IT Strategy and Emerging Technology

Blog with thoughts, links and articles on Emerging Web Technologies, and emerging uses for these technologies

Increasing Efficiency, Improving Communication and Providing Better Information - Video Outlining Bua Consulting's Approach

Fergal Coleman - Saturday, May 08, 2010

The technology in your business must deliver one of the following:

Improve efficiency
Enhance communication
Provide better information for decision-making

Is technology improving or hindering your business?

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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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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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Economist article: Gathering Clouds

Fergal Coleman - Sunday, March 29, 2009

This article at

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13331334

IT WAS the day Sun Microsystems was supposed to rise again. On March 18th the Silicon Valley computer-maker had planned to unveil a new online service to allow start-ups to manage with much less hardware, by buying computing capacity from a “cloud”, rather like electricity from the grid. But the event was overshadowed by the news, hours earlier, that IBM was in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, which would translate into a near-100% premium over the firm’s depressed share price in recent weeks.

As The Economist went to press, a deal had yet to be confirmed. But it is no surprise that the two firms are talking. The economic crisis has pummelled Sun, which never really recovered from the dotcom bust. As its share price plumbed new lows, IBM’s remained relatively unscathed (see chart)—a reflection of its business, which has been protected by the computer giant’s global scope and the fact that it makes most of its money from software and services.

In the months to come, more big fish will seek to swallow smaller fry. That is because something deeper is going on in the computer industry. Thanks to ever more powerful chips and new software, servers and other hardware can now be “virtualised”, meaning physically separate systems can act as one. This enables computing power to become a utility: it is generated somewhere on the network (“in the cloud”) and supplied as a service. To simplify their complex data centres and cut costs, more and more companies are thinking about building in-house computing utilities, called “private clouds”, or outsourcing computing to “public clouds” of the kind Sun launched this week.

What is more, as computing becomes a utility, the borders between different systems are starting to blur. A server, for instance, can easily function as a router (a box that directs data around networks). And this convergence means that companies that used to be allies, or in totally different markets, are now starting to compete with each other, argues James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research.

As a result the industry’s landscape is shifting. Last year Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world’s biggest computer-maker, bought Electronic Data Systems, a big provider of computer services, giving HP more manpower to help its customers build more advanced data centres. HP has also acquired software to manage data centres and put a greater emphasis on networking gear, an important component in the computer centres that have become the heart of many businesses.

Cisco, the world’s biggest maker of routers, has responded by moving into a new area: it will soon start selling servers. Together with other firms, including BMC and VMware, it has developed what it calls a “Unified Computing System”, which was unveiled on March 16th. This is essentially a private cloud in a box. Instead of having to wire up servers, storage devices and networking gear, companies can build and reconfigure virtual computer systems with a few mouse clicks.

For IBM, the third big contender in this emerging field, part of the attraction of Sun is that it has some assets, such as networking gear and data-centre software, which would beef up IBM’s ability to build private clouds. Industry observers think IBM would probably sell many of Sun’s other businesses, however, such as its line of high-end servers. A counter-bid for Sun from HP or Cisco is also possible.

HP, Cisco and IBM (and perhaps Dell, another troubled computer-maker) are gearing up to fight what has come to be called the “war for the data centre”. Much is at stake: this year alone, companies will spend about $100 billion on data centres, according to IDC, a market-research firm. As computing moves online, however, these companies will increasingly have to compete with operators of “public clouds”. Microsoft plans to enter this field, in effect offering to run companies’ computer systems for them inside its own giant data centres. Google is gradually expanding its suite of cloud-based offerings. And Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, is also a pioneer in the field of cloud-computing services, which it has been offering for some time.

In a way, all this is a throwback to the era of “time-sharing” on mainframe computers. In the early days of computing, companies either had to buy a mainframe, which cost millions, or share one with someone else. Now firms will once again be confronted with this choice. Contrary to what some argue, however, big companies are unlikely to go fully either way. In fact, the computing sky will probably always be cloudy, meaning that there will be many private and public clouds, and they will come in all shapes and sizes. And most of them will be interconnected. Cisco already has a name for this computing climate: the “Inter-Cloud”.

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