Uitdaging voor de gevestigde (waan)orde.

Uitdaging voor de gevestigde (waan)orde.
COMPUTABLE EXPERT Andre Salomons
Directeur/CIO
Expert van Computable voor het topic Cloud Computing
Meer Hoewel hier ook wanorde had kunnen staan, denk ik dat het beter past bij de situatie van vandaag de dag. De gevestigde orde van managers, kenniswerkers en anderen moet vanuit de management directieven natuurlijk gevestigd zijn op een aantal zaken zoals output, sales, productiviteit en efficiency.

Er is dan ook niemand die de huidige, onder hoge druk staande, overgebleven werknemer zal lastig vallen met de vraag of deze vindt dat hij of zij wel efficiënt werkt/kan werken aan de in het intro genoemde doelstellingen. Zelfs mensen , wiens beroep het is om wanorde te voorkomen en risico’s te managen, zoals controllers, risk managers en overige financials zijn niet bezig met het gereedschap waarmee zij orde in de chaos moeten scheppen. Dat terwijl de gehele organisatie vindt dat dit de personen bij uitstek zijn die ervoor moeten zorgen dat ceo en cfo 'in control' kunnen zijn.

Van deze mensen verwacht je, onuitgesproken, dat ze hun boeltje op orde hebben. Dat blijkt in de praktijk een waanidee te zijn, omdat volgens de normen van enkele jaren de boel op orde zou zijn, maar dit met de nieuwe ict-mogelijkheden niet meer aan de orde is. Wanorde zou dan kunnen worden gezegd, maar dat is weer een ander uiterste. De organisatie leeft dan in de waan dat alles op orde is. Er is dan sprake van de zogenaamde waanorde.

Tijd voor tools
Tijd om de echte tools, die orde scheppen in de steeds groter wordende hoeveelheid informatie(infobesitas) eens voor het voetlicht te brengen. Wist u dat iemand die vijf jaar bij dezelfde werkgever werkt gemiddeld zes tot acht muisklikken nodig heeft om een document uit het verleden te zoeken? En dat de kans om het dan te vinden niet eens 100 procent is! Dan hebben we het nog niet eens over het kostenaspect van het niet kunnen vinden van documenten.
Na mijn eerste 365 uren werkzaam te zijn geweest met Office 365 moet ik, van huis uit Financial met ict-kennis, bekennen dat ik ben gaan inzien dat Microsoft hier iets moois heeft neergezet. Sinds april 2011 werken wij met Office 365 en er is nog steeds sprake van Sharendipity, het gevoel dat je ieder dag iets nieuws kunt ontdekken in Office 365. Was het zo dat je met eerdere Sharepoint-versies al de beschikking had over de integratie met office-producten, de online-versie gaat nog een stap verder. Je hebt dan in de enterprise-versie de beschikking over Sharepoint-online, Exchange-online, Lync, Exel , Word, Powerpoint. Je hebt al je bestanden bij de hand en wie zal je missen als je vanuit huis je bestanden bijwerkt en upload?

De eerste maanden van de beta leverde nog al wat performance problemen op, maar gaandeweg richting de officiële launch verbeterde dit door de bijschakeling van resources. We werken nu dagelijks ruim tien uur online en de tijden dat de explorer herstart lijken bijna tot het verleden te horen. Wij merken dat ook de helpdesk van Office 365 op toeren komt en inmiddels veel ervaring heeft opgedaan.

De Sharepoint-online functionaliteit is op grote lijnen dezelfde als in de oude versie, hoewel je van tevoren even moet testen of je Sharepoint-template (wsp) direct op SP 2010 werkt. Niet alle site collection features die in enterprise Sharepoint aanwezig zijn zitten in bijvoorbeeld SharePoint 2010 foundation. Lync is ook prettig om mee te werken, al is het alleen al om de functionaliteit dat je in Outlook een bericht krijgt als je een Lync gesprek hebt gemist.



Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/cloud_computing/4181318/2333364/uitdaging-voor-de-gevestigde-waanorde.html#ixzz1YlA5EUf5

Microsoft betting everything on the cloud

Microsoft betting everything on the cloud

By J. Peter Bruzzese
Created 2011-05-25 03:00AM

Microsoft is putting all of its power behind making its Windows Azure cloud offering stable and flexible. From what I've seen, it looks like this strategy will pay off.

I'm not sure I would have been this confident even six months ago, but compelling use cases highlighted at last week's TechEd conference expanded my sense of what is possible in the cloud. One example, a handheld ultrasound unit that utilized Azure on the back end, allowed technicians to perform ultrasounds with just a slate PC and an ultrasound mic. That kind of portability could benefit people all over the world.

[ Get all the details you need on deploying and using Windows 7 in the InfoWorld editors' 21-page Windows 7 Deep Dive PDF special report. | Stay abreast of key Microsoft technologies in our Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]

But where Microsoft makes its strongest argument for Azure is in its ability to provide solutions that bridge the gap between the public and private cloud. This can be seen in the development of such Microsoft products as Exchange, where you might have some of your mailboxes on-premises and some in the cloud through Office 365. Having the ability to manage both zones and to move mailboxes between them at will is an attractive pull for shops not yet ready to go all-in with hosted messaging.

Microsoft's System Center, code-named Concero, is an intriguing solution along those lines. System Center allows for deployment, management, monitoring, and provisioning of systems, applications, and services of both public and private cloud resources. I'll be discussing this solution in greater detail in a future column as we get closer to a release date.

Technologies like these demonstrate Microsoft's conviction to own the public cloud. I've often joked that Azure (aka "sky-blue") is a tell as to Microsoft's ambitions: It doesn't just want a cloud, it wants to take up the whole sky.

TechEd 2011 beyond the cloud
TechEd also saw a number of intriguing releases. Small Business Server 2011 Standard is the latest flavor of SBS, but the real focus is on Essentials and how it will tie into Office 365. Stay tuned, but suffice to say Microsoft is working on it. Between SBS, Home Server, and a variety of other solutions, I'd say 2011 is the year of the small business.

MultiPoint Server 2011 is another recent release not too many people know about. To date, it has been promoted as a great way to get a classroom up and running with Windows 7 systems as thin clients connected to a terminal services-like server. The server is easy to set up and has tools that allow teachers to control what their students are doing at any given time. A demonstration at TechEd set minds in motion on what else we can do with this box. Disaster relief seems to be an easy fit for something you can just plop down and operate in minutes.

Among the third-party releases that intrigued me, GSX Monitor stood out as a great tool for monitoring Exchange, SharePoint, Domino, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, and more. The real-time monitoring dash was easy to work with. The install is apparently agent-less (for basic reporting), and it has all the reporting and analytic tools you would expect from a monitoring solution.

Another intriguing resource is Spoon.net, which lets you launch applications from the cloud without installing them on your desktop. Enterprises can check out Spoon Server (2011 version due June 6); with it, you can simplify app distribution through your organization via a private cloud.

Also of note was Falafel.com's EventBoard, a mobile app for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 that made navigating TechEd (traditionally a nightmare task regardless of the location) a breeze. You could browse the sessions you wanted to attend, bookmark sessions, rate them afterward, and more. It included maps to help you get to your sessions as well, and frankly, it was better than the booklet issued to the audience. Obviously every conference is different, so organizers have to contact Falafel.com to get the details. But I can see this as a must for any show.

There was much more to report, but this is a taste.

This article, "Microsoft betting everything on the cloud," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese's Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Cloud Computing Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud computing

Online computing: The crowded cloud

Online computing: The crowded cloud
By Richard Waters, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Joseph Menn
Published: June 3 2011 22:30 | Last updated: June 3 2011 22:30


You want to send the photograph you’ve just taken to a relative but find you don’t know how to get it off your phone. You have work to finish at home this weekend – but the file you need is inaccessible, stuck on the hard drive in the office. That track you want to play in the car? It’s on the iPod, which you’ve left at home.

Such frustrations are increasingly a feature of everyday life. As the devices on which to view, work on or listen to digital data proliferate, a chasm has opened up between their liberating possibilities and the practical realities. Organising a growing mountain of personal information and media has become, in many instances, a chore.

Much personal information already lives online, whether on social networks such as Facebook, or on e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. But the full potential of an online existence – a life spent in “the cloud”, to use the technology industry’s latest terminology – remains unfulfilled.

It is into this half-formed world that Steve Jobs, the consumer tech industry’s most closely watched taste maker, is about to step. On Monday, the Apple chief executive will appear at the US company’s annual developer conference to show off the latest software advances. Among them: the iCloud.

The details, as with all Apple announcements, are subject to intense speculation in the tech and media industries. The iPod, iPhone and iPad have transformed the company’s fortunes in the past decade. Expectations are now high that Mr Jobs will apply his knack for creating highly intuitive consumer technology to the problems of managing digital information across multiple devices.

Even before Mr Jobs takes the stage in San Francisco, at least one important element is clear. All four major music labels have signed up to iCloud, to allow customers of Apple’s iTunes store to listen to digital music they already own directly over the internet rather than downloading it to each of their devices separately.

The iCloud brand, however, has already stirred up bigger expectations than this. Many in the industry hope Mr Jobs will confer Apple’s seal of approval on an approach to online computing that other tech companies have pushed far more aggressively, though with mixed success.

“Apple adopting the word ‘cloud’ as central to what they are doing is very helpful to us,” says Steve Perlman, a former Apple executive and now head of an online gaming company.

The move will also sharpen growing competition between a handful of internet companies racing to stake out the medium. Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, said this week that a “Gang of Four” was setting the pace, with Apple, Amazon and Facebook joining the search company in redefining how consumers use digital technology.

Yet despite Mr Jobs’ outsized influence in consumer technology, he is anything but a leader when it comes to the cloud. Services such as Spotify in Europe and Pandora in the US have set the pace by enabling listeners to stream music, listening over the internet without downloading.

Apple has also fallen behind in bringing video to the web. US-based services such as Netflix and Hulu have proved more successful in getting movies and television shows to a large online audience.

In other services, too, Apple is lagging behind. From Facebook’s dominance of social networking to Google’s online document, photo-sharing and Gmail services, consumers have learnt to entrust large amounts of personal data to other online companies.

According to advocates, the next phase of the consumer cloud has an overpowering appeal: the convenience that comes from making all types of digital content available on any device. This attraction has so far outweighed concerns about the potential risks to privacy and security arising from letting personal data flow far beyond the user’s own hard drive.

“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I wish I had more stuff in the cloud,’ ” says Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Live and Internet Explorer businesses. “But if you tell them they can [gain access to] it on all their PCs and phones, then they get it.”

The concept may be simple but it is proving hard to make user-friendly. The crucial thing, says Mr Hall, is to make it easy to “synch” or move data from personal devices into the cloud; connect it with other services a consumer uses; and to make it all accessible from any device. “No one has done that well yet,” says Mr Hall.

Apple has struggled to find a big market for MobileMe, its attempt at synching data between devices. But there is hope in tech circles that Mr Jobs, who has succeeded before in making consumer tech intuitive and easy to use, will again show the way.

The impact is likely to be seen first in media, where content owners feel iTunes accounts that number in excess of 200m give Apple more influence over digital consumers than any rival.

The media industry is poised between hope and anxiety about the cloud, which could herald the latest sweeping change to their customers’ behaviour. On the one hand, executives see it as one of the first products of the digital age with the power to enhance their revenues rather than disrupt them.

“There are only so many movies you can store on your laptop,” said Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, this week. “If we give people the ability to buy a lot more because they can store a lot more ... I think that’s fantastic.”

Sir Howard Stringer, his counterpart at Japanese consumer electronics group Sony, displayed similar optimism last month, telling reporters: “All the big American companies, whether it be Amazon or Apple or Microsoft, recognise that that’s the delivery system that the customer wants.”

More media content companies see the cloud as an opportunity rather than a threat, says Chris Vollmer of the management consultancy Booz & Company. The large cheques Netflix has written for content, the prospect of new distribution markets, and signs cloud services limit piracy have all raised the industry’s hopes, he says.

. . .

The risks of the cloud cast a shadow on industry optimism, however. Sony and users of the network attached to its PlayStation console discovered the threats to security in April, when a hacking attack forced the company to suspend the service.

Furthermore, the full impact of this approach to computing on how consumers will gain access to media, and crucially how they will want to pay – if at all – is as yet only fuzzily understood. One risk, some in the industry say, is that it will accelerate the trend for consumers to rent rather than buy media and entertainment products and services. This has hurt sellers of CDs, DVDs and other physical media. Another big question facing media companies is the influence of a handful of online platform companies over their ability to reach – and charge – their customers.

For now, the scramble by these platforms for content has handed power to the media companies, though. The land grab under way in cloud computing “bodes well” for content owners’ pricing power, says Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Barclays Capital.

One indication is the music industry’s warm reaction to Apple’s pending cloud music service, which has already prompted Amazon and Google to rush out similar services of their own, though they have yet to gain approval from the music industry. Labels and publishers hope to use Apple’s terms, which will give them 70 per cent of iCloud’s music revenues, as a template in negotiations with Amazon and Google.

Shahid Khan of Media­Morph, an industry consultancy, predicts content owners will preserve the upper hand in the cloud, and that platform owners face the bigger problem in making money. Google’s record of alienating content owners would harm its prospects, while the sums Amazon and Netflix must pay for content would make their ambitions “challenging”, he said. Only Apple, with its powerful ecosystem of iPhones, iPads and other devices, was likely to retain its bargaining power.

“Near term, especially in music, Apple sits in a Walmart-like position in terms of its digital retail market leadership,” says Mr Vollmer.

Yet even if this proves correct, Apple still faces a profound challenge to its way of doing business: the desire of consumers to access their media and personal data on any device – whether or not it bears an Apple logo.

And media companies show little willingness to let technology companies use their products to lock consumers into their services. Interoperability between online services is important, said Disney’s Mr Iger, so that consumers will be able to move their libraries from one cloud to another without difficulty.

“If someone wanted to corner a market, and a connected platform, in the long term I think it would be impractical,” says Mr Perlman, whose OnLive games service is one of many upstarts that are gambling on being able to get unrestricted access to consumers on all manner of devices.

As in other areas of consumer technology, however, it would not do to underestimate Apple.

Additional reporting by David Gelles

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

In the clouds with Office 365

Posted by John Stokdyk on Mon, 16/05/2011 - 12:27

Microsoft Office 365 is an evolution of Office 2010 Web Apps that makes four key Office products available via the net: Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus access to the Microsoft SharePoint web portal system and Exchange.

Where Office Live was more of a personal Cloud that gave you access to the Office tools, Office 365 is a corporate environment that, within the beta system at least, will let you cater for and collaborate with up to 25 colleagues.

The Exchange option is particularly interesting if you’re a small company using a standard POP internet service. Exchange gives you the ability to administer and archive all company email in one place and to synchronise diaries and tasks between team members. This is a boon if you haven’t got it, but will require much more careful management if you’ve already made the move to Microsoft Exchange, but want to link into Office 365 too. For example, will you have to decide which acts as the “master” system, and which the slave that synchs into it?

With so many facilities on offer, Office 365 looks like it might be capable of supporting an entire company’s administrative technology needs. However, our IT support crew might get a little touchy about some of the things it lets you do. For their sake, I won’t try to take over administration of our email system. Instead this introductory article will explore what exactly is available and how it works during the initial encounters to give members an idea about whether it’s worth exploring for their own uses.

More coverage on detailed projects and processes you can achieve with Office 365 will follow in the coming months.

As I mentioned to FirstTab, we’ve been keeping a close eye on Windows Live developments in recent years. But I came up against a technical roadblock in Windows Live when I tried to share my hefty Fantasy Football player analyser with colleagues; it was too big to display in a browser Window.

The big test for Office 365 would be to see whether it could cope with this real-world scenario, and if it could support cross-platform access from my partner’s Mac, or from BlackBerry and iPhone devices. It was brilliant to be able to log in from a Mac (using Apple's Safari browser, even) and create a Word document. Unfortunately, when it came to the 33Mb football KPI dashboard, the Office 365 Web App was just as uncomfortable handling it as Office Live.

My first encounter was fraught with a few other frustrations. After going through all the hoops to get a WindowsLive ID and access Windows Office Live in the past, the universal passport doesn’t work with the Office 365, so there’s a new ID and password to remember, plus a new domain the system creates for you @onmicrosoft.com.

What it offers

Home: a base for uploading and sharing documents with up to 25 colleagues; this page is also where they will need to connect their desktop apps to Office 365.
Access to Office Web Apps, including Outlook to manage your email and calendar.
Team Site: a website hosted by Microsoft SharePoint, but incorporating similar design and management tools as the Windows Live web-hosting service.
Lync Online, a unified communciations environment that lets you send and receive instant messages (IM), run peer-to-peer audio and video sessions, and display presence information about team members.
Admin section: for adding and managing users, and accessing Microsoft support resources when you need them.
The Web Apps have fewer menu tabs and options tha the usual desktop Office programs. Excel just has File, Home, and Insert tabs, so there is no access to pivot table tools or macros. If you want full access, there is an "Open in Office" option for each application.

To get full integration with your desktop apps, you need to download and run an Office 365 set up program. If you already have the Office suite installed, this step adds a minor element of duplication but once you have configured the SharePoint component to work with Office 365 it will let you access and work on the documents in your shared web portal.

However, after agreeing to the licence terms, the first stage of the installation started to upgrade my desktop version of Office. Remembering Simon Hurst’s experiences with the beta version of Office 2007, which wiped out his existing Outlook in-tray when he installed it, I decided this was as far as I could take my test drive without consulting the IT support team and the Office 365 user forums.

If you do want your on-premise and on-line Exchange email systems to co-exist, Office 365 has a Custom Plan wizard to help create a custom pilot scenario and deployment plan, so you can test your deployment strategy with a small number of users before rolling it out fully.

My intitial experiences confirmed something that was evident from the outset: if you’re setting out to build an IT infrastructure for your organisation from scratch, Office 365 has a lot going for it. While it will also provide the means to integrate your existing desktop Office programs, documents and email into a Cloud environment, you’ll need to do some careful research and planning to manage the process smoothly.

The Cloud movement has revved up significantly in the past few months, particularly with Google threatening to unleash its operating system-free Chromebook machine, which dispenses with all the administrative overheads. Microsoft has got a stranglehold on desktop users, and Office 365 is designed to keep things that way. If you’re comfortable with the Microsoft conventions, processes and interfaces, it’s a very generously featured suite that should make you more productive on the move, but it remains a monolith that demands your undivided attention.

The nature of fast moving Cloud developments is that there’s always an even better, cleverer and faster solution just around the corner. To put it in the terms we used to use for business and practice applications, Office 365 is very much an “suite” that promises to take care of everything for you. But it’s going against the emerging trend for users to opt for “best of breed” Cloud applications.

Find out more about Office 365 yourself - sign up for the beta test version here.

‘It is a service, not a technology’

‘It is a service, not a technology’
By Charles Batchelor

Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22

Chief executives and finance directors are understandably cautious when the IT industry waxes enthusiastic about the next “breakthrough”.

What are they to make of cloud computing, the latest big technology idea to come to mainstream business attention?

Simply put, cloud computing is the use of off-site servers, routers and databases that are not “owned” by the business, to handle all, or large parts, of a company’s computing needs.

Instead of managing requirements in-house, with all the costs and hassle involved, a company will outsource operations such as e-mails, enterprise resource planning and data storage.

Factories used to generate their own power on-site, but now routinely buy in electricity and gas.

Cloud enthusiasts believe that, in future, companies will buy computer capacity in the same way.

Executives may be unfamiliar with the cloud but many will have been using it for years without realising it.

E-mail providers such as Google, social networking sites including Facebook, and Flickr, an online photo and video-sharing service, are all run from global data centres, many of which are owned by companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.

The e-mails or photographs that appear to be stored on your desk- or laptop are actually held remotely.

The term “cloud” comes from the technical diagrams used to represent telecommunications and computer systems, which traditionally enclosed networks within cloud shapes.

Cloud computing represents a development of previous arrangements such as “managed services”, where a company handed the operation of its IT network to an outside supplier.

It also piggybacks on “virtualisation” technology, which allows users to get more out of their network by squeezing several applications on to a single server.

“Research has shown that [in-house] data centres do not use more than 20 per cent of their capacity,” says Michael Kogeler, director of cloud strategy at Microsoft International.

It was the idea of putting all that unused capacity to work and the growth of the internet that led to the birth of cloud computing.

“The cloud is a service, not a technology,” explains Rupert Chapman, a cloud specialist at PA Consulting. “You only pay for what you use” and access the computer power over the internet.

Cloud computing is sometimes seen as of particular benefit to small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to set up their own IT departments but it is also used by large companies.

It allows businesses of all sizes to acquire computer capacity to launch products and services quickly.

There is little or no capital expenditure involved and costs are based on transactions completed or volume of data stored and should be lower than if managed in-house.

Because the capacity of the cloud is, in theory, unlimited, companies can store far more data and handle far more transactions than might be possible on their in-house system.

They can also back up data on a remote site for security. Because data are not kept in house, they can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, so are available to executives on the move.

Going to the cloud for capacity also means the IT department is not constantly updating servers and software to keep up with technology.

A large cloud provider can also devote more resources to maintaining the security of the network.

“From customers’ perspective there are three ways to use the cloud,” says Mr Chapman.

“They can use it to dip their toe in the water to test an application. If it meets their needs, they can bring it in-house and run it on their own machines. The test environment has traditionally been expensive but one client achieved an 80 per cent cost saving.

“Alternatively, customers can use the cloud on a selective basis for particular services. A market information organisation used a customer relationship management system to suck in just the customer information they needed.”

Finally, companies can take a “transformational” approach, opting to use the cloud for most of their applications, retaining direct control only of those that make a real difference to their organisation. Relatively few companies do this as yet, says Mr Chapman, because they often have a big investment in their legacy systems or are tied into managed service contracts.

Problems companies should watch out for include legal ownership of data, security and the risk of getting locked in to a service provider.

An appropriate contract should resolve ownership issues. Security should be better at a dedicated cloud provider, but hackers have attacked networks and sensitive data should be encrypted in transit and storage. The contract should also allow a customer to change providers easily.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..

The Economics of the Cloud

Computing is undergoing a seismic shift from client/server to the cloud, a shift similar in importance and impact to the transition from mainframe to client/server. Speculation abounds on how this new era will evolve in the coming years, and IT leaders have a critical need for a clear vision of where the industry is heading. We believe the best way to form this vision is to understand the underlying economics driving the long-term trend. In this paper, we will assess the economics of the cloud by using in-depth modeling. We then use this framework to better understand the long-term IT landscape.

Misconceptions about cloud computing

Misconceptions about cloud computing
By Chris Burn and Conrad Thompson
Published: March 3 2011 17:53 | Last updated: March 3 2011 17:53
As the market for cloud computing matures, there is growing awareness of its potential among chief executives and finance directors. However, that awareness tends to be based on three misconceptions: firstly, that the CIO should lead the organisation’s approach to cloud; secondly, that there will be significant legal, security and regulatory obstacles; and thirdly, that the cloud is only about IT cost savings. Each of these is wrong.

First, CIOs cannot give impartial advice on cloud. A business that transfers its IT to the cloud will receive those services in a very different way, and that will almost certainly require a smaller IT department. Speaking recently at the London School of Economics, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that increased use of cloud services could lead to job losses of 10 to15 per cent across the worldwide IT industry.

The shift towards cloud is also creating concern for traditional enterprise IT hardware vendors. Big players are hearing some of their clients talk about adoption of cloud-based IT services at a pace that would devastate their existing hardware revenue streams.

They are responding by offering ‘private cloud’ solutions that play perfectly to typical CIO sensitivities. These private clouds, or pre-integrated units of hardware and software from the same vendor, are very attractive at first glance as they address perceived security and confidentiality risks by keeping the hardware and its management on site. This approach creates the illusion to casual observers that cloud is being adopted but preserves the complexity, and size, of the in-house IT organisation.

Ultimately, however, private cloud deployments do not make any significant impact on how IT services are delivered. These rebranded legacy vendor services only lock the organisation further into proprietary standards and expensive service contracts.

This means CIOs need help to challenge the status quo if they are to secure the full benefits of cloud for their organisations. Unfortunately, that support is unlikely to be provided by the leaders of the security, legal and regulatory departments. These groups will find many reasons why cloud is unlikely to be suitable for their particular needs. Here again the problem is that they cannot give an unbiased perspective. They will know that handing over compliance monitoring or regulatory liaison to an external provider risks their own jobs.

Indeed, solutions based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as salesforce.com, are already eliminating some in-house assurance processes as they are automatically pre-approved. This reflects the efforts of SaaS vendors to acquire independently audited third-party certifications, such as ISO27001, as well as increasing customer maturity and willingness to focus on the particular needs of their business rather than the routine mechanics of information systems.

This does not mean that vendors have all the answers yet. Organisations need to secure assurances about the ability of their cloud suppliers to meet standards and remedy failures but also seek expert guidance to understand the laws and regulations that apply to any service moved to the cloud. This is particularly important for multinationals, those working in regulated industries and those dealing with sensitive data. A careful examination of these requirements will highlight the genuinely difficult areas which may need to be dealt with separately from the main cloud provision.

However, the evidence is that obstacles in these areas can be overcome cost effectively, either by providing a mix of services at different price points or by deferring transfers until vendors and regulatory bodies develop ways of managing the issue.

Having challenged that misconception, business leaders considering moving to the cloud need to challenge the view that it is just about IT cost savings. As Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at salesforce.com, said at a recent IT professional cloud computing conference: “If we talk about cost reduction, the most I can do for you is cut your IT spending by 100 per cent. Then we’re done. If we talk about value creation, I can keep on delivering value with no upper bound. That’s a much more interesting conversation.”

The key strategic driver for cloud cannot be cost alone. Like all IT initiatives, the success of cloud depends not only on getting the technical aspects right, though that is important, it lies in securing the engagement from the business. Cloud can transform the way a business operates, it can stimulate innovation and provide a real competitive edge – but it can only do this if everyone is willing and able to use IT in a different way.

This requires business leaders to reconsider what they need to deliver improvements for their customers. That means going beyond generalities such as greater flexibility or lower cost services. The business needs to focus on more specific requirements, such as how to provide self service customer access to processes buried within complex legacy applications, or how to improve the management of customer relationships through more joined-up access to data that is spread across existing systems.

Companies such as Starbucks have taken this approach and used cloud to drive transformation in customer engagement. They built an online platform in six weeks to facilitate conversations with customers and to generate ‘crowd-sourced’ ideas as to how they could improve services. They received 77,000 ideas and 150,000 comments and are now implementing those with the most votes, including new smoothie flavours and the reintroduction of old biscotti favourites, with the confidence that they have the support of their most loyal customers. A traditional IT-driven approach for a worldwide customer collaboration website would undoubtedly have failed at the business case stage by being prohibitively expensive. However, by leveraging the power of the cloud they enabled a successful, cost effective engagement with their customers.

So it is clear that cloud computing is here to stay and that it can deliver significant IT cost savings and improve the efficiency of IT operations. In order to realise those benefits CIOs will need to go beyond the status-quo and understand their IT organisation will be smaller and more focused. Yet cloud’s true potential lies in its capacity to transform business models and help companies respond to an ever more competitive, fast moving world. It will only do this if business leaders understand that cloud is too important to be left to IT and that it has to excite and engage everyone across the organisation.

Chris Burn is an expert in cloud computing, PA Consulting Group and Conrad Thompson is an expert in IT enabled business change, PA Consulting Group.

For more information visit www.paconsulting.com/smart

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

Guest column: Top issues related to cloud

By Tom DeGarmo
Published: March 1 2011 15:55 | Last updated: March 1 2011 15:55
All the hype that cloud computing has got over the past few years tends to push business leaders into one of two camps: those who love the simplicity and convenience of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, like those supporting sales force automation (let’s put everything in the cloud!) and those who do not believe the false promises from vendors and think cloud computing is not ready for enterprise-class security and business continuity requirements.

The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, and the most rewarding adoption patterns will vary considerably depending on the market and competitive situation individual enterprises are dealing with.

The list below offers a set of issues many enterprises are discovering as they engage with cloud computing. We recommend senior leaders spend a little time “in front of the mirror” and make sure they have not fallen prey to them.

1) Thinking cloud computing is only about public cloud services, or only about transforming internal IT into private clouds.

All the great stories about companies taking advantage of public cloud services leads some enterprises to think the cloud computing opportunity is only about external service providers. But much of the medium term value to be harvested from clouds will come from transforming internal IT by emulating the style of computing defined by these types of external services. This requires a deep appreciation for their differences in architecture, technologies, processes, and differentiating roles for IT staff. In other words, by creating private clouds. But putting all your efforts into private clouds ignores the real value that can be found from the on-demand, limitless capacity of public cloud services and the instant-on availability of applications. The best use of cloud computing is derived by adopting an integrated model, one that transforms internal data centers into private clouds and makes use of external clouds where their value proposition is distinctive.

2) Not anticipating the new challenges created by integrated clouds.

Acknowledging the disruptive opportunity of the integrated cloud model is only the start. Companies that adopt the technologies and external cloud services willy nilly end up recreating a complexity and maintenance challenge that defeats two of the biggest paybacks from cloud investments: business agility and business alignment.

Virtualisation technologies, for example, have already recreated “server sprawl” in its virtual form in situations where staff are able to request new instances of virtual servers without guidance from IT policies or “cleanup” systems in place. Enterprises also need to anticipate the scalability and security challenges of systems integration in cloud environments and the impact that rapid introduction of new metadata from SaaS vendors will have on data management in integrated cloud computing environments.

3) Moving forward without a strategy.

Many companies already have elements of this emerging integrated cloud model in place; they use server and storage virtualisation, they have partially automated the management of the data centre and they use SaaS offerings. Few companies have laid out a vision and strategy for moving to a defined future of integrated clouds. A leading practice is to use a cloud maturity framework so you can proceed logically from assessment of current state to realisation of desired future state. This includes important delineations of the core component parts of this future state. PwC has established a conceptual model of exactly this architecture comprising 7 categories of technology types. By establishing this reference architecture it is possible to define your road map, avoid wasteful spending on solutions that promise “instant clouds” but introduce proprietary technologies that will not fit into the architecture, and establish an order for what comes first. Without a strategic plan of this type it is not obvious whether an individual decision to use a service or technology will get you closer to real benefits of cloud computing — agility and business alignment.

4) Failure to recognise the transformative value of cloud to the business — cloud computing is not just a better way to deliver IT.

The openness and architecture of cloud infrastructure establishes a disruptively powerful business collaboration platform that empowers companies to deeply integrate their business processes with partners. We see this already with Web-centric businesses, such as those in retail and hospitality industries. Without leaving, say, a convention Website, customers can make restaurant reservations or purchase tickets to events. The user has an integrated experience even though the convention, restaurant, and ticket service providers are separate companies. And traditional “bricks and mortar” companies, such as those in financial services, are unbundling functions like risk exposure management that were formerly parts of an integrated offerings and making them available in the cloud as “e-services.” As a result cloud is positioned to transform how we integrate and communicate between businesses. However cloud puts new demands on strategy and governance with its agile applications and infrastructure, far more so than previous generations of IT. Although ERP and CRM have had major impacts on the enterprise the focus has been almost entirely on internal processes. Cloud moves that focus to external business collaboration and integration.

Tom DeGarmo is a principal in PwC’s Advisory Practice and leader of the firm’s U.S. Technology Consulting Solutions Practice

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

What is your IT organisation doing to fuel workers’ passion?

By John Hagel and John Seely Brown

Published: December 7 2010 23:23 | Last updated: December 7 2010 23:23

Passion drives performance. What is your IT organisation doing to fuel passion at every level?

In our opening column, we talked about the decades-long decline in financial performance. Return on assets across all companies have fallen 75 per cent for all public companies in the US since 1965. A profoundly destabilising technology infrastructure is a big part of this transformation.

Another key metric in decline is passion. According to the just-released 2010 Shift Index, four of five workers surveyed are not passionate about their jobs.

Sure, they are working longer hours during the downturn, but that doesn’t mean they are engaged or that they will stick with you when the economy improves. Without truly passionate workers, companies will find it difficult to turn round the steady deterioration in financial performance.

Passionate workers are more likely to take challenges and transform them into opportunities.

But passionate workers are easily frustrated by institutional, technical, and cultural barriers that make it difficult to learn and connect with others.

With the right technology infrastructure, however, organisations can fuel rather than frustrate passion. Here’s how.

Disposition for passion

Passionate workers possess two valuable dispositions.

Questing: when asked how they react to challenges, passionate employees we surveyed most often responded that they see an opportunity to learn something or solve problems rather than viewing the unusual as a nuisance or a distraction.

Passionate workers seek out challenges to test their abilities, rather than waiting for them to surface. The passionate are twice as likely as disengaged workers to display this questing disposition.

As a leader, you want people with questing dispositions to move to the next level of performance improvement.

Connecting: Passionate workers have a strong desire to reach out and connect with others who can help them get better faster. We found passionate workers are twice as likely as disengaged workers to have a connecting disposition. They exchange knowledge outside the firm through conferences and social media much more often than workers who lack passion.

Our research suggests that effective knowledge exchange will be crucial to performance improvement.

These dispositions of questing and connecting reinforce each other – both positively and negatively. If you have a questing disposition, but you lack the ability to connect, you can’t learn new things as easily from others. If you have a connecting disposition, but can’t focus your attention on interesting challenges, you’re not as likely to use connections you establish to improve performance.

Implications for technology

Since these dispositions are increasingly central to sustained performance improvement, the question for IT organisations becomes how to create the conditions that support passionate workers.

Most IT organisations have a hard time facilitating people with connecting and questing dispositions. Many people inside big corporations, in particular, view enabling tools such as social media or cloud computing as toys, distractions, or security breaches. In fact, from our experience in discussions with a range of IT executives, most IT departments are ambivalent about, if not actively resisting, the next generation of technologies.

But to help workers pursue their passion, leaders must:

Change the mindset

Most executives are deeply suspicious of workers’ passions, unless they define passion simply as working longer hours to get the usual rote tasks done. Instead, passion is the quest for unexpected challenges. Questing and connecting are huge opportunities to drive performance improvement, if you can encourage and support these traits.

Identify relevant edges

The edges of your firm and your industry – whether geographic, demographic, or between companies – offer the environments where questing and connecting dispositions flourish.

Edges are fertile ground for innovation, attracting risk takers who can drive knowledge creation and economic growth. They are where the questing and the connecting dispositions have the most freedom. Find the edges with the most opportunity and the least resistance, and mobilise passionate people to these edges so they can attack performance challenges emerging there.

Deploy the right platforms and tools

New technology can significantly enhance the impact of passionate employees. Cloud computing, and the sophisticated analytic tools that can be accessed in the cloud, provide individuals with the resources they need to experiment and improvise in addressing performance challenges.

Rather than waiting in a long line to receive resources from a central IT organisation, employees can use the emerging cloud infrastructure and access everything from raw server capacity to sophisticated research tools. They can rapidly scale up and back IT resources and take promising approaches to market.

But it’s not just cloud computing. Passionate workers can now use social networks to stay in touch with a much larger group of individuals. Shared workspaces provide an increasingly rich environment for these individuals to connect with each other and others outside the firm jointly to develop promising approaches to difficult performance challenges.

In fact, these two categories of IT, cloud computing and social software, weave together in powerful ways to integrate both the questing and connecting dispositions of passionate workers. Employees begin to see the compounding effects of connecting with relevant and diverse expertise wherever it resides and combining that expertise with a rich array of IT resources to pursue challenging performance quests.

As passionate workers on the edge of the enterprise demonstrate the kind of impact they can achieve, less engaged workers start to see how much they can accomplish through their initiatives, and passion begins to build in them, as well. As the less engaged connect with more passionate workers, they manifest more of the questing and connecting dispositions. Passion starts to spread.

Emerging technologies play a central role in breaking down many of the institutional barriers that frustrate passionate workers. Rather than feeling blocked, these workers begin to feel more empowered. As passionate employees thrive, companies in turn will find themselves in a better position to deal with performance pressures. Instead of becoming a source of increasing stress, challenges become an opportunity for passionate workers to attain levels of performance never before possible.

John Hagel III, and John Seely Brown are co-chairman and independent co-chairman, respectively, of the Deloitte Center for the Edgew

Their books include The Power of Pull, The Only Sustainable Edge, Out of the Box, The Social Life of Information, Net Worth, and Net Gain.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..

Cloud computing in businesses

By Richard Waters in San Francisco

Published: November 1 2010 00:15 | Last updated: November 1 2010 00:15

Cloud computing may be one on the most talked-about IT trends of recent years, but it has yet to make much of a mark inside big business. Like many new tech trends, the hype has far outweighed the business realities.

If that is to change, then it could well be projects such as recently undertaken by the tax division of ADP, the big US payroll processing company, that explain why.

Extracting data from its customers’ individual systems to prepare employee tax returns has been an expensive proposition, requiring separate engineering in the case of each customer to create the interface with ADP’s own systems.

As a result, it has only been economic to sell the tax filing service to large companies, typically with more than 1,000 employees, says Lori Schreiber, general manager of ADPs tax services division. But inserting a computing service delivered from the "cloud" into the middle of this process has now changed the economics of the business.

In ADP's case, the cloud service in question, from IBM, is a standardised way of "mapping" information from client systems so that it can be "read" by ADP's own systems.

As a result, says Ms Schreiber, ADP can now sell the tax filing service to medium-sized companies it could not profitably reach before. It has also been able to change the way it prices its service, potentially making it more attractive.

"It allowed us to promote it as more of a standard model, rather than charging for it as a professional service where we bill by the hour," Ms Schreiber says.

If cloud computing is to become more than an empty promise, it is this type of new business potential that will account for the shift.

IBM, which has just revamped its cloud computing strategy to base it around services like the one sold to ADP, says this highlights the way the new technology is likely to be felt in the day-to-day business world.

"Taking the operating cost out of service delivery" is one of the big opportunities for companies in many industries, says Mike Daniels, head of IBM's services division. The key, adds Erich Clementi, head of strategy for the company's cloud business, is the "extreme standardisation" made possible by the central delivery of a service. By streamlining Individual processes like this, businesses will be able to create more flexible services, and at a lower standard cost, he says.

As the ADP case suggests, this could open up new business opportunities. For companies in industries like telecommunications, financial services and media and entertainment, pushing some parts of their processes into the cloud will make it possible to "reach markets that weren't reachable before," says Frank Gens, an analyst at IDC. "It will become a fundamental part of the model for all companies trying to reach emerging markets."

Until now, most of the attention in cloud computing has been on the so-called "public clouds" run by companies like Amazon.com and Salesforce.com - centralised services where companies can buy computing resources in much the way they buy electricity.

Services like these have mainly appealed to start-up companies or those looking to create new businesses from scratch. Starting with a blank sheet of paper, designing a company's processes with no "on-premise" systems can be highly appealing.

But for most companies - with large sunk investments in IT systems and an understandable aversion to handing over control of their most important corporate data - this is too big a step to take.

Much of the focus of the big tech companies is now on refining these services to make them appeal to established companies. Mr Daniels compares it to the emergence of e-business in the early days of the internet: after a brief flurry of excitement over the potential of pure-play dotcoms to topple business leaders in many industries, the new technology was applied to enhance the operations of established businesses. It was Walmart, not Pets.com, that won the day, he says.

"The belief is, the money will really be in the enterprise loads, and no one has really untapped that yet," adds Paul Maritz, chief executive officer of VMware, which makes some of the key software for data centres that deliver cloud services.

The key to unlocking this potential are what the tech industry calls "hybrid clouds" - combinations of on-premise and remote, third-party systems that can be combined to create a service, much as ADP found with its tax-filing service.

To make this work, companies need to isolate individual processes that they can outsource, and accept a much higher level of standardisation in these areas, Mr Daniels says. He compares it to the standardisation that has already been imposed on many service functions inside companies, like human resources.

The same constraints are now being placed on the IT departments’ application programmers, he says. They will lose some choice in the platforms they build on and will have to choose from a narrower "catalogue" of IT services, but with significant benefits to their companies in terms of operating flexibility and cost.

These standardised services, in turn, will evolve to suit the needs of particular industries, bringing what IBM says will be a new addition to the IT lexicon: "industry clouds."

This is all a long way from the model of fully-outsourced, "public clouds that first drove interest of the new technology architecture. To the tech purists, it will smack of compromise, surrendering some of the scale benefits promised by fully centralised computing.

There's no question, you lose a lot of the economies of the public cloud," says Mr Gens. "As soon as you say ‘private', you're talking a higher price point."

Long term, that makes the full cloud computing model an appealing one. But for the foreseeable future, the gains seen by most businesses will come from more modest and achievable goals.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

Join the revolution – no more servers

Join the revolution – no more servers
By Brian Thomson, managing director at Rackspace for the Emea region

Published: March 8 2010 16:46 | Last updated: March 8 2010 16:46

This is going to be a year of change as businesses look for more efficient ways to procure and manage IT, freeing up the time and money needed to focus on innovation.

Organisations are tired of managing technology in-house, particularly servers, leading to a shift towards IT outsourcing. Two recent reports from Gartner highlight that ”the future of IT lies outside the IT department” as business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation drives the need for a different skill set, and “virtualisation and cloud computing will transform IT in 2010”.

In line with this demand for reducing IT costs and increasing innovation that will ultimately drive market share, there is a growing trend towards Computing-as-a-Service models, such as software-as-a-service, cloud computing and hosting.

This enables companies of all sizes to buy computing capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis, being charged only for what they use, without up-front capital cost, and freeing them from the shackle of the server.

Gartner estimates that 44m servers are in use worldwide and the great majority of these are deployed internally. New business models mean that instead of purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading these servers, businesses can simply consume computing resources from service providers.

A new era of computing

The business case for this consists of zero capital expenditure and minimal incremental headcount. It also takes away much of the risk from projects, since the responsibility for delivering the overall solution is given to service providers.

Computing-as-a-Service is going to become the mainstream delivery architecture for corporate computing in the next two years, transforming IT departments by bringing flexibility, security, performance and resilience to a function that has traditionally acted as an inflexible monopoly.

Cloud computing, an element of this “no more servers” approach, is currently being used to deliver both new and existing applications. As more solutions are delivered ”cloud ready”, buying and deploying servers in-house no longer makes business sense. For revenue-generating applications, risk can be reduced still further by building the IT infrastructure wholly or partially in the cloud.

Computing-as-a-Service can be used in many different ways – it can be a combination of a cloud infrastructure and dedicated servers, enabling companies to benefit from the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud, but also the increased security and stability of managed hosting, depending on the needs of the business.

Innovate to get ahead

Since the mainframe, innovations continue to extend the availability of computing capacity to more businesses. Each development also increases the amount of computing resource available to business, while driving down costs.

But adoption of “new” approaches is often slow. In part this is due to businesses demanding a return on their past investments before adopting a new approach. The larger the firm, the larger the sunk cost, which means the later the adoption.

This is why the first beneficiaries of each new computing innovation are typically smaller companies because they have less legacy equipment or bureaucracy stalling progress.

And as larger enterprises outsource more, there will be fewer systems to depreciate, decommission, or cling to in the hope of ROI, thus fuelling the process.

This year will see businesses demand more from their service providers, as a “No More Servers” approach must come hand-in-hand with excellent customer service and support.

Those joining the revolution, from small businesses to enterprises, will be empowered to achieve unprecedented productivity at minimal costs. In an ever-increasingly competitive market, what business couldn’t benefit from this?
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

The days of the Next Big Thing could be over

The days of the Next Big Thing could be over
By Alan Cane

Published: December 9 2009 16:29 | Last updated: December 9 2009 16:29

The main difficulty in predicting the “next big thing” – apart from the ambitious nature of the task – lies in defining just what a “big thing” is.

Is it something that will have a lasting and material impact on society – the emergence of revolutionary inventions – the transistor, for example, or the integrated circuit and the microprocessor?

Or could it be software – the Cobol programming language that changed business data processing and continues to influence its progress?

For some, systems are their “big thing” – the advent of mobile phone networks in the 1980s, followed by the internet, and with it e-mail and the world wide web. Today, many believe “the cloud”, an abstraction that represents the electronically interconnected world, fits the bill.

But as Rob Gear, manager of PA Consulting’s innovation unit points out: “Some breakthroughs will transform life for certain people in certain geographies but that same breakthrough will have little or no relevance for others. A BlackBerry or iPhone might have transformed the life of your average urban office worker but it has had little or no bearing on the life of the tribesmen of the Masai Mara.”

Mr Gear’s colleague, David Elton, however, thinks that “big things” are less rare than is believed: “These are things that have changed the way we live and work: search engines, text messaging, wikis, bar codes, RFID (radio frequency identifiers), liquid crystal displays and cheap disk storage.”

He says “market moments” – the coming together of technology, price point and market demand – define big things, giving as an example online retailing: “The first time round in 2001-2003, it was a damp squib. The second go, from 2004, took off like a train. The difference: a market moment. People wanted it, the technology was there; they just needed secure online payment mechanisms.”

Some developments have universal significance. Kishore Swaminathan, chief scientist at Accenture’s technology laboratories, believes no single thing is the answer – it is more a phenomenon, or “scale”.

“The necessity that will drive all future inventions of significance is exponential growth,” he says. “We currently understand linear but not exponential growth. Successful companies, inventions and societies will be those that master scale. Three specific areas of necessity will drive invention – energy, health and mega-cities. Scale is not the same as big. The dinosaurs were big, the internet has scale.”

Rudy Puryear, head of Bain & Company’s global IT practice, argues that businesses are facing structural shifts that will “easily trump emerging technologies as the ‘next big thing’.”

He points to IT collapsing under its own weight: “In a recovery, the fact that IT can no longer respond within a reasonable time cycle will come to the fore. We are expecting to see a surge in IT projects that actually address complexity.”

He says that chief information officers must regain the right to take centralised decisions and that outsourcing will change from cost tactic to strategic weapon: “The smartest CIOs will find ways to use outsourcing providers to do more than cut costs.”

Industry experts such as Joerg Heistermann, chief executive of the Americas Region for the business process management software group IDS Scheer, doubts that 2010 will see breakthrough technologies, arguing that existing developments such as cloud computing may offer amazing possibilities.

“Real innovation is hard,” he says. “It means the destruction of what exists today and requires that we convince people to change . . . an IT industry devoid of supposed breakthroughs would still have plenty of work to do with our bread and butter – continuous improvement.

“Connecting customers and providers, optimising supply chains, streamlining accounting or making interfaces easier to use – these recurring projects are constantly needed to improve any company’s efficiency, customer satisfaction and profitability.”

A number of experts, including Colin Bannister, head of technical sales for Computer Associates UK, also argues that there will no single “next big thing” but instead, waves of disruptive technologies “which will ebb and flow”.

“The risks around them must be managed, complexity removed and company-wide management tools made available to CIOs, if these technologies are to provide added value for businesses within today’s rapid timeframes for payback,” he predicts.

As examples, he cites service-oriented architectures, virtualisation and cloud computing, pointing out that each can increase risk and complexity unless tightly managed.

Growing complexity also worries Karl Havers, head of Ernst & Young’s European technology team, who admits to simple personal requirements: “Let me use three devices instead of a dozen connecting me through the smart grid to my home, shopping, car and family.

“Let that happen far faster than currently and when I want it. Oh, and I would like to be able to rely on simple things like mobile networks to work and not drop calls and the voice quality on my landline to be as good as it used to be when using voice over internet protocol and a remote handset.”

Mr Havers concludes: “The next big idea will be about solving the confusion and plethora of alternatives for people, making things simple and reliable.”

For a contrary view, I spoke to Josh Bernoff, senior vice-president with the consultancy Forrester Research, who says that employees and customers are already taking technology into their own hands with dramatic consequences: “No matter what company you work for, your employees have better technology than you,” he says.

“With their iPhones, their Facebook connections and cheap computing power for rent, they can solve their own problems using technology. They’re building the solutions your company will run on right now, right under the noses of your IT department staff.

“We can tell you about the marketers at Black & Decker who let salespeople use little video cameras to gain an edge on the competition. Or the guy at the US State Department who built his own teleconferencing application to spread US ideas around the world. You can embrace their problem-solving power, or you can hide in a corner,” he challenges.

In fact, an intersection between unified communications (UC) and social networking is already developing, according to Neil Louw, CIO at Dimension Data Europe: “More businesses are realising the potential to harness the burgeoning ‘unified communications mindset’ of their employees – developed through the personal use of tools common to UC and social networking, such as instant messaging, webcams and groups – by introducing enterprise-ready equivalents as part of their UC strategy.”

Cloud computing, however, is high on many lists of likely barnstormers. Hub Vandervort, chief technology officer of Progress Software, believes adoption will be faster than most analysts think because of economics: “It’s a simple empirical model: in a 1,000-machine data centre, efficiency will typically be at 20 per cent to 30 per cent. Getting a further 10 per cent from your infrastructure by moving it to the cloud will save $6m a year – and many data centres are far larger than 1,000 machines,” he says.

Andrew McGrath, commercial director for the communications group ntl:Telewest Business agrees that the benefits and efficiencies of cloud computing and server virtualisation could prove too good to ignore.

“This, in turn, will make the network underpinning these IT initiatives even more important. As a result, the next big thing for business will be the adoption of Ethernet networks. Capable of transporting huge volumes of data at great speed, they are the key to success for the adoption of technologies that rely on shared services.”

And here is a wild card: IBM believes the hottest technology trend of 2010 will be advanced analytics – software capable of making sense of the mountains of raw data companies are routinely storing these days.

IBM argues that predictive analytics will emerge as an essential tool for competitive advantage, focusing on assets – information – that companies already possess.

But even the best predictive analytics are not enough to tell us unequivocally whether they can be the “next big thing”.

On ft.com Alan Cane says: necessity will sort “hot” tech­nologies from the cool, in his regular Perspectives column at:
ft.com/digitalbusiness

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

The desktop of the future: centralised and social?

The desktop of the future: centralised and social?
By Laurent Séraphin, senior product director, Centrix Software

Published: May 18 2009 17:45 | Last updated: May 18 2009 17:45

The desktop is one of the most important utilities for many organisations today. It provides a primary point where, in the digital economy, most workers consume company services and resources and access tools that help them carry out their work: transforming data into information up its value chain.

Over the past 15 years, the PC has been the dominant device used by the majority of the workforce, but the inherent challenges of maintaining and managing PCs has become a serious hindrance for IT departments.

Two major technology trends have emerged that will affect this on a wider scale and impact how organisations plan their desktop strategies: IT centralisation and cloud computing.

These trends are pulling desktop strategy in two different directions, so how can organisations make sure that their IT strategy really meets the needs of users, and delivers value back to the business?

The first stage is to look under the hood. The points of provision and points of consumption for IT services are moving apart. Users have more ways than ever to access their applications and services. It means the IT resources underneath – enabling them to access anything from anywhere – is complicated: many-to-many relationships, relying on multiple nodes and multiple infrastructure stacks to deliver multiple applications and resources.

To reduce their costs and make management simpler, IT is facing two choices: either try to centralise the distribution of applications and resources as much as possible or move applications and services on to the internet as part of a cloud computing strategy.

Both approaches aim to cut the time and cost associated with desktops by broadcasting virtual desktops or publishing virtualised applications (similar to the TV broadcasting model) to the user but they move the level of control and management in different directions. Do you look to centralise and lock down, or give the problem to a third party?

The two technologies that have accelerated these trends are virtualisation and now cloud computing.

Virtualisation splits the workload from the IT resource that it is running on, meaning that PCs can be held in the central data centre instead of under every desk. This approach can deliver greater management control over desktops, while also reducing the overheads that are associated with support. However, it requires resources to be hosted centrally, which can drive up cost.

Cloud computing is seen as the future for some facets of IT services. Much like real clouds, IT clouds can come in a variety of different forms: internal or external; trusted or non-trusted; on premises or outsourced; public or private; and web-based applications. What cloud computing can deliver is greater flexibility and over time this translates into greater business agility benefits.

The main impact on users from cloud computing today is the relative complexity of delivering services to users. The value of the applications held in clouds can only be realised when users can use the services quickly and efficiently. While most cloud-based services are simple to access and operate, there is still a lot of fragmentation: information can reside across multiple services, applications and clouds.

What these two overall directions for the future have in common is to make all services available via a browser-based interface. The availability of internet connectivity makes this more attractive to organisations as the entire spectrum of end-point devices, from desktops through to smartphones, laptops or netbooks can be assumed to have a baseline browser capability, and therefore give access to the same services wherever the user is.

However, as the browser becomes the lowest common denominator, the user experience can be greatly reduced. The functionality and richness that the desktop can provide is often sacrificed.

At the same time, users are becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy. Technology is part of daily life, and this has made users acutely aware of how easy using IT resources can be.

The gap between the private digital experience and the professional IT environment is increasing, leading to dissatisfaction. The main risk that organisations face is that, despite being a success from an IT standpoint, projects are not delivering all the value that they can as users either work around services, or don’t use their full potential.

Users want to retain the richness of functionality that they are used to, so centralised approaches such as virtual desktops can be a let-down.

Similarly, web-based approaches are not yet delivering on their promise, as the most common user experience is very crude. Typically, a user will have to navigate through multiple nested and tiled desktop environments, or “walled garden” style applications where information cannot be taken out of the system. This leads to push back from the users, and is the biggest reason behind the slow adoption of new IT services.

While these two trends are pulling desktop strategy in different directions, by focusing on the browser it is possible to design systems that aggregate applications from wherever they happen to be and deliver them to the user in a way that fits in with their working habits.

In order to meet user expectations and encourage them to make the most of their IT resources, IT has to deliver the best of both worlds: the control and support that centralisation can provide, with the flexibility and innovation of cloud. Without this combination, users won’t get the experience that they are used to.


laurent.seraphin@centrixsoftware.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

The Cloud: a leap created from combining existing technologies

The Cloud: a leap created from combining existing technologies
By Alan Ganek, chief technology officer for IBM Software

Published: April 30 2009 15:21 | Last updated: April 30 2009 15:21

Today’s increasingly interconnected environment requires an IT infrastructure capable of handling the massive quantities of digital information being exchanged. The new IT architecture built to handle this highly interactive world is cloud computing.

At its most basic, cloud computing is an approach to a shared IT infrastructure in which large pools of computer systems are linked together to provide IT services. It offers a simplified, centralised platform that can be used as needed, thereby lowering costs and energy use.

Sometimes technology leaps ahead as the result of a specific advancement, such as the transistor. More often major leaps occur when multiple technologies are combined to create something entirely new.

Cloud computing is created by the fusion of a number of existing technologies, including virtualisation, networking, service-oriented architecture and an internet-based delivery model, known as software-as-a-service that charges customers only for actual usage.

As a result, it is creating a flexible, robust infrastructure to serve the needs of today’s economy where knowledge flows to countries and regions where IT infrastructures are reliable and responsive.

Since it accesses “virtual” resources, cloud computing is not limited by the power and capabilities of local or remote computers. Unlike grid computing, which distributes IT for a specific task, cloud computing can be applied across an entire range of activities, and used with a wide variety of devices, including laptops, smart phones and hand-held devices.

Cloud computing uses IT resources more efficiently, requiring less energy and reducing carbon emissions. According to Info-Tech Research Group, most computer servers run full time, but are used at between 10 and 20 percent of capacity. By pooling resources, cloud-computing platforms can scale up or down, saving energy and operating costs.

Some observers say that cloud computing could mean the decline of in-house data centres, but that is not the case. Rather, it allows the data centre to evolve into a more dynamic, interactive function. Cloud computing provides data centres with extreme scale, and most important, fast access to information in the data centre regardless of the type of device a person uses. This is becoming crucial as many new types of mobile devices come on to the market.

Today, the cloud computing platforms getting most media attention are externally hosted services; however, private cloud computing platforms are also developing especially within companies operating globally. Private cloud platforms are able to establish security protocols, which carefully monitor the levels of access to the information that is made available for exchange.

Cloud computing will continue to evolve as it responds to business and market trends as well as new technological advances. Its advantages, however, are already clear.

Cloud computing offers the ability to integrate widely diverse kinds of information, a simpler infrastructure to manage the complexity of intelligent technologies and more efficient computing power to handle massive amounts of data as it keeps costs and energy use down.

It is an IT approach that will serve the needs of our interconnected, interactive world now and in the decades to come.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Cloud computing

Cloud computing
Published: April 21 2009 09:18 | Last updated: April 22 2009 00:44

Cold reality has a habit of intruding. The latest fad to feel its chill is the concept of “the cloud”, one embraced by the technology sector. On Monday IBM listed cloud computing as one of its three key initiatives for growth. Cisco, which dominates networking equipment, has been tempted by the prospects to move into making servers. Struggling PC maker Dell, meanwhile, aims to join Amazon in providing cloud-based services.

Nailing down the cloud is difficult because its definition has been expanded to include everything companies wish to sell. But broadly, it entails a business outsourcing technology hardware to a third party and then paying according to usage. In theory, commodity services such as data storage will move into the cloud and then be piped back into the building, as with power and water. Economies of scale will mean vast savings for business and fat returns for those running the clouds.

Outsourcing may be too expensive for most large corporations, however. Research from Mckinsey suggests that moving into the cloud costs much more than staying put. Using Amazon’s web services as a guide, the estimated price per computer per month would be $366 compared with $150 for a typical corporate data centre. The study also puts labour savings at just 10-15 per cent, as Luddite employees still need the help of IT support staff. Instead, the consultants suggest virtualisation – using software to make existing racks of servers run more efficiently – is the best route to saving money.

That may miss the point. Companies are unlikely to outsource entire systems in one go. Instead the cloud allows rapid expansion or cheap testing of new projects. It provides a way to expand without capital investment, and the cost calculation will be different for each organisation. But it does suggest that investors should avoid foggy thinking about the companies vying to provide cloud services.


BACKGROUND NEWS
Cisco Systems, the world’s biggest maker of networking equipment, recently said it would start selling servers, the back-room machines that are the workhorses of corporate computing, setting up a showdown with Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

The maturing of the IT industry and a steep slide into recession provided the immediate impetus for the move. But something else is at work. After a technology era characterised by the rise of the PC, a new centralisation is taking place in computing and the biggest suppliers of technology are being forced to respond. A catchphrase has been coined to describe this new approach: “cloud computing”.

Even Microsoft, a company that came to dominate the PC era, is racing to create one of the world’s biggest computing clouds, although it insists this will co-exist with existing forms of personal computing for years to come.

The economies of scale that come from consolidating computing in fewer places, and the availability of fast internet connections that make it easy to tap into this resource, account for the shift. As a result, data centres – whether run by large companies or by internet services groups such as Google – are assuming an increased share of the world’s information processing workload.


To e-mail the Lex team confidentially click here
OR
To post public comments click here

The Lex column is now on Twitter. To receive our daily line-up and links to Lex notes via Twitter, click here

_________________________________________

Lex is the FT’s agenda-setting column, giving an authoritative view on corporate and financial matters. It is also one of the few parts of FT.com available only to Premium subscribers. This article is provided for free as an example. A Premium subscription gives you unlimited access to all FT content, including all Lex articles and the FT mobile Newsreader.

Subscribe now

If you have questions or comments, please e-mail help@ft.com or call:

US and Canada: +1 800 628 8088
Asia: +852 2905 5555
UK, Europe and rest of the world: +44 (0)20 7775 6248

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Microsoft looks to cloud to open new windows

Microsoft looks to cloud to open new windows
By Richard Waters in San Francisco

Published: October 23 2008 19:43 | Last updated: October 23 2008 21:43

After years of hesitation, Microsoft is finally ready to take a big leap into the world of internet-based computing.

That, at least, has been the message for much of this year from senior executives, including chief executive Steve Ballmer.

The wraps are set to be taken off at a conference that the company is throwing for software developers in Los Angeles that starts on Monday.

Depending on what it has up its sleeve, Microsoft’s move could propel it into a new internet-based approach to computing that has become all the talk of the tech world.

Known as “cloud computing”, this involves a greater centralisation of processing power and information storage in large networks of datacentres.

Rather than relying on computing power from corporate servers or desktop PCs, applications and services created in this new “cloud” are delivered over the internet and often accessed through a simple web browser.

If Microsoft fails to lay out a compelling plan for how it will adapt to this new world, however, it would add to a nagging concern among investors and customers that the company is falling behind in the biggest transition to hit information technology in years – and could further open the door to rivals.

“The market is going to look for something big,” said Frank Gens, a technology analyst at IDC.

“If they do it in dribs and drabs, if they come out with a half-hearted ‘cloud’ deployment, it will open the way for IBM, or for Amazon and Google.”

The software company has already hinted at what it has up its sleeve.

Mr Ballmer recently promised that next week will bring an “operating system that runs in the internet” – something he dubbed “Windows Cloud”.

The clear message: having dominated the PC-era of computing, Microsoft believes it is now ready to move to a new arena.

Microsoft’s attempt to reposition its core software reflects a broader change that is forcing all the big tech companies to rethink their approach.

“Platform shifts like this come along every 15 or 20 years,” said Sean Poulley, vice-president of cloud services for IBM’s software division.

Tech executives argue over how new this trend really is or how quickly it will take hold, but generally agree on its significance.

In the consumer world, advertising-supported internet services like those offered by Google have already won a big following.

Corporate IT departments, which account for the lion’s share of the tech business, have started to inch towards a similar approach.

About 4 per cent of IT budgets are currently spent on the business applications, infrastructure software, servers and storage technologies that support cloud computing, according to IDC.

But by 2012, with the share up to 9 per cent, spending on this new approach to technology will account for a quarter of the annual growth in technology spending, making it an important new market for the entire industry.

Much of the attention around cloud computing so far has focused on services, such as Google’s online word-processing service or the corporate applications from Salesforce.com.

Microsoft’s announcement next week, however, will shift the focus back to the guts of the technology behind this shift: the infrastructure of datacentres that supports it, and the software “operating system” that supports online services, in much the way that the current Windows PC operating system supports applications that run on a PC.

The scramble to win a piece of this new market is in its early stages. “There will be a number of years when there will be a lot of competition and confusion,” said Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, a recent book about the coming transition. “Over time, I think it will resolve to a small number of platforms.”

Big IT suppliers like IBM on the one hand, and internet companies like Amazon have already dipped their toe in this water.

As the technology industry’s pre-eminent “platform” company, Microsoft’s promised move has attracted considerable anticipation.

The biggest question that has hung over Microsoft, and the one to which next week’s event may provide an answer: how far, and how fast, will the company push as it reorientates its business around the web?

This is largely an economic decision.

Microsoft’s current highly lucrative business relies on sales of PC and server software, mainly to business customers.

If these customers turn away from that computing approach and instead buy services delivered from the “cloud”, often at low monthly subscription rates based on how much they use, it could undermine the company’s core business model, said Mr Gens.

To compensate for that, Microsoft will have to run fast to create new markets for cloud-based services, for instance among small businesses and consumers, as well as in emerging markets, he added.

Oracle dismisses development as a fad

Larry Ellison, the outspoken head of Oracle, recently dismissed cloud computing as little more than a fad.

Many of the technologies included under these latest buzz words, he said, have long been in use.

“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion,” Mr Ellison said, though he added Oracle would adopt the phrase in its own marketing if it helped sales.

His cynicism points to two commonly-held complaints about cloud computing.

One is that this is merely a new term for a vision that has been around for years – even decades.

“Thin” computing, utility computing, application service providers, on demand computing, software-as-a-service: plenty of jargon has been invented before to describe the long-promised shift of computing on to a more efficient infrastructure of centralised servers.

The second complaint is that in the past, all of these supposedly revolutionary advances have come up short.

Computing still takes place as much on local “clients” – principally PCs – as on servers.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009