"My precious" - why IT/IM should not be like Gollum

(c) MGM 212

With the impending realse of the film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit in the UK, I was reminded of the character Gollum's attitude to the One Ring. He described it as "my precious" despite the fact it had distorted his mind and was gardually killing him. Whilst such an attitude to something you possess and control is a bit extreme, many CIOs, CTOs and even CFOs, take the same view of their information management/IT provision. 

I am the first to champion the call that information is an organisation's most important asset, but that does not mean I agree that the organisation is always the best to manage and explot that asset.

I keep my money in a bank, I pay my local mechanic to service my car, so why, if I were still a CIO/CTO, would I have issues about asking better resouced, focussed and trained professionals to provide my information management/IT capability?

There are 9 questions/myths about managed services/outsourcing and cloud provision that I regularly have to address - and burst.

Gollum didn't have a happy end in Lord of the Rings. Neither will CIOs/CTOs who do not prioritise delivery over (percieved) control.

FAST enterprise search is back - and doing it in Norway

Further to the Microsoft SharePoint 2012 Conference held in Vegas in mid November, Norwegian search solutions company Comperio has been running a series of events around Europe. In London Bjorn Olstad, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and a key acquisition when Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer, confirmed that Microsoft is lifting search out of SharePoint and that enterprise search development will be headquartered in Norway, where the company is intending to recruit 50 people.
This is highly strategic good news, and for me confirms the line that Bjorn (and I from an independent perspective) have been saying for at least the last six years, "search is the new portal".

Caveat emptor

 

Those analysts (including myself) who have covered the enterprise search and information management arena for the last decade, had a general consensus that when Autonomy's market capital reached $5 billion, the CEO Mike Lynch and co. would sell up to one of the software behemoths, and Oracle was top of most analyst's lists.
Well it went to $6 billion with some really smart and complimentary acquisitions (Interwoven, Meridio, ZANTAZ etc),  and I even went on record as saying that potentially Autonomy could be the UK's next CA or Oracle.
Then HP paid (literally) 'top dollar' at $10 billion for the company in 2011, but didn't really appear to have a game plan for the integration of the technology into HP's developing information management stack. It was noticeable that HP didn't want to keep Mike because they didn't appoint him to the board. It was also noticeable that Autonomy became a very independent unit within HP, even to the point of re-hiring people it lost when it was first acquired.
Now HP says it has to take an $8.8 billion charge on the acquisition after "serious accounting improprieties".

This is more than a little ironic as a great deal of Autonomy's expansion in the US came after a street (collective noun) of banks bought Autonomy's IDOL and other software to help them identify their own accounting 'holes' after the Lehman Brothers collapse and the sub-prime debacle.

Were there "accounting improprieties"? I am not qualified to say. But if I was going to spend $10 billion on a company with a market cap of $6-7 billion, I would want to do a heap of due diligence first. Whilst some things will always be missed in the M&A process, overestimating by 88% a company's value (which is what HP now believes) is a huge error on any accountant's spreadsheet.
So what next? Lots of fees for lawyers and (hopefully better) accountants, and there is a good chance that much of the really good software that Autonomy brought to HP will be lost in the melee.
My final thought is of a sign I saw in a tableware shop in Palo Alto "You broke it - you bought it".

Cloud-in-a-box? Why wouldn’t you?

Interesting briefing this morning with the UK arm of technology solutions provider Avnet and HP. It was around a product labelled ‘Cloud-in-a-box’, whose purpose is to give organisations the capability to cost effectively develop and test applications in a controlled environment.

Given current economic constraints, we have demands for faster development and roll-out of enterprise applications which are ‘right first time’. This combined with the increasingly pervasive nature of internet accessibility, and the devices that can be used, means that cloud deployment is becoming the implementation route of choice for organisations of all sizes and complexions.

But rapid/agile development always comes with a level of risk, not least in that test environments are often ‘second-hand’ servers, ‘under the desk’ with limited controls, measurement or management. This situation frequently arises because putting together a business case for a controlled IT test environment can be quite nebulous.

 

The CIAB proposition is for Avnet, through it's partner network, to deliver a preconfigured HP BladeSystem Matrix, with appropriate RAM, discs, a network switch, and HP’s Quality Center test management tools for measurement and quality assurance. All provided on a subscription model, avoiding the capex issue.

As a former IT director, who ‘knew’ that many of his developers, and even network managers, were trying to, (and had to), develop production ready applications on ‘under the desk’ equipment, the concept of the Avnet and HP CIAB is a no-brainer.

 

I will be writing in more detail about the appliance in the next week, however I would recommend those current and potential Avnet partners, whose interest I have raised, to attend Avnet’s webinar on 28 November bit.ly/RNbUsm

Actian aims to dispell fears



Actian Corporation the provider of the Vectorwise analytics engine, and the controller of the open source database Ingres, has produced a timely infographic, based on 100 responses, of corporate attitude to Big Data: http://bitly.com/XU2zTi  – happy Halloween

 

Google - the teenager

So Google has just celebrated its 14th birthday. In that time it has become the dominant internet search engine (outside China). It has developed the most widely used smartphone operating system, and like a teenager on a diet of cola and blue sweets, aims to keep reinventing itself to ensure it gets to be the centre of attention.

Personal opinion, overall despite my natural gravitation to smaller vendors,I really like Google,  its approach and ambitions. I have been to a Googleplex (one of their 'funky' office environments where bean bags and games tables support the creative process for its staff), and like many in the western world, in addition to having it [Google] as the default search engine (although I am cognisant of potential bias in results). I have also come to use Google as a verb when clients ask for reassurance on my activity/credibility - "google me".
However such a profile comes at a price. If you put up a big dart board, people will throw darts at it, and the bigger the dartboard, the greater number and heavier the weight of the darts, and thus Google's local 'representatives' in countries from Germany to India find themselves under scrutiny/questioning from authorities on issues of confidentiality and anti-competitive behaviour (bet that wasn't in the job description).
Happy Birthday Google.

Apple mapping - now it's personal

Like many others I have learned that Apple's Mapping App, delivered on the iPhone 5, along with iOS6,  has a few flaws in its application. And it was funny/acceptable until my local 'rag' spotted that the place I proposed to my wife, and where we (very recently) spent our twentieth wedding anniversary was potentially 6,000 miles from where we live http://bit.ly/QBoRDG.
Please Tim Cook, for the credibility of my marriage, please sort it out.

QlikTech wins with views at London 2012

As I wake bleary eyed from watching another spectacular opening ceremony at the London 2012 Olympic stadium, this for the start of the Paralympics  I have been reflecting on how much technology goes into, and around, the two sets of games. Alongside the go-faster swim suits, the blade-like prosthetics of Oscar Pistorius, the games management system, there are the on screen graphics used by the TV broadcasters, and the multiple streaming channels across the internet. Furthermore it is good to see that UK broadcaster of the Paralympic Games Channel 4, has pulled out all the stops for accessibilty on its website.
One the external 'associated' bit of cleverness that caught my eye, and became the basis for some highly charged (armchair) debates on athletics in the Davis household, was the  QlikTech Global Games App. (I am assuming that QlikTech was not allowed to use the term Olympic as that is heaviliy copyrighted throughout the ganes).  This promotional site illustrates the capabilities of the company's QlikView Business Intelligence product and the visualisation that it offers.
The App which includes a raft of historical detail enables the user to pivot and visualise data from all Olympic games in the last century.
Besides showing that the USA wins a lot of medals (QlikTech is NASDAQ: QLIK, but I don't there is bias) I personally think the site is a good way of illustrating to those who still believe BI is all about reports with numbers and tables, some of visualisations that are now available for business data.
QlikTech has undertaken similar exercises at previous Olympics and Winter Olympics, and given that this years is the biggest ever, and I have a son who plays a mean game of boccia, I am really looking forward to a site on the Paralympics.

Storage de ja vu

Back in 2003, a number of us in the analyst community viewed the acquisition of the 800 lb gorilla in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) marketplace, aka Documentum, to be an exercise based upon the premise of EMC having so much in the way of storage products available, it needed to offer enterprises something to put on those products.  Roll on nearly a decade and we have the offer of  Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glacier to replace tape archives. Ignoring the current (but relevant) debates on pricing, response times, and issues of bandwidth to the Glacier offering, I personally like the idea. It is a modus operandi that is already prevalent in the consumer community. We upload our pictures to the likes of Flikr, Facebook etc not just because we want to show off, but because we believe our valuable memories will be safe there. Many use the likes of BOX.COM and Dropbox as personal archives, and many put their online passwords into emails on universally accessible webmail sites. AWS could be on to a winner.with Glacier, expect Microsoft et al to follow.

"Life is like a box of chocolates"

(c) Paramount Pictures

"You never know what you're gonna get."
In the 1994 Tom Hanks movie Forrest Gump, the ex soldier was bought shares in a 'fruit business' by his former commanding officer and became financially independent from the dividends. At that time the shares in AAPL were trading at $39, having an IPO price of $25 ten years earlier. At time of writing in 2012 they are at $666, and Apple Inc. is the world's highest valued company. Will it stay there? Even with the iPhone 5 and (heavily rumoured) iPad 'mini' to be announced in the next month, and an Apple TV to follow that?
Well looking at the price of Facebook shares on the same day as Apple's achievement, they had lost half of their (admittedly bonkers) initial IPO price of $38 in just three months. So it is not going to be toppled quickly by the 'next big thing' in social software.
Competition in the smartphone market from Samsung and HTC,  may take the gloss away for some iPhone sales in the consumer market, and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 is my current 'wish list' tablet, but I am not expecting them, or a new range of Blackberry's to stop the inexorable penetration of the iPhone and iPad into enterprises as the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) revolution continues.
So as we head into autumn ('fall' for my US colleagues) it looks like the Apple will continue to ripen, and if it can deliver both in terms of product and availability/delivery, there should be lots of (again for US colleagues) 'holiday season' revenues to boost the price further.
So next time you buy a box of chocolates, and find an Apple in it, you may want to hesitate before taking it back to the store.

Outlook.Com does the job - including security

So it's been two weeks since I 'converted' from Microsoft's Hotmail to the new format Outlook.Com. And my verdict? I like it. The user interface is intuitive and migration was simple. The organisation features work well. What's not to like?
Microsoft desperately needed to improve on the tired and 'clunky' 1990's Hotmail interface (sic), where the likes of Google's Gmail and even Yahoo! have recently shown a much tidier set of functions.
And Microsoft has done what it always does best. Identify the features that users seem to work with most in rival products, and put those into its respective offering. This has meant that Microsoft software can never be seen as 'leading edge', and it may never be rated as the 'best' in a particular area, but it will be good enough for the vast majority of users/businesses and offer a reliable product. A while back I visited Microsoft Labs in Cambridge, UK, and was told that all the products developed in the labs are rewritten by a 'production team' to an engineering standard if they go mainstream, to ensure the reliability.
What has disappointed me about the launch of Outlook.Com is not the product, but the reaction of commentators that the 16 character password limit is not enough, and that Yahoo!'s 32 limit and the reportedly 200 for Google (and its ability to also use two-factor) are better for the job.
I know as well as anyone that the strength of a password is linked to its length. But so is the difficulty in remembering it! A lot of awareness raising has been done to push users to create complex passwords with a combination of upper and lowercase letters, characters and numbers. But the reality is that most home users, given the chance, will use the same, even complex, password on all their electronic accounts.
A much better way of getting users to make stronger passwords is to encourage the use of a standard pattern (algorithm). For example using a set string of characters and appending the characters from specific positions in the site's URL. Even at 8 characters that will be stronger than a 32 character password that is used on everything from Twitter to eBay.
Whist one of the arguments to moving to Outlook.Com was that it would look more 'business like', (just like the move of Googlemail to Gmail.com) the reality again is that the majority of Outlook.Com accounts will be home users, and the password will be protecting emails that mostly contain invitations to stag nites (sic) and the pictures of the dog/baby/etc. They may be protecting online banking, (which I would always recommend has a unique password), they will not be protecting accounts of large enterprises and 'national security' et. al. Those latter organisations use Exchange/Active Directory/Outlook client, etc. and are subject to polices that enforce 'secure' passwords, (although I would guess that many users utilise their 'work' password on 'home' accounts).
Outlook.Com is a 'good enough' product for the majority of the millions of users that it is aimed to support.
So which of Gmail, Yahoo! and Outlook.Com will I continue to use as my primary email address?

Can we visualise Big Data?

EMC hopes so. In "The Human Face of Big Data", a photo journalism project it is sponsoring, it is asking 100 of the world's leading photographers, in 30 countries to visually document the collection and use of data.

Working with photographer Rick Smolan, and his company Against All Odds Productions. The objective is to create a coffee table book and iPad app showing the best of the photographs, using the images to demystify the term that seems to have N+1 definitions for the N commentators writing about it. EMC is hoping that the book, to be published in the autumn will be a national "best seller" and is also intending to distribute copes to 'influencers'.

Of course EMC as a storage provider has a vested interest in Big Data, both on premise and in the cloud as a service. The company which recently announced $5.31bn revenues for the second quarter of 2012 makes a lot of cash from storage and with, most notably the Greenplum database, is aiming to offer organisations on premise and/or cloud solutions to meet Big Data needs. 
Illustration of Big Data by those of us in the the analyst community trying to communicate the issue to IT decision makers has always been an issue. We have reached for images of overloaded donkey carts and pictures of people running from tsunami waves. But whilst these raise wry smiles from an audience, they do not in my opinion convey the enormity (pun intended) of the subject, its challenges and opportunities for CIOs and other decision makers.

A long time ago, when I was an IT Manager in the UK NHS, I almost had sleepless nights wondering what I would do when our storage requirements reached 1 terabyte. Lately I have been known to show a photo of the 1000+ DVD collection we have at home, (don't ask) organised by genre/series or artist - that is 5 terabytes 'under management'. I wish the project well.

As a footnote I would (tongue in cheek) like to nominate this Dilbert cartoon http://bit.ly/MTQ97G suggested by @TonyBaer.

Big Data Forum - London

5 July - Attended Unicom's Big Data Forum in London really interesting session with James Howard (ex BBC) on the data requirements for sports journalism,(very relevant ahead of the London 2012 Olympics), and also multi-patent holder Andrew Byde of Acuna on what is big data - “if you can fit it in memory, it is not big data”.

BOX.COM launches in Europe

18 June – the team from BOX.COM are in London in advance of the announcement that they are expanding into Europe, in the first instance through a London base. BOX has (unashamedly) long been a favoured company for myself in that, whilst developed in a University dorm, it was designed from the outset to be an 'enterprise ready' rather than a 'consumer' product – (add your own names here). It will sync with corporate directories and the organisation retains control of all the content.

Previously described as 'ECM in the cloud' msmd advisors believes that BOX like Salesforce.com is taking a lead, in offering organisations an alternative to on premise proprietary solutions, whilst ensuring that corporate security strategy is adhered to. (It is notable that a little time before Microsoft announced it was to acquire the Yammer collaborative suite, and in msmd advisors' opinion, the Redmond behemoth was trying to address the same issue).

However, msmd advisors believes that BOX is a product of it's time. The 'perfect storm' of widespread wifi and broadband access across the world, the emergence of other form factors/devices, such as netbooks, tablets, Android and iOS phones as access devices, and the adoption of a increasing  range of standards for file formats has made this opportunity possible.

Alongside the expansion into Europe to support multinationals etc., BOX has added a whole range of extra tools to ensure differentiation from the 'cloud storage' competition.(again add your own names).
In addition BOX has used its rapid growth to date to recruit key industry individuals to support of its founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, such as general mangers and marketeers (such as Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck from EMC, Joely Urton from Oracle, and Meghan Hughes from Text 100). These people are not only highly experienced and referenced, but all have significant influence n the market(s) that BOX it is aiming to penetrate. They also, like the founders, seem to have a delight in making business fun (which is something that is missing in many companies today). Welcome to this side of the pond.

Adobe saved my wallet

As I write this with the third day of the London 2012 Olympics in full swing I have to say (without endorsement of the company or the products involved) a big thank you to Adobe for the fact that I don’t have to invest in satellite television and recorder.

My eldest daughter is an avid equestrian fan and was insistent that so she could catch up with the events she would miss whilst working, we needed to move on from what I consider to be a perfectly satisfactory Freeview service.

She was very persistent, but I held out, recognising that this would mean she would inevitably monopolise our main TV for the duration, and more relevantly having noted the announcement by the BBC in April that it would be video streaming  24 HD channels simultaneously to multiple devices, with the ability to replay as required
On the day before the open ceremony it was confirmed that the BBC would use Adobe’s Project Primetime to deliver both the live steaming and to create a video on demand (VOD) package for catch up. 
In Project Primetime, Adobe has assembled a video technology platform which aims to deliver seamless viewing of live and recorded video content across multiple devices. The components that make up the Primetime platform include Adobe’s Access, Auditude, Digital Marketing Suite, Media Server, and Pass products with the addition of Primetime Highlights to rapidly generate VOD.

Besides desktops and SmartTVs, Primetime will also support all major mobile platforms including Android and iOS. Whilst designed for TV supported by paid advertising, the licence fee funded BBC is the first broadcaster to use the platform.
Although the live streaming is impressive, even in our rural village, with its relatively low bandwidth and high contention, it is the Primetime Highlights that have caught my eye. The product enables the BBC to create and deliver VOD coverage of the live events in real time, meaning that it is immediately available for replay.

So what was the opinion of the Davis household after day two of London 2012 and the BBC’s use of the Primetime Platform? My daughter with her usual eloquence and enthusiasm “It’s not bad”, her father (and his bank balance) was breathing a sigh of relief.

Is life imitating art?

A post on the BBC news website speaks of 'A spokesman for the social network' when referring to Facebook. As friends of Kevin Spacey will know The Social Network was the title of his biopic of the estabishment of Facebook.

Internet search engines biased? Duh?

The news that Google is in discussion with European Commission (EC) to settle the alleged antitrust case around the biasing of search results to promote its own products, was inevitable, given that a similar allegations are being investigated by the FTC in the US.
What is surprising however, is that users of the dominant internet search engine in Europe apparently cannot recognise the bias.
Google is a business, it is not a charitable endeavor like Wikipedia. As a company it would be niaeve, in fact iresponsible to to its sharehol;ders not to promote its own, and other sponsored products.
When I go to my local Tesco supermarket, at the end of the isle will be the branded goods being promoted (and which Tesco is paid to place there). Then down the isles there will be a mix of branded and Tesco own label goods, with the own label goods often having a promotional price on the shelf edge.
Despite the ideal of a totally free internet, it has to be paid for somehow. Even Jimmy Wales has to post a donation request message once a year.
In due course Google will stump up lumps of cash for both the EU and US treasury coffers, and will make some changes to the algorithms. Let's just hope that the organisation currently funding the lobbying of the EC, Microsoft has the algorithms in Bing ready for inspection.

How the world has changed

I was asked by the bank manager what equipment did I need to equip each analyst in an advisory group which wants to operate on a global basis. My reply "A quad band mobile phone, a netbook and charger, and a passport." - oh the delights of the cloud, open source software, and wifi in every coffee shop.

New kid on the block

1 June 2012 saw the creation of a new UK based, independent IT analyst house - msmd-advisors. Led by myself it aims to address both user organisations and vendor requirements for responsive, credible,and flexible advice and support. The company's first engagement is next Monday in London, I will keep readers posted.

Big Data = Big opportunity (well for the marketing guys and their budgets anyway)
I have spent more time on Big Data this year than any other subject. Last week was Big Data week in London with Oracle's Big Data and Extreme Analytics summit  at which I was privileged  enough to speak at alongside Andy Mendelsohn, Senior VP, Database Server Technologies at Oracle and Doug Cutting, Chief Architect at Cloudera, and of course the person who created Hadoop. There are two big issues that i think we still need to crack in Big Data - demonstrable Return On Investment (ROI) that can be put as a cash quantity, and how do we ensure the provenance of the data analysed? That looks like my work for the next year.