By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Active Endpoints has been acquired by Informatica. The news was buried in a press release announcing Informatica's latest cloud-based product, which is dated February 20, 2013. It's not immediately clear when the acquisition happened.

The announcement introduced Informatica Cloud Spring 2013, the latest release of its Informatica Cloud family of cloud-based integration and data management applications. The product delivers:

• A new Informatica Cloud Data Masking service to reduce the risk of data breaches during application development and testing.
• A new Informatica Cloud Extend workflow service for advanced business process creation and management in the cloud.
• Enterprise-class cloud integration security and administration enhancements.
• Expanded cloud contact validation and master data management (MDM) applications.
• New Cloud Connectors and Get it Now Cloud Integration Templates on Informatica Marketplace.

Informatica Cloud Spring 2013 delivers Informatica Cloud Extend, technologies that Informatica obtained through the acquisition of Active Endpoints to deliver workflow capabilities for salesforce.com customers. Available today on the AppExchange, this cloud-based application enables sales, marketing and support professionals to:

• Encapsulate and automate best practices across business processes and human workflows.
• Create and maintain workflows composed of data in Salesforce CRM and other applications in the cloud or on-premise.
• Take advantage of guidance trees, a new programming paradigm for non-programmers, to create and publish business process workflows users can access in Salesforce screens, websites and mobile devices

So departs another new innovative entrant to be swallowed by an acquisitive big boy of the software world.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 21st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The change of season and, of course, the weather from snow to sunshine here in the UK seems to have coincided with the production of 2 reports on ERP from 2 of the major Magazines aimed at the manufacturing vertical. Logistics Manager article[i] looked at whether ERP has kept time with the changes in supply chains. Manufacturing and Logistics IT article[ii] was a review of ERP with particular emphasis on the views of vendors on mobility and the cloud. Having read these articles, I thought it appropriate to pull the thoughts and views contained in these articles with my own thoughts.

What has changed in the business side of manufacturing? Logistics Manager made a very important point that supply chains depend on the IT systems that support them, in fact it is a critical dependency. Supply chain management has changed considerably over the last decade with networks replacing chains, internationalisation leading transport distance becoming an issue, particularly now in this energy aware and green conscious world. Additionally the collaboration between a company and its suppliers, customers and partners has become much tighter and closer whilst at the same time having to be agile and flexible to changes in the market. The key to supply chains is that they are process and event driven. Now if ERP packages have moved in the way I suggested in 2010 then they should be able to cope with the changed world. What has happened, mostly due to the recession, is that investment in IT has been pretty stagnant and this is particularly true in North America and Western Europe, where budget constraints and legacy systems are more expensive to maintain. However, in the areas of IT infrastructure immaturity, such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia/Pacific, there is an increase in software spend. If ERP is still seen as the price of entry for companies, then this means, as I see it, that the SME market (where the future large enterprises are likely to come from) is the area where ERP vendors have to win their footholds. The other key point that comes out of this Logistics manager article is that with geographical dispersal of supply chains, executives need to be able to access information from anywhere, on lots of different devices, so mobility access is the key and that means security associated with this has to be there.

All the major ERP vendors see that it is very important to provide mobile support for the business functions of customer relationship management, call management, transport and route management and inventory management. Mobility is changing the way people work and utilise business information in the field. There is a great quote in the report from Phil Lewis, Business Consulting Director for Infor, "Today's approach to Mobility is aiming for information without boundaries. The ability to work from a mobile device, be it a laptop, tablet or even a smartphone, should not be compromised." Innovation surrounding mobility is set to continue, especially as vendors see more user interfaces converting to HTML5. However a word of warning here; standards on devices are great for application vendors but as far as device vendors are concerned, they restrict their ability to differentiate.

What about the cloud? The introduction of cloud (SaaS) ERP solutions provides a further degree of choice as to how to implement and, as well, opens up opportunities for SMEs to exploit the benefits business control given by ERP. What is interesting to note is that the view of the importance of the cloud by vendors is directly related to whether or not they have the capability! Let me say that cloud is not the right solution for everyone, you have to be able to offset its advantages against a more rigid adherence to the solution provided by the vendor (though they are getting better) as being really assured about availability and security of your data over the ether. In The Manufacturing and Logistics article, it was interesting to note that some vendors had seen a tendency for certain ERP modules to be more likely implemented over the cloud - one of those mentioned was CRM. I think this suggests that what is likely in the future is a hybrid where some modules of the ERP are run in-house whilst other are run in the cloud. An interesting dilemma then for the ERP vendors as to how to make this seamless! The statistics on adoption show that it is still slow, certainly for the manufacturing sector. One thing the cloud does do is offer a really good way to carry out a proof of concept.

The next big issue is big data (didn't really mean that as a pun!). The Manufacturing and Logistics report made a very interesting comment that big data had been heard about by IT but not by manufacturing business users. Anyone who has been involved in the implementation of sensory devices such as bar-codes or RFID knows that the data collected by these devices can be enormous and one of the issue is what do you do with it? Back in the early 2000's I presented a paper at a BI conference on the issue of RFID data positing that the value of data could increase over time rather than decrease and how is it to be handled?. So there is a large amount of data in manufacturing collected in real time coming from sensory devices on the shop floor, in the warehouses and even from customer and supplier locations so there is a need for big data technology to analyse this. I see big data becoming an important issue to manufacturers and retailers as the economy picks up. There is a need to be able to seamlessly integrate internal and external data whilst maintaining that you are comparing apples with apples. To do this requires an effective metadata repository with business rules to decide how to do the comparisons.

What then about social networking? I like this comment that I found in The Manufacturing and Logistics article that social networking is about bringing the consumer IT world into the workforce. Although I would replace the word workforce by business community, as I see it this is being driven by new entrants into the workforce of organisations, who are very computer literate and used to 'Tweeting' and 'Facebooking' information to their friends and associates. Social networking is, in my view, heavily associated with today's mobile never off-line workforce. I see the first key use of social networking in business is to enable multimedia communications within and without an organisation to get assistance on solving an issue. From a marketing viewpoint, social networking also would appear to be an effective broadcasting media for certain types of blanket marketing campaign. The big challenge that I see for ERP vendors is do they create their own social networking capability or do they create secure interfaces to work with the major social networking vendors?

So, why should an organisation consider ERP as a solution in this decade? ERP solutions still solve their original aims of providing a seamless integrated environment between application modules that support the business so that you only have to input the information once - this is particular true as they relate to finance and resource planning. So if you are thinking of purchasing for the first time, or of upgrading or switching to an alternative, the reason and rationale has to be a business one, which will solve specific measurable issues in your business, not an IT one. When you evaluate the different products what you will find is, with a few exceptions, not a lot of difference in functional support. The solutions in the marketplace support al the major functions of Finance, Human Resources, Production Planning, Product and Service management, Inventory Management, Customer and Supplier Management. In addition there is a heavy verticalisation available from all the major solutions to support verticals from machinery to mining, from oil production to aerospace. So where should you look for difference? My suggestions would be:

1. The underling infrastructure - as this is what makes the product agile, flexible and easy to use.
2. Business Intelligence - not just data warehousing and analytics, but also the ability to incorporate contextual information about the data in terms of the process instance that created it.
3. Ability to build a long term relationship with the vendor - selecting an ERP is not a short term arrangement, we are talking of anything up to 20+ years of association. When I am involved in a selection process I always incorporate a chance for the selecting organisation to visit and meet the vendor people (i.e. more than just the sales team) and also to meet or talk to some current customers.
4. My final suggestion for looking for differences is to look at how the ERP vendor supports mobility and the cloud. This is all about being not necessarily at the bleeding edge but at the forefront of the peloton.

[i] Too old to work. Logistics Manager, April 2013

[ii] ERP spreads its wings. Manufacturing and Logistics IT , March 2013

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 21st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

If there is one thing that drives agile delivery of automated business outcomes, it's continuous deployment. Automation of error-prone manual procedures reduces errors and increases efficiency - as long as you build on configuration management best practices. Note that this doesn't demand 'high ceremony' process and a focus on perfection - 'just enough' process ensures that the automated business outcome is 'good enough' to get the job done - that is, it's fit for purpose - and continuous deployment implies that the scope of impact of any particular change is limited (so any risk is manageable).

This topic is, IMO, one of the sexiest topics at the up-coming BCS-CMSG conference (4 June 2013, at the BCS Office in central London). Martin van Vliet, of XebiaLabs, is talking about taking continuous integration to the enterprise level and extending it to Continuous Delivery. To get there, he says, teams need enterprise-grade automated testing, Continuous Integration and automated deployments - and he'll highlight some simple steps for getting started.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 21st May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The change of season and, of course, the weather from snow to sunshine here in the UK seems to have coincided with the production of 2 reports on ERP from 2 of the major magazines aimed at the manufacturing vertical. The Logistics Manager article[i] looked at whether ERP has kept time with the changes in supply chains. The Manufacturing and Logistics IT article[ii] was a review of ERP with particular emphasis on the views of vendors on mobility and the cloud. Having read these articles, I thought it appropriate to pull the thoughts and views contained in these articles with my own thoughts.

When I wrote the Market Guide (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) - What does it mean to us today?) at the end of 2010, I made a key statement for prospective buyers and said, "An ERP package has to be process and event driven rather than transaction driven. It has to have fewer moving parts and allow configuration to be minimised as well as much easier to perform - not forgetting faster! We are looking for ERP packages to be modularised so that not only can we choose only the ones we are interested in, but also be able to integrate based on standards to other packages with no issues." In reviewing the packages then I specifically looked at what the vendors were saying about mobility, the cloud and also support for social networking as a means of collaboration. So it was very pleasing to see in both articles that these 3 areas were highlighted and seen as key ones. Of course the additional key element was big data and decision support/business information systems.

To read more details, please look at my new article with the same title (ERP - where to in 2013?)

[i] Too old to work. Logistics Manager, April 2013

[ii] ERP spreads its wings. Manufacturing and Logistics IT , March 2013

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 17th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

The Intel Software Conference was in Chantilly this year and, once again, James Reinders' keynote set the agenda - see his blogs here. It's all about parallel programming from few to many cores with consistent models, languages, tools, and techniques; and with special emphasis on the Xeon Phi Coprocessor.

The Intel story includes:

1. Better tools for parallel programming
2. Better parallel models
3. Wildly more hardware parallelism
4. Better educated programmers

Reinders highlighted tools such as Intel Advisor XE to help you design for parallelism and predict the scalability you might achieve; Intel Composer XE to help you build the code; Intel Inspector XE to help you validate the results and Intel VTune Amplifier XE. These are all pretty techie, but the UI (especially for VTune) is much more supportive and accessible than it used to be.

As for new models for parallel programming, Intel now has a couple of parallel programming models, which "yield portability, performance, productivity, usability, maintainability": TBB (Threading Building Blocks), which is popular for C++ scaling; and Cilk Plus, which helps C programmers and supports vectorisation.

Reinders is particularly proud of its SIMD directives, claimed as an Intel innovation and now (well, mid 2013) part of the OpenMP 4.0 standard. This is about whether the compiler will vectorise your code for (much) better performance; the compiler is pretty conservative (which is safe but can be a nuisance), but SIMD directives force vectorisation regardless. Which is great if you know what you are doing but if you get it wrong, you have some debugging to do. Frankly, this scares me, because whenever the general business programmers I knew got near anything clever like this, we got bugs in production - production outages - but, to be fair, SIMD directives are probably aimed at a different class of high-performance computing programmer. It's a very useful feature, I think, especially now it is part of the OpenMP standard; but I'd use it with caution.

Wildly more parallel processing, in Intel terms, is currently about Xeon Phi coprocessors, it seems. Offloading processing to a GPU (graphics processor unit) isn't new, of course, but GPUs have specialised architectures and command sets, and programming them is a bit of a black art. The Xeon Phi is simply a version of the Xeon chip optimised for parallel processing (Reinders suggests that "XEON Phi is what XEON will look like in 5-10 years time") and it offers opportunities for interesting highly-parallel and flexibly-parallel heterogeneous devices, because it has the same instruction set as the Xeon (which should make programming it easier and reduce complexity). Reinders talks about "supercomputer on a chip" (see performance figures here) and claims that "general purpose IA [Intel Architecture] hardware leads to less idle time for your investment"; it's possible to move code seamlessly to Xeon Phi and back again, for example. Personally, I like this model a lot; although some programmers I know are less keen (perhaps because GPU specialisation offers greater performance for the subset of general programming the GPU is suitable for, and perhaps because some programmers enjoy programming challenges and complexity). Intel's vision is to "span from few cores to many cores with consistent models, tools, languages and techniques", which reads like a pretty good vision ; but I guess we'll have to see how successful the whole family from Atom through to Xeon Phi is in practice.

Educating programmers in the Intel MIC architecture and how to exploit it is the 4th part of the story and Intel has a good range of books to help. Check out Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor High Performance Programming by James Reinders and Jim Jeffers at www.lotsofcores.com, for example.

And, that's probably as techie as I want to get in this blog - the conference went a lot deeper into all this, of course. I'd just like to finish with an Intel customer Incredibuild. This started out with build automation and optimisation - for efficient deployment of developed code into production. However, the techniques and models used to make sure that software build tasks can overlap efficiently - that is, run in parallel for development acceleration - turn out to be generally applicable to many other workloads - that is, for general application acceleration. Parallelism is good, but its not just at the core level. Never overlook parallelism at the macro level and learn from mainframe job schedulers which have been maximising the throughput of work on computers for decades by maximising the parallel processing of business-level 'jobs' on linked mainframe computers running in parallel.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 17th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

An interesting innovation at the 2013 Intel Software Conference was its free HTML5 development environment - a packaged set of programming tools, including cloud support. The approach is different to that adopted for its C++ tools and perhaps deals with a different mindset - web app developers who have to collaborate with business users, regulators and so on, in order to concentrate on delivering business outcomes; rather than on how the detailed code operates. The comment was made that people issues are becoming increasingly important to software development managers these days. But, I wonder, do all developers have a collaborative mindset - or were they selected as loners who spoke code rather than English? And perhaps the high-level solutions-oriented packaging approach of the HTML5 tools could usefully migrate to the C++ tools?

Anyway, Intel is espousing the HTML5 approach to cross-platform web development - develop once, sell in multiple app stores for devices with different form factors (this contrasts with native development, involving a different code-base for each device, and the hybrid cross-platform approach espoused by, e.g., Embarcadero). You get the Intel XDK developer front-end (a Chrome browser plug-in with local project file storage) for writing Windows and OS X apps; and Intel App Dev Centre, which provides cloud-based tools and a build service for, for example, Apple's App Store, Google Play, Nook Store, Amazon App Store for Android, Windows Store, and HTML5 Web Apps.

The advantage of this approach, of course, that you just learn HTML5 and don't need to download and learn native platform SDKs (Software Development Kits) although other approaches may possibly have performance advantages (these may not be significant in practice, depending on implementation). What's new in the Intel offering now is support for the Windows 8 Store and an integrated Project Wizard which is fully integrated into the Intel XDK with, for example, a graphical wizard for website-like apps, a games/physics app framework ("physics" is about making objects behave naturally) and demo examples.

The Intel HTML5 developer experience seems to a a rich one (see here); for example, there's an HTML5 App Porter tool in beta, which promises to help iOS developers broaden their market to include other platforms. Intel claims to be making HTML5 better with contributions to Open Source projects, emerging standards, and the provision of a complete, integrated HTML5 development environment to support true cross-platform apps - at no cost. Technically, Intel's C++ programming environments are very impressive and no doubt suit 'real programmers' - but its HTML5 environment seems to be a lot more 21st century and may do a lot more to bring Intel Software to the attention of the business (I can't resist suggesting that it might be a catalyst for a different kind of "Intel Inside" the business).

By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors Posted: 16th May 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

French-founded open-source BPM technology vendor Bonitasoft (covered by us in detail here) today announced it has secured a third round of VC funding of $13m – taking total funding so far to $28m. This round was led by a fund associated with the French government that aims to support companies with the potential to grow strongly internationally. Participants in previous funding rounds (Auriga Partners, Serena Capital and Ventech) also weighed in.

Bonitasoft has a very clear focus and strategy, as well as a simple but effective business model and product/sales approach. The company is pushing the functionality and scalability of its product forward very consistently, but is also very focused on simplicity from a product use perspective (“every single click counts”, as founder Miguel Valdes Faura puts it).

With over 100 integration partners and 600 customers, together with 130% growth in 2012, it seems that simplicity sells. And also attracts funding.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 16th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Readers will know that our last survey into the data migration market, along with the best practices we recommended, was published in 2011. The big result from this survey was the extent to which the adoption of technology increased the chance of success compared to our previous survey in 2007. We concluded that relevant lessons had largely been learned. We might reasonably conclude, therefore, that the best practices recommended in our 2011 paper have been similarly heeded.

The question therefore becomes: what next? What additional technologies or tools or approaches can further increase the likelihood of successful migrations? Some pointers to this were included in our 2011 survey - the use of tools for archival and data masking for example - but we didn't go into the use of these in any detail. Also, some new tools - for what we might call quality assurance - have appeared since 2011. We haven't any further survey information on these tools and techniques but that doesn't mean that they aren't important going forward.

Anyway, I'm going to be discussing all this in a webinar with Informatica on Monday 22nd May. It should be fun: it's not going to be a formal presentation, more of a chat with Q&A, so I hope you'll listen in.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 16th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

QPR Software announced on May 14th the launch of QPR EAXpress, a new software tool offering the benefits of QPR EnterpriseArchitect as a standalone version. Jaakko Riihinen, SVP Products & Technology at QPR Software. stated, "QPR EAXpress has been designed with mobile professionals in mind who need a powerful single user solution enabling a fast start in managing all enterprise architecture layers and dimensions as well as performing gap analysis".

QPR EAXpress comes with QPR's most recent template, the QPR Operational Development Model. This template is a full blown Enterprise Architecture metamodel. The model does not force customers to adopt any new philosophies or paradigms, but instead helps the current operational development function perform more efficiently. For process oriented customers QPR EAXpress delivers business process architecture modeling and analysis and additionally the possibility to supplement these with information and ICT system descriptions. QPR EAXpress also enables the creation, maintenance and navigation of enterprise architecture drastically faster than mere drawing tools.

The launch of QPR EAXpress follows the launch of QPR ProcessAnalyzer Xpress, a standalone product offering the benefits of QPR's offering for Automated Business Process Discovery. With the release of two standalone products, QPR is extending the reach of its products to the independent professionals within the area of operational development.

By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors Posted: 15th May 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

As Sandy, Bruce and David have already highlighted, one of the very biggest themes at this year’s IMPACT conference for IBM middleware customers was ‘Smarter Process’.

BPM in some form has been a significant feature of the previous two IMPACT events, and this year its position was elevated even further—although IBM is now using a different term to describe it. As Bruce notes, the term ‘BPM’ was very rarely heard.

Very briefly, and in my own words rather than IBM’s, the Smarter Process setup goes a bit like this: Mobile, Social, Cloud and Big Data trends are changing the art of the possible in business, as well as changing the expectations that customers have. Globalisation means it’s very hard to compete purely on the basis of efficiency. Mix this in with changes in customer expectations, and you get a situation where any forward-looking enterprise needs to be looking at ways of focusing on customer experience excellence (as well as continuing to focus on efficiency). Business Processes need to be Smarter—and for IBM that means “instant, seamless and insightful”. It’s not enough to try to improve processes by mapping or modeling alone; you need systems in place that can operationalise improvements at scale and with intelligence. These processes need to bridge organisational gaps between marketing, sales, operations and their value chains, and customer service silos—because customer centricity can’t be just about delivering more tailored promises; it has to be able delivering on or exceeding delivery against those promises.

For anyone interested in how the market for business process management tools and systems is evolving, it’s worthwhile quickly exploring why IBM has changed the way it tells its story and sets out its stall. The change is very deliberate.

Partly the shift to ‘Smarter Process’ is a result of IBM being a victim of its own success regarding its use of the term BPM. IBM is hardly alone in this as a technology vendor, but it’s spent a lot of time conflating the discipline of Business Process Management with BPMS technology (as delivered by what’s known as IBM Business Process Manager).

As its engagements with its customer base have matured and as industry expectations have changed, it needs a way to get out of the corner it’s painted itself into—because the answer can’t be about just continuing to add new capabilities into whatever it sells as a ‘BPMS’ (although some analyst firms might like it that way ;-). It needs a way to show how lots of different technology capabilities—not only those provided by core BPMS functionality but also business rules and event processing, content and document management and business analytics, to name a few—can be brought to bear to address the big business challenges of the day. The Smarter Process marketecture overview encompasses IBM BPM, ODM (Operational Decision Management, which combines business rules and event processing) and Case Manager; an embryonic Operational Intelligence offering being built on Business Monitor; together with business intelligence, predictive analytics, ECM and MDM capabilities… and quite a lot more besides.

However this isn’t the whole story—Smarter Process isn’t a ‘BPM++’ product bundling initiative. There’s a clue in the name: Smarter.

For the past couple of years IBM has been completely rebuilding the way it creates and executes marketing initiatives, and the majority of its marketing resources are now directed towards a relatively small number of cross-IBM programs that are judged as having the potential to add billions of dollars to IBM’s top line every year—stuff that will really move the needle. In the main, these programs are labelled ‘Smarter XYZ’.

Over the past couple of years we’ve had Smarter Analytics, Smarter Commerce and more; now we also have Smarter Process (and others, like Smarter Computing). Smarter Process is a signal from IBM that it sees a very significant revenue opportunity in helping companies reinvent their business processes with technology. It’s trying to tell a story that shows how technology can help improve customer centricity while also delivering on operational expectations; it’s pitching this story not only to CIOs and line-of-business heads, but also to COOs. It expects that this initiative will move the revenue needle, against a backdrop annual revenue haul of over $100bn.

IBM is more serious than ever about BPM in its broad sense, even though it uses a different term.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 15th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I've been thinking for some time that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big technology disruption - what we're doing now may simply not scale easily to this new world. Nothing new there but I was listening to an Analyst teleconference yesterday around the innovations presented at IBM's recent Impact conference in Las Vegas, and someone from IBM commented that he was now seeing real traction for IoT amongst IBM's customers. It is, apparently, not just an Analyst thing any more....

Then, this morning, I saw an announcement from ARM and LogMeIn: they're collaborating on the 'Xively Jumpstart Kit' for the Internet of Things. This combines a public cloud platform-as-a-service for IoT with ARM's platform for building connected devices using ARM-designed micro-controllers. According to the press people, what this means is that "developers and businesses can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure and platforms, and as a result can progress from prototyping to volume deployment much faster" - which sounds about right to me.

Just a heads-up and a sign of the times. But don't overlook ARM and its importance in the embedded market. Embedded chips are what make 'things' intelligent and they power the IoT. It may be "Intel Inside" on the TV - but when you actually look inside an intelligent device that isn't a PC, it's often ARM (although ARM Holdings itself doesn't make chips, it simply licenses its designs to chip builders, itself an interesting IP-based business model).

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 15th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

It's almost here - The BCS CMSG Conference 2013 is on 4 June 2013, and you can register here.

Configuration Management is about a lot more than just delivering software code and the BCS Configuration Management Specialist Group (BCS CMSG) is very excited that Professor David Philp, of the UK Cabinet office, has agreed to be its keynote speaker, providing insights and lessons learned from driving the acceptance of Building Information Management (BIM) in the UK. This initiative involved managing cultural and technological change in an entire industry. He will share his thoughts on the strong parallels between data rich BIM ecosystems and more IT-focussed Configuration Management Systems (CMS) and Service Knowledge Management Systems (SKMS).

If we think our IT-oriented CMDBs and CMSs are complicated, imagine trying to design, construct and operate something as ground-breaking as the Shard, as vital to public health as a hospital, or as safety critical as a nuclear power station. However, by looking outside the IT box, we can learn better ways to make any sort of configuration management work.

Nevertheless, the basics are still important and with the increasing complexity of Software Licensing and Compliance (and vendors' penchant for taking legal action over non-compliance), Software Asset Management (SAM) Managed Services are very much of interest. AstraZeneca and Specialist Software Services will present a joint case study discussing SSS's engagement with AstraZeneca (a multinational pharmaceutical company), explaining how engaging a SAM Managed Service Provider has helped it get a grip on its SAM, in a complex, international, software environment.

SAM is often the way into Configuration Management for many organisations, delivering an immediate return on investment and gaining buy-in to configuration management generally. Stuart Dicken, Head of Software Asset Management at Certero (one of the key sponsors of the CMSG Conference 2013), will explain how "just enough" accurate hardware and software asset management is vital in achieving Software Licensing Optimisation - which means getting the best value out of your software assets.

That's the bottom line for why you should register for the BCS CMSG conference 2013 before places fill up - configuration management isn't about building a CMDB or implementing ITIL, it's about delivering reliable service delivery outcomes for the business and getting the best value for the business from its investments.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 15th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

It's not often that I review fiction in here, but I think this book is worth a read - both by IT professionals and by the business managers who (hopefully) manage them. The book is The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Kim, Gene, Behr, Kevin, Spafford, George, and it's available on Kindle here.

It looks a bit like a case study with added human interest (that's because it is; I think the authors will sell you consultancy if you ask) but don't let that put you off - even my wife (who is more often a victim of corporate IT than a perpetrator) says she enjoyed reading it (she, in fact, found this book for me and read it before I did).

Despite the DevOps billing, I think it is as much a story of business continuity (keeping the business going, despite disaster, even self-inflicted disaster). The touches of human interest - which you don't often get in a proper case study - are vitally important. Business continuity, in practice, is all about people issues (as is implementing something like DevOps, of course). Although, for that matter, having a well-managed business system to keep going is also important, in part because if you don't know what automated processes you have and how they relate to business outcomes, it's going to be very hard to prioritise their recovery when disaster strikes.

So, it's a disaster story set in a world I'm more familiar with than the usual war/crime/sinking pleasure liner/escaped snakes scenarios. It's readable but it is just a story - for god's sake don't see it as some sort of Golden Way to follow religiously. I believe that Grimm's Fairy Stories embody some real, and useful, insights into the way people work - but I don't believe in gingerbread houses (nor do I have a religious belief in Lean, Kanban boards and the Third Way, useful as they may be).

But why am I reporting on the book here? Well, Bloor likes telling stories as a way of helping people see what really matters and not enough people tell stories as an aid to implementing change. Once you've read this one, for instance, I think it fuels a really important part of business continuity planning: thinking the unthinkable and putting some contingency plans - and good process - in place before circumstances force you to. Effective process isn't something you only implement after you've nearly gone out of business and any process designed and implemented in a state of panic is a high risk process. Interestingly, some of the "unthinkable" parts of the Phoenix story include the possibility of the following of "accepted good process" actually adding to your problems. I'd want to go through all the scenarios in this book, abstract them away from the story, and perhaps ask 3 questions: "could that happen here"; "if not, why not"; and "if the unthinkable isn't so unthinkable, what can we do to stop it happening, before it does".... And, yes, I think that business continuity planning is just another part of business governance generally, not another special silo.

A single takeaway from this book? Well, perhaps that success implementing changes comes from all stakeholders in the changing, automated, business (including auditors, security, C-level management as well as IT and Operations) collaborating and communicating from the earliest stages of a development or enhancement. This is instead of playing "blame games" and building defensive silos right up to the point were the business goes under.

Nevertheless, the only bit of the Phoenix book I find entirely unbelievable is the happy ending! Sometimes, once you're in the tarpit (there's a description of just one kind of IT tarpit here), you just can't get out, no matter how much you struggle and even if you can see the firm ground. And managers don't usually "see the light" overnight except in stories; and you almost never have an enlightened guru to point the way to firmer ground when you want one. Which is why you need to think about contingencies in advance and about why having a good process (such as DevOps) might help. Perhaps telling stories around the fire (with drink taken) is as good a way of doing this today as it was for our ancestors.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 14th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Often lost amid the talk of cloud deployment models and hybrid hosting efficiencies is the actual task of properly deploying enterprise applications. Deploying applications touches so many aspects of IT systems and business processes, and requires ongoing updates and management, that only the enterprise IT staffs can really do the job.

So if cloud is a way of doing an end-run around IT—yet IT is integral to proper applications deployment and care—how exactly do these disparate propositions co-exist?

Not too well, it turns out, especially as the pace that apps development and deployment—and the skyrocketing need to bring more mobile apps into production—complicates the already tough task of overall applications management.

HP Software today announced four products that aim to tackle this thorny reality—that traditional apps deployment was already broken, and that the new requirements make automation and comprehensive management an inescapable necessity. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingDirect podcasts.]

HP is also banking on the role it can play as a neutral party to better orchestrate the apps lifecycle because—unlike most other large enterprise software vendors—it doesn't have a legacy applications, operating system, hypervisor, database and/or middleware heritage (and cash cows) to favor and protect. That means supporting heterogeneity in total is the imperative, not the exception, for HP.

The next generation of HP's datacenter automation, orchestration, and cloud management software scales in terms of volume, supports all the installed enterprise kit, and allows for unprecedented simplicity, so that IT can get control before its too late, said Manoj Raisinghani, Senior Director of Worldwide Product Marketing for Cloud Automation Software and SaaS at HP Software.

It's not enough to solve parts of the enterprise IT complexity problem, said Raisinghani. The management of the server deployment and management has an impact on the database and middleware management, which then need to be orchestrated as a whole, which then needs to apply to the cloud services deployment options. So, server, data, middleware, cloud and orchestration all need to be part of the management solution for the scale, simplicity and automation to be impactful and practical, he said.

And that's why HP has bundled these four major products under a common release, with a common version number: 10.

Key to cloud
"Server automation is key to the cloud path," said Raisinghani. He said the announcements were a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10 for HP Software.

Managing complex distributed systems and heterogeneous environments is so time-consuming and complex—hindering business agility and innovation—that IT has relied on systems integrators, and is now being tempted to hand over more process orchestration to the cloud providers. But the trends around mobility, big data and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services mean that IT need to be more in control, not less. And IT needs the means to deploy the answer themselves, and rely on the software orchestration they control to move the workloads and date to where the model works best, said Raisinghani.

Therefore, whether it's routine data center maintenance to the delivery of extended enterprise business processes, automation and cloud management software reduces automating repetitive, manual and time-consuming operations, and makes the entire approach more secure and more easily tracked for intrusions, according to HP.

Even deploying the HP Server Automation (SA) 10 product itself is being streamlined via a virtual appliance, said Raisinghani. IT users can do it themselves, he said. Thanks to the virtual appliance model, the suite is "customer installable," said Raisinghani.

HP Database and Middleware Automation (DMA) 10 further automates manual database management tasks. HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 provides service life cycle automation and IT assets management capabilities to scale to cloud services safely. HP Operations Orchestration (OO) 10 automates up to 15,000 simultaneous operations to track all of the above products, processes, and services.

HP SA 10, the life cycle management platform, enables IT to manage more than 100,000 physical and virtual servers from a single pane of glass, as well as improves operational economics by reducing the administrator-to-server ratio by up to 60 percent, said Raisinghani.

This HP Software approach has been long in the making—from the acquisition of Mercury and Opsware, to the business service management emphasis to the early recognition that hybrid cloud was the long-term IT model.

And while the total management approach—supporting all the major OSes, hypervisors, RDBs, apps, and clouds—makes HP a services management Switzerland, there are some advantages too for HP. By focusing on the automation and orchestration, they are building a default capability to the HP public cloud for those organizations seeing an integrated advantage over the more manual efforts require for other public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, said Raisinghani.

"You can go agile, to where the applications can be best deployed," said Raisinghani. "But this is seamless to the user. It just gets deployed. IT can automate how the services are prepackaged and cloud-burst."

Up and running
And HP is determined to make the HP public cloud the best way to get those services up and running, although the customer will have choice on which cloud or clouds to target, said Raisinghani. "The user gets choice—but the default is the HP Cloud," he said. "HP on HP is going to work better. We'll be making them an offer that's very attractive."

So think about it. Would you as a vendor rather be in a race to the bottom on hypervisor price? On public cloud price? On database price? On storage price? Or would you rather be building a market at being best at enabling the automation, speed and security of the workloads and processes that IT needs to navigate the new IT landscape?

Management, orchestration and automation may well be the killer apps of the cloud era. Management, orchestration and automation from apps and data cradle to grave is the sticky value that locks-in based on productivity, not technology. HP has clearly got its eyes on this prize, and the latest releases this week are a major salvo in the cloud enablement as a function of IT—not outside of IT. Because, like it or not, enterprise IT is the ultimate cloud broker to win over.

In other cloud applications automation news, ServiceNow on Monday announced its ServiceNow App Creator, designed to enabling "citizen developers" to rapidly create enterprise and mobile applications on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform.

Originally targeting the ITSM function, ServiceNow is broadening the use of its tools and platform for apps outside the IT management domain, but with IT as the driver as to what platforms the developers will use. The App Creator technology itself is now included in the platform.

"This arms IT to provide developers with a rich RAD platform and puts those apps on a single platform in a single place," said Arne Josefsberg, CTO at ServiceNow.

Leveraging a forms-based workflow on making and deploying apps and process flows, App Creator ensures "best practice" development of custom applications without requiring coding or technology expertise, said Josefsberg.

Applications that the enterprise builds on the platform are then separately licensed on a per user basis. The ServiceNow App Creator is available today to all current ServiceNow customers.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 13th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

The next BriefingsDirect IT leadership discussion focuses on how leading Australian IT services provider Thomas Duryea Consulting made a successful journey to cloud computing as a business.

We'll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers.

The first part of our series addressed the rationale and business opportunity for TD's cloud-services portfolio, which is built on VMware software.

The latest discussion continues a three-part series on how Thomas Duryea, or TD, designed, built and commercialized an adaptive cloud infrastructure. This second installment focuses on how a variety of risks associated with cloud adoption and cloud use have been identified and managed by actual users of cloud services.

Learn more about how adopters of cloud computing have effectively reduced the risks of implementing cloud models from Adam Beavis, General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea in Melbourne, Australia. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Adam, we've been talking about cloud computing for years now, and I think it's pretty well established that we can do cloud computing quite well technically. The question that many organizations keep coming back with is whether they should do cloud computing. If there are certain risks, how do they know what risks are important? How do they get through that? What are you in learning so far at TD about risk and how your customers face that?

Beavis: People are becoming more comfortable with the cloud concept as we see cloud becoming more mainstream, but we're seeing two sides to the risks. One is the technical risks, how the applications actually run in the cloud.

What we're also seeing—more at a business level—are concerns like privacy, security, and maintaining service levels. We're seeing that pop up more and more, where the technical validation of the solution gets signed off from the technical team, but then the concerns begin to move up to board level.

We're seeing intense interest in the availability of the data. How do they control that, now that it's been handed off to a service provider? We're starting to see some of those risks coming more and more from the business side.

Gardner: I've categorized some of these risks over the past few years, and I've put them into four basic buckets. One is the legal side, where there are licenses and service-level agreements (SLAs), issues of ownership, and permissions.

The second would be longevity. That is to say, will the service provider be there for the long term? Will they be a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants organization? Are they are going to get bought and maybe merged into something else? Those concerns.

The third bucket I put them in is complexity, and that has to do with the actual software, the technology, and the infrastructure. Is it mature? If it's open source, is there a risk for forking? Is there a risk about who owns that software and is that stable?

And then last, the long-term concern, which always comes back, is portability. You mentioned that about the data and the applications. We're thinking now, as we move toward more software-defined data centers, that portability would become less of an issue, but it's still top of mind for many of the people I speak with.

So let's go through these, Adam. Let's start with that legal concern. Do you have any organizations that you can reflect on and say, here is how they did it, here is how they have figured out how to manage these licenses and control of the IP risks?

Beavis: The legal one is interesting. As a case study, there's a not-for-profit organization for which we were doing some initial assessment work, where we validated the technical risk and evaluated how we were going to access the data once the information was in a cloud. We went through that process, and that went fine, but obviously it then went up to the legal team.

One of the big things that the legal team was concerned about was what the service level agreeement was going to be, and how they could capture that in a contract. Obviously, we have standard SLAs, and being a smaller provider, we're flexible with some of those service levels to meet their needs.

But the one that they really started to get concerned about was data availability… if something were to go wrong with the organization. It probably jumps into longevity a little bit there. What if something went wrong and the organization vanished overnight? What would happen with their data?

That's where we see legal teams getting involved and starting to put in things like the escrow clause, similar to what we had with software as a service (SaaS) for a long time. We're starting to see organizations' legal firms focus on doing these, and not just for SaaS—but infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as well. It provides a way for user organizations to access their data if provider organizations like TD were to go down.

So that's one that we're seeing at the legal level. Around the terms and conditions, once again being a small service provider, we have a little more flexibility in what we can provide to the organizations on those.

Once our legal team sits down and agrees on what they're looking for and what we can do for them, we're able to make changes. With larger organizations, where SLAs are often set in stone, there's no flexibility about making modifications to those contracts to suit the customer.

Gardner: Tell us about your organization, how big you are, and who your customers are, and then we'll get back into some of these risks issues and how they have been managed.

Beavis: Traditionally, we came from a system-integrator background, based on the east coast of Australia—Melbourne and Sydney. The organization has been around for 12 years and had a huge amount of success in that infrastructure services arena, initially with VMware.

Other companies heavily expanded into the enterprise information systems area. We still have a large focus on infrastructure, and more recently, cloud. We've had a lot of success with the cloud, mainly because we can combine that with a managed services.

We go to market with cloud. It's not just a platform where people come and dump data or an application. A lot of the customers that come into our cloud have some sort of managed service on top of that, and that's where we're starting to have a lot of success.

As we spoke about in part one, our customers drove us to start building a cloud platform. They can see the benefits of cloud, but they also wanted to ensure that for the cloud they were moving to, they had an organization that could support them beyond the infrastructure.

That might be looking after their operating systems, looking after some of their applications such as Citrix, etc. that we specialize in, looking after their Microsoft Exchange servers, once they move it to the cloud and then attaching those applications. That's where we are. That's the cloud at the moment.

Gardner: Is there something about the platform and industry-standard decisions that you've made that helps your customers feel more comfortable? Do they see less risk because, even though your organization is one organization, the infrastructure is broader and there's some stability about that that comes to the table?

Beavis: Definitely. Partnering with VMware was one of our core decisions, because their platform everywhere is end-to-end standard VMware. It really gives us an advantage when addressing that risk if organizations ask what happens if our company doesn't run or they're not happy with the service.

The great thing is that within our environment—and it's one part of VMware’s vision—you can then pick up those applications, and move them to another VMware cloud provider. Thank heaven, we haven't had that happen, and we intend it not to happen. But, for organizations to understand that, if something were to go wrong, they can move that to another service provider without having to re-architect those applications or make any major changes. This is one area where we're well getting around that longevity risk discussion.

Gardner: Is there a confluence between portability and what organizations are doing with disaster recovery (DR)? Maybe they're mirroring data and/or infrastructure and applications for purposes of business continuity and then are able to say, "This reduces our risk, because not only do we have better DR and business continuity benefits, but we’re also setting the stage for us to be able to move this where we want, when we want."

They can create a hybrid model, where they can pick and choose on-premises, versus a variety of other cloud providers, and even decide on those geographic or compliance issues as to where they actually physically place the data. That's a big question, but the issue is business continuity, as part of this movement toward a lower risk, how does that pan out?

Beavis: That's actually one of the biggest movements that we’re seeing at the moment. Organizations, when they refresh their infrastructure, don’t see the the value refreshing DR on-premise. Let the first step cloud be "let's move the DR out to the cloud, and replicate from on-premises out into our cloud."

Then, as you said, we have the advantage to start to do things like IaaS testing, understanding how those applications are going to work in the cloud, tweak them, get the performance right, and do that with little risk to the business. Obviously, the production machine will continue to run on-premises, while we're testing snapshots.

It's a good way to put a live snapshot of that environment, and how it’s going to perform in the cloud, how your users are going to access it, bandwidth, and all that type of stuff that you need to do before starting to run up. DR is still the number one use case that we’re seeing people move to the cloud.

Gardner: As we go through each of these risks, and I hear you relating how your customers and TD, your own organization, have reacted to them, it seems to me that, as we move toward this software-defined data center, where we can move from the physical hardware and the physical facilities, and move things around in functional blocks, this really solves a lot of these risk issues.

You can manage your legal, your SLAs, and your licenses better when you know that you can pick and choose the location. That longevity issue is solved, when you know you can move the entire block, even if it's under escrow, or whatever. Complexity and fear about forking or immaturity of the infrastructure itself can be mitigated, when you know that you can pick and choose, and that it's highly portable.

It's a round-about way of getting to the point of this whole notion of software-defined data center. Is that really at heart a risk reduction, a future direction, that will mitigate a lot of these issues that are holding people back from adopting cloud more aggressively?

Beavis: From a service provider's perspective it certainly does. The single-pane management window that you can do now, where you can control everything from your network—the compute and the storage—certainly reduces risk, rather than needing several tools to do that.

And the other area where the venders are starting to work together is the integration of things like backup and, as we spoke about earlier, DR. Tools are now sitting natively within that VMware stack around the software-defined data center, written to the vSphere API, as we're trying to retrofit products to achieve file-level backups within a virtual data center, within vCloud. Pretty much every day, you wake up there's a new tool that's now supported within that.

From a service provider's perspective it's really reducing the risk and time to market for the new offerings, but from a customer's perspective it's really getting in that experience that they used to. On-premise over a TD cloud, from their perspective, makes it a lot easier for them to start to adopt and consume the cloud.

Gardner: I suppose this is a good segue into this notion of how to make your data, applications, and the configuration metadata portable across different organizations, based on some kind of a standard or definition. How does that work? What are the ways in which organizations are asking for and getting risk reduction around this concept of portability?

Beavis: Once again, it's about having a common way that the data can move across. The basics come into that hybrid-cloud model initially, like how people are getting things out. One of the things that we see more and more is that it's not as simple as people moving legacy applications and things up to the cloud.

To reduce that risk, we're doing a cloud-readiness assessment, where we come in and assess what the organization has, what their environment looks like, and what's happening within the environment, running things like the vCenter Operations tools from VMware to right-size those environments to be ready for the cloud.

Gardner: Now the flip-side of that would be that some of your customers who have been dabbling in cloud infrastructure, perhaps open-source frameworks of some kind, or maybe they have been integrating their own components of open-source available software, licensed software. What have you found when it comes to their sense of risk, and how does that compare to what we just described in terms of having stability and longevity?

Beavis: Especially in Australia, we probably have 85 percent to 90 percent of organizations with some sort of VMware in their data center. They no doubt seem to be more comfortable gravitating to some providers that are running familiar platforms, with teams familiar with VMware. They're more comfortable that we, as a service provider, are running a platform that they're used to.

We'll probably talk about the hybrid cloud a bit later on, but that ability for them to still maintain control in a familiar environment, while running some applications across in the TD cloud, is something that is becoming quite welcoming within organizations. So there's no doubt that choosing a common platform that they're used to working on is giving them confidence to start to move to the cloud.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 11th May 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

In my previous post, Is Big Data Relevant for SMBs?, I looked at the underlying trends driving the buzz around big data, and why big data is relevant for SMBs. I also discussed why 'big' is a relative term—relative to the amount of information that your organization needs to sift through to find the insights you need, when you need them, and the widening performance gap between businesses that can find the right needles in the data haystack, and those that can’t.

But, charting the course from information overload to actionable business insights isn’t easy, especially for resource-constrained SMBs. In this post, I’ll draw on my conversations with three IBM business partners to discuss what they are seeing, and how they are helping SMB analytics novices chart a course to a successful big data landing. They include:

• FYI Solutions is an IT consultancy based in Parisppany, NJ. FYI specializes in business analytics solutions for financial services, insurance, life sciences, media & publishing, and automotive companies. In business for 29 years, FYI Solutions takes pride in creating lasting value through lasting relationships—the average FYI Solutions client relationship is 15 years.

• LPA Systems, Inc. is a business analytics and business intelligence company with deep roots in the healthcare, hospitality, finance and insurance industries. Founded in 2001, LPA’s main office is in Rochester, New York, with additional offices in Houston, Dallas and Cleveland.

• Waypoint Consulting is a business analytics and financial performance management consultancy based in Newton Square, PA and a 2012 Philly 100 company. Waypoint combines proprietary methodologies, partner products and certified consultants to help customers deliver analytic solutions.  Waypoint’s Project Management process provides clients with full transparency into a project while ensuring solutions are delivered on time and under budget.

Houston (or Parsippany, Rochester, Newtown Square), We Have A Problem
SMBs rarely seek out big data solutions. Instead, they’re looking to solve a business problem. They may need guidance to understand what data they need to solve the problem, where the data is that they need to use and how to capture and use the data to address challenges and meet business goals.

Trying to solve business problems is nothing new. What’s changed is that they are dealing with more data, located in more places, and created in different formats. The other big thing that’s changed is that they need to get information and insights faster.

As Joe Rodriguez, Software Practice Leader, FYI Solutions states, “They can be coming at from different angles. They may have delivery people in the field telling them that it’s too slow to do queries to check on inventory—they are waiting too long and losing money. Or their information is stuck in different silos, and it’s a time-consuming, laborious process to try to pull it into an enterprise wide view.” Or as Brendan McGuire, Managing Partner, WayPoint Consulting puts it, “With more external and internal data available, companies can no longer effectively leverage and use the data with the tools they’ve been using.”

The Right Stuff for Successful Outcomes
Most SMBs that come to these solution providers are just getting started down the analytics path. They come in frustrated with ever-more complicated Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables that take too much energy to create and update, and that propagate too many errors to trust.

Some are also coming from industries, such as healthcare, that have undergone a rapid transition to digital records due to new regulatory requirements. All of a sudden, they are swamped with data.

Few have in-house experts that are well-versed in analytic best practices and approaches, and many don’t even have business analysts. As Joe Rodriguez puts it, “We often have a brand new customer who will come to us because they have a problem to tackle. They may have limited knowledge about analytics, and need us to help them understand it and how it can help them.”

So what does it take for these novices to successfully navigate up the curve? The solution providers I spoke with shared common views on the essentials for good outcomes.

1. Start with smarter decision-making, not tools. Start with a close examination of the business drivers for a more advanced analytics approach—not with the tools. As Brendan McGuire noted, “The first and most important part of the conversation is working with the client to understand what processes do they have and what decisions do they need to make, and how can better data insights support this? Or as Barbara Schiffman, Director of Technology Solutions, FYI Solutions says, “We don’t start out by talking about the tools. In fact, the tools are incidental. We start with what business problems are you experiencing? Where do you really want to be instead of where you are today?”
2. Get on the right entrance ramp. As mentioned above, many SMBs are just getting started up the analytics curve. With so many bright and shiny objects under the big data umbrella, it can be tempting to bite off more than you can chew. Jesse McNulty, Account Manager, LPA Systems summed it this way: “Most SMBs are just getting started and have enough to do with getting good basic functional reporting in place. They can get enormous benefits just from getting the foundation in place, then build on their analytics competency from there. But some are already farther along, and ready to move into location analytics, forecasting, predictive analytics or other more advanced things—like prescriptive analytics.” On the flip side, they may not have given much thought to mobile analytics right out the gate, but could benefit from it. According to Brendan McGuire, “Most SMBs don’t initially think about it. But once we end up talking about it, many of them realize that their executives and business users are using tablets and smartphones, and that mobile needs to be part of the plan upfront.”
3. Create the right roadmap for your business.  I know I just said to stay focused, but at the same time, you also need to create a roadmap that will serve your needs as things evolve in your business, the market and with the competition. As Barbara Schiffman advises, “You shouldn’t just put a tactical band-aid on the problem. You need enough detail to figure out the real problems, solve for those today, but also look ahead to the future, and the types of problems that could arise.” Keep in mind that this is your roadmap, for your business. Just as there are many different entry points, the roadmap for each business will be different. “At the end of the day, it’s all about what will deliver the best business ROI for your company,” notes Shiffman.
4. Decode data requirements. Take time up front to think through what data your business needs to enable better decision-making. What data are you drawing on today for decision-making and business processes? Where is the data, and how can you make it more accurate and usable? What data are you missing that you need, and how can you get it? Once you have a clear picture of the key data sources you need to pull from, you can start to figure out which tools you’ll need for the job. If you’re like many SMBs, you probably have data in different silos, such as an internal financials application and a cloud-based HR or CRM solution. Integrating these data sources is likely an investment you’ll need to make. As Brendan McGuire advises, “Data silos are inconsistent, expensive to support, cause errors. When you have an integrated data store, and you use that for analytics, it doesn’t impact your transactional systems. You use that to do any level of reporting, build dashboards, create mobile interfaces.”
5. Evaluate industry-specific solutions. While horizontal solutions may fit the bill in some cases, tailor-made, industry-specific solutions and a solution provider with expertise in your industry can often save time, money and a lot of aggravation. As Jesse McNulty explained, “There is tremendous change occurring in the healthcare industry as payment models shift from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance or full risk. There are many nuances, for instance, to areas such as managing chronic disease populations, and healthcare organizations have very specific metrics that they need to monitor to improve business performance against them.” Having a pre-configured solution that integrates the internal and external data, structured and unstructured, into one location, and addresses specific healthcare needs with healthcare terminology and business practices helps save clients time and money. According to McNulty, “This enables us to get a client’s electronic medical records (EMR) system connected to and running on our Chronic Disease Management analytics in as little as two weeks.”
6. Find a partner that provides comprehensive services. Because most SMBs will take an incremental approach, it’s important to seek out comprehensive services in this rapidly evolving area. Look for solution providers that offer consulting, and implementation and support services, and demonstrate a deep commitment to establishing ongoing relationships with their customers. However, since no one provider is ever likely to be able to do it all, in this volatile space, selecting a vendor that’s part of a strong ecosystem is also important. Being part of a bigger ecosystem gives solution providers the knowledge and training they need to stay ahead of the big data learning curve, and improve the offerings and services they provide to you.

Perspective
As all investment literature warns, past performance in not a guarantee of future success. Just ask Blockbuster, which was blindsided by consumers’ shifting preferences for renting movies; RIM BlackBerry, which underestimated how much the bring your own device (BYOD) trend would impact its smartphone sales to businesses; or Energizer, which missed the boat on how fast the sales of single-use, disposable batteries was dropping.

For most SMBs, being able to mine untapped data for business benefits is still at the aspirational stage. But now is the time to seriously consider what impact big data and analytics will have for your business, your customers and your industry. Think about trends you see taking shape—and even about the ones that you can now only imagine. What information and insights would help you capitalize on these trends? Likewise, what information are you missing that puts the business at risk?

Clearly, the perfect storm is taking shape as data volume, variety and velocity continue soar ahead, almost guaranteeing that the businesses that can harness it to their advantage will benefit, and those that don’t will be blindsided.

This is the second of a three-part blog series by SMB Group and sponsored by IBM that examines big data and its implications for SMBs. The first post, Is Big Data Relevant for SMBs?, parses through the underlying trends and hype surrounding big data, and what is important and relevant for SMBs. In my next and final post in this series, I’ll talk about ways that you can get the conversation going and the questions you need to ask to help your business move ahead.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 10th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Readers will be aware that there has been some confusion about the support for JSON (JavaScript Object notation) documents in the latest release of DB2.

I had originally understood - when I was pre-briefed on this back in October last year - that JSON was going to be supported via a separate storage engine, as is the case with the XML and graph stores in DB2. I was then informed that this was not the case, and they were going to be stored in tables. I was not impressed by this as the implication was that the documents would need to be shredded (and then un-shredded on retrieval), which is precisely the reason why an XML storage engine, as in DB2, is so much better than storing XML in tables.

However, on further investigation, this turns out not to be the case: JSON documents are not shredded. What in fact happens is that name-value pairs are compiled into binary format and then stored within a single column within a table. This enables such things as predicate evaluation in addition to the searching that you can do thanks to the indexes that are created.

In terms of how you access and retrieve documents, IBM has built it so that it looks like MongoDB, which has pretty much been the big data preferred option for JSON documents up until now (though MarkLogic is also making a push for this market). But, of course, DB2 offers ACID compliance, recovery and so on (as does MarkLogic).

This JSON capability is currently in "technical preview", which means that anyone can use it. It's what you might call in gamma (as opposed to in beta). It will probably be launched formally in the Autumn and it will be available both for distributed and mainframe platforms, though not at the same time (probably a two or three month interval).

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 10th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Ariba, an SAP Company, and Discover Financial Services today unveiled Ariba Pay. The new service, to be offered by Ariba, is expected to transform B2B payments by eliminating paper transactions, providing better visibility into cash flow, and producing rich remittance information that improves reconciliation processes for buyers and sellers.

The cloud-based service. announced at the Ariba LIVE conference, will combine the applications and insights embedded in the Ariba Network and deliver them through a trusted and secure global payments infrastructure to streamline and enhance settlement and reconciliation of business commerce. The service is expected to be generally available in 2014. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“It’s the classic joke: The check is in the mail. But few companies find it funny,” said Kevin Costello, president, Ariba. “Buyers are drowning in paper, and sellers have no idea when—or how much—they will be paid. AribaPay will effectively eliminate these issues.”

AribaPay will provide a way for buyers to create purchase orders, receive invoices, and send payments, while sellers receive more-detailed remittance information in a fast, secure, electronic environment.

Improving commerce
"Ariba and Discover are seizing the opportunity to digitize a share of the estimated $30 trillion in B2B payments that are still mostly made with paper checks,” said Roger Hochschild, president and chief operating officer for Discover. “Discover is broadening its network capabilities and infrastructure and choosing diverse business partners like Ariba to move beyond facilitating payments to enabling and improving business commerce.”

For buyers and sellers connected to the Ariba Network, AribaPay will deliver data that shows what payments represent at the invoice and line-item level, fueling faster, more accurate reconciliation on both sides.

Other benefits include:

• Lower processing cost
• Richer remittance advice
• Reduced fraud risk
• Elimination of paper checks and invoices
• Fewer payments lost to escheatment
• Ability to track and trace transactions
• Faster reconciliation and dispute resolution

To learn more about AribaPay and the benefits it is expected to deliver, visit: www.aribapay.com

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 9th May 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

SMBs are taking to mobile solutions like ducks take to water, as revealed in SMB Group’s 2013 SMB Mobile Solutions Study, and as I discussed in 2013 SMB Mobile Attitudes and Challenges. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of any other technology area that has enjoyed such a meteoric rise.

In reviewing the results, one of the things that really popped out is that even very small businesses (VSBs, with 1 to 19 employees) are adopting mobile solutions at a fast and furious clip. Consider that, overall, 91% of all SMBs use mobile devices and services in their businesses, compared to 89% of all VSBs. Meanwhile, 67% of all SMBs agree or strongly agree that “mobile solutions are now critical for our business,” compared with 50% of all VSBs.

As shown on Figure 1, VSB adoption of employee, or internal, mobile apps has grown significantly since 2012.

Figure 1: Number of Mobile Apps Very Small Business (VSB) Employees Use Regularly

One of the areas that we’ve seen the biggest jump is in mobile payments, which is up from 18.5% in 2012 to 23% in 2013, as shown on Figure 2. More VSBs are outfitting their employees to accept mobile payments with solutions including Intuit GoPayment, Square, PayPal Here and Sage Mobile Payments.

Figure 2: Very Small Business (VSB) Use and Plans for Mobile Payments Solutions

These VSBs see mobile payments as a key means to helping them meet their top business goals—growing revenues, attracting new customers, and improving cash flow. For instance, customers that are short on cash can buy—or buy more—from vendors at farmers or fleas markets who are armed with mobile payments devices. Plus, they’re so simple even kids can use them. A case in point is that 32 Girl Scout Councils are using Sage Mobile Payments as an option for cookie sales. Mobile payments can also help cash flow, helping to avoid bounced checks. And, with PayPal Here, vendors get paid instantaneously.

We also found that many VSBs are not only using mobile payments devices while they’re out of the office or store, but also when they’re in it. For instance, I spoke with one woman who runs a yoga studio who processes all of her customer payments through Intuit GoPayment on her iPhone. She doesn’t need to invest in a point-of-sale system, and payments are automatically integrated back to her QuickBooks system, saving time and helping her reduce the errors that come with entering data twice.

Of course, the bottom line is revenues, and mobile payments solutions have proved out. Our research shows that VSBs that accept mobile payments are a whopping 87% more likely to expect their revenues to grow over the next year.

So, if you’re among the 52% of VSBs with no plans to use mobile payments solutions—think again! Mobile payments solutions can be a great and easy way to help you move your business forward.

By: Helena Schwenk, Principal Analyst, MWD Advisors Posted: 8th May 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

SAP ran a virtual and global press and analyst event last night to announce the latest enhancement to its in-memory platform HANA, this time launching SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. The name of the offering pretty much sums it up, but in a nutshell SAP is giving customers the option of running a cloud-based version of HANA together with the applications that run on top of it such as SAP Business suite, SAP BW or other purpose built analytic applications.

As we have spoken or blogged about before, the use cases for HANA have evolved gradually since it was first released around two years ago. As a reminder, it initially started out as an operational reporting accelerator, before its use case widened to incorporate SAP BW (its data warehousing platform), and then earlier this year the company announced SAP HANA would underpin the entire SAP Business Suite. In our view this announcement isn’t in as big or disruptive as these previous developments; instead we believe it’s more about getting HANA and the applications that run on top of it, recognised as a cloud-based (as well as on-premise) offering. The longer term aim, we believe, is to use HANA as the underpinning in-memory platform for all of the company applications—both SaaS and on-premise—enabling it to compete more effectively with the likes of Salesforce and Oracle, who both have cloud versions of their enterprise applications.

For customers, HANA Enterprise Cloud provides more flexibility in how they deploy the in-memory platform. Being in the cloud means, for example, that customers can hand over some of the more mundane tasks associated with HANA’s set up and configuration such as provisioning hardware and disaster recovery whilst also being able to utilise the cloud’s elasticity to scale up resources as needed. In other words it has the potential to speed up the time to value of a HANA implementation.

That said (according to what I’ve read) customers still need to go through some sort of assessment service with SAP Services to determine which of their applications would benefit most from the HANA cloud deployment option. Similarly, whether this cloud deployment model is more cost effective for customers—compared with an on-premise installation—is unknown at this stage since SAP hasn’t released any detailed licensing information. Whatever the pricing arrangements turn out to be, customers will still need to factor in the time, effort and the cost of migrating and on-boarding SAP HANA to the enterprise cloud since SAP is employing a bring your own license model. This means that customers really need to have a license for HANA already (as well as for Business Suite and Business Warehouse) before considering Enterprise Cloud. Once in the cloud, however, customers will pay a monthly subscription for SAP HANA that is priced according to the size, scale of data and applications used.

In terms of how this impacts SAP’s Big Data strategy, it doesn’t radically change things; instead it simply adds to the deployment options available for SAP HANA. That said, this announcement does re-emphasise SAP’s resolute focus on managing real-time data as opposed to processing data in batch like other Big Data technologies such as Hadoop. The platform has been designed with this function in mind as it blends together an in-memory processing engine, data replication, and compression algorithms in a scalable and parallelised multi-core architecture. The benefit for customers here is that they can turbo-charge their SAP Business Suite applications and data warehouses by processing and querying data in real time, enabling them to react and respond to operations and changing business conditions in faster and faster timescales.

SAP is due to release more details of SAP Enterprise Cloud at next week’s Sapphire conference in Orlando.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 8th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Every year, I search for a common theme at Infosec Europe, but this year it was not so immediately obvious. There were no large clouds hanging above the exhibition hall and many of the largest vendors were absent, their places taken by innovative start-ups.

Yet, under the covers, there were two major themes that many of the vendors that I spoke to talked about—APTs (Advanced Persistant Threats) and the need for continuous monitoring. In fact, these two things go hand in hand.

First, we need to be clear what an APT is, and what it is not. What it is not is a super virus. That is not what the 'A', or advanced, in APT refers to. Whilst it is true that the word advanced does apply in terms of the use of a blended threat with many moving parts, it is rather better applied to those groups with advanced capabilities that are behind such exploits, which is being seen in ever larger numbers. And it is not only government agencies, defence contractors or large organisations with significant volumes of sensitive information that need to be worried. Rather, many victims of such attacks are not the final target, but rather the conduit into a larger organisation such as a business partner that they supply to. Anyone can be a victim.

The actors behind APTs tend to be highly organised, with significant resources at their disposal that rival those of many sizeable organisations. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant recently published a report regarding the resources and modus operandi of a group that it calls APT1, which is just one of more than 20 APT groups that it knows of with their origins in China. It states that the APT1 organisation has been conducting a cyber espionage campaign since 2006 in which nearly 150 organisations have been targeted, spanning 20 different industries. APT1 has a well-established attack methodology that has been refined over the years and which is designed to steal large volumes of intellectual property from targeted organisations. According to Mandiant, it is staffed by hundreds, if not thousands, of operators, with staff required to be proficient in IT security, computer network operations and English. Its widespread presence can be seen in the fact that it has established a minimum of 937 command and control servers hosted on 849 distinct IP addresses in 13 countries.

The 'P' in APT refers to persistent as criminal organisations behind APTs look to establish and maintain a presence on the networks they target, attempting to hide their tracks to avoid being detected. On average, APT1 maintains access to victim networks for 365 days, although the longest period of time that has been observed was four years and ten months. Many of its attacks successfully stole large volumes of intellectual property. From Mandiant's observations, just one organisation alone suffered the loss of 6.5 terabytes of compressed data over a ten-month period. The sort of information that has been taken in such attacks includes technology blueprints, proprietary manufacturing processes, test results, business plans, pricing documents, partnership agreements, and emails and contact lists from executives at the victim organisations.

Shortly after Infosec, I discussed issues surrounding APTs with Adrian Culley, global technical consultant for technology vendor Damballa and formerly a detective in the computer crime division of Scotland Yard. Culley states that APTs are not a new phenomenon, but have actually been around since 1993, when the number of personal computers in use began to soar and the first networks other than those designed for academia or the ARPANET network came into widespread use. He states that nation states and criminal organisations around the world are seriously studying, if not investing heavily in APT techniques.

So how do organisations respond to the threat? There are only three states in which data can exist—data can be at rest, where it is in storage; it can be in use, where it is active and can be constantly changed; and it can be in motion, which is data that is moving around a network. Forensics around data at rest is used to look for patterns in stored data that aim to retrace paths to see how something occurred, but criminals deploying APTs are well versed in forensic techniques and go to a lot of trouble to cover their tracks so that they cannot be traced. Investigating data in use is tricky owing to the constant changes made and is difficult to track at enterprise scale.

So that only leaves data in motion, which is easier to track as all communications can be intercepted. APTs are characterised by their need to 'phone home' to a command and control centre housed on a server. Therefore, it makes sense to continuously monitor all network communications in real time, looking for all violations of policy, such as when an advanced threat is trying to phone home, and to block all such exploits as they occur. Culley likens such capabilities to a fire sprinkler system for the network, whereby a sprinkler is deployed for each node in the network, putting out fires locally as they occur.

Proactive capabilities such as continuous monitoring will greatly add to an organisation's detection capabilities, using techniques such as behavioural profiling that can detect more advanced threats that those using signatures for known threats alone. According to Culley, APTs represent a paradigm shift in the way we need to view security. These advanced attacks and the new threat vectors, such as mobile device usage and ever-more interactive web applications, mean that security controls placed at the perimeter based on static rule sets are no longer sufficient as sophisticated attackers will go out of their way to circumvent such controls. Rather, we need to be looking at everything that is moving around the network, actively looking for anything that constitutes abnormal behaviour to prevent APTs from communicating out and stealing valuable information.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 8th May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

One of the largest IT and security technology vendors in the market, McAfee is finally looking to take its place in the identity and access management (IAM) market. However, as a newcomer to this market, its products already provide some robust capabilities. This is because they were developed and previously sold by Intel, which completed its acquisition of McAfee in early 2011. It is now providing cohesion around its products, rebranding those from Intel under the McAfee brand. There will be more to come.

McAfee is not trying to reinvent the wheel by developing another on-premise offering as there are plenty of those to choose from. Rather, it is embracing the need of organisations to ensure that IAM capabilities are extended out to external applications and users, interfacing with corporate directories and on-premise IAM systems from other vendors. In the first public announcement in April 2013, McAfee introduced two products in this area—McAfee One Time Password and McAfee Cloud Single Sign On—as well as a centre of excellence devoted to identity that aims to provide customers, prospects and partners with the latest information and the ability to interact with McAfee on issues related to IAM.

Stating that "identity is an integral component of an enterprise security strategy," McAfee's IAM capabilities are being positioned as a core enabling part of its Security Connected framework, which is designed to provide organisations with a centralised mechanism for risk mitigation and for better aligning security with business initiatives. With capabilities covering network security, information security, security management, endpoint security, and solutions from its partner community, the Security Connected framework covers needs from protecting the data centre to enabling social media and the consumerisation of the workforce. It runs the gamut from securing critical infrastructure, through fixed-function devices, to mobile devices. It covers business needs from protecting resources from internal threats to neutralising advanced malware.

McAfee states that its strategy is to build trusted networks of identifiable people and services and its strengths lie in the integration with a wide range of security controls, as well as its ePolicy Orchestrator central management platform. By establishing itself as a player in the IAM market, it is a big step closer towards achieving that ambition.

By: Angela Ashenden, Principal Analyst, MWD Advisors Posted: 7th May 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Last week, we (Helena Schwenk and Angela Ashenden) attended Salesforce.com’s customer event in London, which this year was branded as the “Customer Company Tour”, replacing the previous CloudForce moniker. As in previous years, this was a glossy, big-hitting event, with high-profile customer stories from brands like GE, Coca Cola, Unilever, Rossignol and Philips, and lots of pumped rhetoric about how Salesforce is leading the industry and changing the world. When you got past the marketing spin, however, there were some interesting nuggets of news, as well as some interesting nuances in the way the company is positioning itself.

Social dominates as a theme
Most notable was the shift this year from emphasising the opportunities that social provides to organisations to the importance of building more connected relationships with your customers. This was very well presented, with astutely targeted marketing videos that built on people’s greater sense of power and control over their product and service providers in this new social and mobile environment. It’s a message that fits well with the company’s suite of products and capabilities, although there was still a little too much “buy our products—it will change your world” rather than acknowledging the help that organisations need—both practically and culturally—to shift to this new perspective.

We also saw more evidence of the importance of being able to connect not just your customers, employees, and partners, but also your products, through enabling them to post data and information into your Chatter environment, for example. Both GE and Philips provided examples of this, with the Philips demo showing how sales staff can see which devices a customer has, and even check the usage of those devices from within the customer record in their CRM system in order to inform account decisions and strategies. One thing that was highlighted in COO George Hu’s keynote was the importance of trust in this new world; where you have connected products and devices continuing to provide data back to their manufacturers even after you have bought them, there is a new need to ensure customers have trust in you to use that data in a responsible and respectful way. I suspect we will see many negative stories in this area before organisations truly recognise the importance of this, but it was good to see Salesforce drawing it to people’s attention.

Salesforce communities bridges the gap between internal and external stakeholders
From a collaboration perspective, the big announcement was the official launch of Salesforce Communities—the application of Chatter’s social collaboration capabilities in an externally-facing online community setting. Of course this wasn’t entirely new news, as we’ve been hearing about it for a good year now, but the product has now been fully incorporated into the overall company positioning and marketing, and in fact is a major thread in the new “Customer Company” focus. In terms of the Communities product itself, while it’s a logical next step for Salesforce.com, it has to be said that it is (indeed as Chatter did, very successfully) entering an already very competitive market, and one where differentiating yourself can be challenging, particularly if (like Salesforce.com) you don’t have much of a professional services model to help organisations with the more challenging adoption aspects of building communities. However, Salesforce.com has identified a really strong differentiator through its integration of the internal and external communities. In the Rossignol demo, we saw a workflow process pass seamlessly between the company’s partner community and their internal Chatter deployment, highlighting the ability to combine sensitive partner-specific information and interactions with more general open community capabilities. This will be received well, particularly by organisations already heavily dependent on Salesforce’s sales, customer service or marketing offerings.

Social.com launches, providing a more compelling integration story
From a marketing cloud perspective, one of the major news points centred on the announcement of Social.com. Although officially launched prior to last week’s event, Social.com is a cloud-based offering that allows organisations to manage social media advertising across Facebook and Twitter platforms. In particular it allows advertisers to create and test social campaigns, monitor the social conversation in real time and track metrics to see how effective their posts and keywords are.

Despite first appearances, this is not a new offering but represents a melding together of capabilities already present within Buddy Media and Radian6—in particular the monitoring and ad placement components of Radian6 and Buddy Media respectively. Splitting out the ad management side from other parts of the marketing cloud offering does make sense since it’s often handled by a different user constituency or third-party ad agency in many cases, compared with other components of the offering.

Interestingly though, the launch of Social.com provides some much needed evidence from Salesforce.com of how it intends to integrate and blend technology from both its Buddy Media and Radian6 acquisitions, but similarly tie it back to its CRM system. Bringing these capabilities together does, for example, enable advertisers to create a Facebook campaign, and target it to different customer groups by importing data from Salesforce;  something that has in the last year been allowed by Facebook. Similarly this level of integration allows ad targeting to be based dynamically on CRM data, so as you capture more information about your customers or prospects your ad targeting can change to incorporate this data. In this respect Social.com represents a more convincing way for Salesforce users to connect the dots between social and customer profiles that in turn can be used to target people more effectively.

If Social.com proves successful on both Twitter and Facebook, we imagine the company will look to extend support to other social networking platforms such as LinkedIn (and possibly Pinterest) in the near future.

So all in all, the Customer Company Tour’s visit to London provided to be an interesting event providing a snapshot of Salesforce’s evolving strategy and the way it presents its overall portfolio, with CRM bubbling to the fore once more.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 7th May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Dell Software has delivered Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition to extend the depth and breadth of managing and optimizing server virtualization as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and their joint impact on such IT resources as storage.

Building on the formerly named Quest vFoglight Pro virtualization management solution, Dell re-branded vFoglight to Foglight for Virtualization to make it the core platform to the Foglight family. Foglight is not sitting still either. Improvements this year move beyond monitoring support for VMware View VDI, to later support for VMware vCloud Director, OpenStack, and Citrix Xen VDI. [Disclosure: Dell Software and WMware are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The higher value from such ecosystem and heterogeneous management support is the ability for virtualization server and system administrators to comprehensively optimize various flavors of data-center server virtualization, as well as the major VDI types, with added capabilities to track and analyze performance from the application level all the way to the server and storage hardware level. This week's announcements have also shown a spotlight on the recently updated Foglight for Storage Management 2.5.

“With Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition, Dell is showing its commitment to offering a  solution that encompasses all aspects of virtual infrastructure performance monitoring and management, built on a platform that can scale as the infrastructure grows,” said Steve Rosenberg, general manager for Performance Monitoring, Dell. “This new release expands Foglight’s ability not only to monitor the additional infrastructure area of VDI, but also to correlate metrics from VDI with performance for applications, the virtual layer, the network, and underlying servers and storage.”

Dell Software also last week released a series of BYOD-targeted products and services, which are related to the better VDI management capabilities. That's because many enterprises and mid-market firms that are tasked with moving quickly to BYOD are using VDI to do it.

With the increasing adoption of VMware View in virtualized data centers (including for MSPs), VDI support is fast becoming a mainstay for today’s IT departments and managed service providers. VDI and server virtual machines (VMs) often utilize the same hardware components. Yet, both of these virtualized infrastructures serve different users and have separate requirements and resource demands, explained John Maxwell, vice president of product management for performance monitoring for virtualization, networking,storage and hardware at Dell Software.

Single-source solution
As a result, VDI and server VMs require dedicated performance monitoring systems. However, these systems must also be connected, because so many underlying resources are often shared. Agent-based Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition offers virtualization administrators a more single-source solution that not only identifies and fixes performance issues within VMware View, but continues to run all features available in vOPS Server Enterprise with no effect on overall vCenter performance.

Foglight for Storage Management 2.5 has been released as an optional "cartridge" to Foglight for Virtualization. Foglight for Storage Management now offers physical storage performance reporting in addition to virtual reporting, providing customers with complete "VM to physical LUN" visibility. 

Additional enhancements in this release include LUN latency reporting, NPIV support, and the ability for customers to purchase the product either as a stand-alone cartridge, or as an optional cartridge to Foglight for Virtualization.

Additionally, Foglight is a unified performance monitoring platform that allows individual product solutions, delivered as sets of pluggable “cartridges,” to run stand-alone or to interoperate. Each individual product delivers best-of-breed functionality to the admin for that area, while simultaneously integrating with other cartridges to deliver true end-to-end monitoring from end-user experience to the underlying storage and server hardware layers, and everything in between, said Maxwell.

Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition 6.8 is available now for a 45-day trial from www.quest.com. Pricing starts at $799 per socket. Foglight for Storage Management 2.5 is also available now for a 45-day trial from www.quest.com.  Pricing starts at $499 per socket.

Because Foglight is built on a common architecture to support the cartridges, it seems likely that it will move from an on-premises only offering to a SaaS-based version too, especially to support cloud- and MSP-based VDI offerings, and also to manage hybrid VDI implementations.

By: Fran Howarth, Practice Leader, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

In order to be effective, a security analytics system needs to integrate relevant information from multiple sources, be able to determine the relative importance of different events seen in the information, and project the state of the system based on those events. The model must be accurate and must be updated regularly and in real time to reflect current events so that an organisation can gauge the status of all systems and devices on the network in real time, and thus gain a better awareness of what the current situation is to aid in better decision making.

Security analytics platforms should be based on a data-centric architecture. All systems should contribute data to a central collection point, with the data normalised so that it appears to be from a single source. The central collection point should be a centralised database, which all applications required can access, regardless of the distributed nature of the system. The central collection point should deploy data-centric middleware that aggregates, correlates, cleanses and processes all sensor data in real time as situational awareness is dependent on the real time nature of the information collected.

Event processing technology provides a way of tracking and analysing information sent from sensors to the central database regarding events that occur so that actions can be taken when an event indicates that there is a problem, such as a sensor broadcasting information that a temperature threshold has been exceeded. For distributed systems such as sensors, a fairly new technology is complex event processing, which can collect event feeds from multiple sources and can analyse large volumes of data in real time to provide a fast response when problems are encountered.

Complex event processing technologies not only perform traditional database and data mining processes such as data validation, cleaning, enrichment and analysis, but can also query, filter and transform data from multiple sensors to enable events to be detected in real time. They provide the ability to automate pattern monitoring, which allows events to be correlated so that event response mechanisms can be developed and critical events can be isolated so that efficient remediation can be taken. This will allow such events to be prioritised according to their criticality so that those with the highest impact can be given top priority, while at the same time automating many of the tasks to reduce the burden on human operators.

In order that those events are understandable to human operators, the technology should provide visualisation capabilities that provides comprehensive visibility over all events that occur and that provides the option of observing specific events of interest in greater detail, as well as presenting data at a high level for overall awareness of the situation. It should give an aggregated view of all events from all sources in the network and should provide added context to events, such as time and location.

For providing context to information, metadata is as important as the data itself and should be captured by the system as this provides a far richer source of context for the data than merely the data itself. It will also allow data to be compared directly across heterogeneous networks, allowing like to be compared with like. Not only should the system capture all associated metadata, but it should also include this information in its analysis of the data.

One further requirement of security analytics platforms is that, although they should collect event data in real time, they should also store historical data in an easily retrievable form. An example of why both real time event information should be correlated with historical information can be seen in the use of such data for predictive maintenance for equipment on which sensors have been mounted. Continuous real time monitoring will show the current status of the equipment, but only through correlation with historical information can an operator determine whether or not it is operating within normal bounds. For example, a sensor displaying a high temperature may indicate that the equipment is malfunctioning, but historic trends may indicate that the temperature tends to increase when the output of that equipment is increased to meet spikes in demand. This will help operators to take better informed decisions as to when maintenance is actually required or other action needs to be taken. Correlating historic and real time information will also enable the organisation to prevent unexpected equipment failure by spotting long-term trends in usage, aiding in asset utilisation and even extending the lifetime of the equipment by ensuring that it is in good working order.

By correlating historic and real time information, the data can show trends that can be used to check against best practice policies and security controls so that refinements can be made to the system and compliance with regulatory requirements can be seen over time, rather than just as a snapshot in time. Operators will also be better able to detect and respond to security incidents, with all information cross-correlated for early breach detection and notification, and historic information will also allow for forensic investigation of incidents that have occurred so that the organisation can learn from them and take steps to remedy such situations.

Security analytics platforms that collect, monitor, analyse and report on information from throughout the organisation will be a great aid in providing the visibility that organisations need across extended networks in order to make more informed decisions and better manage the overall risks that they face. 

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Collaboration will take center stage next week when Ariba, an SAP company, holds its Ariba LIVE conference in Washington, DC. In an effort to fuel greater collaboration between companies through new capabilities and network-derived intelligence, Ariba will announce an enhanced set of tools, as well as a joint offering with Dell Boomi.

Leading the list of enhanced Ariba tools are:

• Ariba Spot Buy. With the integration of Ariba Procure-to-Pay and Ariba Discovery, buyers can quickly discover and qualify new sources of supply for one-off, time-sensitive, or hard-to-find purchases.
• Ariba Recommendations. Through new services that push network-derived intelligence and community-generated content directly into the context of specific business processes and use cases, companies can make more informed decisions at the point of transaction or activity. “Suppliers You May Like,” for example, helps guide buyers to qualified suppliers based on a host of inputs, including buyer requirements, supplier capabilities and performance ratings, and how often other buyers on the network have awarded business to them.

“Just as consumers tap into personal networks like Facebook, Twitter and Amazon.com to connect with friends and family, share and shop, companies are leveraging digital networks to more efficiently engage with their trading partners and collaborate across the entire commerce process,” said Sanish Mondkar, Ariba Chief Product Officer. “This new, more social and connected way of operating is redefining the way business is done. But it demands a new set of tools and processes that are only possible at scale in a truly networked environment. Ariba is delivering these tools today.”

Spot buys—or unplanned purchases of unique items—account for more than 40 percent of a company’s total spend. Spot buys are challenging because they require quick turnaround, and buyers generally lack efficient or effective methods to source them. [Disclosure: Ariba and Dell are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Selective leveraging
According to independent research firm The Hackett Group, “by selectively leveraging software tools in areas like supplier discovery and online bidding, organizations can reduce the time it takes to find the right suppliers from weeks to days or even hours and drive cost reductions of between two percent and five percent on average.”

Nearly one million selling organizations across more than 20,000 product categories are connected to the Ariba Network. And they have access to the more than 13 million leads worth over $5 billion that are posted each year by more than half of the Global 2000 who are connected to the network as well.

New features added to Ariba Discovery allow selling organizations to get the right messages to the right audience and convert these leads into sales.

• Profile Pitch. Sellers can create highly targeted profiles and messaging based on industry, commodity, territory and other factors to promote themselves to active buyers. 
• Badges and Social Sharing. Selling organizations can further raise their visibility by adding Ariba badges to their company websites and/or email signatures, defining vanity URLs for their company profiles and sharing their public URLs and postings on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Pre-packaged integration
Ariba and Dell Boomi will announce that they are teaming to deliver pre-packaged integration as a service offerings to help selling organizations drive new levels of efficiency and effectiveness across their operations.

Designed to simplify and speed integration to the Ariba Network, the Ariba Integration Connector, powered by Dell Boomi Integration Packs, enables companies to collaborate more efficiently and drive game-changing improvements in productivity and performance.  The first connector integrates with Intuit QuickBooks. Additional connectors to enable sellers who own Microsoft Dynamics AX, Netsuite and Sage Peachtree solutions to quickly and easily integrate with the Ariba Network are planned to be released later this year.

“From the beginning, the Ariba Network has been built to be an open platform to connect all companies using any system to foster more efficient business-to-business collaboration,” said Tim Minahan, senior vice president, network strategy, Ariba. “With these new connectors, we are making it even easier for sales organizations of all sizes to fully automate their customer transactions and collaborations over the Ariba Network—directly from their preferred CRM, ERP and accounting systems.”

The Ariba Integration Connector removes the barriers to system-to-network integration by eliminating complexity. An out-of-the-box solution delivered as a service, the connector provides a fast, easy and affordable way for companies to connect to the Ariba Network—regardless of the back-end systems they use. The connector currently supports integration with Intuit QuickBooks Desktop 2009-2013, Premier and Enterprise for US, UK, and CA Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

The connector is available and in use today. To learn more about Ariba’s Connection solutions and the benefits they can deliver to your organization, visit http://www.ariba.com/services/connection-solutions.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

MapR has been very busy recently. Since closing a new round of funding in mid-March it has announced a partnership with Onepoint IQ to provide certified MapR training across Europe, it has opened an office in France (with executives to populate it) to add to the ones it already had in the UK and Germany, it has partnered with Canonical to make the MapR distribution of Hadoop available on Ubuntu, it has made its source code available via GitHub, it has announced the availability of MapR M7 and, finally, it has stated that it will be distributing (this is currently in beta) LucidWorks Search (which effectively does for Lucene/Solr what MapR does for Hadoop, which is to say that it provides enterprise grade security, user management and so forth). As a part of its latest funding round the company has also stated its intention to expand into the Asia-Pacific region.

It is clear that MapR is expanding outwards (perhaps I should say scaling out?) rapidly. That seems like good strategy to me. I think there's no question that MapR has established itself as the leading independent provider of Hadoop distributions for the enterprise and that's fine if you think of Hadoop as an emerging market. However, I think we have now got to the point where Hadoop has emerged from its chrysalis and there are growing numbers of serious deployments rather than just people trying it out. This creates a different market dynamic.

What we've seen recently is IBM launch its PureData System for Hadoop and EMC launch HAWQ (Hadoop with [SQL] query), just to mention a couple of things, and the message is clear: the big boys are getting serious about Hadoop. Well, they were always serious but now they are walking the walk. This has important implications for MapR: it has to establish itself as a serious competitor to the likes of IBM if it is not to fade away and dwindle. The sort of activity it has recently been busy with is exactly the sort of development, not to mention marketing noise, which it needs to get into this position. Of course, it may get acquired anyway in the end but that could be counted as a success story as far as MapR is concerned.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Salesforce.com is about a lot more than customer relationship management these days. Perhaps one of the most interesting facets of the product is salesforce.com as a trusted platform for enterprise cloud computing; together with Salesforce AppExchange, which it describes as "the world's leading business apps marketplace". Although, as I think that most businesses still run on in-premises hardware behind the firewall even now, I'm not sure how much real competition there is for that title (unless Apple and Android see themselves as supporting business apps, as they almost certainly do).

Anyway, whatever the status quo now, I really do think that a switch has clicked over and most people are prepared to consider, at least, trusting cloud apps these days - which makes developing them an interesting career choice for developers.

To stimulate this opportunity further Salesforce announced a 5 million Euro challenge to start-up developers at its Customer Company Tour in London this week. Start-ups will get the chance to approach investors with their ideas for apps at a series of Innovation Challenge events throughout Europe (September to November 2013), negotiate investment funding - and then the winners will be able to build, package and sell their apps on the Salesforce AppExchange.

This idea apparently even attracts the endorsement of Boris Johnson, hardly my first idea of a tech guru: "London is brimming with tech talent which is breeding a wave of innovative start-ups with the potential to grow fast", he says. "Salesforce.com's Innovation Challenge presents a fantastic opportunity for London's silicon entrepreneurs to take their business to the next level of success". That is probably true - although, in my opinion, London's developers may face stiff competition from elsewhere in Europe (or even just from elsewhere in the UK)...

Of course, to share in this investment pot, the apps will have to be developed on or ported to the Saleforce.com cloud platform. I guess Saleforce.com is a success story, so that won't worry developers too much, much as being a Microsoft developer never worried anyone much, but in these days of cross-platform development for Android and Apple, I guess I wouldn't want my apps to be only on Salesforce AppExchange.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd May 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Talking with Michael Madden, General Manager, and David Hodgson of CA's Mainframe group, I was touched by their infectious (and, in my opinion, justified) enthusiasm. It's also a good sign that if Mike Gregoire (CA Technologies' new CEO) is teaching CA Technologies about SaaS, CA Technologies is returning the favour with some interesting education on the future of the mainframe

Big news, for me, is the port of CA AppLogic, an application virtualisation tool, to z mainframes. What Application Virtualisation means is the encapsulation of a software application so that it runs independently of the underlying operating system - the virtualised application isn't installed, in the usual sense, but it executes (and appears to the user) as though it is. The application thinks it is writing to or reading from physical hardware but, in fact, it is writing to the encapsulating software layer. This aids provisioning and can reduce the complexity of supporting different platform variations.

As well as CA AppLogic, some varieties of Windows offer limited application virtualisation. Other competing products include Citrix XenApp, Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization, Microsoft Application Virtualization, and VMware ThinApp.

Now that CA Applogic runs on zEnterprise under Linux, you go a step further in the hardware abstraction story of the sort put forward by IBM with PureSystems. I like the PureSystems story - buy a cloud application platform in a box, never mind the technology - but the hardware underneath has to be rock solid and I have always wondered why IBM didn't put z under PureSystems (well, marketing, I suspect).

With CA AppLogic for z, you can make something that looks very like PureSystems from the business' point of view (the underlying technology/architecture is entirely different, of course) and sell virtualised application services on an ultra-reliable, ultra-resilient manageable z box - which may be in a cloud somewhere and provisioned using DevOps techniques. That's a pretty cool (resilient) platform and, shared in a cloud (remember, z is architected for multi-tenenting), it could be cheap too.

Now, I wonder if anyone is looking at actually marketing anything like that?

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 1st May 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

There’s little doubt that big data is the latest 'big thing' in the IT industry. But for many small and medium business (SMB) decision-makers, big data is a somewhat fuzzy term. Ask any number of them what big data means, and you’re likely to get different definitions. Making matters worse, the “big” in big data, along with endless discussions of petabytes and zettabytes, make many SMBs skeptical that big data is relevant for their businesses.

So it’s not hard to make the case that big data has become an over-hyped and poorly understood catch-all phrase. So what does big data really mean, and what are the implications for SMBs? When we parse through the underlying trends and hype surrounding data, what’s left that is really important and relevant for SMBs?

The realities driving big data buzz

The big part of big data is easy to understand. Basically, the volume and variety of digitized data is increasing exponentially. Think about how much and how many kinds of information have moved from physical to digital form just over the last several years. Doctors have moved from paper charts to electronic medical records; merchants have moved from paper credit card imprinters to POS terminals to virtual terminals to mobile payment devices. Movies have moved from Blockbuster to Netflix; and photos have moved from Kodak to Facebook and Instagram. 'Smart' machines—from traffic sensors to seismographs—are creating entirely new digital data streams as well.

As a result, researchers report that we have already created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and that 90% of it has been generated in the last two years alone. While quintillions are hard to wrap your head around, these facts make the concept more accessible:

• 150,000 new URLs are created each day.
• Twitter sees roughly 58 million tweets every day, and has more than 554 million accounts.
• 160 million emails are sent every 60 seconds.
• Over 20 billion credit card payments are processed annually in the U.S.
• Power companies are moving from physical meters to digital smart meter readings, and going from monthly reading to gathering meter information every 15 minutes. This adds up to 96 million reads per day for every million meters—or a 3,000-fold increase in data.

The term "big data" refers to having the ability to dig in to this growing data avalanche more effectively and quickly with tools that make it easier to store, manage, analyze and act on information.

Big is relative when it comes to big data

According to findings from the IBM Institute for Business Value and Said Business School, University of Oxford, most large enterprises define the "big" in big data as databases with more than 100 terabytes, while most mid-market companies (less than 1,000 employees) consider anything more than 1 terabyte as big.

The fact of the matter is, big is a relative term—relative to the amount of information that your organization needs to sift through to find the insights you need to operate the business more proactively and profitably. Basically, if the data set is too big for your company to effectively manage and get insights from, then you’re facing a big data challenge.

This isn’t just a large enterprise problem. In SMB Group studies, SMB decision-makers repeatedly cite "getting better insights from the data we already have" as a top business challenge. SMBs may not be dealing with terabytes of data, but many are finding that tools that used to suffice—such as Excel spreadsheets—fall short even when it comes to analyzing internal transactional databases.

Welcome to the insight economy

With the amount and variety of digitized growing exponentially, these challenges and requirements will only increase.

Business that can find the right needles in the data haystack more quickly, easily and reliably than competitors can reap enormous market advantages. SMB Group’s 2012 Routes to Market Study shows that SMBs that have deployed business intelligence and analytics solutions are 51% more likely than peers to expect revenues to rise. Likewise, in the IBM/Oxford University study, three out of five mid-market respondents using business and analytics solutions reported that they are realizing significant advantages, most notably to "identify new opportunities in the marketplace" and to "understand and respond to customers better."

Take the example of the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. With one of the lowest public subsidies in the U.S., the zoo needed to increase attendance and boost food and retail sales to operate profitably. But the zoo was unable to easily access the data—which resided on different systems—so it could plan how to do this. The zoo implemented a business intelligence solution to get better insight into customer trends and its own operations, and answer questions such as, "How many people spend money outside of admissions costs?" and "What time of day do ice cream sales peak?" By answering these questions and others, the zoo was able to increase retail and food sales by 35%, save more than $140,000 per year in marketing dollars through more targeted, successful campaigns, and increase overall zoo attendance by 50,000 in one year.

Unfortunately, many SMBs are lagging large enterprises in this area. The IBM/Oxford Study revealed that the gap between large enterprises and the mid-market is increasing, and the SMB Group 2012 Routes to Market Study shows that the smaller the company, the less likely they are to use or plan to use BI solutions.

Perspective
Businesses have always needed the ability to measure critical success metrics and make sound business decisions. Big data solutions are designed to help businesses to do this in a world where the volume and variety of data is growing at breakneck speed.

When you look at the realities that are driving the big data bandwagon, its clear that, long after the buzz fades, these realities will have a long-lasting impact on how businesses of all sizes operate. Over time, the performance gap will widen between businesses that can readily get the insights they need, when they need them, and those that can’t.

That said, figuring out where and how to start isn’t easy, especially for SMBs who are often resource-constrained. The good news, however, is that this is definitely an area where you want to take small steps first. In the next blog of this series, we’ll draw on conversations with IBM business partners to learn how they are helping SMBs to chart the big data journey.

This is the first of a three-part blog series by SMB Group and sponsored by IBM that examines big data and its implications for SMBs. In the next post, I’ll discuss how IBM business partners are helping SMBs take practical steps to put big data to work for their businesses.