May 2011 Archives

A new report from Sourcewire says that technology PRs are failing to use social media to reach journalists.

Well, thank goodness for that, we say.

That's a bit like a report complaining that 'stalkers still not using your work number'. Why do we need to give cold callers new ways to invade our privacy?

Not so, says Daryl Willcox (pictured), chairman of DW Publishing, which owns Sourcewire.

"Many social channels are less invasive than that associated with cold calling, so inappropriate approaches can be comfortably ignored," says Willcox.

"Anyway, since social media is normally public, any pestering by PR professionals would be seen by many, so they'd think twice before potentially damaging their reputation online."

Social media actually polices the time wasters, he argues.

But like all powerful technology, if social media falls into the wrong hands, it's going to damage society, surely? 

"I think the 'wrong hands' are more likely to be wayward governments, criminals and terrorists. Not the PR community," says Willcox.

"PRs generally understand the conversation nature of social media and the need to develop positive relationships with journalists online, that's surely a power for good."

Hmm. Not convinced yet.

Here's the report in full:

Journalists in the U.K. are using social media, but PR pros are failing to reach them in those spaces, according to a recent survey.

Daryl Willcox Publishing contacted 957 journalists this month for its white paper titled, "Journalists and Social Media," and it found that 75 percent of journalists rate social media as an important professional tool, and 90 percent of them are using it more than they did a year ago.

However, 44 percent of journalists said they believed that PR pros did not make enough use of social media.

Of the methods of interaction, emailed news releases and pitches (98 percent and 73 percent, respectively) were the highest, followed by phone contact (56 percent) and traditional face-to-face events (51 percent). These significantly exceeded contact by social media (the highest being via Twitter, at around 25 percent).

"Journalists have been quick to incorporate social media into their processes for gathering and distributing news," said Martin Stabe, author of the report. "But journalists see social media sites primarily as a channel where they can communicate directly with potential sources or engaged members of their audience, without much involvement from PR professionals.

"However, as the report shows, this is only part of the story. Social media also empowers PR professionals to change the way they communicate with journalists or directly to customers."

What we like about Samsungs is that once you get them going, they bash out the paper in no nonsense style for years.

The best printer I ever head was one of Samsung's monochrome standalone desktop lasers. It was the printer that refused to die, no matter now much work I threw at it. It never snarled the paper and the toner seemed to last for ever.

The fact that it never ever wasted paper or toner made it the greenest printer I ever used. I just wish I could remember its name.

So, Samsung might not be good at catchy names, and Lexmark might be better at other things (see upcoming MFP reviews) but once you get the hideous grey box installed, there's nothing more reliable than a Samsung machine.

They are magnificent beasts; they have incredible power and stamina and seem to go through their exercises with the greatest economy of effort.

But these mustangs of the printer world have to be tamed. Few of us are good at this and you need specialist skills to train a Samsung.

That, in a nutshell, is the only reservation I might have about the Samsung ML-3310ND. Once it's working it is a brilliant machine for a small workgroup that needs to bash out A4 pages quickly. A solicitors office, perhaps, or maybe a new boat company wishing to print up hundreds of leaflets quickly for a flyer campaign for the new range of Gemini RIBs.

These are the sorts of workgroups where is unlikely to be an IT expert on hand and they want something that's user friendly that can be set up quickly.

Being a Samsung machine, the Samsung ML-3310ND is certainly reliable. It's quick, quiet and eco-friendly.

But is it user friendly? Well, its eco and duplex modes are easy enough to set up. But what about the network printing aspect of it?

The network configuration side of it isn't all that straightforward at all, we're afraid. It doesn't configure on the default settings, which is fatal for the majority of us.

Samsung really should think outside the box, here, because the things that might seem trivial to them ("Oh, you simply force a Windows update to refresh a driver list from the Internet") aren't the sort of thoughts that occur to us when we're tearing our hair out and shouting at each other because the bloody printer won't work.

Still, once it's working, it's unbeatable...

Price: £200

Spec: 31 pages per minute

Maximum print resolution of 1,200 x 1,200dpi

Monthly duty cycle of 50,000 sheets

Time to set up: too long for my liking

Verdict: Well worth £200. As long as you're reasonably techie. Which most of us aren't.

A Citrix employee has created an app that could aid the recovery of epilepsy sufferers and raise awareness among the public  

Recently, my mission to get to a pub in Soho was interrupted by a woman lying on the pavement. 

The man with her immediately started shouting at passers by, demanding to know why they hadn't called her an ambulance.

So, with my laptop in one hand, and my mobile in the other, I called 999.  Once I'd made the call, the woman suddenly awoke from her coma and sprung up on her feet. "Ere mate," she said, "I don't need an ambulance, I'm narcoleptic. Give me your phone and I'll explain to them, so you won't get in trouble."

It turns out you can't cancel an ambulance anyway.  Three turned up eventually. I'm glad I didn't give her my phone as a man who witnessed the whole event said it was a scam.

Still, the point is, most of us haven't got a clue what to do if we see someone having a fit or a seizure.

So hats off to Robert O'Keefe, Citrix's localisation manager, who has attempted to raise awareness by creating a free information app for Android phones.

The app contains essential first aid tips, including a step by step guide to the recovery position, basic information about epilepsy and a link to an interactive seizure diary.

The Epilepsy Society has given the app its full endorsement and it's available for download here

It was developed with the help of employees from IT company Citrix through the company's Global Day of Impact.  

 Without wishing to be uncharitable, it's not exactly giving you the information you want at the point of need, so it might prove difficult to persuade anyone to take a look at it.

But it's better than nothing, surely.

NSE communications manager Amanda Cleaver explains,  "Epilepsy is a very complex condition. Being able to record details about seizures and make notes about circumstances leading up to an episode are vital to the management and treatment of the condition."

Fair enough.

"We also hope that the app will have universal appeal," she says, "as the first aid advice and step by step guide to the recovery position can be a useful tool for anyone."

Epilepsy first aid fundamentals

EBITDA up 25% to £276m (FY 2010: £221m) 

EBITDA margin 15.6% (FY 2010: 13.1%)

Total revenue £1,765m (FY 2010: £1,686m)

Operating free cashflow up 31% to £156m (FY 2010: £119m)

Headline earnings per share( up 24% to 13.5 pence (FY 2010: 10.9 pence(2))

Statutory profit before tax £57m (FY 2010: £11m)

Cloud service is less nebulous than outsourcing says Savvis. A detailed breakdown of cloud services makes them more likely to succeed.

At Data Centre 2011 in Nice Neil Cresswell (Left) MD for Savvis EMEA, outlined why cloud computing won't repeat the failures of incarnations of online service.

Over the past two decades, previous generations of marketing gurus and tame analysts have hailed a series of disastrous utility offerings.

Application service provision (ASP), IP Centrex, Internet Telephony and even outsourcing have all been launched with tremendous fanfare. There always seemed to be a cheerleader from Durlacher Research ready to predict the successful passage to enormous riches.

A few years later after its launch, the whole money vehicle would be holed below the waterline, before sinking and wiping out millions of passengers.

One IP centrex provider in particular was almost criminally negligent in the way it recruited resellers and dealers to sell a non-existent infrastructure it intended to build on the fly with the money from orders.

IT in Context asked Savvis MD Neil Cresswell how he could guarantee that the channel won't get caught in another perfect storm of marketing bull. Could Cloud Computing get sucked into a south sea bubble?

"That's a perfectly understandable fear," admitted Cresswell, "but the difference is that the conditions for utility computing are more realistic these days."

Processing power, broadband and latency have all made massive advances each year for the last decade. Ten consecutive years of exponential growth in ICT capacity mean that we are light years ahead of the days when the IT service industry was dominated by cowboys and snake oil salesmen.

That doesn't mean to say there won't be any dodgy outfits fouling up the channel, feeding false information to partners and making ludicrous claims to customers.

"There are questions you must satisfy yourself over," said Cresswell. What are the security levels, what are the service levels, how good is the service management, what are the terms and conditions and governance and, finally, what is the experience and reputation of the service provider.

This all sounds terribly familiar. Isn't this exactly the same advice that was given over outsourcing contracts? Customers went into those partnerships with their eyes open and still got royally screwed. So why should things be different now?

Lessons have been learned, said Cresswell. The technology is many times more powerful and the focus is much narrower, he says.

"Outsourcing arrangements were too broad and wide ranging. It was impossible to cover all bases. Cloud computing is much more granular," he said. There's a much more detailed picture to work from. 

But none of this will work unless the service provider really understands how your business works.

How can you satisfy yourself that they do?

A quiz might be a good idea, he conceded. If a company pitches to run a service for you, given them a multiple choice questionnaire about aspects of your business. If they get less than 75 per cent right, then don't give them the contract.

There's a fair few PR companies that would definitely fail this test.

Here's Fred Beringer, who could save the British tax payer millions of pounds, with a new improved cloud service for testing IT systems. 

The NHS's terrible record of offensively expensive IT failures could be ended by new efficient testing systems made possible by cloud computing. But will the contractors who enjoy billion pound public sector IT contracts be motivated to improve their testing procedures?

Soasta told delegates Data Centre 2011 in Nice how cloud computing has made testing IT services quicker, easier and more efficient than the traditional lab based methods.

Could this mean we might see fewer billion pound IT failures in the NHS in years to come?

When it tested Verizon's network, prior to an iPhone 4 rollout, Soasta used the cloud, rather than expensively acquired testing equipment, to test how the mobile network would cope.

Soasta has access to a global array of cloud services including Amazon EC2, Microsoft's Azzure, IBM's Cloud and Go Grid. These can give any mobile network or application an exhaustive fitness test. This is much more thorough check on match fitness, said Fred Beringer, Soasta's VP for business development. As an added bonus, it can be cheaper too!

"Testing equipment is a massive capital outlay. Then you have to keep paying for the maintenance. With cloud services, we can book a service for two hours and get it at fifteen minute's notice," said Beringer.

In a lab testers are unable to obtain real time analysis. The gathering of performance data is a manual process, he said, which yields its results days after the test. Real time data enables testers to make immediate changes to parameters and adapt the test as it is taking place.

By testing an app or network externally, cloud computing based exercises can expose weaknesses at all points of the ICT stack. This means it is not just the app's performance that is measured but the network, the bandwidth and the servers (such as applications and database servers). "Load balancing problems are the most frequent occurrence," said Beringer, "these are not exposed in a lab."

By adopting a basket of different cloud providers from different regions, a service provider can see how the performance of a global service varies across the planet. "You may well want a service to take priority in the US, for example, because you make more revenue from that region. Cloud services give you the flexibility to do this."

The cloud gives you a bigger picture but in greater detail, said Neil Cresswell, MD for Savvis EMEA, "The cloud is much more granular, so you get much more useful service and better control."

Mark Leonard, Colt's executive VP for infrastructure, says internal resistance will be the biggest barrier to cloud acceptance. He explains how they it be overcome

You have to recognise that for most people in your organisation, cloud computing presents a massive culture change, Mark Leonard told the audience at the BroadGroup Data Centres event in Nice.

The CIO, says Leonard, is the person who spends time with the stakeholders in the company, trying to make IT deliver more profits for the shareholders and the board. But it's suddenly become much easier, as the cloud takes the pain out of rolling out new IT services. At least it would if he could get the IT staff behind him. But given that CIOs aren't always the best people managers, is that an easy task?

No, admits Leonard. The success of any cloud project relies entirely on the infrastructure people getting behind the programme. Change is notoriously difficult to implement, especially change that could threaten the livelihood of the people implementing it. That would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Colt experienced this very human drama recently, as it strove to reinvent itself as a cloud services providers. "We couldn't sell cloud services if we weren't a perfect example of how it works," says Leonard.

The techies at Colt, however, were used to doing things a certain way. We all take comfort in rituals and tradition and techies have long observed the sacred routine of taking big tin machines out of boxes, plugging them in, installing software and sitting at a console solving trivial puzzles over teething problems with Unix or Linux.

You can only get people to accept change willingly. Colt achieved this through coercion by advising infrastructure staff how their careers could be improved. The British Computer Society (now the Institute of Certified IT Professionals) played an instrumental role in creating the right environment.

"The BCS was very useful in helping us build a career path for our staff," says Leonard.

The job of an infrastructure techie has changed enormously in recent years. For example, they spend far more time using VMWare now than they did on hand cranking Linux, says Leonard.

All the old divisions at Colt, for example, such as Linux, Unix, Windows and Infrastructure Design teams, are now amalgamated into one virtualisation design team. (That's sounds like the sort of change that would unsettle anybody).

According to Leonard, the transition worked. Now Colt claims to have a much more fluid operational and business support systems, which have eliminated 95 per cent of its costs. Leonard didn't give me a breakdown of these costs, so you'll have to quiz him yourself. 

For ten years Alex Rabbetts, as MD of consultancy Migration Solutions, has advised clients on designing and building data centres. So he's seen many a co-location outfit and frankly, he was so unimpressed, he decided to buy a company and do it himself properly. But will cloud computing's own Victor Kiam be any good at it himself?

 Data Centres 2011, in Nice. 

Alex Rabbets, MD of Migration Solutions, has launched a new co-location company, Sentry 42, which will operate independently from his consultancy business.

The launch is a reaction to the uninspiring service offered by many of the co-location companies on the market today. "They're often property companies who don't really understand data centres. If not, they'll be from an electrical or engineering background, with no real understanding of IT."

There's definitely a gap in the market for more regional data centres, said Rabbetts. "There's huge demand for regional data centres, as most companies and local authorities don't want to go into London. But most data centres are in the capital."

The customer desperately wants an alternative to having a host based in an area characterised by premium property prices, the threat of terror attacks and flood and a shortage of options on power and fibre optics routes.

The new co-lo was built on the site of an old Norwich Union (AKA Aviva) data centre, which Sentry 42 has spent eight months and £12 million refurbishing. "We had to swap out just about everything, from the floor upwards," said Rabbetts.

It should tick all the boxes of the cost and environmentally conscious client, promises Rabbetts. It features heat recycling, free cooling chillers, hot and cold aisle containment. They've even spent £120,000 on installing LED lighting. Normal lighting, run 24/7 for 365 days a year would cost £64,000 a year on electricity, compared to an LED power bill of lights £2, 600.

"We've done no marketing, and we've only just got a web site, but we've already been overwhelmed with inquiries," said Rabbetts.