January 2011 Archives

An application using Naturally Speaking voice recognition software could flush out drunks and those unfit for office. All we need now is someone to write it.

As telecoms advocates, we're permanently aggrieved that the human voice is so under utilised.

The nuances in speech can convey infinitely more information than a message you have to jab out with your thumb.

Communication is so much richer when we talk. And yet, and yet, society has replaced this sophisticated tool with typing or texting. In the process, we've conspired to make work even less exciting or sociable than before. Talk about chucking out the baby with the bathwater.

It's all the fault of the IT nerds. Telecoms people wouldn't do this. They understand that voice is emphatically NOT 'just another application on the network'. How can you compare anything in Microsoft office with the human vocal chords? Did Powerpoint or Word take hundreds of thousands of years to evolve and create 3,000 different languages?

There are some companies, such as Iovox, Voice Commerce and Nuance, who are attempting to give business back its voice. We shall be reporting on their progress here.

Developing voice apps is one of the great, unreported business opportunities of our age. There's unlimited scope for those with a little imagination and a bit of Visual Basic knowledge.
There's endless scope for resellers who understand communications and are blessed with a spark of creativity, says Nuance's Jonathan Whitmore, who looks after the channel partners in the UK, the Middle East and Eire.

The creativity of companies like VoxEnable and Freedom of Speech is inspirational. They write macros and use visual Basic to enable computers to recognise any speech command - "Delete all the pictures on my D drive!" - and translate these into machine language commands that the PC or Mac can understand. So if you can dictate more than just your letters to your machine. You can get it to do everything.

Here's an application I'm working on. The Home Breathalyser Test, using Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Premise. Naturally Speaking is 95 per cent accurate at speech recognition. Unless you're drunk. Half a pint of beer's worth of speech distortion means it is around 85 per cent accurate. After a pint, that falls to 80 per cent.

This makes the package a good indicator of your sobriety. If you're thinking of driving, or operating heavy machinery, but you're not certain whether you're too tired to do the job, this packae makes an ideal home testing system.

If you dictate a letter, and it's more than 50 per cent gibberish, don't drive or do anything that needs a degree of responsibility. Yes, I'm talking to you, Lord Prescott.

Computer Weekly has an interesting piece about Tesco equipping 1,000 stores with mobile phones that look like desk phones.

These fixed mobile hybrids are handy because they're mobile without being stealable, convenient without being massively expensive, easy to use but not easy to lose. But, there's also an interesting story about the gentlemen behind the company who supplied Tesco with these handsets.

David Robson, founder of Burnside Telecom, was one of the early pioneers of mobile telecoms and is the first winner of the GRIST Award (Great Ideas in Science and Technology) granted by the University of Surrey. Another is Nils Martennson, who founded Technophone. Technophone's first product, the Pocketphone, went ballistic and and immortalised its founders in mobile folk lawwhen they eventually sold the company to Nokia in 1991. By this time it was the fourth largest mobile maker in the world. The Pocketphone cost £1990 and could tab between Cellnet and Vodafone networks at the push of a button. Revolutionary at the time.
Burnside specialises in GSM desktop mobiles, such as the hybrids supplied to Tesco. There's a massive untapped market in government departments, local and police authorities. Old people's homes and hospitals are crying out for them, as biddies like the reassurance of a traditional desktop phone, even if it does have a SIM card in it.
Burnside is looking for channel partners. Don't try and sell any of their mobiles to 10 Downing Street though - another channel partner has already got there!

A migration to Windows 7 can have unexpected complications, often arising from integration issues between web apps and IE8. But App-DNA can relieve the pain, claims Paul Schnell, App-DNA's chief technology officer.

You look at them sometimes and you just know they're going to be trouble, don't you?

That's how most of us feel about Internet Explorer 8. It grieves us just to type the name. Attempting to actually use IE8, we're sure, will be even more morale sapping.

We don't know about you, but we resent every minute that some techie has stolen from our lives, by making us come to terms with his needless nerdy changes.

Lord knows what it's like for the poor sap who has to make all his company's web applications work with it. It's no wonder that IT directors, network managers and CIOs will do anything rather than migrate to Windows 7.

Even a storage symposium. I bet that's why Cloud computing conferences are so popular. Nobody wants to go back to the office.

Well hooray for App-DNA, which has invented an Internet Explorer web application system that takes all the pain out of integration. It's all part of its AppTitude offering. The application now automates much of the testing and remediation work needed for smoothing out all the compatibility kinks in your software platform.

At least half of all IT managers have identified IE8 compatibility a major blockage in application rollouts. Analyst Steve Broadhead at Broadband Testing says blindly migrating, without sniffing out all the traps that IE8 will led you into, is a fatally expensive mistake. "AppTitude can save you wasting months on manual testing and reparations because it identifies problem areas and provides remedial actions."

Broadhead says the key features that make the difference are accurate reporting, capture of static and rendered content, automated, and integrated web capture tools.

"App-DNA automates IE8 and Windows 7 migration and will help you prepare for IE9," says Paul Schnell, App-DNA's CTO.

We'll hold you to that one Paul!

Arbor Networks has sent us this diagram, showing us how internet traffic suddenly plummeted in Egypt on January 27th.

If you want to know why this has happened, there are plenty of 24 hour online news resources, all cutting and pasting and interviewing each other.

Experts are speculating that, after 30 years of rule by President Hosni Mubarak, something has changed in the Egyptian psyche. As the groundswell of protests has increased, communications have closed down. All routes to Egyptian networks are closed and there's nothing on the routing tables.

But on this column, we like to investigate the old fashioned way. So we rang the Egyptian Embassy for an explanation. We're not sure who we talked to, but they said that possibly a cleaner might have unplugged the Internet by mistake.

For a different explanation, you might want to visit our own Network Noise blog, check out Herdict.org or (even) ComputerWeekly.com.

Quiz Questions:

1. Which mobile telecoms company enjoys the greatest patronage from the tax payer funded public sector?

2. Which mobile telecoms company was named by Private Eye magazine as Britain's most successful evader of taxes?

3. Can you name a very litigious mobile telecoms company?

 
The Met Police are using an underground data centre to train for a possible terrorist or hostage situation.
The Bunker Secure Hosting is allowing the world famous Metropolitan Police Firearms Unit  to use its underground lair of data centres for armed police training purposes.
"I am delighted the Bunker has been chosen as a training site for the Metropolitan Police Firearms Unit to practice scenarios including Data Centre takeover situations," said Paul Lightfoot,The Bunker's CTO.
I bet he is.
I feel sorry for the technicians, who have to carry out their duties, tinkering with the cooling system and minding the airflow, while police officers are throwing their weight around. If an SO19 fires a smoke canister into a data hall, you've only got seconds before the cloud makes all the servers crash. If that wasn't bad enough, they're likely to follow that up with a stun grenade, followed shortly after by an armed invasion. There's got to be something about that in the health and safety handbook.
There's a bigger question here. Are data centres likely targets for terrorists?
 "The site's complex security systems and unusual layout enables us to practice realistic training scenarios," said a senior firearms instructor at the Metropolitan Police Firearms Unit.
Did anyone spot any song titles in that answer?

Neil Matthews, a partner at Eversheds, doesn't seem to share our revulsion of private equity practitioners. Or maybe he's too professional. Problem is they're taking over.

What's the collective noun for private equity merchants? A smarm? A nest? A whoop?

Whatever it is, last year the experts predicted a ratpack of private equity backs would be issuing initial public offerings for technology companies.

It never happened. Why?

"Institutional investors refused to pay the exit values the private equity houses wanted," says Neil Matthews, partner at international law firm Eversheds.

A year on and the same predictions are being made. Although valuations will have to be realistic for investors to bite, Matthews says investors do seem to have regained their appetite for technology stocks.

"Goldman Sachs' investment in Facebook may have kicked things off and really stimulated the sector," he says.

Still, big money is moving out of bonds and into equities. There's a shift from defensive stocks into slightly riskier assets. Witness the success of the Neilson and Demand Media offerings, says our legal expert.

"2011 could prove to be an active one for technology and internet IPOs," he says.

We'll hold you to that, Mr Matthews!

Following the revelations of 'phone backing' by News of the World journalists, Alastair Campbell has joined the celebrity bandwagon and embraced victim status too.

Campbell told reporters today that he feared his phone might have been hacked. By that, we imagine, he's probably refering to someone accessing his phone messages, which he didn't know how to secure.

That's not exactly hacking really is it? It's not breaking and entering if you leave the door open and someone enters your house. Technically speaking, they've got squatters right. If those News of The World journalists had any gumption, they would have changed the locks (i.e. the password, Mr Campbell) and called in a human rights lawyer. Phone hacking? Surely phone squatting would be a more apposite term.

Since Campbell was Downing Street's director of communications at the time of the alleged 'hacking', it doesn't say much for his professionalism.

Enterprising security resellers should phone all three major parties and offer their services. It's obvious none of them has any idea about security. Either that or they're lying.

Stuart Finlay, author of What Churchill Would Do, says there are many parallels between the technology choices of today and 1939. 

Winston Churchill had a genius for spotting inventions, especially technology which could hurt the enemy. But, unlike his adversary, experience taught Churchill that new technology was never a solution in itself, but a powerful aid.

The emphasis was on practical deployment and realistic measurements of success rather than the invention itself.

Hitler, on the other hand, expected technology to save the Nazis. He would consistently boast that his secret inventions would bring victory. This over-reliance on technology was to prove his undoing.

Take the V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket. Hitler poured resources into these two programs, presuming the British would have no response to either. He was right. The V2 shot straight out of the sky, plummeting vertically at over a thousand miles an hour, causing devastation.

Amazing though they were, their cost was a problem. Each V1 was eight times the price of a fighter and took twice the time to make. The V2 cost 20 times more and took six times longer. Hitler never realised that planes were his most cost effective weapon.

But the dazzle of technology turned his head. With planes Germany could have bombed Russia and Britain with greater venom and intensity. Churchill reckoned it would have been a much tougher fight if Hitler hadn't been such a mug.

Today's business world is full of Little Hitlers. How many CIOs and CTOs order V2s, when a Stuka would do the job better? Millions of technology pounds are squandered - in the public sector the waste runs into billions.

Each Hitler has his own Goering providing the spin for him. We all know companies that waste money and none of us are convinced by the propagandists who proclaim their project a glorious victory.

In the end of WW2, the V1 proved more fallible than the Nazi scientists believed. Anti-aircraft guns eventually found their range and took down 90 per cent of them. The V2, though a success, was too little too late.

Which sounds a bit like today's big system developments that overrun, only with more disastrous consequences and a less forgiving boss.

Stuart Finlay is the author of What Churchill Would Do

This Windows migration is a messy business.

Camwood, a specialist in this area, has won a 12 month contract with engineering group Babcock International to transform its applications.

Its programme of action is to rationalise and categorise Babcock's entire apps portfolio in readiness for a Windows 7 migration.

Though Camwood has developed its own tools and services and tools as it prepares for the battle, it will be bringing up all the big guns available, including AppTitude software from App-DNA. By automating the process of checking application compatibility (from old platforms to new) it saves thousands of man hours, it says.

That, on its own, justifies the money being spent, say customers.

Yes, application transformation is part of a wider IT migration, but once you've broken the back of this task, you are psychologically over the hill, with the enemy vanquished.

"Our application migration approach can drive down costs and project timescales by eighty per cent," says a triumphant Camwood CEO, Frank Foxall.

Here's an invite to an event you may want to attend.

I don't know about you, but I never miss an event that (Contact First Name) is attending. The guy really knows his stuff. And he made a great judgement call on Object Oriented Programming in the Virtual Age.

Of course, there are some people who might be offended by being instructed on making an impression, by people who can't even look up your name. But these critics really ought to get with the programme. Don't these guys get the new digital realities?

Nobody sleeps in the Internet age. That's why we're all so tired, make so many ludicrous decisions and our speech is rambling and incoherent.

A new study shows that civil servants, cabinet members and even the prime minister behind the National ID card scheme couldn't create passwords for their mobile phones.

Britain's political leaders are unashamedly lax about security, according to a new study for IT in Context.

Even the previous prime minister couldn't be bothered to change the default on his password, according to a security audit carried out on our behalf by The News of the World.

The survey also uncovered massive double standards in government, with ministers happy to impose Orwellian style 24 hour surveillance of civilians, then demanding prosecutions for anyone who breaches security windows that they left open in the first place.

In the study The News of the World attempted to gain access to communications systems trusted to cabinet ministers, prime and senior civil servants. The majority of our trusted officials failed in their public duty to protect private information, the exercise found. Researchers at the News of the World, acting on our behalf, exposed information that could put Britain's elected officials and the nation's interests at risk. Their ignorance could have left the Britain at risk of hacking by terrorists, blackmailers and criminals.

Some ministers brazenly admitted that they didn't bother to change their passwords from the publicly known manufacturer's default. Even ex-PM Gordon Brown unashamedly admitted a basic error - despite being the chief advocate of a highly sensitive national ID card scheme.

"If you can't secure your own messages, what on earth are you doing setting up an omnipotent database full of highly sensitive information?" asked one voter.

Meanwhile, the police have given their stock answer to illegal intrusions. "I reported the break in to the police," said one game show host, who was frequently seen at Number 10, "but the desk seargent just said 'sorry, there's not really much we can do about it'."

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, so the saying goes. So Gamma CEO Bob Falconer has abandoned his catapult and is taking far more sophisticated weapons with him on his next crusade.

Gamma Telecom is conducting a castle themed reseller roadshow in the first two weeks of February, hoping to storm the barricades of indifference at Stirling Castle, Peckforton Castle, Walton Hall and The Tower of London.

They say when the ravens leave the tower, that traditional telephony is finished and all the margins are in unified communications.

Gamma will showcase a new MVNA agreement with an FMC capability, a new hosted service with greater flexibility and a stronger feature set around inbound, mobile and UC.

But the biggest surprise will be wheeled up last. It is announcing a new data launch that will let partners offer a single IP solution. It will also feature a new hosted PBX solution that will give businesses more choice in how they deploy their telephone systems.

Yes, but will there be a medieval banquet afterwards?

Here's Nick Ogden. He was around at the dawn of the internet and, unlike many of us, he didn't squander his opportunity. Now the founder of WorldPay wants to give something back by helping startups

Yesterday this column met Nick Ogden (see picture), in the sumptuous offices of corporate lawyer, Sidley Austin LLP. He was at the Woolgate Exchange to brief them on the new ecommerce laws. Ogden created WorldPay - the foundation of the ecommerce boom - before Tim Berners Lee had even invented the web. RBS sold WorldPay for a billion or so more than they had paid Ogden earlier.

Now Ogden is using business.co.uk (the URL he bought at the birth of the Internet) as a portal to help other small businesses. BT, Natwest and other corporates have pledged financial support.

What advice would Ogden give modern start ups? "Don't let a bank control your destiny."

In his new company, Voice Commerce, he says he'll do things differently.

Here's the Office Oddball, the official mascot/character of a new socialising network for city types.

The advert was created by Bloodybigspider, the ad agency that CitySocialising hired to promote the site, using money from its £1 million funding budget from VC backers Profounders Capital.

Wonder what moniker The Office Oddball would choose for his advertising agency?

Something achingly and self consciously zany perhaps? Something like Bloodybigspider, we think. With Brent Hoberman on board, surely a better name would be LastOrders.com

By Philip Lieberman, CEO, Lieberman Software

The biggest drama in the games industry is not played out on screen. The contest is between the games publishers and the hackers. The publishers manage a massive database of payment and player data, which makes it a potential goldmine for potential hackers.
So while you're playing shoot 'em ups, the professionals and the hackers are involved in a more deadly game. And it's all for real.
Here are the rules. The good guys must guard and run thousands of servers and applications with a few staff. To make things interesting, the users (IT groups in big casinos) tend to choose easily-remembered passwords which they rarely change. Which leaves an inviting gap in security cover that hackers find an irresistable target. They know they only have to get lucky once, and they can get access to all areas, since most people have one password for everything.
As if that weren't enough, casinos are horrible places to work, so there's high staff turnover. Some companies lose hundreds of staff every week, many of whom might take inside information with them.
For the same reason, identity and access management (IAM) systems can't cope and privileged identities (super user accounts) can't be monitored easily as so many people (from database clerks to directory servicers) have then.
"Super-user" credentials are often misappropriated by developers, contractors and administrators to gain anonymous access to player and financial transaction records.
The answer: automate the process through a single, centralised console.

Even the most basic attempts to speak the local language will win sympathy, says EC business research

UK resellers struggle to do business abroad because their 'everyone speaks English' assumption offends their European peers.

Though English (albeit the American Corporate version) is the standard dialect of pan European business, many Brit businessmen unwittingly cause offence by failing to pay homage to local dialects and customs.

According to Euro Research, Britons are seen as 'Europe's Most Aloof Nation' by business people across the continent. Our refusal to even attempt local languages is the biggest cause of that resentment, overshadowing other offenders such as EC scepticism and hooliganism.

Researchers were surprised by the finding, given that English is the most widely used business language. However, analysis shows that it is our failure to even make an effort, no matter how pointless, that wins us the reputation as the rudest visitors. It gives British businesses a bad start when competing abroad.

'However futile it is to attempt the local dialect, the effort is always appreciated,' said Emma Scuti, a business language analyst in Pescara, Italy. 'The British let themselves down by assuming everybody speaks English. OK, everybody does speak English, but it looks bad if you take it for granted.'

According to Scuti, even the most rudimentary effort makes a huge difference in gaining trust and empathy in the host country. "All you need is a quick language course before you start your trip," said Scuti, "Attempt a few phrases. You can probably get help on your iPhone these days."

Alright then. Can anyone name one iPhone langauge app?

I had a Japanese business card moment with this book. I pored over it, desperate to be impressed. But there's nothing to immediately enthuse over.

The problem with most business books is they never get to the point quickly. That's because the publishers always demand 12 chapters and around 80,000 words.

Agents advise writers to start their book with their best chapter. At least, that's what we've been told. But by the time you've read the introduction and the gettng to know bit, you've lost the will to go on.

There's plenty to be suspicious about. This column is not mad about the way Google dictates how you write. "Start Every Word Of Your Headline In Upper Case" is one piece of advice. Looks terrible. You'd never catch us doing that.

Google's algorithms looks for repeated patterns, apparently, as evidence of context. So, here's a repeated message for you: "Up Yours You Uppity Algorithms!"

blah de blah de blah

 "Up Yours You Uppity Algorithms!"

rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb

"Up Yours You Uppity Algorithms!

And take your stupid tags with you an' all!

 Tesco Mobile reached the milestone of 2.5 million customers on Christmas Day this year after experiencing its best ever Christmas sales.

Tens of thousands of Tesco Mobile handsets were activated on Christmas Day with the iPhone proving the most popular Christmas gift for customers.

Good for Tesco.

Will it be good for Britain?

Calculating the return on your investment should be easy. ScriptLogic has created this tool for that very purpose. Does it makes things easier? We're not sure...

Did you know that desktops are idle for 58 per cent of the working day. If that wasn't bad enough, 64 per cent are left on overnight.

ScriptLogic offers a way to end this madness without pain.

Its new power management system, Desktop Authority tackles the problem in two ways. It automates a giant cattle product, suspended from the ceiling, that finds the errant user and gives them a short sharp sock.

Then it issues them with an on the spot fine and, if they don't have the money, it frog marches them to the cash point.

No hang on, it doesn't really do that. It should do, but instead, the designers of Scriptlogic take a much gentler approach.

Firstly, the manage Power Settings during working hours so that IT administrators can have granular control over IT equipment. Even the stuff in the data centre (where the worst offenders skulk around guiltily).

Secondly, it shuts down inactive machines, which helps reduce power consumption overnight when there is no activity. It also annoys users no end, which is always a bonus!

Cost? $20,549 (I wonder what that is in English pounds?)

How much does it save? 

Desktop Authority's ROI calculator says an organisation with 350 desktops and laptops that are used 8 hours in a 5-day workweek can save over $44,000 over a 3-year period.

The Veracity Coldstore. It's the Carlos Tevez of storage. It's not exactly pretty, but you're not buying it for its image rights. You want it because it'll give you a fabulous return on your investment. Gooaallllll!

UK company Veracity has developed a sequential data storage system for video, audio and time-based linear recording that saves half the energy by using its patented Sequential Filing System (SFS).

The logic is that with video data, 97 per cent of disk activity consists of writing to disk. So Veracity developed a system that focuses on writing only on one disk and one back-up disk, with the other disks in the array lying idle. This substantially cuts power consumption and heat.

Coldstore's storage arrays have 15 removable disk drives providing up to 30 TB of storage.  Writing data sequentially, to each disk in the array, minimises read/write head movement and heat. By powering one disk at a time all the other disks can be switched off when idle.

It's hard to quantify the cost saving but it uses just 50 Watts, which works out at or 0.6p per hour at a rate of 12p per kW/h.  The unit is cool and needs no cooling.

Here's the latest fashionable foot treatment in London's Soho. A pedicure by hundreds of hungry fish. Isn't it time we did something similar to our carbon footprints? Andrew Jones of Alquist thinks so.

There's this specialist massage joint in Soho where they use animals to give you a manicure. Come on, there's nothing sordid about using fish to make you feel sexy. You know how highly sensitive your extremities are, don't you? Well what could be more romantic than having thousands of tiny swimmers nibbling away your your tarsals? Phwoarr!
In a 30-minute fish manicure treatment (£27) your feet are submerged in a tank. In this time, hundreds of tiny Garra rufa fish will gently exfoliate your delicate digits with their tickly teeth. Aqua Sheko is famous in Soho for these fish pedicures.
This, in a way, is a fishy metaphor for what needs to be done in the nation's data centres. We desperately need to eat away at IT's massive footprint. But it needs co-operation and team work to save power.
"Energy efficiency is not about making one big change, but thousands of little changes," says Andrew Jones, founder of Cambridge based IT consultancy Alquist. We all need to nibble away and do our bit. But who is showing us the way?
Jones' company Alquist has invented a way to map out the temperature variations across and entire data hall, to an impressive level of detail. Most management systems give you a rough picture of the data centre. Alquist, in comparison, gives you a high definition picture. Amazingly, the system Alquist uses to create this sensitive temperature monitoring grid using fibre optics. Not as a networking conduit, but as a series of tiny sensors. How? We shall come back to Alquist for more details.

Duncan Stevens is the director of Vita Energia for TruckEast, the main dealer of Scania trucks in SE England.

Here he tells how the company met its emissions targets. Their first steps were remarkably easy.

They achieved energy reduction through energy efficient light systems, says Stevens.

As part of the project, Vita Energia upgraded a total of 415 light fittings at TruckEast's site, the majority of which were retrofittings, which means that the old light fitting are reworked to become more energy efficient.

"This is the quickest and most cost-efficient way to reach green targets," he says.

The lights were rolled out across the entire Wellingborough site, which spans five acres and includes a 14-bay workshop, body shop and offices.

Vita Energia's new light energy efficiency now saves the company £20,000 and 40 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. With an interest free loan from the Carbon Trust, and a payback of only 13 months, the project has not only cut costs, but improved the quality of light - benefitting approximately 70 workers at the site.

This is Chris Smith, a man who has seen what CRAC can do to an operations manager's budget. Now he's doing everything he can in the war on CRAC. 

Many data centre managers are reliant on CRAC in order to function. Chris Smith, sales and marketing director at on365, has some tips on weaning yourself off this expensive, energy sapping habit.

From a large co-location server hosting company, located somewhere within the M25, he offers his tips on how to come clean on energy.

Smith's tough love regime includes:
An energy monitoring and server rack reconfiguration enabling:

• Stable temperatures maintained within the client's existing SLA.
• Only six out of the original nine Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units being retained to maintain stable air and rack temperatures after the project completed.

It wasn't easy and there were challenges at first.

"Air from the cooling aisle floor grills was mixing with the hot air from the servers, meaning that on reaching the air conditioning units, the air temperature was significantly higher than the CRAC unit was designed to cope with, using extra power to support this," he says. There was a lot of peer pressure too, which Smith had to take into consideration. The company was also under pressure to conform to increasing compliance, in particular the Carbon Reduction Commitment.

Smith's solution provided the client with environmental monitoring capabilities throughout its data centre and the complete separation of the cold aisle to prevent the hot and cold air mixing.

But you cannot expect overnight success. Smith claims the company will see a return on investment in less than two years.

It will be worth it when it comes, however. Smith predicts proven savings of over 15 per cent of the initial 151kW IT load every year and over 15 per cent of the ACU power demand for the same load. Which could be a further five to eight per cent this year.

Provided, of course, the patient sticks to the programme and lapse into bad habits. It sounds like this client was in a bad place, but thank goodness for oN365 which has taken the client in and is providing care.

Evoswitch has a new plan to help you shed tons of ugly CO2 and firm up your bottom line.

Evoswitch claims it can design a carbon neutral data centre. (Uh-oh, that's a bad sign. An over ambitious claim in the very first sentence.)
It claims it can achieve this through the following:

• Cold air corridors, that allow cold air to be drawn to the front of the sealed cabinets as warm air is efficiently extracted at the back. By separating the hot and cold air flows their system proves more energy-efficient and eliminates a major source of wasted energy, as equipment runs at a constant optimal temperature.
• Free cooling, using outside air to keep the data centre cool.
• High-frequency lighting with sensors that detect when people are not around.
• 100 per cent sustainable green energy supplied by the DELTA company (this is how it claims to be carbon neutral)

We asked: how does it work, how much does it cost and how much it saves. They didn't really answer, skirting the issue with "an energy monitor on all servers means you pay for what you use" and "The organisation looks to achieve energy savings of around 80 percent compared with traditional datacentres."

EvoSwitch's PUE was 1.5 in 2009, in 2010 it was nearer to 1.4 and, with its new 5000 m2 data hall set to launch early 2011, it claims its average PUE will 1.2, the say.

IT In Context says: You never lose weight if you keep weighing yourself.

Here's Nigel Brown, director of Orb Data, a Triple A rated IBM partner, which has been nominated to showcase its Self Service Portal and YourTivoli.com at IBM Pulse in Las Vegas.

Yourtivoli.com is about offering Tivoli as a service, which is why it impressed the organisers of IBM's prestigious Integrated Service Management event.

Brown says the event will be a great showcase for its service management expertise. Giving attendees an overview of the business services market, technical training and strategic insight will allow them to get better control over the service they give clients and, of course, allow them to create new ways of offering service. In an increasingly service driven economy, this is a crucial consideration.

Not to mention the fact that attendees at Orb Data's booth (S313) are likely to invest in its expertise!

One of the great unreported blockages in the industry at the moment is that though IBM Tivoli is an extremely powerful toolset, it needs strong management. Without strong management (with the aid of Orb) users could fail to realise a full return on investment. Or, in the worst case, any return on investment!

Brown says he knows the pressures IT departments are under and that's why Orb is able to help them address their problems. "We give customers the flexibility to choose how much or how little responsibility they wish us to take," says Brown.

Orb's Tivoli managed service will liberate IT teams, he promises, and focus on the tasks that matter.

A mystery man has joined an anonymous mobile equipment maker, in a move that is covered by seemingly pointless reporting restrictions.

One of the top equipment makers in the mobile comms industry has just appointed a new VP of wireless sales for Europe. Sadly, reporting restrictions have been placed on this story, for no apparent reason, so we are not allowed to tell you how he is. Or she is, it could always be a woman.
We can tell you that he has had a highly successful career at network equipment suppliers such as Juniper and Cisco. Earlier in his career he worked at Cascade (which became Ascend) and he also enjoyed a spell with an interesting start up called Cambient. (Nope, me neither)
Having worked in layer two and three switching, he (or she, let's not be sexist) is now looking forward to working with one of the world's top mobile equipment suppliers and repeating the success it has enjoyed when installing mobile signalling kit into major sports arenas. The coverage in the Dallas Cowboys home ground and at the new Wembley stadium is now much stronger, thanks to the antennas and terminators and backhaul capacity his new employer has previously installed.
"The company I'm in now is the BMW or Mercedes of the mobile industry," says our mystery man. (Or woman). "I'm looking to extend the reach of mobile."
Meanwhile, in an unrelated story, there is now a Phil Sorsky sized hole at Juniper, where its VP of sales for the UK and parts of northern Europe (whom we can't name) has recently left to become a VP of wireless sales at a mobile equipment maker.

Here's Mystery Man, the fearless CEO of Under Embargo, which is building the world's biggest data centre in Not Allowed to Say. That's how PR works, I'm afraid.

What we can say is they're startng to build a vast new data centre (well four modular data centres to be accurate) on the site of a high ceilinged old IBM hard disk factory in Havant.

They're going to be spending between five and ten million pounds on power management equipment, generators and staff. So now would be a good time for all our readers from Emerson, APC and all the other UPS manufacturers to start making some sales calls.

They've yet to decide on a comms provider, although they have an existing relationship with Virgin Media (let's hope they don't get the same level of installation and service offered in the Kingston area).  They'll be looking for some generators too. And some staff.

We can tell you all that, but for some reason, we can't tell you the name of the company because the story is embargoed for two weeks! Why they set up an interview with us today, we really don't know. It's one of the great, unresolved myseries of PR.

Still, if you're an SME and looking for a new deal on hosting or co-location, there's a very good hosting company about to open an series of Tier 2 and eventually Tier 3 modular data centres.

Here's Kate Craig-Wood, boss of data centre company Memset, who takes issue with our criticism of data centres and their carbon footprint.

"There are two points here," writes Craig-Wood, in response to criticism of the data centre industry's galloping consumption

First data centres only contribute 1.9 per cent of total grid power, thunders the boss of Memset. "Overall the UK IT Industry contributes tenper cent of GDP, so to only generate overall three per cent of total CO2 emissions, the IT industry is delivering bang for its buck in terms of energy efficiency," she says.

Data centres facilitate carbon savings elsewhere though dematerialisation, virtualisation and transport avoidance, says the data centre guru.

"With improvements in data centre technology and Moore's Law we are delivering at least a doubling capacity of work done for every unit of power every eighteen months," says Craig-Wood. "In some cases, like ours we enable customers to move from dedicated servers to highly virtualised environments delivering savings in costs and energy."

That's telling us!

But is Craig-Wood right?

Could the industry do more to cut emissions? We think so.

Do you agree?

Here's a grim looking machine from Emerson. It might even be be too stark for our computers to handle. But look again, it's a thing of beauty because this monster could give you twenty per cent more power for your money, which amounts to a huge saving in a data centre. It might not save the planet, but it's a start.

Chloride at Emerson at Network Power, the UPS maker with a silly name but a huge social conscience, has answered our appeal for energy savings in IT.

Its engineers and researchers have been working on ways to get more usage out of existing electricity supplies. By redesigning its semiconductor technology, it has eliminated the need for transformers, which means you can get 20 per cent more usable (i.e. active) power out of your supply.

The device achieves a significant 98 percent throughput efficiency whilst conforming to all requirements for Tier 4 power protection.

So, twenty per cent off your data centre's electricity bills, then? It's probably not that simple. The device achieves a significant 98 percent throughput efficiency whilst conforming to all requirements for Tier 4 power protection.

Probably needs further investigation.

Energy monitoring expert CurrentCost is offering our readers the chance to win free equipment that will help cut their bills.

Current Cost is offering its energy monitoring technology to reades of this blog, after we pleaded for help in reducing the nation's shameful IT footprint.

Data Centres alone will soon consumer six per cent of the nation's electricity. The situation will get even worse in five years' time, when the government is forced to decommision nuclear power generators, and we all have to huddle around a wind turbine for warmth. the lowering supply of power means that electrcity wholesalers will whack up thier tarffis and electricity bills will soar.

As a response, CurrentCost is offering our readers the chance to win a helpful New Year's gift for the office and their employees in a regional prize draw.

OK, it's not the ultimate solution to our problems, but it's a start.

To enter, log on to the competition site and fill in a few details.

As well as a bundle of energy monitoring devices for employees, six firms will also each win a high tech Current Cost EnviR for the office. The EnviR was recently named a Which? Best Buy in its round-up of energy monitors.

Here's Stuart Finlay, gutsy client director of Thus, who ignored the experts and published his own book, What Would Churchill Do? He's had the last laugh too, as he's made a profit and done his career profile no harm at all.

Those of us married to the publishing industry will have given Stuart Finlay no chance when he decided to write his own book.

Books editors, agents, promoters and shop owners will all tell you that 99 per cent of all books fail to make a profit. Most publishing houses pin their hopes on celebrities these days. So Katie Price is more likely to get a business book deal than the UK MD for Microsoft.

Unless you've been on Big Brother, in Girls Aloud or you're a controversial stand up comic/gameshow host, they won't lift a marketing muscle. And without marketing, you're screwed. The publishing experts say, you don't have a ghost in hell's chance without anyone to plug the book on Radio 4 and kick bookshop arse until all the titles are on prominent end of aisle or window display at Waterstones. (Unless you're the type of ghost that takes a flat fee to pen the autobiography of this year's soap opera icon).

So fair play to Finlay, who refused to be cowed, much like the hero of his business book, Winston Churchill. As sales director for Thus by day, he spent devoted months of his spare time labouring away in the dark, trying to get inside the mind of our great wartime leader and trying to figure out what lessons history has for us in the struggles we find outselves in today. The logic of What Would Churchill Do is. like all the best schemes, brilliant in its simplicity. What is the technology industry, if not war without the bullets?

Recent sales figures have shown that a new version of the book, What Churchill Would Do has gone ballistic since being specially adapted for the Kindle. Since creating a specialised version for Amazon's electronic reader, Finlay has sold 10 times more copies of his book and is now well into profit. That's more than could be said of most novels, never mind business titles. Part of the electronic book's success might be down to the new pricing for the Kindle. Most traditional publishers offer no discounts at all for an electronic book, even though their overheads are dramatically lower. Finlay has passed his savings on to the customer and the Kindle version of What Churchill Would Do costs no more than a cup of latte. (Provided it's from Costa Coffee)

Other ITC channel luminaries are taking on the publishers at their own game and bringing the disciplines they learned in this brutally competitive market to work in publishing; Darren Spence of Bytes set up his own children's publishing company.

Maybe the IT industry has lessons for other sectors.

Are there any other author/pushers out there? 

What Would Churchill Do?

What Churchill Would Do

Reboot: Leading IT in the Information Age by Angelica Mari

Here's the Echo Smart Pen, an ingenious device that records every conversation. If only I had one of these earlier, it would have saved me several court cases.

"Dear Sir, I wish to complain about your recent article, where you have seriously misquoted me...."

Etc, etc. Yada, yada, yada. 

Blimey, we've all heard that one, haven't we? Or is it must me?

You find yourself in court, showing your work to a magistrate, who takes a minute to read it and finds in your favour. All because your thuggish opponent was too vain and stupid to admit the truth.

Recording all conversations is a massive time saver then. Especially when you are dealing with dunder headed Midlands based amateur agencies and their buffoonish bumpkin telecoms clients.

That's why the Livescribe Echo Smart Pen is a lifesaver. In a meeting, you take notes while the pen records every detail of the conversation. If, as happens, you find yourself having to drag someone to court, you will have to prove everything was said. With conventional recordings, this takes an age. Anyway, recorders are passion killers. Once people see you're recording the conversation, they clam up. So a thuggish, boring telecoms salesman becomes even less articulate and begins to sound like a heavily edited sales brochure.

The beauty of the Livescribe Pen is it's unobtrusive, but smart enough to be able to link your written words to the exact point in the recorded conversation. So when you play back the file, you can skip straight to the point where they damn themselves.

The Livescribe Echo is a ballpoint pen with an embedded computer and digital audio recorder. It's handy for business professionals and students and it can be used during meetings or lectures as you can hit 'record' and while you are taking notes, it will record everything that is being said at the time. After the meeting/lecture, you just press 'stop' and when you want to go through your notes you can tap on a certain word on the page and it will play back what was being said at that time.

Brilliant. Case dismissed. Now get out of my court!

In a tough market, the SAS Group has got going, with military efficiency.

Though market conditions in 2010 gave rise to biblical levels of wailing and gashing of teeth, not everybody suffered.

The SAS Group has just reported record growth for the last year. Makes you sick doesn't it?

While we are all struggling, The SAS Group's CEO Charles Davis says his company is thriving. While we put our fingers in our ears, he outlined the company's fourth quarter and year end accomplishments for 2010 (period ending 31 August). It generated £8.7 million in revenue for year-ended 2010, a 22 per cent increase over 2009, he boasted. Yawn. Really?

Yes, said Davis. It also made £2.52 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, a 20 per cent increase over the same period in 2009, he continued. How utterly tiresome, we said.  But there was no stopping him.

It achieved £1.28 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the year, a 31 percent increase over 2009, he said, without even noticing our indifference.

He's got a thick skin this bloke, because he too no notice and proceeded to report a £1.05 million net income for the year ended 2010, a £0.29 million increase over 2009.

How positively ghastly, we commented. But there was no stopping Mr Boasty, who finished with a sort of verbal round robin, where he told us how the company achieved its gross margin target of 40 per cent for the year. 

Yeah, gross, you got that bit right.

"2010 was a very strong year for SAS - we were able to report record financial results in all areas of the business," said Charles Davis, CEO for the SAS Group. "Our strategy for focusing on fast growth technology markets that demand a high level of expertise and customer service for their delivery and management has proven robust."

How utterly bourgeois!

Note he doesn't say how the company made this money? Would all like to know what niches they concentrated on, what services are in demand.

Come now Charles, chuck us a bone will you? Was it something sordid?

UPDATE

"We focused on developing a handful of key strategic relationships that have paid dividends for SAS and will continue to do so for the next three to five years," Davis has responded.
 
"Alongside this, there are some new relationships we are working on around cloud services which will both complement and augment our existing partner strategy," he said.

Here's a poster from a summer movie, the plot of which could match the story arc of the journey of business intelligence into maturity - if the Gartner Group is right.

Business Intelligence is going to forge new relationships which will change it forever, says a new report by Gartner
They make it sound like one of the Hollywood summer movies, don't they? You can imagine a voice-over saying, "And after that summer, BI was never the same again."

What does this actually mean? If you're going to the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011 in London on 31 January, they're going to be talking about the four trends that will gradually change BI. Before your very eyes it morph from an IT-owned and report-centric discipline into something that everybody can use. Big organisations will have to think carefully about the type of BI and analytics they use, how they buy them and who from.

Why? The way that information feeds decision making is evolving.

In the future, it will change further, with more analysis being made by professionals receiving their BI on a mobile handset. Androids, Windows phones and Androids could become the new platforms for analytics. Today BI and analytics take place on the desktop. By the time the Olympics are being analysed, the reports and dashboards of BI will be on a mobile device.

The power of analytic applications is increasing as in-memory functions add scale and computational speed. This makes for more proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities. It also paves the way for more sophisticated analytic functions. Consolidation will mean more emphasis will go on system integration rather than buying new software. As part of this trend we could see the combination of BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments.

Companies are already trying to piece together collaboration technology, social software and BI so they can create collaborative decision making environments. (Hang on, isn't that what meeting technology is about?)

"In the next 18 months, the momentum will grow as they start to more proactively manage, capture and optimise decision processes and outcomes to improve performance beyond the decision inputs such as BI," says the Gartner report.

We hope they make it sound a bit more exciting than that.

These collaborative decision environments will inspire major investment in new BI and analytic applications. Particularly if they can create a collaboration and or social networking function.

Gartner says a lot of vendors are getting involved in this challenge.

Predicts 2011: New Relationships Will Change BI and Analytics.

Microsoft, Google and all those other annoying buggers have announced they intend to keep launching a raft of FATYHTGUT products (flipping annoying things you'll have to get used to) whether you're ready for them or not.

By targeting young simpletons with no powers of discrimination, who will drive the movement for technology adoption, they intend to foist further wholesale changes on society, in a bid to meet their quarterly profit projections.

"We don't like what we've done to the world, but we can't defy shareholder expectations," said a spokesPR for the technology industry, "sorry, but what can you do."

As a further insult, they intend to back the onslaught of technology with a tide of schmaltzy ad campaigns, support for hideously self-important, but unworldly, technology gurus and bamboozling product and service tariffs that plunge people into contractual agreements they never would have signed up for if they understood them.

Here's a new gadget that could not only save busy professionals time and money, it could heal the north-south divide

As an IT supplier, you're well versed in the technicalities of pervasive working. A friend of this column bossed a notorious networking distributor in Farnborough and most of the time he was all over the place!

But now a personal productivity invention could prove a godsend to all you mobile professionals. (Although not our friend Duncan, as he's out of the business now.)

This time saving lifesaver is an application called UbiCabs, that its makers claim will improves the supply of transport to mobile professionals. It achieves this by fine tuning the supply chain of taxis and mini cabs, helping drivers and potential clients find each other more readily.

It's the brain child of by Lorenzo Caffari, who was head of IT in the logistics division of Carrefour, the world's second biggest retail chain.

He used his logistics experience and combined it with the GPS part of mobile technology so that customers and taxi driver can track each other on screen.

Both sides will save money and increase productivity. The drivers spend less time burning diesel while they run an empty cab, while passengers spend less time trudging the street, forlornly trying to get a lift off a psychopath who they've mistaken for a cabbie.

Who knows. Maybe taxi drivers will venture south of the river now, if they know that Jenny Jackson in Surbiton wants a lift to Earls Court for the BETT Show!

This isn't just a money saver. It's healing the divide between north and south London.

PR people always look good. But will they do the business?

Technology companies are always moaning about the PR agencies.

They think that every time Nigel from accounts goes on a cycling holiday, the story should be on the front page of the Financial Times. When the resulting press release doesn't generate a story in MicroScope, some poor account exec at the agency will get the blame.

Unfair?

Hell no! He or she knew what they were getting into. A burned out ex-PR veteran told this column that people go into PR careers with their eyes open. It's like working in Hollywood - a brutal business but the money can be great.

"Working in PR is like the beginning of a new relationship," said X, "you spend all day on the phone, and you're regularly getting screwed."

Sometimes, the PR agencies even get to screw the client. How do they manage this? The boss, whose experience and skills are probably worth paying for, pitches for the business.

Having won the account, they hand the running of it to Johnny intern, who should really be paying you to teach him about the IT industry. And yet you'll get stiffed at least £600 a day for his expertise. And bear in mind, if they take a journalist for a coffee, that's half a day's billable time.

Having said that, there are some brilliant PRs out there, who are well worth their money. But, on first impressions, there's no way of telling if a technology agency belongs to the Magic Quadrant or the Tragic Quadrant. Is there?

Yes there is. Here's one test you can do to see if they're any help.

Pretend to be a journalist, and phone the agency up and ask if they can send you a picture. A good PR will know that a picture for a print publication needs to be in high resolution, at least 300 dots per inch, in Jpeg format and preferably a portrait shot.

If the picture is for the web, it's better to be a landscape and low resolution.

If they pass that initial test, you're ready for Stage two. More of which later.

Here's Tina Green, who earns billions every year as the big name at retail giant Arcadia. That bloke next to her is her husband, Philip.

Philip Green was on TV recently, being interviewed about his multi billion pound retail empire. He was treated like a god by the interviewer, as if he was some retail guru.

But, if you check the company accounts, a different picture emerges.

The accounts seem to suggest his wife does all the work. She is paid a fortune - so much money that Lady Green has to live in tax exile in Monaco.

Her husband, for all his big talk, is paid a relative pittance. Which suggests to me that she might be the brains of this particular business.

Is it fair if he takes all the credit, while she does all the work!

Similarly, there are many under rated IT companies whose achievements need wider recognition.

Take Extreme Networks. Their WAN Optimisation service sounds a bit boring, but it saves companies a bucketload of money on bandwidth. When you consider that it can compress a Microsoft Powerpoint or  Excel file by 90 per cent, that represents a huge saving. It's still a bit broing though. But it makes the sexier apps, like VoIP and video, more viable. So maybe that's one way of selling it. Capture people's attention by talking about the fashionable apps, and sell them something less flashy in the meantime.

If only Extreme's software could compress Sir Philip Green!