CTO Blog | Capgemini | Consulting, Technology, Outsourcing

Three Conferences; MWC, RSA Security Conference and CeBIT – what did we see and what can we learn from them?

It has been one of those interesting points in the year when three big industry events occur almost at the same time, and it is possible to make some interesting comparisons. First we had Mobile World Congress providing some illuminating insights into how the focus of the mobile industry has changed from devices and their specifications to the content delivery model. If you want a more detailed look at how I see this change developing then take a look at my post from 1st March which brought a wonderful stream of posts and builds which is always good to see. Thanks everyone!

Another of the shows has been RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco, a candidate for the definitive security event. Now everyone knows security is a big issue but in truth have we really seen approaches that match up to the problem we are facing? The world we are all working and playing in is no longer finite in any recognisable sense of the word, i.e. in terms of manageable domains, one of the key concepts for a security methodology. In his keynote at RSA, Microsoft’s Scott Charney hit this nail right on the head drawing an accurate picture between policing a physical world as a whole environment, versus the less than complete approaches to securing the virtual world.

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by Andy Mulholland on March 15, 2010 | TrackBacks (0)

(Information Technology) + (Business Technology) ÷ Clouds = Infostructure

Relax! It’s not meant to be a real formula, just a way of trying to think about the relationship between all of these. There is a great deal of growing interest in cloud services for the enterprise and more factors are coming into the mix expected to transform enterprises and impact their business models. Over the last few months - together with my colleagues - we have been closely examining what’s really happening, why it’s happening, and what’s needed. The result is a whole new Capgemini global business unit called Infostructure Technology Services which is designed to address the expertise ‘gap’ rapidly emerging within most enterprises. This is a summary of what we have identified and what is needed in outline, for the full story go to Capgemini Infostructure Technology Services.

The majority of enterprises can be summed up around four activities: buying something, adding value to it reselling it at a profit and the associated administering/operational management. Information Technology has done an excellent job on the two internal activities of adding value and administration/operational management, but has not achieved the same kind of impact on the two other aspects of buying and selling. The goal of business technology is to achieve the same level of improvement in these two areas and for that, it needs to use a different, common and open technology base from that of internal IT.

Mobile World Congress 2010 – behind the obvious …

Mobility has seen fast growth and been a hot topic the in last couple of years and at Mobile World Congress this year, it turned a corner and moved beyond being just a procession of breakthrough devices and new forms of wireless. The question is who noticed this in the IT or enterprise IT community and will they make the connection in terms of the enterprise user and models for cloud delivery?

The focus, announcements and fun have - in the past - always seemed to centre on new devices with incredible capabilities that invited the comparison with the functionality of a PC. Much less time was given to what people are using mobile devices for. That is the real game change to look at and at least one group of 24 operators grasped this and established a new alliance. The alliance is focussed on one simple objective: to take on Apple and its App Store dominance. Under the old rules of the game anything that increased connection time and usage was good, so as long as you were part of the Apple game all those extra call minutes and data were just what you wanted.

Augmented reality arrives in a commercial magazine

If you have been reading my blog for long enough you will remember that during the Second Life boom, I was supportive of the principle that media would be changed by new capabilities around ‘virtual’ or ‘reality’, even if Second Life might or might not turn out to be ‘next big thing’ in quite the way some of its supporters believed.

My new HP laptop features a built in web cam and 3G card, (it has even got a rather cute keyboard light that on transatlantic flights has been useful when they darken the cabin!). So though its form factor is large, it’s a perfectly capable full communication and interaction device at every level from connected to wireless, sound to video. In other words a decent PC today is a fully functional multimedia device.

Open-source software: A natural fit with SaaS and Clouds?

We talk a lot about new technologies but less about some of the implications. Take the software provisioning model, yes it’s all about ‘as a service’, but go a little further into this. Yes, we are changing the provisioning of software, but that is because the purposes people want to use software for are also changing. It then follows that the development of software itself will also change.

Little more than three years ago open-source software (OSS) was being positioned as something not suitable for the mainstream IT market with a series of implied risk statements about its fitness for use at an enterprise level. The use of Linux as a low cost operating system was acceptable, as was the increasing use of the so called LAMP stack, standing for Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages, to support web-based activities. Today many of the major proprietary software vendors who were vehemently attacking OSS have moved to embrace it as part of their product portfolio and can be found making contributions. In the USA the White House website has been shifted to OSS, in the UK the London Stock Exchange has adopted it for its high profile ultra reliable environment, and in Norway using proprietary software has become the exception with OSS the de facto approach.

You are what you eat – or your enterprise is what it communicates

If you are a long-serving computing practitioner who has been through mainframes in data centres to mini computers in departmental computing and then to PC networks and IT, you might just recall hearing about Conway’s Law. Well its coming back again as we move into clouds! Melvin Conway’s thesis, the piece of work that gave birth to the concept of Conway’s Law, first surfaced in 1968 as part of the shift into departmental computers. Essentially Conway’s point was that in designing enterprise business models, computer solutions, even products to take an organisation to market, will always mimic the enterprise’s own communication structure.

Conway’s Law = …organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Some good examples of what this might look like, based on the original thesis, can be found on Wikipedia but you can get a more up to date view from 2008 work at Harvard Business School and at Microsoft Research. To understand the interest and why it comes up at times when technology innovation leads to business change, let me provide my own experience relating first to what it meant at the time of PCs and networks, then what it means now in the context of clouds.

Not another word on iPad or eBooks! But what about using it for Capgemini Debate TV?

I question if I, or anyone else, is able to add anything of value to the topic of the moment – the Apple iPad – and more specifically, eBooks, whether as iBooks or any other format such as Amazon’s longer established Kindle format. What I will remark upon however is how the provision of effective content and readers in two years has transformed the market place for buying and reading books in the same way that MP3 players and providers of online music transformed the way we buy and listen to music. Both owe a lot to the availability of low cost broadband, and as access becomes easier with wireless, and available bandwidth grows, the third part of the trilogy must come next. Video.

The progression of ‘I listen’, ‘I read’, and ‘I watch’ is inevitable, providing the connectivity, devices and content are available. Things are progressing nicely with all of these new devices featuring video capability not just in terms of being able to do it, but being able to do it well for several hours owing to the new generation of batteries. In terms of content, on the one hand there is YouTube, but on the other there is a more serious business purpose as increasingly websites replace huge text posts with more and more video clips.

Why are clouds so hard to understand?

If there is a single question that keeps coming up in my travels and meetings it is this one! I would add here that we in the industry are not helping the situation by taking our usual course of focusing on whatever the current hot topic is, and making out that whatever we are selling is connected to it. I have spent a lot of time trying to address this topic in the context of what we can use web and cloud technology for, but very little on what it actually is! The next two posts deal with this question.

It would have been fair question to ask why client-server based IT was so hard to understand back around 1990. Indeed for those of you who remember this time, there was a similar kind of confusion. The benefit of hindsight shows that because client-server covers the entire breadth of business requirements from ERP on one side, through to various ways it can be implemented (thin or thick client, single, or n tier) on the other side. If in 1990 your experience was based on mini computers with terminals, this was a whole new concept, and you pretty well had to learn everything all over again. At the same time the confusion was increased by mini computer vendors making out that they had a role in client- server in various bizarre ways. Anyone remember the MicroVAX desktop machine that was designed to compete with PCs? And of course don’t forget that PC networks and client-servers lay behind the rethinking of business models through business process reengineering and matrix working.

Microsoft + HP; Oracle + Sun and IBM + IBM

So as it looks like Oracle will get its acquisition of Sun approved with all the consequences of creating a second hardware and software combo player in the market (IBM being the first), and all of a sudden a third alternative arrives, the new HP and Microsoft team. But is all of this simple industry consolidation, or is more of a realignment to deal with the new technology and business market that is also emerging? The question is an important one as most CIOs will be worried about the impacts all of this has on their product portfolios and future support.

Just reflect on the on-off nature of things between Oracle and Sun, and Oracle and HP to see this. First it was Oracle and Sun, who partnered, then there was a split and Oracle partnered with HP. One of the powerful fruits of this was Exadata 1.0, so a year or more back this would look like a great high performing combination to install. Then it was Oracle and Sun back together again with the launch of Exadata 2.0, perhaps an even higher performing combination. But what if you have already built around Exadata 1.0? I am not suggesting that any of these players aren’t going to support their technology, but there is a question about just how realistic this is in terms of resources and time spent.

What do we want from business intelligence?

In the current turbulent trading conditions, it’s no surprise that business intelligence tops enterprise IT wish list. However, in this post, I want to try to dig in to what that really means. On one side of the issue, the use of data and information, an excellent series of posts have already been written by my friend Peter Evans-Greenwood. So it’s the other side I want to look at, the way people use information to make decisions, and the tools and techniques that can be used. The single biggest issue this throws up is that one size does not in fact fit all, or, put a little more clearly, one tool will not deliver everything required across the roles and working practices of an enterprise’s employee base.

Some time ago there were a series of classifications made, dividing up the behavior and working characteristics of different age groups. The result was to define four major groups: Traditionalists 64 yrs +; Boomers 45 to 63 yrs; Generation X 26 to 44 yrs and Millennials 18 to 25 yrs. The classifications used age as a broad basis to define attitudes to work, technology and many other issues, including communication styles, problem solving techniques and decision making. These are three major traits that business intelligence is designed to support. Each age group shows vastly different styles (see diagram below).

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by Andy Mulholland on January 18, 2010

About the authors

Three Conferences; MWC, RSA Security Conference and CeBIT – what did we see and what can we learn from them?

(Information Technology) + (Business Technology) ÷ Clouds = Infostructure

Mobile World Congress 2010 – behind the obvious …

Augmented reality arrives in a commercial magazine

Open-source software: A natural fit with SaaS and Clouds?

You are what you eat – or your enterprise is what it communicates

Not another word on iPad or eBooks! But what about using it for Capgemini Debate TV?

Why are clouds so hard to understand?

Microsoft + HP; Oracle + Sun and IBM + IBM

What do we want from business intelligence?

Subscribe

Recent Posts

Navigate

Search the blog