net.work november 2008

the way business is movingnovember 2008

Infrastructure_communIcatIons_enterprIse IntellIgence_rIsk management_storage_mobIlIty_product updateInsIde:FeATURes://whAT’s Up?_keepIng yoUR bUsIness goIng/

who owns yoUR Ip/mobIle AcTIv 08_mobIle messAgIng FoR The mAsses

the next frontier managing virtualised infrastructure

10

THE NEXT FRONTIER

While it’s still a hot

button, virtualisation in

itself is already old-hat.

Once a company has

virtualised its environ-

ment however, how

does it keep its more

complex, yet better

performing infrastruc-

ture from getting away

from it? The answer is

superior management

– and it’s the next

big thing.

16

WHAT’S UP?

Your business will always be more

vulnerable than you think. Keeping

it going means making sure it can

survive a disaster. And doing that

means more than just backing

up data.

23 MOBILEACTIVE 08

Three hundred and eighty people

gathered from all over the world

in Johannesburg to discuss how

mobile phones might be used for

social and political purposes in

developing countries.

42 WHO OWNS YOUR IP?

A company or individual engaged

in commerce for obvious reasons

wants to ensure that they own their

intellectual property. This sounds

silly but unfortunately ownership

of intellectual property is often

not given enough attention until

it is too late and a company or

individual finds that they have in-

advertently given away their rights

either partially or completely.

REGulARs03 Ed’S COLUMN

04 NEWS

44 PROdUCT UPdATES

sECTIONs23 COMMUNICATIONS

26 STORAGE

30 ENTERPRISE INTELLIGENCE

34 RISK MANAGEMENT

36 ENTERPRISE 2.0

CONTENTs NOvEmbER 2008 - vIRTuAlIsATION IssuE

PAGE 10

PAGE 26 PAGE 17

KEYNOTEs32 THE 2008 bOssIEs

Best of Open Source

Software Awards.

36 NINE CONTENTIOus

IT IssuEs

Gartner analysts outline the

most contentious IT issues.

41 sTAYING ON COuRsE

The guide to identifying,

managing and reducing

complexity.

44 THE ANDROID

HAs lANDED

HTC is officially first to market

with a smartphone based on

Google’s Android o/s.

Welcome to this, the November issue of (net dot work).

As this issue goes to press, things seem to be getting very, very cloudy: from the rain-interrupted 4-ball over the week-end (wet clouds), the ongoing economic crisis (murky clouds), and the virtualisation hot-spots of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ which are driving storage into the ‘clouds’ (tech clouds).

my golf didn’t improve when the rain came. Neither do the dark clouds surrounding the current financial crisis appear to be lifting any time soon. But talk of cloud computing and all of a sudden there seems to be an electric buzz in the air.

A recent survey of 875 organisations by Storage expo (www.storage-expo.com) found that the main driver of their current storage policy is storage effectiveness (60%) necessitated by the need for reliability, scalability and access speed. The second most important driver was storage efficiency (33%) resulting from the need to cope with cost vs. capability. The least popular drivers were green criteria (7%).

As Jon collins, Service Director, Freeform Dynamics notes, “This is quite fascinating, and confirms a trend that we have seen in other studies: that organisations are prioritising effectiveness over efficiency when it comes to setting policy and making purchasing decisions.”

With data storage volumes still growing at over 50% per annum, the need for effective and efficient storage architecture has never been greater.

Virtualisation is proving to be a catalyst for introducing or revitalising related technologies. It is easier to move virtual resources around a data centre in response to demand, to deploy new resources more rapidly, and to redeploy them once they are no longer required. And it is certainly easier than in the past to integrate surrounding tools with virtualised resources. on that note, in this month’s , we focus on a number of these topics, including virtualisation, and business continuity.

Check out:• THE NEXT FRONTIER - While it’s still a hot button,

virtualisation in itself is already old-hat. once a company has virtualised its environment however, how does it keep its more complex,

yet better performing infrastructure from getting away from it? The answer is superior management – and it’s the next big thing.

reports.• WHAT’S UP? - Your business will always be more

vulnerable than you think. Keeping it going means making sure it can survive a disaster. And doing that means more than just backing up data. investigates.

• MOBILEACTIVE 08 - Three hundred and eighty people gathered from all over the world in Johannesburg to discuss how mobile phones might be used for social and political purposes in developing countries.

• WHO OWNS YOUR IP? - A company or individual engaged in commerce for obvious reasons wants to ensure that they own their intellectual property. This sounds silly but unfortunately ownership of intellectual property is often not given enough attention until it is too late and a company or individual finds that they have inadvertently given away their rights either partially or completely.

We also have a look at some of the best of open source software awards, or The 2008 BoSSIeS, and report back on what Gartner analysts think are the most contentious IT issues of the day.

enjoy this month’s read - - the way business is moving.

Sincerely,Darren SmithManaging Editor

PS: All feedback, brickbats and praise, would be welcomed. Contact me directly on [email protected].

www.netdotwork.co.za 03

Managing Editor_Darren Smith [email protected]

Editorial dEpartMEnt

Contributing Editor_Andrew Seldon [email protected]

Sub-Editor_Zamani [email protected]

portal Editor_Katie [email protected]

buyErS’ guidE_Liz [email protected]

ConSulting Editor_ Paul Booth

ColuMniStS Brett Haggard, Simon Dingle, Paul Booth

ContributorS Chris Norton, Dave Paulding, Russell Southwood, Gary Lawrence, Graham Duxbury, Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, ComputerWire, Lance Abramson

SalES dEpartMEnt

SalES dirECtor_Jane van der Spuytor_Jane van der [email protected]

SalES ExECutivES Shirley McGeer [email protected] Tehini [email protected] Karam [email protected]

CirCulation ManagEr_Carmen Sedlacek [email protected]

SubSCriptionS_Justin [email protected]

dESign & layout

dESign_Infiltrate MediaproduCtion_Technique DesignrEpro & printing_Intrepid Printersphotography_ Whitecliffs Photography

publiShEr

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Copyright © 2008 by technews technews t publishing. all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, adapted, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the editors, publisher, or advertisers.

ed’s column

Spatial awareness marketingMapIT has released a dramatically revamped version of MarketScope, the enterprise business intelligence tool that continues to drive and revolutionise geo-spatial planning. The four-module program marries proprietary company information and demographic research data to geographic search and locate processes that re-define and identify opportunities in the trading environment. MapIT would go as far as to state that without spatial awareness, a business cannot deliver customised services reliably; it would find the endeavour complex, costly and time consuming. Geo-location expertise of this nature and accuracy literally signals the end of ‘hit and miss’ marketing”.

NEWS

Altech

Altech has invested 10% in the Kenyan

government’s undersea fibre optic

projects, called Teams, one of five

undersea cable projects linking Africa

with the rest of the world.

A-link technologies

China-based A-Link Technologies has

established a phone assembling plant in

Rwanda that is capable of producing 600

mobile phones per day.

cisco

Cisco has made a R215m investment in

the Cisco Innovation Hub Technology

Centre (CIHTC) that will include an

InnovationLab, a global talent acquisition

programme, the Cisco Netversity, an

Entrepreneur Institute and a software

development program.

picturE thiSNews in pictures, brought to you by Technews.co.za

04 November 2008_

SpriNglEap.com ScorES iNNovatioN accoladEA few months ago Springleap.com was nominated into the top 100 most innovative companies in the world for the prestigious Innovation 100 awards hosted every year by The Standard. The results announced in October, placed Springleap.com as the 2nd Most Innovative Retail Company Worldwide, beating the likes of The Apple Application Store and Amazon.com and Springleap’s biggest competitor Threadless.

Springleap is the only South African company to be nominated in this category for the Innovation Awards. From a small shop in Sea Point, to winning an international award, Springleap.com is really putting Cape Town small business on the map.

LG Electronics SA appoints new MDLG Electronics South Africa has announced the appointment of Peet van Rooyen as its new Managing Director to succeed S.T. Tae. Van Rooyen, who has been with LG Electronics South Africa for six years, was Sales Director: Consumer Sales LG Electronics South Africa.

Van Rooyen is the first non-Korean head of an LG Electronics subsidiary company globally. His appointment is part of LG’s global strategy that the company’s subsidiaries are led by local people with local market knowledge thus ensuring LG remains locally relevant and a stronger globally competitive company.

BotSWaNa

tElEcommuNicatioNS

Botswana Telecommunications has

appointed Thapelo Lippe, ex CEO of

Orange Botswana, as CEO of Botswana

Telecommunications.

NaShua

Nashua has announced the appointments

of Graham Rhodes as Managing Director

of Nashua Office Automation; and Chris

Scoble as Managing Director of Nashua

Mobile, following the resignation of Mark

Taylor, Managing Director of Nashua

Mobile (Mark is joining Vodacom).

datatEc

Datatec has made a 50,01% investment

in India’s Inflow Technologies, an ICT

business that focuses on technology

enablement and distribution of security,

storage and networking products,

services and solutions.

dialoguE group

Dialogue Group Peter Watt, the ex-BCX

CEO, as non-executive chairman of

Dialogue Group following the resignation

of Stephen Rodger.

EricSSoN

Ericsson is to establish an innovation

centre in Sub-Saharan Africa to develop

mobile applications that will benefit

society as a whole, but with a special

focus on meeting the needs of poor and

rural populations.


Social lendingAngelmoola, the first Online Social Lending Exchange in Africa, has launched. Social lending (also known as P2P lending) has been with us for thousands of years, so there’s nothing new or complex about borrowing money from someone else. The banks have been doing the same thing with your money for centuries, you put the money in, they lend the money out and they make all the profits. Now, according to AngelMoola.co.za, you can regain your power and do-it-yourself. You lend money and make a far greater return. You borrow money on far better terms, no-one feels cheated. Hey, you can even buy shares in AngelMoola if you so wish.

Google has opened up its mobile phone platform to anyone who wants it. All of the work that has been poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project.

According to the developers working on the project, Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. And everything is there, from the bootloader

all the way up to the applications. Quite something.

Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools around.

Google gives Android away free

SomE FiNE priNt

As Forbes magazine noted,

Android was not released

entirely as open-source

software, at least as that

concept is understood by

the open-source movement.

The most significant

difference is that Google has

specified an Apache License

for Android, which means

that if users or businesses

create derivative products

based on Android, they are

not required to make those

products open or share

them with other members

of the Android community.

By contrast, any programs

or products created using

the LiMo open-source

platform must be shared

with everyone else.

Get source: http://source.

android.com/download.

NaSpErS

Naspers has announced a joint venture

between its Chinese subsidiary, Tencent

and its Indian counterparts, MIH India

Holdings and MIH India Global Internet, to

attack the wireless market in India.

ugaNda

The Ugandan Communications

Commission has announced that it had

awarded a telecommunications licence to

SA-based Smile Communications that is

owned by a consortium of Saudi Arabian

investors (79%); and, Irene Charnely (ex

MTN Group Director), Paul Savage and

Sharron Vanessa Naidoo.

NEtSurit

Netsurit and Millennium Computer

Services (MCS) have merged. Netsurit

is a managed outsourced IT provider

specialising in the SME market; whilst

Cape-Town based MCS provides IT

consultancy, network deployment and

Internet services to the Western Cape

corporate sector.

rWaNda

The authorities in Rwanda have

announced that there are now four serious

contenders vying for the third national

telecommunications licence. They are

Larrycom for Investment, a privately-

owned Sudanese company, Nasdaq-listed

Millicom Cellular International; Telecel

Globe, an Egyptian company established

by Orascom Telecom (Egypt); and, Zain

(Celtel). An approved decision is expected

by year-end.

NEWSBrought to you by Technews.co.za

SymaNtEc acquirES mESSagElaBS For $695m Security software and services company Symantec has agreed to buy UK-based online messaging security provider MessageLabs for $695m.

Symantec said the acquisition will enable it to expand its software-as-a-service offerings with the integration of MessageLabs’ online email and instant-messaging service into its online backup, storage, and other SaaS offerings. It said MessageLabs’ 14 worldwide data centres and capability in SaaS sales, operations, and support will also enable international expansion of its Symantec Protection Network services.

John W Thompson, chairman and chief executive at Symantec, said: “By combining MessageLabs with our Symantec Protection Network team, we have one of the strongest portfolios of cloud-based infrastructure services and a great foundation on which to grow.”

This is the fifth acquisition made by Symantec this year.

vErizoN BuyS alltEl For $28BN US-based telecoms services provider Verizon Wireless has agreed to acquire its rival Alltel for $28.1bn in a move that will create the largest cellular phone services provider in the US.

Verizon will acquire Alltel equity for $5.9bn and assume $22.2bn in debt. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

If the deal goes through, Verizon will become the largest cellular services provider in the US with 80 million subscribers. AT&T with 71.4 million

customers is currently the largest mobile service provider in the US followed by Sprint Nextel and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile.

Lowell McAdam, the president and chief executive at Verizon Wireless, said: “This move will create an enhanced platform of network coverage, spectrum, and customer care to better serve the growing needs of both Alltel and Verizon Wireless customers for reliable basic and advanced broadband wireless services.”

Verizon Wireless spent $9bn for new spectrum in the FCC’s recent 700 MHz spectrum auction. It has also started to offer the BlackBerry Storm touch screen phone from Canadian Smartphone maker Research In Motion to counter iPhone’s exclusive availability from rival AT&T.

oraclE acquirES primavEra Oracle has announced that it is to acquire Primavera, a software company that focuses on enterprise project portfolio management, PPM. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition follows Oracle’s moves to expand its services, transport, and construction, STC, business. While Oracle already has a significant existing client base in project- intensive industries, through a combination of core technology assets, middleware, Siebel, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Agile, there is still heavy supplier fragmentation in those markets.

By acquiring Primavera, it has started to arm its salesforce with stronger arguments to push for highly lucrative enterprise licensing agreements.

06 November 2008_

“For a successful technology, real-

ity must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be

fooled.”RichaRd P. Feynman

Say What#@?

gartner analysts named the

top 10 technologies and

trends at its Symposium/

itxpo in orlando, Fla.

Gartner analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends it predicts will be strategic for most organisations, defining “strategic technology” as having the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.

Taking it a step further, Gartner defines “significant impact” to include factors such as high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major

dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

Gartner said the technologies impact an organisation’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable a strategic advantage from early adoption.

“Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organisation,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Companies should look

at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market.”

• Virtualisation

• Cloudcomputing

• Servers–beyondblades

• Web-orientedarchitecture

• Enterprisemashups

• Socialsoftware

• Socialnetworking

• Unifiedcommunications

• Businessintelligence

• GreenIT

technology, reality must take

precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be

fooled.”

Top 10 strategic technologies 2009

ca acquirES idFocuS CA has acquired identity management software company IDFocus for an undisclosed sum. IDFocus was founded in 1997 and develops software for access controls.

CA said IDFocus’s advance components extensions, ACE, software will now be rebranded and sold as part of CA’s Identity Management software to enable organisations to manage identity lifecycles and meet compliance requirements.

CA said the integration of its Identity Manager with IDFocus’s ACE will prevent violations related to the segregation of duties. If a policy violation is detected, it said the Identity Manager will block the transaction, preventing violations before occurrence.

Dave Hansen, senior vice president and general manager of CA security management, said: “Identity management is essential to comprehensive IT security and the integration of CA Identity Manager and ACE technology enables CA to deliver a robust and powerful identity management solution.”

takEovEr Bid For WavEcom France-based digital security vendor Gemalto has launched an all-cash tender offer for wireless technology company Wavecom.

Gemalto is offering 7 euros ($9.50) a share, a premium of 72% over Wavecom’s last week closing price, and 20 euros ($27) per convertible bond. The offer values Wavecom at over 100m euros ($135.9m).

Wavecom, which was founded in 1993, has its headquarters in Paris, France. It has subsidiaries in Hong Kong, the US, Brazil, UK, and Germany. It recorded sales of 202.3m euros ($274.7m) in 2007.

Gemalto reported revenue of 1.63bn euros ($2.21bn) in 2007. It provides digital security and has 85 offices in 40 countries. It has 10 000 employees including 1 300 R&D engineers.

Olivier Piou, chief executive at Gemalto, said: “Machine to Machine is an attractive and growing market, with the opportunity to connect billions of devices, and Wavecom is at the forefront of this industry. Gemalto will provide Wavecom with the scale and resources to capture the full growth potential of M2M, and give its employees a truly global reach and working environment.”


“I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”Steve BallmeR, micRoSoFt (a meRe 22 dayS lateR, micRoSoFt inveSted $240 million in FaceBook.)

Say What#@?

NEt 1 uEpS

tEchNologiES

Nasdaq-listed Net 1 UEPS Technologies

(formerly Aplitec) has listed on the main

board of the JSE. Net 1 had revenues of

nearly $250m in its latest fiscal year.

vodacom

Telkom has announced that it has agreed

a R22,5bn deal with Vodafone for an

additional 15% stake in Vodacom; and

then for a subsequent listing of Vodacom.

This deal, together with the Telkom media

sell-off deal expected soon, leaves Telkom in

a position to resurrect talks re its future with

interested parties such as Mvelaphanda.

coNvErgENcE

partNErS

Convergence Partners Investments, a

venture capital firm in which Andile

Ngcaba is involved, has made a 22,55%

investment in SkillPod Media, an online

casual gaming company.

“I think these

networks] are going

open source software vendor red

hat has announced a partnership

with security technology and

services provider tresys technology

to provide government and

enterprise security services for

linux platforms.

The companies will collaborate to provide security services including security engineering, secure application development, virtualisation security, and compliance certification and accreditation support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

Tresys said it is already a contributor to the Security-Enhanced Linux, SELinux, kernel, which was developed in coordination with the open source community and the National Security Agency. Tresys hosts the SELinux upstream repository, which is the central point for the development of SELinux.

Red Hat has also integrated full SELinux support into the community-based Fedora distribution and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Gary Latham, executive vice president of corporate development at Tresys, said: “We share the belief that applications built on SELinux offer security that is among the strongest commercially available today, and we are looking forward to delivering the services customers require to design secure networks, protect platforms, build secure applications, and meet regulatory compliance commitments.”

kontron, a germany-based manufacturer of

miniature computers, has agreed to acquire

intel’s communications rackmount server

business for an undisclosed sum.

The communication servers from Intel will be integrated into Kontron’s family of communications platforms and industrial rackmount servers. Kontron expects 2009 revenue from this business unit to be more that $40m.

The companies will work together in the transition period to ensure a continuous supply

of products and support and services to Intel customers.

Doug Davis, vice president of the digital enterprise group and general manager of the embedded and communications group at Intel, said: “Intel is pleased to reach this agreement with Kontron, an Intel Embedded Communications Alliance Premier member and one of the world’s leading embedded computer companies. We will work closely with them to transition support for customers of these products.” The deal is expected to close early this month.

Intel sells off communications server business

Red Hat and Tresys Form Linux Security Alliance

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.”alice kahn

dimENSioN data

Dimension Data has acquired a 51%

stake in Angola-based Sistemas Redes e

Communicações, an IT solutions company,

a move which marks the launch of

Dimension Data Angola.

FaritEc

Faritec has acquired Ubushu, a supplier of

Novell identity and access management

solutions. The deal also includes the

latter’s 30% stake in Linux Systems

Dynamics.

alliaNcE miNiNg

Alliance Mining has appointed Eugene

de Kok as Executive Chairman and Alwyn

Steenkamp as CEO.

galdoN data

Galdon Data has acquired Abnoba, a

business automation company and

Microsoft Certified Partner.

motorola

Mark Kelly has been appointed as SA

Country Manager for Motorola.

mtN

MTN has acquired Afnet, a Côte d’Ivoire-

based ISP and Arobase Telecom, a land

line operator that also has a CDMA

operator’s licence.

quEScom

QuesCom, a provider of VOIP-mobile

convergence and telecommunications

application solutions, has acquired

Innovations New product Design, a R&D

company that is known for its Least Cost

Routing solutions.

vodaFoNE payS $2.4BN For additioNal 15% oF vodacom Vodafone has agreed to acquire an additional 15% stake in South African wireless provider Vodacom for ZAR 22.5bn ($2.4bn) from South Africa-based fixed-line operator Telkom.

It will give Vodafone a 65% controlling stake in Vodacom, which offers services in South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Tanzania.

It said the bid has the approval of Telkom, which owns 50% of Vodacom, and the South African government, which owns 38% of Telkom. Telkom will also spin off a 35% stake in Vodacom to existing Telkom shareholders and list the company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

The move continues Vodafone’s expansion in emerging markets with acquisitions in Turkey, India, and Ghana to make up for slower growth in Europe.

iBm oFFErS collaBoratioN SaaS IBM has introduced a software-as-a-service social networking and business collaboration offering.

It said Bluehouse includes collaboration tools for instant messaging, web conferencing, document sharing, profiles, and directories for business networking communities.Bluehouse is part of IBM’s broader cloud com-puting initiative that includes an alliance with Google. Earlier this year, it announced plans to invest $400m to set up two data centres in the US and Japan. In March, it launched its first European cloud computing centre in Dublin, Ireland, and in June it established centres in China and South Africa.

hp ExpaNdS pc maNuFacturiNg iN chiNa Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to open a second manufacturing plant in China in the western city of Chongqing.

HP said the Chinese government will build the 20 000-square-metre facility in Chongqing. The plant will manufacture notebook and desktop PCs for Chinese customers and is expected to be operational by 2010.

The company already has manufacturing operations in Shanghai, where it makes desktop computers, workstations, and printers. It also opened a development centre in 2004 as part of an initiative to design products specifically for the Chinese market.

Todd Bradley, executive vice president of personal systems at HP, said: “As the world’s leading PC maker, the world’s largest component buyer, and a contributor to the Chinese economy since 1981, we look forward to expanding opportunities for local talent in the heart of China to help us better serve the Chinese market for computing products and services.”

NEWSBrought to you by Technews.co.za

08 November 2008_

Say What#@?

A week can be a long timeWhenitcomestonews,aweekcanbealongtime.Whenitcomestotechnews,itcanfeellikeamillennium.Thebigtechstoriesplayingout include India’s lunar launch, Google’s Android launch, the proliferation of SaaS application stores (iTunes, Android, Blackberry), the cloud computingstrategiesofOracle,IBM,VMWareandothers...andlotsofconsumertech.TheconsumerisationofIT,asGartnerputsit.

“TheVirtualDatacenterOSallowsbusinessesto efficiently pool all types of hardware resources - servers, storage and network–intoanaggregatedon-premisecloud–and,whenneeded, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional compute capacity.” -ChrisNorton,VMwareSA(VMwareannouncesVirtualDatacenterOperatingSystem(VDC-OS)).

The nexT fronTierManaging virtualised infrastructure

> By Brett Haggard

10 November 2008_

feaTure

While it’s still a hot button, virtualisation in itself is already old-hat. once a coMpany has virtualised its environMent hoWever, hoW does it keep its More coMplex, yet better perforMing infrastructure froM getting aWay froM it? the ansWer is superior ManageMent – and it’s the next big thing.


Virtualisation is undoubtedly a hot button in business IT circles today.

Testimony to this is borne out by the growing buzz surrounding the topic and the fact that a Gartner report released last month, cited virtualisation as first on the list

of strategic technologies businesses must take cognisance of for 2009.The practice of virtualising server workloads and storage volumes is

old news however. Hypervisors – the clever intermediary layers that allow for multiple

server images to run on single physical servers – are in abundance and have become satisfactorily mature in their functionality.

Similarly, the technologies that allow for storage volumes to be virtualised, or appear as a single volume, even though they are spanned across multiple disparate physical disk solutions, have reached a more than functional level.

And largely, customers have been extremely satisfied by the additional performance and efficiency they have been able to achieve by virtualising their infrastructure.

The next challenge is providing platforms that allow IT management teams to easily and effectively manage these virtualised environments. Without the ability to manage a virtualised datacentre using fewer resources, the benefits brought to the table by virtualisation are rendered moot.

Managing virTualised environMenTsManaging a non-virtualised datacentre environment is enough of a challenge today.

To keep their organisations’ business systems ticking over, IT teams require tools not that allow them to monitor server load and storage capacity thresholds, but to do so across disparate operating systems and hardware architectures.

Throw virtualisation into the mix and suddenly there’s an extra level of complexity they need to cope with.

Brandon Atkinson, Business Service Automation boss in HP Software says that although on the one hand is virtualisation has become the customer’s best friend, it can prove to be a huge headache if they

“If tHe company loses track of tHe Images In Its VIrtualIsed enVIronment, tHey mIgHt well HaVe VIrtual macHInes sIttIng around Idle, sappIng resources – and In doIng so, renderIng mucH of tHe BenefIt VIrtualIsatIon offers In terms of Better effIcIency moot.”

feaTure

12 November 2008_

don’t have the tools and processes to manage their new virtualised environment well.

“Our job in Business Service Automation is to help them manage that extra complexity virtualisation can add into the management of a datacentre,” he says.

“Today there are solutions capable of managing a fleet of virtual machines,” Atkinson says.

In fact, many of them come bundled as part of the hypervisor suites customers use to embark on a virtualisation drive.

“Most of the virtualisation management solutions available today are siloed in nature – they are designed to deal with either a client, server or storage specific discipline; and furthermore to deal with specific kinds of virtualisation, on specific operating systems.”

The problem, Atkinson says, is that a change in one part of a business process impacts more than one of these silos.

CuTTing aCross The silosFor example, to manage a change in an order management system that’s running on virtualised infrastructure, the IT team would require discrete tools to manage the virtualised server, storage, network interfaces and possibly even the desktops that solution is delivered to.

“That’s four different silos,” he says, “and generally, the company would require the four different teams in charge of those domains to work perfectly together.

“To avert this potentially confusing situation, a new area that HP is pioneering solutions in, called ‘run-book’ or operations automation comes into play,” he says.

Atkinson says the term ‘run book’ is a colloquialism for an operations manual.

Since an operations manual is where IT departments establish and set the technical IT workflows and processes, ‘run-book’ automation is the automation of those technical IT workflows and processes.

“With a ‘run-book’ automation solution in place, the IT professional that’s responsible for deploying a new service, simply logs into a tool and provisions the new service – all of the individual steps involved in provisioning the underlying silos, such as servers, operating systems, storage and networking devices are orchestrated in the background.”

In some cases, he admits this will involve some manual interaction, like when a manager is required to sign off on a certain change or step.

“The ‘run-book’ automation solution however initiates the steps and carries them out once approval is given,” he says.

Managing ongoing ChangeAtkinson says that this form of automation is not only useful when it comes to speeding up provisioning of virtual and physical infrastructure for new services.

“Since there’s more change in virtual environments than there is in the physical environments, companies need these tools to keep up with the constantly changing demands of their IT,” he says.

This could mean automatically provisioning additional processor capacity or storage as and when specific applications require it.

Beyond this, he says that these new tools also assist customers in assessing the impact of a change on their environment before starting the process of initiating that change.

“If a company deploys a new virtual machine on a server that’s already part of their virtualised environment, they need to see what services depend on that server being available. If it’s too risky, they have the ability to opt out,” he says.

dealing wiTh sprawlAnother area that begs addressing in the virtualised environment is virtual server sprawl.

“Because it’s easier and cheaper than ever to spin up another operating system image in the virtualised world, customers can lose track of what’s in their datacentre and what purpose it’s serving.

“These tools allow for tight controls to be applied to who in the business is allowed to spin up a new image and monitor what the reason for that was.”

If the company loses track of the images in its virtualised environment, they might well have virtual machines sitting around idle, sapping resources – and in doing so, rendering much of the benefit virtualisation offers in terms of better efficiency moot.

“Conceptually it’s not all that different from defragmenting a computer’s hard drive, except that it applies to virtual server instances in the datacentre,” he says.

governanCe, risk and CoMplianCeA last benefit this new breed of solutions offers is the ability to take control of compliance, standardisation and security.

“IT fails its audits when it hasn’t used the prescribed processes for doing things. And in the virtualised world, with its added complexity, this becomes a more common occurrence.

“We have tools that ensure adherence to customers’ defined compliance policies – regardless of whether it comes to physical or

“cItrIx cloud centre (c3) solutIon Is desIgned to gIVe cloud proVIders a complete set of serVIce delIVery Infrastructure BuIldIng Blocks for HostIng, managIng and delIVerIng cloud-Based computIng serVIces.”

virtual servers – and furthermore, allow IT to perform real-time reporting on how compliant it is with its own standards.”

Often however, IT policies need to be deviated from – and this is generally because an application has an idiosyncrasy that dictates a different operating system or virtual machine configuration.

Customers therefore need a red light/green light dashboard that indicates what is compliant with policy and not, and when its not, warn the IT team and give it the ability to either define a new policy, or document the reason for deviation from the policy.

Atkinson believes that the convergence of tools that address both physical and virtual infrastructure management are needed and inevitable.

In many ways, it’s the next frontier.

virTualisaTion for The CloudWhile it’s an accepted fact that hypervisors and virtualisation solutions have reached an acceptable level of maturity, work is still ongoing to ensure that solutions are able to eke even more efficiency out of their hardware hosts and that currently unaddressed areas of the IT market can begin benefitting from the advantages virtualisation brings.

Looking at where things are destined to go in the coming years, Citrix recently announced an updated version of the Xenserver technology it acquired in last year and the extension of this solution into the cloud computing space.

Nick Keane, country manager for Citrix says that of the roughly 300 enhancements announced with XenServer 5 last month, greater storage support and a new high availability option that allows customers to configure their datacentre to automatically restart a virtual on a different piece of hardware if it crashes rank at the top.

The exciting part of Citrix’s announcements however centre on its tailoring of solutions for the cloud computing world, with its newly announced Cloud Centre solution.

“This new area of solutions allows us to build out the cloud environment for enterprises or service providers that provide functionality to customers in a cloud-computing manner,” he says.

Examples of the latter would include organisations such as Salesforce.com and Internet Service providers that host ERP, CRM and similar systems on behalf of their customers.

Keane says the Citrix Cloud Centre (C3) solution is designed to give cloud providers a complete set of service delivery infrastructure building blocks for hosting, managing and delivering cloud-based computing services.

arChiTeCTure for The fuTure of serviCesApart from the underlying virtualisation technology that has made XenServer an important player in this space, Cloud Centre includes a reference architecture that combines the individual capabilities of several Citrix product lines to offer a powerful, dynamic, secure and highly available service-based infrastructure ideally suited to large-scale, on-demand delivery of both IT infrastructure and application services.

This architecture consists of a bundling of four components that are already part of Citrix’s portfolio.

The first of these, XenServer Cloud Edition is nothing new.

From what we can gather, it’s for all intents and purposes XenSever standard edition, except for the fact that it benefits from a consumption based pricing model.

NetScaler – the second component – automatically scales the number of VMs or servers charged with taking care of an application or service in the cloud, so that optimal performance can be delivered to customers.

Keane says that third component, WANScaler, allows for customers to easily begin moving their on-premise virtual machines and application resources into a cloud-based datacentre and back again as needed.

“And lastly, Workflow Studio, provides an orchestration and workflow capability that dynamically controls and automates the architecture so that it fits in with the customer’s defined business and IT policies,” he says.

While these solutions could enable the cloud-based computing model to flourish in the next couple of months, Keane acknowledges there are inhibitors for the local market.

“It’s going to be challenging to enable WANScaler’s ability to move workloads to and from the cloud with the limited connectivity and bandwidth South Africa has at its disposal,” he says.

“We are actively on the lookout for a solution to this and welcome any and all solutions from the market,” he adds.

high-availabiliTyWhile virtualisation has largely traded on its ability to give companies better efficiency in their IT environments, at the outset it didn’t provide for too much redundancy and high-availability.

While the predominant players in grass-roots virtualisation, such as VMware, Sun Microsystems with its Solaris Containers and LDOMs and IBM with mPars have built some level of “high availability (HA)” into their solutions, most of these solutions don’t have the enterprise-ready features that many customers require like rich application monitoring and failover.

“Furthermore,” says Eric Hennessey, Director, Technical Product Management at Symantec, “these HA solutions only work on particular platforms. Most IT organisations have a mix of Windows, Unix, and server virtualisation in their datacentres.

“This means that the IT organisation has different tools on different platforms leading to extra personnel and training costs to manage the entire HA infrastructure,” he adds.

He says that Symantec’s new Veritas Cluster Server One makes a giant leap in traditional clustering and high availability.

“With this new product, IT organisations can use a single product to manage across their physical and virtual, multi-platform data centre. And with the increasing complexity of applications – in some cases the web server or application server may reside in a virtual machine, while

the database may be on a physical server, they can now provide high availability for the entire IT service, even if part of it is running in virtual servers,” Dan Lamorena, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Symantec chips in.

Hennessey adds that Veritas Cluster Server One’s virtual-isation support also helps customers reduce the amount of spare servers it needs to purchase for high availability.

“VCS One allows administrators to assign applications a priority. For example, a mission critical workload may be a Tier 1 application, while a test/dev application may be a Tier 4.

“This allows customers to repurpose their test/dev servers to be failover targets for production workloads. In the event of a server failure, the test/dev system could be shut down, and the production application could be started in its place.

“This allows companies to truly get the benefits of consolidating – reduced capital expenditures.

reduCing pain“They can also leverage the capabilities that are coming out in new hardware in terms of capacity on demand, like what’s available with IBM’s Dynamic Logical Partitions (DLPARs),” he says.

“With VCS One, they will be able to “light up” the proper amount of CPU and memory resources when starting an application, then de-allocate those resources upon shutdown...turning the lights out when they leave the room, as it were,” Hennessey says.

Lamorena adds that the product is also designed to reduce the operational pain usually associated with high availability solutions.

“Administration with Veritas Cluster Server One is designed to be easy.

“It provides a single front end so you can manage all the applications running in an environment that you are authorised to view, or just the one you care about.

“So if you log in to VCS One and you belong to the IT group responsible for marketing, for example, you will only see those servers and applications that belong to marketing and will have full control of those applications.

“You can tell them to start, stop, move, and more. That’s in addition to the traditional high availability functions that are still happening on the backend where if something breaks, Veritas Cluster Server One will move that application from one server to another,” he says.

feaTure

14 November 2008_

fanCy soMe loCal flavour?Virtualisation is not just the domain of international vendors.

A small local developer

called Starship Systems has a

compelling, home-grown offering

for this market and is aiming it

squarely at the SMB space.

Consisting of a hypervisor built

around VMWare’s pre-ESXI server,

some home-grown management

technology and a tiny appliance-

sized controller-box, Starship

Nebula VM solution streams

server images directly from a SAN

and automatically manages the

virtual server pool, removing the

complexity of virtualisation from

customer’s lives.

Because images are streamed

from a central storage system,

nodes in the cluster are brought

live in a matter of seconds and

load balancing and failover is

catered for in that if one virtual

machine fails, the load is switched

to another machine in the cluster.

Furthermore, since snapshots

of each virtual machine are taken

periodically, should a one fail, it

can be restored to another and

brought live within 30 seconds.

Starship says that only the

information that wasn’t saved

since the last snapshot is lost,

minimising data loss substantially.

Expansion of the cluster’s

capabilities also couldn’t be

simpler – the customer simply

plugs the new server into

the cloud and the controller

automatically adds it to the

cluster and begins provisioning

it with workloads.

Designed to work with

the CentOS, Solaris, Linux and

Windows Server 2003/2008

platforms, the solution seems

both versatile and cost effective

enough to service small and

medium-sized environments.

Overall, the Nebula is a well

rounded solution for customers

that need to virtualise on a budget

and being local, gives one the

reassurance that you’re supporting

and developing South African

IT innovation.

Where virtualisation was a pipe dream a decade ago, today it’s delivering good value to customers of all size. It’s clear that all the work hasn’t been done yet. New concepts like cloud computing and the need to cater for older, yet critical concepts such as availability, business continuity and disaster recovery are keeping this space exciting.

[opinion]

Chris Norton, regional manager for VMware SA, provides 7 steps CIOs need to consider when embarking on their virtualisation initiative. Demonstrated cases of virtualisation around the globe and locally have shown that planning is a key element to virtualisation success. So, how do companies get it right?

1 properly define The business Case There are many different reasons organisations decide to go the virtualisation route. For example you may need to get server sprawl under control or reduce your data

centre costs significantly. You may find that security and virus control is a huge issue and minimising downtime is a key driver for your move to virtualisation.

Whether it is one of these, a combination, or something else altogether driving your decision, ensure that you are very clear on these issues and document them. Clearly define the processes of the project. Know upfront what cost savings you expect through virtualisation. What third party application support policies are in place and how will this affect the project?

Once you have built the business case you can set about getting agreement from others within the business. Getting buy-in for virtualisation has its challenges. Business units are used to ‘owning’ their physical servers and keeping their applications and data in silos away from others. The practice and habits that come with decentralisation will require changing and as such you will need executive commitment and support from the CFO. Whatever the objections to virtualisation, know they will be there. Having a documented business case for the introduction of virtualisation and the flexibility it brings into your environment will help its adoption.

2 phased iMpleMenTaTion is CruCialTaking a phased approach is critical when implementing virtualisation. By splitting your roll-out in phases for example via department or application segment or region,

you are able to move carefully through each phase ensuring problems are attended to and developing the virtualisation skills of your teams. Your first phase which is usually the pilot phase, will provide you with a success case for your other migrations. In addition, by starting with a smaller amount of servers first you will be able to adapt your processes and strategy upfront if required.

3 perforManCe and ConsolidaTion raTios MusT be ConsideredThe number of virtual machines that can be run at target performance levels on a

given physical machine is referred to as the consolidation ratio. For example: ten virtual servers on one physical server = 10:1. Understanding your consolidation ratios is important for when you design and deploy your virtual infrastructure.

If you have a high consolidation ratio say of 15:1 or higher, the impact of a host going

Chris norton - regional Manager (vMware sa)

down is large and this needs to be considered when deploying disaster recovery elements of virtualisation. Aim for a 65% utilisation of your server hosts as you will need some flexibility to move virtual machines around in the event of planned or unplanned downtime.

4 peruse your CurrenT environMenT CarefullyIt stands to reason that if your servers, network or storage is badly configured in

the physical world they will be badly configured in the virtual world. If your applications are outdated or unsupported by the business, why virtualise them? Review your application and computing portfolios before virtualising your environment to reduce costs for virtualisation as well as overall support costs to the business.

5 pursue an evaluaTion of your CurrenT physiCal environMenTDoing an evaluation of your existing physical environment should be completed before

going ahead with virtualisation. Evaluate your server utilisation stats, access to storage such as SANs and NAS, network topology and requirements, disaster recovery implications, energy and cooling requirements as well as rack and space availability. Without this stage the design of the virtual infrastructure may not accurately reflect your actual requirements.

6 plan for shared sTorageYou need to have a well-defined storage provisioning and management process because to take advantage of the flexibility of a virtual infrastructure, shared storage

(SAN or NAS) must be in place. Ensure that you design redundancy in all levels of your shared storage and make sure vendor best practices are adhered to in the management of that system.

When you have a virtual infrastructure in place you introduce network virtualisation to your environment. As most 1GB NICs are highly under utilised, allocating numerous virtual machines with a single pair on 1GB NICs allows you to better use the hardware. However, they may be on different networks, VLANs or need different security contexts.

7 people skills need To be ConsideredIt is important to have the basic levels of virtualisation skills in-house to execute and resolve baseline issues. Review the skills sets that you currently have and ensure you

enhance their skills sets accordingly. You will need the following skills to design and deploy a VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 enterprise deployment:• VMware Certified Professional (VCP) Certification; • Basic to intermediate Linux skills; • Basic to intermediate backup and recovery skills; • Shared Storage (SAN/NAS) knowledge; • Intermediate networking knowledge, and;• Advanced server and OS skills.

The 7p’s of virTualisaTion planning

cio and business requireMents for a flexible, responsive, efficient coMputing infrastructure that deMonstrates significant roi has already been clearly deMonstrated by the business case for virtualisation. hoWever, What do cios need to consider before virtualising their environMent?


feaTure

16 November 2008_

feature


Your business will alwaYs be more vulnerable than You think. keeping it going means making sure it can survive a disaster. and doing that means more than just backing up data.

> By simon dingle

Business continuity is an ambiguous term. Its definitions differ from one vendor to the next. But essentially it’s about keeping

your business up – and that includes everything from the seat you sit on to your email archives. Every component of the business must be identified, analysed, scrutinised and prioritised. When the you-know-what hits the fan, how will your business survive?

feature

18 November 2008_

Every IT manager fears disks failing and corrupted databases – but those threats pale in comparison to fires and major natural disasters. Your business could lose not only its data, but also its premises, furniture, processes and, god forbid, people. Its something we don’t like thinking about, but should address nonetheless.

Obviously data is important and must be backed up. Of course it must be easy to restore. Doing so, however, is easier said than done, especially given the ever-growing amount of data accumulated by companies on a daily basis. Backing it up means moving it somewhere. And we all have virtual tons of the stuff cluttering up hard drives. Statistics show that most of it is unstructured too.

Brains versus BrawnJohn Aisien, VP of Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware says that there are two ways of taking care of the problem of dealing with massive amounts of data that need to be moved around.

“There’s the Einstein approach and the Schwarzenegger approach – age old brain versus brawn,” he says. “The brainy solution is to use a clever software approach and other innovative ways of taking care of the problem. The brawn approach is to answer the challenge with powerful hardware and use brute force to move data around. This includes putting in more pipes.”

It’s not to say that one approach is better, or cheaper, than the other. But what if you could put Einstein’s brain in Schwarzenegger’s body? According to Aisien, this is the approach Oracle is taking with its partner HP. Together the two vendors have a new storage product range they want you to throw money at.

“The answer is to ship less data between disks and servers, add more pipes and make existing pipes bigger,” he continues. “And that is why HP and Oracle have launched the Exadata Storage server. Oracle is now in the systems business. Oracle provides clever software that ensures that a minimum amount of data is moving through the pipes. If you

can do that, then you can offload servers. But with HP’s leading hardware we are also ensuring that there are more pipes and massively parallel grids. Bandwidth scales with capacity.”

Petrus Human, technical director for Attix5, a company that focuses on continuity, agrees with the brainy approach of being clever about what data you move around.

“We find most backup companies looking at reduplication or single instance storage for cutting down amounts of data. We also find that a lot of organisations still do full daily or weekly backups. This leads to numerous copies of the same data residing on storage devices.”

Attix5 believes that data selection is a far more intelligent approach to the problem.

“For example, some insist on backing up entire systems, including the operating system,” says Human. “This is a waste of time and storage. The operating system is also usually the reason for a crash happening in the first place. You really don’t want to restore a corrupted OS.

“A better way of tackling the problem is to identify and define critical data and only back that up. Do one full backup of it, and then only backup incremental changes going forward. With the right technology it will still be possible to roll back to any particular date’s backup set. With this approach we find that businesses only need to transfer between 0.25 and 5 percent of their backup selection in daily runs. It is then possible to easily transfer backup data even with ADSL lines in South Africa where the standard upload speed is 384 kilobits per second.”

Human says that a combination of onsite and offsite storage should be combined to ensure that backups can be restored in no time, and that data is safe even in the case of fire or theft.

“It is also important to note that lots of companies have critical data on laptops and removable devices. Up to 80 percent of corporate data goes home at night. So this also needs to be covered by being transferred onto a shared medium that gets backed up nightly,” he adds.

[OpiniOn]

Human cOntinuityIBM is known for its continuity solutions that

can literally respond to government-sized

disasters, with satellite links and tricked-out

vans full of hardware that will park onsite

and plug into the enterprise. However, while

IBM can get you gear in an emergency, and

then some, the company also suggests you

consider the role of your staff in a crises.

“While it’s important to build resiliency

into your business operations, it’s just as

important to build resiliency into your

human capital,” says William LaFontaine,

GM, IBM Global Technology Services for

Sub-Saharan Africa.

“Organisations that can build resiliency

into their human capital are more likely

to protect their most valuable resources

and maintain continuous operations in

the event of a disruption,” he says. “Many

forward-thinking companies are already

considering the impact of short-term

interruptions on normal business activities

and identifying appropriate actions to

sustain vital business processes.”

“However, there are few human

resource disaster recovery plans

comprehensive enough to meet the needs

of employees and the business in a time

of crisis,” warns LaFontaine. “In a crisis,

many organisations will be challenged to

safeguard and support employees while

continuing to deliver the services needed

to keep the business operational.”

“Remember, it’s rarely business as

usual after a disruption. The effort your

organisation makes now to protect your

human capital resiliency in the event of

a crisis will go a long way in helping it,

and your people, recover after the worst

is over.”

“The Brainy soluTion is To use a clever sofTware approach and oTher innovaTive ways of Taking care of The proBlem. The Brawn approach is To answer The challenge wiTh powerful hardware and use BruTe force To move daTa around.force

The big picTureHaving your data backed up is one thing, but it is useless without hardware to use it on. This is a source of vexation for many businesses. Having a backup site on standby makes good sense, especially if your business relies on a call centre, for example – but it seems wasteful to maintain an entire site that may or may not ever be used.

Another approach is to identify the critical hardware and processes in the business and make sure that backup equipment is available that enables the core to keep running while the less important aspects are restored. Or one could learn to share.

“Having a set of duplicate hardware at a business continuity outsourcer or second building is an option, but it’s expensive and only appropriate if you come to the conclusion that you can only be down for a few minutes or an hour or two,” says Allen Smith, CEO of ContinuitySA. “Most businesses like to think that they can only afford small downtimes, but are exaggerating. The truth is that if you suffer

a major fire for example, and your premises burns down, most people would consider restoring it in a few days to be a good job.

“So a more cost effective approach is to make use of a shared or syndicated service,” he explains. “Servers are available offsite and you subscribe to equipment required for recovery. You could be one of ten people subscribing to a system, and because the risk of multiple disasters is highly unlikely there is almost no chance of availability problems. In the case of disaster you then move to this shared equipment while procuring new hardware for the business.”

He adds that it is also important to test restorability. Many businesses assume that they are in the green because they have a plan, but have never tested their ability to recover from failure or disaster. This nature of test should be conducted regularly enough to ensure that the business has what it takes to weather a storm.

Smith also suggests that having a good backup strategy in place means making sure that business processes are streamlined and that the business is efficient and agile. While these qualities will ensure that the organisation can recover from disaster, it has other positive effects too – including increased profitability.

Ensuring continuity means backing up data, having standby equipment available, whether it is currently owned by the business or not, and being able to get your business processes back up and running as soon as possible in the case of a disaster. But some things really don’t need to be covered, and there may be others that you will later be pleased to have lost – like out-dated systems and defunct processes. Get your business in good shape and it will not only be more resilient to curveballs, but also more profitable.

[OpiniOn]

20 November 2008_

“mosT Businesses like To Think ThaT They can only afford small downTimes, BuT are exaggeraTing. The TruTh is ThaT if you suffer a major fire for example, and your premises Burns down, mosT people would consider resToring iT in a few days To Be a good joB.”

feature

The only communicaTions Tools my business needs are phonesValid point, but go back to your customers for a minute (and suppliers, employees and remote workers). If the phone was the only thing they relied on to contact you and vice versa, yes, your business or call centre might need only backup phone services to get through an outage. But what happens if you are forced to work with a smaller staff during an emergency, and your customers no longer have access to self-service tools such as automated FAQ responses or your website? Chances are your business will be overloaded with calls, and will not have sufficient staffing to handle them all.

We can do disasTer recovery ourselvesIf your organisation has made the move to voice over IP (VoIP), that may be true. Fundamentally, IP telephony supports DR via its distributed network architecture – which, during an outage at one location, makes it possible for an organisation to route calls and other voice interactions to an alternate, designated disaster site connected over a local or wide area network. Also, because IP sends calls as compressed voice “packets” over data networks, organisations can build a packet-based system for converged voice and data that is more reliable than traditional circuit-switched PBX phone systems and associated communications hardware.

However, the new breed of IP phones often used in a VoIP configuration require a dedicated power source within the enterprise, usually at HQ where an IP telephony server anchors enterprise-wide phone system capabilities. Interrupt power to that base location, and quite simply your IP phones will not work. Therefore the potential scenario ends up being a Catch 22 in that IP telephony can protect itself against a natural disaster, but cannot protect your business should Mother Nature decide to knock out power at the main office.

disasTer recovery planning is like insurance … overpriced, and seldom usedFair enough. But just like insurance, a business never realises how important a communications disaster recovery plan is until you need it – and do not have it. Research firm Gartner Dataquest estimates that two out of five enterprises experiencing a disaster go out of business within five years. Therefore, having a well-devised DR plan can not only save a company money in the long term, it can save the actual business.

my cusTomers Will undersTand if They cannoT geT ThroughWill they? It is true that most people are sympathetic towards businesses that suffer from the effects of a disaster, like those in the US that were recently devastated by hurricanes. But, as a customer, they may not be as sympathetic when other types of outages interrupt their ability to communicate with your company to place orders, check on the status of those orders, schedule a service call, etc. After all, customers contact a business to purchase a product or service they need, and unfortunately their sympathy will eventually run its course. Then they will choose – or be forced – to go to one of your competitors.

feaTure

When lightning strikes According to dAve PAulding, interActive intelligence’s regionAl sAles director for uK And AfricA, hAving A disAster mAnAgement system in PlAce will no longer bAnKruPt you, thAnKs to the move to softwAre-bAsed PlAtforms. but some orgAnisAtions Are still reluctAnt to mAKe the investment. rAther thAn sAying Any orgAnisAtion without An effective dr PlAn is mAKing A mistAKe, let’s looK At some of the common misPercePtions And reAsons why it is not A Priority.

If you are working with a technology vendor who understands your needs, it is possible to devise a DR strategy to suit your business and your pocket. You will be glad you took the long term view and made the investment when lightning strikes.

[opinion]


22 November 2008_

Q&A

WhitepAper

CAse study

updAte

OpiniOn

thOught LeAder

reseArCh

section keyline

QA

WP

cs

UD

oP

tl

Rs

MASHING-UP FOR FUN AND PROFIT,

By Brett Haggard PAGE30

23 COMMuniCAtiOns Learning about best practices for traditional

communications services, how to evaluate

and select outsourcing alternatives, and

leading the transition to VoIP.

26 stOrAge Learning how key storage and storage

network technologies work together to drive

your business. Clarifying how to use storage

protocols and technologies.

28 MObiLity Wireless, driving both technology and

strategy, is the future of IT and should be

at the strategic heart of your organisation’s

IT plans.

30 enterprise inteLLigenCe

The best of BPM, CRM, ERP, e-commerce,

business intelligence, project management,

application management, and

portal software.

34 risK MAnAgeMent

Identifying, mitigating and resolving

threats as they become more sophisticated

and cause more damage to businesses

than ever before.

At the core of all this energy was a very simple notion. The technology device of choice for the majority of people in developing continents like Africa is the mobile phone. If you want to deliver messages to people or get them to respond then SMS or voice is an obvious route to go down.

But mobiles are not just a delivery channel but are fast becoming a media in their own right. National consumer surveys in Balancing Act’s report African Broadcast and Film Markets showed that between 3-9% of respondents in a variety of countries named the mobile as one of the most used daily sources of information.

Five big storiesBut like the old Hollywood saying, there were only really five stories at MobileActive 08. These were identified by snappy tags like M-health or M-education: indeed, M- almost any development sector you care to think of. Well, there were actually eight areas of M-something: health, education, rural livelihoods (agriculture), governance (political campaigning), disaster warning and women.

Mobiles are now being used to: send out bulk mailings to key target groups (nurses); mobilise supporters; poll people and gather data; to provide answers to enquiries; to offer information support for activities; and raise funds. The majority of this activity is based

on the 160 characters available in SMS. In other words, it’s an instantaneous, wide angle media but you can’t say that much using it. But you can send several messages to overcome this limitation. However, as one-long time veteran of using technology for development in Africa told me: “Everyone knows how to use it and most people have access to it.”

Open source Freedom FoneThe sheer inventiveness of many of the different services was impressive. For example, I attended a presentation by Zimbabwe’s Kubatana.net who used the call centre functionality of Asterisk to create Freedom Fone. This was designed to counteract the tight control of media in that country by allowing users to phone in and listen to short radio-style programming. In the example aired musician Thomas Mapfumo talked of a campaign of “tough love” towards the Government.

The early pioneers of using mobiles for social purposes go back in Africa to the funding of the agricultural pricing service pioneered by Senegal’s Manobi in 1998. But like a lot of new development-based activity, the use of mobiles seems to operate in a memory-free present tense. The early precursors of this activity were those who gathered at the beginning of the millennium to try and use the Internet as way to break out of seemingly intractable development issues: technology would provide a magic pill that opened up new solutions.

On the one side you had the wild-eyed (often American) tech enthusiasts and on the other side, the mumbling choir of African policy makers who seemed to want something called the Information Society. And somewhere in between were the development professionals who were trying to make sense of it all.

commUnicAtionsLearning about best practices for traditional communications services, how to evaluate and select outsourcing alternatives, and leading the transition to VoIP.


mobileActive 08

Three hundred and eighTy people gaThered from all over The world in Johannesburg This week To discuss how mobile phones mighT be used for social and poliTical purposes in developing counTries. The organisers and hosTs sangoneT had expecTed 150 people buT The Topic clearly Touched a nerve. The evenT crackled wiTh The kind of energy ThaT happens when people gaTher on a Topic for The firsT Time. russell souThwood looks aT The issues raised by The evenT’s subJecT. By Russell Southwood, The Balancing Act

tl Mobile messaging for the masses – an idea whose time has come

Dashed hopesThe hopes for technology as a magic solution were dashed upon the rocks of a lack of infrastructure, a consequent shortage of users and the inability of the mumbling choir to remove the policy blockages to achieve the much-mentioned Information Society. The disillusioned and pragmatic headed in a number of different directions. Some of them moved from focusing on the Internet to thinking about how to use mobile phones. People like Peter Armstrong of One World who set up an SMS jobs service in Nairobi’s Kibera were part of this group. Others started campaigning to change both the fundamentals of price and infrastructure.

Whilst others, like Geek Corps founder Ethan Zuckerman (who has been a moving force behind encouraging blogging through Global Voices) moved off in new directions. The absence of those promoting the Internet at MobileActive perhaps reflects these changes.

The Internet enthusiasts had to break through the standard development response which might be cruelly summarised as: how can you spend money on technology when poor people need _________ ? (insert the word reflecting your own particular work area). For whatever else, this interest in technology did, it began at the edges to challenge long-established funding patterns and the thinking around it.

Media efficacyBut it also initiated a debate about the efficacy of different types of media. The Internet was compared unfavourably with radio and in time also with mobile phones: something always had to be the answer to everything. But in reality, no-one thing is ever the answer to everything. People make use of a range of media and any process of communicating with them will be “hybrid”: in other words, it will be sent and received using a range of methods.

The same righteous position-taking about what approach was morally superior was also present at the conference, best exemplified by a person who seemed to pop up at almost every session I attended and make the point that voice messages were more effective in communicating with the poor than text SMSs. Whilst the position has a useful grain of truth, it rather ignores the many millions of messages sent by the functionally and completely illiterate every month. And as I learned, the presence of SMS writers (who

have sprung up alongside letter writers) in places like Pakistan, who charge the illiterate to send messages they compose for them.

Modest claimsUnlike the initial world-changing promises for the Internet, those working with mobiles make more modest claims. Cell-Life which works in HIV-AIDS information says that missed appointments at Themba Lethu clinic in Johannesburg among the 9 000 patients using TxtAlert has dropped from 10% to 3%.

SocialTxt which uses the 120 unused characters on the “please call me” message to insert calls to action about HIV-AIDS has driven an increase in people calling national helplines. One call centre reported that over two weeks 41% of users had accessed services following a campaign of this sort.

These claims are merely illustrative of the various ways in which mobiles can change social circumstances favourably. Others included: • usingMIXITtoteachbasicmaths;• mobilisingprotestbyusingSMS;• “dating”agriculturalgrowerswithproduce

buyers using text alerts (TradeNet in Ghana);

• gettingpeopletospeakoutagainstdomestic violence (WOUGNET in Uganda);

• gatheringdatausingJava-appstocreate simple menus;

• weeklyfarmingtipstofarmers(CELAC project in Uganda);

• usingamobilephoneonatableforconference calls with farmers; and many, many others.So whilst NGO professionals now

make far greater use of PCs and the Internet in their work (according to the Worldwide Worx survey for 2007, 99% of South African NGOs use e-mail), there is a growing acknowledgement that mobile phones can be used effectively for wider communication.

So show me the moneyAs Peter Benjamin of CellLife told me: “There’s a huge demand for information. Very good information already exists (in the HIV-AIDS field) and there are high levels of cell-phone usage. (For most of the people we want to talk to) e-mails and the Internet are from another planet. The mobile is the device in the hands of

the majority and it can do interactions.”So if it’s such an obviously good idea, why

can’t I name more successful, long-standing projects that have begun to change the fundamentals of communication or the lives of people? On the fingers of one hand, you have the aforementioned jobs service from One World and Safaricom’s M-Pesa service (which was initially funded by DFID through Vodafone) and errrr…that’s it? Readers may wish to write and tell me what a fool I am for forgetting to mention other long-standing projects but I doubt that I will find myself using the fingers of more than two hands.

Early stage pioneersThe immediate and seemingly reasonable response is that many of these projects are in their early stages. There did not seem to be a single project I spoke to at the conference that was not a pilot: in other words it will be funded for a year to three years and then may disappear. However, the early pioneers stretch back further and few have found their financial feet or scaled up in such a way that they have made a significant major impact.

24 November 2008_

commUnicAtionsLearning about best practices for traditional communications services, how to evaluate and select outsourcing alternatives, and leading the transition to VoIP.

“There’s a huge demand for informaTion. Very good informaTion already exisTs and There are high leVels of cell-phone usage. (for mosT of The people we wanT To Talk To) e-mails and The inTerneT are from anoTher planeT. The mobile is The deVice in The hands of The majoriTy and iT can do inTeracTions.”

MobileActive ‘08

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Indeed one might ask: with so many pilots around, when are we going to see some flying?

An uncomfortable circle of circumstances involving what the service is, who might use and how it is funded chases its own tail to no little or no effect. You need scale to demonstrate effect. Scale takes time and money to establish. SMS itself in Africa did not spring out suddenly newly-formed with millions of users, it took time to develop. With certain notable exceptions, donors and foundations are keen to seed but do not take a long view.

Impact only comes with scale. A few hundred users is hopeless, a few thousand users is promising, a few hundred thousand users is suggestive and over a million means you’re actually getting somewhere. For complex systems, like agriculture, you need to have “critical mass” across several countries. Faced with the daunting cliff of “scaling-up” or “rolling-out”, some in the development community go squishy and start saying things like cultures are different and things work differently in different places. But whilst this is undoubtedly true, these are what we know technically speaking as “excuses”.

Reaching critical massMobile phones and the practice of using them differs from country to country but that hasn’t stopped them rolling out in every country in the world. The same will be true for services on mobile phones and their use as media: ways will be differ but certain things will be the same and the challenge is to make it so useful that people can’t fail to want it.

It’s not about technology, it’s about what makes people’s lives easier. The big abstract concept areas of development (like health) may sound important and “do you good” but they have to fit into how people lead their lives and their sense of priorities. For as Mark Davies of TradeNet (who wrestles with the complicated issues affecting farmers) said: “It’s all about understanding the agents of change and that’s anthropology not technology.” People in development all too often think they know what’s good for people and for all the rhetoric about “bottom-up approaches” simply fail to observe what people are saying or doing.

To be fair, that listening process is not as simple as it sounds. Gary Marsden of University of Cape Town ran a session that looked at the important relationship between potential users and developers. The design

community’s version of “bottom-up” is “user-centred design”: the user becomes part of the design team in a warm, humane Scandinavian version of co-creation after you show them a prototype.

Why are there no stirrups?The real difficulty faced by developers, according to Marsden, was that the potential users had no familiarity or conceptual framework to make a useful input. To use an analogy, it would be a bit like showing a pre-automobile, horse-rider a car and asking for design input. Why are there no stirrups? One Mexican group simply watched closely the intended users making use of the tools provided and used paper to sketch out what might happen with them.

But this observation probably applies better to more complex apps for computers or menu-driven apps for mobiles, not SMS. But even with SMS simple design flaws can upset the process. One application for data collection using SMS involved using the hash key as separators but the hash key was different when the phone was in SMS mode for some users.

From my own experience, African users want to be helpful and will often consciously or unconsciously simply mirror back what the project’s initiators want to hear.

The conference had a session on “sustainability” which is one version of development-speak for: how will it pay for itself? I was unable to attend this session as I was speaking in another session but having closely grilled two or three people who attended, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of answers that were aired.

Sustainability. Who pays?In truth, there are only three broad, long-term answers and none make very comfortable listening for those who want these projects to succeed. The user pays, the Government pays or as with other media, a sponsor or advertiser pays. There is an interesting sub-set of the user pays which is political issues and the campaigning that goes with them: Greenpeace Argentina can use phone calls to find supporters and ask some of them for funds to pay for this work. If it’s important to you and you want it enough, you’ll find a way of paying for it.

The development sector usually assumes that if people are poor, then a service will need to be “free-at-the-point-of-delivery”: it costs money to have the service but it

comes out of general taxation. But at one level poor people are not so different from the more well-off. The Orange Foundation ran a scheme in a poor part of Mali’s capital Bamako. Mothers would bring their babies to be weighed and the weights of the babies would be mailed to a paediatrician. He or she checked their progress and if and when weight progress fell below a certain level, advice or medication would be provided.

Value vs public service vs critical massThere were 300 subscribers paying US$1.05 a month and by any description this is a health insurance scheme. As with using mobile phones, the poor will pay for what they really value. Therefore one challenge is to produce a service that they really value and large number can afford to pay a small amount for: Safaricom’s M-Pesa has 2.5 million users because it is a service that is really valued by its users. No capacity building workshops were run to help users, they taught themselves based on the service’s marketing information.

There will be some services that cannot be commercialised because they are simply a public service: these will either need to be fundraised for or ultimately become part of the budget of Government. For the latter, the justification for spending will be two-fold. It communicates more effectively with a group of people and/or it is more cost effective. So for example, collecting data electronically is challenging but almost certainly quicker and cheaper than its paper and physical collection equivalent. But for African Governments, it implies overhauling a sclerotic and often inert civil service by moving money out of existing ways of doing things into new more effective ways of doing them.

In terms of advertising and sponsors, the level of activity needs to be at a critical mass to attract interest. Praekelt Foundation’s use of advertising slogans on Call Me messages can reach 13 million people daily in South Africa. But for only 120 characters, the few thousand dollars they charge per million users seems reasonable. Nevertheless new advertising media take time to establish themselves.

[oPinion]But whatever the challenges and limitations of using mobiles as a media, this one will run and run as all those involved wrestle with different ways to make it work.

Source: The Balancing Act, www.balancingact-africa.com


storage

Modern business grinds to a halt without email. And yet no one seems to have a definitive solution for it. Some scratch at the perfect email scenario, but just fall short. Unless I’m wrong it doesn’t seem that anyone is 100 percent happy with the way their email is provided and works. Mostly, we all just want it to arrive timeously, be backed up forever and easily searchable. Mimecast aims to provide the ultimate email management solution and might just have the answer we’re all looking for.

Gartner says Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing are here to stay. Make peace with it, because it is the future. And Mimecast is a comprehensive (to say the least) SaaS answer to email.

A pure SaaS vendor“Mimecast is a pure SaaS vendor,” says Garth Wittles, managing director of Mimecast. “We bring continuity to the email space. There is some confusion between continuity and disaster recovery. The latter describes a solution designed to rebuild or reconstitute when failure occurs. But continuity solutions keep you running during a failure.”

Mimecast has coined the term ‘Unified Email Management’ or UEM to describe its offering. Wittles says that other solutions tend to focus just on security or archiving, whereas Mimecast UEM is designed to holistically take care of all areas of email management.

“Of course, security is a key component of UEM – protecting the organisation

Learning how key storage and storage network technologies work together to drive your business. Clarifying how to use storage protocols and technologies.

mail wranglers

UDFunctioning without email is impossible. it may be dated. you might have latched onto some new, shiny, web 2.0 way oF communicating. but most oF your customers, colleagues, partners and Friends are still heavily reliant on good old email. it’s here to stay and your business relies on it. mimecast claims it can help you keep it up and take it to the next level. By Simon Dingle

26 November 2008_


against email-born malware,” he explains. “People think of viruses and spam as primary threats to email, but there are outbound threats too, which is why Mimecast has data loss, or leak, prevention. Our solution is also different in that it does not use quarantine folders and we guarantee no false positives.”

Mimecast also provides archiving of its client’s email, which is stored at two data centres. These are linked with fibre in a grid for load balancing via an active clustered environment. If one site goes down everything is routed via the other. Being a grid setup, no data is lost. So your email should always be safe.

And then continuity of email is delivered either via a Web interface or directly into Outlook.

“Users can route through Mimecast directly from Outlook and with offline functionality. This allows them to stay in their typical environment. And they can search their email archive from within Outlook too. Searches are completed in under four seconds from Outlook,” says Wittles. “The rapid search functionality is thanks to Mimecast’s federated search infrastructure that allows us to guarantee performance, even over the Internet.”

Mail-server agnostic?He claims that Mimecast is mail-server agnostic. It will also keep your business connected to its email if your Exchange server, for example, goes down by routing straight to Mimecast’s facilities.

And if Wittles is right the solution will also scale well for

organisations with from 25 users to 25 000.

The solution is so robust, according to the guys at Mimecast, that they will even recommend storing documents by emailing them to yourself. Most vendors would have a heart attack at this suggestion, but Wittles says it’s only because their solutions aren’t capable enough.

“Mimecast is designed to be a long term email archive with reliable storage. It will also keep your Exchange environment healthy and bolster its performance. And should your Exchange server go down it can be recovered very quickly from Mimecast,” he states.

The solution also offers email CIM – a formatting service that not only makes email look nice, but also adds in all the legal stuff some companies need at the tail of their messages.

A Microsoft employee once told me that users should never use email as a storage medium. But why not? If you are able to securely and robustly store all your email and have a mechanism to quickly and accurately search it then email provides an awesome timeline of your business. Documents and communication to you in the inbox, and from you in the outbox – all stored in searchable, chronological order – and backed up. Just do your thing and trust your email provider to store it. Continuity built in. Of course, one would have to drive compliance too, but from a practical use perspective this approach could be combined with the other more mundane ways of keeping records. If Mimecast can truly enable that then where do I sign up?

[opinion]

Business users and consumers alike are melded to their mobile devices, and as the scope of smartphones increases and flexible work practices expand, this relationship will get closer still. However, enterprise applications have still not made the leap from desktop to mobile. A few brave sales and service functions have traversed the frontier, but the rest are trailing behind.

Changes in working and communication patterns highlight the need to bring enterprise applications to mobile devices. The speed at

which business needs to be conducted also points to the need to complement static devices like desktops and even notebooks with multi-function smartphones that allow real-time and anytime access to enterprise resources, and do it natively, instead of having to rely on data synchronisation.

Technical hurdlesAlthough there are technical hurdles which should not be taken lightly, such as selecting and implementing a mobile infrastructure and creating the integration between mobile and traditional application

28 November 2008_

SAP iS on the roAd At the moment, rolling forwArd on itS world tour And looking to breAk new frontierS. one of the notAble themeS At itS london event lASt week wAS mobile comPuting And how thiS remAinS An uncroSSed frontier AS fAr AS enterPriSe APPlicAtionS Are concerned.

Mobile frontiers OP

MobilityWireless, driving both technology and strategy, is the future of IT and should be at the strategic heart of your organisation’s IT plans.

infrastructures, the other big issue is understanding how to present enterprise data on mobile devices. This is not simply a case of replicating specific enterprise functions within the context of a small screen, or making all enterprise application functionality accessible via a mobile device, but getting to grips with the type of experience users expect. Key to this is identifying what would constitute a useful type of interaction.

This demands a change in mindset.

Providing access to all

enterprise application processes, tasks, data, and other content would seem to be a natural goal, but would not represent appropriate use of mobile devices because this approach may fail to take into account the user experience.

Cutting down access to a limited number of functions (effectively creating a series of point applications, which is generally the situation with the current generation of mobile enterprise applications) fails to maximise the value from the enterprise application.

A strategic approachThe requirement is for a strategic approach to mobile applications that would allow users access to cross-function data and processes, but without being burdened by a hierarchical application.

On the consumer side, there is also untapped potential to use mobile devices to connect with customers, providing them with self-service customer support for example, in the same way the web is routinely used for customer self-service, or using mobile coupons as part of marketing and sales initiatives. If an organisation wants to be “customer-centric” it cannot afford to virtually ignore the channel and device that all its customer have: the mobile phone.

SAP has noted how well

different functions are being integrated on mobile devices and is looking at ways to bring these functions to enterprise applications running natively on mobile devices to present a seamless user experience.

It is working with Research in Motion for advice on how to use consumer-type technology and interactions in a business environment, on the grounds that RIM’s knowledge and thinking processes are very different to SAP’s, and it has a good grasp of how users interact with mobile and consumer equipment.

As for RIM, SAP says it has an excellent understanding of consumer-type interactions, but less insight into the way business people work and the requirements for applications that are used in business. By working together they are hoping to break through the frontier and start delivering useful enterprise applications on mobile devices, with a user experience to match.

The goal is to find a way of surfacing relevant content and processes from any part of an enterprise application, on a mobile device without compromising on the breadth of access or the user experience. The dream is of making customer data, accounts data, workflow, approval processes, alerts, and business intelligence, and so on as ubiquitous on the mobile as email is.

[opinion]

“If an organIsatIon wants to be ‘customer-centrIc’ It cannot afford to vIrtually Ignore the channel and devIce that all Its customers have: the mobIle phone.”

At the moment traditional software vendors are just in the exploratory phases, but collaboration with mobile experts could bring new thinking to the challenge and allow that mobile frontier to be left behind.


30 November 2008_

enterprise intelligenceThe best of BPM, CRM, ERP, e-commerce, business intelligence, project management, application management, and portal software.

Mash-ups aren’t just for consuMers anyMore. Businesses are getting in on the act and deriving value froM their Bi solutions they never anticipated.By Brett Haggard

TL

While it’s undoubtedly one of the most clichéd terms in the IT industry today, Web 2.0 has intrinsically changed the way businesses trade, interact and develop their competitive advantage.

One example of this is prevalent in the Business Intelligence (BI) space, where ‘mash-ups’ are beginning to challenge the status quo.

Mash what?A mash-up is for all intents and purposes an integrated, often web-based tool that combines data from more than one source to shed light on a topic, add value or represent a completely different view of the data to the one that would be evident by viewing data sources in isolation.

Like most of the Web 2.0 concepts that have made their way into the business space, mash-ups were originally developed to serve the purposes of the consumer.

A common example of one of the most-used mash-ups available online today is the combining of digital photographs that are geo-coded with a mapping service such as Google maps.

The resulting tool represents the photographs in an entirely new way, namely showing a map with pushpins inserted at the locations the photographs were taken.

Mash-ups for businessThe concept has however been extended in the couple of years its been out in the wild and today, companies are beginning to look at ways they can mash their own data sources up so that an entirely new and meaningful view of that data can be created.

But the concept can be extended even further if one considers that in their original form, mash-ups were designed to draw on data sources that were in the public domain.

By mashing their internal, confidential information up with information that’s in the public domain, businesses are beginning to realise they can derive additional value, above that revealed by their BI systems, from integrating their data with others’ information.

Mashing-up for fun and profit

For example Suppose a catering supply company’s BI system tells them that in the past, sales of their goods doubled whenever the local cricket team played at home after a winning streak.

Unless the company can get extra stock to the relevant stadium in time for the right game, they’re not likely to make any more money than what they did before.

And since the company isn’t really all that likely to store cricket teams’ results on their intranet or in their business system, they’re unlikely to derive meaningful information about where demand is likely to spike, unless they look outside of the safe confines of their corporate business systems.

Luckily there are plenty of places on-line where cricket scores, game schedules and team logs are available.

There are, furthermore, plenty of shipping companies that publish their schedules, routes, prices and availability on-line.

While the BI system on its own might be able to predict a spike in demand based on historical data, or if it’s really smart, take into account teams’ scores, it stops just short of making those findings easily actionable.

If the BI system’s findings are mashed-up with external data sources however, suddenly the findings become quickly actionable. Not only will the company be able to predict a spike in demand, they will in all likelihood be able to gauge where that demand is likely to be located and, here’s the kicker, how much it will cost the company to take advantage of that increase in demand, versus what the increase in revenue will be.

Cheaper than you thinkMark Whitehorn, a UK-based consultant for a number of national and international

“By mashing their internal, confidential information up with information that’s in the puBlic domain, Businesses are Beginning to realise they can derive additional value, aBove that revealed By their Bi systems, from integrating their data with others’ information.”

In Whitehorn’s opinion data mash-ups combined with business intelligence are here to stay. “Have these bash-ups reached their full potential? We’ve barely scraped the surface,” he says. “But don’t sit back and watch this space – think laterally, do some bashing, and grab some real competitive advantage while it’s going,” he adds.And he’s right – in a technology world where competitive advantage is becoming more and more difficult to come by, opportunities like this shouldn’t be passed up on.

[opinion]

companies and columnist for SearchDataManagement.com calls these business mash-up solutions ‘bash-ups’ and through personal experience believes they can be implemented on the tiniest of budgets.

Having recently implemented such a project, Whitehorn says, his solution was completed in five developer days using an already operational BI system, one database programmer and one web programmer.

The programmers created a web service to extract the data from the database, the necessary stored procedures and views on the database, and the ‘bash-up’ that sent the data to Google Earth and displayed the result.

“The Web service and the ‘bash-up’ were each about 75 lines of code, much of which was cut, pasted and modified from existing code,” Whitehorn says.

“It was working within two days – the other three were for testing and tweaking.

“So how much that actually costs will depend on what you pay your developers – but whatever that is, we are still talking about a trivial investment for a major analytical improvement,” he says.

If the phrase “open source software” continues to conjure images of impassioned programmers selflessly collaborating for the common good, it may be because, even as commercial interests are behind many of the most prominent projects, the results are no less inspired – and typically no less free.

Yes, advanced functionality or maintenance and support may require writing a cheque, but freeloaders looking for high-quality software – of almost any kind – have never had it so good.

Some of the picks were easy. For office productivity suite, what else but OpenOffice.org? For network intrusion detection, what else but Snort? And for security log analysis, nothing beats Splunk. Even in areas where good options abound, sometimes one solution is head and shoulders above the rest: In CRM, Sugar; in content management, Alfresco; in IP telephony, Asterisk.

But in most categories, stiff competition made the choice difficult. Choosing wasn’t easy, but here we go.

Best of open source enterprise applicationsThe best free application management, BI, BPM, CRM, ERP, e-commerce, portal, and project management software.

Application monitoringThere are many server- and vendor-specific application performance monitoring tools, but if you want to see everything from one dashboard view, Hyperic HQ is the place to watch. It can monitor and manage numerous flavours of server hardware, operating systems, and application software, as well as networks and virtualisation environments, providing granular control on thresholds and alerts, remote control, and management via the Web. Hyperic HQ can also monitor logs, help with security issues, and track inventory changes. Especially liked is the ability to track historical changes in our environment, whether network or otherwise.

Business process managementIntalio BPMS combines a J2EE/JBI-based BPEL 2.0 process engine with an Eclipse-based designer for modelling business activities, while the Intalio Tempo workflow runtime (based on the BPEL4People spec) rounds out the offering with AJAX-driven Forms on the Orbeon engine. The toolkit does a good job of introspecting back-end resources and makes quick work of exposing Web services. End-users gain good Web-based access to task management duties. Work remains to be done, but all told, it’s a respectable effort.

Business intelligenceOpen source BI options are pretty slim pickings, but the contenders are top notch. Judges leant to Pentaho Open BI Suite over JasperSoft in recognition of its fleet of well-crafted modules for reporting and dashboards, data integration (via the Pentaho Kettle ETL integration engine), data analysis (thanks to the Mondrian 3.0 OLAP server), and advanced data mining (with the addition of the Weka project). End-users like the browser-based, self-help wizards that simplify creating and generating reports, and there are good tools for automating delivery via e-mail and portal access and formatting to HTML, Excel, and PDF.

Content managementVirtually identical to Alfresco Enterprise, Alfresco Community is available under an open source licence (only lacking formal support). In both cases, you get a product that addresses the four major ECM activities: image management, document management, records management, and

32 November 2008_

enterprise intelligenceThe best of BPM, CRM, ERP, e-commerce, business intelligence, project management, application management, and portal software.

the 2008 BOssiesBest of Open Source Software Awards

cs

InfoWorld’s annual BossIEs rEcognIsE thE BEst frEE and opEn sourcE softWarE thE World has to offEr to BusInEssEs, It profEssIonals, and productIvE IndIvIduals Who rEly on computErs to gEt Work donE. thE 2008 BossIE WInnErs IncludE 60 products In EIght catEgorIEs covErIng BusInEss and productIvIty applIcatIons, dEvElopmEnt tools, mIddlEWarE, nEtWorkIng, sEcurIty, and storagE. thIs month nEt.Work hIghlIghts thE EntErprIsE applIcatIon WInnErs.

Web content management – all sitting on top of Alfresco’s JSR 170 content repository. Beyond often surpassing commercial offerings’ features, Alfresco is truly easy for end-users, who access content in much the same way as a shared drive. Developers get a jump-start with preconfigured templates. And the system’s distributed architecture is tailor-made for building scalable, fault-tolerant applications.

Customer relationship managementJudges were still sweet on SugarCRM, hands down the most complete and commercial-grade free and open source CRM solution. A flexible AJAX-driven browser interface is backed by an off-line client and plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook. Version 5.1 (currently beta, due in July) supports smartphones and PDAs with a pared-down Web GUI and nice search options that get data into the hands of mobile users quickly. A wizard-driven interface takes much of the setup work

out of generating complex reports, while Excel integration complements a nice set of dashboards. Sugar just gets more refined with each new release.

E-commerceDon’t be fooled by the version 1 label on Magento’s eCommerce platform. This PHP-based package brings power and flexibility to catalogue and customer management, providing unified administration over multiple storefronts and support for multiple currencies and languages. Hierarchical navigation allows shoppers to sift goods, while rules-based promotion tools and proactive alerts rival the real-time order management capabilities of many commercial products. Magento lacks the performance and breadth of the Apache Open for Business project, which builds in Java-based ERP and CRM features, but is far easier to install and manage.

Enterprise portalThere are a number of well-known open source portal solutions, including JBoss, Metadot, and MindTouch Deki. But when looking for enterprise strength, Liferay Portal stands apart. To start, it’s easy to customise and handles large organisational structures, such as giving each business unit a unique look and security permissions. For users, the GUI offers conveniences such as drag-and-drop portlet positioning. And Liferay ships with more than 60 JSR-168-compliant portlets covering everything from administration and content management to community features and personal tool. A Web services portlet lets you access information from other systems.

Enterprise resource planningCompiere delivers a good, general-purpose ERP package along with basic CRM functionality. You get financials, HR/payroll services, procurement and inventory management, as well as general sales and good reporting. Compiere recently improved both security – now showing data-level granularity – and the user experience, with a browser-based UI and stronger search facilities. The features still fail to rise to the heights of, say, NetSuite, and some important new features are only available in the Professional Edition. But if you’re seeking an open source ERP alternative with broad functionality, look no further.

Bi enjOying dOuBle-digit suB-saharan african grOwth

The need to digitise and manage increasing volumes of data, coupled with the expansion of e-governance initiatives, will drive the uptake of business intelligence (BI) tools in sub-Saharan Africa. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan finds the total value of the sub-Saharan African business intelligence software tools market for 2007 to be $759.0 million and estimates that this will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 10.1 per cent between 2006 and 2013.

“Sub-Saharan Africa’s BI software tools market is set to continue experiencing double digit growth, despite the global market slowing down,” notes Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Lindsey Mc Donald. “South Africa currently contributes more than 60 per cent of the total revenues, but there is high potential for growth in the rest of the region.”

Market prospects are mainly limited by a lack of technical expertise to effectively implement and support BI tools. In addition, uncertainties about return on investment (ROI) and the ineffective integration of legacy systems and new solutions are restricting demand.

“Uncertain ROI timeframes are dampening market potential as organisations are concerned about the costs involved,” Mc Donald says. “Most BI tools need to be installed for an extended period of time before companies realise the benefits.”

The introduction of more consolidated, user-friendly, end-to-end BI tools that require limited technical skill for implementation and support will accelerate market growth. The development of reliable, high-performance systems, effective distribution channels and good product price range will also be key to successful market penetration.

Source: Frost & Sullivan, www.itservices.frost.com

34 November 2008_

risk management

While businesses have over the years gone to great lengths to secure the ‘family jewels’ stored in their corporate database, CRM solution or line of business application, as employees have increasingly grown accustomed to using tools such as e-mail, instant messaging and Word/Excel to carry out their daily tasks, so there’s been an increase in the value of information stored in an unstructured form.

The traditional methods of securing these files i.e. keeping them safe from malware using a slew of antivirus and anti-spyware solutions and controlling access to them using conventional operating system-level permissions, are simply not cutting it any longer.

Enterprises realise that if even one of these files finds its way into the wrong hands, the effects could be catastrophic.

Identifying, mitigating and resolving threats as they become more sophisticated and cause more damage to businesses than ever before.

getting a handle on unstructured data sprawl

UnstrUctUred data is growing in volUme and importance. BUt how are it shops getting a handle on the protection and management of this data? symantec claims to have an answer.By Brett Haggard

tl


As such, they’re turning to solutions that not only allow them to securely lock their intellectual property away in safe online stores, but allow them to apply enterprise grade, hardened security policies to these assets.

More than protectionIt’s not just about peace of mind however. Enterprises also have to ensure they’re complying with the data protection and retention policies of their countries of operation and the governance regulation of their shareholders.

And with a survey conducted in September by Symantec claiming that IT managers across the globe estimate that their e-mail and intranet content is growing at in the region of 30% per annum, the issue is only becoming more urgent.

Securing unstructured data is one thing. Being able to produce it on a whim is an other thing entirely.

Three compelling solutionsBecause of the alarming growth of unstructured data in the enterprise, IT managers are having to coordinate their efforts to secure unstructured data with the need to slow data growth, or for that matter slow the rate at which their enterprise storage systems need to increase in capacity.

It’s clear that multi-tiered approach is required.

The best illustration of this was demonstrated at Symantec’s Vision conference held in The Hague in October.

The company used the conference to announce three new solutions that target a great deal of the headaches IT managers face in securing and reducing the proliferation of their unstructured data.

Dealing with messagingThe first of these is Brightmail Gateway 8.0, which through enhanced sender reputation technology and improved management features allow companies to cut down on the volume of data their e-mail and instant messaging systems are required to cope with; and protect the business against messages that contain malicious code.

Inbound protection across the company’s e-mail and instant messaging solutions deals a crushing blow to spam and viruses, while outbound controls bring advanced content filtering and data loss prevention technologies to help companies protect sensitive information, thereby going a long way towards taking care of regulatory compliance.

Rounding the usefulness of Brightmail Gateway out, comprehensive reporting and granular controls ease the job of the IT management team when it comes to managing and administering the enterprise’s e-mail system.

Averting data lossThe second new product announced at the conference, namely Data Loss Prevention 9.0, as its name suggests is aimed squarely at preventing data loss at the enterprise’s endpoints.

Symantec claims that the product broadens the enterprise’s coverage of endpoint events, simplifying endpoint data loss prevention management and enhancing its data discovery capabilities.

The solution is designed to provide customers with the ability to discover, monitor and protect confidential information wherever it is stored or used.

Putting data in a vaultThe last announcement was an updated version of Enterprise Vault, which aims to consolidate e-mail and other electronic information into a single repository, thus making it easier for businesses to protect and reduce the

duplication of data in its data stores.Symantec claims that Enterprise Vault

8.0 can assist organisations in reducing the costs of storing unstructured information by more than 60 percent.

While the reasoning is sound, these solutions will likely only surface during the first part of next year.

On the upside however, the problems these solutions address are going nowhere.

Unstructured data management and protection is likely to be a priority for many years to come and will likely persist long after cloud computing becomes a reality.

Symantec isn’t the only player in this space, but it talks a good tale and seems to have a good view of what’s required. With the attention this area is getting today it’s plausible that this challenge can be brought under control and be managed.

“The TradiTional meThods of securing files i.e. keeping Them safe from malware using a slew of anTivirus and anTi-spy-ware soluTions and conTrolling access To Them using convenTional operaTing sysTem-level permissions, are simply noT cuTTing iT any longer.”

Unstructured data sprawl is a clear issue, and with the importance of this information on the rise, businesses must curb growth, while keeping it safe from harm.

There’s no one-size fits all solution however. IT managers should look into ways of

addressing the data growth at its source i.e. e-mail and instant messaging solutions, while at the same time reducing the number of identical copies of data in their data stores.

And then look at ways to protect that cleansed data, while allowing it to be easily retrieved and used by those authorised to do so.

[opinion]

1Business expectations for IT have outstripped IT’s internal capability to deliver.

In recent years, organisations have wanted their IT departments to increase their external focus on customers, new products and services, new geographies and business processes. Unfortunately, few CIOs have the staff with the skill sets to adequately meet these externally focused demands and there has been little remaining funding for additional hires.

Gartner recommends that CIOs recognise the skills gap, refrain from solely hiring staff with IT backgrounds in the future and focus on identifying and delivering distinctive solutions for the business.

2How to more rapidly modernise infrastructure and operations and reduce costs.

Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders recognise that accelerating modernisation is the only way to deal with rapid increases in demand growth and the need to respond more rapidly to the business but must balance this against unrelenting pressure to reduce costs.

Gartner recommends emphasising modernisation projects that can be ‘self-funding’, that is, pay for themselves, which can often be achieved through I&O consolidation and virtualisation.

3How much formal process is needed for programme and portfolio management?

Many believe that increased levels of process and oversight will lessen an organisation’s agility to deliver projects. Those in favour of more formal process and oversight of project-related tasks take the position that such increased discipline will yield far-better results than experienced in the past. The future of Programme and Portfolio Management (PPM) will actually take a different route than either of the opposing sides. In the future, changes in a project will become normal, expected and accepted.

Consequently, PPM methods will adopt smaller and smaller units of work to allow such project “midcourse corrections” to take place.

36 November 2008_

9 contentious it issues

Gartner analysts outlined the most contentious IT issues at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, which took place recently in Orlando and Cannes. The nine issues include:

TL

4Should we modernise applications? If so, when?Many mission-critical, high-risk

business functions continue to rely on code developed decades ago by programmers and vendors who have long since left the company. Business applications, which run on hardware and other infrastructure that is reaching or past obsolescence, must be migrated.

Strong drivers for modernisation are offset by strong inhibitors, so the debate either rages on or is naively ignored. The decision on when to modernise will be strongly influenced by shareholder interests and investor confidence. Some applications may need to be replaced, while renovation may be sufficient for others, but the complexity and magnitude of the task far exceed the ability to fund and manage such an effort with existing operating budgets and teams. A one-time restructuring-style budget set-aside will be necessary.

5To whom should business process professionals report?Gartner recommends that

business process experts be placed in a new ‘hybrid’ organisation such as a business process competency centre that reports to a chief operating officer. In this scenario, the competency centre would be made up of relatively few employees but would be joined by the business domain experts, process experts and IT professionals for the duration of a project, only to return to their respective departments upon completion of the project.

6“Turf”Control and ownership-related friction that often exists between

various IT groups and the corporate architecture group becomes especially notable when multiple IT groups maintain high-level planning functions.

Gartner recommends focusing on three core IT management disciplines Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and Service Management – to streamline different viewpoints and provide the architectural guidance required to build solutions.

7Lack of business intelligence sponsorship.Many IT leaders lament issues such

as the lack of a business intelligence (BI) vision and strategy; and overall business sponsorship and ownership for BI. Meanwhile, many business people believe there is little or no difficulty with BI as they continue using ad hoc methods to make business decisions.

Gartner advises clients to use its ‘Business Intelligence and Performance Management Framework’ model together with its ‘Four Worlds’ model to build a more complete and integrated plan for BI initiatives and to yield greater returns from related business and IT investments.

8How do I get my vendor to deliver what I was promised?Opportunities for dispute abound

when it comes to sourcing contracts. While users bear a responsibility to be competent buyers of sourcing services, both sides need to be more flexible in laying out a range of conditions and options that should be addressed in the contract. Vendors have seen most conditions and could therefore alert users when they are about to demand an incomplete or wrong contractual term or condition.

9Business accountability for security and risk management.Security and risk management is

not just an IT issue. It is essential that the IT risk manager, using effective communications skills, persuade the appropriate IT owners and line-of-business managers to accept explicit, written responsibility for residual risk impacting their systems and processes, on either a direct or a dotted-line basis. Risk managers should develop mechanisms for assignment and acceptance of residual risk and risk decisions – for example, signature forms, processes, and policies that address the requirement and execution of risk acceptance.

The risk manager should also develop mechanisms to convey residual risk levels that remove reference to technology but still support good risk-based decisions at a business level that may result in the implementation of technical controls.


“IT leaders should use this time, before obtaining new post financial crisis direction from chief executive officers (CEOs), to resolve these issues,” said Ken McGee, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Resolving these issues will place IT leaders in a far better position to take on the challenges of the new future that lies ahead.”

[opinion]

38 November 2008_

We constantly hear about consolidation, doing more with less and making sure that all our technology integrates in perfect harmony. We’re starting to make it work for our CRM, ERP and other line-of-business systems. But Web 2.0 technology is considered by some to be an exception to the rule. It exists somewhere outside of the stack and is a law unto itself. Or is it? Enterprise 2.0 is a new frontier. It puts technology in its place as a platform that enables people to do their thing.

Service Orientated Architecture is simple in principle, but was confused by vendors who have varying definitions of what SOA means. Web 2.0 shares this confusion. But as is the case with any technology, making it work means looking at people and process instead of just technology.

In your spaceIBM is a leader in corporate Web 2.0 technologies. The company’s yellow Lotus brand carries sub brands like Connexions and Quickr that bring Web 2.0 to the corporate arena in enterprise-grade, integrated packaging. But in the case of Web 2.0 does one really need to bank on the heavyweights? Why use Lotus Connexions

when Ning is free? Both can be used for setting up custom social networks.

“With IBM’s Lotus products we initially saw mostly mature IT environments looking at integrating Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Banks, for example,” says Hannes van Vuuren, IBM South Africa’s Lotus brand manager. “Obviously IT budgets are now on hold and big businesses are curbing their spending, but we are seeing a broader interest in Web 2.0 technologies, especially from universities and communications companies. There is a huge interest.

“Integration is part of the reason why you would use Connexions instead of other, free products,” he continues. “Hybrid models that consist of open source and proprietary solutions blended together require in-house experience and skills to implement, but they can work thanks to open standards. A bigger differentiator is the research IBM has ploughed into its products.”

IBM uses Connexions internally to network over 350 000 employees. Talk about a test bed. Now it has a new product that plugs into Connexions called Lotus Atlas that allows for network building and access, similar to what is offered by LinkedIn. The R&D budget IBM throws at these projects eclipses what smaller

TLBusinesses continue to wrestle with Web 2.0 concepts. Where is the value and who should they speak to? In some regards, Enterprise 2.0 is SOA all over again in terms of the debate. But unlike SOA, Enterprise 2.0 is being shaken up by new players in the arena.

BITS AND PIECES

By Simon Dingle

companies like Ning are able to achieve. And IBM’s Lotus products generally integrate to boot. Sure, open standards make anything possible – but there is something to say for tight, vendor-supplied integration.

On the other handMike Stopforth is a maverick in the Web 2.0 space. His company Cerebra, amongst other services, provides what it calls ‘Enterprise 2.0 Social Software’.

“I agree on the open standards point,” says Mike. “But I’d add that IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft have social and semantic augmentation as a top feature on their agendas, so the vendors themselves are steering in that direction, which includes a focus on SOA, SaaS and cloud computing. Mobile seems to be a big feature as well.

“The key is that we’re talking about communities,” he states. “So it really doesn’t come down to technology at all – if the promise of Enterprise 2.0 is to come to fruition it’s about culture shifts more than modules.

“I think one of the primary changes in focus is designing

software that can change with people, as opposed to expecting people to change to technology,” he continues.

Here Mike’s approach is similar to some bigger vendors who focus on the value message, insisting that business processes and culture must be aligned to value. But it differs in how Cerebra engages with its clients, and their clients.

“I like to believe that one of the things that makes us unique is that we have an entire team dedicated to what we call content and community ‘management’ – although it’s not really about managing at all. This is not the most profitable side of our business because it’s labour and IP intensive, but we spend time understanding communities and making sure we build platforms catered to them. No two projects or communities are the same.”

Some companies in the space aim to fabricate communities for their clients, whereas the correct approach seems to be nurturing and identifying existing communities that simply need a platform and perhaps some guidance.

Mike agrees, partially. “It has to be an organic process,” he says. “We see this in the marketing space – you can’t create evangelists, but you can create a space for them to connect and learn, and then attract them to it.”

“The platforms themselves aren’t particularly special, it’s about the community using them,” points out Stopforth. “What is Enterprise 2.0 if not Web 2.0 for internal communities? The only difference is the firewall.”

Enterprise 2.0 is what differentiates grey suits from corporate rock stars. Realising the value from it means accepting that people will form their own ideas about your business and each have individual ways of working with you – your job is to take the rough with the smooth and look at how transparent community building can improve your business.

And here we’re talking about the communities that exist both inside, and outside of the actual organisation. If you can’t trust your employees to mash up their own composite applications or make the switch from search to discovery, as examples, then its likely your business needs a shakedown. Get it together.

[OPiNION]


“What is EntErprisE 2.0 if not WEb 2.0 for intErnal communitiEs? thE only diffErEncE is thE firEWall.”

40 November 2008_

Bluehouse, announced at Lotusphere in January, is IBM’s entry into on-demand social computing services for the small to medium-sized business market. Think of a combination of Facebook profiles, LinkedIn contacts, WebEx web conferencing, Microsoft Office Live document sharing, SurveyMonkey online surveys, Rememberthemilk online activity lists, and Twitter online chat, plus a few other things like online charts thrown in for good measure.

The service is aimed at providing a collaboration platform for, and between, SMBs and business units within larger organisations. The cloud computing delivery model offers a “don’t worry the CIO” way of getting started, and the service will be charged for on a subscription basis, pricing for which has yet to be announced.

Aimed at the business marketIBM is positioning Bluehouse explicitly at the business market and believes that user charging will differentiate Bluehouse from platforms funded via advertising or data exploitation.

Competitors offering more or less comparable solutions include 37Signals, Central Desktop, Cisco Webex WebOffice, Google Apps, Huddle, HyperOffice, ThinkFree, Microsoft Online Services, Oracle Beehive, Work Connect, and Zoho. Wiki providers like Atlassian and Socialtext also provide platforms that perform a similar collaboration role.

In addition, many hundreds of other competitors provide individual elements of Bluehouse’s functions. Some of these niches are dominated by global market leaders, for example, Facebook and LinkedIn in the business networking niche. In other niches such as online document sharing, the market is highly fragmented,

ranging from the giants such as Google Docs to companies like 4Shared, Calameo, Docstoc, Issuu, Scribd, and Yudu.

IBM’s branding and infrastructure capabilities will help it to gain customer trust, but it will be a marketing challenge to create a network effect among SMBs from a standing start.

Collaboration not yet matureThe business online collaboration market is at an early stage of maturity. Even though some competitors may appear to have a strong lead on IBM, the race has really only just begun. The market leaders will claim an advantage created

by switching costs. It takes time and effort to set yourself up in a social computing platform and to build a network. Users may well stick with their existing networks.

The market of users is quite fragmented. More tellingly, many businesses have still yet to fully embrace the notion of social computing as a way of doing business, let alone form strong allegiances to a platform. Some organisations still discourage the use

of Facebook at work, concerned that social networking equals “social notworking”.

Social computing requires a major culture change for organizations, so a marathon race is expected where many of the early leaders will run out of puff.

Bluehouse may benefit from its purely business networking positioning in this regard. IBM’s branding and corporate image will be an advantage in convincing some customers to trust social computing in general and Bluehouse in particular. IBM’s depth of infrastructure capabilities will also give many customers a sense of confidence in the reliability and continuity of the cloud behind the service and the integrity of its data security.

IBM also has a depth of internal experience in how to orchestrate purposeful social computing environments, and this experience will inform Bluehouse’s design as it evolves as an integrated collaboration suite.

However, the bottom line in social computing is the ability to draw a crowd and to mobilise a network effect. IBM has traditionally focused on the big end of town, the corporate IT market served by its Lotus collaboration suite.

It will need to come up with some creative and high-impact new marketing solutions to persuade the millions of smaller companies across the world to give Bluehouse a go and to create a network buzz from a standing start. This will be a test of IBM’s commitment to the SMB market.

[OpiniOn]

TLIBM earlier this month launched a beta version of its business social networking platform Bluehouse. While the platform has a solid pedigree, it has entered a race with a large field of competitors, many of which are well ahead.

iBM jOins Business sOciaL neTwOrking race

By steve Hodgkinson - Ovum analyst (computerwire analystwatch)

“Some organiSationS Still diScourage the uSe of facebook at work, concerned that Social networking equalS “Social notworking.”


Staying on courSe: The guide to identifying, managing and reducing complexity

IT organisations will always be under pressure to demonstrate their value. This is particularly true in a tougher climate, such as the one the world is experiencing at present. Technology investments are being carefully evaluated and the true value to the business often questioned.

The truth remains that the majority of businesses will come to a grinding halt if it weren’t for technology. Often described as a necessary evil and yet another cost centre, now more than ever the IT organisation needs to demonstrate its true value – something that can be achieved by starting with an action plan for improving service delivery.

A four-step planThere are basically four broad areas you will need to consider when developing a service improvement strategy; one which will enable you to change the way your organisation views the IT department. Start off with the following questions: • WhatservicesdoestheITorganisationneedtodelivertothe

business? • Whatinfrastructure,technologyandskillsarerequiredtobe

able to deliver and support the identified services? • Howwillyoupositionyourserviceofferingtothebusiness?• Howwillitbebilled?

Businesses now, more than ever, need to change their mindsets about the internal IT organisation if they are going to weather the gloomy economic conditions.

The services that users will require from the IT department are linkedtothenatureofthecompany’sbusiness,aswellastheindividual roles that employees fulfil. In scoping the required services, you will need to have a view of the entire organisation and the various roles that are dependent on technology. A customer service agent, for example, will require different services than the CFO.

Once a menu or catalogue of services has been developed, you will need to determine the exact requirements from a people, processesandtechnologyperspective.Questionstoaskyourselfduring this phase include whether you have the correct platforms and infrastructure to not only deliver upon, but sustain the services you had identified. Another important consideration is whether youhavetheskillsandresourcestosupportthetechnologiesthatare either already in place, or that need to be implemented as part of the service improvement plan.

No free lunchIn dispelling the perception of IT as a cost centre, you will need toembarkonaninternalmarketingcampaignwithinyourorganisation to not only educate users on the changes in the running of IT, but also to create awareness of the value the IT team can bring to the business.

This exercise changes the dynamic of the IT organisation and it is always interesting to see how internal customers react when they have to start paying for services. All of a sudden, you see a reprioritisationindemands.Businessunitsstartaskingthemselveswhether they truly need certain services if it’s no longer ‘free’ and whether millisecond response times are really required as part of a service level agreement with IT.

Numbers don’t lie Whenyoureachthepointwhereyoustartbillingusersfortheservices they use, you are starting to run your IT organisation likeabusiness.Thisisanimportantstepinmovingtowardsaprofit centre.

It is important to highlight that when users are charged for services based on consumption and the IT organisation can recover the costs thereof, it enables resources to be redirected towards projects that will help the business to deliver on its directives of increasing revenue and profitability as well as retaining existing and acquiring new customers through improved service delivery.

In this month’s column, Gary Lawrence, country manager of CA, places the emphasis on service delivery and how organisational mindsets need to change.

TL

[opinion]

By gary Lawrence - ca africa

42 November 2008_

One example that occurred recently was during the launch of Google’s Chrome browser which was launched with a licence agreement that included a clause essentially giving Google royalty free rights to any content posted or displayed using the new service. This was picked up by an IP astute blogger and Google amended the clause to delete the offending clause.

This thankfully turned out to be a relatively harmless instance. More serious instances occur when different parties collaborate in a commercial venture or where one party hires another party for product development and the intellectual property ownership is not clearly set out between the parties. This could easily result in a party thinking they own their intellectual property when in fact they do not.

IP rights applicable to softwareOne interesting example could occur (in fact does occur too often) in the field of the development of computer software.

By way of background, the intellectual property rights that apply to computer software are as follows. • Trade marks protect the name of the software and prevent

another party from commercialising software with the same name.

• Copyright protects the code, source code, screen layouts etc from unauthorised copying.

• Patents protect the underlying novel and inventive functionality of the software irrespective of the coding language.

With the above in mind, let’s imagine a communications engineering company ABC which invents a brilliant method that allows the compression of data by a scale not seen previously without compromising the data. Company ABC however feels that it does not have the coding expertise to properly implement the software and so employs a software company XYZ to write the code. In addition, company ABC employs a branding consulting company BRA to come up with a name and logo.

TLA company or individual engaged in commerce for obvious reasons wants to ensure that they own their intellectual property. This sounds silly but unfortunately ownership of intellectual property is often not given enough attention until it is too late and a company or individual finds that they have inadvertently given away their rights either partially or completely.

WhO OWns yOur IP?

Lance Abramson - spoor & Fisher

Critical mistakesIn its haste to get the product to market, company ABC makes a few critical IP ownership mistakes.

As far as the ownership of the patent rights is concerned, the method was invented by an employee of the company ABC. The Patents Act states that an invention made in the course and scope of a person’s employment is automatically owned by their employer and so company ABC will own the patent rights to this invention and can proceed to file patent applications in their own name.

However, the situation would not be so clear where company ABC presented the problem of data reduction to another company for a solution. In this case, absent of any agreement between the parties to the contrary, the other company would now in fact own the patent rights with ABC having to rely on an implicit licence granted to them to use the software.

Referring now to the copyright in the software written by

company XYZ, copyright vests in the author of the software. In this case the author of the software will almost certainly be company XYZ. As there were no clauses in the contract between the parties dealing with ownership of the copyright between the parties the default position applies which is that the author of the software (company XYZ) owns the copyright in the software.

Finally, company ABC failed to read the fine print of the contract with the branding consulting company BRA. BRA conceives of and puts together a fantastic name and logo for the new product which company ABC uses to launch the new software. However, unbeknown to ABC, the fine print states that the name and logo developed by BRA remains the property of BRA. Company ABC now finds itself in the invidious position of having to challenge the contract to validate their ownership in what they thought to be their trade mark!

The above scenarios seem to occur all too often where companies and individuals do not pay sufficient attention to the ownership of IP and then down the line find that they in

fact do not own their IP as can be seen by this simple but not far-fetched example.


“The recenT launch of GooGle’s chrome browser saw inTroduced a licence aGreemenT ThaT included a clause essenTially GivinG GooGle royalTy free riGhTs To any conTenT posTed or displayed usinG The new service. This was picked up by an ip asTuTe bloGGer and GooGle amended The clause To deleTe The offendinG clause.”

[OPinIOn]What is also obvious from this example is that with a little attention and well placed advice all of these pitfalls can be easily avoided as was the case with the Google Chrome browser where after a little noise, Google amended the offending clauses. This small amendment in fact had a large impact on the ownership of the rights to the content as discussed above. So after all is said and done – who owns your intellectual property?

44 November 2008_

GooGle has nailed mobile as a priority focus for the company. Not only has it adapted its search, advertising and application offerings for mobile platforms, but Google is driving the very platform itself with Android – an open source operating system designed for mobile phones and developed with the help of the Open Handset Alliance. Where the iPhone is closed, Android, which is based on Linux, is open. Where BlackBerry says “trust us”, Android says, “do what you want”.

Unlimited bandwidthThe brave network to bring the phone to market first is T Mobile in the USA. The company has launched the phone with an unlimited bandwidth package and prices that compete closely with the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone

and BlackBerry, however, networks will have a tough time controlling what happens with that bandwidth. For example, it is impossible to tether the iPhone, which means connecting through the phone with your laptop, for example, is impossible. But because Android is an open system there is little anyone can do to stop you from tethering through the Dream G1. T Mobile acknowledges this and will try to prevent people from tethering in its terms of service instead.

Emulating iTunes storeLike the iPhone, the Dream G1 is also being launched with an application store. However, where developers need to have their applications approved by Apple before offering them to iPhone users, the Android store is a free for all. There is merely a registration required so that the powers that be know that application developers are who they say they are and can trace them if they misbehave, presumably. The store is also optional, and Android users will be able to get applications directly from third parties.

On the hardware front the Dream G1 has all the bits and pieces you’d expect from a top smartphone – HSDPA connectivity, built-in GPS, slide out qwerty keyboard, WiFi, camera, and the quality that HTC usually pours into its devices. The operating system is the real differentiator, finally offering HTC users a robust alternative to Windows Mobile.

The Android has been confirmed for South Africa and will be available from early 2009 via Vodacom, the same network that brought the iPhone to local shores. At time of writing it is, however, impossible to say what the local contract will look like.

By Simon Dingle

While the HTC Dream G1 is an awesome piece of gear I get the feeling that Android is still heavily in the early-adopter stage and, as such, should be reserved for geeks only. If you want to be first on the block with an Android phone and enjoy messing around with new technology – especially of the open variety – then you’ll want one. But if you want something that just works then you’ll probably be better served by waiting for the next incarnation of Android and some more maturity in the open smartphone space.

[OpiniOn]

The Android hAs lAndedHTC is officially first to market with a smartphone based on Google’s Android operating system. It’s the antithesis of the iPhone and will be available in South Africa soon. Meet the HTC Dream G1…

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new 3G GSM anD CDMa SOlutiOnS

Wavecom has introduced two new members of its sleek Q26 Series Wireless CPU family. The new Q26 Extreme offers dual-mode 2G and 3G to enable data-intensive applications like real-time video streaming for the security or automotive industries. In addition, the new Q26 Elite offers CDMA 2000 1x wireless voice and data connectivity in the same form-factor, so you can design your application once and connect using any cellular protocol, anywhere around the world. Contact: Trinity Telecomms, Tel: +27 (0)11 465-7377, www.trintel.co.za

BriGhten BuSineSS preSentatiOnS

The powerful EMP-X5 projector boasts premium quality images and high brightness. The EMP-X5 features 2200 ANSI lumens of brightness and a XGA resolution of 1024 x 768 while offering the quality and security features typically associated with higher range projectors combined with an affordable price tag.Contact: EPSON SA, Tel: +27 (0)11 201 7741, www.epson.co.za

pOwer palS

Ideal protection for one to three PCs, the Nova AVR range of UPS units provides cost-effective and rugged protection against electrical interference and power outages through sophisticated Line Interactive technology (automatic voltage correction) and a wide tolerance to fluctuations in the mains power supply (160V to 290V). The range is available from MGE Office Protection Systems, an Eaton global electrical brand and a leader in UPS and industrial automation products and services.Contact: MGE Office Protection Systems , Tel: +27 (0)11 564 9300, www.mgeops.com

naS fOr SMeS

Local value-added distributor,

Duxbury Networking, has

released a family of six-bay, small

form factor desktop network

attached storage (NAS) solutions

targeted at small to medium size

enterprises (SMEs). The Netgear

ReadyNAS Pro is powerful

enough to provide centralised

network storage for up to 200

users. Housed in a compact

desktop form factor, the

ReadyNAS Pro products support

up to six SATA I or SATA II hard

drives via six lockable, hot-

swappable disk trays. Three USB

2.0 ports enable the connection

of USB drives or printers.

Contact: Duxbury Networking,

Tel: +27 (0)11 351 9821 , www.duxbury.co.za

OptiMiSinG wireleSS perfOrManCe

Sitecom has introduced its WL-182 GM Wireless 300N XR USB Gaming Adapter, which, in combination with the Gaming Router, offers optimal wireless performance and is the ideal solution for users who want optimal performance from demanding applications, such as streaming HD video, audio, VoIP and the transfer of large files. It has the 802.11n draft 2.0 adapter which gives fewer “dead spots” for a maximum range and a wireless transfer speed of up to 300 Mbps. Contact: Digital Channel Solutions, Tel: +27 (0)11 466 5099, www.dcs.co.za


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46 November 2008_

GeO-Spatial Bi

MapIT has released a revamped version

of MarketScope, the enterprise business

intelligence tool for geo-spatial planning. MD

of MapIT, Ray Wilkinson, says,” The introduction

of demographic analysis into the business

intelligence environment has fundamentally

changed the way in which companies can and

will conduct market research.”

Contact: MapIT, Tel : +27 (0)12 345 8015, www.mapit.co.za

hp VOODOO unleaSheD

The HP Voodoo PC began with a small but tightly knit band of technology mavericks and vagabond designers who shared a common vision to create the most powerful, personalised and authentic PC experience possible.

tOuCh Me, tOuCh Me

HP has unveiled its touchscreen technology with the HP Touchsmart PC, which puts your digital life at your fingertips. It comes in a new design that combines a 22” or 25.5” diagonal hi-definition widescreen, with a powerful energy efficient Intel Core 2 Duo Processor.HP Experience Store, Shop L82 in Sandton City

artiStiC liCenCe

The HP Artist Edition Notebook PC was chosen from hundreds of entries in the HP and MTV “Take Action. Make Art” global design competition. The competition challenged young people around the world to create graphics for a special edition HP notebook, with a result that lets you take a stand against the conventional.

IT wITh sTyle

& sexIness

Marketscope Router

Marketscope Locator

Marketscope Spatial Analyser

&&&&&&&

lOGiteCh MX1100

The MX1100 mouse offers eight programmable buttons, enabling you to get to the information, the Web pages, the files and the applications you want – fast. With software installed, a stealth thumb button makes applications switching easy. Zoom controls allow for zooming in and out of a document with the push of a button.

ipOD/iphOne

OMniDireCtiOnal Speaker

A first for iPod or iPhone speaker docks, the Logitech Pure-Fi Express Plus speaker offers omnidirectional acoustics. An innovative speaker technology previously found only in expensive home-theatre systems, omnidirectional acoustics transmit sound evenly in all directions.Contacts: Logitech South Africa , Tel.: +27 (0)11 656 3375, www.logitech.com

DeDiCateD liGhtinG

fOr ip CaMeraS

Raytec’s RAYMAX IP and RAYLUX IP are the

Worlds first dedicated IP lighting solutions

designed to deliver Infra-Red or White-Light

illumination for IP cameras. Installation is quick

and easy requiring only an Ethernet cable

to be connected. With inbuilt photocell plus

Command and Control technology there is no

need for a separate external PSU.

Contact: Raytec, www.rayteccctv.com

wireleSS DiGital MeDia player

Spectrum Multimedia has launched the

Buffalo LinkTheatre HD Nfiniti wireless media

player that streams multimedia content from

any network or connected DLNA, NAS, PC,

USB device directly to a TV. The LinkTheatre

is suitable for high-definition video cameras

users and those wanting to watch HD films,

high-resolution photos and music. Media

files can be streamed through the device

from a number of sources, including a Buffalo

LinkStation Live and TeraStation Live storage

devices, or other DLNA1-certified NAS devices.

Contact: Spectrum Multimedia, Tel: (0)11 807 0707,

www.technogroup.co.za

hIT The

GspoTFour of Logitech’s products have received the prestigious Good Design Awards 2008, receiving the coveted G Mark, symbol of the Good Design Awards 2008.

COrDleSS laSer MOuSe

fOr nOteBOOkS

Featuring the easy-to-attach, easy-to-remove Clip-and-Go dock, the V550 Nano can be clipped to your laptop – giving you more freedom when you move around at home or at work.

illuMinateD keyBOarD

The Logitech Illuminated Keyboard makes typing easy – even in the dark. To optimise existing backlight technology, Logitech combined microlens reflectors, a multilayer painting process and laser etching – creating an experience that is brighter, sharper and easier to read.


Cut the cost of F1 and who knows who’ll join the exclusive club and perhaps deflect some of the limelight that’s been reserved for the grande teams for quite a few years now.

It’s an argument that, on the face of it, has merit for the big teams. If they want to spend their money – and that of their sponsors – why not let them?

But those of us with long memories will recall the many occasions in the past on which big budget teams simply pulled the plug on their F1 campaigns because of a hastily scribbled memo from the boardroom ‘to cut spending on marketing’ or ‘to reduce sports sponsorship programmes immediately’.

Big-name teams such as Renault and Honda scrapped their F1 plans in the 1990s, only to return later to re-establish themselves. But many other teams and companies associated with F1 in that era turned their backs on the sport including Jaguar, Porsche, Peugeot and Ford.

Economically trying timesWhat FIA president Max Mosley wants to avoid is a situation in which only a handful of well-heeled teams compete in F1. He would like to ensure that the independents – the likes of Williams, Red Bull and Toro Rosso – are able to remain in the sport and not be crippled by escalating costs, especially in the light of the recent global credit crisis.

How will he achieve his goal? Mosley has made the first move in what could become a difficult and protracted chess game with the

Formula 1 Teams Association (FOTA). He says that unless the teams collectively agree on a drastic cost cutting programme, with a target of 50% reduction by 2010, he will take matters into his own hands and enforce “draconian” FIA-devised regulations – which he is entitled to do.

Demonstrating his seriousness, he has called for tenders for the manufacture and supply of a single ‘long life’ engine/gearbox unit which, he says, will be mandated for use in F1 in 2010.

Mosley is on record as saying that the drive-train is an area where big cost savings can be realised. He points to the fact that independent teams are paying upwards of 30 million euros a year for the use of engines.

His gripe is that engines could be produced and supplied to the ‘independents’ for around 5% of this budget without the spectator in the grandstand or watching TV noticing any difference in the quality of the racing.

Falling on deaf earsPredictably, most teams have ignored Mosley’s pronouncement, having learnt over the years to take his public statements with a pinch of salt.

Nevertheless, his warning that teams can

no longer afford to “toss out 100, 200 or 400 million euros a year” has not fallen on deaf ears. FOTA has agreed to work on a counter proposal.

What will it entail? As only major car manufacturers currently produce F1 engines (if you position Ferrari in the Fiat camp) then it’s fair to say that future F1 engines will follow auto industry thinking.

And this is for smaller, lighter turbocharged engines operating with direct fuel injection systems and ethanol-gasoline mixtures.

If you apply commercial thinking to the F1 question, it’s perhaps worth noting that the European manufacturers need to reduce the fleet average CO

2 emissions by 2012 to meet

new European Union rules. It’s already been agreed that small capacity turbo engines will achieve this target.

One wonders how F1’s two billionaires, Vijay Mallya of Force India and Dietrich Mateschitz of Red Bull Racing, will feel about these ideas. My guess is they’ll welcome them with open chequebooks.

Duxbury Networking

tel: + 27 (0)11 351 9821, fax: + 27 (0)11 646 3079

www.duxbury.co.za

advertorialGraham Duxbury is the CEO of Duxbury Networking, Formula 1 commentator, South African champion and Daytona Speedway USA Hall of Fame inductee.

Cutting Costs vs the status quoIt’s a game that’s played from tIme to tIme between motorsport’s governIng body, the fIa, and the formula 1 teams. the fIa wants to reduce the costs assocIated wIth f1, whIle the teams – make that the more affluent constructors, lIke ferrarI, mclaren and toyota – want to maIntaIn the status quo In the belIef that bIg cheque books buy podIum places and race wIns. By Graham Duxbury, Formula One in Focus

“One wOnders hOw F1’s twO billiOnaires, Vijay Mallya OF FOrce india and dietrich Mateschitz OF red bull racing, will Feel abOut these ideas. My guess is they’ll welcOMe theM with Open chequebOOks.”

net.work november 2008

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