The most recent Analysis from Incisive Media

Roundtable: Virtual victory

Fleur Doidge — 2009-11-13T17:06:00.000Z

Fleur Doidge, CRN, Friday 13 November 2009 at 17:06:00

Virtualisation offers considerable financial and environmental advantages to users, finds Fleur Doidge

Virtualisation is becoming a reality in more organisations as public and private sector alike seek to reap the advantages of cost and resource savings coupled with increased efficiency across the IT infrastructure. A trend rather than a technology, virtualisation is becoming entwined in the thinking of the desktop administration department as much as in the server room, and even in SMEs.

Neil Sanderson, virtualisation and management product manager at Microsoft, says the industry is just at the stage where virtualisation is taking hold across a wider range of organisations.

Smaller end users, however, may need more assistance than large enterprises to deploy and integrate complex, overarching technological strategies such as virtualisation. And that is where, of course, the channel comes in.

“For the past few years, it was the preserve of large organisations with large numbers of servers. It is now something much more available to everyone, both on the server and on the desktop,” says Sanderson.

“There are more options, and prices are coming down. And the benefits are much more prevalent.”

Partners can reap the rewards due to the clear return on investment (RoI) that may be demonstrated to customers of all sizes. Partners alone have the experience and expertise to follow through on the promise of virtualisation, by educating and explaining to customers what it means and what technologies it might involve.

Consultancy is key with offerings such as virtualisation that are more about a different way of understanding and deploying the whole gamut of IT infrastructure than buying and selling any particular type of technology.

Building on server consolidation

Virtualisation allows users not just to consolidate on the server side but build on that over time and develop increasing efficiencies and improvements via an overall solution.

On the desktop, virtualisation can be used just for the applications, or users can virtualise the entire desktop in a thin-client type approach. This is an area in which public sector customers in particular are interested, due to the large and dispersed nature of the organisations. And almost every customer wants to save money, with budget high on the agenda.

“What virtualisation really means is that you have got options,” says Sanderson.

David Caughtry, director of e-business at specialist distributor Computerlinks, agrees with Sanderson, saying that he is definitely seeing more interest in virtualisation from customers.

“The obvious benefits of virtualisation include reducing the physical hardware and lower power consumption,” says Caughtry. “People are now realising that you can extend the total cost of ownership (TCO) for end users by bringing in strategies around power consumption. The green story is very strong at the moment. IT managers are very aware of the rising costs of data.”

As virtualisation extends its tendrils throughout the whole IT infrastructure, customers are also seeing security benefits as long as they remember that a collection of insecure virtual servers can be just as insecure if not more than a bunch of physical servers.

Many tools now exist to make their manageability vision real but customers will need reseller help to achieve it.

“And larger security vendors are now coming to market with virtualised offerings for their products,” says Caughtry. “Customers need to see what is happening in that virtual world. The reality is that the threats are still the same.”

Virtualisation is really moving more towards the desktop, though, as the understanding and practice of server virtualisation becomes more embedded in the culture of business IT. And users are driving that move to virtualise the desktop, in part because more of them are working and expect to be able to work just as well remotely whether at home, in an airport, at a business conference or at the office.

Customers are requesting virtualisation

Nick Hutton, principal consultant at specialist virtualisation reseller 360IS,

says customers are actually requesting virtualisation. Rather than having to sell it from concept up, end users of all sizes are demonstrating some understanding of virtualisation.

“A year or so ago, a lot of our customers were large enterprises, but in the past 12 months with the price coming down, Microsoft’s entrance into the market and the growing popularity of Citrix solutions, we are seeing smaller companies probably with 200 or so employees asking about virtualisation,” says Hutton.

That said, securing and managing the virtualised environment remains a challenge for customers and an opportunity for the channel.

“Virtualised services, desktops and so on may be managed by the same processes that are used to manage the physical environment. But about 70 per cent of virtualised environments will be less secure than the physical environment,” Hutton adds.

Des Lekerman, managing director of managed services provider Eurodata Systems, says he too has seen prices come down coupled with a shift in end user thinking from his company’s midsize-to-large customers. Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 is also playing a role, as is the ability to deploy management tools and help people get visibility of their infrastructure.

“They were deploying virtualisation specifically for disaster recovery in the early stages,” he says. “We were trying to persuade those customers to deploy virtualisation into production environments, but they were not sure about that they wanted to stick with the disaster recovery side. In the last 18 months, we have seen a big shift to using virtualisation for production systems.”

Virtualisation may merely exacerbate the management challenge that has always been there. An IT team that buys a number of physical servers may not know where they all are and what they are doing but the same also holds true for virtualised servers.

“However, what it means is that if you want 80 servers you can just bang your head against the keyboard 80 times, and there they are,” says Sanderson. “But you need to take all those servers and keep them up to date. And then actually knowing what the performance is of all those apps in those virtualised environment is a real management challenge.”

Education and skill-sets

Computerlinks’ Caughtry says education is key and will represent a “huge” opportunity for the channel.

“Show customers how they can make more on their bottom line when budgets are squeezed,” he says. “There is still a large amount of education needed on how to manage it, control it and the like. Resellers can provide the services and enable success around a virtualisation project, looking at business issues, all the way through to deployment and ongoing maintenance.”

Lekerman says business skills and the right technical skill-sets must be sourced by the channel. Parts of the virtualisation market are still immature suggesting that some skills may prove hard to locate or in the right combinations sought by channel partners, especially small ones without a large human resources budget.

“We have been in this market for three-and-a-half years, so we have got a team of people,” he says. “But we are finding a lot of education there too that needs to go on. With Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), there is still a big gap. Everyone in the market is talking about it but there are not any large-scale customers who have put it into deployment.”

Some traction is now being seen in the NHS and gradually it is spreading into mainstream business, but the awareness is only spreading and developing slowly.

Steven Black, principal technologist at VAR and consultancy Charteris, says that from a Microsoft solutions point of view, the cost model around VDI can be difficult to understand.

This can hinder sales, because it is not as easy to demonstrate a clear financial benefit to the customer. Proving the total cost of ownership calculations can be tricky or at least trickier than in traditional server virtualisation. Then all the applications must be packaged on top of getting the infrastructure right and ensuring their network can support it.

Emerging VDI and service opportunities

That said, the opportunities for VDI appear to be developing.

“We are seeing customers who thought that VDI was a kind of panacea,” says Sanderson. “You just run the desktop in the datacentre and run it through on some kind of thin client device. It is not a guaranteed return; you need to understand what you are looking to deliver.

“We do have the Lancashire constabulary looking at building a VDI infrastructure for their offices, but [on top of] the traditional benefits of server virtualisation, carbon dioxide savings and opex. They can be working with the local authority, but still access data over their app from wherever they are.”

Couple that with savings made and the channel still has a convincing sell

as long as resellers can explain the benefits clearly to potential customers.

VDI will not always be the right solution; simply virtualising the applications on

the desktop rather than the entire desktop itself may deliver benefits.

“I think it is an incredible opportunity for partners to give value. Like with server virtualisation, there is a large amount of consultancy,” says Lekerman. “We are finding that above the physical apps and hardware there is a big managed services opportunity.”

Ensuring customers have the right processes to make the most of their virtualised deployments is also critical, according to Black. Tools from the physical side, along with the right processes, can be implemented on the virtual side. If they are not, the final result will suffer.

“A customer who licenses a virtual server that hosts many virtual machines will only need to [make that mistake] once, because they remember the pain. We ask what tools do you have in place to manage the services?” he says. “You need product, good processes, tools, and people in place.”

A practical example

Hutton says 360IS recently completed a virtualisation deployment for financial services company Demica. This customer provides specialised working capital solutions via consultancy, advice and IT services to various banks and financial institutions. Its London data warehouse processes billions of dollars in transactions from around the world.

Each of Demica’s new customers had its own dedicated server a veritable and diverse server sprawl. Meanwhile, demand for its services had increased.

The consultancy found that only one out of every 20 or even every 40 of the physical servers was needed, with RoI for the consolidation achievable in six months. 360IS deployed a virtualisation appliance with integrated hypervisor, resulting in reduced hosting costs, power consumption and real estate alongside lower hardware maintenance requirements.

The new set-up should be more resilient and easier to scale up allowing faster provisioning of new customers and better use of shared storage.

While consultancy was critical to the assessment and design, the physical infrastructure is streamlined. A single hardware platform eases maintenance, upgrades, capacity planning and management while reducing costs.

“As we start to talk more about utility computing, cloud computing, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), do we not think that even IT companies worry less about the [actual physical] cables, nuts and bolts of a solution?” says Hutton.

The future for the channel is increasingly in a focus on business benefits for the customer, and using whatever technology is best suited to the solution that produces that result. Just like virtualisation, in fact.

NetApp expands programme with Hyper-V

www.channelweb.co.uk/2246195

Fast-forward partner Fusion with AMD

Sara Yirrell — 2009-11-13T16:49:00.000Z

Sara Yirrell, CRN, Friday 13 November 2009 at 16:49:00

AMD’s channel director talks to Sara Yirrell to explain how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to the platform vendor’s new partner programme

AMD is keen to be seen as a platform vendor in 2010 and is set to launch a raft of new channel incentives to stimulate sales.

The CPU and processor vendor recently took the wraps off its global partner programme named Fusion Partner Programme which was designed to bring all aspects of its channel programme together under the same umbrella for the first time since its acquisition of ATI in 2006 (CRN, 5 October, 2006).

Andrew Buxton, EMEA channel director at AMD, says: “We are trying to think of ways we can help the channel and we want to incentivise our partners by offering extra rebates.”

Buxton says that the more resellers generate in sales this coming quarter, the more marketing funds they will generate that can be spent the following quarter.

“Having one programme rather than lots of little ones is more consistent for the channel,” he says.

He adds that in Q1 next year AMD plans to enhance its partner programme, with a view to rewarding customers that buy more AMD product lines.

“We are trying to behave as a platform company rather than a processor vendor,” says Buxton. “Therefore, we are planning ways to reward customers that buy more of our range in the same transaction.”

AMD is also feeling confident for the coming quarter, he says.

“If you go back to this time last year, the whole industry was worried. In Q4 a lot of people stopped spending money and that went down to consumer level. In Q1 things settled down and people began thinking: ‘If I still have a job it’s going to be OK’.

“Also, because interest rates have been so low, people have extra cash and, rather than go on holiday, a lot have thought about upgrading their PC. This is often done by working with the channel many consumers would rather order through a local manufacturer or small reseller that will build the desktop to their spec.

He also warns about underestimating the gaming market.

“A lot of people would still rather order a gaming PC than buy a console that tends to block the TV. With a PC, people can go into a different room to play and not be in the way, and they want the best specs for their money,” he says. “With these customers we can try and respond by delivering a clear value proposition that will give them a better overall experience using the PC.”

Buxton says he has high hopes from the launch of Windows 7.

“If you draw a pyramid there are three things that drive technology adoption at the top CPUs, graphics cards and operating systems,” he says. “So when a new family of CPUs and Windows 7 is released it stimulates everything below it, such as memory, disk drives, keyboards and mice.

“Windows 7 is what everyone wanted Vista to be and it is looking very positive at the moment. AMD has brought a really new price point to the market for the general-purpose Windows 7 PC. We have an entry-level quad core that retails for about 40 per cent less than other entry-level quads.

“When this is coupled with an integrated motherboard and graphics card, users will get a nice PC with a high level of integrated graphics for a very reasonable price point.”

He says AMD is concentrating on picking a few sweet spots in the market and offering a platform through partners that will help to stimulate the market.

“We don’t just want to throw a bunch of components out there. We are seeing more and more that we need to get our platform message out, and that is what we will do.”

AMD fuses partners together

www.channelweb.co.uk/2250355

Industry and human rights campaigners united in opposition to "three strikes" plan

Rosalie Marshall — 2009-11-13T14:02:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, V3.co.uk, Friday 13 November 2009 at 14:02:00

Critics says government proposals to curb illegal downloading are unworkable and morally questionable

Business secretary Lord Mandelson's plan for a “three strikes” law to tackle illegal downloading came under fire this week from various quarters.

Mandelson wants computers that are used to illegally download or share copyrighted content to be cut off the internet after three offences – even if the computer's owner is not the guilty party. Under his plan, internet service providers must first send warning letters to suspected offenders before they can pull the plug.

However, following Mandelson’s proposals the EU ruled last week that citizens' internet access can be restricted if necessary, but only after a " fair and impartial procedure including the user's right to be heard".

The UK government argues that Mandelson’s plan allows for this because ISPs would have to send customers a series of notifications before they are able to cut off internet access, and there will also be an appeals process that will allow individuals to challenge any disconnnection order.

Yet critics of Mandelson’s proposals argue the EU ruling effectively means the three strikes plan is dead in the water, because it punishes suspects without first proving guilt through an impartial legal process.

Scott Fairbairn, a specialist in telecoms and intellectual property law at CMS Cameron McKenna, said, “The recently agreed wording in the draft EU Telecoms Package is clear. Rights holders cannot act as judge and jury in these matters. They cannot simply instruct ISPs to disconnect their customers or restrict their internet connections. In no way can that be considered to be a ‘fair and impartial’ procedure. At the very least there would need to be some kind of independent and impartial tribunal to consider the merits of each case."

During V3.co.uk’s Summit on Information Overload this week, representatives from ISPs, human rights groups, new model online music service providers and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) argued that Mandelson’s proposals were not needed, were too draconian and would do more harm than good.

Open Rights Group (ORG) chief executive Jim Killock pointed out that since the arrival of new service models, such as Spotify, the BBC iPlayer and Sky Songs, that provide online copyrighted content legally, illegal downloading has almost been “cut in half”.

“I think that’s the case closed. There is no reason to have some huge stick,” he said.

Killock suggested Mandelson’s proposals would cost millions of pounds to implement, which may turn out to be more than the amount rights holders are losing.

“The measures could turn out to be a good subsidiary for the Royal Mail but I can’t see who else it will be benefiting – certainly not the music companies.”

“What will happen if they go ahead with the proposals is that they will just depress the market,” he added.

Killock also thought the idea of ISPs acting as law enforcers was wrong.

“Everything that is done to anybody should be done by a court order. Is cutting people off the internet a fair response to copyright infringement? Probably not. This is something the industry is arguing is causing them limited financial harm. The answer to limited financial harm is not removing people’s right to engage in society – that is not a proportionate response. Also, we don’t know the consequence of this; it might cause a whole family problems or damage a person’s business. A court has to be involved in these decisions,” Killock argued.

“However, having said all that, enforcement seems to be a complete distraction. We’re talking about an industry that failed to engage with the internet, failed to license products properly and to get its act together. Now it is saying that in order to get its act together it needs to punish customers – that is really, really wrong and totally unnecessary.”

Killock also said the UK government may have not fully understood the latest EU ruling on illegal downloading.

“At the ORG, we’re going through a detailed legal analysis of the EU proposals and we think it is a great deal stronger than the protections the government is currently proposing. This is likely to be the argument we will have and an argument that just may end up in court.”

BT director of industry policy, Simon Milner, agreed with Killock that the EU arguing for a “fair and impartial process” before cutting off an individual’s internet access is likely to blow a hole in the government’s plans.

“We think the draft EU Telecoms Package does require a due process but the details are still unclear,” said Milner.

He said BT’s opposition to the government’s plans was mainly due to the lack of a due process procedure, rather than the cost the ISP would have to bear, which he said would probably amount to a couple of extra pounds a month per customer.

Milner said rights holders should be taking offenders to courts rather than making ISPs do the dirty work. He noted how some industries were good at taking court action, like the game and film industry. “But the music industry says it does not want to pursue customers as it does not want the bad PR. It would rather ISPs have the bad PR,” he said.

Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk executive director of strategy and regulation, said the ISP was against the government’s plan on both human rights and financial grounds.

“First, the question is, is it ever appropriate to disconnect users from the internet, and secondly, if it is, how about the need for a judicial process?” he said.

On the matter of costs, Heaney said the proposals would require “huge sums of money”to implement.

“It would involve us having to put in a system to identify repeat offenders. We will need to deploy deep packet inspection boxes so we can inspect each packet of data to see if it is a copyrighted file. This would be tens of thousands of pounds just for TalkTalk,” he said.

Heaney added that illegal file-sharers could easily find ways to circumvent Mandelson's plans.

“This is a different world to the traditional analogue world. You can’t stop people file-sharing because people will turn to methods such as encryption and Wi-Fi hijacking to get the content,” he said.

Heaney said education was key to stopping illegal downloading. “Rather than industry representatives telling music fans not to download the content, it should be the stars themselves,” he said.

“Also, TalkTalk is launching a site next year that will allow parents to prevent access to the Pirate Bay and other file-sharing sites, and we are also adding stronger security measures on the Wi-Fi network.”

Heaney agreed with Killock that new distribution models were the way forward, but added that the music industry needed to be more proactive in this area.

“It is interesting that many new models are developing like pay-per-view models such as iTunes, monthly subscription services like Tiscali’s new service, and that of Sky Songs and Spotify’s advertising model,” said Heaney. “People want attractive models but the music industry has not fully woken up to pushing them yet."

Meanwhile, Sky Songs said it was noticing a change in attitude on the part of the music industry.

“It is only now that the industry is realising the internet is an opportunity and not just a threat, and that it can offer a great distribution model. The problem is the music industry has not been acting as quick as it should be and that is why illegal downloaders popped up. We need both a carrot and stick approach to tackling illegal downloading and we are supplying the stick. What the market needs is attractive, well-priced and legal services, and we need to work harder to make sure these are the services we are working towards,” said the spokesman.

Spotify said one of the key objectives when creating its service was to create a product that was easier to use and more convenient than piracy.

“People don't want to illegally download but there were no serious options for users to go out and access music in the way they wanted, which is where the idea came from. Obviously, this was one of the key points we discussed with the industry and continues to be one of our selling points,” said a Spotify spokesman.

Finally, a spokesman for the BPI argued that while it was regrettable that entertainment industries were losing revenue to piracy, internet disconnection is not the way forward.

“Delinquents should be educated but not taken away from the internet,” he said.

He added that the new services that supply copyrighted content to users legally still had a long way to go. “Everyone knows business models need to change but no one has created another model that creates enough money – other than Google, which does not invest in new content.”

Visit our dedicated Summit web site for more breaking news, views, analysis and video on the topic of Information Overload.

Summit: Microsoft Office to the rescue

Daniel Robinson — 2009-11-12T17:47:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, V3.co.uk, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 17:47:00

Chris Adams, Office Client product manager for Microsoft UK, explains how the next version of the suite will help workers deal with communications overload

V3.co.uk: Email volume has been growing steadily, and workers have to deal with other demands on their attention like IM and telephone calls. What is Microsoft's view of the information overload problem?

Chris Adams: It's definitely a topic we look at a lot; one of the four pillars we are basing our entire upcoming Office 2010 release around is insight from complexity, the information overload that people have in their day-to-day lives now, so this has been one of the key foundations for a lot of the work we have done since 2007.

We've got some statistics from some research in the US, done by Basics, which estimates companies lose around $900bn a year through lost productivity as a result of information overload. Workers are spending up to 25 per cent of the time they have in the day looking for information they need to allow them to continue with the job in hand.

Another study done by Accenture showed that managers spent about two hours a day looking for information, but by the time they actually get the data, half of it is useless to them. The challenge is, how do we make the time to find the information shorter, and improve the usefulness of the information they can find?

Microsoft is probably the biggest supplier of office software, so how can you help customers to tackle this issue?

Outlook is the application that most people use in a business environment, with users spending on average 750 minutes a day in it.

If you look at another piece of research that IDC did, after searching for information, managing and responding to email is the second biggest thing that most knowledge workers do on a day-to-day basis, it's an average 13 hours per week that people spend on email.

But email is rarely an activity that stands alone by itself, it tends to be intermingled with lots of other things that different people do – dealing with documents, scheduling meetings, inputting business processes or sales follow-up and responses – so it involves lots of different pieces from other areas of your working life.

In Outlook 2010, we're introducing Conversation View, a feature borne out of the volume of information you get in your inbox, how do you view it and manage it in a way that's easier for the user.

We've done some internal research, and found using Conversation View reduces the average inbox by 40 percent from a viewing point of view; so organising stuff by conversation, you reduce the view of the number of items by almost half.

What is Conversation View?

It's a way that we more logically organise items in your inbox by subject, like a threaded chat, so that all emails around a particular subject are grouped together. It allows the user to go through and understand what mail items or topics or actions they have to follow instead of having to read all of them.

One of the other features is Conversation Cleanup, it looks at all the email items inside that Conversation View and removes any duplicates, so if you've been out of the office all day and there are lots of new emails in that conversation, it can potentially reduce it down to just one big email you need to read to understand what's going on.

Do you need the latest version of Exchange (2010) to use this?

You don’t, actually. This functionality will work on any mail source coming in to Outlook, so if you have a POP account, an Imap account, you can use Conversation View and Conversation Cleanup as well.

But when you have Exchange server at the back end, the great thing is the heavy lifting conversation management is done by the Exchange Server, so not only do you get this great experience when you’re using Outlook on the desktop PC, if you access Outlook through a web browser you also get Conversation View and Conversation Cleanup, and you get Conversation View on your [Windows Mobile] device as well.

Going back to our internal study, it showed that by using Conversation View and Conversation Cleanup plus a third feature, Conversation Ignore, which is basically if you've been added to a conversation that has nothing to do with you, Ignore View tells Outlook that this conversation has nothing to do with you, and Outlook will automatically move this email and any further emails in the thread into your deleted items so they don’t clog up your inbox.

One of the things that's great on the back-end as well is that reducing the volume of email going through your inbox can be a huge cost saver to an organisation in terms of storage costs.

What about help on the telephony side?

When you think about what Microsoft broadly calls unified communications, there are three main elements: Exchange server; Office Communications Server (OCS), which does voice-over-IP and messaging and presence; and then we've got Communicator, the desktop client.

Exchange can help by becoming the single inbox experience for you, so when you get a voicemail, it's dropped into your email inbox, and you have controls so you can play that voicemail directly from the inbox, you don't need to dial into voicemail to get it, and Exchange 2010 also provides a 'best guess' speech-to-text translation, so just by reading the email you can understand what that message is about.

With OCS, any of the Office applications can 'bubble up' people's presence, so if I'm in Word and I get an email and I need to contact a colleague, I can see their status is green and I can start a VoIP telephone call to that person instead of typing a long drawn-out response.

We've got an interesting piece of work done by HP and the University of London looking at the effects of constant interruption into people's working day, which can be email, IM, or phone calls, and it found the impact of these interruptions is quite dramatic on productivity.

That's where Communicator is really great, because by setting my status to busy, I can stop people from disturbing me when I'm really busy. It can automatically route voice calls to my voicemail, so my phone won't ring at all, it will go direct to voicemail.

And I can give different levels of access, so that I can let my boss disturb me, but not anyone else in the organisation.

What infrastructure would customers need for this level of capability?

OCS, if you want a full voice experience, needs integration with your PBX. We have a very software-driven view of telephony. We want to work with existing PBX, whereas a lot of other unified comms vendors want you to buy their hardware. We want to interact with your existing PBX and extend the functionality in software.

How about when someone emails you about a topic, and you have to hunt around for the context (see previous Summit interview with Gartner Research director Nikos Drakos)? Is Microsoft addressing this issue?

If that person is available, it might be best to send them an IM and ask them directly, as I said before. But if they’re offline, you might use some of our search technology, such as in our SharePoint product.

A lot of content still exists on people's hard drives, but by having SharePoint at the centre of the organisation, you can make data available to other people in a compliant way.

So for this example, you might go to your Enterprise search portal and look up the topic, and find a list of documents associated with that particular project.

This extends to people as well, so enterprise search will return a list of people who work on a specific project, and it will give me a view of people's MySites, which is kind of a mini internal portal where people can publish stuff that they work on and that they are interested in, and sometimes it is quicker to just ask the person involved.

Visit our dedicated Summit web site for more breaking news, views, analysis and video on the topic of Information Overload.

Bibby cuts software to the bone

Martin Courtney — 2009-11-12T16:52:00.000Z

Martin Courtney, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 16:52:00

Software asset management solution staves off indignant vendors and improves distribution company's bottom line

As one of the UK's top logistics providers, Bibby Distribution operates from over 60 locations in the UK and employs around 2,500 people, providing outsourced distribution services to household names such as the Toyota Parts Centre and Golden Wonder.

With so many staff, the company's IT department needs to keep close track of the applications and operating systems running on over 1,000 desktop PCs, which makes effective software asset management (SAM) a priority from both a legal and financial standpoint.

"We have a strong governance culture – the demands are that we are legal and we stay legal," said Bibby IT director, Robert E. Lee. "But nothing says we have to pay more [for software licensing] than we actually need to, either because we do not need as much software as we thought, or because we can defer support [costs] on software that we are not using."

In a bid to reduce its expenditure on unnecessary software licensing, Bibby appointed SAM and IT audit consultancy Liken to conduct a pilot software efficiency audit using the Abexus Enterprise Meter data gathering tool earlier this year. The results of that pilot proved better than expected and the software has now been rolled out across Bibby's organisation.

Using a third party organisation for SAM represents a new strategy for Bibby, which previously endeavoured to tackle the issue in-house.

"Software licensing is an absolute minefield and you have to review [licenses] with care," said Lee. "The general view is that some software vendors make it deliberately difficult and opaque so we preferred to use a specialist company to do it for us. I do not claim to be a solicitor but find it useful to rely on Liken to meet legal and economic objectives."

Bibby uses a wide range of applications, from standard software suites and back office products to specialised freight forwarding and transport warehousing applications. Abexus helps Bibby see exactly where that software is and more importantly how often it is being used. That means underused applications, like Microsoft Office Professional for example, can be removed and the license allocated elsewhere.

"MS Office can be used for an intensive period by somebody, but then not used again for six months, so the question is do these users actually need it," said Lee. "If not, we can uninstall it and put it on another desktop."

Lee admits that some users are reluctant to give away any software, whether they use it or not, but says it is simply a matter of selling the concept properly.

"Very few people actually object if you explain to them that if they have a problem or find that [taking away an application] restricts them, they can come back to us and we will re-assess the situation," said Lee.

Lee would not divulge how much Bibby is paying for the contract with Liken and Abexus, "It does involve a bit of extra workload for one of our infrastructure team, but still pays for itself because we can heavily deskill that work," he said. "We do not have to have an out-and-out technical specialist – the software does it for you and we always have a Liken expert on tap."

So is Bibby Distribution more confident that it is 100 per cent compliant with its current software licensing requirements following a full implementation of the Liken/Abexus combination?

"I would be very upset if any software supplier became indignant, as I hope we are tantalisingly close to being perfect now. But I suppose nobody ever is," said Lee.

Given the difficulties involved in achieving that perfection, Lee has unequivocal advice for any company that is approached by software vendors which have a right to insist that it is compliant with the terms and conditions of any one software product.

"You declare, then go and buy a license – it isn't rocket science," said Lee. "Most software providers will not have a problem and are more than happy to oblige if you are honest and say 'We checked and found we are a few licenses short, but we'd like to buy some more.'"

Summit: Tony Young, Informatica CIO interview

Rosalie Marshall — 2009-11-12T14:56:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, V3.co.uk, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 14:56:00

Young discusses how Informatica’s IT department helps keep corporate data private

V3.co.uk: How do you manage problems that stem from information overload?

Tony Young: Well, I look at the problem and there are two aspects: there is what I call unstructured data like emails, Twitter and Facebook content and documents, and then the structured data world like all the content held in databases. The challenge when talking about information overload is that it is happening in both areas.

So in terms of the unstructured world side, what we have done internally is try to consolidate all the technology we use. For example, we use Yammer internally, which is a kind of Twitter tool but it keeps tweets private.

Also Sharepoint allows people to build their own Facebook internally, as we don’t want all their corporate posts consumed by the general Facebook.

These tools train people that there is content not appropriate for external use but which can still be shared internally. We are trying to encourage people to keep information inside the company. It is not a good idea for employees to be tweeting about where they are going and which customers they are visiting.

On the structured data side the biggest problem is that people never control the data themselves. The data is not defined and there is a lack of data governance processes. For example, customer data in a company lies in multiple systems and everyone has had that experience where you change your email with a company but the change does not get reflected in all of the systems.

Therefore it is important for an organisation to agree internally on how they will define customers and who can overwrite whom when changing customer details.

How can people deal with all the channels of information coming at them from so many different directions?

At Informatica we have a staff member responsible for employee enablement. There are so many technologies available for people to use and there is a fine line between over-communicating and needing a wide range of technologies to continue with your job.

The staff member makes sure when staff go to the airport they know how to connect to the internet for free, and when they are with the customer, where to access the right documents. It is important to get control of data rather than allowing it to control you.

How many conversations do you have about information overload a year?

I never really get asked about information overload but the biggest question I get is how do I find something, and I get this once a week. That goes back to having one member of staff dedicated to employee enablement.

How can IT stay at the forefront of technology innovation and avoid being bogged down by data security and privacy issues?

I would say IT should be conscious of what staff can get in the consumer world and try to make the tools available internally and as easy to use and accessible as possible.

Also, most companies require two levels of authentication to get into their intranet. But the question is how important is it to be that security conscious about getting onto an intranet. Why does a business user need to have so many encrypted logins to get to a white paper? Is it that important to make it so secure?

How do you keep on top of the latest technology developments?

I read all the top weekly magazines and I subscribe to several different podcast that I listen to on my commute.

How do you differentiate which tools are good for business users and which are just a distraction?

Part of it goes back to your main IT strategy and how important you regard it to be a leader versus being a mainstreamer. In my business, it is not a great business decision to be a leader but it is good to be a mainstreamer. I would like to see how technology fleshes out before I adopt it, as adopting technology is expensive and to keep adopting new things is not productive.

Visit our dedicated Summit web site for more breaking news, views, analysis and video on the topic of Information Overload.

Summit analysis: To what extent was technology responsible for the financial crash?

Rosalie Marshall — 2009-11-12T13:40:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, V3.co.uk, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 13:40:00

Tech firms argue it was a lack of good processes and the use of inappropriate tools that led to the banking crisis

Did an excessive reliance on technology on the part of the banks lead to the recent financial crisis? More specifically, did banks fail because their business intelligence tools (BI) were not up to scratch?

During V3.co.uk's Information Overload Summit, technology firms argued that it was not a reliance on technology that led to the crash but a reliance on weak technology and poor processes.

BI vendor Microgen, which boasts seven out of the top 10 banks as customers, argued that it was the use of inappropriate business tools such as Excel spreadsheets to manage assets and liabilities that led to the meltdown, because it meant banks lacked financial transparency, consistency and auditability.

Microgen chief operating officer David Sherriff said, “The technology was there to support established risk management procedures but there was also a heavy reliance on manual processes and spreadsheets.

“Many commentators have come out to say that the technology should have performed better, but the business processes have to be in place first in order to then align technology."

Sherriff said businesses cannot just implement a BI system and assume that all their problems are solved.

“BI dashboards only produce the reports that they are requested to generate and many banks didn’t know that the potential underlying problems existed, so they weren’t looking to analyse them,” he said.

“BI tools often only flag up problems when it is too late – the deal has been done. They are not a good preventative measure."

Data integration firm Informatica said the banks ran into difficulties because they did not have access to a clean set of data.

“To make data both accessible and reliable, you need to establish standards, policies and processes for data usage, development and management. We’re seeing more and more banks adopt this approach now,” said Informatica senior vice president of Europe, John Poulter.

“If you feed poor quality data into a BI system, you’re going to get a report based on incorrect facts meaning that decisions are based on flawed information."

However, QlikTech, another BI player, argued that if BI tools had been more widely used, the crisis could have been averted.

“If organisations were using the tools more widely then they could have had more warning,” said Sean Farrington, QlikTech UK managing director.

But Farrington agreed with his industry counterparts that BI tools alone could not have stopped the banks acting as they had and that the processes banks employed were the real problem.

“It is the risk management philosophy underpinning BI and information management tools that could have seen it avoided,” he said. “BI allows business to focus on certain areas but rules are there to guide a risk management strategy. It’s like you have to know a disaster is happening before you turn a traffic light red.”

Since the financial crash, banks have come under pressure from the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to use technology to profile their financial positions in real time for risk management purposes.

Sherriff advised banks to implement a system that will integrate finance, risk and liquidity management to create a single standardised view of all their data.

“With the new systems they need to be able to pull together reports at a moment’s notice with full details of transactions and balance sheet as well as simulate ‘what if’ scenarios,” said Sherriff.

Informatica’s Poulter said this integration would give a “360-degree view of their operations”.

“As most banks are the products of mergers and acquisitions and consist of many separate divisions, the data on each individual customer’s savings, investments and borrowings can sit across several different computer systems that don’t talk to each other,” he said.

“Integrating data across multiple sources is a complex task, but ensuring that there is adequate, timely and most importantly reliable explanatory data attached to their activities is crucial to getting back on an even keel.”

On the issue of whether a system can be put in place to give financial watchdogs insight into the relationship banks have with each other, Sherriff said this will require banks to expose their tracking activity, which will be a difficult task considering they are in competition.

Poulter added, “While banks are keen to improve their financial transparency and they want assurances from their trading partners, it is widely considered to go against the culture of financial services to provide such unprecedented visibility into their balance sheet to their peers and competitors.”

Visit our dedicated Summit web site for more breaking news, views, analysis and video on the topic of Information Overload.

Summit interview: Deloitte discusses security implications of the data deluge

Phil Muncaster — 2009-11-12T12:57:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, V3.co.uk, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 12:57:00

We chat to Mike Maddison, UK head of Security, Privacy & Resilience Services, and Steve Cummings, special adviser to Deloitte's Security, Privacy & Resilience Group

V3.co.uk: How do you think the problem of information overload has contributed to poor information security?

Mike Maddison: It’s been a fairly recurring theme of the past few years. A few years ago it was all about availability, with worms taking down networks. More recently, it’s shifted to confidentiality of information and organisations realising that information has an intrinsic value and is being targeted by groups. We’ve worked with every sector looking at information protection, and we’ve found in all sectors a huge amount of information has been retained, and duplicated within organisations, often for good reasons, and some of that information could be considered sensitive. So there has been a growth in retention of information often without any information governance strategy.

But are organisations getting there now?

MM: Yes – now there’s a recognition, and not just a technical one by IT, but a board level agenda. It’s driving interesting behaviours in organisations, because it’s happening higher up the food chain than previously. I’m optimistic because there’s a recognition that information security needs to be embedded in the day-to-day running of the business. The role of information protection is more visible too, as is the role of risk management. You just have to look at the number of CISO [chief information security officer] roles at a senior reporting level that there are now.

What is driving a greater awareness of information protection?

MM: The PCI Data Security Standard has done a lot to raise awareness among organisations that haven’t necessarily invested in securi ty before. It has added to the whole tone and tenor of what people need to do about data protection. There are large-scale privacy initiatives in a number of organisations now, whether it has been driven by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the Data Protection Act or PCI. But there is still a challenge they face in understanding what information they hold – this is not just sensitive personal information either but corporate information – and where it flows out to the extended enterprise. It’s a big problem.

Why have security incidents still been happening, even with all the publicity they’re getting?

Steve Cummings: I think with organisations it’s possible that the people who work with the data don’t recognise the value and importance if they deal with the stuff every day. They take it for granted and that needs to be recognised internally – organisations must put programmes in place to ensure the people who work there do recognise this. We’re seeing a kind of stick and carrot approach being adopted by many, so they will reward good behaviour with data and also enforce a system of compliance to make it clear that if something is done in the wrong way there will be consequences.

So education is the most important aspect?

MM: Yes, the right processes and technologies should underpin it but there needs to be an education piece embedded in the day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, the credit crunch has probably had an impact on that. Where organisations fail is when they do a one-off shot, especially on the awareness piece. If it’s not embedded and doesn’t happen on a regular basis they’re setting themselves up to fail.

SC: Most responses to government data breaches have been about cultural change, because the technology is already in place there. It’s about getting everyone at the right levels to understand this and act responsibly.

Are government attempts at improving information security suffering because it can’t get hold of experts in data protection, risk management and associated disciplines?

SC: It depends. There are government departments that have no trouble recruiting extremely capable people. If you’re recruited to deal with risk management you’re likely to come in higher up and the public sector is prepared to pay the appropriate salaries. Government has recognised, with the setting up of the Office of Cybercrime, that there is not a big enough pool of people around nationally, and that needs to be addressed. I’m not sure if it’s a case of a public/private sector split.

Is the Data Protection Act working?

MM: When it was first brought in there was a perception of it as tick box compliance – it didn’t help protect information but more the way information was being used in marketing, and so on. That has shifted now though, and the Information Commissioner's Office is making people aware of it. Where that goes in the future I’m not sure, but it is having an effect. It’s all part of the evolution into the technology age. IT was the plumbing, a bunch of tins and wires, but now we’re in the information age where information flows across all sorts of boundaries.

SC: Organisations recognise the risks more now. Some years ago there was a tendency to say if we can collect we will, and we’ll think about how to use that information later. You don’t encounter that mindset at all now though because of the risks.

Should we still be afraid of big centralised government databases though?

SC: I’m not sure how many people actually have those fears. It’s not to say they aren't correct, but I’ve never met anyone who has been upset by it. Some people will give supermarkets their life story for a box of chocolates. Maybe it's a case for a lot of people that they rarely suffer the consequences of any government data loss.

But aren’t people more happy to give up some privacy if they’re getting something in return? When faced with government data losses they don’t think they’re getting anything in return.

SC: The government is collecting data so it can provide them with more effective services. The citizen is getting something in return. No one is collecting all of this stuff just for the sake of it. You can be sure that the speed of the progress in transforming government processes is being slowed down by recognition of security issues.

Should decentralisation be the way forward then?

MM: There are likely to be problems with information quality in this scenario. The problem in an info-centric society is that quality is as much of an issue as confidentiality. When you start putting stuff in the cloud it has huge implications for security. Whatever happens in future though, security will be intrinsically part of the way things are managed.

Visit our dedicated Summit web site for more breaking news, views, analysis and video on the topic of Information Overload.

BT broadband map has wrong co-ordinates

Martin Courtney — 2009-11-12T12:23:00.000Z

Martin Courtney, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 12:23:00

Next generation access network will fail to reach many regions with high demand for faster fibre optic links

BT’s next generation access (NGA) broadband network will fail to reach many prospective customers, say experts, who have compiled research into where end user demand is most likely to be.

A report published today [12/11/09] by broadband analyst company Point Topic has overlaid its own map of NGA broadband demand over BT’s stated plan for coverage. It finds that BT's rollout falls considerably short in many urban areas, meaning thousands of business and residential customers may be left with no access to superfast broadband links.

“The program they have announced is quite a way short of even what will be driven by market demand, so we are likely to see a big have and have-not divide,” said Point Topic chief analyst Tim Johnson.

BT has long argued that it is uncertain about the scale of demand for fast, fibre optic broadband links offering up to 40Mbit/s of downstream bandwidth amongst UK homes and businesses, and Point Topic’s research seems to suggest the telco has substantially underestimated end user interest.

Many businesses and local councils are concerned about the prospects for NGA in their region, with bandwidth up to 40Mbit/s expected to boost the local commerce by helping businesses thrive in the digital economy.

Alternative high speed broadband provision from rival providers will be available in a few selected areas, including South Yorkshire. Digital Region, a partnership between Yorkshire Forward (the regional development agency for Yorkshire and Humber), Sheffield Council, Barnsley Council, Rotherham Council and Doncaster Council that has attracted over £90m of funding from European Union, for example.

Since its inception in April this year [2009] Digital Region has contracted Thales UK to build a network offering a minimum guaranteed 25Mbit/s broadband service to business and residential customers, with 97 per cent of the region’s population expected to get the service by July 2012.

“Let us be clear that even without Digital Region, South Yorkshire will get its next generation, very high speed, 21st century network – because the future is digital.

But, without our intervention, it might just have to wait until the 22nd century to get it. There is no reason to suppose that, left to its own devices, the telecoms market will favour South Yorkshire," said Phil Coppard OBE, chief executive of Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council at the Digital Region partnership’s launch.

"Without Digital Region, South Yorkshire, or at least large parts of South Yorkshire, as in so many other national investment decisions, will be at the back of the queue,” he added.

"Digital Region has had to spend years going through all sorts of hoops to convince the authorities that this is a reliable thing to do," said Johnson. " It makes South Yorkshire look pretty good but it is not an easy option."

Gartner research vice president Scott Morrison points out that DSL based Ethernet in the first mile is also a viable alternative to high speed fibre for many businesses in the UK depending on how close they are to the local telephone exchange.

"BT is not the only provider of these Ethernet solutions in the UK, and as such, this represents a competitive alternative to fibre, both for internet and for MPLS connectivity," he said.

BT has said the NGA network will cover 40 per cent of homes and businesses by 2012, though Point Topic says that only 35 per cent is possible according what the telco has revealed of its plans so far. The cost of the NGA rollout may well prove a barrier to its breadth, with recruitment and other issues similarly affecting BT's ability to deploy the network in a short space of time.

“There are issues over BT finances, and NGA rollout faces cost and capacity problems as well,” said Johnson. “In a way it is much more expensive to try to implement NGA faster rather than steadily roll it out over a period of many years."

"They [Point Topic] are saying that there is potential demand for NGA outside the areas that have already been announced," countered a BT spokesperson. " Since we [BT] have only announced the exchange areas covering the 1.5m premises we'll be taking NGA to next summer, that is not surprising. We will be bringing NGA to 40 per cent of the UK by 2012 but Point Topic does not have information about which exchange areas we'll be deploying it to because we have not [yet] announced the vast majority of them."

BT's latest financial results saw 'another quarter of progress' according to chief executive Ian Livingston.

The troubled Global Services Division, which paid an 'impairment' charge of £280m in the previous quarter, saw revenue dip slightly by 3 per cent.

"These figures are more or less in line with the situation seen in the first quarter, and with BT's own expectations," said Gartner's Morrisson.

"Improvements in profitability have come from cost reduction, which is necessary, but of course, creates short-term concerns about how well BT can serve its customers while it is in the midst of its transition."

Football crazy - PwC's 'director of football'

Becky Ashall — 2009-11-12T09:37:00.000Z

Becky Ashall, Accountancy Age, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 09:37:00

PwC's Julie Clark will be crowned a sporting genius if she can secure the 2018 World Cup for England

Italian Fabian Capello might be leading England’s efforts on the field but over at PwC it’s head of sport Julie Clark who will be helping manage England’s bid for the 2018 World Cup - and the ref has only just blown the whistle for kick-off.

Her 14-strong line-up is keen to see England win, even though it contains two Scots and a German.

What’s happened?

Briefly, England 2018 will use PwC as its primary business adviser for the World Cup tender.

With Ernst & Young backing the 2010 Ryder Cup and Deloitte the 2012 Olympics, Julie Clark has sown up PwC’s role in attempting to bring the world’s second biggest sporting event to the UK.

Clark started her career with the East of England Tourist Board where she was responsible for stimulating investment in tourism through the provision of financial assistance, and for advising public and private sector clients on development and marketing issues.

As an avid supporter of Ipswich Town, some might question her football expertise but, fortunately for Clark, her passion for the game does not end there. Her career includes involvement in the Arsenal move from Highbury to the Emirates Stadium. Other parts of PwC’s football portfolio are impressive too. The firm has managed due diligence reviews for investors in clubs such as Liverpool, Aston Villa and West Ham and has assisted a number of debt funders to understand the risks and options for the oh-so-many football clubs carrying way too much debt.

The World Cup bid is a big win for the firm, though it will be played at home and away. It will be an opportunity to leverage the firm’s expertise in providing economic impact assessment, guidance on tax and guarantees, and advice on the budget to help the bid team.

What happens next?

The next few years will hold challenges for Clark. Not only will she have to demonstrate her sporting prowess, but PwC will also have to prove themselves to the industry. Being associated with such big names can fling individuals into the limelight so only the future will reveal how well Clark keeps her cool amid what are sure to be a lot of dangerous tackles. This will be more pertinent as no project of this size comes without risks, although there will be different pressures to those affecting the massive infrastructure projects involved in the Olympics.

The success of the campaign will be forever linked with PwC as an institution. Being involved with the national obsession in such a high-profile campaign could risk major embarrassment if things don’t go well.

But this is a game of two halves. This is just about winning the bid. The really tricky bit is way off in the distance. But, with a potential economic benefit of £3.2bn, Clark will want to make sure the team is on the pitch for the second half.

Councils must reconsider their IT strategy

Nicola Brittain — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Nicola Brittain, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

Tight budgets have made local authorities consider strategies such as consolidation and outsourcing

There is growing debate about which model of IT provision local authorities should adopt to increase efficiency and output in the face of the tightest budgets in five years.

Cardiff Council last week claimed a UK first, with a 15-year partnership with Indian IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The deal will see strategists from both the council and the supplier working together from the authority’s premises.

Using offshore providers has traditionally been politically sensitive for local councils, but such a deal suggests attitudes may be changing.

New models

The partnership marks a new engagement style between the public and private sector, according to Brian Woodford, director, public sector at TCS UK, who said there will be increased focus on efficiency and how risk is managed, as well as a complete analysis of alternative service models.

“It is not a traditional buyer/supplier relationship and will see the public sector taking the best bits of the private sector,” he said.

“The deal was largely about efficiency. We also offered a cost-effective solution.”

According to a report last week by consultancy Deloitte, local authorities should retain control of their technology strategy and management of suppliers rather than outsource their entire IT operation.

And John Serle, editor of the annual IT Trends report from user group Socitm said there can be problems with such partnership models because the two parties do not have an equal investment in the organisation.

“The supplier has not put in money, so is unlikely to take ownership of the project,” he said.

“A partnership in the traditional sense rarely comes out of agreements such as these. But there are examples, such as BT’s partnership with Liverpool Council, that have seen technology suppliers invest in the project and end up owning it.”

BT will have invested £84m in new technology for Liverpool Council by the ti me the contract ends in 2017.

Serle said that only 10 per cent of local authorities currently outsource all their IT with examples being Milton Keynes, Lincolnshire and Birmingham City Council.

But he anticipates an increase in full outsourcing in 2010 and argues with Deloitte that there can be problems with this model, but that many of these are related to inflexibility once a deal has been set up, and can be avoided.

Addressing overcapacity

Serle said one area that will come under increased scrutiny is the considerable overcapacity in local authorities.

“There are 30,000 people involved in government IT – imagine giving those 30,000 people a common agenda and pooling the resources. Enormous changes could be made in terms of systems analysis and design,” he said.

One way of achieving efficiency would be for local councils to partner and share technology and staff.

This model has been adopted by several local councils in the US, where developers in the authorities create applications for the provision of services and share them via the internet. The same is also being done in parts of Europe.

Cultural conservatism

However, there is a reluctance to follow such a model here because it is not part of the culture of local councils, according to Serle.

“It takes incredible political courage to make big decisions,” he said.

“By way of example, there is an assumption that every school must have a headteacher – but why? It is costly and arguably unnecessary.”

Serle believes that as a result of the difficulty of making such big decisions, many more councils will opt for full outsourcing as a way of cutting costs regardless of the problems it can cause.

Another way in which local authorities can reduce their costs would be by publishing their information on the internet.

People put all sorts of personal data on Facebook and other social networking sites, but seem reluctant to have government data published, according to Serle.

“Wouldn’t it be valuable, for example, to be able to access medical records on the web following an accident on a skiing holiday? This idea has a practical application,” he said.

In addition, some of the more innovative local authorities, such as Birmingham, are believed to be looking into software-as-a-service solutions from companies such as Google, and could reduce their storage spend tenfold, according to some experts.

“When local authorities are given a budget to replace desktop PCs and laptops, they need to take a fresh look at how best to spend their money – and they are beginning to realise this,” said Serle.

“We will see some big changes in local government IT management in 2010.”

Ringing the changes at TalkTalk

Angelica Mari — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Angelica Mari, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

CIO David Cooper tells Computing how his team is coping with the challenge of separating systems from the telco’s former parent, Carphone Warehouse, while integrating recent acquisition Tiscali

TalkTalk’s chief information officer (CIO), David Cooper, is now busier than ever as the company – which has become the UK’s largest broadband provider – embarks on an ambitious project to revamp its IT.

Since joining the firm in the summer, Cooper has overseen the integration of recently acquired internet provider Tiscali, as well as TalkTalk’s spin-off from parent Carphone Warehouse – both are major IT programmes.

The integration of Tiscali – bought in May for £236m – requires enhancement of the TalkTalk core platform Trio to accommodate new functionality such as IPTV, as well as other undisclosed products and price plans.

Tiscali’s point-to-point architecture dates from the start of the decade, according to Cooper, so the migration requires careful analysis and planning – with a view to enabling new features, migrating customers and shutting down old systems in favour of a more robust structure.

“In addition, Tiscali faced some IT issues in the past and worked pragmatically to fix them, resulting in some discontinuities between the systems we are repairing this now,” he told Computing.

The new features added to TalkTalk’s Trio platform are inherited from Carphone Warehouse and based on technology provided by customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Chordiant Software, billing specialist Single View and integration specialist Tibco.

The systems consolidation, which is expected to be completed within 18 months, will enable the company to free up space at its two datacentres for new initiatives.

“There are various new products and services coming up, so that will probably mean a growth in our IT footprint,” said Cooper.

The datacentres are currently managed by IBM, under an infrastructure IT services deal that includes servers, storage, desktop, network and site management.

The separation from Carphone Warehouse is another key project for Cooper, involving the detaching from the parent company of common systems such as sales and logistics.

“This is a fairly major project as TalkTalk grew out of Carphone Warehouse, so there are a lot of shared systems. However, our core system Trio, which supports services that include CRM and billing, was developed as a totally separate new solution for TalkTalk while we were part of Carphone,” he said.

According to Cooper, software and hardware specifications of many of TalkTalk’s systems, such as its billing platform, make it difficult to introduce new technologies such as the cloud to some areas of its IT setup.

“The technical specifications are limited but these are determined by the vendors – until that changes, some applications can’t be run in the cloud. We are working around that by consolidating and simplifying our setup, but it will take a while,” said Cooper.

“Our strategy is about changing things very rapidly, but big infrastructure changes take more time. So we have a number of cycles running, with agile development at the front end and an architecture that supports that slower rate of change for the fundamentals,” he said.

TalkTalk is also revisiting its outsourcing contracts, which include deals with Indian suppliers Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Patni and Tech Mahindra.“We already use a lot of offshore services. We won’t reverse that, but we will move to a more outcome-based approach,” said Cooper.

“It all started off as a lot of ‘body shopping’ – buying in people resources as and when needed – which is OK to get started, but we want to move to a position where suppliers are paid based on what they actually deliver. We have some of that and it is working well. When you give [suppliers] ownership and responsibility, they are normally successful.”

The IT reorganisation at TalkTalk will see it changing its relationship with the vendors – it will expect them to have a better understanding of its business. The firm’s in-house IT team will be expected to have a similar understanding (see below).

Cooper expects his department to have carried out a “dramatic simplification and consolidation” of its technology setup within 18 months, making it easier to run, more flexible for the launch of new products and more cost-effective.

“I don’t think anybody would have predicted TalkTalk would be in this position a few years ago – we are the same size as BT in terms of residential business, which is an immense achievement,” said Cooper.

“We can work to bring our systems and processes together and there is a huge opportunity in that space. In fact, we will be so fleet of foot that BT will face a considerable challenge.”

How Cooper set about building a new team of motivated IT professionals

David Cooper joined TalkTalk as chief information officer (CIO) this summer from mobile operator Hutchinson 3G, where he was IT director, chief technology officer and later head of operations and technology.

As well as leading two crucial IT projects for the company, Cooper has had to use his leadership skills to bring in staff from different areas of the Carphone Warehouse group to create his own team. “Some of my IT staff were working in different areas of Carphone such as AOL and TalkTalk, and I have had to work out where the natural synergies are,” said Cooper.

While formal succession planning has not yet been introduced, Cooper joked that his recent car accident highlighted the need for management continuity within the team.

“It is all about putting the right people in the right places so that if I am suddenly not around, it will carry on. Within a year, our aim is to be able to deliver everything the business needs – we will have the structure, career roadmaps and teams in place,” he said. “My team will be sustainable – we should be able to survive if someone leaves.”

According to Cooper, the key leadership skill is to communicate well and gain trust from staff.

“This is a bit like the Army – people will follow you, but they want to believe you know where you are going, that you know how to get there and that you have the experience to do it,” he said.

“It is dangerous if staff get mixed messages, or they can’t see the end of a project. But it takes a little while for everyone to buy into the sort of management style that is required to deliver this.”

Future IT leaders do not need to be steeped in technology, said Cooper, who holds a physics degree. However, they must be able to solve problems, to think laterally, analyse technical detail and put it into a business context.

Although IT professionals should always look after their own careers, Cooper said that one of his goals as a CIO is to offer a stimulating working environment. “If [staff] want to move internally, we will plan for it and find someone to fill their positions. If they want to move on elsewhere, they will – but we try to make this an exciting place to work, somewhere people will choose to stay.”

Open data initiative gathers momentum

Tom Young — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

The government’s long-touted scheme to improve public services by opening up state data is finally yielding tangible results

After years of talk but little action, the government’s plan to open up state data online is finally gathering momentum.

Last month, the Cabinet Office set up a beta version of www.data.gov.uk with more than 1,000 datasets for developers to test the potential for re-using information. Currently, the site can only be accessed by registered developers, but the government hopes to open it to the public next month.

In addition, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, brought in by Gordon Brown earlier this year to oversee the project, recently met the Cabinet to update them on progress reportedly leaving them in awe.

At a recent conference hosted by IT industry body Intellect, Stephen Timms, the minister for Digital Britain, said: “More datasets will go up between now and the beginning of next year and we will look to increase the number on [the www.data.gov.uk site] every month.”

The move was recommended by the Power of Information Review in 2007 but developers had been skeptical of the government’s commitment to the project after slow progress in making information available.

However, this is changing. The government’s renewed commitment to the project has been mirrored by increasing enthusiasm among developers keen to show what they can do with the data.

Emma Mulqueeny, who is supporting several government departments in putting information online, ran two events in recent months called Rewired State where developers were given government data and asked to develop applications using it.

The results were impressive (see box) and included an application that provides information on local bus routes as well as timetables when a postcode was entered.

“The following weekend Boris Johnson announced a 10-year, £20m project to do the same thing,” said Mulqueeny.

“The sooner more data is online, the sooner these developers can get working and it will cost the taxpayer virtually nothing,” she said.

This is a message often trumpeted by developers. And the same developers have long accused Directgov of trying to control information when it should just publish it in its raw form.

Emer Coleman, who is heading up a project at the Greater London Authority to put London’s information online, has the same view.

“The word from developers is clear get the information out there, in whatever form it is in, and they’ll figure out a way to use it,” she said.

Many are worried that bureaucratic concerns over how to release data, in which format and on what platform will lead to a delay in publication, meaning more multimillion-pound government projects will be launched when the same job could be done for free.

There is still a degree of coercion required to encourage government departments to make their information available it needs a transparency that is anathema to many civil servants in Britain. But people are coming around and the benefits could be huge, according to Coleman.

“Not only will it transfer costs out of the public sector but it will allow people to make more informed decisions about the effectiveness of various local services as the public sector enters a huge fiscal squeeze,” she said.

How open access to state data might benefit society

Creating applications that use raw government data can throw up interesting results. Here are a few examples of tools created by developers:

One developer, Tom Taylor, used transport and central government data to create a “newspaper” for anyone moving into an area. It offers information on transport, health, education and crime in one document based on a postcode entry.

Another application, created by Sam Smith and known as Jobcentreproplus, informs users of all the local jobs near their postcode.

A project picked up by the government’s Central Office of Information saw two teenagers develop an application that plotted a safe route to school based on crime data.

Another developer created a postcode-based application that gave users information on local bus routes and timetables.

One developer mined Companies House data to create Companies Openhouse, a system that made all the Companies House data available 24 hours a day. (Currently, this information is only available during office hours.) The system also made the data more searchable.

Broadband tax comes under fire

Tom Young — 2009-11-12T06:45:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 06:45:00

MPs and industry figures met in London last week to argue the case for leaving the rollout of high-speed broadband to the market

In a development that will please critics of the proposed 50p broadband tax, attendees at a government Business, Innovation and Skills Committee meeting last week suggested that the market would find other ways of reaching the final “unconnected” third of the population.

The tax proposed in the Digital Britain report to aid broadband rollout would therefore be unnecessary, they argued. The meeting was attended by MPs from all the main parties as well as representatives from the telecoms industry.

David Williams, chief executive of Avanti, a company that hopes to provide broadband to rural areas via satellite, told the committee that the Digital Britain report had over-emphasised the importance of fibre networks.

“Digital Britain did a poor job of explaining that technology neutrality is a good thing,” he said. “I’m a firm believer that the market will solve this problem eventually.”

Avanti will launch its first broadband satellite next year and hopes to launch another two years after that. Williams made it clear he needs no state subsidy to reach broadband customers and that his offering will be competitively priced.

In addition, last month the digital switchover of television broadcasts freed up much of the radio spectrum for mobile operators to offer wireless broadband.

The government says the new spectrum will allow operators to bring mobile coverage to 99 per cent of the population over the next five years.

Other ISPs argue that further progress can be made on the ground. They claim that if they were allowed to roll out fibre to street cabinets themselves rather than relying on BT’s infrastructure, they might well be able to connect to more rural communities.

Under the current model, BT Openreach provides the fibre infrastructure across which other ISPs can deliver their offerings.

But Aidan Paul, chief executive of Vtesse, said this means BT has a monopoly on deciding which rural communities will need fibre.“The market is currently closed to us,” he said. “We want access to BT’s fibre.”

Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten pointed out that some firms, such as H2O Networks, are laying fibre through the sewers to extend the network to homes in those cities.

“If [BT] is not getting to the final third, let some local regional outfits with alternative ways have a bite of the cherry,” he said.

However, Tim Whitley, BT’s strategy director, defended the firm’s position of not allowing others further access to its network.

“No one else is providing broadband to areas that we aren’t reaching without some form of subsidy,” he said.

Market alternatives such as those outlined above could negate the need for the tax proposed in the government’s Digital Britain report. The tax, which is forecast to raise £1bn, is set to be introduced in 2010 and will last for about seven years.

In addition, the views expressed at the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee will please the Conservatives. Last month, shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said that a Conservative government would scrap the broadband tax and leave rollout to the market.

While Hunt’s pledge to axe the tax is doubtless designed primarily to appeal to cash-strapped voters before the election next year, his position is supported by ISPs.

For example, TalkTalk’s chief executive Charles Dunstone said last week that the tax would actually be counterproductive because it would lead to 100,000 low-income homes dropping their broadband because they could not afford it.

He said: “This is an unjust and regressive tax on all phone customers that will subsidise mostly richer rural households that can afford high-priced, superfast broadband services.”

Rather than introduce the tax now, TalkTalk believes the government and Ofcom should concentrate on enabling private sector investment and ensuring effective competition.

However, the problem with relying on competition to deliver the results is that it may take some time for alternative solutions to reach the market. But should the Tories get into power next year, the race to find alternative means of broadband provision is on.

Summit: Dealing with communications overload

Daniel Robinson — 2009-11-11T16:33:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 11 November 2009 at 16:33:00

We ask Gartner Research director Nikos Drakos for advice on how to deal with an overflowing inbox and other communications challenges

V3.co.uk: Office workers are now faced with email, instant messaging, and other communications sources such as social networks, phone calls and voicemail. How are they meant to cope with all these information sources without being overwhelmed?

Nikos Drakos: It's true there are lots more communications channels, and people are becoming more comfortable with using them, some make it much easier to send out a message or update than others, such as an internal micro-blogging system some companies have.

There are more channels and more people using them, and there is a downside to things like email where it is easy for anyone to reach anyone else.

If you look closely, there are some differences that can point to solutions in future. A lot of the channels that are real-time, like the phone, versus those that are persistent, are different. When it comes to real-time, it’s an interrupt – you have to stop and deal with it, so it’s potentially more damaging for attention.

However, it is kind of self-limiting – phone calls are point-to-point; they are mostly one-to-one, so the potential for spreading, touching a lot of people that don’t need to be involved is lower.

So is there a better way to deal with calls other than hiding behind voicemail?

The way to deal with it largely comes down to culture and personal discipline. Personal discipline, meaning you just have to block it out if you are busy. On the culture side, it's more to do with education, best practices, making it clear what is and what is not acceptable when it comes to real-time interruption.

A lot of real-time interruptions can be converted into persistent chats that can be stored somewhere, so they end up being part of the rest of the stream of messages. Voicemail can be easily converted to email as an attachment you can find later, for example.

But aren't many people already snowed under with the volume of email they get everyday?

Yes, either email or from social networks, if you get a lot of RSS feeds from a number of places, and there are a lot of systems that deliver status messages that people may or may not be interested in.

To begin to understand what's going on, the multiplication of channels is kind of a red herring; it’s real, but the contribution to overload is that there are now more and possibly easier ways to send messages to lots of people with little effort, such as blogging.

Ultimately, what you have is a lot of messages that are generated by people and systems that are reaching lots of participants through different queues.

This isn’t a problem, as it is possible already to convert from one queue to another, so your email can become a universal queue aggregating messages.

It appears problematic because people say, "Oh I have to go and check all of these things", but it's a solvable problem because you can choose a universal client to see them.

The big deal is that there's a lot of them. People subscribe to a lot of things like distribution lists, alerts, because they may need that information in the future. They don’t need to if this information is archived somewhere and they can easily go and find it.

Is there anything workers can do about this themselves?

If the company or owner of the work environment is not doing something, to capture and organise this information, then the only thing the ordinary employee can do is to set up their own filter.

You put a rule in your inbox so that if a message is not from your manager, if it's not from your team, if it doesn't have your name in the 'to' field, it is routed to a low priority folder that you can check every now and then. It’s not ideal, but there's not much else you can do from a personal perspective.

The solution is filtering, but the other problem with information overload is not that there are so many messages that come to you, what frustrates people is that to deal with every message they need to go hunting for all the information they need in order to put the message in context.

You need to be able to jump off from the message easily into a persistent environment that contains the relevant context, and end users are beginning to solve this problem with tools like wikis and group spaces for documents and status information.

Does that mean organisations need to provide tools to address these issues?

For a lot of activities that happen regularly, and that the company can identify, it should be done at that level. Ultimately, you need some tools for individuals to be able to create this kind of shared persistent context.

When you look at some of the tools becoming available, Novell's recent Pulse announcement and Google Wave are examples, you can combine the transient messages around something with something which is persistent through which you can refer to it and which many people can work on.

Will there be tools to effectively address these issues in future?

If you combine the transient messages with persistent context and filtering, which is already happening, things will get better. In the meantime, the way to deal with it, like I said earlier, is personal discipline and culture.

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