collective unconscious of the smarter planet

HP is upping their game in the mobile administration department. Worth noting.

HP is embracing mobility with apps to allow sysadmins to receive alerts, manage systems and even shut down servers, all from the comfort of their booth seats at the pub.

HP already provides SiteScope, with which one can monitor servers and receive alerts on Android and iOS devices. But in a presentation at the HP Global Partner event in Las Vegas the company promised a good deal more functionality would be coming to mobile clients.

The new mobile management apps will be designed to show off the capabilities of HP’s just-announced Gen8 servers. Those servers apparently monitor 1,600 systems parameters, data which will be available on the mobile app.

But mobile users will also be able to create management scripts, PC World reports, allowing the user to automate common management tasks even if those tasks are unique to their environment. The app will even report the physical location of a failing server, which can only help.

It’s not clear when the app will be available for download, but the Gen8 servers will be available next month and HP will likely want to show off the mobile clients with them.

So there’s still a few weeks to convince the company that an Android (or iOS) device is essential to modern system administration… if that’s not already obvious.

Exactly what the title says — but it also offers some insight into how the CIO role is transforming in the wake of today’s technologies.

Growing a multimillion dollar corporation during a recession is no small feat and it’s no accident. Companies that are swimming against the economic tide are doing things differently than those that are treading water, or worse, drowning. So, what exactly separates the best from the rest?

In a world of tech-empowered consumers and employees, companies that are bucking the economic trend exhibit key behaviors that allow them to exploit technology and weave it into their businesses. We call this a company’s Digital IQ.

We surveyed 489 companies across industries with annual revenues of more than $500 million to find out what successful companies are doing that the others aren’t. Following is how the “top performers”—companies that grew by 5% or more last year—are making the grade.

1) Integrate Technology into Strategic Planning

Naturally, creating a strategic plan is the first step in implementing any sort of large-scale corporate effort. However, the effectiveness of the strategy is what counts. 89% of top performers feel confident about their strategy versus 63% of the pack. Top performing companies are also more likely to integrate IT in their strategic planning process. Of the companies that are excelling, 86% said that their CEO is an active champion in the use of information technology to achieve corporate strategy. That number drops to 56% for the remaining respondents. Moreover, the crème of the crop is more likely to have a CIO who not only reports directly to the CEO, but has strong relationships with other C-suite executives. In winning companies, the CIO is seen as a business champion.

2) Set and Share a Single, Multi-year Roadmap for the Overall Business Strategy

In the mobilization stage, executives create a blueprint for breathing life into the strategy. Too many companies bypass this critical step. Not the best companies. 77% of top performers have a single, multi-year roadmap. That number sinks to 54% among average performers. Furthermore, sharing that strategy throughout the company is also critical to success. 76% of top performers say that their strategy is well communicated throughout the company. Only 44% of the rest make that claim. Additionally, 78% of top performing companies say that their business and IT leaders share an understanding of the strategy. Only 49% of the other survey respondents feel that everyone is on the same page.

3) Look Beyond Delivering IT Projects on Time and on Budget

Setting a strategy leads to IT projects that are delivered on time and on budget so it’s no surprise that superior corporations are meeting their goals more often than the others. 67% of top performers say that their initiatives were delivered on time. In stark contrast, only 38% of the rest of respondents hit the mark. Coming in at or below budget proves to be more difficult for both groups, but nonetheless, 54% of top performers did so compared to 35% of the larger group. However, many organizations downplay the trade-offs in cutting scope and therefore potential business value in favor of bringing a project in under cost and time targets.  Almost 100% of top performers say that they frequently or always deliver their planned scope versus only 35% for all surveyed.

4) Invest in Mobile Workforces

Top performers spend more on empowering their workforces with mobile devices than the rest. 44% of the high performers will invest between $250,000 and $1 million and 33% will invest more than $1 million. For the remainder of respondents, those numbers are 37% and 27%, respectively.

5) Interact with Customers Using Mobile Technology

Only 44% of the pack interacts with customers via mobile devices “quite or very significantly.” That number jumps to 66% among the top performers. And, top performers are putting their money with their mouths are: 50% of them plan to invest more than $1million in mobile solutions for customers in 2012. That number plummets to 29% for the rest of the group.

6) Reap the Rewards of Social Media

Both the best and the rest are investing in social media at almost the same rates, but the top performers claim to see more of a benefit from their efforts than their lower-performing counterparts. 41% of top performers say they are benefiting from their investments in social media compared to 24% of the others. To gain a greater edge, 40% of the top performers expect to increase their use of social media. Only 26% of the rest of respondents plan to spend more in this area. In fact, 36% of the top of the heap plan to invest $1 million in social media for internal communications in 2012.

7) Invest in Cloud Computing

Top performers are investing more aggressively in cloud computing than the pack. 52% of top performers will spend more than $1 million on public cloud applications. Only 34% of the remaining survey respondents plan to spend that much. For private cloud investments, the gap is even wider: 58% of top performers will invest more than $1 million, compared with 39% for the rest.

Overall, top-performers link strategy to specific programs and actions while mobilizing the organization around that strategy. Everyone knows what role they should be playing and what success looks like. Top performers also don’t shy away from opportunities to innovate. The role that the CIO plays is to drive superior execution and innovation.

In this post, we didn’t address the roadblocks that stop companies from becoming top performers. What is preventing the rest from being the best?

2012 predictions from RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady. These are always good.

Data & The Last Mile

It is not technically correct to assert that large scale data infrastructure is a solved problem. Decades of innovation remain, as the Cambrian explosion of projects demonstrate. It is nevertheless true that relative to the user interface, data storage and manipulation is a solved problem. Since the original creation of Hadoop in 2006, for example, we have seen multiple user interfaces applied: connectors (e.g. R), standard MapReduce, scripting (e.g. Jaql/Pig), SQL (e.g. Hive), spreadsheets (e.g. BigSheets), client tooling (e.g. Karmasphere). Each has its strengths, none bridges the last mile: putting the power of Big Data in the hands of ordinary users.

Which is perhaps unsurprising; even the mature relational database world uses abstractions of varying levels of complexity to interface with business users. But with data driven decision making on the rise, premiums are being placed on tooling which can expose in sensible fashion data to those without degrees in computer science. Hence, the elevated visibility of startups such as Metamarkets, who excite data scientists with tools like Druid but whose valuation may ultimately depend on its last mile expertise.

At this point in time, whatever my preferred model for data storage and whatever the type, there will be greater than one credible option for a data engine. The same cannot be said for presentation. Which would be less problematic if the market for Big Data talent were not so desperate; outsourcing to shops like Mu Sigma will be an option in some quarters, but comes with its own inefficiences and risks, not to mention per inquiry premiums.

This, then, will be an area of focus in 2012, for both innovation (look for assisted anomaly and correlation identification, a la Google Correlate) and M&A.

Desktop Importance Declines

The most interesting characteristic of the forthcoming Windows 8 release isn’t the technology, which is curious because it’s revolutionary from a Microsoft standpoint. From the support for ARM to the addition of the Windows Store to the ability to author in JavaScript and HTML5, there is much to digest. Instead, the single most defining characteristic of the pending launch is apathy.

Overall inquiries and discussion of the platform demonstrate curiosity but limited interest; the visibility of the once dominant Windows platform is secondary to mobile platforms like Android and iOS.

While this is not a function of any specific or general design failures on the part of Microsoft – indeed, the platform is incorporating important changes while making itself more developer accessible – it is symptomatic of a broader and more difficult to attack problem: the declining role of the desktop.

The desktop is simply not as important as it once was. Mobile usage is eroding the central role PC’s once played; while they are still the dominant form of computing, the trendline is declining and there is no reason to expect it to invert. It’s been suggested that mobile computing in general is additive; that it’s being used to extend the usage of computing to areas where PCs were not employed, and is thus non-competitive. But our data as well as Asymco‘s indicates that, at least in part, mobile usage is coming at the expense of traditional platforms. General search volume data, as we’ve seen, validates this assertion.

There are two implications here. Most obviously, Microsoft’s ability to generate interest in and thus leverage for its flagship operating system is jeopardized. Worldwide developer populations are not necessarily zero sum as skills overlap, but they tend to be rivalrous; an Android or iOS developer is often a lost potential Windows developer – experiments like BlueStacks aside. We can therefore expect Microsoft to have to expend more effort to attract fewer developers to their platform, a negative cycle which becomes cyclical. Second, as the desktop’s primacy abates, we can expect to see greater competition in the marketplace. As enterprises become by necessity more heterogeneous, incorporating Android and iOS devices, the costs of supporting second operating systems drifts towards marginal, which means that forecasts of greater Apple penetration become more probable.

Monitoring as a Service

We are not oriented around category definitions at RedMonk; we prefer market driven names to those conceived and marketed by the analyst industry. That said, it seems clear that the time of Monitoring-as-a-Service (MaaS) is at hand. New Relic’s growth led to a $15M round in November, Boundary took $4M a year ago this month, Monktoberfest speaker Theo Schlossnagle’s Circonus has been in market for over a year, and virtually every vendor that we speak with today is adding monitoring and management facilities, from 10gen’s MMS to Cloudera’s Cloudera Manager.

The proliferation of these services is a direct response to the increasingly heterogeneous nature of application architecture and the reality that the substrate is frequently network based, rather than local. Given accelerating rather than declining consumption of network resources, we predict a strong increase in interest and adoption of MaaS tools. Much as I don’t care for the term itself.

Intelligent usage of generated telemetry – which we’ll come back to – will further cement adoption, delivering previously unseen value.

Open Source and the Paradox of Choice

Gartner in March of last year asserted that open source had hit a tipping point, saying:

“Mainstream adopters of IT solutions across a widening array of market segments are rapidly gaining confidence in the use of open source software.”

We concur, although we would argue that the tipping point actually occured ten years or more prior. The Apache web server and MySQL were originally written in 1995. In 1999, we saw the public offering of Red Hat and the creation by IBM – as mainstream a technology brand as there is in the enterprise – of the Linux Technology Center. Firefox was first released in 2003. None of these reached their relative levels of popularity in the past twelve months; they have instead been the de facto infrastructure for the better part of the last decade.

Regardless of when one asserts that open source crossed the chasm, however, it remains that it is a model whose popularity is increasing over time. As understanding of the benefits increases and concerns about the risks abate, more organizations are not only consuming open source but contributing to it. Evidence suggests, in fact, that perceptions of the value of software are in decline – we’ll come back to that too, and that the end result of this is that more proprietary code is being released as open source software.

Widely perceived as a net benefit, however, the influx of new projects does present problems for would be adopters. Specifically, the paradox of choice implies that developers will increasingly be forced to select from a growing sea of projects which may or may not be suitable for their needs. And while the nature of open source guarantees developers the ability to apply this code to their projects without restriction or commercial engagement, this is a process with a limited ability to scale. Consider the NoSQL space, as an example. Presuming for the sake of argument that the developers in question understand the different categories of database – key value stores, document databases, columnar databases, MapReduce engines, graph databases and so on – well enough to understand their high level needs, there are at least two and sometimes as many as half a dozen credible options to consider.

This paradox of choice, or too much of a good thing, will become more problematic over time rather than less as contributions will continue to rise. The net impact is likely to be increased commercial opportunities around selection, and therefore attention to vendors like Black Duck, Open Logic, Palamida and Sonatype.

PaaS: The New Standard

It has been evident for some time that runtime fragmentation – an aggressive diversification of programming languages and frameworks, specifically – will change the development landscape. The market failure of the first generation PaaS providers, in fact, was primarily a function of their over-prescriptive natures. The benefits to outsourcing management and scale were obsoleted by the constraints; Java shops were never likely to rewrite their application stack in Python or Ruby strictly to benefit from a platform. Which is why virtually every relevant PaaS provider today offers a choice of runtimes, so as to maximize their addressable market.

But in a fragmented world, what might emerge as a standard? From a developers’ perspective, the standard is most often the framework they’re deploying to, whether that’s Django, Node.js, Lift, Play, Rails, Spring, the Zend Framework or another. From a vendor perspective, however, the new standard is likely to be one level of abstraction up from individual language frameworks: the platform itself. Certainly this is VMware’s opinion, as they are in Maritz’ words trying to construct “the 21st-century equivalent of Linux” – i.e. the substrate that everything else is built on top of.

In 2012, this will become more apparent. PaaS platforms will emerge as the new standard from a runtime and deployment perspective, the middleware target for a new generation of application architectures.

Service Proliferation

With the inevitable adoption of multiple third party services – varying cloud resources, multiple, possibly overlapping, management and monitoring services and so on – will come challenges in making sense of the whole. Overall, instrumentation and visibility on a per service level is improved, but aggregating these views into a cohesive picture of overall architectural health and performance is likely to be highly problematic. Not least because the services themselves may present conflicting information and data. Google Analytics and New Relic, for example, are frequently at odds over load times and other delivery related performance metrics. Introduce in to that mix services like Boundary or CloudWatch and the picture becomes that much more complex. Connecting their data back to underlying log management and monitoring solutions such as 10gen’s MMS or Splunk is more complicated still.

The challenges of service intregration will create commercial opportunities for aggregating services which consume individual performance streams, normalize it and present customers with a consolidated single picture of their network performance. Commercial solutions will not fully deliver on this vision in 2012, but we will see progress and announcements in this direction.

Telemetry Usage

Five years ago, we began publicly discussing revenue models based around what we termed telemetry, or product generated datastreams. The context was providing open source commercial vendors with a viable economic model that better aligned customer and vendor needs, but the approach is by no means limited to that category: Software-as-a-Service vendors, as an example, are well positioned to leverage the data because they maintain the infrastructure. In 2011, we finally began seeing vendors besides Spiceworks take the first steps towards incorporating data based revenue models. For products like Sonatype Insight [coverage], data is not a byproduct, but the product.

In 2012, this trend will accelerate as necessary monitoring capabilities are added to product portfolios and industry understanding and acceptance of the model overcomes conservative privacy concerns. Many more vendors will begin to realize that like New Relic, which observed a decline in commercial application server usage, their accumulated data is full of insights on customer behaviors and wider market trends both.

Value of Software Will Continue to Decline

Capital markets have not, traditionally, been overly fond of software firms, perhaps because comparatively few of them eclipse annual revenue marks of a billion dollars – less than twenty, by Forbes‘ count. Microsoft’s share price has languished for over a decade in spite of having not one but two licenses to print money. The mean age of the PwC’s Top 20 software firms by revenue is 47 years; a fact which cannot be encouraging to startups.

Higher valuations instead are being awarded to entities that employ software to some end, rather than attempting to realize revenue from it directly. Startups today realize this, and the value of software in their models has commensurately been adjusted downward. Tom Preston-Werner, for example, describes the GitHub philosophy as “open source (almost) everything.” Facebook, LinkedIn, Rackspace, Twitter and others exhibit a similar lack of protectiveness regarding their software assets, all having open sourced core components of their software infrastructure that would have been even five years ago fiercely guarded.

This is becoming the expectation rather than the exception because it is nothing more or less than an intelligent business strategy. Businesses can and will keep private assets they believe represent competitive differentiation, but it will be increasingly apparent that less and less software is actually differentiating. As a result, 2012 will see even less emphasis on the value of software and more on what the software can be used to achieve.

An interesting article on diminishing wireless bandwidth - and a potential solution to the problem, using light.

The demand for wireless data has been insatiable over recent years.  This has been driven by the proliferation of wireless devices such as smart phones, laptops & tablets, audio devices, games consoles etc. and by the shift from basic content to much richer media content.  The Internet of Things will add even further to this demand in our future Smarter Planet. 

Wireless data transmission has been more than doubling each year. In 2010 we transmitted 24,000 terabytes of wireless data over the mobile networks and this is set to increase to 6.3 exabytes by 2015.  This is a 26 fold increase over 5 years.  Now consider that the spectral efficiency of mobile technology was growing at 35% per annum but has slowed to just 12%, so to cope with the lack of capacity a lot more wireless cells will need to be installed, or a lot more radio spectrum will need to be found.  In 2010 Obama pledged to almost double the amount of wireless spectrum available over 10 years, but with demand doubling every year this is clearly not enough.  Spectrum is a scarce, expensive and finite resource, it cannot just be created.

Cellular operators have been encouraging the off-loading of data from their networks to alternative Wi-Fi carriers when available and increased off-loading is predicted in the future to Wi-Fi and Femto cells.  The problem here is that these systems suffer the same problems (capacity, congestion and lack of spectrum) and simply multiplying the number of nodes does provide a corresponding increase in throughput due to increased interference.  So how can we cope with the predicted increase in demand?  If wireless provider cannot supply sufficient capacity, will we simply accept much higher tariffs designed to curb this demand?

I believe the solution lies in the use of light as an alternative transmission medium.  There is massive availability of free spectrum, and surprisingly the World’s first wireless telephone call was made, not by radio but, by light in 1880 when Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his patented photophone.  Bell used sunlight as his optical source, but today we have the ability to use LED lamps which are semiconductor devices and can be switched or modulated at spectacularly high speeds.  My colleague, Harald Haas, recently amazed a live audience at TED Global by showing high definition video transmitted from a standard LED light bulb.

There is greater than 5 orders of magnitude more light bulbs in the World compared to cellular access points.  Due to their energy efficiency and reliability, LED light bulbs will dominate all illumination markets very soon.  They will be in offices, shops, homes, in cars, road signs, street lighting, as well as illuminating displays.  In the lab today we can already match Wi-Fi data transmission speeds from a standard unmodified LED light bulb and we don’t need an antenna or radio circuits to transmit and receive the information. The incremental cost to add this technology to every LED lamp would be minimal since the additional processing can be added to the silicon already used in the LED driver circuits.

Of course, there are significant challenges in deploying this game changing technology and Luddites will be ready with a list of objections and will ignore all potential benefits.  However, I am so confident of this opportunity that I have quit my previous job in order head up a new company, called VLC Ltd, that launches this month and will provide visible light communications products and help drive this technology into mass-market LED light bulbs.  After all, we cannot expect to create a smarter, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent planet if there are wireless data bottlenecks everywhere!

RedMonk - and Stephen O’Grady specifically - is on a roll with the enlightening posts. Today they discuss the forces that are reshaping the enterprise procurement process. Nothing particularly surprising, but a very succinct, well-put argument about the consumerization of IT.

Traditionally, industry analyst firms have been oriented around top down adoption patterns. CIOs and other IT decision makers comprise both the research subjects and purchasing audience for the majority of firms in this industry, large and small. Which was logical given traditional procurement patterns. When hardware, software and services are available only at high prices, command and control is an appropriate management structure. Attempting to scale the decision making process for big ticket items across a large body of middle managers is not likely to yield acceptable outcomes.

An approach that makes sense in one context, however, may be misapplied in another.

The technology purchasing landscape today looks very different than it did even five years ago. Where once CIOs might reasonably expect to have the clearest understanding of what technologies are leveraged within their own organizations, today they are, as Billy Marshall put it, “the last to know.” This pattern manifests itself every day within the majority of businesses. Not because CIOs are failing, but because of trends that have fundamentally and likely permanently disrupted their ability to centralize the technology adoption process.

The four trends we see as most important in driving this are arranged here in rough chronological order.

Open Source

In the late nineties, startups and enterprises alike were effecitvely beholden to commercial suppliers for the majority of their software needs. Because each piece of the requisite software infrastructure had to be licensed, the capital expenses associated with new initiatives was high. This represented a barrier to entry, and thus a brake on innovation.

With the popularization of open source software, developers from enterprises and startups alike were able to operate independently. For the first time, the actual software practitioners were free to choose their own software rather than having it selected for them and subsequently imposed upon them by upper levels of management. Even in situations where the ultimate production infrastructure targets remained commercially licensed software, open source software like Linux and MySQL allowed for prototyping and rapid development without the attendant costs, both financial and in procurement latency.

This was the first major shift affecting procurement, and perhaps the most profound. None of the infrastructure we take for granted today – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc – were originally adopted from the top down. Their adoption was, instead, a fait accompli. CIOs – the last to know – gradually became aware that increasingly significant portions of their infrastructure, unbeknownst to them, were running on free and open source software. The inevitable demand for production support options for this software is what fueled, in time, the valuations of MySQL, Red Hat and others.

Bring Your Own Device

In October, Apple CEO Tim Cook asserted that 92% of the Fortune 500 were “testing or deploying iPad in the course of less than 18 months,” which may help explain why the iPad revenue stream by itself would place within the top third of that group. The interesting thing about this is that the majority of businesses appear uncertain about precisely why they’re deploying tablets: “Most participants, 51 percent, indicated that they did not have a clearly articulated strategy.”

The answer, in most cases, is that there isn’t one. iPad adoption, much like the penetration of iPhones and Android handsets is being driven by users who simply want the device. Faced with a choice between users – chief executive officers among them – who will employ their own devices for work purposes with or without the permission of IT, many businesses are compelled to support the platforms even without concrete business justifications for them.

The consumerization of the enterprise is decentralizing the process of technology selection, but its importance may lie rather in design. Like all products, technology is designed and built to be sold to a specific buyer. For enterprise products, historically, the actual user has been a secondary concern; the buyer – typically centralized IT – was the priority. Consumer technology companies like Apple, however, are designed for a user. What they give up in IT friendly features they more than make up for in usability and the ability to delight.

The Bring Your Own Device trend, therefore, may well improve user productivity by driving devices designed to be used rather than managed into organizations, from the bottom up.

Software as a Service

Software as a Service is a classic case study in timing with respect to market acceptance. Not many remember today that the model actually failed the first time around, when its practitioners were known as Application Service Providers. Pyschologically, few enterprises were prepared for either the idea of renting software or externalizing critical data like that stored in customer relationship management systems. By the midpoint in the last decade, however, these concepts were sufficiently commonplace to see Salesforce.com a publicly traded company with a valuation north of a billion dollars.

Consumer markets, meanwhile, had adapted much more quickly. Hotmail debuted in 1996, Yahoo Mail the year after and Gmail dropped in 2004.

Some of those same consumer services were pressed into service by enterprise workers, in fact; it was once common for Exchange users to forward all of their email to Gmail due to the disparity in storage limits between typical Exchange implementations and Google’s webmail product.

This pattern has played out repeatedly over the years, from webmail to CRM to project management software to website hosting to online helpdesks. All were adopted from the bottom up. By making applications available to anyone with a browser, often at low or no cost, SaaS has surged up through the ranks of enterprises. The inexorable nature of the model is reflected by the growth of providers large (Salesforce.com) and small (37signals).

Cloud

The single most important feature of the cloud has nothing, or at least very little, to do with technology. It is, rather, the pay as you go economic model. As Flip Kromer puts it, “EC2 means anyone with a $10 bill can rent a 10-machine cluster with 1TB of distributed storage for 8 hours.”

What this means in practical terms is that for the first time, hardware procurement is democratized. From an accessibility and availability standpoint, cloud is the hardware equivalent of open source software. Where open source allowed developers to bypass traditional procurement channels by making quality infrastructure and development software freely available, so does the cloud allow the growing class of devops technologists to leave the world of high latency hardware procurement – where same day server provisioning is a feature – behind. Armed with nothing more than a credit card, instances can be spun up and ready for use in ninety seconds.

Cloud is the final piece of the bottom up puzzle. Open source software and to a lesser extent SaaS allowed for the decentralization of enterprise technology development, but at some point hardware would become necessary which was the insertion point for IT. With public clouds, it is possible for the first time to entirely bypass the traditional gatekeepers.

The Net

It should be evident that traditional procurement and purchasing is not dead, just increasingly bypassed by a more efficient process. Also, that a great many enterprises continue to function largely as they always have: top down. More important than the question of whether this model is sustainable in the face of the trends above is whether it should be.

Before lamenting the fact that the above forces are disrupting and destabilizing your enterprise IT, consider that that may be a net gain. If the primary drivers of BYOD, Cloud, Open Source, and SaaS include ease of use, lower costs, frictionless availability, and speed of provisioning, are these trends worth opposing? Particularly since efforts to do so will, in all probability, fail?

Or are they instead assets to be strategically leveraged? There is little debate that businesses that move the most quickly have a competitive advantage. It’s not clear how businesses that prohibit the same tools that enable this will benefit.

Either way, bottom up adoption is here to stay: use it or lose.

Somewhat boiler plate - but a good overview of the types of challenges that IT managers are increasingly confronted by.

As we approach the holiday season and possibly the end of the financial/budgetary year, let’s pause for a moment to think about 2012. For many IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals, 2011 was a challenging year; the bad news is that 2012 isn’t going to be any easier. With the pressures of the continued mandate to “deliver more with less” added to by increased business demands on, and scrutiny of, IT service delivery; all against a backdrop of increased business and IT complexity.

The high level view

• Increased business scrutiny: IT cost transparency and value demonstration. One could argue that the challenges listed as “increased expectations” next will also increase the scrutiny of IT performance.
• Increased expectations: agility, availability, “hardware,” and support and customer service.
• Increased complexity: cloud per se, mobility, and compliance.

The top 10 challenges

1. IT cost transparency. Something’s got to give in terms of “what IT costs.” IT is and will continue to be a sizable expense to the business. I&O is spending the business’s money, the business wants to know whether it is being spent wisely, and who can blame them. Consequently, I&O organizations need to know what their services are and what they cost. It isn’t simple and in many ways it’s a great example of where I&O needs to “jump before it is pushed.” Think about having to answer the CEO’s off-the-cuff questions as to how the corporate email service compares to cloud services such as Gmail.
2. Value demonstration. In some ways, IT cost transparency is an onramp to the end game of value demonstration. How does IT positively impact the business? That’s the business’s view of value not I&O’s BTW. Which IT services deliver the greatest value, which deliver little or no value? Are we making IT invest decisions based on value or are we still too supply-focused (led by volumes and technology-related factors)? If we could demonstrate the business value derived from IT, surely we would be being asked to spend more rather than having to respond to corporately-mandated, quick fix, end-of-year budget cuts.
3. Agility. I hate the “A” word these days. Like cloud, “agile” has been abused by vendors and practitioners alike of late. It is, however, appropriate for the business’s needs of I&O. The speed of business change dictates a rapid response from I&O. Not only is it speed and flexibility, it is also “agility of mind.” A change in I&O mindset that asks “why not?” rather than “why?”
4. Availability. Nothing new here. The business needs high quality, highly available IT (or business) services. The difference is in expectations and alternatives. For a number of reasons, the business is becoming less forgiving of IT failure and, again, who can blame them. As with anything else that is procured either personally or corporately, you want to receive what you pay for (or more) and there are always alternative suppliers.
5. “Hardware.” It’s a funny term really and I use it somewhat “tongue in cheek” to poke fun at the language we use in IT. End user devices, will however be a big challenge for I&O in 2012. Whether it is the fact that our “internal customers” are unhappy with their “outdated” corporate laptops or the fact that they can’t have corporate iPads, or the whole “can of worms” that is BYOD (bring your own device); personal productivity hardware will be a battleground of business discontent in 2012.
6. Support and customer service. For me, support is one thing and customer service is another; ideally I&O delivers both. IMO my Paging The IT Organization: You Need To Support The People Not The Technology blog covers the support side in that it is ultimately about supporting the consumption of IT services by people rather than supporting the technology that delivers the IT services. And that service-centricity by frontline staff is not enough, it needs to be all IT staff. The same is true for customer-centricity. Please let’s stop calling our internal customers “end users.” We ought not to forget the challenges of supporting BYOD either.
7. Cloud. Issues abound. Do we really know what cloud is (particularly in light of what my colleague James Staten terms “cloud washing”)? Are we looking at cloud as a technical or business solution, or both? Do we know enough about the status quo to make informed decisions about moving IT services to the cloud? Probably not, yet for many cloud is the answer but I can’t help think that we haven’t really taken the time to fully understand the question.
8. Mobility. Whoa, this blog is too long…I guess I could have done a blog on each element if I didn’t have “real work” to do. BYOD comes into play here again but I think that a bigger issue is at hand (which thankfully encompasses some of the BYOD challenges). To me a fundamental issue is that we are still technology-centric. We all hear talk about MDM (mobile device management) as “THE big issue.” To me, however, this is old school IT. We are focused on securing access to the mobile device when I would prefer that we secured access to the IT service. The device is a red herring and of little interest to the customer. They want (or at least we hope that they continue to want) to access your services any which way they can and need to.
9. Compliance. Whether it be internal or external regulatory compliance. Maybe governance is a better word to use? Either way, most of the above will potentially have a negative knock on to compliance whether it be SOX, software compliance, or meeting internal requirements for “transparency and robustness.” With everything going on elsewhere, it is easy for me to imagine a degradation in internal control, not reacting to new risks as a minimum.

The observant amongst you will have spotted that I’ve only mentioned nine challenges in the preamble and subsequent list, so what’s the tenth?

Survival. All of the above challenges need to be addressed, and the failure to address the demands and issues across the full spectrum of challenges will put the internal I&O organization at risk of extinction. It is in many ways, a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” scenario, it’s time to “adapt or die.”

Dell and Intel have released a series of reports that look at workforce attitudes toward computing in the developed world and emerging markets. Looks very interesting.

Mexico, China and other rising economies are quicker at employing new technologies than the UK, meaning that Britain is lagging behind in the shift to server virtualisation, according to a survey by Dell and Intel.

“The virtualisation rates are lowest where there are the highest legacy systems,” said Bryan Jones, director of European marketing at Dell, speaking at a panel on the survey results.

“Developing countries will have an advantage because they will provide more competitive environments,” the Dell rep said, saying it was easier for places like Mexico and China to be more innovative because they didn’t have the “stumbling blocks” of legacy systems.

The UK is lagging behind on other areas of tech innovation as well, declared the survey: employees’ choice of device and the freedom of employees to download what software they want is much better in Mexico than the UK.

82 per cent of Mexican workers said they felt free to download whatever software they needed at work, while only 37 per cent of UK workers felt that to be case. There was an attitude difference, too, according to the report:

“A stark difference is observed between developed and developing countries - 83 per cent of Mexicans and 76 per cent of Brazilians believe that it is a good thing for “technology and the Internet to allow [them] to do business in different ways”, compared with 43 per cent of British workers and 46 per cent of Americans.”

Ian Jones, director of enterprise business for Intel UK, said that this came with a cost to the UK - that businesses in developed countries were missing out on the benefits that employee innovation can bring. Asked whether the UK should be worried by the findings, Bryan Jones, of Dell, said: “Yes, absolutely. Developed nations need to be freeing things up and need to be more competitive.”

He said that British investment levels in IT are still healthy but CIOs need to be sure they are putting their pounds in the right place.

“Organisations that provide technology freedoms and flexibility will not only be seen as desirable places to work, but at a competitive advantage,” he said as recorded on the press release.

Dell and Intel both provide virtual server technology.

The Evolving Workforce survey was carried out by TNS Global Research on behalf of Dell and Intel, the interviews were conducted in October 2011. TNS interviewed people who use computers for their work for the survey: over 8,000 people worldwide including 1,000 in Britain.

Following on the heels of IBM’s MQTT announcement, UCSD has released a study that argues that wireless networks alone won’t be able to support an internet of things; a massive broadband build-out will be required.

Yesterday’s groundbreaking proposal by IBM for a new and open-source asynchronous protocol for machine-to-machine (M2M) Internet communication, called MQTT, cites a projected 1000x (put another way, 100,000%) increase in broadband device-generated traffic by the year 2020, and the need for a formal protocol for managing it all. Now, a study from the University of California San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) projects, using data supplied by numerous sources including the FCC and network systems leader Cisco, suggests that bandwidth of that magnitude doesn’t just simply fall out of the sky.

Without even taking into account the M2M traffic increases IBM researchers seek to facilitate, state Michael Kleeman, director Roger Bohn, and the GIIC team, the rate of mobile traffic growth is forecast by analysts to be a mere 1,800% over four years. GIIC is responsible for the annual “How Much Information?” report which estimates, as reliably as any research institution has been able to do so far, how much data is served to information workers globally through servers every year. For 2010, the number of bytes breached the 22nd power: 9.57 zettabytes.

It isn’t that the Internet is running out of room, says Kleeman, but rather that the world will run into a serious traffic jam if it continues to increase its reliance upon wireless telecommunication. There are transmission media capable of handling the data explosion, but wireless is not among them. GIIC Director Bohn is on the record as an advocate of fiberoptic.

“We have reached a point of disconnect between the capacity of wireless networks and the emerging needs of today’s customers,” writes Kleeman in GIIC’s latest paper. “This disconnect is driven largely by multimedia and multimodal Internet-based traffic, real-time applications that operate independently of user transactions, and an explosion in the use of mobile video for calling, education and entertainment. Our demand for quality high speed capacity enabled by wireless network infrastructure is growing exponentially and the technology and economics of wireless network capacity are struggling to catch up.”

Using data from Bernstein Research as his guide, Kleeman demonstrated that U.S. mobile data traffic will likely grow from 40 petabytes (40 quadrillion bytes) per month last year to 451 petabytes by 2013. He then did a little math demonstration: Assuming TV ratings service estimates are correct, and that the average consumer watches an average of five hours of programming per day, the equivalent of that being 1,266,000 petabytes of streamed data annually. With the current wireless network’s capacity to transmit data at maximum service levels, GIIC estimates, in one year’s time it would only have been able to transmit the equivalent of about three hours and twenty minutes of programming.

In a strategically placed sidebar, Kleeman adds the following little gem: “Fiber optics is an amazing technology. It can send 40 billion bits per second 100 miles down a highly engineered, beautiful glass fiber by simply using pulses of laser generated light. Need to double the capacity? No need to add another fiber; just get another color laser and send multiple colors (or frequencies) of light down the fiber. If you need more distance just add a booster to amplify the laser light and you can go thousands of miles via a medium that is protected from weather and other interference.”

Indeed, fiber may have more than enough capacity for the job, except there’s one little problem the sidebar omitted: It’s difficult to imagine all the world’s M2M traffic-generating devices, whether they follow GIIC’s projections or IBM’s, plugged into fiber - especially all the RFID tags. Perhaps this could be resolved through the use of unforeseen technologies: for example, Wi-Fi-like hotspots that are themselves linked via fiber, but which retransmit over short distances to M2M devices the way wireless routers do today. Kleeman’s paper does call upon people’s willingness to provide, among other things, “active support and acceptance of some unpopular ideas.”

However, one can only imagine the number of single-points-of-failure that could be introduced into a wireless “micro-cell” network of things. Consider, for example, the case of a grocery store whose shelf goods were all microtagged, sending active signals of their presence to the inventory system (in another country). This way, the story wouldn’t need guards to secure its merchandise. At least theoretically, that is, unless someone brought in a signal jamming device, turned it on, and walked off with several 12-packs without setting off an alarm.

There may not be enough space in the public airwaves for all the things that want to chatter with one another. But the solution may not be as simple as declaring a victor in the “wired vs. wireless” war.

IBM has just contributed a widely used messaging protocol, MQTT, to the Eclipse Foundation where it will be available to anyone who wants to use it under an open-source license. The hope is that MQTT will do for the internet of things what HTML did for the Internet.

Andy Stanford-Clark lives on the Isle of Wight, just off the southern coast of the United Kingdom. He commutes several times per week via ferry to his job  as an engineer at IBM’s Hursley software lab. Frustrated that he would sometimes arrive at the island’s ferry terminal in the morning only to find that weather conditions had slowed or halted ferry traffic, Stanford-Clark invented a method for alerting ferry riders when the transport system had shut down or there were delays. It involves tracking the location of ferries via GPS sensors and sending out alerts via a Twitter account. At the heart of the system is a messaging protocol called Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, or MQTT for short.

MQTT is not easily digested by non-techies, but know this: it has the potential of doing for the Internet of Things what the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) did for the Internet that connects people. It makes it possible, potentially, for every device on the network to communicate and share information with every other device.

Today marks a new departure for the protocol. Its creators, IBM and Italy’s Eurotech, are contributing the software to the Eclipse Foundation where it will be available to anyone who wants to use it under an open-source software license. The goal is to turn MQTT into a pervasive, cross-industry standard that will accelerate the transmission of information not just between machines but from businesses to businesses and from businesses to consumers–as in the Isle of Wight ferry application. “The goal is to get people to come together around this protocol and use it to connect all sorts of device and systems–so we can share information more easily,” says Andy Piper, a software researcher at the Hursley lab who is involved in the strategy for messaging technologies.

The protocol was created in 1999 by Stanford-Clark and colleagues at IBM and Eurotech, a leading supplier of embedded technologies. Since then, it has been used by companies and whole industries to improve communications between machines–for instance, messaging between sensors on a remote pipeline and server  computers that monitor the status of the pipes and the flow of material through them.

But now it’s clear that MQTT could do so much more. It could be a key enabler of the effort to make the human-made systems of the world work better by deploying trillions of sensing devices, connecting them via networks and using analytics to mine insights from the data so people can make better decisions.”We can’t make the most intelligent decisions unless we can connect to the instrumented world. That’s where MQTT fits in. It’s the the connection between the sensor chips and the network,” says Piper.

Innovative companies are already finding important uses for the protocol. Facebook, for instance, uses it as the basis for its new Facebook Messenger application, making it possible for people to reliably send instant messages and conduct online chats with one friend or several. The protocol is especially useful when people are communicating via smart phones–where connectivity can be an issue.  “We were able to achieve phone-to-phone delivery in the hundreds of milliseconds, rather than multiple seconds,” Lucy Zhang, one of the Facebook Messenger architects, wrote in an Aug. 12 blog post.

The connection with the Eclipse Foundation augurs well for the future of MQTT. Eclipse oversees a set of open source projects, software tools and frameworks that are used by millions of developers to help build applications. In addition, IBM and Eurotech hope to greatly expand the use of MQTT by getting it adopted as an international standard by a technology standards body.

In the meantime, it’s possible to configure sensor-based systems so they can take advantage of MQTT even though it’s not installed in the sensors themselves. Piper did just that with a pet project of his own–a weather station that he has installed in his backyard. The data from the sensors is transmitted to a server in his home via an RF connection. From there he shares it with with friends at work, the world via Twitter, and the open “Weather Underground” community, using MQTT as the protocol. Sometimes making a smarter planet starts in your own back yard.

Gartner recently held their Symposium, and as they do every year, they offered up a new version of reinventing IT. This time, however, they weren’t very kind to the large IT incumbents, like IBM, HP, and Oracle.

Enterprise technology spending will rise 3.9 percent in 2012 and keep that rate through 2016, according to Gartner, which assumes that a recession is a foregone conclusion. Amid that budget backdrop IT departments will have to creatively blow up systems they’ve spent 20 years to build.

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner, laid out the research firm’s views of the years to come. It’s a world where chief marketing officers will have a larger IT budget than CIOs. It’s a world where traditional vendors—HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and Cisco—will pull end runs around the IT department to gain sales. It’s also a world where enterprise architectures are useless amid mobile, social and cloud computing trends.

Welcome to the annual therapy session that is Gartner’s Symposium. Every year there’s some flavor of reinventing IT. “Architectures of the last 20 years will be obsolete,” said Sondergaard, who urged tech execs to create “post-modern businesses.”

Sondergaard sounded a good bit like NYU professor Clay Shirky, who also had an argument that consumerization was changing everything. While Gartner is urging creative destruction, I can’t help but be skeptical. If everyone could re-imagine IT and blow up old systems to delight customers, there would be no losers in the corporate world. As we know, there are plenty of losers and there will be thousands of companies that flop at people-centric system design.

Among the more notable points from Sondergaard and his merry band of Gartner analysts:

• The strategies of IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco—old standbys for enterprise tech buyers—should be viewed as “long-term risky,” said Sondergaard. Going forward, these vendors should be judged on how they embrace mobile, social and cloud. Apple and Google will be disruptive enterprise vendors. You’ll buy from all of them.

My take: If tech giants are judged on mobile, social and cloud there will be some spectacular failures. If these key vendors convince IT buyers to buy more gear in the name of private clouds they can stick around. If not, look out below.

• CIOs will lose 25 percent of their IT spending control by 2014 to business units.

My take: This prediction is a no brainer. Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors have traditionally sold to non-CIOs. All of the big guns see that sales trend. Expect IBM, HP, Oracle and others to sell to everyone but the CIO.

• Cloud brokers will be necessary to integrate public cloud services. IT departments will spend more than they wanted on cloud services without brokers.

My take: Cloud brokers are a logical step. Today, public cloud services are only 3 percent of IT spending, according to Gartner. That tally will only balloon.

• Social and enterprise systems will become intertwined. Sondergaard said social networking means there will be “mass employee involvement” with enterprise systems. “You must immediately incorporate social throughout your enterprise systems,” said Sondergaard.

My take: Obviously Gartner has watched a bunch of keynotes from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. I think CIOs get the social thing, but color me skeptical that they will all develop social enterprise systems starting next week. If anything they will buy a bunch of social malarkey from vendors they’ll regret later.

• Companies need to rethink systems for simplicity. The so-called postmodern business will develop systems that put customers first by simplifying. Less is more.

My take: Unless you blow up companies and countries and start from scratch this simplicity movement is pipe dream. There’s a whole generation of enterprise IT that has been raised to complicate systems. The customization curse will live on.