Managing your workforce processes and workflow is now no further away than your iPhone. Workday, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) human capital management provider, this week announced new mobile capabilities, with an iPhone application that allows users to search worker directories and complete basic management tasks.
The Pleasanton, Calif. company also announced that it plans BlackBerry support for later this year, with other mobile tier support in the works. [Disclosure: Workday is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
With the new mobile application users can review, approve, deny, and revise tasks from the Workday workforce management applications, and view the status of ongoing business processes. They can also search for worker contact information and phone or email directly from the smartphone.
The streamlined mobile application includes password and role-based security, along with time-out and sign-out preferences aligned with the user's security requirements.
The mixture of SaaS-based business applications as full web apps or mobile apps that allow the interfacing with the processes is the way of the future. Look at how many of us do email now ... we check on urgent and time-sensitive communications using iPhones and the like. Then we do more asynchronous and "fatter" processes on the PC.
For busy managers flooded with expense report sign-offs and hiring and firing minutiae, the mobile access can be a godsend. It prevents slowed up processes, and also prevents the overloaded email in-box. Making SaaS apps reach the mobile tier -- but in an appropriate way that recognizes the use requirements for "on the go" work -- will become a general business requirement, I expect.
The mobile solutions are built with a platform-independent core. Workday plans to continue updating its capabilities to allow all devices to take advantage of the solution, either through platform-specific client applications or mobile HTML.
The new application will be available from the iTunes App Store. Workday is hosting a webinar on the new mobile capabilities on March 25. Anyone interested can register at http://www.workday.com/update7. More information on the iPhone app is available at http://www.workday.com/mobile.
.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
BriefingsDirect Analysts list top 5 ways to cut enterprise IT costs during economic downturn
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.
Doing more for less in IT? Sure, easier said than done. But who said it couldn't be done?
We took the question of how to cut information technology (IT) costs in the downturn to five analysts and consultants, who can both say and do. The result is the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 38, a periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events.
In this episode, recorded March 13, 2009, our analyst guests make their top five recommendations for cutting enterprise IT costs amid the economic downturn. How does IT adapt and adjust to the downturn? Is IT to play a defensive role in helping to slash costs and reduce its own financial burden on the enterprise?
Or, does IT help most on the offensive, in transforming businesses, or playing a larger role in support of business goals, with the larger IT budget and responsibility to go along with that? Can IT lead the way on how companies remake themselves and reinvent themselves during and after such an economic tumult?
Or is IT good both for economic offense and defense, and therefore the indispensable business function?
We ask our panel to list the top five ways that IT can help reduce costs, while retaining full business -- or perhaps even additional business -- functionality.
Please join noted IT industry analysts and experts Joe McKendrick, independent IT analyst and prolific blogger; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant, and Dave Kelly, founder and president of Upside Research. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by me, BriefingDirect's Dana Gardner. I also offer my 5 cents on the topic.
So here are the lists ... (Read a full transcript of the discussion.)
McKendrick's Top Five Recommendations
1) SOA remains viable: Service oriented architecture (SOA) is alive, well and thriving. SOA solutions promote reuse and developer productivity. SOA also provides a way to avoid major upgrades, or helps with additional major initiatives in enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP).
2) Virtualize all you can: Virtualization offers a method of application and infrastructure consolidation. You can take all those large server rooms -- and some companies have thousands of servers -- and consolidate into more centralized data centers. Virtualization paves the path to that.
3) Cloud computing: Cloud offers a way to tap into new sources of IT processing, applications, and IT data. Cloud allows IT to pay for such new capabilities incrementally, rather than having to make large capital investments.
4) Open source software: Look to open-source solutions. There are open-source solutions all the way up the IT stack, from the operating system to middleware to applications. Open source provides a way to, if not replace your more commercial proprietary systems, then at least to implement new initiatives and move to new initiatives that fly under the budget radar. You don't need budget approval to establish or begin new initiatives using OSS.
5) Enterprise 2.0: These tools and methods offer an incredible way to collaborate and to tap into the intellectual capital throughout your organization. Enterprise 2.0 offers a way to bring a lot of thinking and a lot of brainpower together to tackle problems.
Shimmin's Top Five Recommendations
1) User-generated IT: Give your users a really wide "pasture." There's an old saying that if you want to mend fewer fences, have a bigger field for your cattle. You can see that in IT with some experiments with BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) -- programs that folks like Citrix and Microsoft have been engaging in. IT no longer manages the device, just the virtual image that resides on servers and "visits" the client machine. Mobile devices are also ... extending desktops and laptops. You need to have some faith in your users to manage their own environments and to take care of their own equipment, something they're more likely to do when it's their own property, and not the company's.
2) Don't build large software, buy small software: SOA is well-entrenched within enterprise IT, or in clouds. You can buy either software as a service (SaaS) or on-premise software that is open enough that it connects with and works with other software packages. No longer do you need to build an entire monolithic application from the ground-up. An example is PayPal. This is a service, but there are on-premises renditions of this kind of idea that allow you to basically build up a monolithic application without having to build the whole thing yourself. Using pre-built packages, smaller packages that are point solutions like PayPal, which lets you take advantage of their economies of scale, and lets you tread upon the credibility that they've developed, something that's especially good for consumer-facing applications.
3) Build inside but host outside: You shouldn't be afraid to build your own software, but you should be looking to host that software elsewhere. Enterprises, enterprise IT vendors and independent software vendors (ISVs) ... are leaping toward putting their software platforms on top of third-party cloud providers like Amazon EC2. That is the biggest game-changer in everything we've been talking about here. There's a vendor ... and they've been moving toward shutting down the data centers and moving to Amazon's EC2 environment. They went from multi-multi thousand dollar bills every month to literally ... a couple of hundred bucks a month. It was a staggering savings they saw ... because the economies are scaled through that shared environment.
4) Kill your email: Email has seen its day, and it really needs to go away. For every gigabyte you store, I think it's almost $500 per user per year, which is a lot of money. If you're able to, cut that back by encouraging people to use alternatives to email, such as social networking tools. We're talking about IM, chat, project group-sharing spaces, using tools like Yammer inside the enterprise; SharePoint obviously, Clearspace and Google applications. That stuff cuts down on email. ... Look at software or services like Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can get Exchange Online now for something like $5 per user per month. That's pretty affordable. So, if you're going to use email, that's the way to go.
5) Turn off the printers: By employing software like wikis, blogs, and online collaboration tools from companies like Google and Zoho, you can get away from the notion of having to print everything. As we know, a typical organization kills 143 trees a year -- I think was the number I heard, which is a staggering amount of waste. There's a lot of cost to that.
5.5) Walk away from Microsoft Office: It's the big, fat cow that needs to be sacrificed. Paying $500-$800 a year per user for that stuff is quite a bit. The hardware cost is staggering as well, especially if you are upgrading everyone to Vista. If you leave everyone on Windows XP and adopt open-source solutions like OpenOffice and StarOffice, that will go a long, long way toward saving money. Why I'm down on printing is that the time has gone when we had to have really professional, beautiful-looking documents that required a tremendous amount of formatting. Everything needed to be perfect within Microsoft Word, for example. What now counts is the information. It's same for 4,000-odd features in Excel. I'm not sure if any of us here have ever even explored a tenth of those [features].
Morgenthal's Top Five Recommendations
1) Vendor management: Companies mismanage their vendor relationships. There is a lot of money in there, especially on the IT side -- for telecom, software, and hardware. Get control over your vendor relationships. Stop letting these vendors run around, convincing end-users throughout your business that they should move in a particular direction or use a particular product. Force them to go through a set of gatekeepers, and manage the access and the information they're bringing into the business. Make sure that [buying decisions] goes through an enterprise IT architecture group.
2) Outsourcing: With regard to outsourcing noncritical functions, I'll give you a great example where we combined an outsourced noncritical function with vendor management in a telecom company. Many companies have negotiated and managed their own Internet and telco communications facilities and capability. Today, there are so many more options for that. It's a very complex area to navigate, and you should either hire an expert consultant ... to help you negotiate. Or you should ... take on as much bandwidth as you need on average, and when you need excess bandwidth ... go to the cloud for that additional bandwidth.
3) Utilization analysis: Many organizations don't have a good grasp on how much of their CPU, network, and bandwidth is actually utilized. There's a lot of open capacity in that [poor] utilization, and it allows for compression. In compressing that utilization, you get back some overhead associated with that. That's a direct cost savings.
4) Data quality: I've been trying to tell corporations for years that this is coming. When things are good, they've been able to push off the poor data quality issue, because they can rectify the situation by throwing bodies at it. But now they can't afford those bodies anymore. So now they have bad data, and they don't have the bodies to fix up the data on the front end. ... Invest the money, set it aside, get the data quality up and operate more effectively without requiring extra labor on the front end to clean up the data.
5) Desktop alternatives: It's a great time to explore desktop alternatives, because Windows and the desktop has been a de-facto standard. It's a great way to go -- when things are good. When you're trying to cut another half million, million, or two million dollars out of your budget, all those licenses, all that desktop support, start to add up. They're small nickels and dimes that add up. By looking at desktop alternatives, you may be able to find some solutions. A significant part of your workforce doesn't need all that capability and power [on the desktop]. You can then look for different solutions, like light-weight Linux or Ubuntu-type environments that provide just Web browsing and email, and maybe OpenOffice for some light-weight word processing. For a portion of your user base, it's all they need.
Kelly's Top Five Recommendations
1) Optimize, optimize, optimize: All organizations, both on the business side and the IT side, are going to be doing more with less. ... That makes a great opportunity to step back and look at specific systems and business processes. At the high level, go through business process management (BPM)-type optimization and look at the business processes. Also look at things like data center optimization ... save money and defer capital investment. Increase utilization of storage systems. ... You have all this redundant data out there. There are products from Symantec and other vendors that allow you to "de-duplicate" email systems and existing data. There are ways to reduce your backup footprint. Do single-instance archiving and data compression. ... Just look at existing processes and say, "How can I do individual components more efficiently." Look at specific automated tasks and see how you can do more with less in those tasks.
2) Don't forget the people: The most effective way to have an efficient IT organization is to have effective people in that IT organization. As an IT manager, one thing you need to do is make sure that your people are empowered to feel good about where they're at. They should not hunker down and go into a siege mentality during these difficult times, even if the budgets are getting cut and there's less opportunity for new systems or technology. They need to redirect that stress to discover how the IT organization can benefit the business. You want to help motivate people through the crisis and work on a roadmap for better days ... . Provide a positive direction to use their energy and resources.
3) Re-evaluate commercial software use: You may have investments in Oracle, IBM, or other platforms, and there may be opportunities to use "free" products that are bundled in those platforms that you may not be using. Oracle, for example, bundles Application Express, a rapid application development (RAD) tool, as part of the database. I know of organizations that are using it to develop new applications. Instead of hiring consultants or staffing up, they're using existing people to use this free RAD tool to develop departmental applications or enterprise applications.
4) Go green: Now is a great time to look at energy sustainability programs and try to analyze them in the context of your IT organization. Going green not only helps the environment, but it has a big impact, as you're looking at power usage in your data center with cooling and air conditioning cost. You can save money right there in the IT budget and other budgets by going to virtualization and consolidating servers. Cutting any of those costs can also prevent future investment capital expenditures, too. Look at how you're utilizing the different resources and how you can potentially cut your server and energy costs.
5) Go to lunch: It's good to escape stressful environments ... IT can take the business stakeholders out to lunch, and take a step back and reevaluate priorities. Clear the decks and re-align priorities to the new economic landscape. This may be a time to re-evaluate the priorities of IT projects, re-examine those projects, and determine which ones are most critical. You may be able to prioritize projects anew, slow some down, delay deployments or reduce service levels. The end effect here allows you to focus on the most business-critical operations, applications and services.
Gardner's Top Five Recommendations
1) Harsh triage: Go in and kill the waste by selectively dumping the old that doesn't work. IT needs to identify the applications that aren't in vigorous use, or aren't adding value. They should either kill them outright or modernize them. Extract the business logic and use it in a process, but no longer at the cost of supporting the entire stack or server below each application. IT needs to identify the energy hogs and the maintenance black holes. Outdated hardware robs from the future in order to pay for a diminishing return on the past. Look for the low-lying fruit and the obvious wasteful expenditures and practices. Reduce the number of development environments. Look at something like Eclipse, Microsoft, or OSGi and work toward more standardization around a handful of major development environments. Replace costly IT with outside services and alternatives for your email, calendar, word processing, and baseline productivity applications. Put an emphasis on self-help. Empower the users. That means more use of SaaS and on-demand applications. It's really about acting like a startup. You want to have low capital expenditures. You want to have low recurring costs. You want to be flexible.
2) Build a cloud computing skunkworks: Create a parallel IT function that leverages cloud attributes. Focus on the value of virtualization. That means looking to standardized hardware on-premises, and using grid, cloud, and modernized and consolidated data center utility best practices. More use of appliances, too, and looking at open-source software anew makes sense. This is another way of saying do SOA using cloud and compute fabric alternatives. Also look at outside offerings for where other people have created cloud environments that are very efficient for baseline functions that don't differentiate,and for new greenfield applications.
3) Reduce client costs: It's time to simplify and mobilize the client tier. You can use mobile devices, netbooks, and smart phones to do more activities, to connect to back-end data and application sets and Web applications. It's time to stop spending money on the fat client. Spend it more on the lean server, and get a higher return on that investment. That includes the use of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) types of activities. It means exploring Linux as an operating environment on the desktop, where that makes sense. Look at what the end users are actually doing with these clients. Find workers that can exist using only browsers, and give them either low-cost hardware or deliver that browser as a virtualized application through VDI on a thin client. Centralize more IT support, security, and governance at the data center. Reduce the number of data centers. Use acceleration, remote branch technologies, and virtual private networks (VPNs) to deliver web applications and VDI clients across wide area networks. Act like a modern startup ... build the company based on what your needs are now, not on what IT was doing 15 years ago.
4) BI everywhere: Mine the value of all the data you can. This includes business intelligence (BI) internal to IT, such as server and network equipment log files. Know what the world is doing around you, and what your supply chain is up to, too. It's time to join more types of data into your BI activities, not just your internal relational data. You might be able to actually rent data from a supplier, a partner or a third-party. Bring that third-party data in, do a join, do your analysis, and then walk away. Then, maybe do it again in six months. It's time to think about BI as leveraging IT to gain the analysis and insights, but looking in all directions -- internal, external, and within IT. Also use BI across extended enterprise processes. It's also good to start considering tapping social networks for their data, user graph data, and consumer preferences metadata, and using that as well for analysis as well. There are more and more people putting more and more information about themselves, their activities, and their preferences into these social networks.
5) Elevate IT to the board level: The IT executive should be at the highest level of the business decisions in terms of direction, strategy and execution. The best way for IT to help companies is to know what those companies are facing strategically as soon as they're facing it, and to bring IT-based solutions knowledge to the rest of the board ASAP. IT can be used much more strategically at the board level. That way IT can be used for transformation and problem-solving at the innovation and business-strategy levels, not as an afterthought, not just as a means to an end -- but actually factoring what the end can be and what can be accomplished. That is, again, acting more like a startup. If you talk to any startup company, they see IT as an important aspect of how they are going to create original new value, of how to get to market cheaply, and how to behave as an agile entity on an ongoing and continuous basis.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.
Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.
Doing more for less in IT? Sure, easier said than done. But who said it couldn't be done?
We took the question of how to cut information technology (IT) costs in the downturn to five analysts and consultants, who can both say and do. The result is the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 38, a periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events.
In this episode, recorded March 13, 2009, our analyst guests make their top five recommendations for cutting enterprise IT costs amid the economic downturn. How does IT adapt and adjust to the downturn? Is IT to play a defensive role in helping to slash costs and reduce its own financial burden on the enterprise?
Or, does IT help most on the offensive, in transforming businesses, or playing a larger role in support of business goals, with the larger IT budget and responsibility to go along with that? Can IT lead the way on how companies remake themselves and reinvent themselves during and after such an economic tumult?
Or is IT good both for economic offense and defense, and therefore the indispensable business function?
We ask our panel to list the top five ways that IT can help reduce costs, while retaining full business -- or perhaps even additional business -- functionality.
Please join noted IT industry analysts and experts Joe McKendrick, independent IT analyst and prolific blogger; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant, and Dave Kelly, founder and president of Upside Research. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by me, BriefingDirect's Dana Gardner. I also offer my 5 cents on the topic.
So here are the lists ... (Read a full transcript of the discussion.)
McKendrick's Top Five Recommendations
1) SOA remains viable: Service oriented architecture (SOA) is alive, well and thriving. SOA solutions promote reuse and developer productivity. SOA also provides a way to avoid major upgrades, or helps with additional major initiatives in enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP).
2) Virtualize all you can: Virtualization offers a method of application and infrastructure consolidation. You can take all those large server rooms -- and some companies have thousands of servers -- and consolidate into more centralized data centers. Virtualization paves the path to that.
3) Cloud computing: Cloud offers a way to tap into new sources of IT processing, applications, and IT data. Cloud allows IT to pay for such new capabilities incrementally, rather than having to make large capital investments.
4) Open source software: Look to open-source solutions. There are open-source solutions all the way up the IT stack, from the operating system to middleware to applications. Open source provides a way to, if not replace your more commercial proprietary systems, then at least to implement new initiatives and move to new initiatives that fly under the budget radar. You don't need budget approval to establish or begin new initiatives using OSS.
5) Enterprise 2.0: These tools and methods offer an incredible way to collaborate and to tap into the intellectual capital throughout your organization. Enterprise 2.0 offers a way to bring a lot of thinking and a lot of brainpower together to tackle problems.
Shimmin's Top Five Recommendations
1) User-generated IT: Give your users a really wide "pasture." There's an old saying that if you want to mend fewer fences, have a bigger field for your cattle. You can see that in IT with some experiments with BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) -- programs that folks like Citrix and Microsoft have been engaging in. IT no longer manages the device, just the virtual image that resides on servers and "visits" the client machine. Mobile devices are also ... extending desktops and laptops. You need to have some faith in your users to manage their own environments and to take care of their own equipment, something they're more likely to do when it's their own property, and not the company's.
2) Don't build large software, buy small software: SOA is well-entrenched within enterprise IT, or in clouds. You can buy either software as a service (SaaS) or on-premise software that is open enough that it connects with and works with other software packages. No longer do you need to build an entire monolithic application from the ground-up. An example is PayPal. This is a service, but there are on-premises renditions of this kind of idea that allow you to basically build up a monolithic application without having to build the whole thing yourself. Using pre-built packages, smaller packages that are point solutions like PayPal, which lets you take advantage of their economies of scale, and lets you tread upon the credibility that they've developed, something that's especially good for consumer-facing applications.
3) Build inside but host outside: You shouldn't be afraid to build your own software, but you should be looking to host that software elsewhere. Enterprises, enterprise IT vendors and independent software vendors (ISVs) ... are leaping toward putting their software platforms on top of third-party cloud providers like Amazon EC2. That is the biggest game-changer in everything we've been talking about here. There's a vendor ... and they've been moving toward shutting down the data centers and moving to Amazon's EC2 environment. They went from multi-multi thousand dollar bills every month to literally ... a couple of hundred bucks a month. It was a staggering savings they saw ... because the economies are scaled through that shared environment.
4) Kill your email: Email has seen its day, and it really needs to go away. For every gigabyte you store, I think it's almost $500 per user per year, which is a lot of money. If you're able to, cut that back by encouraging people to use alternatives to email, such as social networking tools. We're talking about IM, chat, project group-sharing spaces, using tools like Yammer inside the enterprise; SharePoint obviously, Clearspace and Google applications. That stuff cuts down on email. ... Look at software or services like Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can get Exchange Online now for something like $5 per user per month. That's pretty affordable. So, if you're going to use email, that's the way to go.
5) Turn off the printers: By employing software like wikis, blogs, and online collaboration tools from companies like Google and Zoho, you can get away from the notion of having to print everything. As we know, a typical organization kills 143 trees a year -- I think was the number I heard, which is a staggering amount of waste. There's a lot of cost to that.
5.5) Walk away from Microsoft Office: It's the big, fat cow that needs to be sacrificed. Paying $500-$800 a year per user for that stuff is quite a bit. The hardware cost is staggering as well, especially if you are upgrading everyone to Vista. If you leave everyone on Windows XP and adopt open-source solutions like OpenOffice and StarOffice, that will go a long, long way toward saving money. Why I'm down on printing is that the time has gone when we had to have really professional, beautiful-looking documents that required a tremendous amount of formatting. Everything needed to be perfect within Microsoft Word, for example. What now counts is the information. It's same for 4,000-odd features in Excel. I'm not sure if any of us here have ever even explored a tenth of those [features].
Morgenthal's Top Five Recommendations
1) Vendor management: Companies mismanage their vendor relationships. There is a lot of money in there, especially on the IT side -- for telecom, software, and hardware. Get control over your vendor relationships. Stop letting these vendors run around, convincing end-users throughout your business that they should move in a particular direction or use a particular product. Force them to go through a set of gatekeepers, and manage the access and the information they're bringing into the business. Make sure that [buying decisions] goes through an enterprise IT architecture group.
2) Outsourcing: With regard to outsourcing noncritical functions, I'll give you a great example where we combined an outsourced noncritical function with vendor management in a telecom company. Many companies have negotiated and managed their own Internet and telco communications facilities and capability. Today, there are so many more options for that. It's a very complex area to navigate, and you should either hire an expert consultant ... to help you negotiate. Or you should ... take on as much bandwidth as you need on average, and when you need excess bandwidth ... go to the cloud for that additional bandwidth.
3) Utilization analysis: Many organizations don't have a good grasp on how much of their CPU, network, and bandwidth is actually utilized. There's a lot of open capacity in that [poor] utilization, and it allows for compression. In compressing that utilization, you get back some overhead associated with that. That's a direct cost savings.
4) Data quality: I've been trying to tell corporations for years that this is coming. When things are good, they've been able to push off the poor data quality issue, because they can rectify the situation by throwing bodies at it. But now they can't afford those bodies anymore. So now they have bad data, and they don't have the bodies to fix up the data on the front end. ... Invest the money, set it aside, get the data quality up and operate more effectively without requiring extra labor on the front end to clean up the data.
5) Desktop alternatives: It's a great time to explore desktop alternatives, because Windows and the desktop has been a de-facto standard. It's a great way to go -- when things are good. When you're trying to cut another half million, million, or two million dollars out of your budget, all those licenses, all that desktop support, start to add up. They're small nickels and dimes that add up. By looking at desktop alternatives, you may be able to find some solutions. A significant part of your workforce doesn't need all that capability and power [on the desktop]. You can then look for different solutions, like light-weight Linux or Ubuntu-type environments that provide just Web browsing and email, and maybe OpenOffice for some light-weight word processing. For a portion of your user base, it's all they need.
Kelly's Top Five Recommendations
1) Optimize, optimize, optimize: All organizations, both on the business side and the IT side, are going to be doing more with less. ... That makes a great opportunity to step back and look at specific systems and business processes. At the high level, go through business process management (BPM)-type optimization and look at the business processes. Also look at things like data center optimization ... save money and defer capital investment. Increase utilization of storage systems. ... You have all this redundant data out there. There are products from Symantec and other vendors that allow you to "de-duplicate" email systems and existing data. There are ways to reduce your backup footprint. Do single-instance archiving and data compression. ... Just look at existing processes and say, "How can I do individual components more efficiently." Look at specific automated tasks and see how you can do more with less in those tasks.
2) Don't forget the people: The most effective way to have an efficient IT organization is to have effective people in that IT organization. As an IT manager, one thing you need to do is make sure that your people are empowered to feel good about where they're at. They should not hunker down and go into a siege mentality during these difficult times, even if the budgets are getting cut and there's less opportunity for new systems or technology. They need to redirect that stress to discover how the IT organization can benefit the business. You want to help motivate people through the crisis and work on a roadmap for better days ... . Provide a positive direction to use their energy and resources.
3) Re-evaluate commercial software use: You may have investments in Oracle, IBM, or other platforms, and there may be opportunities to use "free" products that are bundled in those platforms that you may not be using. Oracle, for example, bundles Application Express, a rapid application development (RAD) tool, as part of the database. I know of organizations that are using it to develop new applications. Instead of hiring consultants or staffing up, they're using existing people to use this free RAD tool to develop departmental applications or enterprise applications.
4) Go green: Now is a great time to look at energy sustainability programs and try to analyze them in the context of your IT organization. Going green not only helps the environment, but it has a big impact, as you're looking at power usage in your data center with cooling and air conditioning cost. You can save money right there in the IT budget and other budgets by going to virtualization and consolidating servers. Cutting any of those costs can also prevent future investment capital expenditures, too. Look at how you're utilizing the different resources and how you can potentially cut your server and energy costs.
5) Go to lunch: It's good to escape stressful environments ... IT can take the business stakeholders out to lunch, and take a step back and reevaluate priorities. Clear the decks and re-align priorities to the new economic landscape. This may be a time to re-evaluate the priorities of IT projects, re-examine those projects, and determine which ones are most critical. You may be able to prioritize projects anew, slow some down, delay deployments or reduce service levels. The end effect here allows you to focus on the most business-critical operations, applications and services.
Gardner's Top Five Recommendations
1) Harsh triage: Go in and kill the waste by selectively dumping the old that doesn't work. IT needs to identify the applications that aren't in vigorous use, or aren't adding value. They should either kill them outright or modernize them. Extract the business logic and use it in a process, but no longer at the cost of supporting the entire stack or server below each application. IT needs to identify the energy hogs and the maintenance black holes. Outdated hardware robs from the future in order to pay for a diminishing return on the past. Look for the low-lying fruit and the obvious wasteful expenditures and practices. Reduce the number of development environments. Look at something like Eclipse, Microsoft, or OSGi and work toward more standardization around a handful of major development environments. Replace costly IT with outside services and alternatives for your email, calendar, word processing, and baseline productivity applications. Put an emphasis on self-help. Empower the users. That means more use of SaaS and on-demand applications. It's really about acting like a startup. You want to have low capital expenditures. You want to have low recurring costs. You want to be flexible.
2) Build a cloud computing skunkworks: Create a parallel IT function that leverages cloud attributes. Focus on the value of virtualization. That means looking to standardized hardware on-premises, and using grid, cloud, and modernized and consolidated data center utility best practices. More use of appliances, too, and looking at open-source software anew makes sense. This is another way of saying do SOA using cloud and compute fabric alternatives. Also look at outside offerings for where other people have created cloud environments that are very efficient for baseline functions that don't differentiate,and for new greenfield applications.
3) Reduce client costs: It's time to simplify and mobilize the client tier. You can use mobile devices, netbooks, and smart phones to do more activities, to connect to back-end data and application sets and Web applications. It's time to stop spending money on the fat client. Spend it more on the lean server, and get a higher return on that investment. That includes the use of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) types of activities. It means exploring Linux as an operating environment on the desktop, where that makes sense. Look at what the end users are actually doing with these clients. Find workers that can exist using only browsers, and give them either low-cost hardware or deliver that browser as a virtualized application through VDI on a thin client. Centralize more IT support, security, and governance at the data center. Reduce the number of data centers. Use acceleration, remote branch technologies, and virtual private networks (VPNs) to deliver web applications and VDI clients across wide area networks. Act like a modern startup ... build the company based on what your needs are now, not on what IT was doing 15 years ago.
4) BI everywhere: Mine the value of all the data you can. This includes business intelligence (BI) internal to IT, such as server and network equipment log files. Know what the world is doing around you, and what your supply chain is up to, too. It's time to join more types of data into your BI activities, not just your internal relational data. You might be able to actually rent data from a supplier, a partner or a third-party. Bring that third-party data in, do a join, do your analysis, and then walk away. Then, maybe do it again in six months. It's time to think about BI as leveraging IT to gain the analysis and insights, but looking in all directions -- internal, external, and within IT. Also use BI across extended enterprise processes. It's also good to start considering tapping social networks for their data, user graph data, and consumer preferences metadata, and using that as well for analysis as well. There are more and more people putting more and more information about themselves, their activities, and their preferences into these social networks.
5) Elevate IT to the board level: The IT executive should be at the highest level of the business decisions in terms of direction, strategy and execution. The best way for IT to help companies is to know what those companies are facing strategically as soon as they're facing it, and to bring IT-based solutions knowledge to the rest of the board ASAP. IT can be used much more strategically at the board level. That way IT can be used for transformation and problem-solving at the innovation and business-strategy levels, not as an afterthought, not just as a means to an end -- but actually factoring what the end can be and what can be accomplished. That is, again, acting more like a startup. If you talk to any startup company, they see IT as an important aspect of how they are going to create original new value, of how to get to market cheaply, and how to behave as an agile entity on an ongoing and continuous basis.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.
Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.
Webinar: Modernization pulls new value from legacy and client-server enterprise applications
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Nexaweb Technologies.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a podcast created from a recent Nexaweb Technologies Webinar on application modernization. Learn how enterprises are gaining economic and productivity advantages from modernizing legacy and older client-server applications.
The logic, data, and integration patterns' value within these older applications can be effectively extracted and repurposed using a variety of tools and methods. That means the IT and business value from these assets can be reestablished as Web applications on highly efficient platforms, and out to mobile devices, too.
Examine here how a number of companies have attained new value from legacy and client-server applications, while making those assets more easily deployed as rich, agile Web applications and services. Those services can then also be better extended across modern and flexible business processes, as part of service oriented architectures (SOAs).
In the podcast, hear from Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions; David McFarlane, COO at Nexaweb, and Adam Markey, solution architect at Nexaweb.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Nexaweb Technologies.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a podcast created from a recent Nexaweb Technologies Webinar on application modernization. Learn how enterprises are gaining economic and productivity advantages from modernizing legacy and older client-server applications.
The logic, data, and integration patterns' value within these older applications can be effectively extracted and repurposed using a variety of tools and methods. That means the IT and business value from these assets can be reestablished as Web applications on highly efficient platforms, and out to mobile devices, too.
Examine here how a number of companies have attained new value from legacy and client-server applications, while making those assets more easily deployed as rich, agile Web applications and services. Those services can then also be better extended across modern and flexible business processes, as part of service oriented architectures (SOAs).
In the podcast, hear from Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions; David McFarlane, COO at Nexaweb, and Adam Markey, solution architect at Nexaweb.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Nexaweb Technologies.
Friday, March 20, 2009
If you’re an enterprise, developer or economist, IBM is not the right buyer for Sun
From the perspective of IT users, developer communities and global industry as a whole, IBM may be the worst place for beleaguered Sun Microsystems to land.
Sure a merger as is rumored is good -- but not urgently or obviously so -- for IBM. Big Blue gains modest improvement in share of some servers, mostly Unix-based. It would actually gain just enough share of high-end servers to justly draw anti-trust scrutiny nearly worldwide.
Yet these types of servers are not today's growth engines for IT vendors, they are the blunt trailing edge. Users have been dumping them in droves, with their sights set on far lower-cost alternatives and newer utility models of deployment and payment. IBM may want the next generation of data centers to be built of mainframes, but not too many others do.
In any event, server hardware is not a meaningful differentiator in today’s IT markets. Sun, if anyone, has proven that. IBM to claim it as the rationale for the buyout is fishy. A lot of other analysts are holding their noses too. UPDATE: Good analysis from Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady.
The rumored IBM-Sun deal for $6.4 billion is incremental improvement for IBM on several fronts: open source software (low earnings), tape storage (modest albeit dependable revenue), Java (already mostly open), engineering talent (easier to get these days given Sun layoffs), new intellectual property (targeted by design by Sun on undercutting IBM's cash cows). In short, there are no obvious game changers or compelling synergies in IBM buying Sun other than setting the sun on Sun.
I initially thought the rumored deal, which drove up Sun's stock, JAVA, by nearly 80 percent on rumor day one, didn't make sense. But it does make sense. Unfortunately it only makes sense for IBM in a fairly ugly way. As Tom Foremski said, it smacks of a spoiler role.
If IBM, would you spend what may end up being $4 billion in actual cost to slow or stifle the deterioration of a $100 billion data center market, and, at the same time, take the means of accelerating the move to cloud computing off the table from your competitors? As Mister Rogers would say, "Sure, sure you would."
Most likely, though the denials are in the works, IBM will plunder and snuff, plunder and snuff its way across the Sun portfolio -- from large account to large account, developer community to developer community, employee project to project. The tidy market share and technology gems will be absorbed quietly, the rest canceled or allowed to wither on the vine.
Certain open source communities and projects that Sun has fostered will be cultivated, or not. IBM is the very best at knowing how to play the open source cards, and that does not mean playing them all.
Listen, this would be a VERY different acquisition than any IBM has done in recent memory. It’s really about taking a major competitor out when they are down. It’s bold and aggressive, and it’s ignoble. But these are hard times and many people are distracted.
The deal is not good for Sun and it's customers (unless they already decided to move from being a Sun shop to an IBM shop), and may put in jeopardy the momentum of open source use up into middleware, SOA, databases and cloud infrastructure. That’s because, even at the price of $6.4 billion (twice Sun's market value before the deal talk), IBM will gain far more from the deal over the long term by eradicating Sun than by joining Sun's vector.
This deal is all about control. Control of Java, of markets, developers, cost of IT -- even about the very pace of change across the industry. For much of it's history IBM has had its hand on the tiller of the IT progression. It's was a comfortable position except for an historically exceptional past 17 years for IBM. It's time to get back in the saddle.
Clearly, Sun has little choice in the matter, other than to jockey for the best price and perhaps some near-term concessions for its employees. It's freaking yard sale. Sun is being run by -- gasp -- investment bankers. Here's a rare bonus bonanza in a M&A desert, for sure.
But let's be clear, this is no merger of partners or equals. This is assimilation. It’s Borg-like, and resistance may be futile. It is important to know when you're being assimilated, however.
Scott McNealy, Sun’s chairman, former CEO and co-founder, famously called the 2001 proposed merger of HP and Compaq a collision between two "garbage trucks." Well, IBM’s proposed/rumored purchase of Sun is equivalent to a garbage truck being airlifted out of sight and over the horizon by a C-17 cargo transport plane. Just open the door and drive it in. The plane was probably designed on Sun hardware, too. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Sun’s fate has been shaky for a long time now. The reasons are fodder for Harvard case studies.
But what of the general good of enterprise IT departments, of communities of idealistic developers, or of open and robust competition in the new age of cloud computing? In the new age, incidentally, you may no longer need an army of consultants and C-17 full of hardware and software at each and every enterprise. As Nick Carr correctly points out, this changes everything. That kind of change may not be what IBM has in mind.
It’s not easy resting having IBM in control of a vast portions of the open source future, and the legacy installed past. Linux and Apache Web servers might have made sense for IBM, but do open source cloud databases, middleware, SOA, and the next generations of on- and off-premises utility and virtualization fabric infrastructure?
IBM today is making the lion's share of its earnings from the software and services that run yesterday's data centers. Even the professional services around the newer cloud models (and subscription fees of actual, not low-utilization, use) does not make up for lost software license revenues. In many ways, cloud is more a threat than an opportunity to Big Blue. It ultimately means lower revenues, lower margins, less control, and feisty competitors that make money from ads and productivity, not sales and service.
Cloud models will take a long time to become common and mainstream, but any sense of inevitability must make IBM (and others) nervous. Controlling the pace of the change is essential.
The hastening shift to virtualization, application modernization, SaaS, mobile, cloud, and increased use of open source for legacy infrastructure could seriously disrupt the business models of IBM, HP, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and others. Moving from legacy-and-license to cloud-and-subscription (on OSS or commercial code) poses a huge risk to IBM, especially if it happens fast -- something this unexpected economic crisis could accelerate.
Enterprises could soon gain the equivalent of the powerful and efficient IT engines that run a Google or Amazon, either for itself, or rented off the wire, or both. IBM probably won't have 60 percent of the cloud services market in five years like it does the high-end Unix market (if it gets Sun). In fact, what has happened to Sun in terms of disruption may be a harbinger of could happen to IBM during the next red-shift in the market.
Sun should have gotten to these compelling cloud values first, made a business of it before Amazon. Sun was on the way, had the vision, but ran out of time and out of gas.
Sun has let a lot of us down by letting it come to this. The private equity firms that control Sun now don't give a crap about open source, or innovation, clouds or whether the network is the computer, or my dog's pajamas are the computer. They need to get their money back ASAP.
As a result, they and Sun could well be handing over to IBM the very keys to being able to time the market to IBM's strategic needs above all else. All for $6.4 billion in cash, minus the profits from chopping off Sun's remaining limbs and keeping the ones that make a good Borg fit.
There should be a better outcome. Should the deal emerge, regulators should insist what IBM itself called for more than 10 years ago. Something as important as Java and other critical open software specifications (OpenSolaris?) should be in the control and ownership of a neutral standards body, not in the control of the global market dominant legacy vendor.
It’s sort of like letting General Motors decide when to build the next generation of fuel efficient and alternative energy cars. And we know how that worked out.
IBM has the deep pockets now to buy strategic advantage during an economic crisis that helps it in coming years. It's during this coming period when the cloud vision begins to stick, when the madness of how enterprise IT has evolved in cost and complexity is shaken off for something much better, faster and cheaper.
And that’s what IT has always been about.
Sure a merger as is rumored is good -- but not urgently or obviously so -- for IBM. Big Blue gains modest improvement in share of some servers, mostly Unix-based. It would actually gain just enough share of high-end servers to justly draw anti-trust scrutiny nearly worldwide.
Yet these types of servers are not today's growth engines for IT vendors, they are the blunt trailing edge. Users have been dumping them in droves, with their sights set on far lower-cost alternatives and newer utility models of deployment and payment. IBM may want the next generation of data centers to be built of mainframes, but not too many others do.
In any event, server hardware is not a meaningful differentiator in today’s IT markets. Sun, if anyone, has proven that. IBM to claim it as the rationale for the buyout is fishy. A lot of other analysts are holding their noses too. UPDATE: Good analysis from Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady.
The rumored IBM-Sun deal for $6.4 billion is incremental improvement for IBM on several fronts: open source software (low earnings), tape storage (modest albeit dependable revenue), Java (already mostly open), engineering talent (easier to get these days given Sun layoffs), new intellectual property (targeted by design by Sun on undercutting IBM's cash cows). In short, there are no obvious game changers or compelling synergies in IBM buying Sun other than setting the sun on Sun.
I initially thought the rumored deal, which drove up Sun's stock, JAVA, by nearly 80 percent on rumor day one, didn't make sense. But it does make sense. Unfortunately it only makes sense for IBM in a fairly ugly way. As Tom Foremski said, it smacks of a spoiler role.
If IBM, would you spend what may end up being $4 billion in actual cost to slow or stifle the deterioration of a $100 billion data center market, and, at the same time, take the means of accelerating the move to cloud computing off the table from your competitors? As Mister Rogers would say, "Sure, sure you would."
Most likely, though the denials are in the works, IBM will plunder and snuff, plunder and snuff its way across the Sun portfolio -- from large account to large account, developer community to developer community, employee project to project. The tidy market share and technology gems will be absorbed quietly, the rest canceled or allowed to wither on the vine.
Certain open source communities and projects that Sun has fostered will be cultivated, or not. IBM is the very best at knowing how to play the open source cards, and that does not mean playing them all.
Listen, this would be a VERY different acquisition than any IBM has done in recent memory. It’s really about taking a major competitor out when they are down. It’s bold and aggressive, and it’s ignoble. But these are hard times and many people are distracted.
The deal is not good for Sun and it's customers (unless they already decided to move from being a Sun shop to an IBM shop), and may put in jeopardy the momentum of open source use up into middleware, SOA, databases and cloud infrastructure. That’s because, even at the price of $6.4 billion (twice Sun's market value before the deal talk), IBM will gain far more from the deal over the long term by eradicating Sun than by joining Sun's vector.
This deal is all about control. Control of Java, of markets, developers, cost of IT -- even about the very pace of change across the industry. For much of it's history IBM has had its hand on the tiller of the IT progression. It's was a comfortable position except for an historically exceptional past 17 years for IBM. It's time to get back in the saddle.
Clearly, Sun has little choice in the matter, other than to jockey for the best price and perhaps some near-term concessions for its employees. It's freaking yard sale. Sun is being run by -- gasp -- investment bankers. Here's a rare bonus bonanza in a M&A desert, for sure.
But let's be clear, this is no merger of partners or equals. This is assimilation. It’s Borg-like, and resistance may be futile. It is important to know when you're being assimilated, however.
Scott McNealy, Sun’s chairman, former CEO and co-founder, famously called the 2001 proposed merger of HP and Compaq a collision between two "garbage trucks." Well, IBM’s proposed/rumored purchase of Sun is equivalent to a garbage truck being airlifted out of sight and over the horizon by a C-17 cargo transport plane. Just open the door and drive it in. The plane was probably designed on Sun hardware, too. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Sun’s fate has been shaky for a long time now. The reasons are fodder for Harvard case studies.
But what of the general good of enterprise IT departments, of communities of idealistic developers, or of open and robust competition in the new age of cloud computing? In the new age, incidentally, you may no longer need an army of consultants and C-17 full of hardware and software at each and every enterprise. As Nick Carr correctly points out, this changes everything. That kind of change may not be what IBM has in mind.
It’s not easy resting having IBM in control of a vast portions of the open source future, and the legacy installed past. Linux and Apache Web servers might have made sense for IBM, but do open source cloud databases, middleware, SOA, and the next generations of on- and off-premises utility and virtualization fabric infrastructure?
IBM today is making the lion's share of its earnings from the software and services that run yesterday's data centers. Even the professional services around the newer cloud models (and subscription fees of actual, not low-utilization, use) does not make up for lost software license revenues. In many ways, cloud is more a threat than an opportunity to Big Blue. It ultimately means lower revenues, lower margins, less control, and feisty competitors that make money from ads and productivity, not sales and service.
Cloud models will take a long time to become common and mainstream, but any sense of inevitability must make IBM (and others) nervous. Controlling the pace of the change is essential.
The hastening shift to virtualization, application modernization, SaaS, mobile, cloud, and increased use of open source for legacy infrastructure could seriously disrupt the business models of IBM, HP, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and others. Moving from legacy-and-license to cloud-and-subscription (on OSS or commercial code) poses a huge risk to IBM, especially if it happens fast -- something this unexpected economic crisis could accelerate.
Enterprises could soon gain the equivalent of the powerful and efficient IT engines that run a Google or Amazon, either for itself, or rented off the wire, or both. IBM probably won't have 60 percent of the cloud services market in five years like it does the high-end Unix market (if it gets Sun). In fact, what has happened to Sun in terms of disruption may be a harbinger of could happen to IBM during the next red-shift in the market.
Sun should have gotten to these compelling cloud values first, made a business of it before Amazon. Sun was on the way, had the vision, but ran out of time and out of gas.
Sun has let a lot of us down by letting it come to this. The private equity firms that control Sun now don't give a crap about open source, or innovation, clouds or whether the network is the computer, or my dog's pajamas are the computer. They need to get their money back ASAP.
As a result, they and Sun could well be handing over to IBM the very keys to being able to time the market to IBM's strategic needs above all else. All for $6.4 billion in cash, minus the profits from chopping off Sun's remaining limbs and keeping the ones that make a good Borg fit.
There should be a better outcome. Should the deal emerge, regulators should insist what IBM itself called for more than 10 years ago. Something as important as Java and other critical open software specifications (OpenSolaris?) should be in the control and ownership of a neutral standards body, not in the control of the global market dominant legacy vendor.
It’s sort of like letting General Motors decide when to build the next generation of fuel efficient and alternative energy cars. And we know how that worked out.
IBM has the deep pockets now to buy strategic advantage during an economic crisis that helps it in coming years. It's during this coming period when the cloud vision begins to stick, when the madness of how enterprise IT has evolved in cost and complexity is shaken off for something much better, faster and cheaper.
And that’s what IT has always been about.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Greenplum aims to eliminate massive data load 'choke points' with Scatter/Gather technology
Greenplum has taken massively parallel processing (MPP) of data to the next level with the introduction this week of its "MPP Scatter/Gather Streaming" (SG Streaming) technology, which manages the flow of data into all nodes of the database, eliminating the traditional bottlenecks with massive data loading.
The San Mateo, Calif. company, which provides large-scale analytics and data warehousing, says SG Streaming has allowed customers to achieve production-loading speeds of over four terabytes per hour with negligible impacts on concurrent database operations. [Disclosure: Greenplum is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Under the "parallel everywhere" approach to loading data flows from one or more source systems to every node of the database without any sequential choke points. This differs from traditional “bulk loading” technologies, used by most mainstream database and parallel-processing appliance vendors that push data from a single source, often over a single or small number of parallel channels, and result in fundamental bottlenecks and ever-increasing load times.
The new technology "scatters" data from all source systems across hundreds or thousands of parallel streams that simultaneously flow to all nodes of the database. Performance scales with the number of nodes, and the technology supports both large batch and continuous near-real-time loading patterns with negligible impact on concurrent database operations.
Data can be transformed and processed in-flight, utilizing all nodes of the database in parallel, for extremely high-performance extract-load-transform (ELT) and extract-transform-load-transform (ETLT) loading pipelines. Final 'gathering' and storage of data to disk takes place on all nodes simultaneously, with data automatically partitioned across nodes and optionally compressed.
It was just six months ago that Greenplum publicly unveiled how it wrapped MapReduce approaches into the newest version of its data solution. That advance allowed users to combine SQL queries and MapReduce programs into unified tasks executed in parallel across thousands of cores.
The San Mateo, Calif. company, which provides large-scale analytics and data warehousing, says SG Streaming has allowed customers to achieve production-loading speeds of over four terabytes per hour with negligible impacts on concurrent database operations. [Disclosure: Greenplum is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Under the "parallel everywhere" approach to loading data flows from one or more source systems to every node of the database without any sequential choke points. This differs from traditional “bulk loading” technologies, used by most mainstream database and parallel-processing appliance vendors that push data from a single source, often over a single or small number of parallel channels, and result in fundamental bottlenecks and ever-increasing load times.
The new technology "scatters" data from all source systems across hundreds or thousands of parallel streams that simultaneously flow to all nodes of the database. Performance scales with the number of nodes, and the technology supports both large batch and continuous near-real-time loading patterns with negligible impact on concurrent database operations.
Data can be transformed and processed in-flight, utilizing all nodes of the database in parallel, for extremely high-performance extract-load-transform (ELT) and extract-transform-load-transform (ETLT) loading pipelines. Final 'gathering' and storage of data to disk takes place on all nodes simultaneously, with data automatically partitioned across nodes and optionally compressed.
It was just six months ago that Greenplum publicly unveiled how it wrapped MapReduce approaches into the newest version of its data solution. That advance allowed users to combine SQL queries and MapReduce programs into unified tasks executed in parallel across thousands of cores.
Active Endpoints aims at greater process design and implementation productivity with ActiveVOS enhancements
Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS visual orchestration system, has kicked things up a notch with the recent release of ActiveVos 6.1, which incorporates new features and functions designed to make developers more productive.
The latest offering from the Waltham, Mass. company provides what amounts to shrink-wrapped service-oriented architecture (SOA) and provides business process management (BPM) automation, while adhering to business process execution language (BPEL) standards. [Disclosure: Active Endpoints is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
There's an Active Endpoints podcast on the solution, and a new white paper on SOA implications of the process efficiencies from Dave Linthicum. We also recently did an Analyst Insights podcast on recent BPEL4People work.
Following close on the heels of version 6.0, which debuted in September, and 6.0.2, which made its appearance in December, the newest ActiveVOS offering brings features aimed at smoothing the way for developers. For example, a new tool, the "participant's view," eliminates the need for developers to manually code complex programming constructs like BPEL partner links and BPEL partner link types that are needed to define how services are to be used in a BPM application.
Another major enhancement is "process rewind." At design time, no BPM application can anticipate all of the operational issues and error handling that will be required. Process rewind gives developers the ability to rewind a process to a specific activity and redo the work without having to invoke any of the built-in compensation logic. This allows certain steps of the process need to be “redone” without impacting work already performed.
Among the other improvements:
ActiveVOS is available as a perpetual license. In an internal development environment, the price is $5,000 per CPU socket. In a deployment environment, the price is $12,000 per CPU socket when the deployment environment licenses are ordered with a first-time purchase of internal development environment licenses. Annual support and maintenance is 20 percent of total license fees.
The latest offering from the Waltham, Mass. company provides what amounts to shrink-wrapped service-oriented architecture (SOA) and provides business process management (BPM) automation, while adhering to business process execution language (BPEL) standards. [Disclosure: Active Endpoints is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
There's an Active Endpoints podcast on the solution, and a new white paper on SOA implications of the process efficiencies from Dave Linthicum. We also recently did an Analyst Insights podcast on recent BPEL4People work.
Following close on the heels of version 6.0, which debuted in September, and 6.0.2, which made its appearance in December, the newest ActiveVOS offering brings features aimed at smoothing the way for developers. For example, a new tool, the "participant's view," eliminates the need for developers to manually code complex programming constructs like BPEL partner links and BPEL partner link types that are needed to define how services are to be used in a BPM application.
Another major enhancement is "process rewind." At design time, no BPM application can anticipate all of the operational issues and error handling that will be required. Process rewind gives developers the ability to rewind a process to a specific activity and redo the work without having to invoke any of the built-in compensation logic. This allows certain steps of the process need to be “redone” without impacting work already performed.
Among the other improvements:
- Any-order development, which presents services details as graphical tables into which details can be entered at any time. This is in contrast to earlier systems in which developers needed to know the details in advance.
- Automatic development, which eases the tasks for developers new to SOA-based BPM. Version 6.1 automatically understands “private” versus “public” web services description language (WSDL) files and creates the required WSDLs in both a standards-compliant mode and a human-understandable format.
- Improved data handling, which allows developers to visually specify what data is needed in each activity and guides the developer through XPath and XQuery statement generation. The BPEL standard separates assignment of data to activities from the invocation of those activities. While the technical reasons for this are clear to experienced developers, for new developers this can be an impediment.
ActiveVOS is available as a perpetual license. In an internal development environment, the price is $5,000 per CPU socket. In a deployment environment, the price is $12,000 per CPU socket when the deployment environment licenses are ordered with a first-time purchase of internal development environment licenses. Annual support and maintenance is 20 percent of total license fees.
Panda Security strengthens SaaS-based PC virus protection solution for SMBs
As the whirlwind of economic pressures and heightened concerns for security push small and medium -sized businesses (SMB) toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, Panda Security has delivered added functionality to the cause with Managed Office Protection (MOP) 5.03.
Panda, with North American operations in Glendale, CA, allows individual companies as well as value added resellers (VARs) to deploy and extend its hosted security services, which originally launched in May 2008. Panda says its solution can be more than 50 percent more efficient than traditional endpoint security software.
I expect that SMBs will be more likely to seek a full package of PC support services via third parties. Those third parties will want to deliver help desk, software management, patch management and -- now -- security as a full service, cloud-based offering.
By adding the Web-based Panda SaaS security benefits, branded under the third parties, the hassle and cost of managing each desktop on premises drops significantly. And it allows the SMBs to get closer to their goal of no IT department, or at least a majority of IT support gained as a service.
Enhancements to Panda's MOP, include:
The channel and PC support third parties gain a more complete package of services, while letting their partner, in this case Panda, pick up the security and on-going threats response requirements.
Another benefit comes from today's highly mobile workforce. Administrators are increasingly concerned with managing laptops belonging to traveling employees. A SaaS-based device support solution allows administrators to monitor and configure anti-malware software no matter what the employee's location.
In a recent study, Panda Security compared its SaaS product to three different traditional security products. The study found that using a SaaS product could be more than 50 percent less expensive over a two-year period than using the traditional products, when you consider staffing costs, capital expenditures, and deployment costs.
Panda MOP is available immediately in licenses sold by the seat in one- to three-year subscription packages. More information is available from www.pandasecurity.com.
Panda, with North American operations in Glendale, CA, allows individual companies as well as value added resellers (VARs) to deploy and extend its hosted security services, which originally launched in May 2008. Panda says its solution can be more than 50 percent more efficient than traditional endpoint security software.
I expect that SMBs will be more likely to seek a full package of PC support services via third parties. Those third parties will want to deliver help desk, software management, patch management and -- now -- security as a full service, cloud-based offering.
By adding the Web-based Panda SaaS security benefits, branded under the third parties, the hassle and cost of managing each desktop on premises drops significantly. And it allows the SMBs to get closer to their goal of no IT department, or at least a majority of IT support gained as a service.
Enhancements to Panda's MOP, include:
- Optimized management of end devices through a new Web-based management console that allows administrators to resolve deployment challenges from one centralized dashboard from on any computer with an Internet connection.
- Increased reporting flexibility that allows administrators to select from an expanded set of security reports, including executive, activity and detection reports.
- Easier software deployment, which allows IT managers to leverage automatic uninstallers along with unique MAC addresses, facilitating personalized security settings for each end-device.
- Simplified computer management that allows offline handling of exported files.
- Improved client network status control, which allows VARs providing security services to SMB clients to have remote access via the service provider administration console, where they can centrally manage any update on every device in the client network.
The channel and PC support third parties gain a more complete package of services, while letting their partner, in this case Panda, pick up the security and on-going threats response requirements.
Another benefit comes from today's highly mobile workforce. Administrators are increasingly concerned with managing laptops belonging to traveling employees. A SaaS-based device support solution allows administrators to monitor and configure anti-malware software no matter what the employee's location.
In a recent study, Panda Security compared its SaaS product to three different traditional security products. The study found that using a SaaS product could be more than 50 percent less expensive over a two-year period than using the traditional products, when you consider staffing costs, capital expenditures, and deployment costs.
Panda MOP is available immediately in licenses sold by the seat in one- to three-year subscription packages. More information is available from www.pandasecurity.com.
IBM buying Sun Microsystems makes no sense, it's a red herring
Someone has floated a trial balloon, through a leak to the Wall Street Journal, that IBM is in "talks" to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion. The only party that would leak this information is Sun itself, and it smacks of desperation in trying to thwart an unwanted acquisition, or to positively impact another deal that Sun is weak in.
If IBM wanted to buy Sun it would have done so years ago, at least on the merits of synergy and technology. If IBM wanted to buy Sun simply to trash the company, plunder the spoils and do it on the cheap -- the time for that was last fall.
So more likely, given that Sun has reportedly been shopping itself around (nice severance packages for the top brass, no doubt), is that Sun has been too successful at selling itself -- just to the wrong party at too low of a price. This may even be in the form of a chop shop takeover. The only thing holding up a hostile takeover of Sun to sell for spare parts over the past six months was the credit crunch, and the fact that private equity firms have had some distractions.
By buying Sun IBM gains little other than some intellectual property and mySQL. IBM could have bought mySQL or open sourced DB2 or a subset of DB2 any time, if it wanted to go that route. IBM has basically already played its open source hand, which it did masterfully at just the right time. Sun, on the other hand, played (or forced) its open source hand poorly, and at the wrong time. What's the value to Sun for having "gone open source"? Zip. Owning Java is not a business model, or not enough of one to help Sun meaningfully.
So, does IBM need chip architectures from Sun? Nope, has their own. Access to markets from Sun's long-underperforming sales force? Nope. Unix? IBM has one. Linux? IBM was there first. Engineering skills? Nope. Storage technology? Nope. Head-start on cloud implementations? Nope. Java license access or synergy? Nope, too late. Sun's deep and wide professional services presence worldwide? Nope. Ha!
Let's see ... hardware, software, technology, sales, cloud, labor, market reach ... none makes sense for IBM to buy Sun -- at any price. IBM does just fine by continuing to watch the sun set on Sun. Same for Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, HP.
With due respect to Larry Dignan on ZDNet, none of his reasons add up in dollars and cents. No way. Sun has fallen too far over the years for these rationales to stand up.
Only in playing some offense via data center product consolidation against HP and Dell would buying Sun help IBM. And the math doesn't add up there. The cost of getting Sun is more than the benefits of taking money from enterprise accounts from others. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
The cost of Sun is not cheap, or at least not cheap like a free puppy. Taking over Sun for technology and market spoils ignores the long-term losses to be absorbed, the decimated workforce, the fact that Cisco will now eat Sun's lunch as have the other server makers for more than five years.
So who might by Sun on the cheap, before Sun's next financial report to Wall Street? Cisco, Dell, EMC, Red Hat. That's about it for vendors. And it would be a big risk for them, unless the price tag were cheap, cheap, cheap. Anything under $4 billion might make sense. Might.
The economic crisis has come at a worst time for Sun than just about any other larger IT vendor. Sun, no matter what happens, will go for a fire sale deal -- not a deal of strength among healthy synergistic partners. No way.
If IBM wanted to buy Sun it would have done so years ago, at least on the merits of synergy and technology. If IBM wanted to buy Sun simply to trash the company, plunder the spoils and do it on the cheap -- the time for that was last fall.
So more likely, given that Sun has reportedly been shopping itself around (nice severance packages for the top brass, no doubt), is that Sun has been too successful at selling itself -- just to the wrong party at too low of a price. This may even be in the form of a chop shop takeover. The only thing holding up a hostile takeover of Sun to sell for spare parts over the past six months was the credit crunch, and the fact that private equity firms have had some distractions.
By buying Sun IBM gains little other than some intellectual property and mySQL. IBM could have bought mySQL or open sourced DB2 or a subset of DB2 any time, if it wanted to go that route. IBM has basically already played its open source hand, which it did masterfully at just the right time. Sun, on the other hand, played (or forced) its open source hand poorly, and at the wrong time. What's the value to Sun for having "gone open source"? Zip. Owning Java is not a business model, or not enough of one to help Sun meaningfully.
So, does IBM need chip architectures from Sun? Nope, has their own. Access to markets from Sun's long-underperforming sales force? Nope. Unix? IBM has one. Linux? IBM was there first. Engineering skills? Nope. Storage technology? Nope. Head-start on cloud implementations? Nope. Java license access or synergy? Nope, too late. Sun's deep and wide professional services presence worldwide? Nope. Ha!
Let's see ... hardware, software, technology, sales, cloud, labor, market reach ... none makes sense for IBM to buy Sun -- at any price. IBM does just fine by continuing to watch the sun set on Sun. Same for Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, HP.
With due respect to Larry Dignan on ZDNet, none of his reasons add up in dollars and cents. No way. Sun has fallen too far over the years for these rationales to stand up.
Only in playing some offense via data center product consolidation against HP and Dell would buying Sun help IBM. And the math doesn't add up there. The cost of getting Sun is more than the benefits of taking money from enterprise accounts from others. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
The cost of Sun is not cheap, or at least not cheap like a free puppy. Taking over Sun for technology and market spoils ignores the long-term losses to be absorbed, the decimated workforce, the fact that Cisco will now eat Sun's lunch as have the other server makers for more than five years.
So who might by Sun on the cheap, before Sun's next financial report to Wall Street? Cisco, Dell, EMC, Red Hat. That's about it for vendors. And it would be a big risk for them, unless the price tag were cheap, cheap, cheap. Anything under $4 billion might make sense. Might.
Other buyers could come in the form of carriers, cloud providers or other infrastructure service provider types. This is a stretch, because even cheap Sun would come with a lot of baggage for their needs. Another scenario is a multi-party deal, of breaking up Sun among several different kinds of firms. This also is hugely risky.
So my theory -- and it's just a guess -- is that today's trial balloon on an IBM deal is a last-ditch effort by Sun to find, solidify, or up the price on some other acquisition or exit strategy by Sun. The risk of such market shenanigans only underscores the depths of Sun's malaise. The management at Sun probably sees its valuation sinking yet gain to below tangible assets and cash value when it releases it's next quarterly performance results. ... Soon.The economic crisis has come at a worst time for Sun than just about any other larger IT vendor. Sun, no matter what happens, will go for a fire sale deal -- not a deal of strength among healthy synergistic partners. No way.
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