As social media grows in popularity with consumers, interest in social analytics has skyrocketed. Paradoxically, many companies are failing to create a social analytics program, and fewer still are properly incorporating social analytics into their existing customer intelligence portfolio.

The volume of social data being generated is mind boggling. Social media has led to an explosion in the amount of information that customers are choosing to share about themselves online. This presents organizations with a goldmine of opportunities for customer and competitive insights, but you need a formal analytics program that can be compared with other sources of customer information to make the right decisions.

In order to make holistic decisions about your customers, create a Customer Insights Center of Excellence (CICOE) that bring responsibility for customer insights under one roof.

Social analytics is a powerful complement – but not a complete replacement – for other sources of customer data. Failing to incorporate social data into your customer intelligence portfolio is failing to make holistic decisions. However, don’t lose sight of other sources of customer insight.

Info-Tech’s new solution set, Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program, will help you determine the social analytics use cases that are most appropriate for your organization, the metrics you should be tracking, and how to execute a social analytics program that works with your existing sources of customer insights to ensure your organization is making the most informed customer decisions possibly.

In the IT world of today, data is being bashed by the raging moves to the cloud, mobile computing, and trust issues. Not to mention the tsunami of big data and analytics that is on its way if it hasn’t already hit you. Knowing where your data is, where it came from, and how it is protected are the cornerstones of your data architecture.

Policies and procedures that govern who has access to data, from where access is allowed, how data is sourced and entered, how it is cleansed, how it is used, and when data needs to be archived, are building blocks that make up the foundation. Master data is the mortar that holds the foundation together. If your master data isn’t managed properly with the right mix of stewardship, ownership, and governance: it will disintegrate and the foundation will at risk of collapsing.

As cloudy skies form overhead, the foundation provides the necessary footings (constraints) and walls (boundaries) on which the applications that use corporate data are implemented; providing a solid structure that can withstand the storms of today and tomorrow’s IT disruptors and opportunities.

Don’t let your data and information be swept away. Architect today for change tomorrow and be sheltered from the storm.

To learn more about data architecture, see Info-Tech’s solution set, Develop a Five Year Data Architecture Plan.

Cloud-based ERP is rapidly becoming an area of key interest for IT leaders and other decision makers. The challenge is that the term “cloud ERP” is a better marketing term than IT strategy term. There are really four different types of ERP:

• On-Premise where a particular enterprise owns and maintains the ERP instance and the associated databases and servers.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options where all users share a single instance.
• Proprietary cloud models where a particular ERP vendor maintains an instance of the ERP system in its own data center. This model is similar to traditional managed services arrangements but the vendor may offer subscription licensing terms instead of up-front-plus-maintenance terms.
• White label cloud options are particularly challenging. In this scenario, an ERP provider – typically a VAR or reseller – offers to host the ERP system in a third-party hosting center.

Each of these models varies widely in terms of benefits, costs, and risks. In many cases, on-premise software may offer a wide range of potential benefits but have high up-front licensing costs. Conversely, a SaaS solution may offer attractive up-front licensing but present inappropriate risks. These assumptions are not, however, universal. The cost of SaaS can be shockingly high over the entire lifespan of a solution. Similarly, on-premise solutions aren’t necessarily low risk if the IT department lacks the sophistication and maturity to effectively manage it.

The solution to the cloud ERP dilemma is to use Risk-Adjusted Cost Benefit (RACB) to assess different ERP options. Every deployment scenario has a different RACB. Consider the existing solution and compare it to different hosted and on-premise options. RACB provides a way of comparing apples with oranges.

For more information, see Info-Tech’s solution set, Determine if Cloud ERP Lies in the Future.

Ultra Messaging SMX has the potential to change the game for how messaging software can be used. Messaging software has traditionally been used for communication between multiple application processes or inter-process communication (IPC) via shared memory. SMX will allow developers to leverage the benefits of messaging on inter-thread communications (ITC) within a single application process rather than having to develop their own shared memory ITC solution.

Informatica has targeted the Ultra Messaging product at the low-latency, high volume electronic trading applications in financial markets. However, use cases will emerge in other applications and markets as more things are connected (the Internet of Things), mobile devices generating real-time data are integrated into systems of interaction, and the results of data analytics are required in real-time.

Informatica is not the only vendor tackling the high volume, low latency data processing problem. With data volumes growing exponentially and organizations looking for insights inside that data as soon as possible, several of their competitors are also bringing solutions to market.

• Actian’s acquisition of Pervasive puts their high performance VectorWise database together with Pervasive’s DataRush technology to significantly reduce data analysis time and effort.
• IBM has released a high volume, low latency, and extremely scaleable messaging appliance in their MessageSight appliance, which can handle one million connected devices, and 13 million messages per second.

Mobile Devices, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and all the big data being generated in today’s IT environment are driving the need to break current performance barriers. Organizations are moving from wanting to know what happened in their business to predicting what is going to happen, and new technology is emerging that will help them understand what is happening right now. Real-time business analytics have emerged to help organizations dynamically adapt to changing conditions in economic, social, political, and physical environments as the changes are occurring, allowing organizations to adapt to new opportunities.

Vendors will continue to push the performance limits with new products and solutions – with these three vendors’ announcements happening within the last two months alone. I am confident we will continue to see more performance improvements across the data processing vendor landscapes as Big Data continues to push innovation.

More often than not, organizations jump the gun on social media service selection when building a social media strategy. Most organizations engaging in social media immediately try to build their presence on Facebook and Twitter, the two largest social networks. But oddly enough, few organizations have been able to successfully leverage social media to actually interact with their customers. What’s the deal?

Info-Tech believes a key contributor to their failure is a lack of deliberation when picking which services to maintain a presence on – many companies follow the herd while declining to participate in potentially better suited niche services.

Organizations need to assess who their targeted customers are and then determine which platforms those customers are most likely using. There are a wide variety of smaller but popular services available (such as Pinterest, Yelp, and Vimeo) to effectively cut through the clutter and better connect with key customers.

Facebook and Twitter accounts are still a must-have for most consumer-facing organizations, but don’t forget about the little guys! Remember, it’s better to deeply engage with ten target consumers than get a passing “like” from ten thousand. Build a market coverage model that incorporates a wide variety of different social media services into your channel interaction framework.

Info-Tech’s Optimize Social Media Strategy by Service solution set will help you determine exactly which services are most appropriate for your business by examining demographics, the nature of your product, social media goals, and many other factors.  After determining your optimal mix of social media services, this solution set will help you to execute a plan for social service selection and management, and perform a semi-annual social media service audit.

For example, there is an established pattern of SAP ERP using DB2 for its database. There are patterns that integrate WebSphere Application Server with WebSphere MQ, virtual DataPower appliances, and databases. The list goes on, and if there isn’t a pattern in the catalog that meets your requirements, make one and put it in your own catalog of available patterns for invocation.

I was surprised and pleased to see the concept of patterns being sold in a commercial IBM product. Early in my former tenure as an Integration Architect at IBM, I was involved in testing the revised Process Integration Patterns for e-Business, circa 2003. I won’t take credit for what is in Pure today, but part of me wonders whether or not I helped pave the way.

A pattern is a use case or commonly observed interaction among multiple components. In my experience as an integration architect, our patterns handled the exchange of messages between common end point types, and used common transformation rules. Each “interface” was an instantiation of a pattern.

Pure patterns are pre-configured instances of, and connections between each component in a solution. In the PureFlex environment, each component is a virtual machine running in a private cloud. In the PureApplication environment, each component is an application or application middleware virtualized inside the private cloud. In the PureData environment, each component is a virtual database or data cluster.

When a pattern is instantiated, it is configured for the specific business solution in order to meet given requirements. IBM has harvested the most common patterns of usage in the business world of infrastructure, applications and data and turned those patterns into products. Hats off to IBM for providing patterns based solutions to common problems of systems integration. IBM even admitted they learned a lot about making their own products work together when they built the PureApplication solution.

“Applause” from someone (me) who formerly ran a startup business on WebSphere Application Server and Message Broker connected via JMS running on top of DB2. It wasn’t a walk in the park to install, configure, and then maintain.

IBM Pure has helped solve these problems using patterns, and through the elasticity of a cloud environment, the solution can scale up and down to meet demand.

Patterns are not just useful for instantiation. They are very effective during system testing: test one instance of a pattern to make sure the pattern works before moving onto test the remaining instances. Once deployed, system monitoring and maintenance can also be designed within the context of patterns. Last but not least, governance of the solutions and change control is easily handled through the use of patterns.

Patterns are no longer limited to what we see in woven fabrics, art work, architecture, or mechanical design; they now apply to the cloud. Fortunately, IBM has figured out how to make clouds look the same through the use of patterns, and when a new cloud formation appears that we haven’t seen before, it can be captured and saved as a pattern for future reuse.

Reduce, recycle, and reuse. That’s pure.

Within the scope of its recent FSA Vendor Landscape, Info-Tech was impressed with TOA Technologies’ information-powered approach to FSA. TOA’s Field Service Automation platform is built with powerful self-learning analytics engine (one step towards artificial intelligence). The engine searches for individual’s and organizational patterns to delivery optimized scheduling, smarter collaboration and better customer service. We all hate it when the cable company gives us 12 hour-long service windows, don’t we?

This approach manifests itself in different phases of the service lifecycle. For example, scheduling engines usually use averages when estimating time need to resolve field issues. In reality the resolution time depends on individual and geographical characteristics. Identifying such patterns and using them in scheduling results in more realistic schedules. The more TOA’s customers use the product, the more information is learnt by the system to further optimize scheduling.

What’s more impressive is how that information which already exists in almost every organization is used to deliver very powerful collaboration to field technicians when they need it the most. TOA’s collaboration features allow technicians to request help using their mobile device and automatically locate the best resource anywhere in the organization (in the field or back at the head office) and connect them to the field technician to help resolve the issue.

Info-Tech believes that technology should leverage the collective knowledge of an organization to deliver optimization, lower costs, happier customers, and empowered employees. TOA Technologies seem to be on the lead edge, and Info-Tech predicts that such information-powered approach will soon take hold in the space.

For more on these vendors, read Info-Tech’s Vendor Landscape: Field Service Automation.

IBM introduced the five key imperatives that business needs to begin focusing on in 2013. At the top of the list is mobile. MobileFirst is an IBM portfolio of offerings that support the delivery of powerful computing into the hands of users, literally. Everyone who owns a smartphone owns a computer more powerful than the ones used in the Apollo missions. Tablets are eating into the market share of personal computers as they offer mobile computing in a user-friendly, interactive interface. Projects such as Google Glass and the rumored Apple iWatch devices will allow us to wear computers.

Enter “Systems of Interaction,” a new term being used by IBM, which is inclusive of “The Internet of Things,” “Systems of Record,” and “Systems of Engagement” all connected via the cloud.

The Internet of Things includes all those things you may or may not see that aren’t computers, but they generate data: road sensors, weather stations, traffic lights, satellites, utilities, security cameras, RFID tags, etc.

Systems of record are the traditional CRM, ERP, SCM, and databases used for conducting business. The traditional footprint of IBM technology.

Systems of engagement are where the data meets the people. It is the smartphones, tablets, PCs, kiosks, smart boards, and now vehicles.

The cloud sits in the middle of all these systems, or more correctly, the cloud provides the necessary elasticity of storage, computing power, middleware, and application functionality that is required to enable the connection between the systems of interaction.
The MobileFirst initiative can be summed up in the one phrase that appeared as a full-page IBM ad in last week’s Wall Street Journal: “Mobile isn’t a device. It’s data.” Every mobile device either receives or generates data: from email and text messages through to photos, videos, GPS coordinates, and more depending on the apps that are installed.

The analysis of the data captured by a mobile device can help retail influence buyers depending on where they are, what they just did, the weather patterns in the area, and even the friends they are with. This data can also help people avoid traffic jams and accidents; optimize delivery routes; and optimize emergency response times. Video captured by security cameras and mobile devices were a primary tool used to locate and apprehend the Boston marathon bombing suspects. There are endless use cases, but regardless of how many there are, the systems of engagement will continue to be mobile.

Each of IBM’s remaining imperatives follow the premise of MobileFirst.

• The second is to reinvent your business design and processes to adapt and leverage the new mobile computing world we live in.
• The third imperative is to adopt a flexible and secure integration model that enables information to flow to/from the mobile devices and among the systems of interaction.
• The fourth is to be insight and data driven to find the hidden insights generated across the systems of interaction.
• The final imperative is to build on open architectures to support more plug and play of mobile devices and the information that flows between the systems of interaction.

That’s a pretty comprehensive set of imperatives that demonstrate that IBM has been thinking beyond the hype of Big Data, the Internet of Things and mobile computing to figure out how it all comes together. What else would you expect from the world’s largest technology company?

Traditional IPT vendors have added increasingly sophisticated features to their core telephony platforms, while Microsoft has extended its original UC-focused OCS product into a full-fledged telephony system in Lync. Visit Info-Tech’s solution set Vendor Landscape: IP Telephony and Unified Communications to see what leading IPT/UC vendors have to offer.

Cisco, with well rounded IPT/UC solutions for the mid-market and organizations of almost any size, and both a Champion and the Trend Setter in Info Tech’s IPT/UC Vendor Landscape, has demonstrated clearly how an IPT-origin solution can enable a full range of advanced UC features, including multi-media recording and analytics, fixed mobile convergence (FMC), web and desktop video conferencing, and out-of-the-box Lync integration.  Emerging Players like Interactive Intelligence and Digium have brought affordable alternatives to the table, generating stiff competition for more established vendors when specific use cases (contact center and open source, respectively) are an important focus.

Whether employees are on their desktops in the office, at the airport on their tablets, or anywhere in between, IPT/UC vendors are increasingly able to provide full multi-media feature parity across the ever-growing breadth of devices and platforms.  Info-Tech expects this trend to continue: Avaya’s top-rated IPT/UC solutions, coupled with its acquisition and integration of Radvision’s leading video conferencing systems, and the general move toward SIP across the IPT/UC market are an indication that it may only be a matter of time before we see a number of converged IPT/UC/VC solution providers.

Pervasive video conferencing is nearing a reality: integration with UC solutions, clientless web conferencing services, and cloud/hybrid infrastructure deployment options all contribute to expanded opportunities for use of traditional room-based VC systems.  Similarly, enhanced options for high-quality VC across commodity internet connections – led by Vidyo and adopted by other vendors evaluated by Info-Tech – mean that video-based collaboration is no longer the exclusive domain of enterprises that can afford top-dollar vendor offerings.

As tablets and smartphones are further embraced (or at least accepted) by organizations, video conferencing and IPT/UC integrated solutions look to become more critical. Organizations are generally looking for full feature parity on tablets and smartphones if video conferencing is to take hold in the increasingly important mobile space: Avaya’s Radvision acquisition is a good indication of this direction, following a similar route as Cisco with their Tandberg acquisition and broader UC ecosystem.

All-in-all, Info-Tech sees a bright future for video-centric collaboration as part of converged communication strategies that aim to provide easy-to-use solutions that increase end-user productivity.

To compare different VC vendors, take a look at Info-Tech’s Vendor Landscape: Video Conferencing.

What is a PC anyway? The Knowledge Navigator vision of 1987.

The quarterly numbers are in and the PC market is crashing. Hark! The end of the personal computer era is at hand. Its over. Its finally over! Um, no. The end of the PC era is to me indicative of the triumph of the personal computer. The personal computer as a disruptive idea marches on.

It was and is a compelling idea — that an individual, rather than a government or corporation or any other authority, could own a computer as personal property like they might own a washing machine, typewriter, refrigerator, automobile, or television set. It was their personal information, creation, and recreation device.

What is passing is not this fundamental idea of personal computing but a particular form factor and delivery mechanism for personal computing. Those who cannot, or will not, follow where this idea is going risk irrelevancy — whether they are tech vendors or IT departments.

Worst. Quarter. Ever.

Saying first quarter 2013 sales of PCs were not good is an understatement along the lines of the sinking of the Titanic was not good for transatlantic cruises. Descriptors have ranged from disastrous to catastrophic. IDC pegs the decline at 14%, worst ever (or at least since they started counting in 1994).

This is indeed bad but I think we need to focus on who it is bad for and why. The losers right now are the companies that have continued to invest in the traditional Windows PC  — Microsoft and the mainstream PC manufacturers like HP and Dell. Its also bad in the longer term for any organization that sees workforce computing as only maintenance of a fleet of these Windows PCs.

The personal computer device of mass market choice has very rapidly become the smart phone and the tablet. Microsoft is trying to transition to the new PC with its touch sensitive Windows 8, and PC manufacturers (along with Microsoft) have debuted Windows 8 devices, but evidently the transition has not been fast enough to catch the wave.

Not only do smart phones and tablets deserve to be called personal computers, I think they have more right to the name than your traditional Windows PC. They are truer exemplars of that idea of computing as consumer appliance. In fact consumerization of IT is a term often used to describe this latest phase of a revolution, 30 years in the making, that isn’t over yet.

Back to the future

Consumer IT is not a new concept and neither are the computing devices we’re carrying around these days. Back in the late 80s and early 90s “PC evangelists” and “power users” among us knew that the PCs we were buying were not the real PCs. They were proto-PCs. The real PCs hadn’t been invented yet.

If personal computers were cars we were in the pre-Model T era. Power users and evangelists would remain a minority because of the cost and complexity of the PC (even the Mac, a consumer PC that cost a heck of a lot more than a washing machine). Like the Model T the real PCs would be mass market appliances that nearly anyone could own and use.

So what would the real PC look like? Well, a reasonable candidate was the Knowledge Navigator. In 1987 Apple created a series of videos about what the personal computer would look like in 2012. You can have a look at the video here.

The video featured a professor working in his office and interacting with a device unlike anything anybody was using in 1987. It was a portable tablet. It had a touch sensitive interface and also had voice command. It was wirelessly connected to some kind of global data and communications network.

It wasn’t really like a PC — more like, oh, I don’t know, some kind of smart telephone?

Don’t Count Microsoft Out, Ever

I’m not quite ready to declare the smartphones and tablets as the Model T of personal computers. However, they do fit the bill better than the traditional PC. They are mass market appliances that pretty much anyone can own and master. (I’m treating smartphones and tablets as one because they usually have unifying OS and app ecosystems. One is just a bigger, or smaller, version of the other.)

Microsoft and the PC makers are late to this party. Too late? Microsoft was late to the Internet, to graphical user interfaces, and server operating systems. They always seem to catch up and dominate. Also there is what I call the Star Trek Movie phenomena (every second release sucks).

Right now a lot of businesses are just finishing their Windows 7 upgrades. As Windows 7 excelled after the Vista debacle, Windows 9 will probably rock after the Windows 8 stumble.

If the smartphone/tablet is the Model T of personal computers Microsoft’s real obstacle is the phone side of the story. With Apple and Android it is handy having the same ecosystem for your phone and tablet. I have seen some excitement about Windows 8 on tablets, not so much about phones.

For the latest Mobile-focused Info-Tech research, see:

• Architect the Mobile Strategy in Two Days
• Develop and Enforce Policies that Securely Enable a Mobile Workforce

Is this why one of the most recent mergers and acquisitions in the Big Data market was centered in Austin? Pervasive, a local Austin company and leader in data integration and quality, and with an unmatched ability to process significant volumes of data faster than those bats can fly, was acquired by California based Actian, which is lead by a CEO from the UK. That’s weird! Or is it?

Actian’s Vectorwise product is a next-generation analytic database delivering record-breaking performance on commodity hardware without tuning. Pervasive’s DataRush technology is a patented application framework and analytics engine for high speed parallel data processing. It utilizes every core and thread of a processor, on any platform at run-time: from a laptop PC through to high performance servers. Code once, run anywhere and use every bit of horsepower available. Sounds like Actian and Pervasive were a good match for each other, and the performance these two solutions together can bring to the market is kind of, well, weird.

Let me give you an example. KNIME is a leading open source tool for predictive analytics. The Actian (Pervasive) RushAccelerator plugged into KNIME reduced a data processing scenario by 98%: from 9 hours to 9 minutes! Weird but wonderful.

Actian CEO Steve Shine was at the conference and clearly stated that the acquisition was also about integration: integration of data, and applications. Lance Speck, GM of Integration Products at Actian stated that organizations can’t win without integration. Integration reduces friction and improves business outcomes. Actian’s Vectorwise customers now have an option under the same banner to reduce integration friction and get “faster time to business” – a new mantra being chanted at Actian.

One last perspective that was impressed upon me again at this year’s conference was that of Pervasive’s continued dedication to treat customers as partners. During a customer presentation I attended, the customer team members involved in a project were asked to stand. After they sat down, the Pervasive resources that were involved in the same project were asked to stand. More people from Pervasive stood up than those from the customer team. Weird. I hope customers will continue to enjoy “partnering” for success under the Actian banner.

From what I experienced at Actian’s Integration World 2013, they are keeping Austin weird, but in a good way!

Modernization is a hot topic these days for legacy applications, but is being green really so bad? If you are going to modernize, make sure it’s driven by sound business reasons, not just perception. Otherwise, you’re just putting lipstick on a pig, as the saying goes.

Case study: Green screen wins out over web-based interface

An insurance company, that has asked to remain anonymous, was well on its way to converting green screen interfaces for a data entry application to a web-based interface, when the business leaders put on the brakes. Yes, a web-based app would cut down on training time for new staff, but would impact their productivity; in short, green screen was much faster for data entry.

In short, if all IT was going to do was replace the existing green screen interface with the exact same screens in a browser-based interface — i.e., no process improvements, shortcuts, or truly enhanced functionality — they wanted no part of that.

Start modernization projects with a business objective

There are several good business reasons to consider modernization. For example:

• Can you increase productivity by replacing 5 green screen pages with 1 web page that includes time-saving features such as drop-down menus and so on (which can make up for slower response times for web pages)?
• Similarly, can you improve accuracy by including options in drop-down menus?
• Is there an opportunity to more seamlessly integrate with other applications, thereby streamlining your overall business process?

Providing a web-based interface to reduce training time for new staff is absolutely a solid business reason, but as the case study above illustrates, that may not be a good enough reason on its own. The insurance company in this example settled on providing a web-based interface for customers but stuck with green screens for their employees to maintain existing productivity until they could put the time in to make meaningful improvements via modernization.

Legacy is not a dirty word. Legacy applications equal longevity, staying power, and value. Consider the ROI you’re getting on that green screen application that was written 20 or 25 years ago? Oh, and remember, even if you think they’re ugly, pigs have their good points too, like bacon.

For me, as a minimal iPad user, I’m nonplussed about the whole idea. I love my iPad for consuming media of all kinds; written, video, even podcasts. I’m not a luddite, I do see the value of an iPad as part of my set of work devices. Would I ever grind through writing a blog post or modify an excel tool or build a slide on it? No, we are not there yet with tablets. I still want a big screen, a keyboard and mouse for these tasks.

Do I think that Microsoft is crazy to not have an app for iPad? Yes. They should have one now, Office 2013 is built for a touch environment and frankly it fills a need that would generate both enterprise and consumer revenue. Given all the mobile friendly features that are device agnostic, an iPad app should not have been a stretch for the Office team. They clearly missed the boat - or more likely were betting that enterprise IT would be investing in MS Surface tablets in a big way…which has not happened to date.

But here is the open secret…You can already use Office 2013 on your iPad (iPad 2 or 3 but not 1). It’s called OWA and it works fine on Safari or Chrome, the Lync app also works on the iPad. SharePoint is accessible from iOS, so you can collaborate, get desktop content and edit Office files on your iPad. OWA also gives you some offline function – depending on licenses. Name me another enterprise grade web app that gives you that on multiple mobile devices?

Is there a large community calling for full-blown Office to make content from scratch on an iPad or Android tablet? I don’t think so – or at least not in revenue generating numbers.

This is about business uses, what do business users really want on a mobile device? Note taking is the key application. OneNote 2013 is really, really good on touch devices for note taking. It is available as a standalone app for iOS and can content can be linked and stored in corporate Skydrive Pro accounts. OneNote and OWA more than cover most iPad and Android use cases today.

From Microsoft’s perspective, Office 2013 is touch friendly so there is no need for a iPad specific version. From an enterprise perspective I can see how an Office app would help control and simplify their BYOD and mobile problems.

Microsoft is in a no-win situation here. They need to recoup some investment in Windows 8 but they need to acknowledge the two realities that will shape productivity: People do not just accept corporate devices anymore and they do not want to be told what OS they have to use. To me the Surface is a much better work device than an iPad based largely on the native Office experience.

Not having an iPad app available is a small miss-step that stems from competing interests between hardware and application groups. The larger and more concerning aspect for any enterprise heavily invested in Microsoft, is how poorly all of the features of Office 2013 (and also Office 365) have been marketed.The hope is that this is a small bump and not the start of a decline in the company as a whole. Office as a whole is really good for managing mobile content, it is unfortunate that Microsoft hasn’t understood how important that one message is to Enterprises.

Hopefully the delay means that the app will function as well on iOS and Android as it does on Win RT, and all of the issues around SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint have been worked out. It is too bad that Microsoft has not been clear about why the potential delay until 2014 when clearly the components are available on iOS and Android.

Taking a proactive approach to data auditing is something every organization needs to do. Data is one of the organization’s largest assets. In order to utilize it effectively and benefit from it, data requires effective management in the form of policies, procedures, standards, and ownership. Audits will not only promote higher levels of data quality, they will also positively impact data security and compliance to regulatory laws and regulations.

Data audits will also identify where data owners and stewards may be required, any extraneous data sources that internal departments or lines of business’ may be using without IT’s knowledge, and the location of all data sources within the organization.

Audits don’t need to be a painful experience. Keeping things simple and sticking to a data audit framework is the secret to a successful audit. Organizations that perform audits on a regular basis will have a comprehensive inventory of all data assets, a clear understanding of any data issues that exist, and where data ownership and accountability may be lacking.  It’s in every organization’s best interest to perform regular data audits.

To complete your own data audit see Info-Tech’s Integrate a Data Audit into the Data Management Plan.

This type of information management – extract, embed, extend, and educate – is applicable far beyond service desk and IT. For any organization, it is the first step in translating common knowledge into common practice because it embeds information directly in organizational processes. In effect, it ensures that common information informs common practice. If we think of knowledge as a progression from data to information and then to knowledge, we still need to further in transforming common knowledge into common practice.

Since knowledge cannot exist independent of people, the clutch piece to transforming common knowledge into common practice is actually people. Embedding good information in processes provides a solid foundation for knowledge growth and development, but it is just one aspect. Engaging people in good, informed processes is the next aspect that enables people to use information to generate knowledge.  As a takeaway, inform the process and engage the people in order to translate common knowledge in common practice.

To learn how to take control of your service desk, read Info-Tech’s solution set, Take the High Road to Service Desk Effectiveness.

The evaluation results were more disappointing than surprising: the state of the market showed a deteriorating performance in what should otherwise be commodity areas by 2013.

If you are looking to implement a CRM suite in the small enterprise space, be prepared to implement a standalone SMMP solution to supplement the lacking functionality. In the large enterprise space, the tools may be available as add-on products from your vendor or from third-party partnerships.

More tidbits on the small enterprise CRM market:

Product affordability is definitely an important selection criterion for small enterprises. Keeping that in mind, Info-Tech had to make a judgement call on what product mix to evaluate from one of the vendors, Salesforce.com.

With the addition of Marketing Cloud to Salesforce’s product portfolio in 2012, deciding which products your organization needs can become increasingly complex. If you chose to include Marketing Cloud, you will likely bridge many of the social “gaps” discussed above. The price will go up as well.

Info-Tech’s assessment demonstrated that the social features that come with Marketing Cloud will be a worthwhile investment for many organizations. For a more detailed assessment of Salesforce’s product portfolio, as well as other competitive solutions in the small enterprise CRM space, see Info-Tech’s Vendor Landscape: Customer Relationship Management Suites for Small Enterprises.

More tidbits on the large enterprise CRM market:

With rapidly changing market demand, some vendors are unable to keep up with prominent collaboration trends. Just a few years ago, Infor Epiphany was defining the market with its agent-to-customer collaboration through live chat. Today, the vendor scored “unsatisfactory” on collaboration because the product lacks other leading-edge collaboration tools.

Think of agent-to-agent collaboration, for instance: this critical feature facilitates the 360-degree view of the customer across sales, marketing, and service. Customer-to-customer collaboration features are also gaining prominence. Inbuilt customer communities are paramount to decreasing support case volume and increasing efficiencies in the service process domain. Keep an eye out for these collaboration features when shopping for your CRM suite. For more information, please see Info-Tech’s Vendor Landscape: Customer Relationship Management Suites for Large Enterprises.

To learn more about selecting and implementing CRM suites see Info-Tech’s Build a Customer Relationship Management Strategy.

An interesting story has not been so much VMware’s leadership but whether any other player would ever be a serious and legitimate alternative. Five years ago it was really no contest. Today there is a contest, particularly from Microsoft. But in tracking the progress of competitors we shouldn’t take VMware’s leadership position for granted. VMware doesn’t.

In short, let’s give VMware their due.

Areas of Leadership

In focusing on a competitive landscape we often look at feature parity. Back in the day there were things that VMware did that nobody else did. Things like being able to move a running virtual machine from one host to another and being able to increase the number of VMs that could comfortably share a host machine through memory sharing.

But VMware can rightly claim that, while the competition can add “me too” features, that doesn’t mean that they do it better.  In memory sharing and “over commit”, for example, the competition can claim progress, but VMware has a larger slate of capabilities including memory compression and transparent page sharing. In memory management, VMware is clearly ahead.

Another example is storage management. In a shared environment, storage management is critical. VMware is not the only vendor that has storage management in their portfolio, but VMware is the only one that has built APIs (vSphere APIs for Array Integration or VAAI) to integrate virtual management with the native management of storage arrays. The degree to which storage vendors support VAAI is a differentiating feature in our storage vendor landscapes.

VMware can, and does, point to other areas where they continue to show leadership. In securing virtual infrastructure, for example, VMware has vShield application, data, network, and endpoint security. These have recently been amalgamated under the banner of vCloud Networking and Security 5.1.

Good Enough Might Be Good Enough

Does all this mean that we think VMware is the only and obvious choice for virtualization in your infrastructure? Of course not. You don’t always need to go with best in class. Sometimes good enough is good enough. As noted above, an interesting story has been about whether the competition has been good enough.

A year ago I blogged on how Microsoft is VMware’s only real competitive threat. I still hold to this position. Microsoft has continued to get traction for Hyper-V. The main reason they have not been a champion in our Vendor Landscapes has been the slow general availability release of Hyper-V 3.0 and System Center 2012. Microsoft has a tendency to talk about a product as if it is in general use a year or more before the fact. Only now is it coming together in actual product.

Citrix XenServer has always scored well in our feature-by-feature comparisons with VMware but it has struggled for market share. Citrix no longer argues XenServer as a general replacement for VMware instead focusing on targeting it to areas where Citrix has existing strength such as application and desktop virtualization and service provider clouds.

In the meantime, VMware continues to do what they have always done, focus on where virtualization is going next and innovating to remain the market leader. This includes cloud of course as well as the fully software defined data center (servers, networks, and storage).

It had been a turbulent two years since analysts had last been invited to an event like this. The lag time in itself was indicative of HP’s trials. The summits were a regular springtime occurrence in Boston for years. But in 2011 it was moved to San Francisco by new CEO Léo Apotheker. Apotheker was hired by HP after the controversial resignation of former CEO Mark Hurd.

That 2011 San Francisco Summit was a broader affair. While the focus of these events was traditionally enterprise systems this one added personal systems with plenty of talk about HPs tablet and WebOS operating system. There was also talk of HP’s plans to acquire British software company Autonomy.

Before the end of that same year, the HP tablet was discontinued after only weeks on the market, WebOS would be spun off, plans were announced to spin off personal systems, and HP took a $9 billion write down on the Autonomy purchase. Then, in September 2011, the HP Board removed Apotheker and board member and former eBay exec Meg Whitman took over.

The Analyst Summits were scheduled and then cancelled twice in 2012 as Whitman got to work on getting HP back on track. In this year’s event, Whitman reiterated that this is not a project that can be completed in one year, but they have made a good start.

Personal Systems were there again and had some interesting things to show in the mobile space, but I am primarily interested in convergence and virtualization. Here I saw a reiteration of HP’s leadership in convergence. HP execs rightly noted that the company was first to promote converged systems where servers, networks, storage, virtualization and management come together in a unified system.

HP has solid products at each layer of the converged systems layer cake as well as in aspects of the software defined infrastructure (especially software defined networking). They are investing more in R&D to further innovate on convergence. It was noted that the current iteration of convergence – for example stacks of blade servers, disk arrays, and switches – will not be able to cope with future requirements to store and process mountains of data.

A big part of HP’s future innovations roadmap is Project Moonshot. Moonshot is a server architecture project built around the processors normally associated with smart phones, tablets, and netbooks (such as ARM and Intel’s Atom). Moonshot is shooting to create servers that consume up to 89% less energy, 94% less space, and cost 63% less costs of traditional x86 servers – a hyperscale platform ready for those mountains of data HP says are coming from everything from social media to ubiquitous sensors in the global Internet of things.

I was impressed with the focus and collaboration of the various parts of HP’s portfolio, and leadership, under the mantra of “One HP.” There are no guarantees here. The challenges of the future remain, and the competition is fierce, especially in industry standard architectures where the dreaded (by tier one vendors) term “commodity” is often heard.

HP as a company and a product portfolio has been there all along in spite of the turmoil at the top. It was gratifying, then, to see that HP’s leadership team has found themselves again.

We’re calling the two VLs homogeneous and heterogeneous backup.

1. Homogeneous focuses on vendors that provide backup primarily for Windows and Linux systems. It is homogeneous in that these are all industry standard x86 systems. Typically, customers are at the small to mid-range of the SMEs. Champions: [withheld].
2. Heterogeneous backup focuses on products typically in the mid-sized to enterprise space that support a range of architectures. While x86 remains a critical component here we are also looking to support for proprietary UNIX systems up to mainframes. Champions: [withheld].

As with our unified storage array landscapes, we find that solutions in the small to mid-range come from multiple antecedents and tend to overlap in terms of market coverage. In storage, for example, you have traditional enterprise solutions, typically based on Fibre Channel networking, that have come down market to the mid-range. Then there are the iSCSI and NAS players that started in smaller-end and grew up-market.

Similarly, in backup, there are products that began in larger heterogeneous enterprises as far back as the 1980s and then there are more recent entrants that catered to the smaller, primarily Windows-based, end of the market. When x86 servers became a data center staple the former big iron titles expanded their reach. The former Windows backup titles expanded their capacity. Now they’re all playing in the mid-range and there is considerable overlap for potential mid-range customers.

Treating the mid-range as one market can be problematic for product differentiation, particularly for vendors that have multiple product offerings. In storage, if Dell is a leader, is it for Dell EqualLogic, is it for Dell Compellent, or is it for both? In backup, is Symantec being evaluated for Backup Exec or for NetBackup?

On the other hand, there are vendors that have one product whose sweet spot is precisely in the middle of the mid-range, right in that overlap zone of small-to-mid and mid-to-large. CommVault is such a vendor and product in the mid-range backup space. Its lineage is in Windows backup, but it has grown up to take on the enterprise titles at the larger end.

We hope having two backup VLs rather than one will improve the clarity of our industry view. If that isn’t enough, we’ve recently published a third VL on virtual infrastructure backup. Effective backup of virtual machines is becoming critical as more server infrastructure is virtualized. In addition to the big system/little system predecessors to modern backup, there is also a group of players that come from a pure-play virtual backup realm (Veeam, Vizioncore, PhdVirtual).

For more information, please see:

• Vendor Landscape: Windows/Linux Backup for SMEs
• Vendor Landscape: Backup Software for Heterogeneous Environments
• Vendor Landscape: Virtual Backup Software

The trend towards increased centralization is observable in more standardization in IT platforms and applications, greater formalization of IT business processes, further centralization of decision making regarding IT, relatively more IT employees positioned in corporate than in the business units, and a higher rank of the top IT leader in the organization.

Moreover, this trend has been occurring despite greater decentralization of decision making to business units. That is, while organizations may require decentralized decision making to meet the need for flexibility and responsiveness in a rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, the IT function may be better positioned to support such business units via a more centralized approach to IT governance.[1]

The key driver behind this trend towards more centralization of IT governance is greater demand for integration, that is, horizontal co-ordination across business units to achieve a common task. This is particularly evident in multi-business unit organizations where there is increasingly higher demand to share more and more information. It is further complicated when organizations are expected to share information with other firms and organizations, for example, suppliers and government.

Research indicates that there are six key factors behind demand for integration, as shown in the figure to the right.

Because technology is the most expedient means to coordinate and facilitate this demand for integration, the IT organization is the natural conduit. To do so effectively requires greater standardization (technology, applications, data, and business processes), and greater centralization of IT governance.

As overall coordinator and facilitator of connectivity across the organization, IT is in the unique position of having the greatest insight into the needs of all business units and functions, and therefore can elevate its value to the business by:

• Identifying the opportunity and supporting the need for cross-business unit innovation.
• Recognizing the need for complimentary products and services.
• Being proactive in initiating business solutions that create enterprise-wide capabilities and support collaboration.

On the other hand, where demand for integration is low, excess centralization of IT governance can lead to adverse consequences such as the organization’s inability to respond effectively to local needs, and protracted decision making, which in turn can result in the development of shadow IT organizations and business units evading IT to make technology decisions.

Striking the right balance for your organization is critical, and requires thoughtful consideration of the level of interdependence within and across business units, and with external stakeholders.

To find out where your organization fits, read Info-Tech’s solution set, Make the Case for the Hybrid IT Operating Model.

Take the time to get things organized before you decide to outsource. Make sure the ticket data is consistently categorized with complete incident descriptions and clearly articulated resolutions. Get the most common incidents reflected in ticket templates and in the knowledge base. Delete or update aged knowledge base content. Clean up the service level agreements and the workflows. And when all that’s done, make sure your reporting still makes sense. For more information on how to prepare, please see Info-Tech’s solution set, Outsource or Repatriate the Service Desk.

If you don’t do these things first, you will find that the vendor candidates are asking you questions you can’t answer. The vendor needs to know what they’re bidding on, and a disorganized and poorly managed service desk is like blood in the water. It sends signals to the vendor that say, “We need your help, we can’t do this on our own, and please assume we have a high propensity to pay.”

The things that make your service desk difficult to manage will also make the vendor struggle with success. After all, how is the vendor supposed to automate workflows when it doesn’t know how you did it? How can it provide the best solution when you didn’t? And how will you monitor the vendor if your old reporting failed to tell the story? Get these things straightened out first to give yourself a baseline for managing the vendor from a position of knowledge.

Your appetite to outsource just might fade away as you realize that, once again, some good old fashioned maintenance solves a lot of problems.

However, it should be duly noted that DBaaS does not take away the core responsibilities from you. That is, it is still ultimately your duty to ensure your data is secure, your database is up and running and your practices are compliant. For the purpose of this post, we will focus on the first and review the necessary steps in managing data security with databases in the Cloud.

Having databases in the cloud, as opposed to on-premises, slightly alters the way you would approach security. Everything on the hardware level is done by the vendor, and you are only left with logical administration that is abstracted from the physical layer. However, this does not mean you should completely forget about security on the hardware level.

Instead, the first thing you should do is to read over the vendor’s contracts and SLAs carefully to ensure their level of security match with your requirements. Make sure they have certifications such as SSAE 16 and ISO 27001. Also, be prepared to negotiate aggressively in case their security rules are not satisfactory.

Secondly, make sure they have the right tools above the hardware level as well. The vendor should provide you with a relatively simple way (e.g. via web portal) to achieve access control. You should be able to control internal access with logins, and block access from unwarranted IP addresses with a database firewall.

The third is encryption. Encrypted connections using protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) should be supported. You can also encrypt your data that is sitting on a database, usually through a third-party security vendor. This option is relatively less common as it can introduce high complexity and cost. However, it is nonetheless beneficial, especially if your enterprise data needs the highest level of security.

Lastly, Segregation of Duties (SoD) is just as important with DBaaS as it is with on-premises databases. In fact, with a large chunk of administration handed over to the vendor, it is easy for companies to have one dedicated engineer handle all administrative privileges that are left. Avoid having your company data in the hands of a single individual by assigning strict roles and responsibilities.

For more information on Database-as-a-Service, visit Info-Tech’s solution set Use DBaaS to Drag, Drop, and Deploy Enterprise Databases.

1. Compliance in the cloud: I think it’s fair to say that most IT shops will eventually have at least some operations in the cloud, ranging from the mundane to the critical. While this is all fine and well for cost savings, IT leaders must always keep in mind that the cloud isn’t cheaper when there are no controls. Meaning, a vendor’s lack of controls could spell disaster for your own compliance efforts. There are several ways to ensure compliance among your cloud vendor(s):

• Demand the right-to-audit in your service agreement (SA) with the cloud vendor. This ensures you have the opportunity to conduct an assessment of that vendor’s controls, a requirement called for in regulations such as SSAE 16, HIPAA/HITECH, and others.
• Look into “zero-knowledge” application development. Companies such as Spideroak offer solutions that allow IT shops to develop and deliver IT services to clients without actually retaining (or even seeing) their clients’ private or confidential information, thus relieving the compliance burden from the service provider. I can think of many, many use case scenarios for such a development method.
• Find out which geographical areas your sensitive data is being hosted, or is flowing through. If the location is in another country or legal jurisdiction, then this qualifies as trans-border data flow. Do you know what the data privacy/breach notification laws are in those countries? While Europe and North America have more comprehensive and stringent data protection laws, many other parts of the world lag considerably in this regard. If the laws in the countries where your data is stored or flowing through are less stringent than the ones you yourself are subject to, you may want to source a different vendor.
• Finally, you must determine who on the vendor side will have access to your data. Are they trained in compliance and privacy issues? What about the vendor’s subcontractors? What policies and controls are they subject to? Again, any cloud vendor that can’t answer these questions thoroughly and satisfactorily should probably be avoided.

2. Risk management metrics & programs: After attending numerous track sessions on this subject – and after speaking with numerous IT leaders here at the conference – it became clear to me that many companies’ risk management programs are ineffective. The major culprit here is a distinct lack of relevant risk metrics, or the inability to accurately report on those metrics. Some steps to remediate and close the gaps in knowledge include:

• Meet with key stakeholders across the company and achieve consensus on what the risks are and you how define those risks.
• Decide which risk vectors are the most important to your organization. Is it vendor management? BYOD? Supply chain? Data? Again, consensus amongst your stakeholders will be paramount to the success of the program.
• Choose just a small number of key metrics, say 3 to 5 at most. Any more than that and you run the risk of losing important information in all the noise.
• Keep lines of communication open internally by pushing out the metrics dashboard to all relevant persons, and make doubly sure that the dashboard is consistently refreshed with timely, accurate data.

3. GRC software solutions: Long before going to RSA this year I had been seeing a lot of confusion from Info-Tech clients about GRC software. Common questions focused on things like who owns the GRC solution internally, who should choose the solution, who should fund it, and other such concerns. But most often I would I hear “how do I know if this solution is right for me?” Let’s put some of these questions to rest:

• IT is always going to own and be responsible for the GRC solution. Funding, however, should always come from the top two user groups (e.g. Audit, Finance, other departments).
• Evaluate any GRC solution based on use cases. What are your potential use cases? There are community forums where you can find out what other enterprises have faced.
• For example, if vendor management and auditing are your top two use cases, then Legal and Procurement departments are the ones who should fund the GRC, with the IT department acting as steward as well as a sometime user for any IT compliance and controls features.
• Look for vendors who adhere to the Unified Compliance Framework.
• Look for vendors with robust community and support forums.
• Look for vendors that segment the market by persona or profile, not by company size.
• Finally, keep an eye out for our upcoming Vendor Landscape report on GRC software, to be released Spring 2013.

That’s about all for now. You can find tweets on these and other subjects at @A_R_Armstrong.

Thanks for reading!

The classic Application Integration (AI) functionalities of publish/subscribe, canonical message models, routing, brokering, and orchestration are being implemented in the Data Integration (DI) world, and blurring the lines between the two integration domains. Data formatting, transformation, enrichment are features that both domains have shared, because at the heart of every application programming interface (API) call is data. More recently, Change Data Capture (CDC) has brought real-time data messaging to the DI world.

The primary functional difference between AI and DI is the interface layer. AI interfaces at the API level whereas DI interfaces at the database level. The primary non-functional difference is the way that data volume is realized. An easy illustration is considering 1000 records of data being sent between applications. An AI scenario would represent those records as individual messages, sent 1000 times. In a DI scenario, those 1000 records would be sent in one message. Therefore, DI scenarios are not ideal when implemented in application integration Enterprise Service Buses, simply because ESBs are not engineered to process large data sets in each interaction.

Q: So if both approaches have their place, why are the lines blurring?

A: The technology they are being implemented in.

If a data integration product can’t call REST and SOAP APIs; or an application integration product can’t interact directly with a database; neither one of the vendors selling those products will get far in today’s IT landscape. Some of the larger vendors handle both approaches, but with different product sets, meaning customers need to spend more on software licensing to handle the two different scenarios. Other vendors focus on one or the other, and have some overlaps in each so they can claim to be all things to all people.

Wouldn’t it be great if data transformations written in an ESB are just as applicable in an ETL job, or vice-versa? Wouldn’t it be great if integration specialists didn’t need to know, and support multiple product sets in their environment that did similar, but different things. Wouldn’t it also be great if we could reduce the number of software licenses that needed to be negotiated, purchased and maintained.

The obvious part of the DIH is to tackle the integration hairball. Even with tooling, data integration has long been point-to-point. Extract, Transform, Load implies one source, and one target. The DIH provides the ability for multiple integration flows to re-use canonical data in a publish/subscribe paradigm, and remove the point-to-point nature of traditional data integration. Now the extract can work for multiple loads, because the ability to implement multiple transforms depending on target is now possible.

My only question is: how long will it take for the Data Integration Hub to evolve into a Data Services Bus (DSB) to run alongside, in or below the Enterprise Service Bus? Hub and spoke integration went the way of the dinosaurs when it became the single point of failure in a distributed environment.