Let's be clear about one thing, if the developing world wants to emulate the western world's way of life, we will need multiple planets to supply the raw materials and absorb the waste. EMC's Dick Sullivan points out that China has nine motor vehicles per thousand heads of population, India has eleven and the USA has 1148.

Huge changes need to take place and many of them are quite beyond the scope of the IT department. But, having said that, ICT generally can make a substantial difference and have a positive effect, not only on the planet, but on society and on company profitability.

In the last item in this series, we saw how changes in the data centre and at the desktop could make a substantial difference to energy consumption, space usage and the bottom line. Today we'll look at how ICT can support the organisation in its pursuit of environmental objectives.

Broadly speaking, ICT can help run a more efficient and less energy-consuming organisation. It can also help 'dematerialise' a company's products and the means by which it delivers its services. To take a simple example of dematerialisation, remember when we had telephone answering machines? Now the same function is delivered as a service, either by the telecom service provider or by software inside the organisation. More recent examples are online music and eBooks.

Another form of dematerialisation is to substitute travel with videoconferencing. We can transport people as bits instead of atoms. And save the economic and environmental costs of ground and air transport as well as accommodation expenses. EMC uses Cisco's TelePresence system and finds meetings very realistic. The worst aspect is that you can't all go down the pub together when the session's over.

Forrester Research suggests that, in future, the cost of a product or service will be measured not only in price, but also in terms of energy consumed over its lifecycle. No doubt a product's inherent recyclability and use of hazardous chemicals could also be taken into account. Such information would need to be recorded and maintained by IT systems. And it will apply to both the purchase, processing and supply activities of a company. All companies will need to account for their environmental performance.

IT can't act alone and its impact will vary in proportion to the type of organisation it is supporting. It must be difficult if you're the CIO of a coal-burning power station to know that 60 percent of the energy produced goes straight up the chimney. But we all have to do our bit and hope that others, with bigger carbon deficits are doing something about theirs.

The important thing is to look at the business as a whole, along with the CEO, facilities, HR and anyone else with a vested interest. Raw materials, manufacturing, logistics, staff travel and buildings are all part of the mix. IT applied intelligently can reduce road and air miles, reduce commutes and eliminate many business trips altogether. In America, UPS plans its routes to maximise the number of right turns. It estimates that this, and its package flow technology, saved it three million gallons of fuel last year.

Cutting the carbon footprint is a question of motivation at the top. Once a company has decided to act, every aspect of the business can be re-examined in this light. The trick, certainly in the early days, is to look for the big wins. These usually deliver nett economic, environmental and social benefits.

An IP communications network can put antennae in every part of a business. Instead of separate monitoring and control systems, they could be consolidated into a single all-embracing network, in theory at least. Building security, cctv, presence sensors, lighting, elevator control, air conditioning, fire alarms, remote sensing of reservoir water levels, railway points and so on could be integrated and automated. But common sense needs to be applied with regard to the investment needed and the payoff expected.

It's unlikely that anyone in the organisation will be familiar with all the potential opportunities. So why not create online meeting places where employees can discuss and share information and opinion? Especially in identifying opportunities for the beneficial application of ICT. The more ICT is seen as value-adding, the more it will attract budget and raise its importance to the organisation.

In order to keep the planet ticking over and to recover lost ground, we need to shift as many of our desires as possible away from material things and towards services. It all sounds terribly idealistic, but when you think that an iPod is probably thousands of times more environmentally friendly over its life than a conventional music system with its collection of records, CDs and tapes, then it's not such a big leap. We still get the pleasure we crave but with a much smaller environmental impact. The short term hit of retiring the old equipment and buying the new ought to lead to a long term nett benefit.

IT can help at many levels. Not least in environmental accounting for all the companies inputs, processing and outputs, in the effective operation of the buildings and services and in the minimisation of travel, accommodation and commuting.

But, it has to be said, if your company does not take any of this stuff seriously then your best bet is to show how environmental actions can actually benefit the bottom line. And take it from there.

Say "green" to most enterprise IT suppliers and they fire back with "energy". They see energy issues as the number one threat for organisations, and IT departments in particular. They also see it as their number one opportunity to hook their sales teams into your refresh cycle. The twin evils of faltering energy supplies and rising prices deliver hardware and software suppliers a chance to offer IT departments what amounts to an energy-related 'get out of jail free' card.

Dig a little deeper and each supplier will lay claim to a green agenda. As we saw in the last report in this series, some have a genuine history of environmental concern and try to be ahead of the regulators while others simply do what they are obliged to. It might help your company's own environmental credentials if you ensure that your own suppliers are credible in this respect.

Most vendors agree that IT equipment usually runs inefficiently. Servers and desktops alike only run to a fraction of their capacity yet, whether fully occupied or idle, they still gobble power. The cost of power is rising and demand for computing resources shows no sign of abating. Making IT equipment and its surrounding infrastructure more energy efficient saves money and improves your company's environmental performance.

The first step is for IT departments to figure out how much energy they use. Traditionally, this is not something they have had to worry about. Electricity is bought and paid for by facilities and accounts and a proportionate charge slapped on IT by the bean counters. Unless, or until, IT can measure its power requirements and identify exactly where the energy goes, it cannot put an effective energy saving strategy into operation.

For many organisations, this need to manage energy usage comes at the same time that the company is growing, placing increased processing demands on the IT department. These contradictory forces will be shaping the IT agenda very soon, if they are not already. One good thing is that computer power continues to grow while occupying the same amount of rack space.

If you're running a data centre, a large chunk of incoming energy goes on cooling. The next large slice is taken by the IT equipment itself. The next chunk is used by the UPS. If you are running racks of x86-based servers, the news is good because these are currently the least efficiently used pieces of equipment. And they throw out a lot of heat, which is usually wasted to the atmosphere although some companies try to put it to good use, feeding it into the space heating system, for example.

A more efficiently run server farm with a more intelligent use of cooling equipment could pay cost and environmental dividends, either by shrinking energy budgets or by enabling growth. You'll find better designed racks and cooling systems on offer. Some, such as Hewlett Packard's Dynamic Smart Cooling  can be retrofitted to existing installations.

Moving to the servers themselves, let's be generous and say that the average server is running at 20 percent capacity (estimates start at five percent). Obviously, you won't crank that up to 100 percent but, through virtualisation, 60 percent might be achievable. That's a tripling of capacity or a shrinking of the equipment and its surrounding infrastructure by two thirds.

What about consolidation? If your computer operations are spread across multiple locations, could they be brought together? To take an extreme example, IBM consolidated 150 data centres to ten and 31 networks to one. It also went from 3900 servers down to 33 mainframes running Linux. The savings were astronomical and are ongoing. Sun went through a similar exercise, slashing its data centre floor area by 80 percent and its energy usage by 65 percent. The IT folk checked out the function of every server and powered down hundreds whose function couldn't be determined.

Sun estimates that the average desktop is run at around one percent of capacity. It advocates a thin client approach using its 4 watt SunRay devices. But, regardless of whether its figure for PCs is accurate, it does raise the issue of the appropriateness of equipment. Do people need the PC power that they're given? Do they know that standby mode consumes less energy than a screen saver? Do they switch off their machines at night? In the data centre, are the servers, storage and cooling over-specified for the job at hand? Would it matter if lower-power processors or slower drives were used?

Whichever way you look, the question "is this resource appropriate for the task?" can be asked. It's not a case of fork-lifting in a new data centre, although some vendors would love that, it's about systematically considering each component in a green/energy light in advance of your next equipment refresh.

And, when the time comes to refresh, don't forget to plan for the environmentally friendly disposal of old equipment and the packaging of the new equipment. An increasing number of manufacturers will be happy to make this part of the deal.

I was asked again recently about the options for extending enterprise applications out into the field using mobile technology. It seems that more and more people are looking beyond mobile email to how they can use wireless access in relation to applications such as ERP, CRM, and so on.

One of the most commonly considered applications we see being mobilised is field service management, and the lessons learned in this area are relevant to many other applications. If you are interested in a proper treatment of the topic, I suggest you download this community research report.

For those who are interested in a more 101-level ‘which end is up’ introduction, here are a few notes I jotted down for the person who was enquiring about the topic yesterday.

The main options for wireless-extending existing applications are:

Bolt-on packages: Some application vendors provide these themselves and most have third-party options available as well. We can think of this type of solution as essentially a module that just extends the application, typically reusing a lot of the metadata, master data and transaction layer. This is good if your aim is mobilising a single packaged application such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft or whatever. The downside is that it can be a pain if you want data/functionality from multiple back-end systems to be surfaced together on the device.

Value-added services: Commonly referred to as the ‘VAS’ option in mobility circles. The basic idea is essentially the same as the bolt-on approach defined above, except that the solution is hosted (typically, but not necessarily, by the operator). As operators are mostly into repeatable solutions given their business model and mindset, the VAS approach is typically even more prescriptive than the bolt-on one, and is therefore generally targeted at simpler requirements. However, many applications extension requirements are actually quite simple so there is a place for this approach.

Open middleware platforms: This is where you procure a middleware platform that may be used to bridge the gap between back-end applications and mobile devices, with all of the clever stuff required to make this work properly. These platform solutions generally come with a development environment or allow you to use open tools such as Eclipse to design and build solutions. In reality, many of the solutions in this space are delivered with pre-defined templates or libraries for working with the most common back-end applications, but these are just a starting point for your own development efforts rather than a fully supported turnkey solution. The advantage of this approach is clearly that you have freedom to extend pretty much any application or mix of applications – including bespoke/custom/legacy applications, as well as packages.

The big imperative when getting into all this is understanding your requirement – particularly bearing in mind the medium term at least - think a little way beyond the immediate job at hand. I am personally not an advocate of big over-arching mobile strategies that cut across all types of application as the space is so fast moving and your requirements and what technology will be capable of looking forward are both difficult to predict. The concept of five-year mobility strategies is just nonsense as there are just too many variables that you cannot possibly tie down. There is also a strong argument that mobile access should be an element incorporated into other strategies for mobile working, process automation, collaboration, communication, and so on, rather than a strategy in its own right.

Something that’s critical, though, is getting a sensible policy framework in place, which will address things like security/compliance, integration standards, device selection/endorsement, operational management, and support. When doing this, it is important to think about what needs to integrated with the stuff that is already there and what you can legitimately ‘reinvent’ for mobile specifically without creating lots of disjoints and conflicts. You may have invested a lot of time on a security infrastructure, for example, and be reluctant to put a parallel policy management in place for the mobile domain.

The bottom line is that before you make a move in this space, it is worth taking time out to educate yourself, understand the options, understand your own requirements, then make choices on an objective and informed basis that will work for the immediately funded project and likely additional medium-term requirements.

As I said, this really is just a brief orientation, and my categorisations of solutions are just to give a flavour of what’s out there. Experts will tell you that not all VAS solutions are prescriptive and that bolt-on offerings often have development environments too that allow customisation and access to other applications, but people at least seem to appreciate having some basic classification framework in place as a starting point for gathering their thoughts.

As I said, a lot of this explored further based on actual feedback from practitioners in the Field Service Management report (and thanks to Momote for funding the underlying community research study upon which this is based).

By Dale Vile

Freeform Dynamics is big on the practical aspects of business-IT alignment. One of the key attributes we have been measuring and cross referencing against all sorts of different things this year is the notion that some organisations use the concept of services when dealing with their business users, some use them within the IT department only, and some don’t have a ‘services thing’ at all.

It might surprise you to learn that despite all the talk of ‘services’ and ‘service management’, our first major research project in 2007 - involving gathering insight from approximately 1600 IT practitioners and leaders - showed that organisations using a services-oriented approach to communicating with the business were in fact in the minority - around 33 per cent. Of the remaining two thirds, another third told us they used the ‘service concept’ in the IT department but not when talking to the business, and the remainder didn’t use the concept of services at all.

We had the opportunity to ask a similar audience the same questions at the end of the second quarter of the year. Interestingly we found that the number of organisations using services to communicate with the business had risen to just over 40 per cent, while the number using services within the IT department only had fallen slightly, and the number not doing services at all was constant.

Now, while I am wary of comparing statistics from two different sample groups (albeit of the same general profile and size) it is of interest to note the movement in the numbers, and also to acknowledge that a sizable number of organisations simply don’t yet see the need to express their IT-business related activities in terms of services. There does appear, however, to be a relatively rapid turnover from a ‘halfway house’ - having a services oriented approach within the IT department - to a full blown services mindset, which doesn’t surprise me at all. I also think that it is only a matter of time before the non-services-oriented organisations come around to this way of thinking, not least because it will make a lot more of what the rest of the industry is talking about, doing and selling more accessible in the context of IT enabling the business.

I have been criticising vendors recently for not bothering to define service, the assumption being everyone already gets this, and, as discussed above, this isn’t the case – so I should do so here. Actually, it’s IBM’s unofficial version – which I happen to like because it doesn’t send the reader down any specific pathways, and is applicable to any business or IT related area which involves a consumer (service user) and a provider (IT or the business itself):

A service is: ‘a desired outcome consistently executed through the application of resources and controls in a defined manner.'

So, I hope you are thinking, just what do these services-oriented organisations get that the rest don’t? In a nutshell, the way the industry is evolving just gets easier to engage with. Things just line up better. There are two ways of acknowledging this. The sceptic might consider that organisations which ‘get’ the services thing are simply opening themselves up for a lot more vendor-related messaging and new kit to buy. A more positive view is that there needs to be a common language between IT and the business – for obvious reasons – and a sensible way of achieving the appropriate level of mutual understanding and meeting of requirements is to consolidate both business requirements and IT activities, in the way they are requested, designed, managed and consumed, into a services-oriented approach. That indeed may open up new requirements for investment - though not always in technology - but the key thing to remember is that looking ahead, these new requirements should be the right ones, not simply additional ones.

And so to the configuration management database (CMDB) – the focus of a project we carried out earlier this year. It’s one of those areas which appears more desirable if you look at it from the corner of your eye instead of straight on, and something which appears more achievable and relevant if you don’t talk directly about it.

A good example of a topic which can generate a need to ‘talk CMDB’ is discussed here http://freeformcomment.blogspot.com/ and involves the potential for convergence between the disparate worlds of enterprise asset management and IT asset management. Back to the point. Take a look at the chart below, which is a good example of some specific benefits achieved by organisations that take the service / alignment thing seriously across their business. Again, simply put, things just make more sense.

Fig 1: Responses to question: ‘what risks have there been or would you anticipate in association with a CMDB implementation?’ Organisations that considered their IT department as being strongly tuned into the business versus rest of sample.

To add some meat to the previous statement: you can see that the differences in actual and perceived risks are significantly lower for organisations which have already taken steps to achieve business-IT alignment, by communicating via a services orientated approach, and those which have not.
I don’t believe that getting to the point where what IT does for the business is categorised in terms of services requires a huge amount of effort in terms of change – initially at least it’s a mindset thing, one which requires decent communication and liaison between business and IT. Needless to say, organisations that do the services thing have these sorts of people in place, and it works. But what we were able to capture in our CMDB study was that the benefits, especially in terms of bringing the right people together, and frankly, planning the hell out of what is undeniably a complex project to undertake, are clear, and not just by a few percentage points either.

Ultimately, whether considering a CMDB or related project or not, taking a different view of the world in terms of what IT does, and what the business does with IT is paying dividends for those organisations which have already set off down this route. For those that have not yet explored this, it is high time to do so, because while the competition is gaining incrementally and constantly, everyone else is slipping further behind.

By Martin Atherton

Download Freeform Dynamics’ reports, including Deploying CMDB Technology free of charge from www.freeformdynamics.com

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

Throughout much of the last 15 years a lot of attention has been lavished on the less than humble personal computer, now almost universally revered as "the PC". While there is absolutely no doubt that the PC has enabled much productive, and valuable, work to be delivered it has not been without cost, especially in terms of the time spent configuring, repairing and maintaining such devices. However, in recent years the high cost of looking after the device has caught up with the PC.

A question many organisations are now asking, perhaps belatedly, concerns identifying the best way to deliver "desktop" service to users, and there are now many ways of answering the question. In addition to the standard 'unmanaged', usually Microsoft Windows-based PC, we have now entered an age where alternative solutions may be suitable for some users. Indeed, technology and business needs now ensure that alternative solutions are investigated.

The alternatives include using sophisticated management tools to assist daily PC administration and operations as well as potentially deploying rapidly maturing thin client-type solutions. In the not too distant future it is clear that newer offerings such as SaaS (software as a service) could have some role to play supplying basic desktop office functionality, but it is not there yet. It is also apparent that there will soon be obvious opportunities to bring well established virtualisation solutions to the desktop. The simplicity of deploying a single file containing a user’s desktop to whatever PC device is needed quickly and without fuss is certain to attract attention, especially in those organisations that are already comfortable operating virtual machines on their server platforms.

On the question of better management of desktop / laptop machines, this is something that Microsoft has emphasised as one of the major benefits of Windows Vista. With this in mind, it is informative to note the results of some research (yet to be published) that we have recently undertaken concerning the likely adoption of Vista among enterprises. In answer to the question “When do you think you are likely to roll out Windows Vista in your organisation?”, fewer than one in 10 of those that take an ad hoc or informal approach to monitoring the quality of service delivered by IT say they will roll out Vista within a year, versus greater than 40 per cent of those at the other extreme who monitor performance across the broad scope of IT service delivery.

This is, perhaps, indicative, that the challenges associated with desktop service delivery are now much more visible than in the past and that there is a growing recognition of the business value delivered by IT in general and the desktop in particular.

I will be writing more on the rapidly expanding range of methods becoming available to help organisations large and small deliver desktop services. In future articles I will consider the current state of affairs, the benefits, challenges and general fit of various approaches to desktop deployment.

Tony Lock

A long, long time ago, I can still remember… when, at university, we were taught about how computers were going to help people have all the information they needed, quite literally at the speed of electricity. Hum. It’s now 20 years later, and I don’t feel any more like information is at my beck and call than I did back then. Indeed it’s the other way around – I feel beholden to information, rather than feeling it is beholden to me.

I don’t think I’m alone. In fact, I know I’m not – a research study we conducted at the beginning of the year showed that information access remains an area of weakness for many organisations. Quite ironic really, given that we supposedly work in “information technology”, that is, the technology of information. Someone, and I suppose we all need to put our hands up for this, isn’t doing a very good job.

But is it an impossible goal? Think: if you could tap into whatever information you needed right now, what would it look like and how would you access it? It’s not an easy question to answer, and indeed, it is difficult if not impossible to do so without considering what facilities are already available to us. Every now and then I have a deep insight into my own information needs, for example when I am in a strange town, there’s nobody around and I really, really could do with a curry. Weren’t mobile software vendors telling us years ago that such a problem had already been solved? Perhaps it’s just me – everyone else is enjoying fine curries, laughing into their Cobras at having managed to keep the secret – but I doubt it.

It’s the same for business information. Whatever the reasons, many (if not all) organisations still struggle when it comes to pulling together whatever information is necessary for day to day activities. Again, there have been many promises over the years of how, say, we would be able to access a single view of the customer, or manage product information over the lifecycle. But, let’s face it, if it is still a challenge to organise meeting room bookings – and indeed, in many places it is – what chance do we stand in achieving more esoteric goals. Even this is a simplistic view of the real requirement, as anybody who invites a potential customer for a meeting, only to be turfed out of the room by some irate jobsworth, will know.

So what’s the answer? One thing is for sure - it cannot just be about technology. For an organisation to get on top of its information pile, it must be able to distinguish the important from the clutter – and manage the information accordingly. Long ago I went on a five-day information management course. What made it interesting was, four-and-a-half days were spent on how information should be managed, and in the last half day, the trainer announced: “And there are some technologies that can help people do it.” One day perhaps, when information technology has slowed down from its current pace of change, organisations may put an equal amount of focus on the problem, rather than leaping straight to the solution. Until then, we’ll just have to do the best we can.

By Jon Collins

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

Watching the evening news, we are constantly reminded of how dangerous the world is. Stories about terrorism in particular dominate the headlines at the moment, but anything to do with political controversy or instability, significant changes in the financial markets, corporate scandals, cyber crime, natural disaster, public health emergencies, and so on, also tend to get prime-time coverage. 

Against this background, we might assume that the average organisation is sitting there constantly worrying about the risks that arise from all of these potential threats to their business. But in a recent Freeform Dynamics study looking at business attitudes and practices in the area of risk management across Europe and the Middle East, we found that some of the more prominent threats highlighted by the media are not given that much consideration at all. In fact, businesses are generally much more concerned about information loss and downtime of IT systems than they are about terrorist activity, bird flu, earthquakes, floods or the antics of stock market investors or politicians (see chart below).

Of course it could be argued that some of the potential problems at the top of this list can be caused by those at the bottom, but it is interesting that organisations are generally not explicitly considering the latter that much during the business planning process.

But should they?

Well, that depends. When considering any particular risk, it is necessary to assess three things – the probability of an incident occurring, the impact of an incident if it does occur, and the cost of either preventing an incident or dealing with its consequences. When we think in these terms, the above picture starts to make a lot of sense. While natural disaster in a particular geographic area can have a devastating impact on the local business community, the majority of businesses across Europe and the Middle East are just not located in high-risk areas. Similarly, while we all hear and read so much about terrorism, few regard the probability of being directly affected as significant. And, how sensitive is your business, really, to the ebb and flow of the financial markets, short of a major recession that you can do little about anyway?

Clearly most businesses figure that these things are not worth losing sleep over because they are so unlikely to be touched by them.

At the other extreme, the chances of very damaging IT-related issues occurring if you neglect to pay proper attention to operations, security, and so on are very high. Furthermore, the impact of critical data loss and downtime of key operational systems is potentially very significant in terms of damage to the business, which is clearly why these items are at the top of the risk consideration list.

We do, however, need to be careful not to generalise too much, as both perceived and actual risks are highly dependent on specific situations and scenarios. Looking behind the overall view of priorities we have been discussing, for example, we find that financial services organisations not surprisingly take the performance of financial markets and potential regulatory exposure very seriously from a risk management perspective. Oil and gas companies, on the other hand, with the nature and diverse geographic spread of their activity, pay a lot more attention to accidental damage (think fire) and natural disaster related risks.

These are a couple of high-level industry examples, but if we drill down again, we can get even more specific, for example financial services companies based in the City of London stand out in the degree to which they worry about terrorism, and any organisation that interacts electronically with the general public tends to be quite jumpy about the risk of IT systems downtime.

Beyond this, there is the question of balancing the three dimensions of probability, potential impact and cost of mitigation, which plays out not just at a macro level, but when, for example you are assessing very specific security or operational risks, considering how much time, resource and money it is worth spending trying to deal with a particular threat. We’ll be picking up on this balancing act during future discussions as we revisit the area of risk management in the context of different domains, particularly looking at how technology advances can open up new ways of dealing with some of the same old threats as time goes on.

In the meantime, if you are interested in more details of the risk study mentioned in the above discussion, the report is available for download here .

I recently joined a group of IT managers to dig into the issues they face in building their next-generation desktop architectures.

The format of the event was a roundtable discussion on key issues, sponsored by NEC and hosted by Computing. But once we started going round the table doing the introductions, it seemed that everyone was keen to unburden themselves of the pressing issues and trends that they see today, and it’s interesting to see how this small sample mirrors some of the output of Freeform Dynamics’ primary research.

One of the areas that we naturally covered was the migration to Microsoft Vista and the Office 2007 application suite. Opinions in the room matched the research that we carried out on Vista adoption in the first part of 2006, with only one out of the 10 IT managers present doing an active migration, the others preferring to wait some period of time until convinced of the stability of the new products. This latter course was expressed in a number of different ways, from the standard ‘not until Service Pack 2’ statement to a more measured response tied to the product lifecycle of the PCs.

One of the frustrations expressed was the feeling that everyone was being driven by Microsoft’s product release agenda, rather than being involved in a consultative process to take business capability forward on the new platforms. While we all like to be armchair marketing experts, there is an argument that says that Microsoft has been very keen on pushing the new technologies in Vista and Office 2007 and the degree of development effort involved in delivering them, encapsulated in the mass advertising around the campaign ‘The Wow starts now’, as opposed to communicating the undoubted business benefits that can be derived from adopting them. This is particularly true of new line of business applications developed using the latest version of Visual Studio that can access the new display capabilities in Vista, and the integration of products in the Office suite with collaboration services such as SharePoint.

SharePoint has achieved a viral level of success within organisations, much in the way that departmental Lans (local area networks) did in the 1980s, and this was again validated by a straw poll in the room, with some of the participants noting their surprise at how many SharePoint servers they were able to find on their networks when they went and looked. In a lot of cases these servers remained in place after the project they were set up to support had finished, which raises some interesting issues around management and administration.

Clearly SharePoint is delivering business value, but in many cases there is no corporate policy for management and use, so it’s probably a sound idea for IT and business to get together to develop a support and management model for better managed use of the technology. This would then make it easier to develop some of the Office 2007 collaboration features that would otherwise be underutilised. This additional value would also help motivate users to go through the pain barrier as far as learning the use of the new look-and-feel of the suite, such as the ribbon menu system.

Another area that a number of participants commented on was the pressure on IT coming from newer entrants to the workforce who have been accustomed to a rich online experience. It’s often frustrating for these younger people to move into to a computing environment that is missing the kind of collaborative experience that they have been used to. In many cases they understand the difference between work and social life, but they don’t understand why technologies such as online group chat, file sharing and free voice over IP are not available to facilitate their work.

This feeling is further strengthened when the employer claims a commitment to home working, in which case the remote worker is using a home machine on which they are used to using newer social tools. This contrasts with the challenge at the other end of the age and experience spectrum with more mature workers who lack IT confidence, feeling very nervous about setting up and doing self-maintenance on home networking.

There was also some discussion on the whole area of green computing. Much in the news with politicians tripping over themselves to burnish their ecological credentials, IT managers are dealing with more practical issues, like how to get all the heat out of dealing rooms that have three computers and five screens per desk, and getting power in and out of wiring closets that have to be upgraded to support the power over Ethernet (PoE) required to drive the latest generation of IP phones. Having worked for a thin client manufacturer in a former life, it was good to hear that this technology still has good mindshare in the enterprise, with many IT managers considering it for suitable environments such as call centres, hotdesks, and applications where data has to be kept away from local storage. Many of the drawbacks are now overcome, particularly in areas of graphics delivery, with newer techniques such as those from NEC allowing the delivery of streaming video without being hamstrung by the poor performance of the screen display protocol.

The main conclusion, which isn’t exactly a revelation, is that IT managers are clearly ready to embrace newer technologies, but on their own terms. Key criteria include achieving harmony with existing investments in software and systems, as well as timing of the product upgrade cycle. Vista and Office upgrades will be more palatable if they fit this model, as opposed to being force-fed as the only available software option on newer equipment. But the substantial discontinuity that this migration represents is giving some IT managers, particularly those in the public sector with an obligation to get the most utility from the public money they use, to look, however briefly, at alternative desktop technologies such as thin client, and even different software solutions such as Linux, OpenOffice and StarOffice.

David Perry