Peter's Technology Trumpet : Scotland Technology

Saving the World 1 Watt at a time?

SmallCountry — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:49:31 GMT

“Every little helps” according to Tesco’s and the nice lady rattling her Sally Army collection box.

Unfortunately, in terms of our Ecology and Environment, that’s just not true. To change the post-industrial trends in fossil fuel dependency and carbon emissions, massive shifts in technology and society are required.

Militant Eco-warriors view that our efforts so far smack of tokenism: consumers assuage their guilt by switching to hessian shopping bags and eco washing up liquid; Government’s energy policy, foiled by the planning process, approve only tiny wind farms which make negligible impact on our energy generation mix; Business’ carbon offsetting measures smack of cynical “greenwashing”.

But Its easy to understand why people are unsure how to act. Generally the public have a poor understanding of the science behind “carbon emissions” and their contribution to global warming. Though scientists finally reached consensus that human actions were contributing to climate change in the IPCC 2007 report, there is still much contradictory and confusing information on our impact on global warming – and whilst we are bombarded with Green Marketing messages it is difficult for us to truly understand the links between our lifestyles and their environmental effect.

The Technology Trumpet would suggest that the key to understanding our environmental impact is for everyone to understand their personal energy use. Since James Watt perfected the steam engine, the energy consumed by all our activity, travel and consumption has steadily increased. Whilst this started in the burning of coal to steam engines, our ever-increasing lifestyle energy demands for energy for travel, heat, manufacture and electricity still come from fossil sources.

Today in the UK our daily energy consumption is around 200 kiloWatt hours – the equivalent of 200 40Watt bulbs switched on all day, every day, for every person in the country.

Unfortunately the hangover from all this energy consumption is a warmer planet – the accumulated “greenhouse gases” from burning hydrocarbons mean that infra-red “heat energy” from the surface of the Earth is absorbed and warms the atmosphere rather than harmlessly passing into space.

Back with the Eco-warriors, most popular initiatives to restore kilter to the complex systems which threaten to warm the Earth’s atmosphere by a few degrees by 2100 are tiny compared to growing “light bulb” count. Every little helps, but not at a scale to check the rate at which global energy use is increasing. Taking steps which drastically reduce the consumption of individuals, businesses and society in general is required to check the process which by general agreement of the scientific community, now seems to be underway.

Unfortunately for our comfortable Western lifestyles, bigger initiatives, which eliminate a significant fraction of our “personal light bulbs” are required. Here in the UK the lions share of our light bulbs are from Travel, Heat, and consumer “stuff” that takes a lot of energy to make or use. We stand the best chance of switching off our personal light bulbs by addressing these three areas.

Broadly speaking we can address this in several ways – use energy from renewable sources which don’t emit carbon, reduce energy requirements through technological innovation (like better insulating our houses), or mandate changes in our energy intensive lifestyles.

The problem is scale and timing – the changes required in any of the above must be drastic throughout the first half of this century to make a substantive difference before the century ends.

The Scottish Government had a go at this recently when it proposed that 95% of passenger cars should be electrically powered by 2020 in Scotland. This proposal, aimed at achieving an audacious 42% reduction in Scotland’s carbon emissions over the same period, were rubbished as hopelessly unrealistic by pressure groups from the business and consumer community. But this is the scale of change required to make a real difference.

Whilst democracy remains a popular system of government, our politicians, understanding of human nature, prefer to soften the hard lifestyle change messages to maximise their chances of election.It can be tricky to convince the population to support implementation of changes at the scale required as shown by last years rejection of the large Lewis Wind farm.

Prof David MacKay’s “Sustainable energy without the hot air” is a seminal work which quantifies the changes needed in the way the UK generates and uses energy. His conclusions are sobering, showing that onshore wind farms the size of Wales and massive offshore tidal barrages in Pentland and Solway would be required for the reality to meet the rhetoric.

So in summary, we may all fry unless we drastically change our ways – and soon.

Meanwhile, despite the bunkum of the industries’ Green marketing, it could yet be we Information Technologists who end up saving the planet!

That’s because the World needs us to help them effectively measure energy use. Because few individuals and businesses effectively measure, they fail to understand and effectively address energy use and costs.

Though we all mump and moan about the rising cost of our energy bills, few actually have any idea of their breakdown. Like the careful driver who feathers the throttle when driving a car with a trip computer measuring instantaneous fuel consumption, we need instant feedback to modify our behaviour. Whilst the gas and ‘leccy meter stay in the cupboard under the stairs, we miss the feedback.

The Utility industry is addressing this only slowly - In Germany Yello Strom are undergoing widespread deployment of Smart Electricity Meters, and closer to home Scottish Hydro have tentatively rolled out these devices which instantly feed back the cost of our actions, so that we don’t fill the kettle quite so full, hang up the washing versus switching on the tumble dryer and understand the value of better insulating our homes.

Whilst the utilities dawdle, a new class of software which address personal energy management has appeared – Google with PowerMeter are aggressively targeting smart meter infrastructure, whilst Microsoft, with their Hohm tool announced in late June, uses expert systems based on location, utility company, home size, etc. to predict energy use in advance of smart meter rollout.

The holy grail for these applications is to integrate with energy measurement and demand mitigation devices (thermostats, electric vehicle charging systems, etc) around the home and industry, to manage and mitigate overall energy use. It is early days, but this could become one of the great IT industry innovation battlefields like the desktop OS, the Browser, or the Search Engine.

Another area where the IT industry can make a huge impact on personal energy use is in travel avoidance. Air and surface travel account for over 40% of our personal energy use (80 of those 40Watt bulbs). The financial and environmental impact of technologies for teleworking and virtual meetings are well documented at the micro level. At the global scale, an ambitious study recently published by the WWF t concluded that the impact of Telework aggressively implemented would have a dramatic effect on World carbon emissions. It claims that by 2050 overall global transportation emissions could drop to between a quarter and a third of their current levels.

This is perhaps an optimistic view – again it is difficult to compel people and businesses to adopt the changes required. Ironically it may be the first global flu pandemic for 40 years which tips the balance. If 100,000 new daily cases of H1N1 swine flu are appearing by late August as predicted by the UK government then Teleworking technologies could help stem the spread of the virus, as well as saving the world one watt at a time.

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

Facing West

SmallCountry — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:01:40 GMT

In the 18th century the city of Glasgow amassed great wealth through trade with the New World. Opinions abound in the history books of why the Glasgow Tobacco Lords achieved a virtual monopoly on the weed trade, but it came down to one fundamentals- the Clyde formed a safe West-facing port best placed to take advantage of the trade winds of the arduous Atlantic crossing.

Glasgow's Merchants were undoubtedly clever chaps, but the city became the 2nd city of the Empire largely due to Geographic fluke. It wasn't superior national intellectual horsepower which created Scotland's coal reserves which fuelled its Industrial revolution and drove the British Empire. Likewise, the discovery of recoverable oil in the North Sea was not the result of an economic development masterplan.

Let's face it - we're just jammy. It rains a bit, but look on the bright side - Scotland always seems to be in the right place to receive a disproportionate share of Europe's natural resources.

With the growth of investment in mega-datacenters, Scotland has yet another chance to create a successful industry by capitalising on its natural resources and geography.

This time the world order of the new industry is shaped by energy availability and security, availability of plentiful electricity generated from renewable sources, geopolitical issues of where to safely place important data, and of course proximity to dark fibre which connects the data and applications to the Internet peering points and population centres of the Eurasian land mass.

Europe's economic development authorities are quietly angling for this business by pitching potential datacenter sites to the likes of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Oracle and others closer to home such as BT and Fujitsu. In this competition the prizes are significant - with successful sites seeing many-year investments of $100 millions with benefits for the local economies involved, their power/communications infrastructure and to the ecosystem of companies involved in the creation and supply chain of these 100 acre, million server monsters. Switzerland, Iceland and most other continental European nations with energy independence and/or a reasonable renewable energy capacity are already making a strong play.

Scotland of course already has a long history of Hydro generation, relevant experience in North Sea exploration, and has a large share of Europe's wind, wave and tidal generation capacity.

In larger datacenter projects in North America, the appearance of a big name such as Microsoft has triggered the creation of a cluster of similar datacenter investments, sparking economic diversity and regeneration in some rural areas. Quincy, WA, now has Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit and others on the way. Likewise datacnters from Microsoft and IBM across Ireland have led inward investment of nearly €1 Billion. But unlike Washington state, Scotland doesn't have earthquakes, and unlike Ireland it does not have problems meeting the industries demand for electricity.

Just as West-facing trading ports flourished in the Age of Empire, there are specific sites in Scotland's which are set to flourish in the Software + Services,/Cloud Computing/Datacenter age. Ecclefechan & Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway is one such location. Scotland's roundwood forestry thinnings and sustainable crops of willow find their way to the largest Biomass power station in Europe, E-On Steven Croft - visible from the M74 motorway. When Europe ultimately runs out of oil and gas, Scotland's forests will continue to provide a sustainable energy source.

As a bonus, the area has planning permission for around 200MWs of windmills, and the proposed site of the 300MW Solway tidal barrage is not far away. There are also multiple UK National Grid interconnects nearby. Put the Biomass and these interconnect assets together, and you have multiple redundant, always on (the last thing you want in the 24/7 datacenter industry is a power outage), power supplies with capacity in the 100MW region which are available today.

Coincidentally, the area is flooded with data fibre trunk routes due to the adjacency of power transmission rights of way, and the proximity of the West coast main train line.

So once again Scotland finds itself again in the enviable position of possessing all the natural and technological assets required to build a new industry. Lets hope that it can prioritise the steps required to develop this new industry in the face of swift-moving competition...

Microsoft To Mainstream Containerized Data Centers

SmallCountry — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:02:57 GMT

Trends of consolidation can be seen in the migration of servers to fewer, larger more automated datacenter locations, and also in consolidation of the units within those datacenters.

With the availability of advanced management tools and virtualisation techniques it's inefficient for engineers to be fiddling around commissioning individual servers, storage and racks. In a consolidated datacenter world, Prefabricated containers containing maintenence-free redundant units of datacenter fabric and processing power are more practical.

Rackable, SUN and others have helped drive container datacenter designs, and this commodity-based approach is now entering the mainstream. Microsoft's annoucement at the Data Center World conference last week was of a substantial 100+MW datacenter facility filled entirely with Microsoft C-Blox container datacenter.

Although this use of containerised datacenters in a Microsoft mega-facility is the first of its kind, the modular approach is also interesting for Scotland, as proposed in an earlier post on the renewable Energy Datacenter.

As James Hamilton, of Microsoft's Live Platform Services team points out when considering where to locate computing power, "multiple smaller datacenters, regionally located, could prove to be a competitive advantage". Scotland's natural advantages around cheap power potential, addressing heat density and geopolitical position should make it worthy considering as a location for Europes datacenters.

Microsoft To Mainstream Containerized Data Centers With C-Blox -- Data Center -- InformationWeek

£600m green investment for Scotland : Hi-Tech Scotland

SmallCountry — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:35:00 GMT

Internet Villages International announced that they will constructing datacentres on their 140 acre site in Lockerbie. The announcement of the creation of more datacentre space is hardly newsworthy, but there are a few unusual aspects to this project:

it will bring hi-tech employment to an area of Scotland not associated with the IT industry (500 jobs was mentioned), stimulating the local economy
it will take advantage of renewable energy sources including the local 44MW Biomass power station and various wind turbines in Dumfries and Galloway
the waste heat from the datacentres will used by local housing and horticultural businesses

Perfect.

Article, £600m green investment for Scotland : Hi-Tech Scotland

Land of Fire and Ice

SmallCountry — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:54:31 GMT

Iceland.

Thoughts of bargain supermarket frozen turkey twizzlers, Viking epics, alternative rock band The Sugarcubes, may all be triggered when naming this barren and volcanic North Atlantic island nation.

But soon Iceland may also be known as a world centre for International Datacenter operations. According to PWC, abundant geothermal energy, generous tax incentives for the industry, and plenty of submarine optic fibre connecting it to the USA and UK, make it the most competitive location to stick your servers.

The trend towards siting the massive centralised computing resources which support “Web 2.0” close to sources of cheap power and good Internet connectivity is well documented. So far in October George Gilder wrote of ”The Information Factories” in Wired, and in Hi-Tech Scotland mag columnist Colin Walker wrote of the power supply issue for IT datacentres in an article which reflected many of the ideas and data points in my post on Renewable Energy Datacentres.

Iceland and The Scottish Highlands and Islands have much in common - both are geographically remote with a population of about 300,000, both have abundant cheap energy potential (Scotland with 25% of Europes renewable capacity, and Iceland with Volcanoes and geothermal energy plants). Both are unable to fully capitalise on their energy generation capacity, because they can't efficiently transmit the power to major points of energy consumption. In Rekjavik , they have so much energy they even heat the pavements.

However, Iceland has a vision to drive investment in the Internet infrastructure required to capitalise on their natural resources, including investment in the dark fibre required to ensure they are not an Internet backwater like the Scottish Highlands and Islands area. In addition to the existing FARICE connection to the UK via the Faroes and Orkney, those wealthy Icelanders are making the appropriate investment in capacity to link themselves to Europe and the USA through Northern Ireland. http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com/documents/8607-IcelandPR-JSAFinal.pdf

Upgrading Scotlands more remote regions Internet connectivity would not only help the Scottish Government reach its broadband penetration objectives, but would take advantage of our natural assets to support ventures in a new growth industry. Further sighted governments such as that of Iceland understand this opportunity, and are making the appropriate investment.

Scotland has an advantage over Iceland as a datacenter location - Iceland is a dangerous place to be in geographic terms. Just over 200 years ago a volcanic eruption killed 20% of Icelands population. The ex-citizens of Pompei, South Washington state (nr Mount St. Helens), Sumatra and Java might have strong opinions on where to place datacentres to offer best business continuity.

Head in the "Cloud"

SmallCountry — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:47:41 GMT

At the age of 24 I rode my bike across the 6.5km Columbia River bridge between Oregon and Washington state. Big river, big bridge. I remember thinking it would make a damn :-) good power plant.

Upriver, past Portland and in the shadow of Mount Hood, I hear Google have constructed a 30 acre server farm near the Dalles Dam, just one of several 2 gigawatt hydroelectric schemes up the Columbia gorge.

High bandwidth reliable networks, and the migration of computing power to "web services" in the cloud, mean that one should generally put servers next to cheap power. As long as the datacentre has the appropriate connectivity, the huge capacity and speed of global optical networks mean processing is best placed close to the power, rather than close to the people.

If such dam-envy seems dangerously close to train-spotting, consider that your average punter is now an enthusiastic user of web services like search engines, Internet mail/IM, and web mapping services.

Likewise IT Professionals are increasingly drawn to the irresistible logic of consuming services like email security and management (Exchange Hosted Services) and online Meeting services (Live Meeting) from "the cloud". Its far more efficient and effective to run these generic services centrally in a massively scaled, highly automated datacentre. This tallies up with the traditional business view of outsourcing "non-core" activities like payroll, security, catering, and PC desktop support.

Based on the success of companies like Salesforce, and huge investment from Microsoft, Google and others, it seems that in the next 2 to 5 years will see significant uptake of IT services that are remotely hosted and internet delivered. With data spread across the Internet, and applications running across the browser, desktop and remote datacentres, black-shirt wearing dot-com entrepreneurs have come up with new terms to describe the social and IT phenomenon's like "Web 2.0" and "cloud computing".

Microsoft's Software + Services mantra is a reflection of these new architectures, with some people factors thrown in - users can only use applications which are simple and familiar, and IT people want choice of where they put their servers (in their offices, centrally hosted in a datacenter, or completely outsourced to the cloud).

What this means in practical terms is that we will increasingly depend on 100,000-system datacentres, where automation and economies of scale drive down the cost of these services compared to the in-house IT approach. Microsoft's has a dual role in this - firstly to provide energy and effort efficient platforms and automated management tools, and secondly to provide the tools and building block services which enable this new S+S world.

Which brings us back to the Columbia River. One issue with the above is the growing power consumption of datacentres globally. George Gilder in Wired magazine recently estimated that the datacentres of the 5 leading search engines consume around 5 Gigawatts of power, counting servers, storage, cooling, and the inefficiencies of the grid's power transmission. Compare that to the 60GW peak demand on the UK national grid, and global energy requirements of datacentres can only grow as the global interweb's consumption of these services increases. Power accounts for around 40% of the overall running costs of the typical datacentre, a proportion which will only increase as energy prices increase and improved technology and automation reduce staff costs.

The moral of the story is that building your datacentres next to sources of cheap, clean power, makes good fiscal sense, and gives you a nice warm feeling about doing your bit for the planet.

Scotland, and in particular Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, has extraordinary renewable energy generation potential. Scotland has an estimated potential of 36.5 GW of wind and 7.5 GW of tidal power, 25% of the estimated total capacity for the European Union and up to 14 GW of wave power potential, 10% of EU capacity. Despite this the Scottish government have set modest targets for 6GW from renewable schemes by 2020.

Sadly, the costs and planning issues of grid connection can have an impact on their financial viability and social acceptability. But to overcome these grid-connection issues, why not consume the power at source by placing computing power close to point of generation? The Highlands and Islands region is blessed with lower temperatures and freely available water supplies (to aid cooling), cheaper than average labour, and plenty of tidal, wave, hydro and wind gen capacity.

Such a scheme could use self-contained, modular and portable container-based datacenters to overcome the logistical and skills issues, and allow the Highlands and Islands area to quickly capitalise on its sources of cheap and renewable power.

Container datacentre solutions allow a fully functional datacentre to be dropped in remote locations close to inexpensive power. Rackable systems unveiled such a solution recently, and James Hamilton of Microsoft, who frequently speaks about his ideas for the commodity datacentre, reckons that this approach can help overcome the myriad of political and logistical issues that surround datacentres and their power needs.

Power is currently about 40% of the cost of running a datacentre. With rising fossil energy costs, decreasing hardware/software costs, and decreasing staff costs through automation, this proportion will only increase unless abundant cheap power is nearby.

Coupling renewable energy with the commodity datacenter makes sense to meet our renewable energy goals, create a new source of employment and income for Scotland, and help bridge the predicted 20% " UK energy gap" by 2015.

Perhaps its time for Scotland to look towards the Renewable Energy Datacentre.

Baiting the Bear and Zapping the Zombies

SmallCountry — Tue, 29 May 2007 18:59:50 GMT

The internal affairs of the small Baltic republic of Estonia hit the global news headlines in April when its ethnic Russian minority rioted in protest of the removal of a Red army war memorial.

As a resident of another small country, I know that the weight of history can cause a difficult relationship with a more powerful neighbor. But Culloden was 350 years ago - for some ethnic Estonians the demise of the 1st Estonian republic and mass deportations following the 2nd World War are still within living memory. (Disclaimer: Regular readers of this column will know that as Mrs Ferry hails from Estonia, I may express some bias.)

The Kremlin's response to these events bordered on the sinister, with threatened sanctions and a failure to defend the Estonian embassy in Moscow against pro-Kremlin youth groups. Its all a bit scary for a country of 1.3 million people positioned next to the Kremlin's military might, which perhaps Estonian PM Andrus Ansip should have considered before he started baiting the Russian bear by removing the statue of the Red Army soldier.

Meanwhile back in the UK the Baltic political situation is of some interest to any follower of international news, but more significantly we may just have witnessed the first CyberWar on record. By mid-May it became apparent that Estonian government, media, email and commercial web servers were under a deliberate and targeted attack. These took the form of massive spam attacks on government email servers, distributed denial of service attacks on key Internet banking sites, and hacking/defacement of significant websites such as the ruling political parties homepage.

Estonia is possibly the most switched on of the EU countries in terms of penetration of paperless government, web-based banking and ambitious plans for country-wide WiMAX networks. So the Estonian government considered this a substantial threat to national security, and didn't take long to call in the Internet security spooks from NATO, Israel and elsewhere. The attacks peaked around the time of the Russian Victory Day public holiday on May 9th. The most damaging attack was probably on national bank Hansapank's website, which was forced to shut down for an hour - and for a week or so afterwards, I found that along with all foreign IP addresses, I had been blocked from their Internet banking site - a simple but effective line of defence. The skills and preparedness of Estonian companies, their IT security experts, and the swift response of international partners were all instrumental in avoiding more serious consequences.

Whilst there was some evidence that these attacks were Kremlin sponsored, as any Internet security expert will tell you, the use of Botnet's and Zombies around the World makes the ultimate source of the attack almost impossible to identify. But its clear that this was an orchestrated and organised attack, and was a highly successful terrorist attack on a sovereign state. The Kremlin has denied all involvement, but conspiracy theorists will point the finger at Putin following the Alexander Litvinenko affair. And now there is even now some evidence of counter-attacks from Estonia

What this situation has graphically illustrated is that IT Security is no longer an issue which is only important to Chief Security Officers and IT Security propeller-heads. Scotland's top technology journalist Bill Magee pointed out that "CORPORATE Scotland [...] could be hit by exactly the same sort of cyber criminal attack that brought state and commercial website systems crashing to a halt"

Here in Microsoft Scotland, we continue to invest in our network of Partner companies with the Security Solutions competency. These companies have proven skills and experience in design and deployment of the security infrastructure, policy and tools. With the availability of Forefront Client Security, Microsoft is unique in providing a comprehensive line of business security tools which can help Corporate Scotland establish robust Internet defenses.

Only with the right partners, skills and tools will we keep the zombies at bay.

Link to The St. Petersburg Times - Top Stories - Estonian Claims Kremlin Behind Attacks on Web Sites

Link to Scotland Warned of attack by Zombies

Membership has its privileges

SmallCountry — Tue, 15 May 2007 15:26:06 GMT

Starting a business is hard. Making it successful and keeping it growing is harder.

In our Global Village even smallest business must constantly keep in touch with the competition, the changing market, and find new customers and opportunities. Certainly that's been the experience of Mrs. Ferry since starting out in business 12 months ago.

Thus the role of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce is key - they support indigenous business, represent them at political and international level, and provide a vital network for entrepreneurs to collaborate, establish new partnerships and find new customers.

The Chambers is a venerable institution with 10,000s of company members across Scottish Small, Medium and Enterprise business, accounting for well over half of the private sector jobs in Scotland. They are seen as an exemplar for Chambers of Commerce organisations worldwide, and engage in productive relationships with their business partners such as Microsoft. Indeed HRH The Princess Royal, President of the Scottish Chambers, summed it up when she said:

The work of the Chambers of Commerce is very worthy of our support, as they exist to promote businesses locally, nationally and internationally. Scotland’s Chambers of Commerce are well placed to assist businesses of all sizes to help expand their activities at home and overseas using the worldwide network of Chambers of Commerce.

Liz Cameron, Executive Director of Scottish Chambers, knows that the Chambers must evolve from its regional footing to meet the changing needs of their members, and the evolving challenges of business.

When a delegation of the regional Scottish Chamber organisations visited the Microsoft UK head office late last year to discuss these challenges, she explained to me that the benefits of Chamber membership must be national and international rather than locally focussed - the ability to deliver services efficiently to their membership at a national level could make the Chambers network more modern and efficient, and help grow membership and spread benefits to a larger audience. Liz announced her planned shakeup and Microsoft's role in Scotland on Sunday a few weeks back.

Technology has an important role to play as the Chambers modernise and confirm their role amongst other business membership and networking organisations, and online business networking services.

The impact of social network services on business has been huge - LinkedIn now has over 10 million users, mostly in the United States of America http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/12/01/8394967/index.htm

Many believe social networks are for teenagers and blind daters. However, business social networks allow members to describe themselves and their companies services, and invite people they know and respect to "connect" and be part of their network. They can then recommend and introduce colleagues on a global scale, creating an efficient business network and thus oiling the cogs of the free market economy. Such networks rely on 6 degrees of separation theory which assert that any 2 individuals are connected by at most 6 others.

LinkedIn registration is free, but it soon makes money out of members through advertising (based on the topics in a member's description). Some members, such as those involved in recruitment, pay for "added value" membership services (such as searching for individuals outwith the immediate business network).

Meanwhile back in Scotland, the Chambers position is unique. Hundreds of years old, and with an long established membership and reputation, most people join the Chambers for the networking opportunity of Scottish Chambers events and are already willing to pay membership fees for the privilege.

Taking the Chambers membership online, and activating member online social networking would drive more members of the network, establish a positive feedback loop to make the network more valuable and even provide an online channel for foreign business to find the right skills and resources to trade in Scotland.

With this in mind Microsoft Scotland have just completed the "proof of concept" Scottish Chambers members Portal - codenamed CONNECTIONS - to deliver a unified set of member services, and the Chambers shop window to the world. This portal takes advantage of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server collaboration and portal capabilities, and was delivered in collaboration with David Elder, Technical Director of Scottish Chambers.

CONNECTIONS provides the rich set of Chambers services at a national level:

Members can gain access to specialist news and articles based on their industry area. They can engage in industry or job function specific discussion forums to get questions answered.
They can search the member directory to find skills and business partners to help advance their enterprise
To support the Chambers role in influencing policy, members opinions can quickly be polled using online surveys

Most exciting though, is the opportunity to build online connections between members to build informal business networks. Existing members can send an invitation email to those colleagues not already in the Chambers to join the network as a registered online member. Members will more readily reach the skills, experience and assets of corporate Scotland.

This could be the "killer app" driving Chambers membership, and perhaps making Connections the LinkedIn of Scotland.

Ultimately this will drive a more efficient market and support the entrepreneurship which will build Scotland's impact on the world business stage.

With Scotland's skilled business players online and linked via the Connections portal, there is fantastic opportunity for business people who wish to give something back to society by sharing their skills and experience. Connections could support other organisations which support Scottish entrepeneurialism in small an startup business, such as Local Enterprise Companies, Scottish Enterprise Business Gateway, and the fantastic work of Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust.

If Scottish Chambers can move quickly, my colleagues and I believe that Connections presents a fantastic opportunity for the Chambers network in Scotland to re-establish and re-invigorate its role at the centre of business life, and potentially become THE business portal for Scotland.

Office Live or Die...

SmallCountry — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:43:41 GMT

Regular readers of this column will be aware of Mrs. Ferry's limited grasp of technology, so she of course immediately turned to her in-house IT provider. However, as a busy executive at the cutting edge of high-tech, I am of course too busy cutting million dollar deals and mixing with captains of industry to do anything as mundane as set up a website or register an email domain. As for backing up files in case the kids knock a glass of milk over the laptop - completely out of the question.

It has therefore been interesting to help Mrs. Ferry start a new business over the past year or so. The Kurekodu property business, like most microbusinesses, needed

a website to attract and inform potential clients, and give the feel of a well-run and professional outfit
a "corporate sounding" URL and email address....(e.g. CHiefExecutive@WeAreABigReputableCompany.COM style)
somewhere safe to store all the invoices, marketing and financial business documents being generated

So Office Live was a means to obtain a professional result with the minimum of time invested. Office Live lets one-man-bands and microbusiness get online in a matter of minutes, with a minimum of IT savvy required. It's going live on May 23rd, although already there are around 1800 Scottish businesses online with Office Live websites. (Including the highly informative and successful Just Winches site - if you find yourself in need of a winch, that's the place to go)

This "quick and easy" appeal has been borne out by the Kurekodu experience. After registering for the Office Live Premium service, the Kurekodu website was up and running within 2 hours, built using the Office Live Web Designer. This is a simple, elegant AJAX browser based application, which lets business owners define a simple theme and navigation for their site, and create a basic set of professional looking pages. That is a real boon for the small business owner, whom without the luxury of an IT department, would normally have to pay for a web designer to do this, and understand the more arcane aspects of registering domain names etc.

Even the non-techno-savvy Mrs. Ferry regularly uses this application to modify the property for sale web page when Kurekodu offers a new property for sale or rent. The Web Designer also let her quickly "sex up" the website, with animated picture galleries and simple web forms which send an alert email when a customer makes a web enquiry.

She was also delighted to purchase further domains (making the site available over kurekodu.co.uk, kurekodu.com and houseinestonia.com) addresses to make the site easier to find, and having registered on Google and Windows Live Search engines, is building up the site to make it top of the pops for likely internet searches.

However, apart from the ease of establishing an effective internet shop front, the most dramatically useful aspects of Office Live have been its business applications.

Office Live gives businesses not only a public-facing website, but also supports secure workspaces for documents, contacts, lists, photos - indeed any kind of business information. Kurekodu's MD (the technophobe Mrs. Ferry) and her associates in Estonia use this to collaboratively create particulars for properties for sale, and to build invoices for the companies' services. These are all secured using Windows Live ID (formerly passport) and kept up on the Kurekodu private site where they are safe, backed up, without the version confusion caused by email tennis.

What's more, these important business documents can be shared securely with customers (indeed anybody signed up for a Windows Live ID), so they can track service charges for their investments under Kurekodu's management. That's a secure extranet collaboration solution delivered at a miniscule IT cost.

But Office Live Business Applications are the really exciting area for small businesses. These make available powerful business tools to the small business previously available only to companies with £10,000s a year to spend on IT. Kurekodu runs a simple Accounting application on Office Live, to maintain profit/loss account for each property investment, or client property under management. Its by no means a complex application, but is customised to the company's business niche, is an online, hosted application and hence available to all staff regardless of where they are based, and works offline through its integration with Access 2007. Currently Kurekodu's hard working IT Director (yours truly) is building a Reporting application so that the MD can be kept properly informed of the profitability of each customer and property investment.

As Office Live is built on the Windows Sharepoint Services 2007 platform, these powerful business application capabilities will come as no surprise to any of Microsoft's Business Partners. Many are already building Office Live solutions to take their applications downstream and target smaller business customers, such as Solution Canvas with Justia , whom I blogged about a while back. Such industry-focused applications used to automate business processes without having any nasty servers or difficult software applications to install, made available by subscription, are very attractive to small businesses with no time or funds to invest in an overly complex IT strategy.

Clearly for any Small business IT company Office Live and services like it cannot be ignored. Despite its limitations today, for many small businesses this is enough to support business functions with the minimum of fuss. Clearly its a case of Office Live or Die...

SharePoint Sleeper

SmallCountry — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:53:24 GMT

I was interested to see this article in the Wall St. Journal confirming the established position of Microsoft's greatest stealth technology - SharePoint 2007.

Several of the Scottish Microsoft Partners I work with closely have invested huge time and effort in preparing for the latest iteration of SharePoint technologies which became broadly available earlier this year. Charteris, Avanade Scotland and Company Net are all working on Sharepoint 2007 solutions for customers which to be delivered imminently.

Chelford SFM have built a fantastic "Sharepoint Test Drive" which allows customers to quickly get to grips with how they can use SharePoint to

"create a single interface to a common environment within which documents and files can be managed, information and data collected and presented, users can collaborate and communicate in virtual spaces and global document searches are carried out with relative ease" - David Gardiner, Director, Chelford Solutions for Microsoft

Through Machiavellian Microsoft software licensing agreements, many companies find that their employees are entitled to use the Standard version of SharePoint 2007. Jeff Teper, the VP of Microsoft's SharePoint product group who has been most helpful to Microsoft Scottish customers as the SharePoint technologies have evolved throughout the current decade, claims 85 million SharePoint licenses across 17,000 companies are in circulation.

Microsoft's customers and partners have a great opportunity to make better use of the new capabilities they have inherited in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. These capabilities are very wide in scope and potential business impact.

More specifically SharePoint is a modular toolset covering the popular enterprise information management categories of Collaboration, Portal, Business Intelligence, and Content management. To this it adds Search, Business Forms and Workflow capabilities, and architectural support for Intranet, Internet and Extranet deployment. The icing on the cake is that this wide-ranging information management platform works closely with the Office desktop, meaning that end-users can very quickly be productive with new applications built on Sharepoint.

As such, not only can SharePoint be used to address the "usual" content management and information access problems that exist in any organisation, it can also be used as a common platform to build business process solutions which rely on workflow, forms and structured data. The application templates on TechNet, and the huge volume of Microsoft Partner value added SharePoint solutions on the Office Solution directory are testament to this.

The sheer scale of these capabilities can be disconcerting for those considering SharePoint technologies as a solution to business issues. To those I would recommend attending one of Chelford's test drive events in Glasgow or Edinburgh, or if you prefer to DIY sign up for a hosted Office Live site.

Link to Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software - WSJ.com

Technorati tags: SharePoint, Office Live, Collaboration

Incapacitated or Entrepreneurial?

SmallCountry — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:53:24 GMT

I found myself incapacitated this week when the dreaded lurgy swept through Chateux Ferry. For 3 whole days I could not drag myself into work, and languished in bed with a serious case of man-flu.

But being blessed with a guilt-driven protestant work ethic, I can't remain idle for long and soon found myself bored and thinking up new money-making schemes to fund the 3 cost centres growing demands for life's essentials i.e. tennis club fees, expensive foreign holidays, fast moving consumer goods, and hats.

This work ethic is clearly something which is not shared by a significant fraction of the population of Scotland. An enlightening example of this is that 1 in 6 of working age adults in Glasgow are currently claiming Incapacity Benefits. This is compared to a national average of about 1 in 14.

Now, clearly the majority of people claiming IB are unfortunate enough to be limited in what work they can do, and are fully entitled and deserving of these benefits. But one could easily extrapolate from these figures that the concentration of work-dodging benefits cheats is especially high within Greater Glasgow area.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to some missionary work in Glasgow's Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre to speak at the New Start Scotland event about starting a new business and taking it online.

However, I was very pleased to experience real entrepreneurial spirit amongst the audience of people who had recently started, or planning to start a new enterprise. They in turn were very pleased to learn that building an online web presence with Office Live is FREE. Even a subscription to Office Live Premium, with full access to the Applications any small business needs to function, at £22.95 a month makes a small impact in the Incapacity Benefit giro.

So what is Office Live, I hear you ask?

You may have heard of Live services from Microsoft (Interesting online services for the consumer, like Live Mail, Live Favourites, Live Local mapping services, etc). In the consumer world, we use online services for and expect them to be really easy and to pay nothing.

Office Live extends the concept to startup and small businesses, and lets that business put up a professional-looking website within 2 hours, using a mycompany.com domain name for the website and email addresses. Gratis!

I've experienced small business startup at 1st hand. Entrepreneurs starting a business need a simple way to address the technology issues of building a web presence, getting it noticed by the search engines and keeping it interesting and up to date.

Often IT is a most confusing, expensive and unsatisfactory aspect to business startup. These IT decisions and issues occur just when the business owner should be focused on key factors of business planning, funding, recruitment, etc.

Office Live offers all the services a new company needs in a single place, at low or no cost, and can expand as the business needs grow. You can see a successful Office Live site at www.houseinestonia.com which has generated 800 unique visitors per month since it was created in 2 hours 3 months ago.

Office Live is a compelling offering which saves time, hassle and money for small business, but also presents an opportunity for Microsoft's business partners. This opportunity comes through Business Applications.

Starting a business is hard work - it demands commitment, hard work and long hours to manage costs and achieve forecast revenues in the crucial 1st months of operation. Business applications support activities such as customer contact managment, timekeeping and expenses, sales and billing and are key in providing an environment of order, co-ordination and automation which any business needs to flourish and expand.

Office Live cheaply provides a basic set of Business Applications (hosted and accessed online, rather than purchased, planned and installed on-premise), and helps make the business more productive by opening the doors to automating business process and collaboration (like sharing proposals with business partners). Anyone familiar with the Windows Sharepoint Services platform, upon which Office Live is built, will be familiar with its information management and workflow capabilities.

The partner opportunity is that Microsoft are building a marketplace of value-added solutions for Office Live which address specific needs of different industries. For example, Solution Canvas a Glasgow-based Gold Certified Partner have built Justia. Justia extends Office to meet the exacting time management requirements of those professional services industries such as Solicitors.

Solution Canvas solution is built on Office Live, and is offered to small professional services business for a monthly subscription fee. Any customer can come along and try before they buy. As its a hosted solution accessed over t'internet, they typically need no help from expensive IT professionals to procure, install and commission the software. If they like what they see, they can sign up.

This has made it possible for Solution Canvas to open up a whole new potential market for their application and industry expertise. Whereas before these smaller companies would have bought a software package and each needed assistance with set up, install, and support, now these customers have a much smoother and less expensive path to meet their needs - and Solution Canvas have a model which allows them to serve small business IT business application requirements and generate recurring subscription revenue.

If any reader has an idea for a business application, and would like to understand how to deliver it on Office Live, I suggest you take a look at my chums Christian Longstaff and Tim Kimber chatting about Office Live.

Technorati tags: Office Live

Great Train Journeys of our Time

SmallCountry — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:07:00 GMT

Living and working in Scotland we are privileged to have such wonderful countryside on our doorstep. As Mrs. Ferry usually annexes our car for short trips to "ladies who lunch" dates, I often find myself on public transport. This is no great hardship, as Scotland boasts some of the most picturesque train journeys in the world.

It was with this thought that I boarded the 0914 from Haymarket to Dundee, travelling over the Rail Bridge and up the Fife coast along the Forth Estuary. It’s a beautiful line, marred only by my destination – Dundee, city of Discovery and the wee jakie capital of Europe.

After dodging the junkies at the station, I was lucky enough to sit through a presentation from SUN during a visit to a customer. Although Microsoft and SUN have settled many of their differences this was the first time I have had the opportunity to sit in on a talk from our partner in co-operatition.

Scotland has long been a stronghold for Microsoft competitors such as Novell and SUN. Perhaps its something to do with the gulf stream, the low winter sun at these latitudes or the dogged focus on outdated ideas like independance, but Scotland’s IT decision makers till now have favoured lost causes. I’m sure SUN and IBM plants in Linlithgow and Spango valley have something to do with it too.

SUN Sparc-based servers running Solaris have remained the server platform in many larger Scottish enterprises long after the rest of the world have switched on to the better price/performance of other x64 OS/hardware combinations. A large financial institution I worked with until recently continues to deploy 32 bit Windows despite being entitled to deploy Windows x64 for applications which would make give them far greater performance, at the same price point and with a minimum of user re-training.

Clearly AMD Opteron x64 multicore processors and budget vendors like DELL have been nibbling away at SUNs SPARC business. So what I heard from SUN was total focus on the SUN x64 server range. SUNs ranges of discrete servers and blade clusters sound like beautifully engineered machines, but must be difficult to shift in a world where DELL are shipping much cheaper 4 socket AMD multicore servers. SUN tout their x64 range as a great platform for Solaris, Linux (red hat and SUSE), VMWare and Windows (in that order!). Their server consolidation story was familiar, referencing the 15% processor utilisation of typical servers, and the opportunity to consolidate these to bigger scarier SUN boxes using their proprietary Solaris partitioning technologies (if you only want to consolidate Solaris) or VMWare (for multiple OSs and versions).

Server consol through virtualisation sound great for low perf and legacy servers, but it only addresses the hardware support issue by enabling retirement of the poorly utilised servers. The real challenge is in how to manage multiple Virtual images, and how to manage the guest OSs and applications. SUN partnering with VMWare, and focus on XEN open source virtualisation is understandable given their competing position with Microsoft, but it leaves them with no story around how to manage the full software stack of Hardware/Virtualisation layer/OS/Application.

When a customer chooses to virtualise production services, the imperatives are the overall availability and performance of the service. Focussing exclusively on the OS virtualisation layer (e.g. VMWare's focus on expedient deployment of an OS image) does nothing to manage the availability of the Exchange, SQL or Citrix application service. Thus it is important to deploy virtualisation in the context of the toolset you will use to manage the overall application. Virtualisation alone makes life more complicated, not simpler!

Consider the Exchange example - IT professionals need management tools which give a single picture of the performance and health of all the Exchange services, any failures in the underlying hardware, the charachteristics of the Virtualisation layer, and what the multiple virtualised OS images are up to.

As Virtualisation becomes a commodity (moving into the Linux and Windows OSs) customers choice of virtualsation layer will be more about the strength of management tools moving forward. Only Microsoft have a complete story with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager....maybe an opportunity for a closer partnership with SUN J

Over the top for the big push

SmallCountry — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 18:10:00 GMT

Wondering why you should bother to upgrade your laptop to Windows Vista? Perhaps you could do without the danger of a beta OS limiting your productivity, or are just thinking "why bother"?

The team in Microsoft Scotland do not have the luxury of hanging around. A colleague James Henderson has committed to our Scottish business Partner community that we will all be on Vista and Office 2007 before the end of September. This was an attempt to set a good example, and so far the Scottish Partners have responded to the challenge by committing 53 of their own users on Vista/Office 2003 by end October.

Current thinking is that a Vista RC1 will shortly be with us as a solid build for the big push.

However, in the meantime James has created a boot DVD of Vista build 5472 and is wandering our office looking for laptops to upgrade. Its the 1st of September tomorrow...best get a move on James :-)