Will sustainability turn BT Global Services' fortunes?

The IT or, to give it it's full name, the ICT industry has led a pretty charmed life. After being a participant for over forty three years, it amazes me that it still manages to buck trends; from ever more power at ever lower prices to the potential ability to steer the planet and its occupants from environmental disaster.

At least, that's the hope and the intention of the green IT industry. Manufacturers are gleefully chomping out and selling more and more ICT equipment, while claiming that the environmental savings accruing from its use will mightily offset the environmental harm caused by its manufacture, operation and the disposal of whatever it's replacing.

Of course, IT isn't the only game in town. Cleantech industries are working hard on coming up with new things (with their embedded environmental harm) to reduce our overall environmental impact. It's paradoxical and uncomfortable, but it seems we have to do some more harm in order to do even more good.

One company that has an interesting environmental programme is BT Global Services. It also wants to be seen as "the IT provider of choice". It plans to do this by raising the level at which it consults with businesses by using sustainability as a lens. It has the IT in the form of data centres, software and services. And it has the C, because its core business is communications.

Global Services has posted some ghastly results recently and is in the middle of a restructuring. Perhaps it sees 'sustainability' as an opportunity to improve matters for itself and for the environment.

Anyway, if pretty charts are anything to go by, its Sustainability Practice has a comprehensive approach to helping its customers build sustainable organisations. Like many large companies (IBM, Cisco, CA and HP are just four examples), it has drawn heavily on its own experience to formulate its guidance for customers. For example, an early step in the process is a carbon assessment. This focuses on people, power and procurement.

People commute and travel on business and they use laptops, personal printers and mobile devices, for example. Power is used in office devices and data centre equipment, as well as heating, lighting and cooling. Procurement includes third party services, hosted equipment, print services, transport and so on. These three elements are analysed according to the three 'Scopes' of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. (Scope I is the direct burning of fossil fuels. Scope II is electricity and the carbon created in using it. Scope III is indirect activity such as staff commuting.)

When you look at it this way, it seems obvious, but that's the deceptive thing about a simple framework.

Of course BT has a range of service offerings to match sustainability needs. And, as you might expect, substituting travel with communications looms large. And 'Homeshoring' is offered as a solution for UK contact centres. (With dog-cancelling microphones, perhaps?) The data centre hosting story is the usual one of greater carbon efficiency than a DIY approach.

The individual elements of the BT story aren't particularly original, but its telephony and networking pedigree hint at good service and security levels. It has many years of implementing sustainability initiatives with resulting business benefits. The savings it boasts sound huge, but these have to be considered in the context of BT's size (£21.4bn turnover last year). It saves £37m per year in travel costs and it saved £238m in one year through conferencing. It also reports a 20 percent productivity improvement from flexible working arrangements.

BT has spent years trying to muscle in on IT's turf. Now the industry really is ICT, perhaps this is the best chance it has. And, with the inevitable build up to December's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, now seems to be a very good time for BTGS to set out its sustainability stall.

By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.

Virtual events aren't real events shoved online

As you know, most of us are facing financial difficulties and some of us are becoming concerned about our environmental impacts. Or we may actually find ourselves being pushed in that direction by customer pressure or legislation.

We still like the idea of jetting round the world, or even driving round the country, in order to meet our suppliers, customers and work colleagues. But, faced with the aforementioned issues, we're increasingly turning to online meetings and events. And, for many, the experience falls short of expectations.

Of the whole panoply of virtual engagements from webinars to telepresence, one type probably sticks out as the most likely to disappoint and that's the virtual exhibition and conference. And this is probably because we all know what a physical event should be like, so we expect the same or something very similar with the online version.

This is a mistake.

They are not the same and each has its strengths and weaknesses. To ignore this, when planning to present, exhibit or visit, is to invite disappointment.

We are all familiar with the physical event, so perhaps it's best to focus here on the good and the bad of the virtual. You may have your own views in which case we'd love to hear them.

Primarily, a virtual event (subject to some technical and localisation caveats) is available to all, anywhere in the world. And it involves no travel or accommodation expenses. It will still, of course, take up some of the delegate's time, but they can generally choose when they want to visit. (The events usually remain online for a while after the initial event closes.) If you visit in real-time, you can probably participate in live Q&As, for example, but you may put a higher value on personal convenience. Because of the social networking tools wrapped round a virtual event, you will still be able to reach out to speakers, exhibitors and fellow delegates as long as the event site remains live.

Exhibitors and speakers also benefit from lower costs, although these are mostly staffing, travel and accommodation savings during the event itself. They still need to prepare and adapt their approach to suit the online world. Making a recorded 90-minute PowerPoint presentation available online is really not taking advantage of the new medium or, indeed, the attention span of an online visitor. Remember that, just as with the web, escape for the visitor is just a mouse click away. In theory, a virtual event should be able to pull together a high calibre of speaker or panellist because of the smaller impact on their time. They would probably be happier to do shorter presentations too if they don't have to travel thousands of miles for their appearances.

A hierarchical approach to exhibit materials would make sense. Exhibitors could offer a cascade of presentations from short and sweet down to whatever depth they feel is appropriate. And back this up with a menu of downloadable materials such as case studies, product/service information and white papers. This is similar to real life, except that shelf space is infinite, different languages can be accommodated and the materials can include podcasts and movies as well as documents and links to web pages. This self-service approach has the advantage for the delegates that they don't have to run the gauntlet of the sales team in order to lay their mitts on the collateral. They'll come back soon enough if they're interested. And, because they've prequalified themselves, their value is much higher than that of the average booth visitor at a physical event.

From the organisers' and exhibitors' perspective, they can collect an incredible amount of detailed business intelligence during the event. All the conversations a company has with its visitors and who downloaded what collateral could be captured. At a more anonymous level, all the visits, engagements and downloads made by delegates show the organiser which parts of the event are working well and which are not.

At real events, 'networking' is probably claimed as the number one payoff for the delegates. And it's true that this physical, "look 'em in the eye and shake their hand", contact is missing from online. This is an incredibly important facet of our everyday lives but, if you can't afford the time or money to participate in an important event, then a virtual equivalent might be better than no event at all. Having said that, in some respects the virtual event is better because of the ability to check out companies and individuals through the event directories and make appointments to meet them virtually. It is also theoretically possible to stimulate serendipitous meetings by having lounge areas for people to virtually mingle, backed up by on-the-fly created chat rooms if they need privacy. This does, however, miss all those body language cues which tell us whether we want to make contact or not. But some things things we're just going to have to do without if we're concerned about our budgets, our time and the environment.

By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.

Is telehealth coming at last?

Yesterday at Cisco's C-Scape analyst briefing, we were treated to a presentation by one James Ferguson. And what a treat that was. Cisco chose wisely. He was a good speaker, passionate about his subject (telemedicine, which he prefers to call telehealth) and a medical practitioner to boot. It was a real person talking about real things, not some propellor-head from technoland or, worse, a marketeer. This background, of course, made him a devastatingly effective salesman, and it wasn't until the Q&A that some of my (Scotch?) mist of enthusiasm started to clear.

His pitch was essentially simple. Because the coverage of the Aberdeen-based Scottish Centre for Telehealth (SCT) includes highlands, islands and oil-rigs, it faces some rather unusual problems. Popping into the local hospital is hardly convenient. And doctors can't easily get to where they're needed. Not always in time, anyway. So SCT's been working on getting diagnoses done remotely in order to a) help people to get the right treatment locally and b) to identify those who need hands-on professional treatment urgently. The filtering questions are: "Is this time dependent?" (urgent), "Is it experience dependent?" (need an expert) and "Is it facilities dependent?" (need particular facilities).

We saw people sticking their tongues out and waggling their tonsils in kiosks while remote experts tried to figure out what's wrong. Apparently ninety percent of diagnoses can be done by looking at someone, listening to their chest and looking in their ears, noses and down their throats. It's a slightly dehumanising way of doing medicine: in the same way that we all like to meet in person rather than through a computer screen or over the phone. The truth is, when you're ill and you're far away from help, anything is better than nothing at all.

Ferguson was not afraid to mention the dangers of turfing up at hospital. He'd rather sit on a telepresence or videoconference consultation than face God-knows-what in person. And patients eliminate the risk of catching hospital-borne infections if they don't have to go near the place.

The benefits are piling up.

The downside, of course, is that this stuff has to be paid for and the bandwidth has to be there. On payment, Cisco has a cash mountain so this, presumably, is why it's happy to consider spreading payments over time, essentially turning the customer's capital expenditure into operating expenditure. It can still recognise its own revenue at point-of-sale. Although it's a different issue, we're also seeing gradual acceptance this pay-as-you-go approach in the various kinds of cloud-based services.

The harder part of the equation is the communications infrastructure. Covering highlands, islands and oil-rigs with high quality broadband connections is a political and economic challenge, given the relatively sparse populations. Oil rigs have, apparently, been trialling a satellite-based facility called OPTESS. And some of the ground-based services have been using ISDN but, of course, the higher the bandwidth and the further the reach, the more services can be provided remotely.

Ferguson pointed out that medicine is now so good at patching us up when we get a major illness, we keep on living only to get more and more illnesses, until we end up with some chronic condition. All of this puts increasing demands on an already overstretched health service much of which, in theory at least, could be alleviated with some kind of home monitoring and self-treatment service, escalating to the professionals as and when needed.

But that's to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, the SCT has run trials inside hospitals running telehealth 'kiosks' in parallel with conventional assessments, in order to compare the quality of results. (It has a clever way of eliminating bias.) It is extending this facility to multiple hospitals and has started home monitoring trials. All of which are testing the principles of telehealth and capturing feedback from users on the experience.

As with so many things in the computer world, the big question is whether it will be able to scale. And that depends largely on either an appropriate infrastructure or a system which can adapt successfully to lower bandwidth connections.

By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics

 

Yesterday at Cisco's C-Scape analyst briefing, we were treated to a presentation by one James Ferguson. And what a treat that was. Cisco chose wisely. He was a good speaker, passionate about his subject (telemedicine, which he prefers to call telehealth) and a medical practitioner to boot. It was a real person talking about real things, not some propellor-head from technoland or, worse, a marketeer. This background, of course, made him a devastatingly effective salesman, and it wasn't until the Q&A that some of my (Scotch?) mist of enthusiasm started to clear.

His pitch was essentially simple. Because the coverage of the Aberdeen-based Scottish Centre for Telehealth (SCT) includes highlands, islands and oil-rigs, it faces some rather unusual problems. Popping into the local hospital is hardly convenient. And doctors can't easily get to where they're needed. Not always in time, anyway. So SCT's been working on getting diagnoses done remotely in order to a) help people to get the right treatment locally and b) to identify those who need hands-on professional treatment urgently. The filtering questions are: "Is this time dependent?" (urgent), "Is it experience dependent?" (need an expert) and "Is it facilities dependent?" (need particular facilities).

We saw people sticking their tongues out and waggling their tonsils in kiosks while remote experts tried to figure out what's wrong. Apparently ninety percent of diagnoses can be done by looking at someone, listening to their chest and looking in their ears, noses and down their throats. It's a slightly dehumanising way of doing medicine: in the same way that we all like to meet in person rather than through a computer screen or over the phone. The truth is, when you're ill and you're far away from help, anything is better than nothing at all.

Ferguson was not afraid to mention the dangers of turfing up at hospital. He'd rather sit on a telepresence or videoconference consultation than face God-knows-what in person. And patients eliminate the risk of catching hospital-borne infections if they don't have to go near the place.

The benefits are piling up.

The downside, of course, is that this stuff has to be paid for and the bandwidth has to be there. On payment, Cisco has a cash mountain so this, presumably, is why it's happy to consider spreading payments over time, essentially turning the customer's capital expenditure into operating expenditure. It can still recognise its own revenue at point-of-sale. Although it's a different issue, we're also seeing gradual acceptance this pay-as-you-go approach in the various kinds of cloud-based services.

The harder part of the equation is the communications infrastructure. Covering highlands, islands and oil-rigs with high quality broadband connections is a political and economic challenge, given the relatively sparse populations. Oil rigs have, apparently, been trialling a satellite-based facility called OPTESS. And some of the ground-based services have been using ISDN but, of course, the higher the bandwidth and the further the reach, the more services can be provided remotely.

Ferguson pointed out that medicine is now so good at patching us up when we get a major illness, we keep on living only to get more and more illnesses, until we end up with some chronic condition. All of this puts increasing demands on an already overstretched health service much of which, in theory at least, could be alleviated with some kind of home monitoring and self-treatment service, escalating to the professionals as and when needed.

But that's to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, the SCT has run trials inside hospitals running telehealth 'kiosks' in parallel with conventional assessments, in order to compare the quality of results. (It has a clever way of eliminating bias.) It is extending this facility to multiple hospitals and has started home monitoring trials. All of which are testing the principles of telehealth and capturing feedback from users on the experience.

As with so many things in the computer world, the big question is whether it will be able to scale. And that depends largely on either an appropriate infrastructure or a system which can adapt successfully to lower bandwidth connections.

By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics

 

Virtualisation and security – the two-edged sword

All new innovations in IT are a double-edged sword – with the benefits come challenges and unintended consequences. Not least server virtualisation, which does have a number of security advantages over running software directly on servers. While it’s worth considering these, it’s also worth weighing them up against the challenges, particularly given the relative immaturity of the technology.

To be fair, virtualisation has been around ever since the dawn of computing – what is an electronic computer other than a virtual environment? I did get into trouble a few years back for crying foul when Microsoft claimed: “We’ve been doing virtualisation for many years,” but to an extent they were right – as soon as there is layering or abstraction in a computer system, we have something that could be termed ‘virtualisation’. So, we have virtual memory, virtual disks, and indeed virtual machines.

It’s this latter version of virtualisation that’s garnering most interest currently, and to be more specific still, virtualisation when applied to X86 (i.e. commodity) servers. Until this side of the millennium, server computers didn’t really have the horsepower to run multiple, virtual machines (mainframes did of course, but were still a bit pricey – a factor which is notably changing). Now, with multi-core processors that build in virtualisation hooks (essentially, enabling instructions to be run by the virtual machines in a fashion which makes them pretty much as fast as running on physical machines), server virtualisation has crossed into the mainstream.

From a security perspective, virtualisation has a number of advantages. The first, almost a by-product, is how virtualisation adds to the fundamental security principle of ‘defence in depth’. The virtualisation layer provides an additional level of abstraction which needs to be cracked if the core application is to be reached. In this way it’s a bit like Network Address Translation (NAT) in that it keeps core applications one step further away from the bad guys.

Virtualisation also offers what’s referred to as a ’separation of concerns’, That is, different workloads (i.e. applications) can be run within their own virtual machines, such that if there is a problem with one, then others should not be affected. Building on top of both of these concepts, security features can be built into the virtualisation layer – in principle (see below).

However, virtualisation does have its security downsides. I’ve already mentioned the additional virtualisation layer – this can either exist as a hypervisor (for example that from VMware or Microsoft) or as an extension to an operating system kernel (for example using KVM in Linux). For the additional layer to be effective, it needs to be secure – in some ways more secure than the operating systems and applications it hosts, given that if it gets hacked or goes down, they all go down.

Without dwelling too long on specific vulnerabilities (there’s a handy summary of some here), suffice it to say that the presence of an additional layer adds to the security burden rather than reducing it. Not only is it necessary to secure the hypervisor, but also the management tools that go with it (which may be, for example, susceptible to brute force attacks to attempt a login). There are a number of ways of mitigating these risks, both in terms of patching against specific vulnerability, and also defining building security into the virtual architecture with appropriate use of firewalls and other protective measures. Baking such capabilities into the virtualisation layer is still, admittedly, a work in progress as illustrated by recent announcements such as VMsafe.

There are some additional risks resulting from the increased flexibility that virtualisation brings. For example, a virtual machine may be moved from one, highly protected server, to another far less protected server without it being absolutely clear that anything untoward has happened. This scenario becomes even more likely if there is insufficient controls over the provisioning and/or management of virtual machines. A virtual machine could even be moved off-site, onto a third party server (at a hosting site or ‘in the cloud‘, to coin a phrase.)

Perhaps one of the biggest security risks at the moment is that organisations are deploying virtualisation without always considering the security implications. At a panel I hosted at Infosecurity Europe a few weeks ago, one security professional in the audience explained that in his organisation virtualisation was being brought in primarily for cost reasons (nothing wrong there), but also that the rush towards savings was made without taking security into account (e.g. by costing it into the business case). Security comes at a cost, and like fault tolerance and other risk management approaches, it never works quite so well when it is retro-fitted; the knock-on effects of rushing towards virtualisation may also include the aforementioned proliferation of virtual machines, resulting in a more complex (and therefore riskier) environment.

This factor is borne out when we consider recent Freeform Dynamics research suggesting that less than a quarter of organisations feel they are operating at ‘expert level’ when it comes to virtualisation – the impact is that knowledge of security best practice for virtualisation will still be lacking for many.

In conclusion, then, it is important to remember that these are still early days. Virtualisation undoubtedly has its benefits, not least from a security perspective. However organisations adopting virtualisation today would do well to ensure they do not increase the level of security risk they face. A simple risk assessment at the start of any virtualisation deployment, together with an appropriate level of vendor and product due diligence from a security perspective, could be the stitches in time that save a lot of heartache later.

By Jon Collins, managing director at Freeform Dynamics.

Dan Bricklin (inventor of PC spreadsheet) on technology

A couple of weeks ago, Wiley asked if I'd like a review copy of Dan Bricklin's Bricklin on Technology book. Normally, I'd say "not on your Nelly" because I know what a chore book reviewing can be. However, I was at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980 when Bricklin collected his first award for VisiCalc - the pioneering spreadsheet for the PC. I was also a fairly avid user of his 'Demo' program a few years later.

Even though I don't think we met, (unless it was in Zaragoza a couple of years ago), I felt connected, not least because I also developed and published PC software for many years, but without his degree of visibility or success.

When the book arrived, I winced because it's more or less 500 pages long. Unless you're a commuter or you don't get much sleep, how do you find time to read that much?

Anyway, the book was enjoyable at a couple of levels and a disappointment at another. Enjoyable because it peeled off and examined the layers of thinking that went into various products and issues. Bricklin leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of insight. The transcript of an 85-minute interview with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is a classic in this respect. (It was 37 pages.)

I'd rather Bricklin had identified and pulled out the key elements but then, I suspect, this would have been an editorial step too far for him. He would have had to impose his own interpretations on the conversation, rather than laying it out in full in front of his audience.

You will get insight if you read this book. Insight into what brought us to where we are and a few glimmers into how we might get to where we're going.

The other enjoyable bit for me, which you won't all share, is that I've met (albeit fleetingly) many of the people mentioned in the book, worked with many of the products and written about many of the issues. Bricklin and I even started programming at the same time - early 1966, and we've both tried to take the user perspective in our work.

The book triggered many long-dormant memories and reawakened many old feelings, especially in the late 70's/early 80's as we all groped our way through the chaos of the emerging microcomputer/PC business. This is not really a reason for buying the book because Bricklin's chosen subjects seem, in the main, to be serendipitous. A comprehensive history book it is not, although it is a useful addition to the history of the IT world of the late 20th century.

The book is a compilation of old blog posts, essays and transcripts of recordings, loosely arranged around topics which Bricklin finds important, all topped and tailed with narrative from the perspective of 2007/8. As he says in the conclusion, "On any topic you can explore deeply and find nuance", which more or less sets the tone for the book. He does dig deep, he records faithfully and, at times you want him to make his point more quickly. But maybe that's not what he's trying to do. Perhaps he's trying to help the reader understand the nuances, so that they can move forward with their own thinking. I don't know.

Most of his topics have some resonance today, although much of the writing has been overtaken by events or absorbed into the mainstream. The chapters will give you a clue: What Will People Pay For?; The Recording Industry and Copying; Leveraging the Crowd; Cooperation; Blogging and Podcasting; What Tools We Should Be Developing?; Tablet and Gestural Computing; The long term; Historical Information about the PC; Interview with the Inventor of the Wiki; and VisiCalc.

It's a ramble round the industry and round the inside of Bricklin's head. His invention of VisiCalc gave him a passport to go where he likes when he likes and meet who he likes. And that's what he's done and, in this book, shared it with us.

My approach, if you're thinking of buying it, would be to say "I'm getting a good 300-page book, I'll just need to pick which 300 of the 500 pages are of most relevance to me." It's a bit like his approach to software - give the user the tools and let them choose how best to use them.

Amazon is selling it in the UK for £10.99.

By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics

A virtual sustainability summit, or three

Now here's an idea that makes sense: a follow up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. Or, to be more accurate, a series of follow ups, none of which requires much travel. A company called G2Events is putting on a series of three online conferences which include exhibit booths, presentations (from organisations small and large), telepresence-basd panel discussions, meeting rooms and downloadable materials. Called Sustainability Virtual Summits, it is entirely digital - totally in keeping with its name,

Each event has specific focus areas in order to maximise the chance of a meaningful exchange of views. The first, in February, will concentrate on virtualisation and dematerialisation and how ICT can get its own act together (my words, not the organiser's). The second, in May, concentrates on smart motor systems and smart logistics. The third, in August, looks at smart buildings, smart grids and water and sanitation. Each event concentrates on the role of ICT in delivering sustainability benefits.

Why should we have mini-summits following the big one in Copenhagen? Well, to be blunt, you can only achieve so much at these big events. If the delegates agree on a post-Kyoto protocol and all get their pictures taken looking pleased with themselves, (preferably while standing next to Barack Obama) then that's about it. The real work takes place in all the organisations that are obliged to live up to the greenhouse gas promises that eventually get made.

The truth, though, is that we're in disarray. For example, last week I looked at ten different carbon calculators. They gave ten different results. (Choose one and stick with it if you want to monitor your progress.) But wouldn't it be better if we could all agree on some standards? This is one of the reasons these follow up events have been brought into existence. Participants get a chance to review and discuss these and many other sustainability-related issues.

Each 'conference' will be a day long, covering three time zones. After the initial three days, the live debate will continue for 30 days. After that, all the material from the whole event will be left online for a further 90 days. In theory, this could become a substantial resource for anyone seeking a genuine understanding of the issues around ICT and sustainability. It would be nice to think that some global understanding will emerge. If positions polarise, at least everyone can see what's going on and know where further effort needs to be applied. Hopefully a lot of bonding will take place among movers and shakers around the world.

The trick will be to get the right people to attend. As anyone who's visited Second Life will attest, that experience can be quite unpleasant. The virtual summits promise to be very different. They are photo-realistic for a start. A little bit of downloading takes place before you get into the conference so, presumably, a lot of  the rendering is done inside your own computer. A company called Design Reactor takes care of the technical aspects and, looking at some event work it did for Hewlett Packard, the omens are good. You can also see a dummy of the Sustainability Summit site here.

Although this is a commercial activity, its heart seems to be in the right place. It is independent. It has some good sponsoring organisations. Exhibitor booths don't cost very much. It's going for a smallish audience - around 5,000 quality visitors drawn from CSR/sustainability execs, c-level, data centre managers, supply chain, product development, finance and marketing. It seems like a good event to drop in on during the 30 day 'discussion period'. I'm guessing that this where the fun will begin. It's also where people with implementation experience will be able to contribute their insights.

By David Tebbutt

A(nother) take on cloud: "Nothing to worry about"

Although we’ve said on several occasions that cloud computing isn’t the revolutionary movement that many would have us believe, my visit to Cloud Expo this week really hammered home a point that could make many businesses breathe a sigh of relief, so I thought I’d reiterate it here.

When it comes to engaging with service providers, most organisations are really only interested in outcomes. The key question is: Does what is on offer here fulfil my requirements? A business wants to achieve a specific goal, and if a service provider meets certain criteria, it wins the business. How the service provider delivers the paid-for outcome is a factor to be included in the due diligence process but only insofar as delivery mechanisms meet the need.

Cloud computing changes absolutely nothing in this regard. If the service provider is using ‘bona fide cloud computing technology’ (whatever that means) in its data centre to help it deliver services with greater economies of scale, resilience, flexibility, and so forth, then so be it. Some customers will care, some will not.

This point became ever more clear to me yesterday at Cloud Expo because most service providers in attendance were offering hosting and/or managed services. The entire event would not have looked any different had it been called ‘Hosting Expo’.

And there’s the rub. None of this really matters if all you care about is the outcome you want to achieve from a third party service provider. For practical purposes today it might be easier to consider ‘The Cloud’ as simply a consolidation term, an umbrella term under which all the different types of third party service providers that existed in more narrowly defined boxes in the past now live.

Sure, there is more to it than that, but only if you care about details beyond what you are actually paying for. For example, virtualisation technology allows service providers to offer up ever more specific services to suit lots of different performance, scalability and price point requirements. But this is the difference between ‘what’, and ‘how’, and there is currently far too much mixing up of the two, which is counterproductive to say the least.

Back to third party service providers, then: The effect of ‘cloud’ is greater choice to the customer in terms of what’s on offer and how it is sourced, paid for and used. But nothing has fundamentally changed. Despite so many providers claiming that because something carries a certain label, it must be good, everything you ever knew about using third party service providers remains as important – nay – more important, than ever before.

By Martin Atherton, research director at Freeform Dynamics.

Two men say they’re Jesus....

I had a link to a short video entitled ‘Cloud Computing in Plain English’ sent to me yesterday, which I thought provided an useful overview of utility computing and the role virtualisation plays in that context.

While I thought some other parts of the video were a bit confused, the thing that really struck me about it was the way in which the term ‘cloud computing’ was used to refer to the utility computing model only. Indeed, within the video, cloud was differentiated against Software as a Service (SaaS), which was positioned almost as being an old-hat way of doing things with some undesirable restrictions that ‘cloud’ overcomes.

I couldn’t help thinking of a similar ‘back to basics’ video from Salesforce.com that talks about cloud computing in reference to the SaaS and Platform as a Service (PaaS) models. The view expressed there is very similar to the messages heard from other SaaS/PaaS players and wannabes, from Google to the myriad of smaller application service providers that have sprung up in recent times.

So, we have two conflicting views here, and as the old Dire Straits lyric goes: “Two men say they’re Jesus; one of them must be wrong”.

It seems as if we are moving from a situation in which the term ‘cloud’ was so ill-defined that it could pretty much mean anything, to one in which certain factions are attempting to assume ownership and exclude definitions that don’t fit their requirements. Not sure if this is progress or just adding to the confusion.

While I personally detest the word ‘cloud’ in the IT context because it is so ambiguous and I am a bit of an obsessive about precision, I have grudgingly accepted it on the basis that it is not going away, and have learned to work with it. The only way to make sense of a lot of discussions in this space, however, is to begin each conversation or review by establishing which flavour of cloud is actually being talked about.

In order to facilitate this, the Freeform Dynamics team analysed all the things that cloud could potentially mean and came up with quite a few categories that we now use as a starting point for interaction. These cloud categories are explained here if you are interested, and as you’ll see, we take quite an inclusive approach, regarding cloud as an umbrella term (if you’ll forgive the pun), which breaks out into multiple offerings from vendors and service providers, some of which are very different.

With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see where all this ends up at an industry level. I guess it will either come down to who has the deepest pockets to promote their definition of cloud from a marketing perspective, or the industry actually cooperating to unravel the tangled mess of terminology, ideas and ideologies that exists out there at the moment.

In the meantime, it's important to be on your guard and be careful about making assumptions on the language you encounter when on the receiving end of marketing messages, media coverage and analyst advice.

By Dale Vile, research director at Freeform Dynamics.

Cloud: evolution not revolution

Fed up with "the cloud" yet? You ain't seen nuthin'. It's not going to go away. But, with a bit of luck, it's going to start falling into place.

When Microsoft announced its "Software Plus Services" plan, many people, including me, scoffed. We assumed this was just a way of preserving its profitable fat-client software business while nicking whatever advantage it could from cloud-delivered services.

Microsoft has sunk its Office hooks deep into the corporate marketplace. But that won't surprise you. For better or for worse, people actually like using the same applications as their colleagues inside and outside the organisation and, in enterprises, the most popular ones are from Microsoft.

It doesn't matter how hard competitors try, the compatibility just isn't there. And, with products such as Word, useful capabilities like Track Changes are just not portable. The wiki brigade will point out the nonsense of Track Changes and argue that a single workspace with multiple authors and a proper version history makes so much more sense. And in a pure academic sense, they're right. But, in the main, wiki products are lightweight and alien compared with the richness and ubiquity of Word.

What many organisations really need is concurrent editing of single instances of Microsoft documents. Some companies are working on such things, but that's tomorrow. They will have to climb the curve of evangelist, early adopter and early majority before they get anywhere near mainstream acceptance. By which time, who knows?, maybe Microsoft will have extended Word into a Microsoft-hosted wiki-like environment.

But Word is only an example of what's going on. Plenty of other applications deliver tremendous capability at the desktop and their online cousins less. A long time ago an industry pioneer called Adam Osborne used to claim that, "adequacy is sufficient, everything else is irrelevant." He probably said it to foist a portable computer with a five-inch screen on an unsuspecting world. But, for many, especially in the lower reaches of the market, his observation is true. There, OpenOffice, Google Docs and other products/services will continue to steal desktop business from Microsoft.

But, despite claims to the contrary, we're not about to experience a cloud revolution. The world isn't going to suddenly put all its eggs in the cloud basket. We're going to see a wide range of engagements with cloud. We've seen the start with SalesForce.com - a massively popular niche application which can be tapped into from anywhere. The same goes for email, online storage and credit card payment services. These are all cloud-based and require little thought to implement. They sit well with existing business processes.

Other cloud services act as an extension of the IT department, providing physical expansion (and contraction) without wrecking budgets and causing chaos in the data centre. As we move forward and we think of entrusting more of our IT to the cloud, we will need to tread carefully, lest we create hard-to-manage interdependencies between service providers. Nothing new in priniciple, but this is our own business we're entrusting to outsiders. Service-level agreements and responsibilities need to be nailed down carefully.

It seems pretty obvious now that cloud services will sit alongside existing applications and services and be called upon when they provide genuine incremental value. But this wasn't so obvious a little while ago when the evangelists were screaming "cloud is the future" and Microsoft, in what looked like a rearguard action to save its traditional business, was arguing that "software plus services" is the future.

It sticks in my craw to say it, but I think Microsoft got it dead right.

By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.

The business service management imperative

Key points:

• Business service management (BSM) is not new – but to the uninitiated it can come across as yet another initiative. It’s important to separate the true value of BSM from the hype.

• BSM is as much about delivering efficient services, as it is about ensuring they effectively support the needs of the business.

• Services, and therefore BSM, should start and end in a dialogue with business stakeholders at all levels.

• BSM is not ‘yet another something to manage’ – it’s the right way of managing – so to be effective, BSM should itself deliver sustainably, and on a continuous basis.

Click here to read the full article.

By Jon Collins, managing director at Freeform Dynamics.