that the owner sees bar sales dropping below a certain level, they will give two weeks notice to a show and and they are out,” says Mark. Such was the case for the feted, but short-run Made In Dagenham. The ability, therefore to generate higher demand for tickets is of huge importance, as is reaching out to previously untapped demographics such as younger audiences who would tend to purchase the less accessible, cheaper tickets.

Better ticketing doesn’t just mean an uplift in sales therefore, it also means that producers and venues are able to put on shows that might previously be seen as higher-risk. This is all before even thinking about the nuggets of insight that will lie inside the ticketing data itself — who is going to what kind of show, when, using what form of transport and so on. As we discussed this, I was reminded of how farmers are taking soil samples so they know how to target fertilisers more accurately — I couldn’t help wondering if the same principle applied to incentivisation of theatre goes to ensure all seats could be filled.

Perhaps the takeaway is that the ticket itself is a consequence of past models, which worked as well as they could in the analogue world. Even as our interactions become more digital, we have an opportunity to make them more about the very human relationship between producer, customer and venue, all of whom are looking to gain from the deal. The opportunity exists to move beyond the blunt instrument of the paper ticket and towards deepened relationship, manifested for example as event-led packages, loyalty programmes or even patronage models.

In the world of theatre and in many other sectors, technology enables us to move above and beyond the dark arts. Of course, the opportunity for abusing such tools also exists — there we face an ancient choice. But the stage is set (oh, yes) for a more direct, transparent relationships between participants. Cue applause.

—-

With APIs we can access millions of tickets.

Customers could never find the tickets they wanted — they didn’t have much choice, and there was limited flexibility on price, they could never get the cheaper tickets and they could never get the premium tickets.

[With API connectivity all that has changed.]

Every ticket is available, right up until show time.

Basket value up - people are spending more

Getting new, younger audiences that would purchase cheaper tickets

And tickets available until last minute - Anne - Marketing Director

Looking for partner opportunity - could be a train or an air company. 30% of people coming to London will want to go to the theatre.

Concierge is all a bit of a dark art - phones an agent, who phones the box office

In-room iPad - GLH - great little hotel

Can of course add it to their profile

Anne - Theatre is not a one size fits all - you can’t walk into the industry and say “I want this show to do this”, that’s not how it works.

[So above all it brings flexibility. ]

Create an event-led package, talk to producer - hotels’ getting the room etc.

Technical challenges?

With the venues - a bit control freaky

Three relationships - the producer - the vision of how it’s going to look,… they are expecting to sell every ticket! They think they have the best idea…

Venue owners want bar sales and rent - the minute the rent falls below a certain level, bar sales dropping, they give two weeks notice and they are out

Owners sell venue to producer like they can sell tickets

Jersey Boys - uplift of 600% when plugged into system.

[Get uplift once start collating data - cf Farming]

Every theatre ticket sold by ticketmaster will be going through LTD - we coudlnt’ have done it without Tibco Mashery.

We have to work with multiple venues - with multiple versions. We had to do the integration with each.

[Data brokerage?]

12-06 – Future Platform Based

Future Platform Based

AWS Re:Invent parting thoughts: The post-hybrid technology landscape will be multiplatform

As I flew away from Amazon Web Services’ Re:Invent developer conference, my first thought was how there is far, far more going on than anyone can keep up to date with. This issue has dogged me for some time, indeed every time I tried to make headway writing the now-complete book Smart Shift, I was repeatedly beset by the world changing for a thousand reasons and in a thousand ways. (As a result, incidentally, the book has morphed into a history of technology that starts 200,000 years in the past — at least that isn’t going to change! But I digress.)

Even though making sense of the rapidly changing digital landscape feels like drinking from several fire hydrants at once, such immersion does reveal some pointers about where technology is going. Across conversations I had at Re:Invent, not just with the host but also Intel and Splunk, Treasure Data and several partners and customers, a number of repeated themes started to let themselves be known.

Let’s start with hybrid and get it out of the way. Actually, let’s start with the fact that AWS are pretty darned impressive in what they are achieving and how they are achieving it, with a strong focus on the customer and a business model that really does save organisations a small fortune in running costs. This being said, one aspect of the organisation’s overall pitch stuck out as incongruous. “We were misunderstood. Of course we always believed hybrid models were valid,” said Andy Jassy at the keynote. I paraphrase but that’s about it: unfortunately I, and many of the people I spoke to, have too good memories to take this revisiting of history with anything other than a pinch of salt.

A second topic of conversation, notably with Kiyoto Tamura of data management platform Treasure Data but reinforced by several customers, was how multi-cloud models would pervade — again, despite AWS’ opinion to the contrary. While it may be attractive to have a “single throat to choke”, a clutch of reasons make two or more cloud providers better than one: many government organisations have a requirement to work with more than one supplier, for example; meanwhile past decisions, cost models, use of specific SaaS that drives deeper PaaS all make for a multi-cloud situation alongside the hybrid consequence of using existing IT.

However, even as AWS toes the hybrid line (to its credit as this is a significant pillar of its alignment to the enterprise, a point I will expand upon in a future blog), I think the world is already moving on from the history-driven realities of hybrid and the current inevitability of multi-cloud. The history of this technological age has been marked by some underlying tendencies, one of which is commoditisation through supply and demand (which directly leads to @jonno’s first law of data growth) and the second, a corollary, is the nature of providers to expand into less commoditised areas.

Case in point: AWS, which started in storage and virtual servers, but which is placing increasing attention on increasingly complex services — c.f. the machine leaning driven Alexa, Lex and Polly. To stay in the game and not be commoditised out of existence, all cloud providers inevitably need to become platform providers, purveyors of PaaS. As another corollary, this does send a warning shot across the bows of platform-enabled facade companies, such as those over-valued digital darlings AirBnB, Uber and the like. Who are quite rightly diversifying before they are, also inevitably, subsumed back into the platform.

The future is platform-based rather than cloud-based, for sure. As Andy Jassy also said, and again I paraphrase, “We don’t have to waste time having those conversations about whether cloud is a good idea any more. We can just get on with delivering it.” The conversations are already moving on from cloud and towards what it enables, and it will be enabling far more in the future than in the past. As yet another aside, it may be that AWS should be thinking about changing its mantra from “journey to the cloud” to “journey to what is enabled… but I digress again.

The platform perspective also deals with how we should think about all that pesky in-house, legacy stuff. There’s barrow-loads of it, and it is fantastically complex — we’ve all seen those technology architecture overviews that look something like a Peter Jackson-directed fly-through of an Orc-riddled mine. For many enterprise organisations, such complex, arcane and inefficient environments represent their business. But, fantastically complex as it is, existing IT systems can also be thought about as delivering a platform of services.

Many years ago I helped a public organisation re-consider its existing IT as a valid set of services in what was then called a service-oriented architecture, and the platform principle is not so different. Start with working out the new services you need, build interfaces to legacy systems based on the facade pattern, and the rest is gravy. So, if an organisation is going to be using platforms of services from multiple providers, and if existing systems can be ring-fenced and considered as service platforms in their own right, what do we have but a multiplatform technology landscape?

And why does it matter? Because this perspective takes us beyond notions of hybrid, which essentially refer to how cloud stuff needs to integrate with legacy stuff, and towards a principle that organisations should have a congruent set of services to build upon and innovate against. This is not simply thinking out loud, but has tangible consequences as organisations can think about how skills in platform engineering, architecture, delivery and orchestration will become future differentiators, and can start to plan for them now. For sure we will see service catalogues, marketplaces and the like, as there is nothing new under the sun. Most important however is for organisations to deliver the processes and mindsets that will enable them to make the most of such enablers in the future.

12-21 – Why Will Data Grow Faster Than Processing

Why Will Data Grow Faster Than Processing

Five reasons why data growth will outstrip processing for the foreseeable future.

A while back, I documented what I called, with no small amount of hubris, “Jonno’s first Law” – namely that data will always be created at a greater rate than it can be processed. This principle, I believe, is fundamental to why we will fail to see the ultimate vision of artificial intelligence (which I first studied at university 30 years ago) become reality, perhaps for some decades.

So, what is driving the ‘law’? Most simply that Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip will double periodically, is not the only principle at play. Other principles are economic, contextual and consequences of the way we choose to create data. While I haven’t done the maths, here are some of the reasons why Jonno’s first law will continue to apply:

1. Data creation requires less processing than data interpretation. Data is easy to generate from even the least smart of sensors. It is also easy to duplicate with minimal processing and/or power, as illustrated by passive RFID tags and ‘smart’ paving slabs.

Corollary: A small modification in a complex data set can difficult to represent as the differences from the original data set, meaning it is more likely to result in two complex data sets.

1. There is always more data to be captured. Current business approaches are based on gaining an advantage based on accumulating more data. Equally, human desire to progress implies higher quality images and frame rates, larger screens, more detailed information from manufacturing systems and so on.

Corollary: The universe cannot be measured molecule by molecule – it is too vast, the data set too big to capture without a similarly vast set of measures. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle comes into play both at the lowest level and in how captured data influences human behaviour.

1. The number of data generators is increasing faster than processors. For example, digital cameras and indeed, mobile phones are being used in the main for content generation. 100 million servers exist in the world, compared to 10 billion phones.

Corollary: While processing continues to commoditise, data generation continues to fragment. Cloud computing manifests the former, and consumers, the latter.

1. Current models charge less (or zero) for data generation, more for processing. Consumer-oriented data generation is paid for by advertising, which covers its costs but leaves little for large-scale processing of the information.

Corollary: Consumer-based data generation is fragmented due to competitive interests, as multiple organisations (Facebook, Amazon) are growing their businesses primarily through data accumulation and secondarily interpretation.

1. Many algorithms are only recently becoming feasible. Much of the mathematics around current AI, machine learning and so on is well established, but processing was too expensive to handle it until recently. The potential of such algorithms is still being worked through, therefore.

Corollary: The algorithms we use are based on human understanding, not computer understanding. This means that our ability to process information is bottlenecked not only by processing power, but also by our ability to create suitable algorithms – which themselves depend on the outputs of such processing.

We still lack an understanding of how to automate the interpretation of data in an intelligent way, and will do so for the foreseeable future. As notes Mark Zuckerberg,

““In a way, AI is both closer and farther off than we imagine… we’re still figuring out what real intelligence is.” A final hypothesis is that such a leap will be required before processing capability can actually ‘leapfrog’ data growth and bypass the realities of data growth versus processing.

2017

Posts from 2017.

April 2017

04-05 – Aws Sentinel

Aws Sentinel

AWS meets the enterprise head on

Amazon Web Services must have been a very interesting company to work for over the past five years. My conversations with AWS senior executives have sometimes been fraught — not because of any conflict or contention, but rather due to the pervading feeling that any discussion was getting in the way of activity. The organisation has been so busy doing what it is doing (and making a pretty reasonable fist of it) that it it barely has had time to stop to talk.

Any thoughts or feedback about how AWS might do things differently, about how the needs of the enterprise could be better achieved, were met with flummoxed consternation. It’s all completely understandable, in a company which measures success by the number of new features achieved or services shipped, to question any question of whether it is doing enough. But still, the question has needed to be asked.

Against this background, watching the feet is a far better option of watching the mouth. The company has come a long way since its early stance of offering an out-and-out alternative to in-house enterprise IT processing and storage and indeed, continues to work on delivering ‘the’ technology platform for digital-first organisations that need, and indeed desire, little in the way of infrastructure.

From an enterprise perspective however, and despite some big wins, many decision makers still treat the organisation as the exception rather than the norm. In part this is through no fault of AWS; more that you couldn’t just rip and replace decades worth of IT investments, even if you wanted to. In many cases, the cheaper (in both money and effort) option is to make the most of what you have — the blessing and the curse of legacy systems.

In addition, as IT staffers from CIOs to tape operatives are only too aware, the technology is only one part of the challenge. Over the years, Enterprise IT best practice has evolved to encompass a wide variety of areas, not least how to develop applications and services in a sustainable manner, how to maintain service delivery levels, how to pre-empt security risks and assure compliance, how to co-ordinate a thousand pools of data.

And, above all, how to do so in what sometimes feels like a horseless cart careering down a hill, even as the hill itself is going through convulsions of change, just one slope in a wide technology landscape that shimmers and twists to adapt to what is being called the ‘digital wave’ of user-led technology adoption. Within which AWS itself is both driving the cause and feeling the effect of constant change. Is it any wonder that such conversations may sometimes falter?

So what? Well, my perception is that as AWS matures, the underlying philosophy of the organisation is becoming more aligned to these, very real enterprise needs. This can only be a perception: if you asked AWS execs whether they cared about security, they would look at you askance, because of course the organisation would not have got to where it was without pretty strong security built in. Similarly, the AWS platform is built with the needs of developers front and centre. And so on.

What’s changing is how these areas are being positioned, to incorporate a more integrationist, change-aware foundation. For example, development tools are evolving to support the broader needs of integrated configuration and delivery management, DevOps automation and so on. Security teams are not only delivering on security features, but are broadening into areas such policy-based management and, for example, how to reduce the time to resolution should a breach occur.

The seal on the deal is AWS’ recently announced Managed Services (previously codenamed Sentinel) offering, which brings ITIL-type features — change management, performance management, incident management and so on — into the AWS portfolio. The toolset originally appeared on the radar back in June last year but wasn’t launched until December, perhaps in recognition of the fact that it had to be right. It’s also available both to end-user organisations and service providers or outsourcing organisations.

AWS’ incorporation of ITIL best practice kicks into touch any idea that AWS doesn’t ‘get’ the enterprise. And meanwhile, many other areas of AWS’ evolving catalogue of capabilities, and indeed the organisation’s rhetoric, reinforce a firming up of direction to take into account the fact that enterprise IT is really, really hard and therefore requires a change-first mindset. From the organisation’s confirmation that the world will be hybrid for some time yet, to the expansion of Snowmobile to a 100 Petabyte shipping container, to simple remarks like “many customers don’t know what they have,” all serve to illustrate this point.

Such efforts continue to be a work in progress, as IT is never ‘done’. Plenty remains for AWS to deliver internally, in terms of how products integrate, how features are provided and to whom: this will always be the case in a rapidly changing world. Nonetheless the organisation is a quick learner which is moving beyond seeing cloud-based services as something ‘out there’ that need to be ‘moved to’, and towards an understanding that it can provide a foundation the enterprise can build upon, offering not only the right capabilities but also the right approach.

With this understanding, AWS can engage with enterprise organisations in a way that the enterprise understands, even as enterprises look to make the kinds of transformations AWS and other technology providers have to offer. Finally the organisation can gain the right to be a partner with traditional enterprises alongside the cloud-first organisations it has preferred to highlight thus far.

04-21 – Retarus

Retarus

Cybersecurity is an incurable disease, so it’s time we though of it that way

A couple of weeks ago I met with the email management and security vendor Retarus. While I was unfamiliar with the company (and it appeared to have a reasonably standard portfolio), my interest was piqued because it was German, and the country is very particular about such questions as personal data, privacy and so on.

As our conversation tended towards what the organisation is calling patient zero detection — referring to how the vendor’s software looks to improve how it reacts to security attacks that have already taken place, I found myself on fundamentally more interesting and potentially valuable ground. It’s difficult to explain why I think this is so important, so please bear with me and I shall try.

IT security has had a chequered history. Back in the day when I used to manage UNIX systems, workstations and servers tended to be delivered with all technological ‘doors’ left open (front and back), so that any person with a reasonable grasp of the operating system could gain access to whatever they wanted.

Some systems were better than others — indeed, good old mainframes had an almost-militaristic attitude to their own protection, the principles of which were adopted over time by the open systems movement and then the PC wave of computing (c/f Microsoft’s late-to-party-but-still-laudable Trusted Computing Initiative, kicked off in 1999).

(As an aside, pretty much any time I have pushed back against such efforts being promoted by IT vendors, my discomfort has been driven by the presentation of well-established, accepted and required truth as something new.)

As computing moved into the mainstream, security best practices came into alignment with the broader world of contextual risk, itself well known in military and safety-critical circles. This world had taken a different path, moving from risk (and litigation) avoidance to the (more affordable) risk management philosophy we still follow today.

Having bottomed out the best practices required for managing and mitigating the probability and impact of risk, attention has turned to resolving any issues when they arise. The parallel fields of business continuity and disaster recovery are testament to these efforts, their principles later applied to IT security not least in terms of how to deal with zero-day exploits.

Here’s the ‘however’: while this philosophical path from risk mitigation to breach resolution remains a constant, it is based on assumptions that are difficult to maintain where IT is involved. Not only that decisions, once made, can be stuck with; but also the idea that by dealing with the tangible assets (bey they physical, electronic or software-based), the stuff they deal with is also protected.

In the case of IT, the ‘stuff’ is called data. When the Jericho Forum got together to discuss the changing nature of IT security, they did so because they saw the protect-the-border approach to security as being a recipe for disaster. Their focus moved to identity management as a result, proposing models now espoused by Google’s zero-trust, end-to-end encrypted BeyondCorp initiative.

And so, in this day and age, traditional asset-based security runs uneasily alongside the school of thought that says data, not devices, needs to be protected. I was faced with this dichotomy myself when I released my (more asset-centric) book on Security Architecture to pointed criticism from luminaries of the latter camp.

The truth, however, is that neither perspective is completely right — and indeed, both start from the wrong point. Specifically, neither considers what to do when things don’t work out, when (as all too often) a breach or data leak takes place. The pervading view from security professionals is “well, you didn’t listen” which is not the most helpful in a time of crisis, however accurate.

The mindset of all parties, that we are trying to prevent things from going wrong to the best of our abilities, is fundamentally flawed. The core notion (which goes back to the origins of both IT security and broader risk management) is that if we did everything right, we would pretty much ensure bad things didn’t happen.

This notion is false. It is not that bad things are going to happen anyway, in the same way that a vehicle crash might happen even with all the right protections in place. That may be true but if we do have a car accident we are typically distraught, in the knowledge that we were, figuratively and statistically, one of the unlucky ones.

A far better framing of the nature of IT security is similar to that of disease. Of course we can look to avoid illness but when we succumb, we recognise it is part of the tapestry of life. Prevention will never fully work, recovery is a necessary and well-understood set of steps.

Indeed, so it is with human weakness, in that sometimes we succumb to our less positive traits. Far from being just another analogy, this is a fundamental input to our understanding of how digital technology is as likely to be misused as used for positive reasons.

The overall consequence is that we should be accepting the consequences of such weakness as the norm, not treating any incidents as exceptions. We should also be thinking about risk management and mitigation in the same way as we think of hygiene when dealing with germs — as necessary as it is imperfect and, sometimes, counterproductive.

Thinking more broadly, even as I write this we are getting far better at using data to understand the spread of disease. It makes absolute sense that we should be investing in tools that look at how computer attacks spread virally, and how they can potentially be contained and their wider impact minimised.

It’s not for me to say whether Retarus’ product is any better or worse than any other (as I haven’t tested it), but the company’s philosophy was decidedly refreshing. Thinking in terms of ‘patient zero’ outbreak detection and mitigation is a good start for any security vendor and, more importantly, it should be part of the mindset adopted by any organisation wanting to define its attitude to IT security in this increasingly digital world.

December 2017

12-08 – 2018 Predictions

2018 Predictions

2018 predictions — the two-edged sword of technology

Predictions are like buses, none for ages and then several come along at once. Also like buses, they are slower than you would like and only take you part of the way. Also like buses, they are brightly coloured and full of chatter that you would rather not have in your morning commute. They are sometimes cold, and may have the remains of somebody else’s take-out happy meal in the corner of the seat. Also like buses, they are an analogy that should not be taken too far, less they lose the point. Like buses.

With this in mind, here’s my technology predictions for 2018. I’ve been very lucky to work across a number of verticals over the past couple of years, including public and private transport, retail, finance, government and healthcare — while I can’t name check every project, I’m nonetheless grateful for the experience and knowledge this has brought, which I feed into the below. I’d also like to thank my podcaster co-host Simon Townsend for allowing me to test many of these ideas.

Finally, one prediction I can’t make is whether this list will cause any feedback or debate — nonetheless, I would welcome any comments you might have, and I will endeavour to address them.

1. GDPR will be a costly, inadequate mess

Don’t get me wrong, GDPR is a really good idea. As a lawyer said to me a couple of weeks ago, it is a combination of the the UK data protection act, plus the best practices that have evolved around it, now put into law at a European level with a large fine associated. The regulations are also likely to become the basis for other countries — if you are going to trade with Europe, you might as well set it as the baseline, goes the thinking. All well and good so far.

Meanwhile, it’s an incredible, expensive (and necessary, if you’re a consumer that cares about your data rights) mountain to climb for any organisation that processes or stores your data. The deadline for compliance is May 25th, which is about as likely to be hit as I am going to finally get myself the 6-pack I wanted when I was 25.

No doubt GDPR will one day be achieved, but the fact is that it is already out of date. Notions of data aggregation and potentially toxic combinations (for example, combining credit and social records to show whether or not someone is eligible for insurance) are not just likely, but unavoidable: ‘compliant’ organisations will still be in no better place to protect the interests of their customers than currently.

The challenges, risks and sheer inadequacy of GDPR can be summed up by a single tweet sent by otherwise unknown traveller — “If anyone has a boyfriend called Ben on the Bournemouth - Manchester train right now, he’s just told his friends he’s cheating on you. Dump his ass x.” Whoever sender “@emilyshepss” or indeed, “Ben” might be, the consequences to the privacy of either cannot be handled by any data legislation currently in force.

2. Artificial Intelligence will create silos of smartness

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a logical consequence of how we apply algorithms to data. It’s as inevitable as maths, as the ability our own brains have to evaluate and draw conclusions. It’s also subject to a great deal of hype and speculation, much of which tends to follow that old, flawed futurist assumption: that a current trend maps a linear course leading to an inevitable conclusion. But the future is not linear. Technological matters are subject to the laws of unintended consequences and of unexpected complexity: that is, the future does not follow a linear path, and every time we create something new, it causes new situations which are beyond its ability to deal with.

So, yes, what we call AI will change (and already is changing) the world. Moore’s, and associated laws are making previously impossible computations now possible, and indeed, they will become the expectation. Machine learning systems are fundamental to the idea of self-driving cars, for example; meanwhile voice, image recognition and so on are having their day. However these are still a long way from any notion of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

So, yes, absolutely look at how algorithms can deliver real-time analysis, self-learning rules and so on. But look beyond the AI label, at what a product or service can actually do. You can read Gigaom’s research report on where AI can make a difference to the enterprise, here.

In most cases, there will be a question of scope: a system that can save you money on heating by ‘learning’ the nature of your home or data centre, has got to be a good thing for example. Over time we shall see these create new types of complexity, as we look to integrate individual silos of smartness (and their massive data sets) — my prediction is that such integration work will keep us busy for the next year or so, even as learning systems continue to evolve.

3. 5G will become just another expectation

Strip away the techno-babble around 5G and we have a very fast wireless networking protocol designed to handle many more devices than currently — it does this, in principle, by operating at higher frequencies, across shorter distances than current mobile masts (so we’ll need more of them, albeit in smaller boxes). Nobody quite knows how the global roll-out of 5G will take place — questions like who should pay for it will pervade, even though things are clearer than they were. And so on and so on.

But when all’s said and done, it will set the baseline for whatever people use it for, i.e. everything they possibly can. Think 4K video calls, in fact 4K everything, and it’s already not hard to see how anything less than 5G will come as a disappointment. Meanwhile every device under the sun will be looking to connect to every other, exchanging as much data as it possibly can. The technology world is a strange one, with massive expectations being imposed on each layer of the stack without any real sense of needing to take responsibility.

We’ve seen it before. The inefficient software practices of 1990’s Microsoft drove the need for processor upgrades and led Intel to a healthy profit, illustrating the vested interests of the industry to make the networking and hardware platforms faster and better. We all gain as a result, if ‘gain’ can be measured in terms of being able to see your gran in high definition on a wall screen from the other side of the world. But after the hype, 5G will become just another standard release, a way marker on the road to techno-utopia.

On the upside, it may lead to a simpler networking infrastructure. More of a hope than a prediction would be the general adoption of some kind of mesh integration between Wifi and 5G, taking away the handoff pain for both people, and devices, that move around. There will always be a place for multiple standards (such as the energy-efficient Zigbee for IoT) but 5G’s physical architecture, coupled with software standards like NFV, may offer a better starting point than the current, proprietary-mast-based model.

4. Attitudes to autonomous vehicles will normalize

The good news is, car manufacturers saw this coming. They are already planning for that inevitable moment, when public perception goes from, “Who’d want robot cars?” to “Why would I want to own a car?” It’s a familiar phenomenon, an almost 1984-level of doublethink where people go from one mindset to another seemingly overnight, without noticing and in some cases, seemingly disparaging the characters they once were. We saw it with personal computers, with mobile phones, with flat screen TVs — in the latter case, the the world went from “nah, thats never going to happen” to recycling sites being inundated with perfectly usable screens (and a wave of people getting huge cast-off tellies).

And so, we will see over the next year or so, self-driving vehicles hit our roads. What drives this phenomenon is simple: we know, deep down, that robot cars are safer — not because they are inevitably, inherently safe, but because human drivers are inevitably, inherently dangerous. And autonomous vehicles will get safer still. And are able to pick us up at 3 in the morning and take us home.

The consequences will be fascinating to watch. First that attention will increasingly turn to brands — after all, if you are going to go for a drive, you might as well do so in comfort, right? We can also expect to see a far more varied range of wheeled transport (and otherwise — what’s wrong with the notion of flying unicorn deliveries?) — indeed, with hybrid forms, the very notion of roads is called into question.

There will be data, privacy, security and safety ramifications that need to be dealt with — consider the current ethical debate between leaving young people without taxis late at night, versus the possible consequences of sharing a robot Uber with a potential molester. And I must recall a very interesting conversation with my son, about who would get third or fourth dibs at the autonomous vehicle ferrying drunken revellers (who are not always the cleanliest of souls) to their beds.

Above all, business models will move from physical to virtual, from products to services. The industry knows this, variously calling vehicles ‘tin boxes on wheels’ while investing in car sharing, delivery and other service-based models. Of course (as Apple and others have shown), good engineering continues to command a premium even in the service-based economy: competition will come from Tesla as much as Uber, or whatever replaces its self-sabotaging approach to world domination.

Such changes will take time but in the short term, we can fully expect a mindset shift from the general populace.

5. When Bitcoins collapse, blockchains will pervade

The concept that “money doesn’t actually exist” can be difficult to get across, particularly as it makes such a difference to the lives of, well, everybody. Money can buy health, comfort and a good meal; it can also deliver representations of wealth, from high street bling to mediterranean gin palaces. Of course money exists, I’m holding some in my hand, says anyone who wants to argue against the point.

Yet, still, it doesn’t. It is a mathematical construct originally construed to simplify the exchange of value, to offer persistence to an otherwise transitory notion. From a situation where you’d have to prove whether you gave the chap some fish before he’d give you that wood he offered, you can just take the cash and buy wood wherever you choose. It’s not an accident of speech that pond notes still say, “I promise to pay the bearer on demand…”

While original currencies may have been teeth or shells (happy days if you happened to live near a beach), they moved to metals in order to bring some stability in a rather dodgy market. Forgery remains an enormous problem in part because we maintain a belief that money exists, even though it doesn’t. That dodgy-looking coin still spends, once it is part of the system.

And so to the inexorable rise of Bitcoin, which has emerged from nowhere to become a global currency — in much the same way as the dodgy coin, it is accepted simply because people agree to use it in a transaction. Bitcoin has a chequered reputation, probably unfairly given that our traditional dollars and cents are just as likely to be used for gun-running or drug dealing as any virtual dosh. It’s also a bubble that looks highly likely to burst, and soon — no doubt some pundits will take that as a proof point of the demise of cryptocurrency.

Their certainty may be premature. Not only will Bitcoin itself pervade (albeit at a lower valuation), but the genie is already out of the bottle as banks and others experiment with the economic models made possible by “distributed ledger” architectures such as The Blockchain, i.e. the one supporting Bitcoin. Such models are a work in progress: the idea that a single such ledger can manage all the transactions in the world (financial and otherwise) is clearly flawed.

But blockchains, in general, hold a key as they deal with that single most important reason why currency existed in the first place — to prove a promise. This principle holds in areas way beyond money, or indeed, value exchange — food and pharmaceutical, art and music can all benefit from knowing what was agreed or planned, and how it took place. Architectures will evolve (for example with sidechains) but the blockchain principle can apply wherever the risk of fraud could also exist, which is just about everywhere.

6. The world will keep on turning

There we have it. I could have added other things — for example, there’s a high chance that we will see another major security breach and/or leak; I’d also love to see a return to data and facts on the world’s political stage, rather than the current tub-thumping and playing fast and loose with the truth. I’m keen to see breakthroughs in healthcare from IoT, I also expect some major use of technology that hadn’t been considered arrive, enter the mainstream and become the norm — if I knew what it was, I’d be a very rich man. Even if money doesn’t exist.

Truth is, and despite the daily dose of disappointment that comes with reading the news, these are exciting times to be alive. 2018 promises to be a year as full of innovation as previous years, with all the blessings and curses that it brings. As Isaac Asimov once wrote, “An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.”

On that, and with all it brings, it only remains to wish the best of the season, and of 2018 to you and yours. All the best!

12-18 – Do Organisations Think They Are Secure

Do Organisations Think They Are Secure

Unanswered question for the day: Why do organizations think they are secure?

Recently I’ve been asking friends, colleagues and clients what they think are the most important unanswered questions in tech. I thank Ian Murphy, who works in the security industry, for the following conundrum:

“Why do companies with little or no real security experience think they know their environment better than anyone else? That is, because it’s ‘their”’ network, they feel best placed to identify attackers (even those with advanced techniques who hide in the normal traffic noise)?” 

It’s a good one. I’ve been working in IT for decades and I remain baffled how we lock up our houses, secure our vehicles, seal away our valuables and yet, in the corporate environment, senior executives still question the need for security expertise. Ignorance, it would appear, is bliss.

While the problem may be technological, I suspect the answer is inherently human. Back in the day, when I was an IT director for a subsidiary of Alcatel, it took a major security incident on my watch to trigger any release of monies from my superiors.

Now, I recognise that I am already looking guilty of transference — wasn’t I the person responsible for securing the network and servers? While this is true, anyone who has worked in this environment know just how complicated it can be to ask for security budget. I know I tried.

And indeed, I remember the feeling of “I told you so” even as I worked with my team to rebuild the previous day’s data sources from (offline - phew) optical backup drives. Suddenly the cheque book was open and we could self-authorise training courses and enforce stricter policies — it was an internal breach.

So, I’m not sure organizations do think they are inherently secure, or that it’s nobody else’s business. I think, a bit like that feeling as we head down a dirt track on a mountain bike, we simply hope that the bad things won’t happen. That might have worked back in the early 1990’s, at least some of the time.

The difference now however, is that bad things are happening, all the time. We have moved from a state of security by exception (where probability was relatively low, even if impact was high) to a situation where all organisations are under constant attack.

This isn’t the latest missive from the industry, keen to sell you some security solution, it’s a fact. The probability is very high that, right now, an automated software package will be trying to infiltrate your corporate boundary. The impact is as high as it ever was, so overall risk has increased.

Somehow however, we still retain the attitude that ignoring the problem will get us through. Denial has been a fantastically useful tool in our evolution, without which we may not have survived as a race.

Like the shell on a tortoise, however, it wasn’t designed to deal with the threats of technological age. Indeed, the smarter cybercriminals are basing their strategies on our hope against hope that the bad things will not happen to us.

So, the answer to the question is potentially not that companies think they know their environment better. Rather, that they don’t want some third party coming in and rubbing their noses in their own ignorance.

Indeed, I’ve heard of cases (perhaps we all have) where organizations have decided against an audit, lest it turn up things that will have to be dealt with. Which is quite staggering, if you think about it.

What’s the answer? Sometimes it takes a major breach to shake board-level execs out of their reverie. However, relying on this approach is possibly the highest-risk strategy of all.

2018

Posts from 2018.

January 2018

01-02 – Innovation And Governance

Innovation And Governance

What does innovation and governance mean?

How is positive value being delivered by tech and tech firms?

- Feeding the innovation flywheel

This covers leading-edge technological developments, not least the SMAIC of social, mobile, analytics/AI, IoT, Cloud. But without going in-depth on any, I see these as manifestations of where we are right now. More interesting is what they make possible in terms of (say) algorithmic retail, better online customer experiences etc. Still to come are VR/AR, NFV, 5G etc which will keep the flywheel of innovation spinning — but it is the flywheel that matters most.

- How innovation happens (and how it doesn’t)

This covers startups and enterprises alike, and how opportunities for growth can be achieved. I’ve been doing some really interesting work on business model evolution for enterprises, the platform and network economy and so on, as well as work across verticals (banking, government, retail), all of which feeds this. This incorporates management theory and economics, as well as ecosystems and collaborative models.

- Innovation in practice

Building on the collaborative theme, this covers agility and open approaches, including DevOps and other methodologies. Having worked as an agile development consultant and an operations manager I’m no stranger to any of this, it’s fascinating still how it tries but doesn’t quite succeed in balancing the principles with the practicalities. This also covers manifestations such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), reflecting the analyst and consulting need to bottle and sell best practice and software.

- Governance by design

Technology is a two-edged sword — by accident or aforethought, it can undermine its own value. Cybersecurity, GDPR and so on are a reflection of the need to manage risk, direct and indirect, of the technological age. It’s worth being quite forthright on the weaknesses of GDPR. Equally, areas like data aggregation and ‘toxic’ combinations can be covered — it is up to every organisation to take responsibility for their actions, and no doubt some interesting tech solutions will emerge to help.

In terms of research programmes and so on, I think some areas drop out of this quite naturally. It might be worth doing something on cybersecurity — e.g. SecOps and/or applying machine learning to threat detection — some interesting vendors in those spaces. I can/should also pick up on the DevOps theme and build on the report. I’m also curious about CSR, green IT etc and latest efforts there — the overall take should be,

01-02 – To Anyone Expecting Techno Utopia

To Anyone Expecting Techno Utopia

To anyone expecting techno-utopia: don’t hold your breath

Last week, as I took some time out of all things tech, I bookmarked an article from Rick Webb about the failures of the internet, and the culpability of those driving its adoption. It’s a harsh self-indictment of all those driving the digital revolution, specifically the faith paced in the information-rich utopia that would undoubtedly emerge. “I believed that the world would be a better place if everyone had a voice. I believed that the world would be a better place if we all had no secrets. But so far, the evidence points to an escapable conclusion: we were all wrong,” he wrote.

Well, Rick, perhaps I can put your mind at ease. The good news is, you still are: wrong, that is. Even as a smaller number of suddenly powerful people in rapid-growth startups continued to present a utopian vision of the future, the rest of were treating it as it was, and is — a set of tools that can be used for good, ill and everything else in between. There is no “all wrong” just as there never was an “all right”. Even the update to the article, “ “We” is a poor word choice here. Of course there were people — many people — who saw this coming,” is starting from the wrong place, as it still assumes that the options are binary.

Now, I didn’t start this article to give a kicking to some random stranger I have never talked to directly (Hi, Rick). However a pervading notion colours the thinking coming out of Silicon Valley, a re-worked (or should I say re-imagined) version of the fact that history belongs to the winners. The only voices that have merit, goes the logic, are those of the more successful leaders, or the thinkers that guide them, at any moment in time. Any questioning of these voices simply reinforces the point.

It may be true according to one set of metrics: would Steve Jobs have succeeded if he followed any other than his counter-culture-based narrative? Probably not, and nor would any other of the series of accidental leaders (hat-tip to Bob Cringely). Such single-minded perspectives drive the innovation we see around us, but they have a sell-by date, which means that people falling in line with them may start to feel duped when they starts to creak at the seams. Yes, you were probably wrong to think that any absolute vision could be wholly true, but when in history has that ever been the case?

So, no, the Internet has not created utopia, nor could it ever have done. in order to progress, we need people who fix single-mindedly on a vision — indeed, some (like Steve Silberman) might suggest it is a built-in element of our psyche that has enabled us to survive this long. At the same time however, we need to build realism into our innovations — I’d use the term ‘governance by design’ to describe a better starting point than the frankly irresponsible approaches adopted by some of our digital heroes, with those who founded Twitter being the latest of the bunch.

Let’s not be downhearted, rather, let’s recognise that no technology can enable us to transcend our discomfortingly complex, conflicted and ambivalent nature as a species. Technology has already done a great deal of good, but meanwhile we will continue to let ourselves down; we are all individuals, with fundamentally different views depending on our own backgrounds and psyches; and even the notions of good and bad are shifting, as we understand better what our digital tools can do. To ignore or deny these truths is worse than naive, it is allowing the bad things to happen.

Picture credit: Flickr/Lucas Theis. Public Domain.

01-03 – Can Blockchain Transform Healthcare

Can Blockchain Transform Healthcare

Can Blockchain ‘transform’ healthcare? Simple answer: no.

On Carts and Horses

We’d all love to see technology improve patient care, reduce diagnosis and therapy times and otherwise help us live longer, wouldn’t we — so could Blockchain hold the key? In a recent article on PoliticsHome, Member of Parliament John Mann highlighted a couple of areas where Blockchain might offer “transformative potential” to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS):

“By enabling ambulance workers, paramedics, and A&E staff instant access to medical records updated in real-time, medical care could be carefully targeted to a person’s specific needs. The ability to upload results of scans, blood samples and test results and have them accessed by the next practitioner near-instantly, without the risk of error offers the chance to improve survival rates in emergency care and improve care standards across our health service,” he wrote.

While the Rt. Hon. Mr Mann (or his advisors) may be correct in principle, he is falling into an age-old trap by issuing this kind of statement without caveat. While it is a powerful tool (as I noted in my 2018 predictions), it isn’t true that Blockchain enables anything, any more than a chisel enables a sculptor to sculpt. Sure, it could help, but it needs to be in the right hands and used in the right way.

Of course, some might say, this point should be taken as read. If that were the case however, we would not see repeated money being thrown at technology as a singular solution to otherwise insurmountable problems, in healthcare and beyond. And then failing to deliver, to general wailing and gnashing of teeth.

To continue the sculptor analogy, if the poor fellow is asked to deliver the thing in impossible timescales, designed by committee and with conflicting expectations of what it will look like, the result will probably be a mess. As sculpture, so technology, whatever the chisel manufacturers or IT vendors might have us think.

A massively complex organisation seemingly ruled (depending on who you ask) by metrics, efficiency, litigation prevention and so on will see such criteria impact any solution — either by design, or in consequence. I’m not critiquing the NHS here, just observing that IT will always take a subordinate role to its context. It’s the same in the US or any other country.

Perhaps Blockchain could help, but so could any number of technologies — if used in the right way. Indeed, you could take the above quote and inert it into any data management capability or service from the past four decades, or indeed, mobile, IoT and so on, and it would still make sense. Indeed, as healthcare writer Dan Munro notes on HealthStandards.com,

“The technical reality is that all of the features of a blockchain – except double spending – can easily be created with other tools that are readily available – and cheap – without actually being a “blockchain.” ”

While I’m well aware of both the many potential uses of blockchain in healthcare and the dangers of simply being one of “those armed with spears” (according to my old colleague and healthcare author Jody Ranck), the horse needs to be put before the cart: tech will not, by itself, solve any problems for anyone. This is more than a glib riposte to a quote taken out of context. For Blockchain to work in the way Mr Mann suggests, it would have to be rolled out widely, across a health service. Flagging up technologies is easy, but delivering transformation is astonishingly hard: our representatives need to understand, accept and design this in from the outset, for any “transformative potential” to be achieved.

(Jon was CTO of healthcare startup MedicalPath2Safety)

01-11 – Will GDPR fail?

Will GDPR fail?

Will GDPR fail? Beyond the new regulation lies a long, hard journey

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a good thing, right? A recent discussion with Fieldfisher lawyer Hazel Grant confirmed that, despite its voluminous and bureaucratic outer appearance, it contains the essence of data protection law as present in the UK for over a decade, combined with the current state of best practice. Given that online privacy knows no borders, it will undoubtedly be better to have a single framework rather than being linked to any single nation or jurisdiction. Word is (for example, from this round-table discussion) that it will make the backbone of privacy law globally — if you’re a multinational, goes the thinking, it makes more sense to implement it once, rather than having different grades of regulation depending on the geography.

Neither is GDPR necessarily the end of the world for ill-prepared (and, potentially, previously in denial) organisations. “The vital thing is to plan, rather than panic,” says Freeform Dynamics’ Bryan Betts, who attended said round-table. “GDPR compliance may not be that onerous, especially if you already handle customer data fairly and transparently.” Even if surveys suggest that 75% of marketing data will be “obsolete”, the 80/20 rule suggests that organisations could do without that bit anyway — ‘keep everything’ is a strategy for the hopeless hoarder, not the business leader.

Yes, GDPR may be expensive to implement, particularly for organisations who have played fast and loose with our privacy in the past, and who now face potential fines with real impact. Yes, it may involve a learning curve as people get their heads around the 260-page document it involves (quick tip: get someone in that understands it). Yes it might be a pain for consumers, who may be faced with incessant questions from online providers, each carefully worded to avoid any suggestion that the customer was duped or cajoled. And yes, organisations such as Axciom, operating in the background of marketing data acquisition, may fear their business models are under threat and respond accordingly.

No doubt it will achieve many of the goals it set out to achieve. All well and good. And yet, and yet… a looming question is, will it actually make us safer, or protect our privacy online? As in, will the potential bad things be countered, such that they are less likely to happen? Please forgive my over-simplistic language, but isn’t this what it all boils down to? For a number of reasons (most of which are speculative, this is the future we are talking about after all), this may not be the case.

Challenges of scope, consent, loopholes, aggregation, unexpected consequences and speed of innovation

First, we have unaddressed challenges of scope. Worth a read is “Global authority on adblocking” PageFair’s work comparing GDPR’s impact on Facebook and Google: simply put, Facebook needs to ask people if it can use status posts as input to its advertising engines, whereas Google does not need to know someone is — its AdWords algorithms generate information based on search requests, location and so on, without being personally identifiable. “Google’s AdWords product has the benefit that it can be modified to operate entirely outside the scope of the GDPR,” states the article.

In other words, data can be processed and people can be targeted with marketing materials whether or not they are “personally identifiable”. This (targeting) is only an issue if it is an issue, but it does seem to be one of the areas that GDPR was set up to address. Keep in mind that other providers, including Facebook, can take a similar tack if they choose. “Nothing in the GDPR prohibits Facebook from serving non-targeted ads,” says Michael Kaufmann.

Bringing Facebook into the discussion leads to the question of consent, specifically GDPR’s need for “clear affirmative action” around “agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her” — law firm Taylor Wessing provides a good explanation, as does the UK Information Commissioners’s Office (ICO). On the outside, Facebook has done a pretty good job of building Privacy by Design into its services, giving users granular access to what they allow on their timelines.

I don’t know about you however, but my grasp on consent is tenuous at least — I couldn’t say what it is that I have consented to across Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and so on’s services over the past few years. Indeed, who remembers the “A privacy reminder from Google” thing, where essentially we agreed to whatever we had to so we could keep getting the service? For sure, we have a choice not to agree, and I am sure (having just checked) that it is all set out in nice, clear English.

But who has done anything other than following the “Scroll down and click “I agree” when you’re ready to continue to Search,” versus removing oneself from the Google-enabled online world? The consent debate becomes a Hobson’s choice: either agree, or cut yourself off from all things digital. This is crucial: by saying yes, we are acknowledging that one of the most powerful companies in the world, and its partners, can use our data. Having done so, any thoughts about meanwhile restricting access to the local Mom and Pop hardware shop becomes laughable.

And as an aside, consent isn’t always required, for example if another legal requirement needs the data to be processed (here’s an HR-based view). Given the smorgasbord of regulations out there, it’s not hard to imagine an organisation using one law’s requisites as a loophole against the those of GDPR. For example (and I welcome a lawyer’s view on this), the ability to be forgotten necessitates remembering who was forgotten and why, which somewhat undermines the principle: even GDPR could be used as a defence against the consent provisions of GDPR. I’m not trying to be picky, more illustrating how any loopholes are open to confusion or exploitation.

Building on the fact that we are dealing with not one, but multiple global corporations, and a squillion of smaller data users, the issue of aggregation looms equally large. The issue is not only around how individual data gorillas are for new ways to exploit information in the name of innovation, but also what happens when third parties plug into APIs and slurp potentially innocuous feeds in ways that unexpectedly affect privacy. Let’s say your startup creates a new learning algorithm and plug it into the Twitter and Strava APIs, which determines and then posts online provable examples of dangerous cycling. Who is at fault at that point? You? Twitter? Strava?

Or indeed, does it really matter given that you have no money and the cat is already out of the bag? What if the data is reputation-damaging, or directly usable by law enforcement? This leads to the law of unintended consequences — for example, in some cases, data may be sub-poenaed for good reason (in this case, a murder investigation) but a raft of less valid data requests are likely: indeed, these are driving the current review of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (a.k.a. The Snooper’s Charter). Indeed, nothing’s stopping government agencies from acting as the startup in the previous paragraph, and/or creating laws to enable that to happen, in the name of fighting crime.

Perhaps the biggest issue of all is speed of innovation, which moves far faster than regulation. Like it or dislike it, much of innovation’s value comes from ‘leveraging’ (horrible word, but more positive than ‘exploiting’) areas of potential difference — for example dis-intermediating an inefficient or costly model of working (e.g. FinTech vs traditional banking), or finding new ways to connect things (e.g. social media). Innovation and speed go hand in hand, as nobody wants tenth-mover advantage.

Innovation and bacterial mutation are not so different, in that both happen without any real chance of success (ask venture capitalists, or indeed Bill Gates): it’s only with hindsight that the next generation of winners emerge. However our governance models act as though the next big thing will happen like the last. The seemingly innocuous “let’s identify new ways of doing things” attitude is exactly what will lead providers to circumvent GDPR in ways the regulators haven’t considered. The latter group are not good at acting quickly: what we now call GDPR was first mooted in June 2011, and replaces laws adopted in October 1995.

To illustrate what the future might hold, consider this example of how voice recognition can detect ‘emotional state’ — the question of how this can impact privacy without needing to be personally identifiable, is not addressed by GDPR. Given that nobody can predict the future, we should at least have governance mechanisms that can react to it.

We need to protect people, not simply data

If GDPR cannot address these issues, what becomes of it? For a start, it becomes an expensive burden which fails to deliver on some pretty fundamental goals. It will inevitably need to be replaced, but any changes will be flawed if they follow the same splat-the rat, see a problem and try to regulate it away approach, built on a fundamental, naive optimism that law can be implemented even as the context, and its supporting artefacts, shift beyond recognition. As an interesting aside, the financial regulation world is already responding to the fact that such an approach is neither possible, nor desirable.

Tackling this challenge requires very different ways of thinking, starting from the very source. GDPR’s fundamental purpose is not to protect the privacy of citizens but to protect data, that’s the D and P of GDPR. This needs to change — it is people that need protection, whatever data is stored about them and however it is used. And indeed, whoever is in charge: right now, the most likely force that will undermine the provisions of GDPR is ourselves.

Almost three years ago, I proffered the idea of an virtual bill of rights (a couple of weeks later, Web founder Tim Berners-Lee did similar). My point then, and it remains now, is that we can’t legislate on data. Rather, we need to afford the virtual/digital world the same rights and responsibilities as the physical world. So, there is no such thing as cyber-theft, but we simply have theft; same for fraud, extortion, bullying and so on. It should be that simple — this also means that all existing laws need to be considered in the light of what is now possible. If it is to be illegal to market to me without my consent, that should be possible whether someone holds information on me or not. And so on, and so on.

Even if we arrive at a world in which everything is known, we still need to act as though we are humans. Perhaps it isn’t that different to village life — back in the day, when we all lived in each others’ pockets and it was very hard to keep anything secret, we first learned the principles of acceptable behaviour. All that really needs to happen is to accept that such age-old ideas, of courtesy, respect and basic rights (not to be stolen from, defrauded or conned, or harangued for money and so on) still stand.

For now, we are where we are. What can organisations do in the meantime? Well, get on and protect the data they hold about their customers, that much is still true. Perhaps we will see a GDPR 2, which will be far simpler, but further-reaching than the existing framework, but I could never advise anyone to wait for this, as it would be illegal (even if GDPR is subject to a ‘grace period’).

Even as you look to respond to existing regulation however, you should be looking beyond it and towards a moment when the privacy regulators recognise current approaches will never be effective. Don’t expect GDPR to make us any better protected against annoying consent-based advertising, higher-risk aggregation-based insights or the biggest challenge of all, downright manipulation. To recall what Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy once said, “Privacy is dead, deal with it.” Indeed, we need to deal with it, in a way that will actually deliver.

[Disclaimer: I haven’t read the full GDPR documentation end-to-end, nor do I intend to.]

01-19 – Why Is Digital So Hard

Why Is Digital So Hard

If you’re looking to ‘do’ digital transformation, read this first

Barely a day goes past in the tech press without some mention of the importance of digital transformation to businesses; each accompanied by a caveat that nobody really knows what it is. Without engaging further in this debate, what are the absolutes?

1. That it’s all about the data. All of it.

How ever we phrase things, the singular, significant change that technology has brought over the past 100 years is the ability to generate, store, process and transmit inordinate quantities of data. Whatever ‘revolution’ or ‘wave’ we might want to say we are in right now, be it digital, industrial or whatever, there is only really one — the information revolution.

This trend continues with a certain linearity: even as we double the number of pixels on a sensor for example, or transistors on a processor, our abilities increase at a more steady pace. In business terms, the challenges of integration, capacity planning or service level management are the much the same now as they were a decade ago; we are simply working at a higher level of resolution.

2. That technology is enabling us to do new things

This still leaves room for breakthroughs, as technology passes certain thresholds. We saw, for example, the quite sudden demise of the cathode-ray television in favour of LCD screens, or indeed that of film versus digital cameras. What we see as waves are quite often technologies passing these thresholds — so, for example, the Internet of Things is a consequence of having sufficient connectivity, with low-cost sensors and ‘edge’ processing.

It’s useful to compare these moments of “release of innovation” with the previous point, that many consequences are subject to evolutionary, not revolutionary impact. This dichotomy drives much technology-related marketing: a new advance can have significant specific impacts even if it does not change the world; however it will be presented as enabling the latter, even if it will only really achieve the former. Case in point — digital cameras have not made us better photographers, and nor has CRM made organisations better at customer service.

3. That we tend to do the easy stuff, as consumers and businesses

Many innovations happen through ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’. We can spend our lives putting together complex business cases that demonstrate clear ROI, but even as we do we know they are really lip service to process. In work as at home, a great deal of technology adoption happens because it makes our lives easier — those explaining the extraordinary rise of Amazon, Facebook and so on emphasise ecosystems, platforms and networks and treat our own laziness and desire for a simple life as an afterthought.

The CBA factor is of inordinate importance, and yet gets little mention: it’s like we are embarrassed to admit our own weaknesses. Interestingly, its corollary (that of “Resistance to Change”) does get a mention when looking to explain large project failures. But here’s the fact: many of the great technology advances occur because they are easier, and they stumble when they are not. The fact people still like books or printed reports can be explained as much through ease of use, as through the need to hold something physical. The perceived need for ‘transformation’ comes from the idea that against such inertia, some big change is necessary.

4. That nobody knows what the next big thing will be

As my old boss and mentor once said however, innovations are like route markers — it’s important to see them as points on a journey rather than a destination. However, doing so goes against two major schools of thought. The first comes from technology vendors who want (you) to believe that their latest box of tricks will indeed bring nirvana. And the second, from consulting firms, whose thought leadership role diminishes significantly if their advice is framed in terms of observational mentoring (a good thing) as opposed to somehow holding the keys to the kingdom.

There is no promised land, and neither is there a crevasse we will all fall into, but we still persist in looking through the wrong end of the telescope, framing business needs in terms of solutions rather than putting the former first. Sometimes this is done so subtly by marketers it can be difficult to spot: back in the days of “service oriented architecture” for example, it took me a while to realise that its main proponents happened to have a specific product in mind (an “enterprise service bus”). Doing so isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s worth following the money.

5. That we are not yet “there”, nor will we ever be

As a species, particularly in times of great change, we need a level of certainty at a very deep, psychological level. And it is messing with our ability to act. It’s too easy to pander to the need for a clear answer, buying into current rhetoric with a hope that the latest advance might really work this time. All sides are at fault — those purveying solutions, those buying them and those acting as trusted third parties — but who wants to hear anyone say “it’s not going to work”?Each time round the cycle, we come up with new terms and subtly change their definitions — industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing might mean the same, or very different things depending on who you ask, a symptom of our desperation to understand, and adapt to what is going on (after all, haven’t we been told to ‘adapt or die’?).

Interestingly, the companies that we applaud, or fear the most, may well be those who care the least. Amazon, Uber, Tesla, the rest of them don’t know what’s around the corner, and what is more they don’t see this as a priority — they simply want to still be in the game this time next year. Rightly so, as they are were born into uncertainly, forged through some indecipherable and unrepeatable combination of factors. Why did Facebook succeed when Myspace, Bebo or any other high-valuation predecessor did not, for example? Above all, these organisations have an attitude to change, a mindset that sees uncertainty and therefore responsiveness, as a norm. Jeff Bezos’ articulation of Amazon’s “Day One” approach to business strategy offers a fantastically simple, yet utterly profound illustration.

6. Responsiveness is the answer, however you package it

Where does this leave us? The bottom line is that “digital transformation” is the latest attempt to provide a solid response to uncertain times. It isn’t actually relevant what it is, other than a touchstone term which will soon be replaced (you can thank the marketers for that). So debate it by all means, just as you might once have debated business process management, or social networking, or hybrid cloud, or whatever tickles your fancy. As you do so however, recognise such procrastination for what it is.

And then, once you are done, take action, over and over again. Transformation doesn’t matter, unless we are talking about the transformation of mindsets and attitudes, from build-to-last to do-it-fast. That’s why agile methodologies such as DevOps are so important, not in themselves (yes, that would be putting the cart before the horse again)but because they give businesses an approach to innovate at high speed. As we continue on this data-driven journey, as complexity becomes the norm, traditional attitudes to change at the top of business, or indeed our institutions, become less and less tenable. The bets we make on the future become less and less important; what matters more is our ability to make new ones.

01-24 – Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

Still complacent about cybersecurity? The clock is ticking.

In the land of lies, damned lies and statistics, the insurance industry may be one of the more trustworthy sources. After all, it is founded on maths, its actuarial background built into every policy and claim. As purveyors of protection against all risks, insurers cares less about which risks are more important, and more about the relationship between premiums and pay-outs. Indeed, getting this equation wrong is potentially the biggest risk the industry faces.

So, when Allianz reports that cybersecurity is the second most important business risk, according to over 1,900 respondents globally, we would do well to sit up and listen. To put this in context, over the past five years it has climbed from 15th position, so why? First and simply, the number and complexity of cyber attacks is growing. This is to be expected, as it mirrors technology’s increasing impact and complexity: the bad things are dark mirrors of the good.

The organization also cites GDPR as a significant driver, not in causing breaches but in how they may result in a conssiderable fines. “Many businesses are waking up to the fact they have potential vulnerabilities, and the realization that privacy issues create hard costs will emerge fairly quickly once GDPR is implemented,” says Emy Donavan, Global Head of Cyber at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS).

But wait, there is more to this. The Allianz survey is global, across 80 countries. An appendix shows how Nigeria sees theft and fraud as the biggest cause of business risk, while in Croatia it is legislative change, and so on. In the USA and UK meanwhile, as well as Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Australia, India, South Africa and Singapore, cyber incidents take top spot in the risk charts. Cyber is also the number one risk in the Media, Financial Services and Legal, and indeed the Technology and Comms sectors. It’s also top risk for mid sized companies.

And, to cap it all, let’s just look at the number one business risk — business interruption (BI). “ Whether it results from factory fires, destroyed shipping containers, or, increasingly, cyber incidents, BI can have a tremendous effect on a company’s revenues.” What’s that you say, cyber incidents is one of the main causes of the main business risk? Indeed, it’s the first in the list, according to respondents, before fire/explosion or natural catastrophe.

In other words, while cyber incidents pose a significant challenge by themselves, their consequences can potentially be even greater. The good news is that organizations large and small are well aware of the challenge, are they not? Well, no, says AGCS UK CEO, Brian Kirwan. “Far from being over-hyped, the threat is under-appreciated and not always well understood.”

I’m not sure any additional comment is required, other than that the conundrum around cybersecurity remains as astonishing as ever. Behind the figures lies a simple truth, that business continuity today means data continuity. While no person is indispensable in an organization, take away its sensory capabilities and you render it useless.

On the upside, and rightly so, insurance companies such as Allianz do have insurance products, and indeed whole practices, to help organizations protect themselves against such risks. But this is missing the point. While it is difficult to get a clear answer (that’s the nature of denial) the corporate position still appears to be that dealing with cyber-threats is too complicated to address, so we’ll all just cope with the consequences.

This frontier town attitude never worked, and it is going to become even less viable really soon. We are at the start of a wave of machine learning, which will grow rapidly in scale over the next few years: you don’t have to be a guru to work that one of the softest targets for semi-intelligent bots will the highly vulnerable defences many organizations still have around their data centers. Corporate psychology will shift quickly from hoping cyber incidents will happen to somebody else, to finding that the paltry and permeable protections have already been breached.

01-26 – Trust In Media Is Collapsing

Trust In Media Is Collapsing

Trust in media is collapsing. Is that such a bad thing?

You’d have to have had your head under a bushel of wheat not to have noticed the comprehensive destruction of faith in popular media. Exhibit A is Edelman’s 2018 trust barometer, which shows media organisations as the least trusted type of global institution for the first time. Goodness knows, they have fought hard for such an accolade.

Social media is also taking a battering, according to a Verge survey of Americans from the end of last year. Despite the catastrophe of the financial crisis, the scourge of the one-percent and so on, we still put more trust in our banks than we do in Facebook or Twitter. It’s difficult to think of a greater indictment of those so-well-intended organizations.

But how much does this matter? To answer this question, we need to recognize how such findings reflect a deeper set of transitions. Back in the day, it was generally assumed that the learned, and their seats of learning, could be considered as the source of authority. We normalized this doctrine to the detriment of any other opinion: if “the doctor says so,” then the question was not for dispute.

Recent decades have kicked such perspectives into touch. The very real democratization of data has blown the doors off the ivory towers, for better or worse: an authority position is no longer enough in the face of being able to find things out for oneself. At the same time, as a good friend reminded me, opinions are like a-holes (and by extension, not all are particularly helpful or indeed pleasant).

This is where we are. For the first time in history we have very real, factual data, more than we know what to do with or understand. It could be argued that we might rely on our media more than ever, and indeed we are seeing this in terms of polarization and sometimes-unquestioning acceptance of certain sites — perhaps harking back to the need for authority in a maelstrom of uncertainty. Anecdotal evidence suggests this is less of an issue for the young, than their ‘superiors by age’, an area worthy of detailed study.

In the meantime, we are seeing an explosion of tiny epiphanies, a realisation that “just because someone in a position of authority says so” is not enough to convince. If anything is in a state of collapse, it is not the media but our own naivety. If we look at the Verge data from this perspective for example, we see simply that people see no reason to trust Facebook, or Twitter. And why would they? Until very recently, such sites have done all they can to distance themselves from any notion of responsibility.

We’ve seen such a collapse in the belief in authority before. The French revolution started as a rebellion against the complacency and arrogance of established institutions and, just as now, things turned nasty. The parallels are worthy of more detailed review, not only the more obvious (such as the death of Robespierre, as he tried to curtail the corrupt insanity that ensued) but also — did you know that the distribution of fake news became an indictable offence (in English, here)?

As with many states of trauma, the French revolution had to hit rock bottom before it could become more sensible, and society could once again function. This may also be the case for the data-driven age. We can see some causes for hope, not least from Edelman survey: “Voices of expertise are now regaining credibility,” it reports. “Technical experts, financial industry analysts, and successful entrepreneurs now register credibility levels of 50 percent or higher.”

So, perhaps our collapse in trust in the media is in fact a symptom of our increasing desire to engage with reality. While we are less likely to accept authority for its own sake, we recognize the fact that we cannot know everything: the opportunity, then, is to develop information sources that rely on provenance, on provable expertise and the ability to articulate how and why things are as they are. The fact that no mainstream news organization is taking up this mantle, leaves the door wide open for a newcomer to do so.

February 2018

02-06 – We Need New Lawmakers More Than Laws

We Need New Lawmakers More Than Laws

The current, “sudden” plague of deepfake videos is just the latest in a series of “unexpected” events caused by “unplanned” use of technology. More will occur, and indeed are already happening: in a similar vein the computer-generated mash-up videos on YouTube that care more about eyeballs than child protection; the ongoing boom in cyber-trolling; bitcoin pimping and pumping. To be expected are misuse of augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing and robotics. Wait, 3D-printing of guns is so five years ago.

As I’ve written before, such bleak illustrations are the yang to innovation’s ying: trolling, for example, is the downside to the explosion of transparency illustrated by the ongoing, global wave of #MeToo revelations (in its traditional, not salacious media sense). The present day is multi-dimensional and complex, and it is often difficult to separate positives from the negatives: so much so that we, and our legislative bodies, act like rabbits in headlights, doing little more than watch as the future unfolds before our eyes.

Or, we try to address the challenges using ill-equipped mechanisms — was it Einstein who said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”? Nice words, but this is what we are doing, wholesale and globally: lawmakers are taking fifteen years to create laws such as GDPR which, while good as they go, are also, immediately insufficient; meanwhile the court of public opinion is both creating, and driven by, power-hungry vested interests; and service providers operate stable-door approaches to policy.

What’s the answer? To quote another adage, “If you want to get there, don’t start from here.” We need to start our governance processes from the perspective of the future, rather than the past, assessing where society will be in five, ten, fifteen years’ time. In practice this means accepting that we will be living in a fully digitized, augmented world. The genie is out of the bottle, so we need to move focus from dealing with the potential consequences of magic, and towards accepting a world with genies needs protections.

In practical terms, this means applying the same principles of societal fair play, collective conscience and individual freedom to the virtual world, as the physical. I’m not a lawmaker but I keep coming back to the idea that our data should be considered as ourselves: so for example, granting access to a pornographic virtual or 3D-printed robot representation of an individual, against their will, should be considered to be abuse. It’s also why speed cameras can be exploitative, if retrofitted to roads as money generators.

Right now, we are trying to contain the new wine of the digital age in very old, and highly permeable skins created over previous centuries. I remain optimistic: we shall no doubt look back on this era as a time of great change, with all its ups and downs. I also remain confident in the democratizing power of data, for all its current, quite messy state, and that we shall start seeing more tech-savvy approaches to legal and policy processes.

Meanwhile, perhaps we shall rely on younger, ‘digital native’ generations to deliver the new thinking required, or maybe — is this too big an ask? — those currently running our institutions and corporations will have the epiphanies required to start delivering on our legislative needs, societal or contractual. Yes, I remain optimistic and confident that we will get there; however, when this actually happens is anybody’s guess. We are not out of the woods yet.

02-07 – What Kinds Of Vehicles

What Kinds Of Vehicles

Luxmobiles and flying unicorns: how diversification and proliferation will rule the routes

While it’s all go for robotic systems in the automotive space right now, we seem to be suffering from collective linear thinking — that a driverless car is like a car, just without a driver. In reality nothing will be further from the truth, for a number of reasons not least that current designs are built around the need for multi-use, protecting people sitting in a certain configuration and so on. When you can click your fingers and get a ‘mobility solution’ along in five minutes, chances are it will be designed more around single-need, safe and efficient use.

This requirement for flexibility influences most aspects of car-based transport today, as well as logistical transportation. The latter is also impacted by restrictions caused by the notion of a driver: so, while container trucks may be able to deliver their modular loads, they still have face-forward cabins.

To understand the future of vehicular transport, we need to consider a world in which all such restrictions are removed, or at least applied differently depending on the payloads being carried. Airbags will still be vital for people for example, but not so much for pizzas or car parts.

With this in mind, what kinds of vehicles can we expect to see? With no evidence in fact (that’s the great thing about speculation), we just might see the following come to our road- and other-ways:

Luxmobiles and budget pods. As the model moves from multi-vehicle ownership to single-vehicle with the increased use of autonomous transport, it seems inevitable that people will look to brands so they can travel (particularly longer distances) in comfort. At the same time, this may be overkill when nipping to the shops or sending the kids to school. If indeed, we still do the former, given…

Pizza box scooters. For efficiency reasons, robot vehicles will inevitably tend towards being as small as possible, to the extent that they may become little bigger than the objects they are transporting. With echoes of Han Solo tripping over droids in Star Wars, this situation is highly likely to become a nightmare as our transport corridors become saturated with tiny vehicles, potentially leading to…

Drone swarms. Okay, some level of control will be needed, particularly for consignments that are to travel by air. Scheduling efficiency and autonomous transport governance may well lead to groups of robot transport moving en masse, either under their own steam or indeed, using some more powerful mechanism for the longer hauls. Indeed, this could result in…

Super Strings. I was thinking about massive people movers, then I remembered, oh wait, they are called trains. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some Smart Alexa doesn’t come up with a standardized, mechanical or magnetic coupling device that enables a string of automobiles to travel long distances with a lot less fuel. Of course, these are not restricted only to land or sky, with…

Pub-subs. Our once-disused waterways and canal systems could find a new lease of life carrying smaller loads across very long distances, very efficiently, on or under the surface. The upside is that they will have minimal disruption effect on the visual environment; however their more general impact would need to be monitored as with other, diversifying forms of transport including…

Late Night Vompods. Not every consequence of autonomous transport will be positive. As a discussion with my son revealed, the notion of being able to hitch a ride home after a few drinks (good, safer etc) needs to be weighed against the potential for spillages, or worse, by drunken revellers. A more serious aspect is how to ensure the personal safety of passengers, for example against unwarranted advances. On the upside, at least we will have…

Flying Unicorns. No reason exists why vehicles need to be restricted to roads, or even wheels, as advances in robotics offer the potential to use routes without tarmac. Legislation is currently unclear on whether a parcel-carrying bipedal robot would be permitted to use a public footpath. Or indeed, in quadruped form, a forest path. Or indeed, if fitted with propellors (or wings), whether it could lift itself over rivers and gates. Such a ‘vehicle’ would blend into the environment better if it was given more natural form (say a horse), then the question would be where to put the antenna…

While none of these examples may manifest themselves in practice, diversification is the name of the game; we can also expect proliferation, indeed this is pretty much guaranteed due to the law of unexpected volumes (a corollary of the law of lowering thresholds, where a new technology or service is used to its absolute maximum).

Yes, it’s going to be a noisy, trip-hazard-filled nightmare. But at least we will have pizza.

02-13 – Tech To Uk Gov

Tech To Uk Gov

Technology to UK Government: Nice idea, but it won’t work

In this ultra-communicative world we now occupy, part of the challenge faced by any authority is to get its message out there. It’s not enough to do the right thing, quietly and in a corner: you have to put it on a press release. No, more than that, you have to make a statement that shows you mean business.

Such as, “We’re not going to rule out taking legislative action if we need to do it,” the money shot, the soundbite that has taken the headlines about the UK’s funding of £600,000’s worth of terrorism-related image recognition.

It’s worth unpicking this action, and this statement. First a negative: the figure sounds like a lot, until you actually think about it. To put it in perspective, the governmental InnovateUK funding body has allocated £6,251,375,051 in grants over 14 years, or about half a billion a year, to technology projects. The figure is so big because £600K doesn’t actually buy you much.

On the upside, it’s a big enough figure to show more than a passing interest. The government is investing in AI, and not just that, it is spending on the kind of AI that might make a difference. Which has to be seen as a good thing.

Flipping back to negatives, the trouble is, the headline news (that the software can therefore recognize jihadist material) is subject to the law of consequences. Simply put, if software becomes very good at recognising black and white scarves, jihadists will stop wearing them.

The straightforward answer here is that algorithms will continue to evolve, to take evolving imagery into account — but this doesn’t account for the complexity and breadth of the system. For example recruiters can take a different tack (consider the funny-meme-based online recruitment strategy adopted by UK far-right group Britain First).

I’m not saying this in some kind of yah-boo-sucks-it-ain’t-gonna-work rant. Thinkers and do-ers in both governments and corporations know that you can’t just stick an AI band-aid on a complex problem. They also know that a million bucks is a drop in the technological ocean. Which begs the question — why, therefore, is this headline news?

Behind the statements are messages of intent: that public and private institutions alike recognise they have created a monster they don’t know how to control; and that they need to work together to deal with the consequences. The intriguing thing is, to talk about it, they make use of the same, democratizing yet dangerous tools that cause the damage in the first place.

We are all in the same boat, left trying to interpret what is being said wherever it comes from. Perhaps — indeed, this could be a prediction — we will soon be able to apply AI to all communications from any organization, filter out the nasty stuff and see what is behind the messaging. In the meantime, we need to recognize that what we see on the surface is as much about controlling the narrative as representing what is going on.

02-15 – The Seven Deadly Threats

The Seven Deadly Threats

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Digital World

We are all, in the words of Agent Smith and Agent Jones, “only human.“ This paradoxical quality, humanity, which powers our finest achievements and leads us to the pinnacle of artistic endeavour, is also that which feeds our less desirable traits, actions and moments of downright cruelty.

As with many religious themes, the seven deadly sins of lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride are rooted in earthly reality. So how do they map onto how we interact with technology, in our interactions or in terms of the services we create? Let’s take a look.

• Lust is a simple one, manifested in what we now label ‘inappropriate content’. In times past we would harbour images of each other, driving ourselves insane with our own thoughts. The printed image, then the video, and now algorithm-driven fakery leave little to the imagination and feed the monster within.
• Gluttony in the digital age maps onto the dreaded data deluge, as we find ourselves drawn into social sites through an urge to know more, to share, to play, to participate. In this age of plenty we time-waste, we procrastinate, we become unable, like a person whose desire to ingest has trumped any ability to resist.
• Avarice, or greed, can be seen throughout our culture of increasing expectation, as we all want what we perceive others having. In this take-first, ask-later culture, startups discuss ‘data monetisation’ whilst quietly ignoring whose data it was anyway. And for some, it means cybercrime in all its highly lucrative, complex form.
• Sloth boils down to plain stupidity or laziness, in each of us a belief that the bad things will happen to other people, a lack of effort to engage in simple things like doing backups. Sloth makes the bad guys’ job more straightforward, as they conjure new types of attack based on our inability to resist clicking a link.
• Wrath used to emerge every now and then, but in the pressure cooker of social media it has become a beast to be fed, to its creators’ chagrin. Trolls act as acolytes, carefully triggering indignant energies to sustain the dark animal lurking within. Knee-jerk, righteous justification has replaced calm statesmanship, seen as a behavior to be rewarded and applauded rather than managed.
• Pride is the sin to rule them all, the inability to admit when we are wrong. It is the social silence, the absence of a ‘dislike’ button, the quiet covering up of failure or shredding of the files of corruption. Unsure what the right thing is, but somehow sure we are on the right team, we become complicit in the resulting, silent inaction.

What a dark note to end upon (which harks to sadness, the eighth ‘sin’ in the original list). Our collective conscience can seem but dust, the immolated ashes of sacrifice to the new gods of the digital age. But this is part of a far greater process in which what we knew is torn apart, so it can emerge stronger. Principles that go back millennia are stronger than any wave of tooling, however insurmountably powerful and complex it may seem at the time.

02-20 – Tpus And All That

Tpus And All That

Why AI on a chip is the start of the next IT explosion

It’s game on in the AI-on-a-chip race. Alongside Nvidia’s successes turning Graphics Processing Units into massively performant compute devices (culminating in last year’s release of the ‘Volta’ V100 GPU), we have ARM releasing its ‘Project Trillium’ machine learning processor on Valentine’s Day and Intel making noises around bringing the fruits of its Nervana acquisition to market, currently at sample stage. Microsoft with Catapult, Google with its TPU — if you haven’t got some silicon AI going on at the moment, you are missing out. So, what’s going on?

We have certainly come a long way since John von Neumann first introduced the register-based computer processing architecture. That, simple design (here’s a nice picture from Princeton), which fires data and instructions into an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), still sits at the heart of what we call CPU cores today, though with their pre-fetching and other layers of smartness, these are to von Neumann’s original design a souped-up, drag racing version of the original design.

Three things about this, bling-covered workhorse of a design. First, that it was planned to work really well for a certain type of maths — the clue’s in the ‘A’ of the ALU — which is great for arithmetic, but less great for other kinds of maths, such as that requiring floating point operations.

This brings to the second, based on a principle named after Alonso Church and Alan Turing: that anything you can compute with one computer of any type, you can program with another. Don’t ask me to explain the proof, but the result is that you can do any kind of processing on an ALU, it just might take a bit longer than a processor conceived for the purpose.

There’s a third point: it’s all maths, really. We talk about computing in terms of data, insight, algorithms, programming, processing or whatever are the latest buzzwords of the day, but behind it all, deep in the bowels of any piece of silicon are chunk of electronics that allow us to do something mathematical. Like add, or subtract, or multiply. It’s a corollary of the Church-Turing principle that anything you want to program, you can convert into a series of mathematical formulae to be calculated.

Why (oh why) is this relevant? Because the name of the game is efficiency. Just because a CPU can process anything we throw at it, it won’t always be the best tool for the job. You can go to school on a tractor but it will be neither fast nor comfortable. We have CPUs as the de facto mechanism because the cost of fabrication has, traditionally been so great that we have gone for a one-size-fits-all solution. The downside, however. many bells and whistles we have attached to them, is that CPUs will have an overhead when they try to do things they weren’t designed for.

Traditionally, the answer has been to create different processors. In 1987 for example, Intel released the 80387 as a floating-point processing companion to its rather popular 386 CPU: while this was later incorporated on the same piece of silicon (and exists within today’s cores), it’s still a separate processing capability. It’s also fair to say that the Graphical Processing Unit, designed to display information on a screen and therefore geared up around the mathematics of symbol processing, was never conceived for use beyond graphics — but the fact was, and is, that it can do certain maths much more efficiently than a CPU. Ergo, Nvidia’s dramatic recent success.

It’s only more recently that anyone beyond a core (sorry) of organisations has had the ability to create silicon. The costs are astonishingly high, largely because the margins for error are astonishingly small: this meant that while engineers may have desired to create specialized hardware back in the 1980s, it was not possible to beat general-purpose machines at a workable cost (”most of the training times are actually slower or moderately faster than on a serial workstation,” says this architectural survey). But over the decades (and no doubt thanks to computers), high-tech manufacturing has become more affordable: the same logic that has given us personalised Coca-Cola and the orange Kit Kat also acts in the favour of those thinking that it would be nice to make their own computer chips.

It’s actually quite fascinating (to be fair, I once worked in chip design, but I’m sure it has a broader appeal) to peruse the paper released about Google’s AI-oriented Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Here’s a key paragraph, which says, in other words, that the elements of the processor were ’simply’ geared up around the specific needs of neural networks (NNs):

“The TPU succeeded because of the large—but not too large—matrix multiply unit; the substantial software- controlled on-chip memory; the ability to run whole inference models to reduce dependence on host CPU; a single-threaded, deterministic execution model that proved to be a good match to 99th-percentile response time limits; enough flexibility to match the NNs of 2017 as well as of 2013; the omission of general-purpose features that enabled a small and low power die despite the larger datapath and memory; the use of 8-bit integers by the quantized applications; and that applications were written using TensorFlow, which made it easy to port them to the TPU at high-performance rather than them having to be rewritten to run well on the very different TPU hardware.”

The result is that the chip can scale to workloads far beyond other types of hardware. In much the same way as the 80387, it’s designed to do one thing well, and it does it very well indeed. Back to the Church-Turing principle, general-purpose processors could do so as well, but will inevitably slower — so, if you can afford to make your own, more specific chip, why wouldn’t you? Indeed, the paper suggests that the best is still to come: “We expect that many will build successors that will raise the bar even higher.”

Ultimately, it’s easier to think of computer chips as combinations of task-specific modules, each designed around doing a certain kind of maths. We have now arrived at a point where the door is opening for those who want to design their own modules, or architect them into processors aimed at a specific purpose. So this isn’t about speed but architecture. In much the same way as home-grown app transformed the data management industry, so we can do the same with chips.

We shouldn’t be surprised that so many players are getting in on the game, nor that significant performance hikes are being seen; more important is the likely impact of diversification, as the bar falls still further on chip design. In much the same way as apps transformed the mobile device industry, we might be about to see the same with computer chips, particularly for so-called ‘edge’ devices appearing in homes, offices and factories. This industry may be decades old but the real game may only be just starting, leading to advances we have not yet even considered.

02-21 – Malicious Use Of Artificial Intelligence

Malicious Use Of Artificial Intelligence

What’s missing from The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence report?

Probability vs plausibility

Only a fool would dare criticise the report “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation,” coming as it does from such an august set of bodies — to quote: “researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, OpenAI, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for a New American Security, and 9 other institutions, drawing on expertise from a wide range of areas, including AI, cybersecurity, and public policy.”

Cripes, that’s quite a list. But let me at least try to summarize its 100 pages of dense text.

- There’s a handy executive summary and introduction

- 38 pages cover all the things that could go wrong

- 15 pages describe ways to not let them happen

- 33 pages cover the people and materials referenced

It’s difficult to argue with any of it, on the surface at least. Particularly the overall message: there could be bad things, and we should not sleepwalk into them. While this is welcome advice, one factor is noticeable by its absence. Strangely, as the report comes from groups for whom the scientific method should be as familiar as brushing one’s teeth in the morning, it lacks any discussion, or indeed conception, of the nature of risk.

Risk, as security and continuity professionals know, is a mathematical construct, the product of probability and impact. The report itself makes repeated use of the term ‘plausible’, to describe AI’s progress, potential targets and possible outcomes. Beyond this, there is little definition.

We can all conjure disaster scenarios, but it is not until we apply our expertise and experience to assessing the risk, that we can prioritise and (hopefully) mitigate any risks that emerge.

So, without this rather important element, what can we distil from its pages? First we can perceive the report’s underlying purpose, to bring together the dialogues of a number of disparate groups. “There remain many disagreements between the co-authors of this report,” it states, showing the reality, that it is a work in progress: to coin an old consultancy phrase, “I’m sorry their report is so long, we didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

A second, laudable goal was to bring AI into the public discourse. In this it has succeeded, measured in terms of column inches — though in doing so, it is in danger of achieving no more than adding to the well-meant, yet already heaped pile of hype and anti-hype surrounding AI. Writing in the MIT review, Rodney Brooks’ The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions offers a pretty good analysis of this phenomenon.

Finally, buried within its pages are an important admission on the part of “throw the doors open” organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A priority area is stated as “Exploring Different Openness Models” — that’s right, it’s not as simple as making everything open by default, particularly if bad guys and rogue governments have the same access as good, community-spirited folks like the rest of us. To whit:

“The potential misuses of AI technology surveyed in the Scenarios and Security Domains sections suggest a downside to openly sharing all new capabilities and algorithms by default: it increases the power of tools available to malicious actors.”

So, no, the report should be thrown out wholesale, it’s collates some good, if incomplete thinking. It should however be seen for what it is: a non-scientific work in progress, an undisitilled set of perspectives from a range of academic researchers on an emerging capability. Indeed, three of the four recommendations advise more priority (and potentially more money, therefore) to be allocated towards AI-related research areas. That’s a standard tactic for academics as much as for consulting firms.

Perhaps the fourth and final recommendation is most telling, “Actively seek to expand the range of stakeholders and domain experts involved in discussions of these challenges.” Reports such as these will only make sense if they involve technology organizations developing the capabilities involved, as well as reinforcing the point that our policy makers need to be an order of magnitude more tech-savvy than currently.

On the upside, there will (plausibly) be as many good things coming out of AI as bad. “These technologies have many widely beneficial applications,” states the report. So there remains cause for optimism, even as we look to gain a better handle on future reality.

March 2018

03-07 – Dealing With Gdpr

Dealing With Gdpr

For most firms GDPR is an opportunity, not a threat

Many conversations around GDPR seem to follow a similar sequence as Dave Lister’s experience in the opening episode of Red Dwarf.

Holly: They’re all dead. Everybody’s dead, Dave.

Lister: Peterson isn’t, is he?

Holly: Everybody’s dead, Dave!

Lister: Not Chen!

Holly: Gordon Bennett! Yes, Chen. Everyone. Everybody’s dead, Dave!

Lister: Rimmer?

Holly: He’s dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.

Lister: Wait. Are you trying to tell me everybody’s dead?

So, yes, GDPR affects all kinds of data. Big data, small data, structured and unstructured data, online and offline, backup and archive, open or grey, digital or paper-based. It’s all data, and therefore GDPR applies to it.

This simultaneously makes the task of compliance very easy, and very difficult. Easy, because decision makers don’t have to worry about what data is involved. And very difficult, because few organizations have a clear handle on what data is stored where. That filing cabinet in the back of a warehouse, the stack of old tapes on top of a cupboard, that rack of servers which were turned off… yeah, all of them.

Because that’s not the focus of GDPR, you know, the technology gubbins, complexity and all that. The regulation quite deliberately focuses on personally identifiable information and its potential impact on people, rather than worrying about the particular ramifications of this or that historical solution, process or lack of one.

At the same time, this does suggest quite a challenge. “But I don’t know what I have!” is a fair response, even if it is tinged with an element panic. Here’s some other good news however — laws around data protection, discovery, disclosure and so on never distinguished between the media upon which data was stored, nor its location.

You were always liable, and still are. The difference is that we now have a more consistent framework (which means less loopholes), a likelihood of stronger enforcement and indeed, potentially bigger fines. To whit, one conversation I had with a local business: “So, this is all stuff we should have been doing anyway?” Indeed.

Of course, this doesn’t make it any easier. It is unsurprising that technology companies and consulting firms, legal advisors and other third parties are lining up to help us all deal with the situation: supply is created by, and is doing its level best to catalyse, demand. Search and information management tools vendors are making hay, and frankly, rightly so if they solve a problem.

If I had one criticism however, it is that standard IT vendor and consulting trick of only asking the questions they can answer. When you have a hammer, all the world is a nail, goes the adage. Even a nail-filled world may seem attractive for purveyors of fine hammers, they should still be asking to what purpose the nails are to be used.

To whit for example, KPMG’s quick scan of unstructured data to identify (say) credit card numbers. Sure, it may serve a purpose. But the rhetoric — “Complete coverage, get in control over unstructured data on premises and in the cloud.” implies that a single piece of (no doubt clever) pattern matching software can somehow solve a goodly element of your GDPR woes.

As I have written before, if you want to get there, don’t start from the place which looks at data and says “Is this bit OK? What about this bit?” A better starting point is the regulation, its rules around the kinds of data you can process and why, as documented by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The “lawful bases” offer a great deal of clarity, and start discussions from the right point.

Mapping an understanding of what you want to do with data, against what data you need, is not cause for concern. In the vast majority of cases, this is no different to what you would do when developing an information management strategy, undertaking a process modelling exercise, or otherwise understanding what you need to do business efficiently and effectively.

The thing GDPR rules out is use of personal data people didn’t want you to have, to fulfil purposes they didn’t want you to achieve. For example, use of ‘cold lists’ by direct marketing agencies may become more trouble than it is worth — both the agency, and the organization contracting them, become culpable. Equally, selling someone’s data against their will. That sort of thing.

But meanwhile, if you were thinking of harvesting maximum amounts of data about, well, anybody, because you were thinking you could be monetizing or otherwise leveraging it, or you were buying data from others and looking to use it to sell people things, goods or services, you should probably look for other ways to make money that are less, ahm, exploitative.

But if you have concerns about GDPR, and you are ‘just’ a traditional business doing traditional kinds of things, you have an opportunity to revisit your information management strategy, policies and so on. If these are out of date, chances are your business is running less efficiently than it could be so, how about spending to save, building in compliance in the process?

Across the board right now, you can get up to speed with what GDPR means for the kind of business you run, using the free helplines the regulators (such as the ICO) offer. If you are concerned, speak to a lawyer. And indeed, talk to vendors and consulting firms about how they are helping their customers, but be aware that their perspective will link to the solutions they offer.

Thank you to Criteo and Veritas, whose briefings and articles were very useful background when writing this article. As an online advertising firm, Criteo is keenly aware of questions around personal vs pseudonymous data, as well as the legal bases for processing. Veritas offers solutions for analysis of unstructured data sources, and has GDPR modules and methodologies available.

03-21 – Facebook Cambridge Analytica

Facebook Cambridge Analytica

Slaughterhouse Blues: What have we learned about Facebook that we didn’t already know?

Thus week’s backlash against Facebook’s practices was as predictable as it was unavoidable. The smoking gun is in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, either the epitome of corruption or simply the poor child who happened to be in the orchard when the farmer walked by, even though every other kid had been stealing apples with impunity.

Let’s pick this apart. The backlash was predictable — why, yes. We have been handing over our data in the vain hope that some random collection of profit-driven third parties might nonetheless act in our best interests. How very naive of us all, but we did so apparently eyes-open: if you are getting something for free, then you are the product, goes the adage.

What we perhaps didn’t realise was just how literally this might be taken. We, or our virtual representations, have been bundled into containers and sold to whoever took an interest, feeding algorithms like mincing machines that have, in turn, fed highly targeted and manipulative campaigns. Keep in mind that the perpetrators maintain that they have not broken any rules.

And indeed, maybe they haven’t. The ‘crime’, if there is one, revolves around the potential that Facebook’s data (well, it’s ours really, but let’s come back to that) was in some way ‘breached’. If that is the case, at least privacy law has something to go on. Let’s be realistic, however: this is trying to fit an ethical square peg into a legal round hole.

Meanwhile, the practice of Facebook data harvesting via quizzes etcetera carries on. You don’t have to be as underhand as this: simply have a page of puppy pictures, get lots of people to like it and then sell it on, we’ll never know as we are already drowning in the crashing waves of digital. We already know what is going on, deep down, but we live in hope that the worst will not happen. Optimism is a positive trait, but blind optimism less so.

When we are told exactly what is going on with our data, when it is presented in black and white, it is like a veil is removed from our eyes. People are angry, and perhaps rightly so when they realise the depths to which organisations will stoop even if “they have not broken any rules.” It’s the same, shocked reaction as when someone finds out exactly where their meat comes from, and swears to become vegetarian on the spot.

Equally, the backlash was unavoidable as we arrive at a point of realisation, and therefore responsibility, for what our new, data-oriented powers give us. Back in 2012 I wrote that we were heading towards a Magna Carta moment; more recently I said how GDPR, good as it is, doesn’t deal with the kinds of challenges that we now face. Rest assured that I’m not going to say it all again, but the points still stand.

What about Cambridge Analytica — should the company be hauled over the coals? It’s not as simple as that, as the organisation happened to be in the right (or the wrong) place, at the right time. The chances are that its algorithms are not all that smart, as in, they probably depend on some machine learning or Bayesian techniques that are now well understood. This also means the organisation will not be a lone wolf.

At the same time, doing wrong just because it is possible, or because everyone else is doing it, or because the law isn’t clear, is still doing wrong. We need the debate about digital ethics to become a top governmental priority, and we all need to adjust our consciousnesses, and our consciences, to what is now possible. The time for blind optimism is over.

April 2018

04-20 – When Is A Pitch Not A Pitch? Retrospective Thoughts On Techpitch 4.5

When Is A Pitch Not A Pitch? Retrospective Thoughts On Techpitch 4.5

When is a startup pitch not a pitch? Retrospective thoughts on TechPitch 4.5

This week I was lucky enough to be a judge at the most recent TechPitch 4.5 event in London. I say lucky for a number of reasons: it’s nice to be chosen, of course, but more than that, judging offers a rare opportunity to really think about what’s going on.

The range of candidates was diverse to say the least — from an enterprise-scale AI solution as a service to a widget that you can put on your web site, from a new way of making music to an asset management solution for estate agencies.

Largely because of this diversity, it really was possible to see what made a good pitch and what doesn’t. And indeed, why it matters. I’m reminded of a recent conversation with a colleague who fielded a (relatively cold) sales call. “I wasn’t clear on what they were trying to sell me,” she said. “I doubt I’ll be using it.”

While this may appear to be short-term thinking, in these cluttered, time-strapped times we really don’t have the bandwidth to investigate every new possibility that comes along. Failure to realise this significantly undermines the addressable market, to the subset of “people who will spend the extra time trying to work out what I didn’t articulate.”

It shouldn’t be necessary to say this but clearly, it is. The presenters at TechPitch 4.5 had only 3 minutes to tell their stories: some, but not all succeeded. This isn’t the place to run through the qualities of the perfect pitch, but at the very least it should be clear on what, why and how it benefits, where it is and what is needed at this point.

Add to that we were a relatively gentle panel: our ethos was not to be antagonistic. In reality however, and as mentioned by fellow judge Lindsey Whelan, some investment panels, VCs and so on take great pleasure in demonstrating their alpha-prowess by belittling the organisations they profess to be helping.

Perhaps the biggest lesson was that all organisations are a work in progress, with all the complexity and unfinished business that entails. The trick, therefore, is to present something simple: while this may only be a subset of what you do, it may be enough to move you forward. The more complicated it is, the less of a pitch it becomes.

This was the approach followed by both winner and runner up. The “we help connect you with runners” model from A, and the “we can put a form on your site that is better than what is there” from B might not have been the most technically profound or world changing. But they had the most resonance, reflected by panel and audience judging.

It would be a mistake to suggest that any of the presenters were unprepared: clearly a lot of effort had gone into each and every pitch. What was missing in some was whether it passed this basic litmus test. We can all have genius ideas — but if they leave the people you are speaking to scratching their heads, you probably have some work to do.

04-25 – Monetisation

Monetisation

GDPR - are we witnessing the death of one-way monetisation?

I may have spoken too soon about GDPR. Despite the conflicting legal advice and the general level of vagueness around the new legislation, a head of steam has been building up behind the notion of privacy. In significant part, it has been helped by the scandal around Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and so on — despite various authorities railing for years about social media playing fast and loose with our data (hence GDPR, of course), it has taken our august media to raise the level of public awareness alongside a frisson of panic among data controllers.

To be fair, this was difficult to predict but it has had quite an effect: the need for headline-grabbing material really is a two-edged sword. The consequence is that many organisations are treating the looming threat of GDPR non-compliance like a hot stone, to be dropped at the earliest opportunity. I’m sure I won’t be the only person to have received a raft of emails from various commercial and non-commercial sources, saying that if I don’t opt into marketing, I will never again know about the wonderful offers they might put on the table.

They may be over-doing it: as I understand it, organisations are within their rights to keep sending me stuff if I have bought from them before, unless I decline it. But organisations face a Hobson’s choice — they can spam me with requests for consent now (thus forcing them to fall on their own swords later, if I don’t respond), or face the uncertainty around what the law actually says. Tricky. So, for example, I’ve had currency card companies asking me whether it was OK to keep sending me currency-related information, and train operators asking me whether I wanted to know about special travel offers.

I have also had Facebook asking me whether it was OK to send targeted marketing, or to recognise my face. Which is all a far cry from the attitude of just a few months ago, certainly from the big boys who saw privacy as a bunch of doors to be pushed, or lines to be crossed (which reminds me, strangely, of training a spaniel). “Ask forgiveness not permission” has been a highly successful business strategy, enabling Facebook et al to grow phenomenally, and deliver a fair amount of innovation. This isn’t the place to knock Facebook — few people appear to be actually choosing to boycott it, which says something.

There’s a deeper point to all this knee-jerk reacting and giving the law the benefit of the doubt: that organisations are moving, nay running away from the idea that they can do whatever they like, with whatever data they like. This breaks with the assumed convention in thinking, that (personal) data is to be harvested, collated, aggregated and mined regardless of where it comes from, or whether it is known to have value. These notions surrounding monetisation of data are no longer valid: data: it may still be the new oil, but it isn’t necessarily your new oil, to do what you like with.

What does this mean in practice? First, it forces organisations to say, and therefore to think, in advance about what they require personal data for. This is no bad thing: it’s called strategy or design, depending on what level it is being considered. Indeed, it turns the binoculars around: rather than asking, “Why do we need this data point,” and looking for vague answers, a better starting point is to say, “What are we trying to achieve?” and then working out what data is needed to achieve it.

A second consequence, then, is a changing dialogue with the source of the data — that is, the identifiable person. It’s a requirement of GDPR to say what you will be using the information for. Of course, many organisations will look for loopholes in the regulation, though on the aspect of non-ambiguity it is pretty tight. While this is still to be tested, simply saying “to improve our services to you” may no longer be enough. Even Google — whose model is based on a “we don’t really know you” stance — is coming under the cosh.

Third, though this is wishful thinking on my part, is that we may arrive at a point where individuals appreciate the true value of their data. The net worth of many companies is currently calculated on the basis of how many active users, or customers, they have. So, what if (let’s say) a social media giant paid me for the privilege of accessing my thoughts and needs? If, at the end of every month, I received a cheque for having just been myself? I know, it’s been tried, but perhaps the right model is yet to be found.

Let’s get one thing straight. Marketing in general, and advertising in particular, isn’t going anywhere. The play on personal apathy and ignorance will continue, and as I have said previously, I don’t think our lives will be any more private as a result of GDPR. However, and even though it only currently applies to EU citizens, the new law is catalysing a sea change in how personal data is treated. One can only hope this ushers in a new era, in which data also serves as a backbone for transparency and value exchange between data creators and those who can make money from it. Put simply, if data is going to be monetised, we should all gain.

04-26 – Aura

Aura

AURA band

Based in the UK and Moscow, AURA Devices is launching a fitness band that goes to places others currently don’t based on what it calls ‘bio-impedance’ technology. The company’s Kickstarter is being pretty successful, with the company nearly doubling its original goal of $40,000. I spoke to co-founder Stas Gorbunov about the wrist-based health monitoring device.

1. Where did the ideas behind AURA come from?

The technology behind AURA was based on a university scientific project around bio-impedance, following which the founders decided to bring it to the wider market. When we started out, we wanted to use bio-impedance more conveniently than currently. So we thought about fitness trackers — we went to the corporate guys, the big IT companies, insurance companies who were working on smart health, if you are fit can reduce premiums and so on.

We also worked with athletes/fitness enthusiasts - who can track how body compositions changed, and people wanting to lose weight, who need to track how weight changes during the day. So this is our audience.

2. What does AURA bring to the party?

First, the hardware design. Most of the hardware parts you can find on the market, you can build bands but it’s all about having the right design for the device. There are a lot of issues to doing this. The main challenge is to ensure accuracy, as the device is pretty small - it only has two points where it touches skin, whereas a medical-grade device has 8 points.

The most exciting and unique feature is hydration level — it’s very difficult to do this, but we want to bring it to your wrist. Having said this, our IP is mostly in the software. The main idea is about interpreting the data, making big data comparisons and so on. For example, we can increase accuracy by adding information about activity type and lifestyle.

3. How does it fit within the fitness and health ecosystems?

The Aura band is just an instrument to get data about you - the goal is to give insights about your health. If you are enthusiast, you can get the raw data and interpret it for yourself. This is the first in several types of device - we plan more devices in healthcare field, we will increase our ecosystem at the same time.

We are integrating with Apple and Google health kits, adding and interpreting that data alongside our own. We also have gamification through ‘duels’ and loyalty programs — you can earn a pair of sneakers through healthy behaviour! We try to bring as much flexibility as we can.

4. AURA talks about insurance relationships — how does this work?

Insurance is a big opportunity for us: we are looking to bring new innovation in terms of health plans. The idea of insurance companies using AURA band data does create potential issues around privacy, but if this is a problem you can turn off this feature and use our band as any other fitness tracker.

There’s always going to be questions raised around heath data and insurance. For example, insurers are looking at scoring your online data, e.g. from public feeds of Strava and so on.

5. What are plans for the future?

We are heading towards mass production right now. We expect to deliver devices to Kickstarter customers in August, and online sales in September/October in time for Christmas. We have also seen some corporate sales.

We may look to license analysis to other hardware. Right now we could not find the right hardware, so we had to develop our own. If hardware comes, we can recommend it and work with it. Right now, we have what have.

We are trying to make an ecosystem - we think healthcare, insurance and fitness should work together and bring more personalised services, cannot do so without monitoring instruments. Our position is to exist right in the middle.

My take — another crystal in the solute of a nascent market

When I first looked at AURA band, I confess to have thought, “Yet another fitness device?” but it does look to collate and analyse data other devices cannot, or at least not outside the medical sphere. While the company is right to see its future in the software rather than the hardware, this whole area is subject to rapid commoditisation — the chances of other OEMs looking to tackle the same problems are pretty high so the company has its work cut out.

What of the ‘issue’ of giving data over to insurers, isn’t this a two-edged sword? The relationship between health monitoring, fitness and insurance will continue: in some cases it may be intrusive or cause greater premiums, but in others, it can help early monitoring or identification of issues, as well as encouraging behaviours that lead to better health. I’m not a great fan of loyalty programmes as they play into consumerism, but that’s probably just me.

Ultimately, there is still room for both innovation, and new players, in this still-nascent space. With companies like Philips re-inventing itself as a health data platform provider, the need will continue for organisations to deliver usable and effective data. Market opportunities are broader than we think (consider protection of endangered species, for example) and overall, I am optimistic that the benefits of better monitoring and interpretation will outweigh the downsides.

May 2018

05-18 – Is Enterprise Devops An Oxymoron?

Is Enterprise Devops An Oxymoron?

Is Enterprise DevOps an Oxymoron?

A long, long time ago, in my career days just before being an analyst, I was a software development consultant. I loved doing it — these were the Three Amigo days, full of unified models, cross-functional teams, dynamism and service orientation. Had it not been for the crushing amount of time I was spending travelling (and therefore not seeing my young family), I might still be doing it now.

The job was not without its challenges. Technical complexity, and tight timescales combined with getting people on board and showing them how, yes, drawing things out before hacking code really could speed things up without jeopardising quality. All in all, however, things went in the right direction, but for one difficulty that was near-fatal for a project I was supporting.

I can remember the meeting like it was yesterday. The shape of the room, the large windows down one side, the whiteboard on the wall. Opposite me and to the right was the operations manager for the firm. On my left were representatives of the development team.

Nobody gets out of bed in the morning thinking, “I know, today, I’m going to go out of my way to upset people.” Yet, here was the operations manager, in an impossible situation. “You want it deployed… when?” he asked, shaking his head. “As we said, by the end of the month,” said one of the developers. “But that’s… impossible. It can’t be done,” he said.

He didn’t mean to be angry, but he was clearly frustrated for a number of reasons. That the expectation was on him to make things easy, even if they were not. That he was therefore being put in a position of being the difficult one. And yes, that he would have to work out how to manage the new application alongside everything else he had to deal with.

Of course, he was frustrated because he didn’t understand why he hadn’t been told about the deployment weeks, if not months before, so he would have had time to prepare. But more than this: ultimately, because the situation seemed so unnecessary. How had the organisation arrived in a place where this conflict was even a thing?

It would be great to say that this is the challenge DevOps was set out to resolve, but that isn’t the case. In large part, DevOps is rooted in a world in which bright young things at well-funded startups are building exciting new capabilities on top of highly commoditised, cloud-based platforms: people who haven’t had to suffer the indignities of not one, but thousands of legacy systems vying for attention.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before the notion of frictionless deployment was confirmed as a jolly good idea for brown-field organisations. Which have, as my anecdote illustrates, been tussling with notions of dynamic software development practice for many years, through the waves of eXtreme Programming, Agile development, continuous integration and indeed, the realm of DevOps.

As per a recent conversation, DevOps proclaims to break down the wall of confusion between two technical tribes, each with their own ways of speaking and acting. And who wouldn’t want to do precisely that? Continuous deployment is a laudable goal, as is everything else building up around the pipeline right now — testing, security, data management, performance management, you name it. All help the notion of a single, seamless flow.

But still, when we look at the enterprise (a.k.a. any large organization that has an accumulated technology investment), we find that deploying DevOps itself is extremely hard, if possible at all. As a good friend, a colleague from my consultancy days and now senior developer at a big bank, commented: “I’m fascinated by any large company more than 10 years old that thinks anything like DevOps will make the slightest difference to their ability to deliver business impact through software-intensive systems,” he said.

It may well be that one day, we can all default to massively scalable, managed infrastructure that adjusts itself to the workload at hand, at which point all organisations could be in the same position as startups — though as a senior decision maker said to me, this could be ten years out or further; having said this, we are also looking at a re-distribution wave, following cloud’s impetus to catalyse centralisation, as illustrated by what’s currently termed the Internet of Things.

This, complex and dynamic situation is the starting point for the report I am writing on DevOps in the enterprise. Like the operations manager of old, large organisations are frustrated, as their desire to innovate and push into new areas using software is stymied through repeated disappointment caused by process friction and organisational inertia. Technology vendors may claim to have the answers, but they are all-too-frequently preaching to the converted, as the real challenge — of delivering real, practical, sustainable improvement — remains out of reach.

Over coming weeks, I will be scoping out the development and operational challenges faced by organisations today, and looking at how these can be addressed. The answers may come from a direction we currently label with the term ‘DevOps’, but rest assured, even this is no more capable of being a magic bullet than the technology solutions that purport to deliver on the dream.

So, yes, watch this space. Also, if you have any insights you want to share, let me know. Perhaps, with some thought about what actually works across the variety of scenarios that exist, we can distil out ways for even the largest, most hampered organisations to improve on what they are doing right now, or to move beyond successful experiments into enterprise scale, yet efficient software delivery.

June 2018

06-07 – The Missing Element Of Gdpr Reciprocity

The Missing Element Of Gdpr Reciprocity

The missing element of GDPR: Reciprocity

GDPR day has come and gone, and the world is still turning, just about. Some remarked that it was like the Y2K day we never had; whereas the latter’s impact was a somewhat damp squib, the former has caused more of a kerfuffle: however much the authorities might say, “It’s not about you,” it has turned out that it is about just about everyone in a job.

To put my cards on the table, I like the thinking behind GDPR. The notion that your data was something that could be harvested, processed, bought and sold, without you having a say in the matter, was imbalanced to say the least. Data monetisers have been good at following the letter of the law whilst ignoring its spirit, which is why its newly expressed spirit — of non-ambiguous clarity and agreement — that is so powerful.

Meanwhile, I don’t really have a problem with the principle of advertising. A cocktail menu in a bar could be seen as context-driven, targeted marketing, and rightly so as the chances are the people in the bar are going to be on the look-out for a cocktail. The old adage of 50% of advertising being wasted (but nobody knows which 50%) helps no-one so, sure, let’s work together on improving its accuracy.

The challenge, however, comes from the nature of our regulatory processes. GDPR has been created across a long period of time, by a set of international committees with all of our best interests at heart. The resulting process is not only slow but also and inevitably, a compromise based on past use of technology. Note that even as the Cambridge Analytica scandal still looms, Facebook’s position remains that it acted within the law.

Even now, our beloved corporations are looking to how they can work within the law and yet continue to follow the prevailing mantra of the day, which is how to monetise data. This notion has taken a bit of a hit, largely as now businesses need to be much clearer about what they are doing with it. “We will be selling your information” doesn’t quite have the same innocuous ring as “We share data with partners.”

To achieve this, most attention is on what GDPR doesn’t cover, notably around personal identifiable information (PII). In layperson’s terms, if I cannot tell who the specific person is that I am marketing to, then I am in the clear. I might still know that the ‘target’ is a left-leaning white male, aged 45-55, living in the UK, with a propensity for jazz, an iPhone 6 and a short political fuse, and all manner of other details. But nope, no name and email address, no pack-drill.

Or indeed, I might be able to exchange obfuscated details about a person with another provider (such as Facebook again), which happen to match similarly obfuscated details — a mechanism known as hashing. As long as I am not exchanging PII, again, I am not in breach of GDPR. Which is all well and good apart from the fact that it just shows how advertisers don’t need to know who I am in order to personalise their promotions to me specifically.

As I say, I don’t really have a problem with advertising done right (I doubt many people do): indeed, the day on which sloppy retargeting can be consigned to the past (offering travel insurance once one has returned home, for example) cannot come too soon. However I do have a concern, that the regulation we are all finding so onerous is not actually achieving one of its central goals.

What can be done about this? I think the answer lies in renewing the contractual relationship between supplier and consumer, not in terms of non-ambiguity over corporate use of data, but to recognise the role of consumer as a data supplier. Essentially, if you want to market to me, then you can pay for it — and if you do, I’m prepared to help you focus on what I actually want.

We are already seeing these conversations start to emerge. Consider the recent story about a man selling his Facebook data on eBay; meanwhile at a recent startup event I attended, an organisation was asked about how a customer could choose to reveal certain aspects of their lifestyle, to achieve lower insurance premiums.

And let’s not forget AI. I’d personally love to be represented by a bot that could assess my data privately, compare it to what was available publicly, then perhaps do some outreach on my behalf. Remind me that I needed travel insurance, find the best deal and print off a contract without me having to fall on the goodwill of the corporate masses.

What all of this needs is the idea that individuals are not simply hapless pawns to be protected (from where comes the whole notion of privacy), but active participants in an increasingly algorithmic game. Sure, we need legislation against the hucksters and tricksters, enforcement of the balance between provider and consumer which is still tipped strongly towards “network economy” companies.

But without a recognition that individuals are data creators, whose interests extend beyond simple privacy rights, regulation will only become more onerous for all sides, without necessarily delivering the benefits they were set out to achieve.

Cocktail, anyone? Mine’s a John Collins.

Follow @jonno on Twitter.

July 2018

07-20 – Broadcom Ca

Broadcom Ca

10 reasons why Broadcom bought CA

I wouldn’t normally comment on acquisition stories, but in this case, well. Back in the day, CA was the master of the acquisition, as it first knocked out several enterprise management competitors and then built out its portfolio to disguise its mainframe-centric business models (and, it turned out, its dodgy business practices).

And now, the company is being bought by Broadcom, the “diversified global semiconductor leader” (a.k.a. chip manufacturer), this hot on the heels of its attempted, and blocked, acquisition of the more eligible and compatible Qualcomm. Many are asking why, and not in a good way: ten billion dollars have been wiped off Broadcom’s stock price, which is over half of the acquisition cost.

Few are seeing this as a good idea, though some are seeing an upside. Given that nobody has a crystal ball, I thought it might be worth summarising some of the reasons why a chip company and an enterprise software company might be the perfect match.

1. There’s got to be something in that portfolio. CA has 1,500 patents across a portfolio of 200 products (irony alert: CA’s directory is A-Z, when all start with C — and that’s just the ones they are listing). Surely, surely, there’s got to be something directly related to Broadcom’s business?

2. CA has lots of smart people. OK, not convinced? The future, as we keep being told, lies in software, not hardware — areas such as machine learning, analytics and so on. Within CA’s products are some pretty smart capabilities, along with the people who built them, and who can turn their skills to Broadcom’s needs.

3. It’s all about the mainframe money. Bullet four on the press release mentions ‘recurring revenue’ — that is, for all CA’s pretence at doing otherwise, much of its business still comes from cash cow mainframe software.

4. It’s all about Broadcom having too much money. Conversely, you know how it feels, you were about to start a relationship then you find you can’t, you’re knocking around with a hundred billion in your pocket and feeling low, then who should walk round the corner but…

5. It means someone else can’t acquire CA. Stranger things have happened — like how EMC’s acquisition of Documentum was rumoured to have taken place just to stop IBM from getting it.

6. Broadcom genuinely wants to diversify. This is plausible, if a little scary. I’m not saying hardware companies never ‘get’ software, nor that chip manufacturers have only had limited success outside of their core business, nor that even software companies don’t tend to understand the enterprise, but, OK, yes, I’m saying all those things.

7. It really is a great match and everyone is stupid. This is a perfectly reasonable suggestion. After all, Broadcom will have done its technological and accounting due diligence, and found clear areas of alignment. Won’t it? And we’ve never seen that going completely wrong before, no sir.

8. There’s something deeply sneaky going on. Hang on, wait. Non-US company looks to buy US company, the deal gets blocked. So then the same non-US company goes to buy another US company in a completely different sphere. It surely wouldn’t do that just to gain a longer term foothold onto the territory, would it? No, too far fetched.

9. Well, there was this bottle of wine. Or a bet. You know the story, it was a chance meeting, then a drink, one thing led to another and then, well, the next thing they knew they were grinning at each other and signing some thing… or indeed, they were in the locker room, being all alpha, and one said, “So, you don’t believe it would work? Watch this!” Or something.

10. The world is about to change in a completely unexpected way. Little do we all know, but the biggest enterprises are on the brink of some fundamental, singularity-scale transformation, where the entire software stack collapses down into a self-orchestrating, massive distributed micro-kernel architecture that runs directly on the chip.

At which point, Broadcom wins the Internet, all technological problems in the world are solved, and we can all go home.

August 2018

08-02 – Five Questions For Farm 491

Five Questions For Farm 491

Food security is a growing concern for many, as we live longer and as the population grows. It goes without saying that technology can help; more interesting is how agriculture has been a slow adopter of some of the more leading edge (dare I say digital) technologies. I was lucky enough to attend the launch of the Alliston Centre at the UK’s Royal Agricultural University: as well as being host to general regional development as part of the Gloucestershire Growth Hub network, the centre operates as an incubation centre for AgriTech businesses, under the umbrella of the RAU’s Farm491 initiative.

So, will Farm491 deliver the kinds of innovations we need in both farming practices and underlying technologies? I spoke to Ali Hadavizadeh, Programme Manager for Farm491 and startup business mentor, to find out more.

1. What problem is Farm 491 set up to solve?

The challenge of global population increase is becoming more serious. If human numbers are to increase to 10 billion by 2050, this means that globally, we need to produce 60% more food, which needs to be nutritious, high quality and affordable. At the same time, our environmental footprint will increase exponentially, so we need to produce more food with less avaialble production land. 

Historically, we have been complacent in our attitudes to food production. In the UK, waking us up to reality is Brexit. We’ve come to realise that we’ve become so dependent on imports, we’ve almost forgotten how to grow food efficiently. We have to learn to be more self-sufficient. 

2. So, were are the areas of focus?

Primarily, AgriTech is the ability of thinking innovatively, so we get more product, with the same or less impact. One starting point is decoupling food production from the land. Farming has relied on favourable weather, traditionally, so if you can prevent heat loss and provide light artificially, you’ve cracked it. With vertical farming and LEDs for example, you can give plants the correct wavelength to maximise photosynthesis.

We also want to get value from waste. We’ve spend a lot of energy producing it in the first place, so why not get maximum value out of it? This is where technology is coming in, this is a huge area of untapped potential. Consider Multibox http://multibox.farm  for example — rather than vegetable waste ploughed into land or into landfill, why not feed it to insect larvae, to create fish food such that the fish can then enter the human food chain?

Many AgriTech startups are of this mindset, to take the challenge on. Young minds lap it up — identify problem, writing software, seeking investment and going for it. We try to nurture that mindset, providing a safety net so people can come up with a solution and see if it is viable. We want to put a business case around a good idea. 

3. What kinds of AgriTech solutions do you see?

I like to ask, is your solution like an aspirin, or a chocolate? If an aspirin, you need to find customers with a headache whereas chocolate is more of a nice to have. Consider The Land App https://www.thelandapp.com , which helps map out how agricultural land is used — that one is very much aspirin rather than chocolate! The Land App has just secured its first round of investment and have partnered with Ordnance Survey and other key influencers. 

In some cases, it is a case of direct innovation in a specific area. For example, look at MagGrow  https://www.maggrow.com , which is an engineering solution targeted at improving spraying coverage based on optimising droplet size. There is nothing new about spraying, but in conventional spraying you can lose up to 70%, as droplets lost in drift and miss their targets. If you can get active ingredients to hit 100%, you have then a win-win scenario, as you use less pesticide, less water and get better results.

4. How does Farm 491 help AgriTech startups? 

Farm 491 is vital — it is the only agri-specific incubator in the country. We have an inspiring AgriTech innovation programme www.farm491.com/iai  - we need to support 73 new AgruiTech  businesses. If you’ve got a good idea, let’s test it and then try to help them seek clarity of long-term business survival and success. It’s like building a house — if you don’t do it properly, then it falls apart. Timing is also critical on introducing products to market. Too late and you miss the boat, but too early and people think you are bonkers!

One of the tools we use is to measure and advise across eight axes — product, market, channels, competition, financials, team, legal and IP. When they arrive, startups are often enthusiastic about product, but less knowledgeable on markets and channels. At the point when people say “I have no competition,” I get angry with them. That can spook them! Financials also often score very poorly, as do criteria around team. 

When they come to us, many startups look like a pear on this eight-point spider diagram - our job is to create a balanced startup which marks high on all eight criteria. So, when they send a pitch deck to an investor, the proposition is de-risked as much as possible. Ultimately, perhaps the most important is about IP. Startups need to do something, even a trademark, to say “stay off our patch.”

5. What kinds of challenge do you see to incubating AgriTech startups?

At the moment, AgriTech is very new, it hasn’t been considered as a sexy technology area in terms of exploitation. On the upside, innovation can also come across from other sectors, as many verticals are quite advanced. So automotive, data, robotics — each offers massive potential to agriculture. 

One specific challenge is to get more people to join the sector as innovators. We’re now partnered with AgriBriefing media (who produce Farmers Guardian) - hosting Agri Innovation Den  https://www.aginnovationden.com . On this competition project we have  partnered with BASF. 8 finalists will get business support & media coverage, plus a year of flexible membership with Farm 491 and possible investment from enterprise arm of BASF. These are incentives to look at the agriculture sector with new eyes.

To drive things forward, we have also helped formethe Agri-South West network. Our specific role is to support good entrepreneurs, but this is for the entire supply chain. As a result, we will be able to ensure our startups get all they need after they leave, so they don’t fall off the end of a cliff. 

We are working with a fantastic group of partners, including universities, LEPs, councils and private sector. The South West provides 37% dairy, 32% beef and 15% of the poultry for the UK, but we didn’t have a common voice: the network aims to do that, and has recently applied for a fund called ‘Strength in Places’ to support the agri-supply chain in the south west. We are at the beginning of that journey.

My take: a crisis is a problem with no time left to solve it

Despite many challenges, today’s western populations are very lucky to live in a time of relative plenty, as well as living through rapid technological change. The latter has driven huge market changes: it is highly unlikely that outsourcing and offshoring would exist on the scale we have seen, without the availability of global connectivity. Not only has this led to an ongoing worldwide rebalancing of resources, but it has also led to a level of complacency around how, and where, our food is produced. We can debate the whys and wherefores of this; meanwhile, we can recognise that it is unlikely to last forever.

This creates a problem, not for now, but for the future. We not only need to be able to know how to produce food; we also have to become very good at doing it, as we will have to do so with increasingly constrained resources. In life there are good problems, and bad problems, and this is currently a good problem: rather than waiting for the problem to become a crisis, we need only to take the initiative, to grasp the clear opportunity that presents itself. Not only can we work towards more sustainable farming, but also, there is a great deal of efficiency to be gained, and therefore money to be saved in the short term.

08-17 – Making Tax Digital

Making Tax Digital

The UK tax authorities are Making Tax Digital, whether businesses like it or not

In a changing world, it is good to know that some certainties remain, such as the time of year when companies log their affairs and give up to Caesar what is due to Caesar, that is, pay their tax. In the UK at least, even this constant is under fire. I’m speaking tongue in cheek of course, but the government’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative is proving troubling to more than a few businesses.

On the upside, tax accounting software vendors seem very well furnished with information. There’s a quick start guide which shows JSON and XML formats for information exchange, RESTful API calls and so on. There’s also a developer hub to test remote access to APIs. Less available is information to businesses and accountants, who are largely in the dark beyond a central assumption that everyone is using vendor packages now, aren’t they?

Simply put, if you’re already using a package such as QuickBooks or Xero, you should be OK (according to the list of those whose software will enable auto-uploading to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, HMRC). But many organisations are not, preferring to keep their books as, erm, books or indeed, spreadsheets. So, what if you don’t want to deliver your books digitally? Well, you have to.

As a techie, I find myself strangely nonplussed about this: while I might not have a problem with using a computer, many others whose income passes the £85K threshold (and who have run businesses quite happily without one) are now faced with three new potential costs: the software itself, the training to use it, and the conversion from one package, or spreadsheet, to a certified package.

Software vendor Liquid Accounts will “provide a single company, single user version of Liquid VAT Filer free of charge to any VAT registered business” — this works with MTD and, according to the article, with spreadsheets. Regarding the latter, the HMRC mentions ‘bridging software’ for spreadsheets here, confirmed here. A couple of solutions are now available, as per the article, including the TaxCalc spreadsheet plugin.

But it begs a question: why didn’t the Revenue simply define a file format standard for accountants to use, which all packages could write to and which anyone could upload? Perhaps there is no place for such primitive mechanisms, not in the API economy. For UK businesses meanwhile, waiting for clarity is becoming an increasingly risky option: we have nine months to go before the end of the tax year in April 2019, by which point MTD will be the default approach.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the British Chambers of Commerce are requesting that the roll-out of MTD is delayed, as this press release notes. On the point about British businesses having enough on their plates right now, I have to concur and can only hope our bureaucratic betters see sense before April next year.

September 2018

09-13 – Could Devops Exist Without Cloud Models?

Could Devops Exist Without Cloud Models?

Could DevOps exist without cloud models?

The GigaOm DevOps market landscape report is nearing completion, distilling conversations and briefings into a mere 8,500 word narrative. Yes, it’s big, but it could have been bigger for the simple reason that DevOps touches, and is therefore helped and hindered by, every aspect of IT. Security and governance, service level delivery, customer experience, API and data management, deployment and orchestration, legacy migration and integration, they all impact DevOps success, or cause what we have termed DevOps Friction.

While the report is about DevOps, and not all these other things (the line had to be drawn somewhere), one aspect rings out like a bell. I go back to an early conversation I had with ex-analyst Michael Coté, who brings a hard-earned, yet homespun wisdom to technology conversations. I paraphrase but Coté’s point, pretty much, was, “The kids of today, they don’t know any other way of building things than using cloud-based architectures.”

With that, he lifted his rifle and shot a can off the fence. Okay, no he didn’t, he talked about the foolishness of caring about operating system versions rather than just using what’s offered by the cloud provider. It took me back to a software audit I undertook, many years ago, when the ultra-modern JBoss interface layer built onto a Progress back-end had been customised by a freelancer who promptly left, leaving the organisation with a poorly documented, legacy open source deployment… but I digress.

Many, if not all startups work on the basis of using what they are given, innovating on top rather than worrying about what’s under the hood (or bonnet, as we say over here. I know, right?). They also then adopt some form of DevOps practice, as the faster they can add new features, the more quickly their organisation will progress: the notion of the constant Beta has been replaced by measuring success in terms of delivery cycles.

Bluntly, the startup innovation approach wouldn’t work without cloud. Providers such as AWS know this; they also know their job is to deliver as many new capabilities as they can, feeding the sausage machine of innovation, however much this complicates things for people trying to understand what is going on. AWS is more SkyMall than Sears, its own business model also based on dynamism of new feature delivery.

This truth also applies to the toolsets around DevOps, which are geared up to help deploy to cloud-based resources, orchestrate services, deploy containers and spin up virtual machines. If a single cloud is your target, the DevOps pipeline is a sight simpler than if you are deploying to an in-house, hybrid and/or multi-cloud environment. Which, of course, reflects the vast majority of enterprises today.

The point, and the central notion behind the report, is that enterprises don’t have it easy: DevOps needs to roll with the punches, rather than sneering from the sidelines about how much easier everything could be. We are where we are: enterprises are complex, wrapped up in historical structures, governance and legacy, and need to be approached accordingly. They might want to adopt cloud wholesale, and may indeed do so at some point in the future, but getting there will be an evolution, not an overnight, flick the switch transformation.

DevOps Friction comes from this reality, and many providers are looking to do something about it. As per a recent conversation with my colleague Christina von Seherr-Thoss, such developments as VMware running on AWS, or indeed Kubernetes-VMware integration, help close the gap between the now-embedded models of the data centre, and the capabilities of the cloud. This isn’t just about making things work together: it’s also transferring some of the weight of processing from internal, to external models.

And, by doing so, it’s helping organisations let go of the stuff that doesn’t matter. We’ve long talked about data gravity, in that most data now sits outside the organisation, but an equally important notion is that processing gravity hasn’t followed, making enterprise DevOps harder as a result. I personally don’t care where things run: if you can run your own cloud, go for it. More important is whether you are locked into a mindset where you tinker with infrastructure, or whether you use what you are given and innovate on top.

Right now, enterprise organisations are looking to adopt DevOps as part of a bigger push, to become more innovative and adapt faster to evolving customer needs — that is, digital transformation. Enterprises are always going to struggle with the weight of complexity and size: as startups grow up, they hit the same challenges. But traditional organisations can do themselves a favour and shift to a model that breaks dependency with servers, storage and so on.

While we don’t deep-dive on infrastructure and cloud advances in our DevOps report, it is fundamental and inevitable that organisations which see technology infrastructure as an externally provided (and relatively fixed) platform will be able to innovate faster than those who see it as a primary focus. Breaking the link with infrastructure, minimising dependencies, using the operating systems you are given and building on top, could be the most important thing your organisation does.

October 2018

10-17 – Github Actions

Github Actions

The game changer that is GitHub Actions

“GitHub? That’s a code repository, right?” said a friend, when I mentioned I was in San Francisco. GitHub Universe, the company’s annual conference, is small but perfectly formed — 1,500 delegates fills a hall but doesn’t overwhelm. And yes, developers, engineers and managers are here because they are pulling files from, and pushing to, one of the largest stores of programming code on the planet.

GitHub representatives would likely dispute the “just a code repo” handle, nonetheless. I would imagine they would point at the collaboration mechanisms and team management features on the one hand, and the 30-plus million developers on the other. “It’s an ecosystem,” they might say. I haven’t asked, because the past two days’ announcements may have made the question somewhat moot. Or one announcement in particular: GitHub Actions.

In a nutshell, GitHub Actions allow you to do something based on a triggering event: they can be strung together to create (say) a set of tests when code is committed to the repository, or to deploy to a target environment. The “doing something” bit runs in a container on GitHub’s servers; and a special command (whose name escapes me…wait: RepositoryDispatch) means external events can trigger actions.

That’s kind of it, so what makes GitHub Actions so special? Or, to put it another way, what is causing the sense of unadulterated glee, across both the execs I have spoken to and those presenting from the main stage. “I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck as I talk about this,” I was told, not in some faux ’super-excited’ way but with genuine delight.

The answer lies in several, converging factors. First, as tools mature, they frequently add rules-based capabilities — we saw it with enterprise management software two decades ago, and indeed ERP and CRM before that. Done right, event-driven automation is always a feature to be welcomed, increasing efficiency, productivity, enforcing policy, governance and all.

Second is: what happens when you switch on such a feature for a user base as large, and as savvy, as the GitHub community? Automation is a common element of application lifecycle management tooling, and multiple vendors exist to deliver on this goal. But few if any have the ability to tell millions of open source developers, “let’s see what you got.”

Which brings to a third point: right now, we are in one of those fan-out technology waves. In my report on DevOps, I name-checked 110 vendors; I left out many more. Choosing a best-of-breed set of tools for a pipeline, or indeed, deciding the pipeline, involves a complex, uncertain and fraught set of decisions. And many enterprises will have built their own customisations on top.

As I wrote in the report’s introduction, “In the future, it is likely that a common set of practices and standards will emerge from DevOps; that the market landscape for tools will consolidate and simplify; and that infrastructure platforms will become increasingly automated.” The market desperately needs standardisation and simplification: every day, organisations reinvent and automate practices which, frankly, is not a good use of their time.

For there to be a better way requires a forum — an ecosystem, if you will — within which practices can be created, shared and enhanced. While there may be a thousand ways to deploy a Ruby application, most organisations could probably make do with one or two, based on constraints which will be similar for their industry peers. With a clear day, a following wind and the right level of support, GitHub Actions could provide the platform for this activity.

Will this put other continuous automation and orchestration vendors out of business? Unlikely, as there’s always more to be done (and no organisation is going to switch off existing automations overnight). However it could create a common language for others to adopt, catalysing standardisation still further; it also creates opportunities for broader tooling, for example helping select a workflow based on specific needs, or bringing in plugins for common actions.

It’s also notable that GitHub Actions is only being released as Beta at this point (you can sign up here). Questions remain over how to authorise and authenticate access, what criteria GitHub will set over “acceptable” Action workloads, and indeed, how Actions will work within a GutHub enterprise installation. Cliché it may be, but the capability creates as many questions as it does answers — which is perhaps just as well.

Above all perhaps, the opportunity for GitHub Actions is defined by its lack of definition. Methodologists could set out workflows based on what they thought might be appropriate; but the bigger opportunity is to let the ecosystem decide what is going to be most useful, by creating Actions and seeing which are adopted. And yes, these will go way beyond the traditional dev-to-ops lifecycle.

One thing is for sure: the capability very much changes the raison d’être for their founding organisation. “Just a code repository” they may have been, in the eyes of some; but a collaborative hub for best practice is what the organisation will undoubtedly become, with the adoption of GitHub Actions. No wonder the irrepressible sense of glee.

December 2018

12-18 – Aws And The Future

Aws And The Future

As a first take, the 2018 AWS Re:Invent conference event seemed to be slicker, even if it was bigger, than previous years. While conference sessions were far too distributed across multiple hotels to feed a coherent view, the big-barn expo exuded a feeling of knowing what it was about. Even the smallest vendors had stands which went beyond the lowest-common-denominator quick-assembly cube, suggesting either (a) the organisers had put more thought into it or (b) the vendors were better-established and (therefore) had more money. All in all, it felt less of a bun fight — more space between stands, less urgency to get from one place to another.

It would be too much of an extrapolation to suggest this reflects the state of the cloud marketplace in general, and AWS in particular; however, it does serve as a useful backdrop upon which to paint a picture of an industry maturing beyond its “look at us, over here, we are different!” roots. From the sessions held for analysts, a couple of notably aligned moments stand out: the first involving use of the H-word, met with a smattering of laughter as an AWS representative spoke about embracing (my word) hybrid architectures and deploying (in the form of AWS Snowball Edge) capabilities inside the enterprise boundary.

The second, also met with more of an accepting shrug than anything, was a presentation by Keith Jarrett, AWS’ worldwide lead on cloud economics, which accepted, nay endorsed the fact that AWS’ cloud models wouldn’t always be the cheapest option for everything. Any thoughts of “ah-HA! Got you!” were almost immediately overtaken by, “Well, of course, how could it be?” — unless someone has also invented the perpetual motion machine or some other magical device. At a risk of repeating the obvious, there is no silver bullet/single solution/one-model-to-rule-them all in technology, never has been and never will be. Keith went on to present a series of KPIs around value creation, rather than pure cost.

So, with maturity comes the circumspection of understanding one’s place in the world, what one brings to the party, and therefore a level of differentiation based on competence, not capability: in a nutshell, it’s not about “use cloud” but, “if you want to use cloud-based services, work with us as we do it better than anyone else.” We saw this across the AWS portfolio, for example through the repeated theme of ‘frameworks’ — AWS has one AI (as presented by Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Amazon Machine Learning), one for IoT (thank you Dirk Didascalou, VP, AWS IoT), one for more general cloud adoption (hat-tip Dave McCann, VP, AWS Marketplace and Todd Weatherby, VP, AWS Professional Services).

It all makes sense — if the platform is (increasingly) a commodity, the differentiator becomes how it is used. We see this over and again: now that Kubernetes is (becoming) the de facto target for containerised applications for example, to say “we do Kubernetes” is no longer interesting. Nor for that matter are the frameworks, from a business perspective — illustrated by the current trend away from DevOps being an end in itself and towards governance models and tooling such as Value Stream Management. Most important are whether organisations can innovate and deliver faster, harness opportunities, deliver new customer experiences and generate business value, more effectively with one provider or another.

This is all good news for the enterprise, as the terminology and philosophical underpinnings of cloud computing increasingly align with the more traditional thinking pervading our largest organisations. Across the past ten years, it has been enough to ‘do’ cloud, or ‘do’ open source in order to create competitive advantage: indeed, upstart organisations (the usual suspects of AirBnB, Uber, indeed Amazon et al) have built their businesses on the basis of rapid time-to-value. Simply put, older companies, with all their meetings, legacy systems and indeed thinking, have not been able to deliver as quickly as businesses without all that baggage.

Indeed, they still can’t. But them old companies are still there, for a number of reasons. First that the new breed have largely tackled the customer-facing elements of business, but there’s only so much of that to go around. It is completely unsurprising that Amazon is opening (albeit automated) shops, and that Uber (together with Toyota) is investing in (driverless) car fleets: someone has to do the infrastructure stuff. Meanwhile, not all customer-oriented business can be done on an ad-hoc basis. Take Healthcare for example, which (thank goodness) has not thrown itself gaily into adopting the heck-why-not-throw-away-the-old-rules-and-see-what-happens business models of the platform economy.

And indeed, while big old businesses are still big and old, and therefore unable to act quite so responsively as the youngsters, three things are happening: not only are they getting better at that whole innovation thing — or indeed, learning how to align new models of innovation with their own approaches, but also, the younger companies are having to learn that they can’t get away with avoiding complexity for ever. And in parallel, as we have already seen, technology providers such as AWS are maturing to fit the evolving needs and capabilities of both sides. It’s not just the big players: at Re:Invent I was also able to talk to both organisations in Amazon’s partner ecosystem and their customers, notably a conversation with that quite popular gaming company Fortnite about both AWS and MongoDB.

Where does this leave us? First that AWS is establishing itself not as a cloud player but as a technology provider, and rightly so, moving away from a false debate based on cost and towards one based on value. Second, AWS recognises that it cannot go it alone, nor does it need to (historically echoing of Microsoft’s attempts to play the better together card, which worked to an extent but could never be the whole answer). Third, that this reflects a more general maturing of the industry’s relationship with business, as attention moves beyond the platform and towards how to get the most out of it in what, frankly, a highly complex and constantly evolving world.

Whatever happens, complexity of all types will continue to constrain our ability to maximise the value we can get from technology. While technological complexity may appear to be a Gordian knot, it is more a Hydra — cut off one head and many more grow back. Understanding this and trying to tame and align as a platform, rather than looking to restrict and present one model above all, holds the key to unlocking future innovation for businesses of all sizes.

2019

Posts from 2019.

January 2019

01-01 – GitHub Actions: The Best Practice Game Changer

GitHub Actions: The Best Practice Game Changer

“GitHub? That’s a code repository, right?” said a friend, when I mentioned I was in San Francisco. GitHub Universe, the company’s annual conference, is small but perfectly formed — 1,500 delegates fills a hall but doesn’t overwhelm. And yes, developers, engineers and managers are here because they are pulling files from, and pushing to, one of the largest stores of programming code on the planet.

GitHub representatives would likely dispute the “just a code repo” handle, nonetheless. I would imagine they would point at the collaboration mechanisms and team management features on the one hand, and the 30-plus million developers on the other. “It’s an ecosystem,” they might say. I haven’t asked, because the past two days’ announcements may have made the question somewhat moot. Or one announcement in particular: GitHub Actions.

In a nutshell, GitHub Actions allow you to do something based on a triggering event: they can be strung together to create (say) a set of tests when code is committed to the repository, or to deploy to a target environment. The “doing something” bit runs in a container on GitHub’s servers; and a special command (whose name escapes me…wait: RepositoryDispatch) means external events can trigger actions.

That’s kind of it, so what makes GitHub Actions so special? Or, to put it another way, what is causing the sense of unadulterated glee, across both the execs I have spoken to and those presenting from the main stage. “I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck as I talk about this,” I was told, not in some faux ’super-excited’ way but with genuine delight.

The answer lies in several, converging factors. First, as tools mature, they frequently add rules-based capabilities — we saw it with enterprise management software two decades ago, and indeed ERP and CRM before that. Done right, event-driven automation is always a feature to be welcomed, increasing efficiency, productivity, enforcing policy, governance and all.

Second is: what happens when you switch on such a feature for a user base as large, and as savvy, as the GitHub community? Automation is a common element of application lifecycle management tooling, and multiple vendors exist to deliver on this goal. But few if any have the ability to tell millions of open source developers, “let’s see what you got.”

Which brings to a third point: right now, we are in one of those fan-out technology waves. In my report on DevOps, I name-checked 110 vendors; I left out many more. Choosing a best-of-breed set of tools for a pipeline, or indeed, deciding the pipeline, involves a complex, uncertain and fraught set of decisions. And many enterprises will have built their own customisations on top.

As I wrote in the report’s introduction, “In the future, it is likely that a common set of practices and standards will emerge from DevOps; that the market landscape for tools will consolidate and simplify; and that infrastructure platforms will become increasingly automated.” The market desperately needs standardisation and simplification: every day, organisations reinvent and automate practices which, frankly, is not a good use of their time.

For there to be a better way requires a forum — an ecosystem, if you will — within which practices can be created, shared and enhanced. While there may be a thousand ways to deploy a Ruby application, most organisations could probably make do with one or two, based on constraints which will be similar for their industry peers. With a clear day, a following wind and the right level of support, GitHub Actions could provide the platform for this activity.

Will this put other continuous automation and orchestration vendors out of business? Unlikely, as there’s always more to be done (and no organisation is going to switch off existing automations overnight). However it could create a common language for others to adopt, catalysing standardisation still further; it also creates opportunities for broader tooling, for example helping select a workflow based on specific needs, or bringing in plugins for common actions.

It’s also notable that GitHub Actions is only being released as Beta at this point (you can sign up here). Questions remain over how to authorise and authenticate access, what criteria GitHub will set over “acceptable” Action workloads, and indeed, how Actions will work within a GutHub enterprise installation. Cliché it may be, but the capability creates as many questions as it does answers — which is perhaps just as well.

Above all perhaps, the opportunity for GitHub Actions is defined by its lack of definition. Methodologists could set out workflows based on what they thought might be appropriate; but the bigger opportunity is to let the ecosystem decide what is going to be most useful, by creating Actions and seeing which are adopted. And yes, these will go way beyond the traditional dev-to-ops lifecycle.

One thing is for sure: the capability very much changes the raison d’être for their founding organisation. “Just a code repository” they may have been, in the eyes of some; but a collaborative hub for best practice is what the organisation will undoubtedly become, with the adoption of GitHub Actions. No wonder the sense of suppressed glee.

February 2019

02-25 – GigaOm Infographic: Connectivity and Customer Experience

GigaOm Infographic: Connectivity and Customer Experience

How can businesses use connectivity to drive improved CX for their customer? GigaOm asked 350+ strategic enterprise decision-makers from North America and Europe to share their experiences. Check out the infographic below and then read the full Research Byte here.

March 2019

03-04 – Five questions for… Keri Gilder, Chief Commercial Officer, Colt Technology Services. Can Connectivity be linked to Customer Experience?

Five questions for… Keri Gilder, Chief Commercial Officer, Colt Technology Services. Can Connectivity be linked to Customer Experience?

Customer experience, or CX, is one of those areas that makes you wonder why it’s being discussed: after all, which organisation would go out of it way to say that customers were not a priority? Nonetheless, talking about customers can be very different to actually improving how they interact with the business, not least because the link between theory and technical practicality will not always be evident.

In the case of connectivity, the task is even harder. In principle there should be a connection – if you (as a customer) can’t connect to the service you need, or if it is slow or unresponsive, your experience will be less good. In practice however, connectivity is often seen as low-level infrastructure, with little value to add beyond linking things up.

These challenges made our research on the link between connectivity and CX, conducted in partnership with Colt, all the more fascinating. The top-line finding was that organizations did see a link, and furthermore, were actively looking for ways to improve CX via connectivity. Following the research, I sat down with Keri Gilder, Chief Commercial Officer, Colt Technology Services, to find out what she thought of the findings, and what the provider was doing in response.

1. From the perspective of a connectivity provider, how are you framing the increasing attention on customer experience? How is it impacting both your wholesale and enterprise customers, and what do you think is behind this?

Customers in all sectors are demanding much more from their providers – the consumerisation of IT isn’t a new trend but it’s still highly relevant. People look at the flexibility and service they get from consumer facing companies and are asking why that doesn’t apply to their B2B suppliers. Many telco companies have been slow to adapt to these demands, so the result is that connectivity can be treated as a commodity rather than a differentiator.

Our customers are dealing with massive change, from the growth in cloud applications and the changing structure of the workplace, to security challenges and the constant state of digital transformation. This means the network becomes even more critical for those with a focus on delivering the best experience to customers.

When customers are dealing with these challenges it’s not good enough to sit back and wait for them to tell us what they need – we need to work together to help shape requirements, acting as advisors instead of just a supplier.

2. In the report, we saw a number of challenges getting in the way of improving CX delivery, not least how difficult it is to draw a clear picture of what customer experience actually means. How is this manifesting itself in the organisations you speak to?

A ‘good’ customer experience can mean different things to different people and sectors, so it’s not a surprise to see people struggling to identify the best course of action. To some degree it’s the obvious things that people expect – delivering quickly and on time, while ensuring they have access to the information they need.

But for suppliers it’s also about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes; what challenges are they facing and what are their customers demanding of them? From there it’s easier to see how to make a difference to their business and, in turn, how you can improve their experience of working with you.

3. A fascinating and repeated finding was that enterprises want connectivity that ‘just works’ from the outset, whether or not it has more advanced capabilities such as flexibility over time. How does this map onto what your customers are asking for?

Our customers have always expected connectivity that just works – the challenge we’re seeing now is that it’s much harder to predict network demand for the coming years or even months. CIOs are having to manage capacity requirements for applications or activities that might not even be on their radar and that’s driving a need for flexibility. This shows how connectivity can directly impact customer experience goals – if the network can’t manage these new services or if it doesn’t have the ability to quickly add new locations or services then it’ll be seen as a barrier, rather than a platform for innovation.

4. Also interesting was the low level of importance assigned to Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Is it that such metrics have had their time, or how else would you explain this? [Probably that NPS is an aggregated view, of the consequences of other metrics]

We closely track our NPS score – it’s an excellent way for us to measure ourselves as it covers so many aspects of what we provide to customers. But we know it isn’t and shouldn’t be the only measure of good customer experience. It’s the other factors identified in the research like delivering on time and how you respond if something goes wrong.

If you don’t deliver on promises, meet expectations or go above and beyond to keep the customer happy then you won’t score highly. I don’t think it was a surprise to see that people don’t use NPS as a way to measure their suppliers, but if suppliers are getting everything else right, then their NPS score will naturally improve.

5. Respondents told us that the most important way to improve the link between connectivity and CX, was to get their own houses in order, improving skills sets and operational processes. How is Colt as an organisation helping its customers achieve this goal?

We’ve always been focussed on customer experience, and our vision is to be known as the most customer-oriented businesses in the industry. This means that we need to do much more than providing connectivity to our customers. Whether that’s Enterprise, Capital Markets or Wholesale, it’s about working in partnership with our customers to find out what their goals are and then collaborating to show how we can help achieve them.

A crucial part of achieving this comes from listening to our customers and taking the time to understand the challenges they’re facing; one way in which we do this is through Innovation Workshops. These take part in the early stages of an engagement, bringing together multiple stakeholders with Colt experts to fully understand the broader business problems and how we can use technology to solve them. This means we’re providing more than just technology – we’re helping customers with their business objectives.

The other aspect is in leading from the front – everyone at Colt has a performance objective relating to customer experience. We also have several internal programs running which don’t just superficially look at customer experience but are seeing the business invest in new tools and create new processes to ensure we’re going above and beyond what people expect from a connectivity supplier.

2020

Posts from 2020.

April 2020

04-08 – VDI in the Age of Covid-19: Remote Work and the Challenge of the Virtualized Client

VDI in the Age of Covid-19: Remote Work and the Challenge of the Virtualized Client

These are trying times, not least because corporate life needs to go on, which for millions of businesses means delivering compute resources to employees at home. Remote work is no longer an option or an initiative – almost overnight it’s become a global imperative. And just like that, IT pros worldwide face a massive challenge.

One possible solution is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which connects users via web browser into a virtual machine instance running on a server somewhere, be it inside a corporation’s data centers in Citrix or VMware, or provided by a cloud platform such as AWS or Azure.

Of course, the concept of remote access to a pre-configured virtual desktop is not new. I can remember how on one of my first analyst assignments, some two decades ago, I was tasked to determine the total cost of ownership (TCO) of thin-client systems against their local, rich-client desktop equivalents. Twenty years later, I return to this suddenly urgent topic to ask some of our analysts what’s new about VDI and how it might address our current challenge.

First off, VDI is still very much a thing, with technology that continues to evolve and leverage hosted, cloud models.

“Every company I’ve worked with in the last 15 years has started some sort of VDI environment – especially now that teams are upgrading or replacing legacy Citrix environments,” says Iben Rodriguez, whose day job crosses a number of enterprise clients in the financial and government sectors. “We had a company come to us for an expansion of their 1000-user AWS Workspaces solution, and another customer is moving 3000 users to a Microsoft VDI solution away from Citrix.”

He says that a 2009 user deployment on VMware Horizon VDI still runs on Cisco and EMC hardware.

And Iben contends that there’s still plenty of TCO to be found in VDI deployments. Even if endpoint hardware prices have dropped, cost overhead can still be significant in an unmanaged environment. The lower costs enabled by centralized control appears to be the compelling reason to move to a VDI approach. Add to that the security and management benefits across both the remote desktop and the communications link, and the benefits add up. Control enables simplicity, which reduces risk —all good reasons to adopt a virtualized model.

However, centralized control can cause conflicts with the user base, which is after all the group being served. And that conflict, says Andrew Brust, is all about end users wanting control.

“While VDI from old school Citrix and Remote Desktop to newer cloud-hosted platforms are cool, people find that desktop-on-desktop gets confusing and nobody loves it. Just as people like apps on their phones, people like to install software on their laptops and don’t love delegating control of that away — even if IT does.”

There’s another issue: Today’s ”perfect” desktop configuration may not be quite so perfect in six, 12 or 18 months. Management systems have a decay curve, which needs to be factored into the initial business case and approach.

“The gold image problem is real, and a real headache, says Ned Bellavance, who also warns that proper hardware needed to support good VDI can be costly. “And it doesn’t help with overwhelmed VPNs or disconnected scenarios.”

The answer, in part, lies in deciding what is worth fixing, and what should remain outside of centralized control. “When you factor stuff out that’s portable, it scales well,” says Brust. “When you try to replicate the full stack including the personal OS and environment, not so much.

He adds: “In general, centralizing and templatizing for large-scale deployment of things that are based on personal [computing] environments can hit glitches.”

If this sounds like a compromise, that’s because it is — at least in the short term. Looking further out, we can learn from another domain — Mobile Device Management (MDM) – which has evolved to help organizations control and secure smartphones and handheld devices.

“Many traditional MDM solutions moved to a mobile application management paradigm, because controlling the device is a pain,” says Bellavance. Core to the new MDM approach is the use of containers.

Containers, essentially stand-alone application modules that can run anywhere, are having an impact across the technology space — not least in massively scalable, cloud-based application architectures. Netflix, for example, is the poster child for containerization.

As it turns out, containers are also very useful when it comes to balancing control with user flexibility.

“It’s easier to control the app as a container on mobile devices,” Ned continues. “Ideally we would bring a similar container approach to desktop operating systems, and you wouldn’t need to mess about with local device management.”

Microsoft is an adopter of this model, with its InTune app protection product, and the company has leveraged containers to enable Windows to run on ARM processors.

“The container approach (broadly speaking) has been liberating in lots of ways. It’s made things work that seemed utterly insoluble for a very long time,” says Brust.

So, how can organizations adopt VDI today, while at the same time planning for the future? The answer is to be realistic on cost planning in the short term, particularly in terms of management and support overhead created by the huge increase in remote work. At the same time, IT organizations should watch for advances around containerization and how it can enable an optimal blend of end-user flexibility and centralized control.

May 2020

05-07 – Why Should You Bother with Value Stream Management?

Why Should You Bother with Value Stream Management?

What is Value Stream Management?

Value Stream Management (VSM) is the TLA du jour among software development tools, so is it relevant to your organization? We can separate this question into three parts: philosophy, approach, and benefits. First, a bit of history: like so many dev practices, the term originated in manufacturing, specifically lean engineering. The core principle is to consider not only a process as a whole, but also each step, in terms of the value it brings. It should be possible to log not only the benefits (e.g. features built, problems solved) but also the costs, measured as time spent, people/hand-offs involved, and so on.

The relevance to DevOps pipelines and approaches may be self-evident to organizations looking to scale their efforts. DevOps is used by many enterprises as an innovation mechanism, based on a belief that iterative, continuous, fast delivery is key to success. But scaling DevOps across the organization comes with pitfalls, including loss of efficiency, a lack of coordination between stakeholders, increased bottlenecks, and prioritization difficulties. All of which can hold back deployment, and undermine the very reason for doing DevOps in the first place.

Enter VSM, which can help to achieve more consistent and productive pipelines. The core notion is to think of activities across development and operations in terms of a ‘value stream’ (rather than a pipeline or workflow), in which value should be measurable, and maximized, at every stage. This enables bottlenecks to be identified from a tactical perspective, plus the overall process can be assessed in terms of hand-offs, repetition, and other criteria, enabling it to be improved as a whole.

What Does This Mean in Practice?

Key to the success of Value Stream management is measuring the DevOps pipeline in terms of how well it meets the needs of its users and customers. It helps DevOps managers measure what is important, in terms of pipeline efficiency, effectiveness of results, and overall business value. In addition, it enables and encourages that all-important link between technology and business decision-makers, as they look to collaborate, set priorities, and drive delivery.

From a principles and tooling perspective, VSM incorporates the following aspects:

• Value Stream Mapping: modeling the steps of a pipeline in a measurable fashion, for example using a graphical tool
• Value Stream Efficiency: measuring pipeline steps, pulling in information to identify bottlenecks across development, testing, and deployment
• Value Stream Effectiveness: creating measures and dashboards that link to return on investment (ROI), customer satisfaction, and other business-facing criteria

Who Can Use VSM and What Can it Achieve?

If you’re wondering what VSM could achieve for you and your organization, we’ve outlined a few stakeholder-specific cases below.

Chief Information Officers (CIO)

What can it achieve? If you are looking to deliver on a board-level strategy of digital transformation, VSM enables you to offer a constructive response to board strategy, while keeping atop of decision making.

How can you achieve it? Show how VSM can deliver on both agility and governance, demonstrating value without undermining the potential for innovation. CIOs can use VSM as a route to remove risk and increase control of technology-based innovation in the face of consumerization and Shadow IT.

Business Leaders

What can it achieve? If you need to drive more effectiveness from your technology investments, VSM offers a conduit to conversations around measurable software delivery, based on business outcomes

How can you achieve it? Engage with the IT teams and work together to deliver both efficiency and effectiveness using VSM and agree on delivery metrics that link to key areas of business strategy such as growth or customer experience.

IT Development or IT Operations Leaders

What can it achieve? VSM can increase efficiency, freeing up time and money from process overheads, which can be better spent on innovation goals.

How can you achieve it? VSM can be a way to request more structure and control in the development process, reducing the level of conflict across the deployment wall. Consider tools and mechanisms that can deliver management information both in terms of process efficiency and resulting business impact. Also, find different ways to present information to different stakeholder groups, enabling intercommunication and supporting broader decision making.

Adopting a Staged Approach

Different organization types can view and deploy VSM according to their own experience and maturity. For example:

• Enterprises with early-stage DevOps practice can use VSM to set out a framework for DevOps best practice, which can then be replicated across the organization as additional departments and projects adopt it. For these organizations, we would advise deploying the minimum necessary VSM mechanisms you need to start DevOps on the right foot, implementing an approach that builds in process efficiency measurement and business value from the outset.
• Mature DevOps organizations, and organizations that have implemented DevOps across development and operations, can use VSM to achieve greater efficiency and governance. For these organizations, you can use VSM to define core processes and toolchains to meet your needs, consolidating existing DevOps toolchains and practices. VSM can also drive automation decisions for testing, security, and governance aspects of the DevOps cycle, so you can justify the spend on tools via overall cost savings.

Conclusion

“Value” has many meanings, and by following a process that defines what it means for different parts of your organization, you will build a better understanding of your development process and its value to your whole business. This is no silver bullet: by breaking down development and deployment into discrete steps, VSM can help you make small changes that incrementally improve production and development processes. These adjustments can be easy to implement, but, repeated throughout an organization, can create exponential improvement.

These techniques can lead to better efficiency and good governance, which can create a huge variety of positive outcomes for an organization. Happier customers, bigger profits, higher productivity, happier staff, and better internal communication can all be by-products of using VSM. Note however that while VSM tools enable organizations to collate, and visualize information, it is equally important to have a business-facing, value-oriented mindset across the software delivery process and beyond.

You can read more about VSM in our report Research Byte: Value Stream Management. And stay tuned – we’re producing a Key Criteria Report and Radar to help you set strategy and evaluate vendors. If you have any questions or feedback, you can find the author, Jon Collins, on Twitter.

05-20 – Three Steps to Successful DevOps

Three Steps to Successful DevOps

You can listen to the entire conversation here.

July 2020

07-14 – Is Visibility the DevOps Magic Bullet?

Is Visibility the DevOps Magic Bullet?

DevOps is an area defined by aspiration – there’s a better way of doing things, it suggests, a path to faster software delivery, better results, more efficient processes and higher levels of productivity. The potential is there, but as we cover in our report Driving Value Through Visibility, the path to success is beset by challenges. Not least:

• Siloed teams
• Complex architectures and legacy constraints
• Complicated and challenging compliance issues
• Communications issues internally

These challenges can stymie development efforts, diminish potential value and negatively shape the view of development projects internally. It’s not just traditional enterprises that can suffer: younger, and reputedly ‘agile’ organizations can hit similar challenges when they attempt to scale.

At least part of the answer, in our experience, comes down to visibility (or, as somebody once said, “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage”. Building on themes we have been developing across our DevOps report series, visibility needs to be end-to-end, across the pipeline from development and into operations. This gives management the information they need to prioritize and plan; it helps teams identify bottlenecks in development; and it offers wider understanding of ongoing innovation projects, and their value across the organization.

As we discuss in our Key Criteria report, end-to-end visibility is a key element of Value Stream Management, which enables value creation across a process, helping deliver on the goals of DevOps, such as efficiency, improved time to value and so on. Not only this but it helps shift the mindset of an organization from project- to product-based thinking, effectively focussing on the outcomes for the customers, not the needs of the project.

As organizations look to scale their practices, they need to increase visibility within their organization in parallel with their processes becoming more complex. So, while there may be no such thing as a magic bullet (not in this industry at least), visibility helps decision-makers know which way to aim.

To read the full report, click here.

October 2020

10-26 – When Is a DevSecOps Vendor Not a DevSecOps Vendor?

When Is a DevSecOps Vendor Not a DevSecOps Vendor?

DevOps’ general aim is to enable a more efficient process for producing software and technology solutions and bringing stakeholders together to speed up delivery. But we know from experience that this inherently creative, outcome-driven approach often forgets about one thing until too late in the process—security. Too often, security is brought into the timeline just before deployment, risking last minute headaches and major delays. The security team is pushed into being the Greek chorus of the process, “ruining everyone’s fun” by demanding changes and slowing things down.

But as we know, in the complex, multi-cloud and containerized environment we find ourselves in, security is becoming more important and challenging than ever. And the costs of security failure are not only measured in slower deployment, but in compliance breaches and reputational damage.

The term “DevSecOps” has been coined to characterize how security needs to be at the heart of the DevOps process. This is in part principle and part tools. As a principle, DevSecOps fits with the concept of “shifting left,” that is, ensuring that security is treated as early as possible in the development process. So far, so simple.

From a tooling perspective, however, things get more complicated, not least because the market has seen a number of platforms marketing themselves as DevSecOps. As we have been writing our Key Criteria report on the subject, we have learned that not all DevSecOps vendors are necessarily DevSecOps vendors. Specifically, we have learned to distinguish capabilities that directly enable the goals of DevSecOps from a process perspective, from those designed to support DevSecOps practices. We could define them as: “Those that do, and those that help.”

This is how to tell the two types of vendor apart and how to use them.

Vendors Enabling DevSecOps: “Tools That Do”

A number of tools work to facilitate the DevSecOps process -– let’s bite the bullet and call them DevSecOps tools. They help teams set out each stage of software development, bringing siloed teams together behind a unified vision that allows fast, high-quality development, with security considerations at its core. DevSecOps tools work across the development process, for example:

• Create: Help to set and implement policy
• Develop: Apply guidance to the process and aid its implementation
• Test: Facilitate and guide security testing procedures
• Deploy: Provide reports to assure confidence to deploy the application

The key element that sets these tool sets apart is the ability to automate and reduce friction within the development process. They will prompt action, stop a team from moving from one stage to another if the process has not adequately addressed security concerns, and guide the roadmap for the development from start to finish.

Supporting DevSecOps: “Tools That Help”

In this category we place those tools which aid the execution, and monitoring, of good DevSecOps principles. Security scanning and application/infrastructure hardening tools are a key element of these processes: Software composition analysis (SCA) forms a part of the development stage, static/dynamic application security testing (SAST/DAST) is integral to the test stage and runtime app protection (RASP) is a key to the Deploy stage.

Tools like this are a vital part of the security layer of security tooling, especially just before deployment – and they often come with APIs so they can be plugged into the CI/CD process. However, while these capabilities are very important to DevSecOps, they can be seen in more of a supporting role, rather than being DevSecOps tools per se.

DevSecOps-washing is not a good idea for the enterprise

While one might argue that security should never have been shifted right, DevSecOps exists to ensure that security best practices take place across the development lifecycle. A corollary exists to the idea of “tools that help,” namely that organizations implementing these tools are not “doing DevSecOps,” any more than vendors providing these tools are DevSecOps vendors.

The only way to “do” DevSecOps is to fully embrace security at a process management and governance level: This means assessing risk, defining policy, setting review gates, and disallowing progress for insecure deliverables. Organizations that embrace DevSecOps can get help from what we are calling DevSecOps tools, as well as from scanning and hardening tools that help support its goals.

At the end of the day, all security and governance boils down to risk: If you buy a scanning tool so you can check a box that says “DevSecOps,” you are potentially adding to your risk posture, rather than mitigating it. So, get your DevSecOps strategy fixed first, then consider how you can add automation, visibility, and control using “tools that do,” as well as benefit from “tools that help.”

December 2020

12-10 – Asked and Answered: How Incorporating AI into DevOps Will Unlock the Future

Asked and Answered: How Incorporating AI into DevOps Will Unlock the Future

Incorporating AI into DevOps

So often, technology practitioners can feel like the cobblers’ children of tech—we talk about how development and operations can be automated, yet the capabilities we have at our disposal are frequently incomplete, fragmented, complex, and in all a long way from the vision of what tools could be. So, is there any hope for the future? I spoke recently to Eran Kinsbruner, Chief Evangelist at Perfecto, and Justin Reock, Chief Architect, OpenLogic at Perforce Software, about Incorporating AI into DevOps, and how the processes of DevOps will be transformed in the next five years by automation. Eran has just got a book out—Advancing Software Quality: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the Age of DevOps (available from all good outlets), so he should have a few of the answers.

What did I learn? First, the importance of a focus on value in DevOps; second, the role of AI and ML in accelerating DevOps; and third, the opportunities that exist today for AI-based improvement. Our conversation has been edited for clarity, but here’s the key points:

Jon Collins: What does DevOps really mean for you and what makes it work?

Eran Kinsbruner: DevOps is not a closed term that people really understand perfectly. I love Microsoft’s definition of DevOps: it is a union of people, process and product, helping deliver constant value to their customers. Fantastic. But it’s still quite vague.

So how do I do it? I have the people, I have feature teams, I have technology. I’m building these features in a short amount of time. But what is value? How do I know that I’m really adding value to my clients?

Perhaps execution speed is vital to them? In my mind, value is not just about execution speed, it’s much more, but you need to listen to your end users. What are they actually looking to get from your product? Sometimes the end developer doesn’t even know how his feature is going to be utilized out there.

Jon: Yes, I agree—you have to ask: What does value mean to your customers? Suddenly you’ve got a conversation: How do we define value? What are the benefits that our customers are getting? And what are they prepared to put in, in order to get those benefits? It becomes a higher level conversation that can steer everything else.

Without that high-level conversation then you just pump stuff out with no clue. It’s like producing cars. Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Is anyone driving them? I have no idea! So, and how does that relate to quality in your mind? How does quality play across the lifecycle?

Eran: So I am looking at DevOps from the perspective of end users. Are my end users consuming my products? What do they think about my products? And how can I make sense of all the feedback so I can improve and create more value to these users?

So quality is not just about function: put something in, get something out. You want value equals quality by definition. When you bake into your costs into value delivery, you learn what it really means: functionality, performance, response time, availability.

You discover it by testing what’s right from the end-user perspective because if it’s not something that your clients are dealing with, you’re also not testing or providing quality for what matters. So both from a development and quality assurance perspective, you need to be very focused.

What do I need to cover? What do I need to test? On which platform? Which scenarios? Which is the most eloquent feature that someone actually touched in the previous code commit and stuff like that. This is when you find the result: valuable features or products to your end users.

Jon: Great, let’s make it value-first. But how does this map onto the DevOps process, from a pipeline perspective? And how can AI help?

Justin Reock: When I think about DevOps, it goes back to the Theory of Constraints and applying the idea of reducing the amount of friction involved in converting value to throughput. That to me is the essence of DevOps, at least from a business perspective. We’re doing everything we can to reduce the amount of “laying around” inventory, i.e. code that has not been converted into money yet.

The more we can do to reduce friction between converting our inventory and organizational costs throughput, the quicker every line of code that a developer commits to a source control repository becomes throughput, or money, out in the market. And if you distill it back to that birth, then I think that if you look at AI, its place becomes very clear.

The ideal DevOps pipeline is one that will be completely frictionless: a developer checks in his code and that code is then running in production five seconds later, right after passing through a series of tests where no human was ever involved. The customer is buying something, and you converted that code into throughput in a matter of seconds. That’s brilliant and beautiful and elegant, and that is the goal of DevOps and software, and so AI.

Jon: Let’s get down to the nitty gritty—can we look at an example?

Justin: Sure, for example software testing? There are multiple points where we can remove not only the slowdowns that having humans as part of that process adds, but we also, if we do it right, can eliminate more and more tester bias from that pipeline, which means we have less and less retesting. In a lot of ways, we’re still brute forcing the way we deal with that problem. We do A/B testing and Canary releases, just in case we didn’t think about a possible pathway.

But we still have goals here: DevOps is all about the continuous feedback loop. So you have to get feedback about your product and you have to integrate that into new features and you have to fix bugs, of course. The more we can reduce those issues and prevent them from seeing the light of day, through things like fuzzing and AI, the faster we can get that code out making money.

This all ties together. In a world where it’s all connected software, it opens the door to ambient services, self-driving cars, or completely automated retail venues. It helps create our fully realized virtual and augmented reality where everything is a digital asset, and scarcity is proven through blockchain, but that blockchain only matters if quality is enforced.

Jon: Whoa. That’s quite a leap!

Justin: Yes, you’re right, but I don’t think people really understand the molecular level at which software is about to bloom, due to AI in the DevOps process. Reducing friction in the pipeline is the biggest necessity, and it will open up all kinds of opportunities.

Jon: OK great, let’s drill into this –what is the lowest hanging fruit? What is going to change in DevOps over the next few years, because of AI and ML?

Eran: Let’s think back to the feedback loops. Sometimes developers and DevOps managers think they got it right, and are doing things right, but then a machine learning algorithm comes and sets them free, providing feedback which is quite different from what they thought they would get. ML can help provide unbiased, objective feedback, which doesn’t really look at the product roadmap or anything like that, but it looks at the end users, which is kind of clean.

Then when you merge it with the product decisions and the software delivery cycle, maybe you’re going to get something more solid and more relevant to your clients. That’s what I see as the biggest opportunity right now.

Jon: That all sounds great, it’s great theory. But what do I do to address these ideas?

Eran: That’s a good question. You don’t need to throw everything away and AI cannot really solve everything immediately. But we do need this acceleration of software quality. The noise reduction, the prioritization. We can obviously apply them throughout the entire pipeline, but let’s just focus on testing.

The test cases that are the most unreliable are a good case in point. We call them flaky. They’re showing up red in your CI/CD pipeline and you’re doing nothing about them because you don’t know why they are failing. AI is able to look into these failures, and classify them into different buckets. And suddenly we can see 80% of all these failures are not real bugs. They’re just down to poor coding skills by a test engineer. We now can zoom into the 20% that are real bugs, that are real issues that may impact the value to my customers. Now I have something I can prioritize. I know where my developers need to focus.

So noise reduction and prioritization of testing can result in an acceleration of software delivery. Once you’re applying that into your existing processes, you can move much faster.

Jon: Great, thank you! So AI and ML may unlock huge value in an increasingly digital world. Key right now is to look for direct opportunities to remove friction from the process itself, in testing and across the pipeline. Eran and Justin, thank you very much for your time!

12-17 – Beyond Agile: 4 Lessons to Better Software Development

Beyond Agile: 4 Lessons to Better Software Development

The widespread adoption of Agile, coupled with the rise of DevOps, means you’d be forgiven for thinking software development is now an easy, stress-free process. But whenever I speak to developers in the field that’s not the experience they describe. Missed deadlines, accumulating technical debt, and high workloads are all common struggles in the developer community.

This begs the question: if Agile isn’t the solution, what is?

I spoke to Daniel Mostert, a director of infrastructure technology solutions with a large technology services company, to tap his experience leading projects for large-scale applications and helping companies address struggles in their development processes. We discussed the problems inherent in development, the role Agile can have in those processes, and the techniques managers can use to engage their teams and deliver projects on time and on budget. Our conversation produced four key lessons that Mostert says he has gleaned from his 30-year career in development.

1/ Break Down the Process

This is the key to improving any process, as Mostert explained to me, and the sheer simplicity of it means many managers forget to do it. But by breaking down a process, and evaluating each step’s importance to the overall goal, it helps create priorities and sharpen focus in the team.

“I came through the whole process of functional design, object orientation, even up to scale,” Mostert said. “It’s basically all the same: breaking the process into smaller pieces and understanding what you’re trying to do. That’s what it’s all about, but we call it all different things. But in the end, that’s what it boils down to.”

2/ One Size Does Not Fit All

Mostert believes the Agile concept can be very positive and productive in certain environments, but not others. Often, achieving higher productivity requires employing different and creative management techniques and processes.

“If you’re in a large project and you’re developing some functionality which is very clearly defined, I think there’s a lot of reasons for the Agile approach,” he said. “If you’re working in a hybrid environment where you’re doing some maintenance, some enhancements, some development, then the question becomes, ‘What is the priority of the day?’ There’s probably multiple environments that can be laid out, and different approaches for each of these different environments. But good leadership, I think, remains essential.”

3/ Avoid the Scheduling Trap

It’s a key part of many project management training courses: How to create a schedule. But, Mostert said, this is often a fatal mistake from management—looking to control a process from the top down, but with little knowledge of what the project actually requires and how long it’s going to take.

He suggested working with the development team early on to create rough timetables because they can provide better estimates of expected completion dates without setting rigid timescales.

“What’s absolutely not going to work is the story approach of people telling you: ‘This is the date. This is the plan and this is when you have to have it finished,’” Mostert said. “You can’t, from the top, assess the work and say, ‘This is going to be finished on this date,’ because you can’t plan a software project from a schedule. That’s just not going to work. How long does it take you to write a program? How long does it take you to test? How long does it all take? There’s a little bit of Agile coming back into that, that the team has got to assess the work and help with the scheduling.”

4/ Creative Structure, Positive Culture

Mostert is a proponent of adapting management styles and processes to the project at hand, but he has a few “plays” he recommends for specific problems. He likes to pair these plays with a positive team culture, where everyone buys into the new structure and supports each other to achieve various goals. But this approach can have its downsides too, Mostert warned.

One model I found intriguing was to separate teams into “firefighters” for addressing bugs and “heads down coders” for developing functionality. Mostert said this drive for creating good functionality is critical to avoid burdening the project or product with crippling technical debt.

“You have to structure the team so that you have one team that can pick up all this nonsense of changing priorities and things like that,” he said. “And then you have to have another part of the team that can just roll with the functionality that you want to create.”

Mostert said the danger comes from creating technical debt that never gets cleared. Teams lay down a solution and plan to refine it later, and then later never comes. Over time, Mostert said, “You end up with one or two people that know what’s going on in that mess and they are forever busy firefighting. And you never get out of that spin.”

The biggest challenge, according to Mostert? Keeping the team and the culture intact as different members roll in and out of the group. If one or two key members leave, he said, “then you almost start all over again.”

Conclusion

Mostert’s ideas struck a chord with me, especially the way they address the importance of flexibility in approaching a software development project. It’s a vital quality for project managers to possess, especially when operating at scale.

Agile processes have been very successful enabling the modern, efficient culture of software development, but it isn’t applicable to every environment, as Mostert so clearly expressed. His philosophy of changing processes and team structure to suit the project gives agency to project managers to assess the tasks in hand, evaluate their brief and team, and to make creative decisions that may or may not fit into a traditional Agile structure. In the end, all that matters is that it works.

2021

Posts from 2021.

February 2021

02-26 – Getting Started with Value Stream Management

Getting Started with Value Stream Management

Getting Started with Value Stream Management

Value stream management (VSM) has been one of the hottest buzzwords in DevOps over the last few years—but what does it actually mean in practice, and how can DevOps professionals implement VSM in a way that helps them achieve more without disrupting their existing pipelines?

I sat down with Siddharth Pareek, Global Practice Lead for DevOps at NatWest Group UK to discuss VSM, why it matters, and what DevOps teams can practically do to start their journey toward using VSM to improve their development process.

What is VSM?

Jon Collins: Hi Siddharth, and thanks for joining me today. My theory is Value Stream Management is really just the reinsertion of good old management governance visibility principles into fast-moving, dynamic Agile. I don’t know how that resonates with your organization, Siddharth?

Siddharth Pareek: I think it resonates with most of the organizations I’ve worked with. We have started running tools and technologies, we have started running towards cloud, digital transformation—but in that journey of going through change or being in competition, or getting digital, getting cloud, somewhere down the line we have forgotten, “What is the value we are actually trying to derive? For whom? Why?”

Jon Collins: It’s one of those things that when you’ve realized that you’ve forgotten, you’re like: “Oh my goodness! Right, we definitely need to focus on this!” It’s just something that’s been forgotten. It’s not like we’re building a rocket ship here. It’s merely that we’ve forgotten why we’re here in the first place.

Silos in the Pipeline

Siddharth Pareek: It may be possible that people are focusing on just one part of the delivery pipeline. There are different teams assigned at different stages. Each team does not have the view of the whole delivery. So if you ask them what is happening at the team level, you may have an answer, or asking the ops team what’s happening at their level, they may have an answer. But if you ask, “What is happening in that whole delivery pipeline?” They don’t have an answer for it.

Jon Collins: The thing I’ve learned is, essentially, that we should move from a project mindset to a product mindset. But I’ve worked in project offices, you know, CMOs and so on where everything’s about the deadlines. Everything’s about the Gantt charts. Everything’s about the scheduling. And then when you hit a deadline, you’ve done it, and you’re pleased, but you’ve got absolutely no inkling of whether or not what you did was useful. So this idea that it’s actually about a product, because when you build a product you deliver it, and then you’re really keen to know what it is that you have, whether or not your customers are using it and whether it works, and so on.

Getting Started with Value Stream Management

Siddharth Pareek: For DevOps professionals in the field, about to go on the journey to search for value using VSM, do you think it is something which has been forgotten, that could come back into the foreground, or do they need to discover it completely fresh?

Jon Collins: Value stream management is about thinking of things as value streams and then managing them as value streams. But then how do you do that and what does it mean in practice? The first step is, if you want visibility of your value stream, which is essentially onto your development pipeline, then you need to know what it is. So value stream mapping is vital. There are tools out there that essentially enable you to map out the different activities that happen in your pipeline in any process.

I’ve had really good experience with the business process side of things where you do lots of interviews, you write down exactly all the different stages and then you present it back and everyone says, “Oh, that’s great. Fantastic. Finally, now I understand it!”

So if you’re not getting on top of outlining your value streams and where that value lies, then a really good first step is to just start speaking to people, work out what’s happening. It doesn’t matter if it’s being done efficiently, because the goal of the next stage is to help it be done more efficiently. What matters is, do you understand how things are built? Do you understand how things are deployed today? If it’s complex and convoluted, you’re already halfway towards solving the problem because you are already identifying areas that you can address.

Efficiency is King when getting started with Value Stream Management

Jon Collins: I’m a great believer in separating out efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency, essentially, is doing the right thing. So if you’re doing the wrong thing, you’re probably wasting money: you’re spending time doing stuff you don’t need to and you’re creating problems for yourself that are unnecessary. In software development terms that maps onto bottlenecks. For example, something goes off to the test team. It sits around for two weeks, waiting for them to get through their testing backlog and then finally comes back to you, which is very inefficient, of course. So, you can start to identify things like that.

Now we’re happy with our pipeline, which we’re calling a value stream, the next step is really the master class of VSM: It’s the why.

Siddharth Pareek: Exactly. Are the things that you’re building actually going to help people? How can you measure the value in features that you’re building? How can you rank them according to whether or not they’re supposed to give value? What metrics do you want to put around that?

Jon Collins: And then, how much do they cost to build? And then when you release them: How can you show that they are actually delivering the benefits that you expected?

This could be a feature on a website that simplifies the way that people buy multiple things. You build it, you implement it, you add it to your shopping basket functionality, then you have to examine whether or not people are buying more stuff from you. Or are they buying faster or has the average order value increased? Or you can look at customer experience metrics, etc.

But ultimately in that situation, you’d care mostly about people spending more with you. And so good tools in the value stream management sphere actually enable you to link metrics like website effectiveness and the amount that’s going through the shopping cart with the pipeline so you can get a direct feedback loop on the benefits that your stuff is providing.

So that’s really the kind of toolkit around values. And value stream management, of course, is a response to a need, because it’s emerged that people aren’t necessarily thinking about value.

March 2021

03-25 – Asked and Answered

Asked and Answered

You can also listen to the full conversation here.

April 2021

04-13 – The Why of Value Stream Management

The Why of Value Stream Management

If you’re like me and have been around the block in tech more than once, you’ve seen three-letter acronyms come and go. Sometimes the technology they refer to is a flash in the pan; other times it hangs around for a bit before being subsumed into the platforms we build upon.

And so it is with value stream management (VSM), which has grown in popularity in DevOps circles. The first question I tend to ask about this is, why? Is this some new innovation that needs a name, or has someone spotted a weakness in existing tools and methods?

In a nutshell, VSM refers to the need—or the ability—to have visibility over how software is being built. As units of function pass along the pipeline, from concept to deployment, managers can benefit from understanding how this is taking place, from speed of development, to where the bottlenecks are, to what value is being delivered, and so on.

The question of whether we need VSM is particularly pertinent in the field of software development, not least because people have been building applications for an awfully long time. You’d think we’d know how to do that, and how to manage the process by now.

So, has the DevOps world hit an epiphany where suddenly it discovered the secret to life, the universe, and how to develop software? Not quite. VSM (which also has a heritage) exists as a response to a current need, so let’s take a look at the causes.

First, let’s face it: Software development has been running itself into the sand for decades. As systems became larger and more complex, linear processes couldn’t keep up or, more accurately, increasingly slowed things down. There may be some waterfall advocates still out there, but all too often, the process itself was the bottleneck, hindering innovation.

Back in the nineties, pockets of people looked into different ways of doing things. Some went for lean manufacturing approaches and Japanese efficiency techniques. Others focused on outcomes, with use-case-driven design and eXtreme programming, both being about just getting stuff done. Still, when I was training people in agile development methodologies such as DSDM, such approaches were very much the exception.

And then a new reality appeared, driven by the Web, open source, RESTful APIs, and more, where kids were getting stuff done and leapfrogging older, more crusty approaches. Sites and apps needed to be developed fast; they needed to be put together and put out there, quick. People started to say: Look, can we just get that website by next week?

The need for speed was very much driven by fear, and we’re still seeing this today as organizations are (rightly, yet hyperbolically) being told how they need to transform or risk going out of business. But as software development accelerated, it hit new challenges and bottlenecks—not the least of which was the need to control change (one of the founding principles of DevOps, in 2007).

Fast forward to today, and there’s a whole new set of challenges. The fact is that any approach, if applied universally, will eventually show weaknesses. In this case, “just” developing things fast will come at the detriment of other aspects, such as developing them well (cf. shift-left quality and security), or delivering things that make a positive difference.

The latter is where VSM kicks in. It basically serves to fill a gap: If you’re not thinking about whether you’re doing the right stuff, in the right way, then it’s probably time to start. We are now in an age where agile practices, which used to be the exception, have become the norm. But agile itself is not sufficient: “managed agile” is what’s needed.

Which brings us to another challenge. The world has moved from scenarios where everyone was building stuff in the same (waterfall) way, to using development processes that flex according to what people want to do. This is great when you’re just getting going and want to focus on building stuff, but not so good when you want to, say, switch teams and crack on without learning how everything works again.

Frankly, development processes have become fragmented, inefficient, cumbersome, and costly. Which is not good—teams don’t want to be spending their time managing processes and tools, when they could be building cool new applications. And this is where VSM comes in.

The term value stream comes from manufacturing. The easiest way to think about it, I think, is to think about what you’re trying to deliver as a stream of activities that build value on top of each other. So, first, start thinking about the development pipeline as a value stream; make it efficient and effective, then look to standardize value streams across the organization.

Someone recently asked me: Isn’t VSM just applying business process modeling and management techniques to software now? And I answered: It’s completely just applying business process modeling and management to software development. This goes back to a good old Hammer and Champy’s definition of a business process: It’s a sequence of activities that deliver value to a customer, and that’s what software delivery should be.

Value stream management exists because it has to right now, though it doesn’t exist in many places that are trying to implement DevOps practices. So it’s really the reinsertion of tried and true management governance and visibility principles into fast-moving, dynamic, and agile environments.

Will VSM last? That’s another good question. I’m hearing some organizations find VSM to be yet another overhead (clue: they’re probably doing it wrong). I’m also of a mind that if we, as a collective of development and operations advocates, could agree that we don’t need every individual project to reinvent best practice, we could probably standardize our pipelines more, allowing more time to get on with, yes, the cool stuff.

I don’t want to see a return to onerous methodologies such as waterfall. I do want to see innovators innovate, developers develop, and operators operate, all with minimal stress. I’m watching with interest the DevOps Institute’s move toward assessing capabilities, I’m enjoying seeing the adoption of product-based approaches in software development, and I’m talking to multiple vendors about how we might see pipelines as code form into a Terraform-like open standard.

All of these threads are feeding a more coherent future approach. There’s a catalyst for all of this, namely microservices approaches, which beg for straightforwardness in face of the complexity they create. Cf. a recent conversation with DeployHub’s Tracy Regan about the need for application configuration management.

I realize I haven’t answered the question yet. I believe VSM will prevail, but as a feature of more comprehensive end-to-end tooling and platforms, rather than as an additional layer. Managed value streams are a good thing, but you shouldn’t need a separate tool for that, isolated from the rest of your toolchain.

So, ultimately, VSM is not a massive epiphany. It’s simply a symptom of where we are, as we look to deliver software-based innovation at scale. The journey is far from over, but it’s reaching a place of convergence based on microservices (which, somewhat ironically, go back to modular design principles from 1974). Best practice is emerging, and will deliver the standards and platforms we need as we move into the future.

June 2021

06-02 – Becoming a Learning Company: Why Boosting Technology Training is Just as Important as Operations

Becoming a Learning Company: Why Boosting Technology Training is Just as Important as Operations

In the highly competitive and skilled world of enterprise IT, continued technology training has always been a huge part of career development. The recent massive shift to remote work combined with the continued democratization of learning platforms is enabling a whole generation to find the training it needs online, anytime, and from anywhere.

What does this fundamental shift from training a lucky few within the company to a distributed world with self-taught developers and engineers mean for business and the skills IT workers need to succeed?

To answer this question, I spoke to Don Gannon-Jones, Head of Software Developers Skills for technology training platform Pluralsight. We spoke of the evolving use of the platform, how the pandemic has affected attitudes toward technology training, and how enterprises can become ‘learning companies’ with ongoing training at the heart of business and IT strategy.

Jon Collins: Hi Don, and thanks for joining me today. What has been the biggest change you’ve noticed on the Pluralsight platform, and how have individuals and companies been using it over the past year?

Don Gannon-Jones: It’s funny. The pandemic went through this really weird cycle that in retrospect was pretty predictable. A lot of people had massive job insecurity, so they either needed to learn a new skill, or what we saw was a lot of people who wanted to skill up.

If there’s a takeaway, it’s that a lot of people have learned that your job is only your job, Your career must be all-encompassing. It’s up to you to make sure your career path is up to snuff, particularly in technology, so when you need a new job, your career is ready to take you there.

The second thing I noticed was a lot of companies experiencing a corporate version of the same thing. It goes something like, “We’ve been doing things this way for a long time and all of a sudden, some key things in our world no longer fit together and we weren’t prepared for that.”  training wasn’t up to date, so there’s been an enormous demand for companies to upscale their teams.

Some companies told us, “We need to triple down on technology, and bring in a ton of people skilled in Agile development, who are much broader technically. It’s not just going to be Java and C#. We need a broader range of skills in house.” But they were unprepared.

That’s because the market was not prepared to give them the right people. We’ve started to see a lot of insourcing and more apprenticeships. We’re seeing companies bring people in from non-technical sides of the company, like business analysts and project managers. These are roles that were perhaps technology adjacent. So companies are teaching them to be software developers, systems engineers, architects, and so on because people with the right skills aren’t there.

Jon Collins: Which parts of that have accelerated? Is it Agile, or project management, or the deep engineering that people are lacking?

Don Gannon-Jones: It’s the technical skills—software developers in particular. It’s not so much that there’s this sudden massive demand for software developers. It’s the variety of software developers: “We need a little bit of JavaScript, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” All of a sudden, shops that used to be more monolithic from a technology perspective have become super broad, so that’s what they’re looking for.

Attitudes toward technology training and certifications tend to “roller coaster” in our industry. First organizations care. Then they don’t care. Demand for cloud certifications have exploded, and it’s unfortunate, because I feel like every time we go through one of these “certifications exploding” cycles, three or four years later we tend to regret it.

Employers start looking for certifications as a minimum bar of competency and that becomes a barrier. It becomes a checkbox on the job posting, so the entire world goes out and starts studying real hard to earn certifications. Then we realize the minimum bar wasn’t all that high to begin with, and we regret having leaned into certifications so hard. And that is where we are right now. Everybody wants people who know Azure, Google Cloud and AWS. Those are almost table stakes.

We’re seeing an incredible trend internally of companies pressing people to get skilled up, so they can leverage the cloud technologies that they need.

Jon Collins: Something I’ve learned over the decades is how much IT is run by non-technical drivers. One is quarterly sales cycles and the other is CVs. Over here, we’ve had the furlough scheme. A lot of people are working part time or being laid off on full pay. This is a great time for them to think, ”Let me look at my CV and get it up to scratch,” so I can get another job.

Don Gannon-Jones: For people who have the personal ambition and self-starter drive to do that, it really is a great time. We’re seeing a lot more people engaged with fundamental learning paths across all languages with entry level certifications. That’s obviously what those are for — someone just getting started. We’re also seeing people jump from adjacent industries into the hardcore side of technology, because I think there’s a feeling there’s going to be more jobs in that area. Tech is one of the easiest types of work to do remotely. It’s not just people in the US. It’s people throughout Africa, South America, and beyond. If you’ve got the Internet, you can work.

Another interesting part of this is around diversity, which is related to insourcing. We’re starting to see a few companies that may have often expressed strong commitments to diversity, particularly amongst their technical workers, but they’ve struggled to make it happen. If you’re not getting a diverse pool of candidates, then you’re not going to achieve your diversity goals. And while everyone was still hiring for skills, they just said: “Well, we did the best we could, and we’re going to continue to try and do better.”

Now we’re seeing these insourcing programs starting to be successful. They’re super hard to set up, can be a big risk, and they take a lot of management. But when they work, they work incredibly well. The result is they’re going to hire, knowing they have the ability to train anyone up. We’re seeing some companies confident enough in their ability to build skills, and they’re hiring for things they can’t build, including diversity.

Jon Collins: This is fascinating. I’m a great believer in the need for diversity of thought in order to innovate, which means diversity of people. It also means you don’t have to hire for skills, but for other abilities, including the ability to learn.

Don Gannon-Jones: Yes, indeed. A popular phrase for a few years has been, “Every company is now a tech company, whether they like it or not.” And I think there’s a corollary to that, which is that every tech company needs to be a learning company. You need to be a skills company.

The only way you can survive in the long term, and the only way you’ll be able to get all the things you need, is if you can reduce your dependency on the job market to bring you the skills your company needs. You must be able to control those skills through technology training. Once you do that, you can have any technology you want. And you can have anything in the workforce that you want.

It can be local. It can be remote. It can be diversity. You can do all those things if you can confidently bring skill levels where you need them. I think there are a lot of technology and business leaders starting to see learning isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s not an employee benefit. It’s a core competency, and it’s just as crucial as accounting, or operations, or any other part of the business.

Jon Collins: Don, thank you so much!

Don Gannon-Jones: My pleasure.

July 2021

07-13 – Why Cloud Observability Now?

Why Cloud Observability Now?

The term Observability might come as a conundrum for anyone who has been involved in IT Operations over the years, given how a major part of the challenge has always been to keep “single pane of glass” visibility on what can be a complex IT estate. Moving to the cloud also requires visibility, across the virtualized infrastructure and services in use — this is to be expected. Less evident at the outset is how cloud-based architectures change the nature of what needs to be managed:

• cloud-based applications can become very complex, particularly if they are based on microservices
• they can rely on multiple integration points with external and SaaS-based applications and services, accessed via APIs.
• they are often hosted in multiple cloud environments or may still have portions hosted in on-premises or private clouds as well.
• Third-party components such as JavaScript frameworks, advertising and analytics, etc. must also be monitored

Alongside the need to maximize reliability and performance of their applications, organizations also need to focus increasingly on user experience, often directly with customers. For all of these reasons, organizations are today recognizing they need to rethink the way they approach IT Operations: cloud observability is required now, because of both the nature of what is being monitored, and the reasons for monitoring.

Cloud Observability starts with how organizations view a much more extended, and more complex, portfolio of IT assets; changes are also required at a deeply technical level, to collate the required low-level information on how services are performing — system events, alerts, performance data and other telemetry information that can be used to build a picture of what is going on.

Despite this apparent change of focus, the goals remain the same — to assure the responsiveness of IT operations to any changes in the environment, including expected events (such as deployments), adverse incidents, and outages. Cloud Observability captures the practices, platforms, and tools required to manage cloud-centric IT architectures in such a way that uptime can be maintained at a high level, and when things go wrong, service issues can be minimized. Outages are measured by Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and it is the goal of the observability concept to drive the MTTR value to as close to zero as possible. Also, cloud observability products can reduce costs by not requiring egress charges to move metrics, traces, and logs from the cloud app to a non-cloud monitoring system.

Understandably given the rate of change of digital transformation today, there is no one single way to deliver on the goals of Cloud Observability. Solution providers such as Splunk have extended their existing platforms to embrace observability across cloud and hybrid environments, whilst new vendors have focused specifically on cloud-based applications. In our Key Criteria report for Cloud Observability, we cover how end-user organizations can evaluate different solutions according to their own needs, and we conduct our own evaluation in the accompanying Radar report.

Tools are only one element of a Cloud Observability strategy, which needs to incorporate best practices and structures that fit with a cloud-centric IT Operations mindset. We explore this topic, as well as the rationale for Cloud Observability, in our up-coming webinar. We’d love to see you there, and would welcome any questions you may have so tune in and we can flesh out how to deliver on a future-proof approach for IT operations, together.

To learn more, please join us for the webinar on July 15. Register here.

2022

Posts from 2022.

April 2022

04-19 – Ransomware: Why It’s Time to Think of it as a Data Management Problem

Ransomware: Why It’s Time to Think of it as a Data Management Problem

Over the last couple of years, ransomware has taken center stage in data protection, but very few people realize it is only the tip of the iceberg. Everybody wants to protect their data against this new threat, but most solutions available in the market focus just on relatively quick recovery (RTO) instead of detection, protection, and recovery. In fact, recovery should be your last resort.

Protection and detection are much more difficult measures to implement than air gaps, immutable backup snapshots, and rapid restore procedures. But when well-executed these two stages of ransomware defense open up a world of new opportunities. Over time, they will help defend your data against cybersecurity threats that now are less common, or better said, less visible in the news—such as data exfiltration or manipulation. And again, when I say less visible, it is not only because the incidents are not reported, it is because often nobody knows they happened until it’s too late!

Security and Data SilosNow that data growth is taken for granted, one of the biggest challenges most organizations face is the proliferation of data silos. Unfortunately, new hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge infrastructures are not helping this. We are seeing what we might call a “data silo sprawl”–a multitude of hard-to-manage data infrastructure repositories that proliferate in different locations and with different access and security rules. And across these silos there are often rules that don’t always follow the company’s policies because the environments are different and we don’t have complete control over them.

As I have written many times in my reports, the user must find a way to consolidate all their data in a single domain. It could be physical—backup is the easiest way in this case—or logical, and it is also possible to use a combination of physical and logical. But in the end, the goal is to get a single view of all the data.

Why is it important? First of all, once you have complete visibility, you know how much data you really have. Secondly, you can start to understand what the data is, who is creating and using it, when they use it, and so on. Of course, this is only the first step, but, among other things, you start to see usage patterns as well. This is why you need consolidation: to gain full visibility.

Now back to our ransomware problem. With visibility and pattern analysis, you can see what is really happening across your entire data domain as seemingly innocuous individual events begin to correlate into disturbing patterns. This can be done manually, of course, but machine learning is becoming more common, and subsequently, analyzing user behavior or unprecedented events has become easier. When done right, once an anomaly is detected, the operator gets an alert and suggestions for possible remediations so they can act quickly and minimize the impact of an attack. When it is too late, the only option is a full data recovery that can take hours, days, or even weeks. This is principally a business problem, so what are your RPO and RTO in case of a ransomware attack? There really aren’t many differences between a catastrophic ransomware attack and a disaster that make all of your systems unusable.

I started talking about ransomware as malware that encrypts or deletes your data, but is this ransomware the worst of your nightmares? As I mentioned before, such attacks are only one of the demons that keep you up at night. Other threats are more sneaky and harder to manage. The first two that come to mind are data exfiltration (another type of prevalent attack where ransom is demanded), and internal attacks (such as from a disgruntled employee). And then of course there is dealing with regulations and the penalties that may result from the mishandling of sensitive data.

When I talk about regulations, I’m not joking. Many organizations still take some rules lightly, but I would think twice about it. GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations are now in place worldwide, and they are becoming more and more of a pressing issue. Maybe you missed that last year Amazon was fined €746,000,000 (nearly $850,000,000) for not complying with GDPR. And you would be surprised at how many fines Google got for similar issues (more info here). Maybe that’s not much money for them, but this is happening regularly, and the fines are adding up.

There are several questions that a company should be able to answer when authorities investigate. They include:

• Can you preserve data, especially personal information, in the right way?
• Is it well protected and secure against attacks?
• Is it stored in the right place (country or location)?
• Do you know who is accessing that data?
• Are you able to delete all the information about a person when asked? (right to be forgotten)

If regulatory pressures weren’t concerning enough to encourage a fresh look at how prepared your current data management solution is for today’s threats, we could talk for hours about the risks posed by internal and external attacks on your data that can easily compromise your competitive advantage, create countless legal issues, and ruin your business credibility. Again, a single domain view of the data and tools to understand it are becoming the first steps to stay on top of the game. But what is really necessary to build a strategy around data and security?

Security is a Data Management ProblemIt’s time to think about data security as part of a broader data management strategy that includes many other aspects such as governance, compliance, productivity, cost, and more.

To implement such a strategy, there are some critical characteristics of a next-generation data management platform that can’t be underestimated. Many of these are explored in the GigaOm Key Criteria Report for Unstructured Data Management:

• Single domain view of all your data: Visibility is critical, yet attempts to close a visibility gap with point solutions can result in complexity that only heightens risk. Employing multiple management platforms that can’t talk to each other can make it almost impossible to operate seamlessly. When we talk about large-scale systems for the enterprise, ease of use is mandatory.
• Scalability: The data management platform should be able to grow seamlessly with the needs of the user. Whether it is deployed in the cloud, on-prem, or both, it has to scale according to the user’s needs. And scalability has to be multidimensional, meaning that not all organizations have the exact same needs regarding compliance or governance and may start with only a limited set of features to expand later depending on the business and regulatory requirements.
• Analytics, AI/ML: Managing terabytes is very difficult, but when we talk about petabytes distributed in several environments, we need tools to get information quickly and be readable by humans. More so, we need tools that can predict as many potential issues as possible before they become a real problem and remediate them automatically when possible.
• Extensibility: We often discussed the necessity of a marketplace in our reports. A marketplace can provide quick access to third-party extensions and applications to the data management platform. In fact, it is mandatory that APIs and standard interfaces integrate these platforms with existing processes and frameworks. But if the IT department wants to democratize access to data management and make it readily available to business owners, it must enable a mechanism that, in principle, looks like an app store of a mobile platform.

From my point of view, these are the main principles of a modern data management platform, and this is the only way to think holistically about data security looking forward.

**Data Management is Evolving. Are You?**Now back to the premise of this article. Ransomware is everybody’s top-of-mind threat today, and most organizations are focusing on finding a solution. At the same time, users are now aware of their primary data management needs. In most cases, we talk about the first steps to get more visibility and understand how to improve day-to-day operations, including better data placement to save money, search files globally, and similar tasks. I usually classify these tasks in infrastructure-focused data management. These are all basic unstructured data management functions performed at the infrastructure level. Still, they need the same visibility, intelligence, scalability, and extensibility characteristics of advanced data management I mentioned above. But now there are increasingly pressing business needs, including compliance and governance, in addition to learning from data to improve several other aspects of the business.

Now is the right time to start thinking strategically about next-generation data management. We can have several point solutions, one for ransomware, one for other security risks, one for infrastructure-focused data management, and maybe, later, one more for business-focused data management. Or we can start thinking about data management as a whole. Even if the initial cost of a platform approach should prove higher than single-point solutions, it won’t take long before the improved TCO repays the initial investment. And later, the ROI will be massively different, especially when it comes to the possibility of promptly answering new business needs.

May 2022

05-01 – Case Study: Datadobi moves from product to platform with GigaOm advisory

Case Study: Datadobi moves from product to platform with GigaOm advisory

Context – From Product to Platform

Datadobi is a fast-growing, unstructured data management software vendor based in Belgium. Since its origins in data migration, it expanded into data protection; then, in 2022, the company broadened into data management with the introduction of its product StorageMAP. The impetus was a realization that Datadobi’s object-based data analysis and movement capabilities could be offered as a platform to support a much wider range of services. 

At the same time, this meant moving into new markets, addressing different scenarios, and potentially adopting different terminology. Datadobi was an infrastructure-focused company, and needed to reflect the requirements of its customer base: this had an impact both on its roadmap, and on its go-to-market strategy. 

Engagement – Value-add From The Outset

In June 2020, Datadobi worked with Touchdown PR to instigate an analyst program, speaking to a range of analysts for the first time, including GigaOm’s data management lead, Enrico Signoretti. Datadobi recalls how the conversation with GigaOm was much more open than with other analyst firms – “We agreed on many things, disagreed on others,” recalls Carl D’Halluin, CTO, Datadobi.

Part of this conversation related to Datadobi’s planned roadmap. Enrico shared his perspectives on the market, in particular, referencing a model he had created for data management, mapping infrastructure against business governance. Based on this model, Datadobi could see how to adjust the roadmap to fit with market trends around unified data management (UDM), but more than this, the company could now define how to address different and less familiar market segments. 

Response – Open and Transparent Advisory

To dig deeper into these topics, Datadobi took out a GigaOm subscription incorporating advisory time. This gave the company’s sales team a focused, compelling way of engaging with customers and prospects in a language they could understand and connect with. 

More than this, the idea of Datadobi becoming primarily a universal platform came out of these conversations. In roadmap terms, this drove a need for software partnerships, with Datadobi offering an “App Store for UDM” that partners could plug into. 

Outcomes – Building a Deeper Partnership

While it is difficult to put a hard figure on benefits, Datadobi’s relationship with GigaOm helped focus the company on a model and language that it could take to the market around the launch of its StorageMAP product. Not only this, but GigaOm was a pleasure to work with with its engineering-led, technical focus. “GigaOm analysts know what they are talking about and always give us valuable feedback rather than just trying to sell an offering!” says Carl. 

Moving into the future, Datadobi intends to extend its platform into financial and other areas of data management. As it does so, the company sees its partnership with GigaOm as a foundation of honesty, advice and expertise, which it can use to hone its roadmap and drive its customer conversation ever higher.

June 2022

06-19 – Retrospective thoughts on KubeCon Europe 2022

Retrospective thoughts on KubeCon Europe 2022

https://vimeo.com/715991400

I’m not going to lie. As I sit on a plane flying away from Valencia, I confess to have been taken aback by the scale of Kubecon Europe this year. In my defence, I wasn’t alone the volume of attendees appeared to take conference organisers and exhibitors by surprise, illustrated by the notable lack of water, (I was told) t-shirts and (at various points) taxis.

Keynotes were filled to capacity, and there was a genuine buzz from participants which seemed to fall into two camps: the young and cool, and the more mature and soberly dressed.

My time at KubeCon Europe was largely spent in one-on-one meetings, analyst/press conferences and walking the stands, so I can’t comment on the engineering sessions. Across the piece however, there was a genuine sense of Kubernetes now being about the how, rather than the whether. For one reason or another, companies have decided they want to gain the benefits of building and deploying distributed, container-based applications.

Strangely enough, this wasn’t being seen as some magical sword that can slay the dragons of legacy systems and open the way to digital transformation the kool-aid was as absent as the water. Ultimately, enterprises have accepted that, from an architectural standpoint and for applications in general, the Kubernetes model is as good as any available right now, as a non-proprietary, well-supported open standard that they can get behind.

Virtualisation-based options and platform stacks are too heavyweight; serverless architectures are more applicable to specific use cases. So, if you want to build an application and you want it to be future-safe, the Kubernetes target is the one to aim for.

Whether to adopt Kubernetes might be a done deal, but how to adopt certainly is not. The challenge is not with Kubernetes itself, but everything that needs to go around it to make resulting applications enterprise-ready.

For example, they need to operate in compliance environments; data needs to be managed, protected, and served into an environment that doesn’t care too much about the state; integration tools are required with external and legacy systems; development pipelines need to be in place, robust and value-focused; IT Operations need a clear view of what’s running whereas a bill of materials, and the health of individual clusters; and disaster recovery is a must.

Kubernetes doesn’t do these things, opening the door to an ecosystem of solution vendors and (often CNCF-backed) open source projects. I could drill into these areas Service Mesh, GitOps, orchestration, observability, and backup but the broader point is that they are all evolving and coalescing around the need. As they increase in capability, barriers to adoption reduce and the number of potential use cases grows.

All of which puts the industry at an interesting juncture. It’s not that tooling isn’t ready: organizations are already successfully deploying applications based on Kubernetes. In many cases, however, they are doing more work than they need developers need insider knowledge of target environments, interfaces need to be integrated rather than using third-party APIs, higher-order management tooling (such as AIOps) has to be custom-deployed rather than recognising the norms of Kubernetes operations.

Solutions do exist, but they tend to be coming from relatively new vendors that are feature rather than platform players, meaning that end-user organisations have to choose their partners wisely, then build and maintain development and management platforms themselves rather than using pre-integrated tools from a singe vendor.

None of this is a problem per se, but it does create overheads for adopters, even if they gain earlier benefits from adopting the Kubernetes model. The value of first-mover advantage has to be weighed against that of investing time and effort in the current state of tooling: as a travel company once told me, “we want to be the world’s best travel site, not the world’s best platform engineers.”

So, Kubernetes may be inevitable, but equally, it will become simpler, enabling organisations to apply the architecture to an increasingly broad set of scenarios. For organisations yet to make the step towards Kubernetes, now may still be a good time to run a proof of concept though in some ways, that sip has sailed perhaps focus the PoC on what it means for working practices and structures, rather than determining whether the concepts work at all.

Meanwhile and perhaps most importantly, now is a very good moment for organisations to look for what scenarios Kubernetes works best “out of the box”, working with providers and reviewing architectural patterns to deliver proven results against specific, high-value needs these are likely to be by industry and by the domain (I could dig into this, but did I mention that I’m sitting on a plane? ;) ).

KubeCon Europe summary – Kubernetes might be a done deal, but that doesn’t mean it should be adopted wholesale before some of the peripheral detail is ironed out.

August 2022

08-05 – Achieve more with GigaOm

Achieve more with GigaOm

As we have grown substantially over the past two years. We are often asked who (even) is GigaOm, what the company does, how it differentiates, and so on. These are fair questions—many people still remember what we can call GigaOm 1.0, that fine media company born of the blogging wave.

We’ve been through the GigaOm 2.0 “GigaOm analyst firm” phase before deciding we wanted to achieve more. That decision put us on a journey to where we are today, ten times the size in headcount and still growing, and covering as many technology categories as the biggest analyst firms.

Fuelling our growth has been a series of interconnected decisions. First, we asked technology decision-makers —CIOs, CTOs, VPs of Engineering and Operations, and so on—what they needed and what was missing: unanimously, they said they needed strategic technical information based on practical experience, that is, not just theory. Industry analysts, it has been said, can be like music critics who have never played in an orchestra. Sure, there’s a place for that, but it leaves a gap for practitioner-led insights.

Second, building on this, we went through a test-and-learn phase to try various report models. Enrico Signoretti, now our VP of Product, spearheaded the creation of the Key Criteria for table stakes and the GigaOm Radar report pair based on his experience in evaluating solutions for enterprise clients. As we developed this product set in collaboration with end-user strategists, we doubled down on the Key Criteria report as a how-to guide for writing a Request For Proposals.

Doing this led to the third strand, expanding this thinking to the enterprise decision-making cycle. Technology decision-makers don’t wake up one morning and say, “I think I need some Object Storage.”

Rather, they will be faced with a challenge, a situation, or some other scenario – perhaps existing storage products are not scaling sufficiently, applications are being rationalized, or a solution has reached the end of life. These scenarios dictate a need: often, the decision maker will need to define a response and then have to justify the spending.

This reality dictates the first product in the GigaOm portfolio, the GigaBrief, which is (essentially) a how-to guide for writing a business case. Once the decision maker has confirmed the budget, they can write an RFP leveraging the GigaOm Key Criteria and GigaOm Radar), and then consider running a proof of concept (PoC).

We have a how-to guide for these as well, based on our Benchmarks, field tests, and Business Technology Impact (BTI) reports. We know that, alongside thought leadership, decision-makers need hard numbers for costs and benefits, so we double down on these.

For end-user organizations, our primary audience, we have created a set of tools to make decisions and unblock deployments: our subscribers come to us for clarity and practitioner-led advice, which helps them work faster and smarter and achieve their goals more effectively. Our research is high-impact by design, which is why we have an expanding set of partner organizations using it to enable their clients.

Specifically, learning companies such as Pluralsight and A Cloud Guru use GigaOm reports to help subscribers set direction and lock down the solutions they need to deliver. By its nature, our how-to approach to report writing has created a set of strategic training tools which directly feed more specific technical training.

Meanwhile, channel partners and professional services companies such as Ingram Micro and Transformation Continuum use our research to help their clients lock down the solutions they need, together with a practitioner-led starting point for supporting frameworks, architectures, and structures. And we work together with media partners like The Register and The Channel Company to support their audiences with research and insights.

Technology vendors also benefit from end-user decision-makers who are better equipped to make decisions. Rather than generic market-making or long-listing potential vendors, our scenario-led materials directly impact buying decisions, taking procurement from a shortlist to a conclusion. Sales teams at systems, service, and software companies tell us how they use our reports when discussing options with prospects, not to evangelize but to explore practicalities and help conclude.

All these reasons and more enable us to say with confidence how end-user businesses, learning, channel and media companies, and indeed technology vendors are achieving more with GigaOm research. In a complex and constantly evolving landscape, our practitioner- and scenario-led approach brings specificity and clarity, helping organizations reach further, work faster and deliver more.

Our driving force is the value we bring; at the same time, we maintain a connection with our media heritage, which enables us to scale beyond traditional analyst models. We also continue to learn, reflect, and change — our open and transparent model welcomes feedback from all stakeholders so that we can drive improvements in our products, our approach, and our outreach.

This is to say, if you have any thoughts, questions, raves, or rants, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me directly. The Jon Collins virtual door, and my calendar, are always open.

08-30 – Five Top Tips for Radar Briefings

Five Top Tips for Radar Briefings

Inspired by Harley Manning’s excellent advice on vendor briefings for evaluations, I thought I would document some of my recent experiences. Let’s be realistic: GigaOm is not the gorilla in the analyst market. Plus, we have some curious differences from other analyst firms — not least that we major in practitioner-led evaluation, bringing in an expert rather than (as Chris Mellor points out) “a team of consultants”. Nothing wrong with either approach, as I have said before, they’re just different.

So, what would be my top tips for vendors looking to brief us for a Radar report?

1. Make it technical

At GigaOm we care less about market share or ‘positioning’, and more about what the product or solution actually does. Our process involves considerable up-front effort pulling together, and peer reviewing a research proposal, following which (every time) we produce a Key Criteria report — for subscribers, this offers a how-to guide for writing an RFP.

By the time we’re onto the Radar, we’re mainly thinking, “Does it do the thing, and how well?” If we can get our technical experts in a virtual room with your technical experts, we can all get out of the way. See also: provide a demo.

2. Understand the scoring

Behind GigaOm’s model is a principle that technology commoditizes over time: this year’s differentiating product feature may be next year’s baseline. For this reason, we score against a general level, with two plusses given if a vendor delivers on a feature or quality. A vendor doing better than the rest will gain points (and we say why), and the converse is true. If we’re saying something, we need to be able to defend it — in this case, in the strengths and weaknesses in the report.

3. Make it defensible

Speaking of which, a vendor can make our lives simpler by telling us why a particular feature is better than everyone else’s. Sorry, we’re not looking for an easy ride, but to say what makes something special gives us something to talk about (as opposed to “but everyone thinks so,” etc). Note that customer proof points carry much more weight than general statements — if a customer says it to us directly, we’re far more likely to take it on board.

4. Tell us the scenarios

At GigaOm, we’re scenario-led — which means we’re looking at how technology categories address particular problems. Many vendors solve specific problems particularly well (note, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a top-right shortlist of vendors to suit all needs). Often in briefings, I ask ‘magic’ questions like, “Why do your customers love you?” which cut through generalist website hype and focus on where the solution is particularly strong.

5. Focus on the goal

A Radar briefing shouldn’t be perceived as a massive overhead — we want to know what your product does, not how well your media-trained speakers can present. Once done, our experts will be able to complete their work, then run the resulting one-pager back past you for a fact check. For sure, we’d love as much information as you can provide, and we have an extensive set of questionnaires for that purpose.

I’ve just flicked back through Harley’s ten points, and there’s a lot in there about being respectful, aiming to hit dates, not arguing over every judgment, and so on. Wise words, which we get just as often, I wager. I also recognize that even as we have published schedules, methodologies, planned improvements, and so on, you also have your own challenges and priorities.

All of this means that together, our primary goals should be effectiveness, such that we are presenting you, the vendor, correctly with respect to the category, and efficiency, in that a small amount of effort in the right places can benefit all of us. Which probably means, let’s talk.

November 2022

11-09 – A Ray of Hope for Getting Into the Tech Industry

A Ray of Hope for Getting Into the Tech Industry

At the end of last week, I was fortunate to be attending Pluralsight’s EXP executive event in London. In case you don’t know, Pluralsight is an online courses provider offering cloud computing courses to budding programmers, network and security engineers, cloud architects, and in general, helping people break into tech — the company is also a GigaOm partner as, ultimately, a lot of what we do is building tech skills amongst technology decision makers.

The event wasn’t about deep tech but rather the nature of learning in technology-related disciplines — for example, speakers included BT’s Director of Leadership, Learning, Talent, and Diversity, Wendy James. In the midst of it, all were presented some stats about the need for technology-based talent in the UK and beyond — in the simplest terms possible; we’re short of it. Like, seriously short. There are 500,000 jobs in tech vacancies in the UK alone, and that’s likely to increase.

Mixed news for the tech industry perhaps — but thinking more broadly, just an hour after Wendy spoke, the Bank of England predicted the longest recession the UK has ever had, plus a rapid increase in unemployment. We have an online training company, a shortfall of skills, and an increasing number of people with no work. Now, I’m not the smartest person in the street, but even I can put two and two together and make something of this.

For sure, an opportunity exists for someone recently handed their papers to reskill and join the ranks of gainfully employed tech stars. But of course, it isn’t as simple as saying, “Oh dear, I’ve just lost my job; I know I’ll become an expert data scientist.” Neither is it inconceivable: across tech are tasks that would suit more administrative types or managers, people-facing and back-room roles, deeply nerdy engineers, and equally passionate creative brains.

And indeed, this doesn’t have to be all about tech. Wendy James pointed out that tech skills weren’t necessarily the hardest to acquire. Rather, it was softer, people-oriented abilities that needed more effort. Now, you could debate this point, but please do debate it with Wendy, who is working on this challenge day in, and day out.

I remember working with a neighbor who had been made redundant from their manual labor job a few years ago. Could he work in tech? He asked me. We talked about it, and shortly afterward, he applied to electronics retailer Dixons to join one of their tech support training schemes. He got in and never looked back.

He wasn’t young (he’s retired now), but sure, he was self-motivated, which helped. Equally, the bar to entry can be lower than you think — the ability to check a computer’s configuration or wire up a cable is already good, as is the ability to follow a standard set of instructions. I’m reminded of how Carphone Warehouse used to build training aids directly into their customer service scripts. Perhaps they still do.

I don’t want to be in any way patronizing, but all of this is to say you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work in the tech world. It’s a bit like people who say, “I can’t sing,” even though singing is a fundamental human ability; similarly, saying, “I’m not technical enough,” is unlikely to be true in the real, multifaceted world of IT that now exists.

The opportunity is there. (Of course) it’s not as straightforward as deciding to retrain those made redundant with a new set of skills. Employers should stop hoping they will get fully formed programmers, network engineers, and Helpdesk staff and instead start looking at what the people can bring at a human level with soft skills. Then, bring in technical skills as part of a development program.

And equally, the industry should do what it can to demystify many tech-related areas. Programming, for example, requires a certain set of skills that may be (understandably) unfamiliar but can nevertheless be made fully approachable. Writing programs, or indeed reading them, isn’t that different from creating or reading recipes — if you can follow Gordon Ramsay, chances are you can make sense of reasonably-written computer code.

Perhaps it’s not for you but never say never — if you’ve been made redundant and don’t believe that you have what it takes to work an entry-level cloud or software development job, try testing that assumption with a more technical friend or colleague. Just as my neighbor did years ago, a simple question could be all it takes to get your foot in the door with a fulfilling and long-lasting career in tech.

11-09 – Now’s the Moment to be Thinking About Sovereign Cloud

Now’s the Moment to be Thinking About Sovereign Cloud

Sovereign Cloud was one of VMware’s big announcements at its annual VMware Explore Europe conference this year. Not that the company was announcing the still-evolving notion of sovereignty, but what it calls “sovereign-ready solutions.” Data sovereignty is the need to ensure data is managed according to local and national laws. This has always been important, so why has it become a thing now if it wasn’t three years ago?

Perhaps some of the impetus comes from General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR compliance), or at least the limitations revealed since its arrival in 2016. It isn’t possible to define a single set of laws or regulations around data that can apply globally. Different countries have different takes on what matters, move at different rates, and face different challenges. “Sovereignty was not specific to EMEA region but driven by it,” said Joe Baguley, EMEA CTO for VMware.

GDPR requirements are a subset of data privacy and protection requirements, but increasingly, governments are defining their own or sticking with what they already have. Some countries favor more stringent rules (Germany and Ghana spring to mind), and technology platforms need to be able to work with a multitude of policies rather than enforcing just one.

Enter the sovereign cloud, which is accelerating as a need even as it emerges as something concrete that organizations can use. In terms of the accelerating need, enterprises we speak to are talking of the increasing challenges faced when operating across national borders — as nations mature digitally, it’s no longer an option to ignore local data requirements.

At the same time, pressure is increasing. “Most organizations have a feeling of a burning platform,” remarked Laurent Allard, head of Sovereign Cloud EMEA for VMware. As well as regulation, the threat of ransomware is highly prevalent, driving a need for organizations to respond. Equally less urgent but no less important is the continuing focus on digital transformation — if ransomware is a stick, so transformation offers the carrot of opportunity.

Beyond these technical drivers is the very real challenge of rapidly shifting geopolitics. The conflict in Ukraine has caused irrecoverable damage to the idea that we might all get along, sharing data and offering services internationally without risk of change. Citizens and customers—that’s us—need a cast iron guarantee that the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data will be protected even as the world changes. And it’s not just about people—industrial and operational data subjects also need to be considered.

It is worth considering the primary scenarios to which data protection laws and sovereignty need to apply. The public sector and regulated industries have broader constraints on data privacy, so organizations in these areas may well see the need to have “a sovereign cloud” within which they operate. Other organizations may have certain data classes that need special treatment and see sovereign cloud architecture as a destination for these. And meanwhile, multinational companies may operate in countries that impose specific restrictions on small yet important subsets of data.

Despite the rapidly emerging need, the tech industry is not yet geared up to respond — not efficiently, anyway. I still speak to some US vendors who scratch their heads when the topic arises (though the European Data Act and other regulatory moves may drive more interest). Hyperscalers, in particular, are tussling with how to approach the challenge, given that US law already imposes requirements on data wherever it may be in the world.

“These are early days when it comes to solutions,” says Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP of Cloud Provider Solutions at VMware, “There is no standard for sovereign clouds.” Developing such a thing will not be straightforward, as (given the range of scenarios) solutions cannot be one-size-fits-all. Organizations must define infrastructure and data management capabilities that fit their own needs, considering how they move data and in which jurisdictions they operate.

VMware has made some headway in this, defining a sovereign cloud stack with multiple controls, e.g., on data residency — it’s this which serves as a basis for its sovereign-ready solutions. “There’s work to be done. We’re not done yet,” says Sumit Dhawan, President of VMware. This work cannot exist in isolation, as the whole point of the sovereign cloud is that it needs to work across what is today a highly complex and distributed IT environment, whatever the organization’s size.

Sure, it’s a work in progress, but at the same time, enterprises can think about the scenarios that matter to them, as well as the aforementioned carrot and stick. While the future may be uncertain, we can all be sure that we’ll need to understand our data assets and classify them, set policies according to our needs and the places where we operate, and develop our infrastructures to be more flexible and policy-driven.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that enterprises need a chief sovereignty officer, but they should indeed be embedding the notion of data sovereignty into their strategic initiatives, both vertically (as a singular goal) and horizontally as a thread running through all aspects of business and IT. “What about data sovereignty aspects” should be a bullet point on the agenda of all digital transformation activity — sure, it is not a simple question to answer, but it is all the more important because of this.

11-15 – Can low code process automation platforms fix healthcare?

Can low code process automation platforms fix healthcare?

I was lucky enough to sit down with Appian’s healthcare industry lead, Fritz Haimberger. Fritz is someone who practices what he preaches — outside of his day job, he still spare-times as a medic and a firefighter in his hometown of Franklin, Tennessee (just outside Nashville). I’ve been lucky enough to work with various healthcare clients over the years, from hospitals to pharmaceutical firms and equipment manufacturers; I’ve also been involved in GigaOm’s low code tools and automation platforms reports. So, I was interested in getting his take on how this space has evolved since I last had my sleeves rolled up back in 2016.

While we talked about a wide range of areas, what really caught my attention was the recognized, still huge, challenge being faced by healthcare organizations across the globe.  “If you look at healthcare over 15 years, starting with electronic medical record systems — for so long, we’ve had a continued expectation that those implementations might cost 500 million dollars and might be implemented in 14-16 months. Reality has never been like that: repeatedly, it’s been three years down the road, a billion dollars plus in expense, sometimes with no end in sight,” said Fritz. “The notion of implementation time to value was blown away, and organizations resigned themselves to think that it’s just not possible to deliver in a timely manner.”

In part, this comes from legacy tech, but equally, it is down to underestimating the scale of the challenge. When I was working on clinical pathways for Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT), what started as a simple series of steps inevitably grew in complexity — what about if the patient was already being treated on other drugs? What if blood tests returned certain, conflicting information? So many of these questions rely on information stored in the heads of clinicians, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and so on.

The resulting impact is not only on data models and systems functionality but also the way in which information needs to be gathered. Keeping in mind that healthcare scenarios must, by their nature, be risk averse, it’s not possible to build a prototype via “fail fast” or “test and learn” — real patient lives may be involved. So, how can healthcare organizations square the circle between addressing unachievable expectations without having the “do it quick and cheap” option?

Enter low code app development, integration, process, and other forms of automation development platforms. Let’s work back from the clichéd trick in the tale and agree that it won’t be a magic digital transformation bullet. You only have to look at a technical architecture map of the NHS to realize that you’d need an entire squadron of magic rockets to even dent the surface. But several elements of the low code process automation platform approach (okay, a bit of a mouthful, so I’ll stick with automation platforms from here) map onto the challenges faced by healthcare organizations in a way that might actually make a difference.

First off, the low code development platforms are not looking to either directly replace or just integrate between existing systems. Rather, and given their heritage, they are aimed at accessing existing data to respond to new or changing needs. There’s an industry term – “land and expand” – which is largely about marketing but also helps from a technical perspective: unlike historical enterprise applications, which required organizations to adopt and adapt their processes (at vast cost), the automation platform approach is more about solving specific challenges first, then broadening use — without imposing external constraints on related development processes.

Second, the nature of software development with automation platforms plays specifically to the healthcare context. Whilst the environment is absolutely safety critical, it’s also very complex, with a lot of knowledge in the heads of health care professionals… This plays to a collaborative approach, one way or another — clinicians need to be consulted at the beginning of a project but also along the way as clinical needs emerge. “The tribal knowledge breakdown is huge,” said Fritz. “With platforms such as Appian, professional developers, clinicians, and business owners can better collaborate on custom applications, so it’s bespoke to what they’re trying to achieve, in a quick iterative process.” Not only does this cut initial time to value down considerably – Fritz suggested 12-14 weeks – but also, it’s along the process that complexity emerges, and hence can be treated.

Automation platforms align with the way it is possible to do things, but at the same time, they are, inherently platforms. This brings to a third pillar that they can bake in the capabilities healthcare organizations need without having to be bespoke — security hardening, mobile deployment, healthcare compliance, API-based integration, and so on. From experience, I know how complex these elements can be if either relying on other parts of the healthcare architecture or having to build bespoke or buy separately — the goal is to reduce the complexity of custom apps and dependencies rather than creating them.

Perhaps automation platforms can, at the very least, unlock and unblock opportunities to make technology work for key healthcare stakeholders, from upper management to nursing staff and everyone in between. Of course, they can’t work miracles; you will also need to keep on top of your application governance — thinking generally, automation platforms aren’t always the best at version controls, configuration and test management, and other ancillary activity.

Above all, when the platforms do what they do best, they are solving problems for people by creating new interfaces onto existing data and delivering new processes. “Honestly— if I’m looking at the individual, whether it’s a patient in clinical treatment, a life sciences trial participant or an insured member – if we’re improving their health outcomes, and easing the unnecessary burden on clinicians, scientists and others, that’s what makes it worthwhile putting two feet on the floor in the morning and coming to work for Appian!”

Yes, platforms can help, but most of all, this is about recognizing that solving for business users is the answer: with this mindset, perhaps healthcare organizations really can start moving towards dealing with their legacy technical challenges to the benefit of all.

11-30 – Time Is Running Out For The “Journey To The Cloud”

Time Is Running Out For The “Journey To The Cloud”

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Cloud is all, correct? Just as all roads lead to Rome, so all information technology journeys inevitably result in everything being, in some shape or form, “in the cloud.” So we are informed, at least: this journey started back in the mid 2000s, as application service providers (ASPs) gave way to various as-a-service offerings, and Amazon launched its game-changing Elastic Compute Cloud service, EC2.

A decade and a half later, and we’re still on the road – nonetheless, the belief system that we’re en-route to some technologically superior nirvana pervades. Perhaps we will arrive one day at that mythical place where everything just works at ultra scale, and we can all get on with our digitally enabled existences. Perhaps not. We can have that debate, and in parallel, we need to take a cold, hard look at ourselves and our technology strategies.

This aspirational-yet-vague approach to technological transformation is not doing enterprises (large or small) any favors. To put it simply, our dreams are proving expensive. First, let’s consider what is a writ (in large letters) in front of our eyes.

Cloud costs are out of control

For sure, it is possible to spin up a server with a handful of virtual coppers, but this is part of the problem. “Cloud cost complexity is real,” wrote Paula Rooney for CIO.com earlier this year, in five words summarising the challenges with cloud cost management strategies – that it’s too easy to do more and more with the cloud, creating costs without necessarily realizing the benefits.

We know from our FinOps research the breadth of cost management tools and services arriving on the scene to deal with this rapidly emerging challenge to manage cloud cost.

(As an aside, we are informed by vendors, analysts, and pundits alike that the size of the cloud market is growing – but given the runaway train that cloud economics has become, perhaps it shouldn’t be. One to ponder.)

Procurement models for many cloud computing services, SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, are still often based around pay-per-use, which isn’t necessarily compatible with many organizations’ budgeting mechanisms. These models can be attractive for short-term needs but are inevitably more expensive for the longer term. I could caveat this with “unless accompanied by stringent cost control mechanisms,” but evidence across the past 15 years makes this point moot.

One option is to move systems back in-house. As per a discussion I was having with CTO Andi Mann on LinkedIn, this is nothing new; what’s weird is that the journey to the cloud is always presented as one-way, with such events as the exception. Which brings us to a second point that we are still wed to the notion that the cloud is a virtual place to which we shall arrive at some point.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t. Instead, technology options will continue to burst forth, new ways of doing things requiring new architectures and approaches. Right now, we’re talking about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud models. But, let’s face it, the world isn’t “moving to multi-cloud” or hybrid cloud: instead, these are consequences of reality.

“Multi-cloud architecture” does not exist in a coherent form; rather, organizations find themselves having taken up cloud services from multiple providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and so on—and are living with the consequences.

Similarly, what can we say about hybrid cloud? The term has been applied to either cloud services needing to integrate with legacy applications and data stores; or the use of public cloud services together with on-premise, ‘private’ versions of the same. In either case, it’s a fudge and an expensive one at that.

Why expensive? Because we are, once again, fooling ourselves that the different pieces will “just work” together. At the risk of another spoiler alert, you only have to look at the surge in demand for glue services such as integration platforms as a service (iPaaS). These are not cheap, particularly when used at scale.

Meanwhile, we are still faced with that age-old folly that whatever we are doing now might in some way replace what has gone before. I have had this conversation so many times over the decades that the task is to build something new, then migrate and decommission older systems and applications. I wouldn’t want to put a number on it, but my rule of thumb is that it happens less often than it doesn’t. More to manage, not less, and more to integrate and interface.

Enterprise reality is a long way from cloud nirvana

The reality is, despite cloud spend starting to grow beyond traditional IT spend (see above on maybe it shouldn’t, but anyway), cloud services will live alongside existing IT systems for the foreseeable future, further adding to the hybrid mash.

As I wrote back in 2009, “…choosing cloud services [is] no different from choosing any other kind of service. As a result, you will inevitably continue to have some systems running in-house… the result is inevitably going to be a hybrid architecture, in which new mixes with old, and internal with external.”

It’s still true, with the additional factor of the law of diminishing returns. The hyperscalers have monetized what they can easily, amounting to billions of dollars in terms of IT real estate. But the rest isn’t going to be so simple.

As cloud providers look to harvest more internal applications and run them on their own servers, they move from easier wins to the more challenging territory. The fact that, as of 2022, AWS has a worldwide director of mainframe sales is a significant indicator of where the buck stops, but mainframes are not going to give up their data and applications that easily.

And why should they if the costs of migration increase beyond the benefits of doing so, particularly if other options exist to innovate? One example is captured by the potentially oxymoronic phrase ‘Mainframe DevOps’. For finance organizations, being able to run a CI/CD pipeline within a VM inside a mainframe opens the door to real-time anti-fraud analytics. That sounds like innovation to me.

Adding to all this is the new wave of “Edge”. Local devices, from mobile phones to video cameras and radiology machines, are increasingly intelligent and able to process data. See above on technology options bursting forth, requiring new architectures: cloud providers and telcos are still tussling with how this will look, even as they watch it happen in front of their eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots to like about the cloud. But it isn’t the ring to rule them all. Cloud is part of the answer, not the whole answer. But seeing cloud – or cloud-plus – as the core is having a skewing effect on the way we think about it.

The fundamentals of hosted service provision

There are three truths in technology – first, it’s about the abstraction of physical resources; second, it’s about right-sizing the figurative architecture; and third, that it’s about a dynamic market of provisioning. The rest is supply chain management and outsourcing, plus marketing and sales.

The hyperscalers know this, and have done a great job of convincing everyone that the singular vision of cloud is the only show in town. At one point, they were even saying that it was cheaper: AWS’ CEO, in 2015, Andy Jassy, said*: “AWS has such large scale, that we pass on to our customers in the form of lower prices.”

By 2018, AWS was stating, “We never said it was about saving money.” – read into that what you will, but note that many factors are outside the control even of AWS.

“Lower prices” may be true for small hits of variable spending, but it certainly isn’t for major systems or large-scale innovation. Recognizing that pay-per-use  couldn’t fly for enterprise spending, AWS, GCP, and Azure have introduced (varyingly named) notions of reserved instances—in which virtual servers can be paid for in advance over a one- or three-year term.

In major part, they’re a recognition that corporate accounting models can’t cope with cloud financing models; also in major part, they’re a rejection of the elasticity principle upon which it was originally sold.

My point is not to rub any provider’s nose in its historical marketing but to return to my opener – that we’re still buying into the notional vision, even as it continues to fragment, and by doing so, the prevarication is costing end-user enterprises money. Certain aspects, painted as different or cheaper, are nothing of the sort – they’re just managed by someone else, and the costs are dictated by what organizations do with what is provided, not its list price.

Shifting the focus from cloud-centricity

So, what to do? We need a view that reflects current reality, not historical rhetoric or a nirvanic future. The present and forward vision of massively distributed, highly abstracted and multi-sourced infrastructure is not what vendor marketing says it is. If you want proof, show me a single picture from a hyperscaler that shows the provider living within some multi-cloud ecosystem.

So, it’s up to us to define it for them. If enterprises can’t do this, they will constantly be pulled off track by those whose answers suit their own goals.

So, what does it look like? In the major part, we already have the answer – a multi-hosted, highly fragmented architecture is, and will remain the norm, even for firms that major on a single cloud provider. But there isn’t currently an easy way to describe it.

I hate to say it, but we’re going to need a new term. I know, I know, industry analysts and their terms, eh? But when Gandalf the Grey became Gandalf the White, it meant something. Labels matter. The current terminology is wrong and driving this skewing effect.

Having played with various ideas, I’m currently majoring in multi-platform architecture – it’s not perfect, I’m happy to change it, but it makes the point.

A journey towards a more optimized, orchestrated multi-platform architecture is a thousand times more achievable and valuable than some figurative journey to the cloud. It embraces and encompasses migration and modernization, core and edge, hybrid and multi-hosting, orchestration and management, security and governance, cost control, and innovation.

But it does so seeing the architecture holistically, rather than (say) seeing cloud security as somehow separate to non-cloud security or cloud cost management any different to outsourcing cost optimization.

Of course, we may build things in a cloud-native manner (with containers, Kubernetes and the like), but we can do so without seeing resulting applications as (say, again) needing to run on a hyperscaler, rather than a mainframe. In the multi-platform architecture, all elements being first class citizens even if some are older than others.

That embraces the breadth of the problem space and isn’t skewed towards an “everything will ultimately be cloud,” nor a “cloud is good, the rest is bad,” nor a “cloud is the norm, edge is the exception” line. It also puts paid to any idea of the distorted size of the cloud market. Cloud economics should not exist as a philosophy, or at the very least, it should be one element of FinOps.

There’s still a huge place for the hyperscalers, whose businesses run on three axes – functionality, engineering, and the aforementioned cost. AWS has always sought to out-function the competition, famous for the number of announcements it would make at re:Invent each year (and this year’s data-driven announcements are no exception). Engineering is another definitive metric of strength for a cloud provider, wrapping scalability, performance and robustness into the thought of: is it built right?

And finally, we have the aforementioned cost. There’s also a place for spending on cloud providers, but cost management should be part of the Enterprise IT strategy, not locking the stable door after the rather expensive and hungry stallion has bolted.

Putting multi-platform IT strategy into the driving seat

Which brings to the conclusion – that such a strategy should be built on the notion of a multi-platform architecture, not a figurative cloud. With the former, technology becomes a means to an end, with the business in control. With the latter, organizations are essentially handing the keys to their digital kingdoms to a third party (and help yourself to the contents of the fridge while you are there).

If “every company is a software company,” they need to recognize that software decisions can only be made with a firm grip on infrastructure. This boils down to the most fundamental rule of business – which is to add value to stakeholders. Entire volumes have been written about how leaders need to decide where this value is coming from and dispense with the rest (cf Nike and manufacturing vs branding, and so on and so on).

But this model only works if “the rest” can be delivered cost-effectively. Enterprises do not have a tight grip on their infrastructure providers, a fact that hyperscalers are content to leverage and will continue to do so as long as end-user businesses let them.

Ultimately, I don’t care what term is adopted. But we need to be able to draw a coherent picture that is centred on enterprise needs, not cloud provider capabilities, and it’ll really help everybody if we all agree on what it’s called. To stick with current philosophies is helping one set of organizations alone. However, many times, they reel out Blockbuster or Kodak as worst-case examples (see also: we’re all still reading books).

Perhaps, we are in the middle of a revolution in service provision. But don’t believe for a minute that providers only offering one part of the answer have either the will or ability to see beyond their own solutions or profit margins. That’s the nature of competition, which is fine. But it means that enterprises need to be more savvy about the models they’re moving towards, as cloud providers aren’t going to do it for them.

To finish on one other analyst trick, yes, we need a paradigm shift. But one which maps onto how things are and will be, with end-user organizations in the driving seat. Otherwise, their destinies will be dictated by others, even as enterprises pick up the check.

*The full quote, from Jassy’s 2015 keynote, is: “There’s 6 reasons that we usually tell people, that we hear most frequently. The first is, if you can turn capital expense to a variable expense, it’s usually very attractive to companies. And then, that variable expense is less than what companies pay on their own – AWS has such large scale, that we pass on to our customers in the form of lower prices.”

December 2022

12-20 – How GitOps is Driving Cloud Native at Scale

How GitOps is Driving Cloud Native at Scale

GitOps is great, isn’t it? What’s that, I hear you ask. Simply put, in these days, where all infrastructure can be virtualized, GitOps is about managing information about what that needs to look like (written as a text file), alongside the application that’s going to run on it. Hold onto that word ‘managing’.

The concept of infrastructure-as-code managed in the same way as software code may be simple, but its consequences are powerful. Thence GitOps, the term coined by Alexis Richardson, CEO, and co-founder at Weaveworks: ‘git’ being the code repository of choice for cloud-native applications, and ‘ops’ because, well, isn’t everything about that these days?

Weaveworks’ own GitOps workflow solution, FluxCD, has just graduated from the incubator factory that is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – no mean feat given the hoops through which it will have had to jump. “We had security auditors all over the code,” said Alexis when I caught up with him about it.

FluxCD is not the only kid on the block: ArgoCD for example, led by teams at Intuit, Codefresh, and others, has also achieved CNCF graduation. Two competing solutions aren’t a problem – they work in different ways and suit different use cases.

And what of those powerful consequences? Well. Driving GitOps work is the clear-and-present need, to manage configuration data in massively distributed, potentially highly change-able application environments. In the increasingly containerized space of cloud-native applications, this same driver spawned the existence of orchestration engines such as DockerSwarm and Kubernetes, as well as the need for cloud observability tooling – a.k.a. how the heck do we identify a problem when we don’t even know where our software is running?

In the cloud native space, this generally means that any applications that have achieved their goals of delivering at scale – cue examples that follow the Netflix architecture – need to keep on top of how they deploy their software and then how they manage it at the same scale. Do so and you can achieve great things.

For example, the manifestation of all three is vital to scenarios such as machine to machine communications and driverless cars. In the telecoms space, in which the latest generation of wireless (5G) is cloud-native by design, the ability to deliver software and configuration updates in parallel and at scale only becomes possible by adopting such principles as GitOps. “You can update forty thousand telco towers without touching them. That just wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” remarks Alexis, referring to Weaveworks’ partnership with Deutsche Telekom.

GitOps is neat. However, there’s a lot to unpack in the phrase “manage configuration data” from the fifth paragraph above: this isn’t all about moving left to right, from application/infrastructure design to deployment and then into operations. Close to my heart, and something I’ve written about before is an issue at the heart of all things DevOps – that, in our drive to innovate at speed, we have sacrificed our ability to manage what we have created.

This inability to close the DevOps infinity loop can be likened to a firehose spluttering out trace data, incident reports, user experience metrics and the like, showering the development side of the house with bits and pieces of information without any real prioritization or controls. It’s a mess, often meaning (I am told, anecdotally) that developers don’t know what to work on next in terms of fixes, so they just get on with what they were going to do anyway, such as new functionality.

Elsewhere I’ve talked about the governance gap between innovation strategy (“Let’s build some cloud native stuff”) and delivery. It’s a reason why I latched onto Value Stream Management early on as a way of building visibility across the pipeline; it’s also why I was keen to learn more about Atlassian’s move squarely into the IT service management space.

GitOps solves for the governance gap, not by adding dashboards and controls – at least, not by themselves. Rather, a fundamental principle of GitOps is that configuration information is pushed in the same way as code and then not tampered with post-deployment, unless it can’t be helped.

These two concepts are enshrined in the heart of GitOps tooling, as otherwise it’s just stuff that I bet looks good on a whiteboard. From the Open GitOps site, the full set of principles is as follows:

1. Declarative – a system needs to be documented in advance through declared statements rather than having to discern the system from its runtime configuration

2. Versioned and Immutable – this is the bit about storing these infrastructure declarations alongside application code, in a version-controlled repository such as git.

3. Pulled Automatically – now we’re talking about how the desired system is always built based on its declared configuration rather than by tinkering.

4. Continuously Reconciled. This is the coolest and most important bit – if you do go and tweak the runtime configuration, the tooling should detect the change, and trigger a fix.