Peter's Technology Trumpet : BPOS

Lucky White Heather?

SmallCountry — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:46:44 GMT

Happy New Year. Its getting harder to stay cheery these days.

We've all tried to stay positive as the sub-prime crisis spawned the credit crunch which smothered the global economy. But its easy to lose heart as pensions and house prices tumble and mighty institutions such as HBOS, RBOS are humbled.

As the gloom of the New Millenium Depression sinks in, we find ourselves working harder, with scarce opportunity, and evaporating job security.

As the good Rev. I. M. Jolly once said, "You know, its been a hell of a year".

With this in mind just before Christmas we invited renowned economist Jeremy Peat to speak at Microsoft Edinburgh HQ.

Jeremy's views on the Scottish economic outlook for the next 18 months were riveting, but there were few rays of sunshine. Luckily the windows are sealed at Waverley Gate, preventing the assembled Scottish IT Industry leaders from throwing themselves on the railway tracks below.

Looking for cheerier news, I checked some of my favourite RSS feeds.

Although Barry Beelzebub politically incorrect rant on the state of the nation and The Daily Mash can't fail to amuse, everywhere else it's doom and gloom as the World faces a doubly whammy of financial and environmental catastrophe.

The Guardian's respected environmental blogger George Monbiot tells us that the International Energy Agency is warning of "Peak Oil" in 2020, some 10 years earlier than previously projected. Earlier posts explain that global warming proceeding faster than anticipated faster than expected with melting of arctic ice and permafrost warming the atmosphere by around 5 degrees to 2050 - rendering human civilisation impossible across much of the planet.

George's views, backed up by solid research it must be said, is that we must change our ways or the planet will burn. I imagine he doesn't get invited to many parties these days.

Meanwhile in the Technology Industries perhaps there are some positives... The Global Financial Crisis may be a perfect storm for technology and IT professionals with Business willing to try out new ideas.

In economies like the UK and US where GDP is likely to shrink by a few points in 2009 and faced with growing commitment to climate change legislation and regulation, it seems clear that business and consumers must find new ways of "doing stuff" which are less wasteful of resources, can reduce operating costs and make less demands on capital investment. Its common sense that a recession changes habits - Consumers put off the expensive holiday in favour of paying the mortgage. Organisations will take every opportunity to make changes which cut operating costs before taking the step of making redundancies.

Lynda Gratton of the FT predicts that business travel habits will fundamentally change in her article "Recessions give space for new ideas to flourish" with fiscal necessity driving adoption of collaboration and video conferencing technologies.

This really is a no-brainer - stop flying employees to meetings and use conferencing technology. Not only will this take a serious bite out of business air travel carbon emissions (currently 6% of UK total), but it can have a significant impact on opex. Of course this doesn't work for all industries, but it is not unusual for a UK services sector enterprises to budget £10,000 per year for employee T&E. My personal experience has been that judicious use of Unified Communications tools can cut 50% off that figure.

In fact, if such tools are fully adopted in the company culture (and this takes time), Real Estate and Facilities could really start to trim some fat from the bottom line. Such tools promise to make employees productive wherever they are, reducing the capital cost of office move and consolidation, facilitating Telework and promoting more flexible sharing of expensive office space.

Such ideas are not new - but as the tech gets cheaper and the pressure to reduce operational expenditure increases, ideas thought too risky in the boom times may become standard in the bust.

Cloud-delivered subscription services such as Microsoft's Business Productivity Online, which for some companies can give an employee all the IT services they need for around a tenner a month, may become the norm for smaller customers in a protracted recession. This is more efficient for many businesses than procuring hardware and software and running the services themselves, and for those familiar with the growing electricity consumption of the IT industry worldwide, it promotes maximum efficiency of energy use.

Perhaps all this is good news for IT industry professionals: demand for skills around technologies which reduce consumption and make things more efficient in the coming years may stay solid. Companies IT spend will may shift focus, and new ideas previously thought of as too far removed from the status quo will flourish.

Information Technology based applications, ideas and initiatives can have a broad impact on energy use and operating costs. Take Shiply - a venture born just as the UK's major banks were passing round the hat in Rights Issues last year. Shiply is on online freight marketplace which benefits both the consumer and supplier of the service. Hauliers reverse-auction for jobs to fill empty lorries returning from other work, and the customer pays around 50% of traditional services. Clearly this service improves efficiency, reducing costs, more effectively utilising resources, ultimately reducing the number of freight journeys and hence carbon emmissions.

Ex-SAP Executive Shai Agassi high profile Better Place initiative aims to go even further. His ambitious business model is to replace our vehicle and oil based public transportation with an electric infrastructure of free cars where we pay by the mile, in much the same way as the free handset/Pay as you go model works in telecomms. Further positive grand vision can be found in the Global E-sustainability initiative "SMART 2020 - Enabling a low carbon economy in the Information Age" which identifies the IT industry as the hero, contributing to the Low Carbon economy by enabling new motor and logistics systems, smart energy grids and buildings.

So despite the doom, gloom and despondancy, there are still some uplifting stories to raise our spirits in 2009 - But remember in these dark and uncertain times the words of the Good Reverend - "Life is like an ashtray - full of little doubts".

YouTube - Reverend I.M.Jolly

Cloud Capital and the Credit Crunch

SmallCountry — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:06:39 GMT

Cloud computing. Marketing pixie dust or IT Industry paradigm shift?

The topic even had the Economist gushing about cloud computing's impact on business in their regular technology supplement in October. Analysts have wholeheartedly jumped on the bandwagon with Gartner spreading cloud computing all over its Top 10 strategic technologies list for the coming year, and Yankee group predicting a $20B marketplace for software as a service by 2011.

Meanwhile marketeers keen to capitalise on all the attention are sticking a "Cloud Computing" banner over last months "Green Computing" badge in a desperate attempt to sell the same old junk to win a share of an increasingly fickle audiences shrinking IT budget.

Despite the confusion caused by cloud marketing spin, at a Software + Services Roundtable I attended today with a collection of Scottish IT Services and Software Development companies, Edinburgh and Scotland seem well-placed to benefit from these industry developments.

CLOUD CAMPAIGN:

The Cloud concept is providing great headline fodder for bloggers and journalists, with "Ahead in the Clouds" from the Times, "Thinking Out Cloud" from high rated cloud blogger Geva Perry and "Get onto my Cloud" from Yours Truly.

But there is little evidence that the activity on the newswires has influenced buyers of IT services - many customers I meet nonplussed by the promise of cloud computing's promise of a new way forward, and see it as just a recycling of last years concepts - Software as a Service, Grid, Utility Computing and the like. Others, like Larry Ellison, are bamboozled by the buzzwords. Larry with some justification condemned the IT industry fickle fascination with fashions such as cloud and confessed "Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about".

So what is behind the hype? Cloud is nothing more than shared IT services: delivered at large or massive scale, made made available to multiple customers, generally on a subscription basis over t'Internet.

What marks a real shift in the industry is the explosion in diversity of these internet services, the stong investment in software development and cloud infrastructure by key industry players like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, etc, the creativity of cloud startups, and the willingness of more customers to consider the model for their own applications.

Cloud embraces familiar computing models such as co-location (where multiple customers dedicated equipment is placed together and some or all of its operations outsourced) and Software as a Service (where many customers instance of an application are run centrally far more efficiently and at lower cost than any one customer could achieve). The recent activity and attention has arisen from the variety of applications, services and business processes which are starting to be made available in this manner.

GATHERING CLOUDS:

So where will clouds growing share of the software marketplace predicted by Gartner, Yankee et al come from?

Firstly from Software delivered as a "finished service" such as Salesforce, and Microsoft Exchange Online. Till now, most would prefer to trust important business information to their own tin in their own server room. But if a service is available as hosted or on-premise and both can be shown to meet all of a customer's requirements, the hosted option is likely to be cheaper overall through its inherent economies of scale.

Given the pay as you go model, it's likely that cloud adoption will accelerate in the current global recession. Customers will find it more difficult to find capital for the upfront investment in equipment and systems integration which an on-premise solution requires. Likewise, as more companies tighten their belts and try to reduce costs, subscription software may be an increasingly attractive option allowing them to scale up quickly and provision new services, users and infrastructure based on demand. Likewise if the back office staff have to be let go, or the Christmas rush doesn't happen, capacity and costs can be quickly reduced.

Another important cloud play is around the virtual datacenter - this model is really co-location on steroids, where rather than racking up servers, storage and networking in their own server room, an enterprise can readily provision such services in the datacenter of a cloud provider with usage-based chargeback. Customers can provision servers with their specific preconfigured application images as and when peak demands dictate. Server virtualisation and associated technologies are an enabler here, but key to the viability of such services is automated provisioning of IT infrastructure and the abstraction of this physical hardware and setup from the customer - companies such as QLayer and Scotland's Enigmatec are innovating to fill this gap.

But where the cloud has generated most hyperbole and discussion of "platform shift" is where the cloud can offer all the services required for applications as a complete "Cloud OS" . Examples include Amazon's Web Services and Microsoft's Azure. These aim to provide all the services which application developers require to build applications and services in the cloud, incorporating existing applications and devices, and providing tools which allows companies and developers to leverage their existing skills and investments.

SCOTLAND'S CLOUD CAPITAL:

Scotland is seeing its fair share of innovation in the cloud space. Scottish hosting company XCalibre have established their Flexiscale low-cost on demand computing service, and Enigmatec founder Duncan Johnson-Watt is currently in stealth mode setting up Cloudsoft. Several more Cloud Computing startups are at the funding stage, and we can expect to hear more in the New Year.

Likewise Scotlands play for the nascent market for the engine rooms of Cloud Computing is gathering pace with support building for 3 ambitious mega-datacenter projects in the 100MW range - Cable & Wireless/Thus and Internet Villages International in the South West, Alchemy Computing in the NorthEast, and from Morgan Stanley near the Pentland Firth.

CLOUD CONCLUSIONS

The Cloud currently gathering on the horizon will drive an evolution of the IT industry rather than the revolution the hype has suggested. But in the words of David Chappell, the Armani-wearing long served Microsoft pundit...

...whether you work for an ISV or an enterprise, some cloud platform services are likely to be useful for applications your organization creates. A new world is unfolding; prepare to be part of it.

"We're Doomed!...

SmallCountry — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:10:18 GMT

...as Private Frazer was prone to shout whenever Captain Mainwaring's home guard faced a crisis.

Likewise I have long bored colleagues with prophecies of doom for those failing to embrace new business models enabled by "cloud computing".

"Doom" might be overstating it, as the Microsoft's partners making a living from installation and service of customers' PC server, collaboration and application infrastructure continue to do rather well - so much was obvious in the Aberdeen Microsoft Partner group last night who heard about Microsoft Virtualisation and Management strategy from Matt McSpirit. Business is good in Aberdeen right now, as the Oil/Gas industry continues to stoke customers IT budgets in the Northern boom town, whilst Financial Services dependant partners in the central belt are increasingly dismayed by the glbal financial outlook.

However, the arrival of Internet Services such as BPOS potentially make a customer less reliant on a friendly IT partner based round the corner. Consider a partner providing Exchange email for a customer- cross-border cattle-rustlers could offer this service through BPOS undercutting or undermining the partners installation and maintenance revenue.

BPOS won't suit all customers, but the smart partners are learning how they can blend it into their existing services - so that they can continue to offer a "value-added" relationship to their customer base, which includes Software Services offerings like BPOS as and where appropriate.

The BPOS juggernaut is on its way and will reach our shores in Spring 2009. I encourage partners to look at the trial and sign up.

In the meantime, Steve Ballmer was moved to describe online services as "a platform for the next technology revolution" in his Exec Email yesterday following Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie's announcements of Microsoft Azure Services, formerly known as RedDog, at the Professional Developers Conference yesterday. In his words

"Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone".

The new cloud services operating system runs in Microsoft Datacenters and is a platform for applications - as opposed to a "finished" application like Exchange Online or Live Meeting.

This gives enterprises and developers a new option to host apps and services in the cloud - providing on demand computing and storage to enable applications without up-front investment in infrastructure.

A pay as you go hosted platform for any app, taking full advantage of developer's skills in .NET, and the like, will likely be an attractive means for an organisation to move processing off-premise or for an ISV to build and distribute its app without the hassle of deploying servers. By taking advantage of other web services such as SQL, Sharepoint online and CRM Live, and leveraging consumers's data synchronised across his Mesh of devices, powerful applications can be composed with low initial costs. Whats's more they could scale up readily to meet demand, and potentially allow organisations to reduce capital investment and move costs to ongoing operational expenditure.

At the core of Azure is .NET Services (the artist formerly known as Biztalk, providing the backbone to compose, sequence and orchestrate processes up in the cloud) and SQL Data Services (a hierarchical data store in the cloud built on SQL Server). As ever, David Chappell has reduced a tricky concept to the level of a Ladybird Book in his newly published white paper.

As if that was not enough, the PDC this year also annouced Office Web Applications, lightweight browser delivered versions of the Office apps which will be added to Office Live when Office 14 is released.

Don't Panic Mr Mainwaring!