The topic of media and digital content came up at a recent analyst briefing from Cisco on European and emerging markets. It wasn’t really surprising, considering that this truly is the hot new vertical, driven primarily by consumer markets and the entertainment industry, but with interesting possibilities for corporate computing as well. For its part, Cisco sees media and digital content as an opportunity, which is only to be expected when considered in light of its Linksys division and last year’s purchase of Scientific Atlanta.   

Because Cisco sits in the network, it equates the growth of digital media with growth for the network and for the products and services it offers to both consumers and companies. What made Cisco interesting is that it sees this change as an opportunity for consumers as well as for business. You could argue that other vendors also see digital and media content as an opportunity, but do they really? To me it seems that Cisco is more excited – and correctly so - by the possibilities of digital content for the infrastructure gains than by either the issues around the actual content itself or for the entertainment industry.  Sadly, that’s the trap many vendors fall into – and so far Cisco seems to be avoiding it.

So much of what we see as analysts is all about how to monitor, protect, police, and manage content. Granted security is an important issue and one that will never be solved in a changing digital world.  We accept that, but so often it seems that discussions we have with vendors all lead back to resurrecting the age old philosophical argument – is man basically good or is man basically evil, in the context of digital rights and stealing content.  Either people assume that content will be stolen no matter what we do, or they believe that people would not steal content if only there was a reasonable way to purchase and use it.

In reality, it is a tiresome set of arguments because there’s not a lot that we can do about it from a technology viewpoint beyond building better digital rights management (DRM) mousetraps and then smarter mice to get around them.  The problems are not technological, they are sociological and cultural. This means that social technology neither creates nor resolves the problem, although it can push some issues to the fore.

Rather than giving us self-righteous drivel about how Cisco really is looking out for the customer by hobbling software or enforcing questionable DRM by default, we had an interesting albeit short presentation about what a technology provider can realistically do or not do in that realm.  This isn’t to say that Cisco is not respectful of content rights or management. To the contrary, it has focused a lot on network security, how that extends to applications, and identity management – all important aspects in the overall picture.  What Cisco has done now is to focus on infrastructure enablement and get out of the way of how users create, post, or alter their content.

One of the other analysts attending the event, James Governor of Redmonk, wanted to know if Cisco was going to be an enabler of content, and Dan Scheinman, the senior vice president for Cisco's media solutions group responded that he just wants to enable customers to do whatever they want.  Although there was a lot of room for discussion around both the question and the answer, I think that was the right response. I cannot and will not imagine Cisco focusing on content creation or ownership.  It shouldn’t.  And it feels as though too many companies who want to be involved in the technology around media and digital content have a hard time understanding the line between enabling customers, enabling content, and becoming responsible for that content throughout its lifecycle.

There is a slippery slope in the industry right now as too many diverse issues are being drawn together by common, affordable technologies. Music rights, performance rights, film rights, image rights, international rights, licensing, and fair use are among the various complex issues that are being unfortunately lumped together. Vendors cannot solve these problems with their technology; they must be solved within countries and between countries. Technology should be used to make it easier to work within the laws and customs agreed upon and without causing further problems, obfuscation, and limits.  That’s going to take a long time to sort out as most of the players seem to be avoiding courts of law to settle these issues. 

In the meantime, I wish more companies took Cisco’s approach.

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell

Whenever a company buys another one that has a similar (perhaps previously competing) product line, there is always a fear that there will be tears within at least one of the customer bases when users are forced to migrate as the inevitable rationalisation takes place.

Worse than this is when the acquiring vendor says it will actually merge the two product lines, taking the best from each to provide a superior hybrid, which customers take as meaning that there is not even a chance of avoiding future cost and disruption, as everyone will need to migrate regardless of their starting point.

In such situations, there is also the added risk that the hybrid will end up looking less like the offspring of two thoroughbreds and more like the software equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster.

If you take such fears and multiply them a number of times, you get to the situation Oracle ended up with as a result of bringing together the PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel solutions with its existing Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), then declaring that everything would be pulled together into a single Fusion Applications product line.

Groans from the respective customer bases were almost audible at an industry level when this was originally announced, and many of the concerns and emotions still linger in many peoples’ minds, as captured in a Freeform Dynamics study conducted towards the end of last year.

After several iterations of often confused and sometimes conflicting messaging, Oracle eventually came up with a story, however, about how it would protect customers’ investments. This was known as known as Applications Unlimited within which, it pledged not only long term support for each existing product line, but continued commitment to enhance and keep them up-to-date.

The idea was to ensure that individual customer bases did not suffer from neglect of heritage applications as Oracle ploughed more resources into the super hybrid. Each product was endowed with a development roadmap to back this up and customers gave Oracle the benefit of the doubt. So far, the vendor appears to be keeping its word, with a pretty convincing set of upgrades recently launched for each product line.

Despite this, however, sceptics still ask whether it is economically viable for Oracle to maintain four major application product lines while developing a fifth one, which is a very legitimate question. Oracle’s reply is that the existing maintenance revenues coupled with the usual incremental spend that naturally occurs within any application customer base is exactly as it was before the acquisitions took place, which amounts to a lot money to fund ongoing enhancements.

It goes on to argue that all application vendors are in the process of re-architecting their software in line with trends towards ideas such as service oriented architecture (SOA), and that by redirecting the funds allocated to this investment from individual product lines to a central “pot”, it can finance platform related R&D that can be applied across both existing and new offerings. In this way, it can balance the books effectively.

Oracle’s reference to a major shift in architectures and platforms also brings one of the most common concerns expressed by the various user bases into focus, that as a result of the acquisition activity customers will be forced into major migrations they don’t really want. We have to keep this in perspective, however. PeopleSoft customers, for example, would at some point have had to go through this shift anyway if they were at all serious about keeping their infrastructures reasonably well up to date and taking advantage of modern emerging architectures.

Customers have been complaining about the rigidity of enterprise applications for years, not just SAP, but this can’t be fixed by vendors re-architecting alone – at some point the customer needs to take that transformation on board. So is Oracle really forcing customer’s hands?

The reality is that it is not, and in fact it is probably the complete opposite in that Oracle is likely to work especially hard to avoid “I told you so” come-back from sceptics by taking its eye off the ball with regard to heritage maintenance and enhancement. This would damage customer trust, which would have a knock on effect to its business general.

Meanwhile, the strategy of introducing increasingly more commonality across the individual product lines with each subsequent release under the Applications Unlimited programme is very sound. It means that when customers are ready to take the plunge on the big transformation, the disruption will be minimised.

Even then, conversations we have had with some of the senior execs within Oracle’s applications business suggests they fully understand the need for customers to take things steadily. One of the threads running through Applications Unlimited is a drive to get everything working together as much as possible across product lines through out-of-the-box integration.

Included in this is the new Fusion Applications line, so if a customer just wanted to migrate financials or HR, for example, and leave manufacturing planning where it is while they gain experience and confidence with the new architecture, Oracle will support them in doing that.

OK, so this is a bit of a simplification and in practice, with customisations and so on, there will always be development and integration work to be done, but again, this shouldn’t be any different to migrations that would have taken place anyway.

The bottom line is that when you consider Oracle’s Fusion Applications and Applications Unlimited strategies together, it all looks eminently sensible, and actually very empathetic to customer concerns and needs. Provided Oracle continues to work through plans with customers on a case by case basis, as it has been doing, it can hopefully keep everyone moving forward positively and gain or retain hearts and minds.

The only question then remaining is whether it can deliver on the promise of the ambitious Fusion Applications programme, but that’s a whole separate discussion.

Dale Vile

In the world of IT, we are constantly debating the latest trends and developments. Usually, although granted unsurprisingly, these deliberations revolve almost exclusively around the features of a particular technology, more often than not taking the form of “is technology / solution XYZ ready for adoption by mainstream customers or is it a bleeding-edge solution that is likely to appeal only those in desperate need of its features?” Too rarely it seems do things get turned around to consider whether “ordinary” customers are ready to exploit the solution. 

Consider for example the solution currently described by the acronym SaaS - software as a service. At its base SaaS consists of users sitting at a screen with essentially no special software running on their local device being able to access and run an application. Nothing new here as back in the mists of time this was the method by which all IT services were delivered. Over time things changed and for a period many systems were deployed using some variant on the client-server theme whereby the local access device had to have specialist software for each business application to be run.

This model has now begun to be replaced as it has been found wanting in the areas of cost and flexibility; it takes time and resources to keep distributed software up to date and today very many business applications now utilise the common-or-garden web browser as their front end leaving the bulk of the application code hosted on a server somewhere in the ever expanding "network”. Clearly today in most enterprises, large and small, it is the case that these central servers are located within the business, but given that IT departments are increasingly thinking in terms of service delivery, it is fair to ask whether any application using a web browser as its front end should be classified as being examples of SaaS?

A quick investigation shows that SaaS, both delivered from servers located inside and outside the enterprise, has now matured technically. Base connectivity, Wan optimisation, solution architecture maturity, application availability, web browser acceptance, the ability of servers to deliver sophisticated content to modern browsers using plug-ins, have all developed to a stage whereby their utilisation has almost become invisible.

However, as stated at the beginning of the article it is worthwhile spending a little time pondering the social and business issues that have developed alongside the maturation of SaaS-enabling technologies. The cost of delivering IT services has never been more visible whilst the pressure to reduce such costs has never been greater. A quick scan around any office or place of work (including the desk at home, kitchen table, internet café or WiFi hotspot) illustrates the fact that people, and thus in turn their business, want to access business applications wherever they happen to be located. Thus is born acceptance of SaaS as a delivery mechanism. In this respect, at least, it is more than apparent that the mainstream has already adopted the fundamental mechanics that underpin SaaS, but probably subconsciously given the wider definition of SaaS.

This therefore really only leaves the question of whether mainstream businesses, that is, everyone out there, is ready to utilise as part of their daily operations “archetypal” SaaS services, namely those provided by service providers outside the enterprise. The sophistication of solutions directly offered by suppliers of hosted email systems and application providers such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP and a host of others has certainly reached a level whereby technically they are suitable for use by very many businesses.

One might still question whether the cost models are pitched at quite the right level, especially as most organisations may not be ready, willing or able, to eliminate or even significantly reduce their internal, frequently invisible, IT support costs.  Whilst use of external SaaS offerings is clearly growing rapidly, it is from a very small base. However with all of the major software providers apparently ready to back SaaS, it is certain that the numbers using SaaS will continue to increase. Indeed, the movement of the likes of Google and Yahoo to offer web desktop tools is likely to hasten user acceptance of SaaS.

By and large it is fair to say that users really do not care what model is used to give them access to their applications as long as it works when they want it. Business managers of course have other concerns but these should focus around levels and cost of service along, perhaps, with questions of security. They, like the users, should not have to concern themselves with questions of IT service delivery architecture. Perhaps the question of whether the Mainstream IS ready for SaaS should really now target the IT support community. SaaS may not be appropriate everywhere, but the solution delivery mechanism is not going to go away.

Thus far SaaS has had many of its greatest successes in smaller businesses where dedicated IT skills are notoriously rare, along with individual departments or functions in larger enterprises who make their own arrangements independently, often to overcome the perceived drag of central IT. Either way, SaaS has tended to be a business rather than IT-driven phenomenon. Like PCs when they first entered business use, SaaS is easy for individuals and groups to bring into the organisation without the blessing or even the knowledge of corporate IT. 

In terms of simplicity and usability the SaaS model for delivering IT services is here and it has been accepted by the mainstream user base. IT departments need to recognise this and work out, logically and transparently what place it holds today in their operations and where it will be utilised tomorrow, for services hosted inside the company and for those that can / should / should not be hosted outside it. The mainstream is more than ready for SaaS.

By Tony Lock