IT Strategy and Emerging Technology

Gartner: By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets

Fergal Coleman - Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Gartner's 2010 and beyond predictions have been released with some interesting insights available at:

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413

The key predictions are as follows:

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.
By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings
By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization
By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs.
In 2012, 60 percent of a new PC's total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on
Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.
By 2014, over 3 billion of the world's adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.
By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.
By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

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Top 10 Strategic Technologies For 2010

Fergal Coleman - Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Gartner released their predictions on top 10 strategic technologies 2010 in late October.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613

Unsurprisingly Cloud Computing and Predictive Analytics top the list. CIO's should be factoring these technologies and some of the other on the list into their strategic plans for 2010.

Below is an excerpt from the list:

"Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

“Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.

Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions. Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.

Client Computing. Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical. Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.

IT for Green. IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.

Reshaping the Data Center. In the past, design principles for data centers were simple: Figure out what you have, estimate growth for 15 to 20 years, then build to suit. Newly-built data centers often opened with huge areas of white floor space, fully powered and backed by a uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled and mostly empty. However, costs are actually lower if enterprises adopt a pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion. If 9,000 square feet is expected to be needed during the life of a data center, then design the site to support it, but only build what’s needed for five to seven years. Cutting operating expenses, which are a nontrivial part of the overall IT spend for most clients, frees up money to apply to other projects or investments either in IT or in the business itself.

Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.

Security – Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements. A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.

Flash Memory. Flash memory is not new, but it is moving up to a new tier in the storage echelon. Flash memory is a semiconductor memory device, familiar from its use in USB memory sticks and digital camera cards. It is much faster than rotating disk, but considerably more expensive, however this differential is shrinking. At the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages including space, heat, performance and ruggedness.

Virtualization for Availability. Virtualization has been on the list of top strategic technologies in previous years. It is on the list this year because Gartner emphases new elements such as live migration for availability that have longer term implications. Live migration is the movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server. This takes place by replicating the state of physical memory between the source and destination VMs, then, at some instant in time, one instruction finishes execution on the source machine and the next instruction begins on the destination machine.

However, if replication of memory continues indefinitely, but execution of instructions remains on the source VM, and then the source VM fails the next instruction would now place on the destination machine. If the destination VM were to fail, just pick a new destination to start the indefinite migration, thus making very high availability possible.

The key value proposition is to displace a variety of separate mechanisms with a single “dial” that can be set to any level of availability from baseline to fault tolerance, all using a common mechanism and permitting the settings to be changed rapidly as needed. Expensive high-reliability hardware, with fail-over cluster software and perhaps even fault-tolerant hardware could be dispensed with, but still meet availability needs. This is key to cutting costs, lowering complexity, as well as increasing agility as needs shift.

Mobile Applications. By year-end 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a rich environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. There are already many thousands of applications for platforms such as the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market and need for unique coding. It may take a newer version that is designed to flexibly operate on both full PC and miniature systems, but if the operating system interface and processor architecture were identical, that enabling factor would create a huge turn upwards in mobile application availability.

“This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “When determining what may be right for each company, the decision may not have anything to do with a particular technology. In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”

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Innovative use of Iphone by Toyota

Fergal Coleman - Friday, November 06, 2009

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Thriving in Adversity - Opportunities in Recession

Fergal Coleman - Monday, October 05, 2009

There is an excellent article in this week's Economist on the opportunities for businesses that arise in a recession: http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14540023

Innovation is a key to these new technologies - IBM for instance is holding "innovation jams" with its employees. The GFC has provided many organisations with an opportunity to review their costs and to look at better more efficient ways to conduct business. We have worked with a company recently to construct an entirely new IT infrastructure. Not only have they dramatically decreased costs but they have seen a huge rise in productivity as a result of the new systems. They have embraced newer web based technologies to achieve a large number of these improvements. Less tangible results such as increased collaboration and better internal communication has also resulted.
How can your organisation innovate?

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The Information Age - Data for life

Fergal Coleman - Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Wired magazine's July edition had a large section devoted to the emergence of data in all aspect of our life. More posts to follow on this.

One of the areas was discussed was fitness and the success of Nike+ (Nike and Apples) running system. Essentially Nike's shoes are embedded with a chip that shares data with your ipod and allows you to record your training data.

As I wear Asics this wasn't an option for me! So I have downloaded an iPhone Application called Runkeeper (runkeeper.com) that essentially does the same thing. The only downside is that I have to take my iPhone running with me. The GPS in the phone keeps a track of the area I cover (and records in Google Maps), it tells me how fast I am running (not fast enough!) and the time and distance covered. Once I have completed my run I can save the session and upload it to www.runkeeper.com from where I can track my training progress.
The basic application is free with an upgrade available to runkeeper pro which provides training guidance.

I'v yet to see how much my iPhone download usage increases by but I'll keep readers posted. is anyone else using data like this in their personal or health and fitness life?

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Smart Grid Technology is on the way

Fergal Coleman - Tuesday, July 21, 2009

A Smart Grid for Intelligent Energy Use: The Smart Grid involves the use of communications and computing technology to transmit and distribute energy more efficiently.

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Sixth Sense: The Future of Mobile Technology

Fergal Coleman - Friday, June 19, 2009

The Sixth Sense

Pattie Maes of MIT showcases a prototype wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

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The business system

Fergal Coleman - Thursday, June 18, 2009

Excellent multimedia presentation from Mckinsey:

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Enduring_Ideas_The_business_system_2379

Business strategy involves an integrated set of actions designed to help companies gain sustainable advantage over competitors. The business system is a framework that allows a company to formulate the set of actions most likely to achieve this advantage. First introduced in a McKinsey staff paper in 1980,¹ the business system was later presented to the public by McKinsey’s Fred Gluck,² who stressed its usefulness in forming strategy. In 1985, Harvard’s Michael Porter introduced a similar framework—the value chain—and cited the business system concept in the book Competitive Advantage.³

The business system charts all the steps involved in creating and delivering a company’s product. At each link in the chain, from product development to sales and service, managers have a choice of how to conduct business. From a strategic point of view, the most important assessment is how the choices made at each step reinforce the company’s overall value proposition and, hence, its competitive advantage. The word system in business system emphasizes the importance of aligning conduct at every step with the value proposition.

Enduring Ideas: The business system

A narrated interactive explores this classic strategy framework.

Launch Interactive

Back to top

To develop improvements to any one link, managers can ask a series of open-ended questions about current practices and alternate possibilities: How does the company perform at this stage? Is there a better way? How do competitors behave? Who achieves lower costs—the company or its competitors? By varying the questions, examining scenarios, and evaluating all in light of the company’s total strategy, a company can discover new strategic moves to make within an existing business—for example, whether to expand or diversify. When used to evaluate acquisitions, the framework forces managers to look for synergies between the target’s own activities and the company’s current business system.

A surprisingly simple concept, the business system continues to be a serviceable tool. Deeper examination of current conditions and potential changes at each stage can reveal the forces likely to shape a business over time—and the competitive capabilities required to meet them

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Cloud computing and standards for moving data

Fergal Coleman - Wednesday, June 03, 2009

ANother great article on opensource and the discussion of standards for moving data between clouds

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13740181

Unlocking the cloud

May 28th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Open-source software has won the argument. Now a new threat to openness looms

“FIRST they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi probably never said these words, despite claims to the contrary, but they perfectly describe the progress of open-source software over the past 15 years or so. Such software, the underlying recipe for which is created by volunteers and distributed free online, was initially dismissed as the plaything of nerdy hobbyists. Big software firms derided the idea that anyone would put their trust in free software written by mysterious online collectives. Was it really secure? Whom would you call if it went wrong?

At the time, selling software to large companies was sometimes likened to drug dealing, because once a firm installed a piece of software, it had to pay a stream of licence fees for upgrades, security patches and technical support. Switching to a rival product was difficult and expensive. But with open-source software there was much less of a lock-in. There are no licence fees, and the file formats and data structures are open. Open-source software gained ground during the dotcom boom and even more so afterwards, as a way to cut costs.

Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, went from laughing at the idea to fighting it, giving warning that there might be legal risks associated with using open-source software and even calling it a “cancer” that threatened to harm the industry. Yet the popularity of open-source programs such as the Linux operating system continued to grow. The fact that Google, the industry’s new giant, sits on a foundation of open-source code buried the idea that it was not powerful or reliable enough for heavy-duty use. One by one the industry’s giants embraced open source. Even Microsoft admits that drawing on the expertise of internet users to scrutinise and improve software has its merits, at least in some cases.

The argument has been won. It is now generally accepted that the future will involve a blend of both proprietary and open-source software. Traditional software companies have opened up some of their products, and many open-source companies have adopted a hybrid model in which they give away a basic version of their product and make money by selling proprietary add-ons (see article). The rise of software based on open, internet-based standards means worries about lock-in have become much less of a problem.
Clouding the picture

But now there is the danger of a new form of lock-in. “Cloud computing”—the delivery of computer services from vast warehouses of shared machines—enables companies and individuals to cut costs by handing over the running of their e-mail, customer databases or accounting software to someone else, and then accessing it over the internet. There are many advantages to this approach for both customers (lower cost, less complexity) and service providers (economies of scale). But customers risk losing control once again, in particular over their data, as they migrate into the cloud. Moving from one service provider to another could be even more difficult than switching between software packages in the old days. For a foretaste of this problem, try moving your MySpace profile to Facebook without manually retyping everything.

The obvious answer is to establish agreed standards for moving data between clouds. An industry effort to this effect kicked off in March. But cloud computing is still in its infancy, and setting standards too early could hamper innovation. So buyers of cloud-computing services must take account of the dangers of lock-in, and favour service providers who allow them to move data in and out of their systems without too much hassle. This will push providers to compete on openness from the outset—and ensure that the lessons from the success of open-source software are not lost in the clouds.

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Open Source and Cloud Computing

Fergal Coleman - Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Good Economist article on the open source movement and the convergence with commercial software operating on "the cloud."

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13743278Open-source software in the recession
Born free

May 28th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Open-source software firms are flourishing, but are also becoming less distinctive

MANY technology firms are floundering amid the recession. But many of the ones that offer services tied to open-source software—free programs written by volunteers who collaborate online—are boasting double-digit growth. Sales at Red Hat, the world’s biggest independent open-source firm with annual revenues of $653m, grew by 18% year-on-year in the first quarter. More and more firms, particularly in Europe, seem prepared to embrace open source (see chart). “Budgets are tight and we think that is good for open source,” said Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s boss, when announcing the results.

Indeed, open source is so widely accepted that traditional software firms are beginning to dabble in it, while some open-source firms are starting to sell proprietary add-ons to open-source programs instead of charging to provide support to firms using open-source software. If current trends hold, traditional software firms and their open-source rivals will soon be hard to tell apart. “A new pragmatism is rising,” says Matt Asay, an open-source advocate and an executive at Alfresco, which makes open-source software that helps firms manage digital content.

The “free and open-source software” movement, as it is officially called, has come a long way from its anti-establishment origins. Pioneers such as Richard Stallman did not want users to be locked into monolithic products, but to be able to change programs in whatever way they wanted, and to share their modifications.

For years, this software commons was no more than an obscure sideshow. But then the internet provided volunteer programmers with a way to co-operate cheaply. IBM and Oracle, two industry giants, threw their weight behind the Linux operating system, in part to weaken their rival Microsoft. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, many firms turned to Linux and other open-source software to save money.

Cost is once again the main reason why companies are turning to open source, says Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research, a consultancy. Its success is no longer limited to basic software, such as Linux or Apache, a program that powers web servers. Open-source firms are flourishing in databases (Ingres, for instance), business intelligence (JasperSoft), customer-relationship management and other business applications (SugarCRM, Alfresco). In addition, open-source firms have started to move into new markets without proprietary rivals. For instance, a company called Cloudera distributes a version of Hadoop, a program which helps firms process and analyse the unprecedented volumes of data generated by large websites.

But cost is not the only reason for open source’s growing popularity. Many firms now know that it offers more flexibility than proprietary programs, the licences for which often include restrictions on how they can be used, explains Matthew Aslett, of the 451 Group, a market-research firm. And companies no longer perceive free software as riskier, he adds. Getting sued for running programs that inadvertently violate somebody else’s intellectual property, for instance, has proven not to be as big an issue as once feared. Most open-source firms indemnify their customers against such lawsuits in any case.

All this has led many companies to develop a much more pragmatic approach to open-source software. In the late 1990s installing Linux was often something of a gesture of defiance against Microsoft’s domination of the software industry. Today decisions are more rational. The key question is whether the savings in licensing fees for proprietary products outweigh the additional costs in manpower to integrate and operate the free alternative. “Open-source software has become a means to an end,” says Forrester’s Mr Hammond. “Most firms don’t really care that it is libre, as in freedom, but that it is gratis, as in beer.”

Open-source firms themselves have also become increasingly pragmatic. Red Hat and Novell, its main rival, still make money by giving away Linux and charging for support: customers sign up for a subscription that gives them the right to all the updates and someone to call if something goes wrong. Yet recent years have seen a flowering of different business models. A popular approach is to sell proprietary extensions to an open-source core. “The support model does not scale well,” Mr Aslett explains. It does not generate the returns expected by venture capitalists, who invested more than $3 billion in 163 open-source firms between 1997 and 2008, according to a study by the 451 Group.

Conversely, having realised that they can economise on resources and garner good ideas, proprietary software firms are increasingly taking a liking to open-source programs, albeit mostly at the edges of their offerings. IBM has sprinkled open-source software throughout its product line and is rumoured to be interested in buying Red Hat. If Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems goes through, it will have an even bigger open-source portfolio including MySQL, a popular program for databases. Even Microsoft now carefully embraces what its managers once described as a “cancer”.

Cloud computing—the delivery of processing power over the internet from vast warehouses of shared machines—will further blur the lines between proprietary and open-source software. Most of the firms peddling this model, such as Amazon and Google, use open-source software, since having to pay licensing fees would make the business unprofitable. But their services also rely on code developed in-house, which is not given away free. Microsoft, meanwhile, is building a huge cloud using its own software. If computing becomes a service delivered over the internet, it will hardly matter how the underlying software is developed.

Does this mean that the quest for openness in software is obsolete? On the contrary. If they are not careful, companies and consumers could get locked into a cloud even more tightly than into a piece of software. This is because data residing in the cloud can be hard to move to another service. “If you have a gigabyte somewhere, it develops a certain inertia,” says Mike Olson, the boss of Cloudera, which recently found it could not switch from a poor storage service because there was no way to move the data.

This sort of problem has spawned an open-data movement. In March a group of technology firms led by IBM published an “Open Cloud Manifesto” that has since received the support of more than 150 companies and organisations. It is only a beginning, but perhaps this time around the industry will not have to go through a long proprietary period before rediscovering the virtues of openness.

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