Obviously you do need a fair amount of storage and processing power – or access to cloud services to burst to – in order to render down the raw data into something you can use for business insight. This is getting the vendors fairly excited, as, if a customer can see value in pursuing this route, somebody somewhere, whether end user or cloud provider, is going to have to buy some stuff! This appears to be very much a scale-out play rather than a scale-up one, and a lot of the focus is on storage platforms like EMC’s Isilon, as a lot of this data is unstructured – i.e. not in a database.

I came across a couple of articles over the last week which explain the approach and some of the concepts well – I hope you find these useful:

Freeform Dynamics: How big is Big Data?

Information week: Big Data: Why all the fuss?

A host of providers – GOOD, Mobile Iron, Sybase and others – have sprung up recently providing different takes on ways to secure employee-owned devices for email etc. Alongside that, I suppose it could be said that maybe there is more of a buzz around Android and Apple at the minute rather than Blackberry handsets. That had led me to think that RIM had some serious work to do in this space.

Sounds like they are on it already – I understand that in March, they will release Fusion, which is an add-on to an existing BES implementation that will enable you to manage iOS and Android devices from your BES server. This is more of a Mobile Iron style approach where you can enforce settings and use encryption on the device itself, rather than a GOOD approach where you get an encrypted app that you manage. I slightly prefer this approach as it doesn’t change the experience of the device that your users choose.

This could present an interesting and useful departure for RIM, where they continue to produce hardware, but also use their existing installed base to manage other devices. I don’t think that’s a bad strategy at all – just a shame that they aren’t shouting about it yet!

Kudos to RIM for recognising that Blackberry is not the only fruit in a BYOD world…

Happy New Year from all at Softcat! I thought we would start the year off with a few predictions for what we expect to happen over the course of the year. Rather than this being simply some predictions in isolation, we’ve made a few suggestions as to how you might be able to respond to, or take advantage of, these trends:

Desktop – if you haven’t already, you will come under increasing pressure to migrate to Windows 7. We expect IT to need to reduce desktop management costs, while maintaining or improving service levels to the business. Windows 8 is looking likely to ship towards the end of the year – it’s looking good so far and could be interesting when your PC, phone and tablet run basically the same OS. We think Windows 8 will be the last revision of the ‘desktop’ operating system as we know it – Windows won’t go away, but will increasingly be a platform across a huge range of devices.

What to do?

Get your desktop house in order – look at management toolsets such as System Center to reduce the pain of migrating to Windows 7 and of ongoing maintenance, and reconsider server-based computing (VDI, Terminal Services etc) where this makes sense.

BYOD – more and more people within  your organisation will demand, and even expect, to be able to use their own devices – particularly phones and tablets – for work purposes. You need to set out your strategy here, as it is something that you can harness to improve productivity, employee satisfaction and business continuity.

What to do?

Evaluate the risk inherent in having data on these devices, versus the demand and potential gains. Technologies such as GOOD can encrypt data on those end-points, or you can use centralised computing to deliver Windows apps to those devices without any data getting on to the device. Over time, you may want to consider rearchitecting your line-of-business applications or at least having a transport mechanism that enables delivery to handheld devices.

Communications – we think there will be two main trends in communications. The first will be mobility-related – replacing desktop handsets by running telephony clients on mobile devices, and increasingly implementing VoIP over GSM or WiFi. The second will be an increase in the use of casual, desktop-based video conferencing and application sharing. Both of these trends will improve collaboration across geographical boundaries and bring disparate work-forces closer together.

What to do?

We think the increasing interest in Microsoft LYNC will drive both of these areas, so you could do worse than start there, especially if you have an Enterprise Agreement which gives you at least some LYNC entitlement. There’s a healthy ecosystem of products to improve and extend the capabilities of LYNC, as well.

Datacentre – virtualisation will continue to be the prevailing trend. If you haven’t, you really should – and if you have, you should probably do more! We’ll see more management technologies, both from the virtualisation vendors and from the ecosystem, which will help to push up the percentage of applications you virtualise, as well as to migrate towards the nirvana of a ‘private cloud’. No doubt your demand for storage will accelerate as well, so you will need to be clever about the way in which you use disk to keep on top of costs in that area while maintaining the performance your applications need. Oh, and you’ll need to improve your ability to recover in the event of a disaster, too.

What to do?

Review your strategy for virtualisation – are you trading physical server sprawl for the virtual equivalent? Would tighter management enable you to drive up utilisation? Review your storage strategy as well – can you make use of deduplication, for example – or employ a combination of SSDs for performance and cheaper, slower disk for data? The combination of clever use of storage and increased virtualisation can make it far easier – and cheaper – to implement a robust DR plan.

Cloud – this is the year that we will see ‘Cloud’ descend into Gartner’s ‘trough of disillusionment’. It wouldn’t surprise us if we saw the first serious security breach in the cloud space, and doubtless another large-scale outage.  Having said that, losing some of the hype will make Cloud a more realistic proposition for businesses when done properly. We think that localised, friendly cloud providers will be increasingly important – credit-card-cloud will be reserved for development and test.

What to do?

Don’t write cloud off – but look to providers where you have or can build a relationship and where doing your own due diligence is possible. Look to extend the capabilities of your infrastructure for capacity or DR by partnering with a provider of infrastructure as a service, and if your business needs a new application, consider cloud options against on-premise.

Security – Firstly, 2012 is the year we expect security technologies to start to catch up with virtualisation. Up until now the available technologies have been somewhat immature, and the new model of ‘introspection’ via APIs will improve this. Secondly, this will be the year the business tells you to stop blocking Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, as people are now genuinely using them as business tools. You will no longer be able to mitigate the risks by turning them off! We’ll also see more focus than ever on keeping data safe – something which is increasingly difficult in this mobile world.

What to do?

Firstly, if your legislative or threat landscape demands it, look seriously at Intrusion Prevention technologies which will work across your virtual environment. Secondly, make sure that your Web Security Policy is up-to-date, and supplement it with a powerful filtering technology that enables control down to application-level within social networking sites, rather than taking a simple allow-or-deny approach. Thirdly, gain an understanding of the way in which data moves around your organisation and make sure your access policy limits data misuse, especially through social media and email. Encryption of remote access is a sensible step, and you may, if your position requires it, like to give consideration to a data-loss-prevention tool.

So, according to Forrester, these people are increasingly using Macs (and, I would presume, iPads etc) in a business context, because they are not constrained to the Windows desktop that they are provided by ‘corporate’. This is noteworthy as it is only three years since Forrester declared that Macs only had a niche place in business.

This has been a trend I have been following for a while – regular readers will know about my iPad addiction. When I attended the VMware Premier Partner Exec Council in January of this year, which encompassed the top 200 VMware partners worldwide, I was amazed at the number using iPads and MacBooks – and the small number using PCs.

I’ve been experimenting with the Bring Your Own Device/ PC concept within Softcat, and you know what? It works. The main reason for this was the fact that I was starting to embrace some of the social media concepts that were around, wanted to have access to those tools from whatever device – and also work (sadly!) from a variety of platforms in and out of hours. I guess I am not your typical employee, and hopefully I am a touch more technically literate than your average IT user, but you know what? This stuff works! I’ve had the luxury of access to both Citrix XenApp and VMware View, and of course we run Outlook Web Access and provide external access to SharePoint – the latter two being where I spend most of my time.

Not only does this stuff work, but it’s coming. There are plenty of technology solutions out there for device security, any-device access, application delivery – make sure you get ready for it!

(UPDATE)

This is not intended as anti-PC and certainly not anti-Windows – of course I am using Windows, but just via a remote connection. What I am saying is that I am ‘pro-choice’ – over the form factor, the access device, the (local) operating system. It’s anti-corporate conformity, not anti-Windows… It depends on what you want, and how you personally work more efficiently. One of our VMware techies runs Fedora as his native OS – apparently that works for him, but it’s a stage too far for me!

I spoke for most of the time about the crazy place that Softcat is – how we give everybody breakfast, arrange for their ironing to be done, and generally have a great time (whilst working really hard of course) – and how because our employees feel valued, empowered and rewarded they will absolutely go the extra mile for our customers.

One point I did make relates to a conversation I have been having more and more with IT guys recently. Many IT teams are concerned that lack of recent investment in infrastructure, coupled with the growth of the importance of, and demands on, IT, has led to systems that are under-performing and not delivering the user experience which their internal customers demand. I am convinced that this has a direct effect on customer service, in that customers don’t get the information or response that they need quickly enough.

Equally importantly, I think this has a serious impact on employee satisfaction; if your people can’t get their systems working quickly enough to do their job, they are going to be less happy in their work. Doubtless this will affect their usual sunny disposition in dealing with customers! We’re currently making a huge investment in our own infrastructure to ensure that we can deliver to our staff and our customers the performance that they need – I’ll tell you more about the details of what we are doing in a future post.

In the meantime, a few things you might like to think about relating to performance and user experience (by no means an exhaustive list, and I would be very interested in your feedback in the comments):

• Look into virtualisation as a cost-effective (and cost-avoiding!) way of upgrading ageing hardware and of allowing you to move applications around your infrastructure to free up space
• Look into storage – SSD is becoming more and more prevalent, and, needless to say, can assist where your applications are constrained by IO. Some storage vendors offer data tiering which means that ‘hot’ data will automatically be moved to faster disk…
• Think about how your applications are delivered – a ‘chatty’ application might be better deployed on Citrix or the equivalent, close to the servers on which it depends, rather than on PCs where it has to pull a lot of data over the network
• Think about your network – is it time to look at 10GbE in the server room?
• Consider your cloud options – you might not be ready to go full-bore into the public cloud, but pushing out some of your less critical or less security-dependent applications might free up some space for the rest – and get you used to cloud for the future.

Lots of speculation about where WebOS will end up and whether it will be sold or licensed. I don’t know any better than the rest of you, but I reckon Amazon are a decent contender. Why?

• They are a consumer-facing and -focused organisation
• They already build and ship their own (successful) hardware
• Plenty of rumours about a forthcoming Amazon tablet
• They have a content ecosystem – Amazon MP3 and cloud delivery, TV and film content, LoveFilm…
• They have a cloud platform and therefore direct access to developers…

However, I was impressed with this one. It was fast, slick, seemed to work well. There was no discernible lag to the interface, which seems to be the case with many tablets. The keyboard/dock/extra battery worked very well, with hotkeys for certain functions and a really useable track pad. I was even able to play Fruit Ninja (badly, but that’s down to me not the device) using the track pad. And I gather the dock adds an extra 8 hours of battery, which is pretty awesome – somewhere close to 18 hours all in, apparently.

Downsides? Well, I’m not convinced the elongated (widescreen) form factor is for me – it wants to be in portrait whereas I tend towards landscape with tablets. It’s blooming heavy with the keyboard dock – unscientific measurement (holding apples in one hand, android in the other) suggests that the weight is roughly the same as my iPad and 11″ MacBook Air. I didn’t like the ouside coating, a plasticcy, sort-of carbon fibre effect. Although as Phill pointed out, it’s probably scratch resistant and does form a protective shell for the device when the keyboard dock is closed.

With access to a virtual desktop delivered by Citrix, VMware View or similar, this could be all the device you need…

I don’t think I will be replacing my iPad right now, but it’s good to see there’s some good competition at last!

Recently, though, I have developed an issue whereby I am unable to log in to applications – in particular the official Twitter app (probably a productivity advantage!) and Citrix (definitely not a productivity advantage!). I tried all sorts, including deleting the apps and reinstalling (nice and easy from the app store of course!).

I must admit I was getting a bit frustrated. However, tonight I decided to fiddle with network locations – not something I was actively using, to be honest. I deleted the network locations I had, and added a new one – hey presto, I can log in again.

Don’t ask me why it works (hey, if you know why, please tell me in the comments!), but it did. So you know what to try if you have the same problem!

Some of the stuff he talked about resonated with me, as it was similar to the way we try to shape our own business. He was saying that while they are a public company and have a duty to their shareholders, they are more interested in building something interesting and powerful, which will deliver benefits to their customers – whilst having fun – than focusing short term on the needs of those shareholders. We try to do the same – focus on employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, in our belief that the former drives the latter. If we treat our customers right, the rest will follow – I’m sure that’s an appropriate standpoint. We’re privately owned, but I’m sure Mark’s attitude will deliver for his shareholders in the long term.

Anyway, back to business… Mark was talking about the way in which IT calculate the return of spending money – or how business calculates the return of spending money on IT. This is generally based on TCO – total cost of ownership – and whether having a lower TCO will generate a return for the investment over a given time period.

The suggestion was that in this day and age, we should be looking at Total Value of Ownership – TVO – instead. This means concentrating more on the benefits an IT solution will deliver to the business rather than the pure costs.

I guess this is particularly appropriate in the virtual desktop space where Citrix play – it’s difficult to justify a VDI project on capital grounds over the cost of replacing PCs, but the benefits come in terms of, yes, lowered operational expenditure but also in flexibility of workspace, device independent computing (letting users choose their access device), home working, employee experience… We’re likely to role out VDI for our own users, and can see such benefits, as an employer which likes to be nice to its staff, as really important. I look forward to the day when all users can access IT systems securely using the device of their choice, wherever and whenever they want. Maybe we should call it Martini computing….