July 2011 Archives

Jargon buster is a good idea but it misses the real target

By Billy MacInnes on July 29, 2011 2:43 PM | No Comments
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Earlier in the week, IT support company Barton Technology released a "jargon buster" designed to help small businesses and SMEs decipher some of the jargon in hardware, networking, software and licensing, backup, server applications and security issues.

Having had a quick scan, I can say it's harmless enough and does a decent job of explaining basic terms such as "server", "hard disk" and "anti virus software". The problem, to me at least, is that this isn't exactly the jargon I was thinking of when I was looking for a jargon buster.

Like many other people out there in the wider world, I find the language spoken by a lot of people in the IT world to have only a peripheral relationship with English as we know and understand it. Now, if someone would write a guide that enabled ordinary people to decipher the code that passes for language between people in the IT industry, I think it would be downloaded in the thousands.

What Barton appears to have missed is that the terms for products actually aren't that difficult to work out, it's the words around them, usually those deployed to try and describe the products themselves, that often stray into what appears to be some strange dialect of Martian or Venusian.

Cloud computing is a lot of hot air (and it can heat your house)

By Billy MacInnes on July 26, 2011 9:06 PM | 1 Comment
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There's an intriguing paper published by Microsoft in which the authors argue that it could be possible to send servers used in cloud computing data centres to houses and office buildings and use them as a primary heat source.

The Data Furnace: Heating Up With Cloud Computing paper believes that the problem of heat generation in data centres can be turned into an advantage with servers placed into buildings to provide low latency cloud computing for offices or residents.

The authors suggest this approach improves quality of service by moving storage and computation closer to the consumer, enhances energy efficiency and eradicates the cost of cooling the servers by reusing their heat.

It's a fascinating example of lateral thinking. There are a number of issues to be resolved if it is ever going to take off such as the physical security of the servers, the need for zero touch management and the fact that data furnaces cannot exceed the power and bandwidth capacity of the buildings where they are housed.

Still, kudos to the authors - Jie Liu, Michel Goraczko, Sean James and Christian Belady at Microsoft Research and Jiakang Lu and Kamin Whitehouse at the University of Virginia Computer Science Department - for even thinking of such an idea. Pity they didn't take the time to go through the article and correct all the references to "Data Furances".


The next life: Netbooks report back from their new homes

By Billy MacInnes on July 25, 2011 8:38 PM | No Comments
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Fascinating project from MIT's SENSEable City Lab which turned used netbooks into independent "reporters" to document their 'second life' after they were sent off to be reused in developing countries.

In Spring this year, MIT equipped 40 refurbished netbooks with tracking software adapted from the open-source Prey project to send back their location and a picture from their built-in camera every 20 minutes as part of the Backtalk project. 

Recipients of the machines are fully informed about what they do and there are stickers attached to each netbook explaining the project in the local language.

The netbooks provide fascinating glimpses into the everyday life of people in cities in developing countries, sending back despatches from their new homes.

backtalk-3-hi small.jpg

Thoughts on HP's MPS Confessions campaign: what kind of people have 'beloved' print devices?

By Billy MacInnes on July 25, 2011 8:13 PM | 1 Comment
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In case you missed it, HP has just launched its "MPS Confessions" campaign - no, not MPs Confessions (now that might be diverting) but MPS. 

For those of you who have been living in a desert outpost somewhere miles away from an internet connection (could there be such a thing anymore?), MPS stands for Managed Print Services and HP is busy doing its best to sell the concept to partners and customers because it's the next big thing in the print and copier world.

Having read through the press release, I can report that the "confessions" in the campaign relate, according to HP, to the lengths that some people will go to "to 'protect' their beloved print devices". I'll confess there are two parts of that sentence which I have a problem with. The first is the suggestion that someone would go to great lengths to protect their print device. The second is that any print device could be viewed by anybody as "beloved".

Personally, I think HP might be laying it on a bit thick when it talks about people hiding their printers in office drawers, stationery cupboards or underneath a pile of coats. All sounds a bit like the French resistance in WW2 for me.

Anyhow, HP EMEA MPS marketing manager Henry Blum isn't afraid to join in. "An MPS implementation, which involves the removal of a cherished printer, will invariably lead to feelings of resentment and dissatisfaction. Printers are considered (quite rightly) a personal productivity tool and often a sign of prestige as well! Thus, they are not given up easily, unless people understand the overarching benefits for themselves and their organisations."

"Cherished?" Really? Printers are considered "a sign of prestige"? Wow, I never thought of it like that. How high up the scale of company prestige are they? Do you start up the ladder by getting your own pencil sharpener before progressing to your own stapler and hole-punch?

There's a serious point behind all this which is that a company needs to get its staff on board if it wants to successfully implement a MPS. All well and good but it doesn't seem, to me at least, to link that tightly with a campaign entitled Confessions.

Is there more to Microsoft than Windows?

By Billy MacInnes on July 22, 2011 11:01 AM | No Comments
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Only the churlish would seek to dismiss a company reporting record revenue and profits, especially when that company is Microsoft, the biggest software business in the world. As I'm not churlish by disposition, I won't, although quite a few others have. 

Some people have noted that sales of Windows, the bedrock of the company's existence to date, declined slightly for the year to 30 June 2011. At the same time, sales of Office 2010 helped fuel a big increase in revenue at the Business division. The Server and Tools business also grew. Perhaps the biggest success was in Entertainment & Devices, which covers the Xbox and Kinect, where sales were up 45%.

So although Windows fell a little bit, other parts of Microsoft's business more than made up for it. Looking forward, there is a suggestion that Microsoft's failure so far to break into the fast-growing tablet market (and the equally lucrative smartphone sector for that matter), could have potentially painful effects on its Windows business if it ends up confined to the PC ghetto. We shall see.

But what the success of some of the other business units demonstrates is that if Microsoft does get the strategy right with tablets and smartphones, the opportunities will also exist for other parts of its business to exploit those markets as well.

The big question is whether Microsoft has the knowhow and cultural awareness to be successful in areas beyond the comfort of its PC domain. To some extent, Apple has shown how it can be done and Microsoft would do well to follow its rival's example where appropriate.

The continuing difficulties at Microsoft's online services division, which houses the Bing search engine, show that merely throwing money at the problem to gain market share in the long term can be a very expensive process. True, Bing has increased its US search share to 14.4%, but over the past three years, the division has reported losses of more than $6.5bn. Somehow, I don't think Microsoft wants to find itself in similar territory for tablets and smartphones. Neither will the shareholders.

Apple may not be a computer company anymore but it's doing very nicely

By Billy MacInnes on July 20, 2011 11:42 AM | No Comments
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In January 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the company was dropping the word "Computer" from its name to become "Apple Inc".

As he pointed out at the time, only one product (the Mac) was a computer out of the four product ranges it had at the time: Mac, iPhone, iPod and AppleTV. Since then, it's added another product category: iPad.

What the most recent set of results for Apple, published yesterday (19 July), show is that Apple definitely isn't just a computer company anymore. Revenue from the iPhone and iPad ranges were both higher than for the Mac business. 

iPhone revenues were two and a half times larger than those for the Mac range and the iPad has now jumped ahead of the computer business as well, a year and a half after its introduction.

Not that the computer business is doing badly. By PC market standards, it's doing reasonably well with sales up 14%, but it's dwarfed by the sales growth from the iPhone and iPad parts of the company.

Given the negative comments from certain sections of the computing industry and press that accompanied the launch of the iPhone and iPad, it's hard not to escape the conclusion that a lot of them were unable to look beyond their own technological ghetto when it came to getting a view on the potential impact of those two products (in much the same way as they did before that with the iPod).

There's a world beyond the PC and that's the world computing is blending into with all manner of devices. Apple has already made the move into that space. And it's paying off big time.

Currency fluctuations can be good for your business, ask IBM

By Billy MacInnes on July 19, 2011 7:40 PM | No Comments
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Here's an interesting snippet of information: IBM's second quarter revenues were positively affected by currency fluctuations to the tune of 7% or around $1.6bn. In other words, without positive foreign exchange rates, IBM's revenues would have been just over $25bn rather than the $26.7bn Big Blue reported.

To put that in perspective, the $1.6bn from positive currency movements is equivalent to around 34% of hardware sales for the quarter, just over a quarter of software revenues or a tenth of services revenue. 

You wouldn't get that good a deal at the bureau de change at Heathrow Airport.

Staff benefit from Softcat's "rubbish forecasting" with beer and cake

By Billy MacInnes on July 19, 2011 2:35 PM | No Comments
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When Softcat broke through the £200m revenue mark last week, managing director Martin Hellawell revealed that it would be celebrating with beer and cake for staff.


"I never dreamt of getting to the £200m mark this financial year," he told MicroScope, "which shows how rubbish we are at forecasting." Maybe so, but if you had to be rubbish at forecasting, Softcat definitely chose the better of the two options.


One question which occurred to me was at what point in its growth will management break out the champagne and caviar for the staff? They must be thinking that with a bit of luck, if Softcat continues to be as rubbish at forecasting as it has been this year, it could be reasonably soon.

Memo to Turner: You can run Windows 7 on an iMac. It's not a big deal

By Billy MacInnes on July 18, 2011 10:49 PM | No Comments
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Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner was in combative mood at the vendor's Worldwide Partner Conference last week, taking jabs at all manner of rivals, including Google, IBM, Oracle, salesforce.com, VMware and Apple.

On the latter, he made great play of an Apple reseller in a Latin American country showing Windows 7 on Apple's hardware. "I was shocked to learn that the reseller was selling Windows 7 on the Apple Mac hardware," he said, claiming it demonstrated "the importance of having a great OS".

Really? You could argue, as Apple resellers would, that it shows the importance of having good hardware that can run Mac OSX and Windows. They would argue it reassures switchers that they will still be able to run Windows as and when required even if they switch to a Mac.

Besides, it's really not that unusual a sight. I've seen a Macbook running Windows 7 in an O2 store in Dublin and an iMac with the Microsoft OS in a computer store in Dubai.

And let's not forget this is the man who said, at last year's Worldwide Partner Conference, of the iPhone 4: "It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their [Apple's] Vista and I'm okay with that."

Xerox covers all the bases with SME strategy

By Billy MacInnes on July 11, 2011 3:47 PM | No Comments
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Xerox has an interesting approach to the SME market which, at first sight, seems to be ever so slightly contradictory. Last week Douraid Zaghouani, president of indirect channels group at Xerox, revealed that it wanted to recruit partners that were selling products for other vendors to help build its presence in the SME market. Nothing wrong with that, you could almost say it was standard practice.

But today, Zaghouani is quoted in MicroScope as saying that Xerox also plans to continue with its strategy of acquiring resellers, as it did earlier in the year with Scotland-based Canon dealer Concept Group and Middlesex-based NewField IT, to strengthen its presence in the SME market.

That appears a little bit bizarre because what it seems to be doing is buying businesses that compete with the very same resellers it is trying to recruit. If buying those dealers was a means of taking them out of the market, that would be viewed as a pretty positive move but if it's effectively buying them to run as independent businesses selling its products into the SME market, there could be some conflict there.

Mind you, there is a neat symmetry in the fact that the resellers Xerox has bought to date have, for the most part, been selling products from rival vendors rather than its own product range. So, in one sense, it's pretty much pursuing the same strategy of invading other vendors' channels but through the two different methods of straightforward acquisition or poaching their partners.

Does privatisation plan for police IT cross the thin blue line?

By Billy MacInnes on July 8, 2011 2:41 PM | 1 Comment
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This has got to be one of the most bizarre ideas I've seen when it comes to a public service. We have become accustomed to the notion of private businesses being contracted to provide IT systems for public bodies but the suggestion that those companies should then be allowed to pay to be part of the agency that manages those contracts on behalf of the public is, frankly, almost beyond comprehension. Can it really be right for private companies working to provide police IT systems to own a stake in the business which manages the process? Wouldn't that potentially represent a significant conflict of interest?


Gordon Wasserman, a veteran of the Thatcher years, has been appointed to a Home Office board overseeing the creation of a private company to manage police IT. Yes, you did read that right. A private company to oversee police IT. Given the current furore over the News Of The World and the police, the timing seems a tad inopportune for an action which seems likely to loosen public oversight and control of police systems (which may extend to include what's stored on them, where it's stored and who accesses them).


I can't be the only one who sees something ironic in plans to privatise the National Police Improvement Agency (there's a name to conjure with), which manages the Police National Database (PND), the Ident fingerprint database and the auto-numberplate recognition data warehouse, being announced on the same day (4 July) as the News Of The World hacking scandal and details of payments to police for confidential information finally exploded into the public consciousness.


Success in the SME market is harder than it looks

By Billy MacInnes on July 8, 2011 11:53 AM | No Comments
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MicroScope reports that Xerox is seeking to recruit more resellers that sell rival products in a bid to boost its presence in the SME market. Nothing new in that. Vendors have always had to go out and try and get resellers on board if they want to make a decent job of hitting the SME market and, by definition, those resellers are often selling kit from other manufacturers. All too often, they are resellers for vendors that have already made a move into the SME market and put some investment and resource into selling to smaller businesses.

Companies like Xerox have to be a little bit sensitive here because if resellers think it's just a case of a vendor trying to expand outside its enterprise and corporate base into the SME market by piggy-backing on someone else's channel, they might question just how serious Xerox is. A strategy for breaking into the SME market by using someone else's channel sounds easy, but there are potential drawbacks for any vendor.

For a start, the products better be right because you are pushing them onto resellers already selling products that work for the SME market. They know what works. If your products don't stack up, they'll know it. And so will you, very quickly.

And you better appear serious about it. With their experience of dealing with other vendors in this space, resellers will be able to see very clearly and quickly whether you are going in the right direction and putting the required resources and effort into making it work.

On the face of it, Xerox is merely opting for the best way to get into the SME market, quite possibly the only way to do so. But things which appear simple can go awry very easily too. There's a reason why the channel works for SMEs. It gives them what they want. It knows what they want and it knows what they need. Any vendor that doesn't understand this will soon find itself in full-scale and ignominious retreat from the SME market.


Finance officers take keener interest in IT spend

By Billy MacInnes on July 6, 2011 2:00 PM | No Comments
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So the finance people are starting to take much closer control of IT spending. According to a study, chief financial officers (CFOs) have authorisation for 26% of all IT investment compared to 5% for chief information officers (CIOs).

In addition more IT organisations report direct to the CFO compared to 33% reporting direct to the CEO. This may not be so surprising given the study's findings that only 30% of organisations believe IT fulfils its mission, suggesting there is a danger too much purchasing is conducted on what the IT department thinks about the technology rather than what it can do for the business.

But the seeds for why this level of dissatisfaction exists might also lie in the fact that 72% of respondents said they would invest where they see a competitive advantage driven by IT. Whatever the merits of IT in areas such as business intelligence and business applications (identified as the highest investment priorities in the study), seeing it as a driver for competitive advantage rather than a potential enabler to help a company achieve competitive advantage is probably a recipe for disappointment.

What you need to do with the IT is probably more important than what the IT can (theoretically) do. If a company has bad business processes, adding IT won't miraculously make it a better company. 

The trend, if anything, with current hot technological developments such as cloud computing and SaaS, is to move towards IT as a platform for delivering business processes in a standardised and simplified manner in much the same way as electricity and water is delivered. 

In this scenario, quality of supply is important, although there are very few people likely to invest in their own bespoke water and electricity plants in a bid to deliver a worthwhile competitive advantage over their rivals.

It seems to me the primary reason for involving CFOs as the final arbiters of IT spending decisions is to make sure the fundamental question of "why am I spending the company's money on IT" is answered satisfactorily. 

In many cases, "competitive advantage" is unlikely to be the right response because it is often too hard to define or measure. Competitive against who? Advantageous in what way? I often wonder if the only ones gaining "competitive advantage" are the people who sell the system and win another customer rather than the client who buys it.

Even in the cloud, there's nothing new in alliances

By Billy MacInnes on July 5, 2011 2:34 PM | 3 Comments
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There's a lot of confusion around cloud computing. What is it exactly? Who is it for? What can it do? Hardly surprising then that groups are springing up that claim to help people understand the concept, see beyond the hype and get an idea of what it is they're buying or not buying.

There's nothing unusual in these types of circumstances for businesses to form alliances to try and promote/sell new technologies or concepts to customers under a reassuring umbrella of a one-stop shop.

The UK Cloud Alliance is the latest such grouping to emerge, labelling itself as "a small collective of screened and trusted members working together to serve UK business". It promises to "assemble exactly the right blend of technologies and capabilities that match your specific needs - liberating you from managing multiple suppliers".

On one level, this can be seen as something fairly new to cloud computing at least in that it offers a formal and single mechanism for potential customers to buy into cloud services. But it's a tad ironic when you consider that, in the wider business firmament, there is nothing new in a small number of companies joining together as a consortia to sell their wares to small and medium sized businesses. Nothing new at all.

If it succeeds or fails will be largely dependent on whether this approach is appropriate for the cloud computing market and for the type of customers it is targeting. And in that respect, whatever people think of the cloud's disruptive or revolutionising effects on the industry, it's really no different from all the other alliances that have preceded it in other areas of IT.
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