Ongoing Adoption of Enterprise Social Software Solutions

The demand for substantive customer feedback -- and engaging all constituents into the feedback process -- drives the need for businesses to innovate and also manage innovation in a new way.

Results from a recent market study show that this inherent need is also creating the opportunity for social technologies to help support and add value to the commercial innovation process.

The fourth annual "Social Business Survey" from International Data Corporation (IDC) revealed a significant departure from previous years -- in terms of focus and use cases for social business technology.

With the maturing of social media tools within the enterprise -- and their adoption as an engagement channel -- use cases have grown into some broad categories, such as customer experience, sales enablement, digital commerce, enterprise social network (ESN), innovation management, and socialytics.

IDC says that as users request solutions to extend outside the firewall, the 2012 survey demonstrates that security (84%) and privacy (81%) are the top two important functionality identified by companies.

"As enterprise social software grows into enterprise social networks (ESNs), solution functionalities like profiles, activity streams, and blogs have quickly become assumed," says Vanessa Thompson, research manager for the IDC enterprise social networks and collaborative technologies group.

IDC believes that the marked shift in the buying behavior of solutions in 2012 highlights the need for meaningful solutions to extend outside the company firewall and include customers, partners, and suppliers in the feedback and business workflow processes.

Additional findings from the IDC market study include:

• In 2012, 67% of companies surveyed have deployed corporate-sponsored enterprise social software, noting that the level of autonomy an employee has on how they manage individual task and business workflow has increased.
• In 2011, the top response to why organizations were using social media, networking, or community initiatives for business purposes was to acquire knowledge and ask questions. This dropped dramatically in 2012, replaced with the notion of customer feedback and engaging all constituents into the feedback process to support and add value to the innovation process.
• Survey respondents highlighted competitive pricing (87%), minimal performance downtime and latency (85%), and meeting expectations with regard to solution updates or upgrades (85%) to be the most important characteristics of solutions.

IDC polled 700 senior executive-level decision makers in the United States, on their current and future technology and business plans, perceptions, and experiences related to the use of social media or social networking for business purposes and corporate sponsored enterprise social software applications.

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Massive Economic Upside for Unified Communications

A significant new analysis of the economic potential of video, data and voice systems that work together over the Internet -- known collectively as Unified Communications (UC) -- demonstrates that when these collaboration technologies are interoperable, they deliver clear commercial and consumer benefits.

The paper, written by Dr. Michael Katz and Dr. Bryan Keating studies the current unified communications market. The Katz/Keating study outlines the potential negative outcomes for the market of some UC vendors refuse to adopt industry standards that would enable video-to-video calls between different systems.

"The economic effects of incompatibility are not an abstract academic theory," Katz said. "There are real, everyday consequences to economic growth, consumer well-being and business productivity when one company has a proprietary Internet video system that does not work with others. This means less jobs will be created and people and businesses will not be able to communicate as freely, thus negatively affecting global economic potential. Our strong view is that government should monitor this market carefully to ensure that the implementation of standards is not blocked by dominant players seeking to gain competitive advantage."

UC  technologies -- especially video calling -- have been found to improve collaboration, boost productivity, reduce travel costs and enable remote training and services in health care and education.

However, according to the research by Katz and Keating, industry standards are critical to the future growth of the UC market. The market study reports that analysts at both Gartner and Frost & Sullivan find that interoperability is an important consideration for enterprise customers and that standards will increase flexibility for users as well as help lower costs.

"UC has the potential to be a huge growth industry at a time when many sectors are stalling," Keating said. "As with the Internet, we can't afford to have a ‘go-it-alone' mentality in this area.  We must do everything we can to ensure that companies adhere to the common global standard for video calling so that businesses and consumers reap the full benefits of these compelling communications platforms."

The study, commissioned by Cisco, included these findings:

• UC technologies have significant potential to increase business productivity but the lack of interoperability is an impediment to widespread adoption.
• UC is particularly susceptible to market failures that could impede standards based interoperability: (a) there are powerful network effects, meaning that the technologies become more valuable as more users are connected; (b) there are significant costs associated with using multiple vendors or switching from one to another; and, (c) certain vendors have large installed bases and important complementary products.
• Under prevalent market conditions, those vendors who would gain a competitive advantage when networks are proprietary can have incentives to thwart interoperability by undermining industry standards or refusing to adopt them.
• For these reasons, Katz/Keating conclude, the UC market should be monitored closely for signs of specific anti-competitive conduct.  When there is evidence of conduct that could or has adversely affected competition through effects on interoperability, government should address that conduct and impose appropriate remedies that would ensure adherence to agreed-upon industry standards. 

The economic study follows two recent surveys in the U.S. and in Europe which showed strong support for video technologies working together.  Nearly four in five likely U.S. voters surveyed believe it is important for technologies such as video calling to work together to help create jobs, promote innovation and deliver critical benefits in remote health care, education, business and other services.  And 84 percent of European consumers surveyed believe that video calling should be as easy as making a phone call.

The use of video by consumers, government and business is growing at a staggering rate.  According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, in just three years, one million video minutes (the equivalent of 674 days) will traverse the Internet every second.  Use of video calling services is also increasing. Share your support for an open video community.

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Europeans are Demanding More Open Video Calling

As video calling usage increases, 81 percent of Europeans say that they now see it as personally important for them that these communications technologies work together, according to the findings from a recent market study.

In a clear signal to the video communications industry, 86 percent want companies to agree to a common standard so that software and devices -- including popular video calling apps like Skype, Facetime, and Google Chat -- are able to communicate with one another.

Unfortunately, that is still not the case in video calling, as opposed to speaking on the phone or exchanging emails, where interoperability is already the norm.

Europeans appear to have a very healthy appetite for video communications. In a survey of 1873 consumers, conducted on behalf of Cisco Systems, nearly 40 percent of those who use video calling said they will use it more often in the next twelve months, whereas only 4 percent expect to use it less often.

Growing Applications for Video Calling

What particularly attracts people to video calling is that it allows them to talk face-to-face with friends and family across the world. However, they are just as enthusiastic -- and sometimes even more so -- about possible applications of video calling technology in areas such as healthcare, education, and in the workplace.

Of those surveyed, 80 percent see video calling as an important way for patients in distant rural areas to talk face-to-face to medical specialists in cities without travelling, while 69 percent believe the technology has an important role in enabling teachers and other educators to hold live lectures and classes by video calling and to interact with students in real-time.

However, survey respondents are even clearer in pointing out that they want multiple devices or programs made by different companies to be able to communicate with one another.

Of those surveyed, 81 percent indicate such communication to be extremely important to their use of video, an unambiguous indication that people have little tolerance for potential glitches caused by a lack of interoperability.

Given the size of its market share in particular, 78 percent of respondents believe that Microsoft should open its Skype video platform. Moreover, 72 percent deem Microsoft's decision not to make Skype interoperable to be unfair to its users.

Key Highlights from the Video Calling Survey

• 85 percent of respondents want companies to agree to a common standard for video calling so programs work together.
• 84 percent believe that video calling should be as easy as making a phone call.
• 79 percent want Skype to be interoperable with other video technologies.

This survey was conducted by Purple Strategies and based on 1873 telephone interviews. For additional details on related trends, view an infographic that outlines business leader thoughts about in-person and online video meetings.

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Unleashing Application-Driven Network Programmability

The ongoing transformation to a comprehensive Business Technology model requires savvy leaders to see beyond the traditional IT and networking silos within their organization -- thereby offering a cohesive portfolio of application-driven services to their key stakeholders.

Cisco has introduced a versatile and broad approach to network programmability -- Cisco Open Network Environment (Cisco ONE) -- aimed at helping customers drive the next wave of business innovation through trends such as cloud, mobility, social networking, and video.

Cisco ONE enables flexible, application-driven customization of network infrastructures to help realize business objectives such as: increased service velocity, resource optimization, and faster monetization of new services.

The Cisco Open Network Environment is delivered through a rich set of platform APIs, agents and controllers, and overlay network technologies. Cisco ONE complements current approaches to software-defined networking while encompassing the entire solution stack from transport to management and orchestration.

With Cisco's Open Network Environment customers can harness the intelligent network through programmability and abstraction across multiple layers, offering a choice of protocols, industry standards, and usage-based deployment models.

As part of the Open Network Environment, Cisco announced the One Platform Kit (onePK) which provides application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers across Cisco operating systems: Cisco IOS, IOS-XR, and NX-OS.

Cisco also announced proof-of-concept controller software and proof-of-concept OpenFlow agent for Software Defined Networking (SDN) research. Cisco is also enabling scalable virtual overlay networks for multi-tenant cloud deployments with the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch. New innovations include: OpenStack support, programmability, multi-hypervisor capability, and VXLAN gateway functionality.

"Our IT network engineers and computer science department researchers have been collaborating with Cisco to develop and advance SDN solutions that will help move SDN from the R&D lab to mainstream business and academic production environments," said Bruce Maas, vice provost for information technology and CIO at University of Wisconsin Madison. "We believe that programmable networks -- providing program interfaces to devices and software that take advantage of network intelligence -- will enable new research innovations that will advance science and boost economic development."

Cisco is collaborating on emerging network technologies with industry leaders, academic organizations, and standards bodies to meet their heterogeneous requirements for network programmability. Cisco's Open Network Environment supports a wide variety of deployment models including:

• Universities and Research Organizations: Network partitioning or "campus network slicing" using proof-of-concept controller software and OpenFlow agents for SDN research.
• Hyperscale Data centers: Network flow management with programmatic access via APIs.
• Cloud Providers: Automated provisioning and programmable overlay network for scalable multi-tenancy.
• Service Providers: Programmatic access, policy and analytics to optimize and monetize service delivery.
• Enterprises: Private cloud automation for virtual workloads , including VDI.

Beta trials and phased general availability are scheduled to begin the last quarter of 2012.

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Five Megatrends are Driving the Personal Cloud Era

If you believe that you've had to learn more about the safe online operation and ongoing management of your PC than you ever wanted to know, then you'll be pleased to discover that there's relief on the horizon. According to the latest market study by Gartner, the reign of the personal computer is coming to an apparent close. By 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer -- and this transition will likely include greater use of media tablets, chromebooks or other similar devices.

Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will become the foundation for a new era that will provide users with an increased level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities -- leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity.

However, Garner says that it will require enterprise IT leaders and their staff to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to their end-users.

Seeking New Fundamental Ways to Achieve Goals

"Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner.

He says that emerging cloud computing services will become the glue that connects the various digital devices that people will choose to use during the different aspects of their daily life.

"Many call this era the post-PC era, but it isn't really about being after the PC, but rather about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives," said Kleynhans.

Transition is Defined by a Series of Megatrends

Several driving forces are combining to create this new era. Gartner believes that these "megatrends" have roots that extend back through the past decade, but are aligning in a new way:

1. Consumerization -- Gartner has discussed the consumerization of IT for the better part of a decade, and has seen the impact of it across various aspects of the corporate IT world. However, much of this has simply been a precursor to the major wave that is starting to take hold across all aspects of information technology as several key factors come together:

• Users are more technologically savvy and have very different expectations of technology.
• The Internet and social media have empowered and emboldened users.
• The rise of powerful, affordable mobile devices changes the equation for users.
• Users have become innovators.
• Through the democratization of technology, users of all types and status within organizations can now have similar technology available to them.

2. Virtualization -- it has improved flexibility and increased the options for how IT organizations can implement client environments. Virtualization has, to some extent, freed applications from the peculiarities of individual devices, operating systems or even processor architectures. Virtualization provides a way to move the legacy of applications and processes developed in the PC era forward into the new emerging world. This provides low-power devices access to much-greater processing power, thus expanding their utility and increasing the reach of processor-intensive applications.

3. Software App-ification -- When the way that applications are designed, delivered and consumed by users changes, it has a dramatic impact on all other aspects of the market. These changes will have a profound impact on how applications are written and managed in corporate environments. They also raise the prospect of greater cross-platform portability as small user experience (UX) apps are used to adjust a server- or cloud-resident application to the unique characteristics of a specific device or scenario. One application can now be exposed in multiple ways and used in varying situations by the user.

4. The Self-Service Cloud -- The advent of the cloud for servicing individual users opens a whole new level of opportunity. Every user can now have a scalable and nearly infinite set of resources available for whatever they need to do. The impacts for IT infrastructures are stunning, but when this is applied to the individual, there are some specific benefits that emerge. Users' digital activities are far more self-directed than ever before. Users demand to make their own choices about applications, services and content, selecting from a nearly limitless collection on the Internet. This encourages a culture of self-service that users expect in all aspects of their digital experience. Users can now store their virtual workspace or digital personality online.

5. The Mobility Shift -- Today, mobile devices combined with the cloud can fulfill most computing tasks, and any tradeoffs are outweighed in the minds of the user by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices. The emergence of more-natural user interface experiences is making mobility practical. Touch- and gesture-based user experiences, coupled with speech and contextual awareness, are enabling rich interaction with devices and a much greater level of freedom. At any point in time, and depending on the scenario, any given device will take on the role of the user's primary device -- the one at the center of the user's constellation of devices.

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Why Big Data Applications Adoption is Accelerating

Big Data applications have gained new momentum in the marketplace, as the benefits of working with larger and larger data sets enables analysts to spot key business-related trends. International Data Corporation (IDC) released a worldwide forecast of Big Data opportunities, noting that the market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015.

This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent -- or about 7 times that of the overall Information and Communications Technology (ICT) market.

"The Big Data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and start-ups vie for customers and market share," said Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics Solutions at IDC.

IDC believes that for business technology buyers, opportunities exist to use Big Data solutions to improve operational efficiency and to drive innovation. Use cases are already present across industries and geographic regions.

"There are also Big Data opportunities for both large IT vendors and start ups," Vesset continued. "Major IT vendors are offering both database solutions and configurations supporting Big Data by evolving their own products as well as by acquisition. At the same time, more than half a billion dollars in venture capital has been invested in new Big Data technology."

Findings from the latest IDC market study include:

• While the five-year CAGR for the worldwide market is expected to be nearly 40 percent, the growth of individual segments varies from 27.3 percent for servers and 34.2 percent for software to 61.4 percent for storage.
• The growth in appliances, cloud services, and outsourcing deals for Big Data technology will likely mean that over time end users will pay increasingly less attention to technology capabilities and will focus instead on the business value arguments. System performance, availability, security, and manageability will all matter greatly. However, how they are achieved will be less of a point for differentiation among vendors.
• Today there is a shortage of trained Big Data technology experts, in addition to a shortage of analytics experts. This labor supply constraint will act as an inhibitor of adoption and use of Big Data technologies, and it will also encourage vendors to deliver Big Data technologies as cloud-based solutions.

"While software and services make up the bulk of the market opportunity through 2015, infrastructure technology for Big Data deployments is expected to grow slightly faster at 44 percent CAGR. Storage, in particular, shows the strongest growth opportunity, growing at 61.4 percent CAGR through 2015," said Benjamin S. Woo, program vice president, Storage Systems at IDC.

The significant growth rate in revenue is underscored by the large number of new open source projects that drive infrastructure investments.

Focus on Big Data Deployment Methodology

IDC methodology for sizing the Big Data technology and services market includes evaluation of current and expected deployments that follow one of the following three scenarios:

1. Deployments where the data collected is over 100 terabytes (TB). IDC is using data collected, not stored, to account for the use of in-memory technology where data may not be stored on a disk.
2. Deployments of ultra-high-speed messaging technology for real-time, streaming data capture and monitoring. This scenario represents Big Data in motion as opposed to Big Data at rest.
3. Deployments where the data sets may not be very large today, but are growing very rapidly at a rate of 60 percent or more annually.

Additionally, IDC requires that in each of these three scenarios, the technology is deployed on scale-out infrastructure and deployments that include either two or more data types or data sources or those that include high-speed data sources such as click-stream tracking or monitoring of machine-generated data.

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Mobile Enterprise App Development Life-Cycle Services

Media tablet and smartphone software applications (apps) have entered the mainstream of business technology. In fact, results from recent market research by International Data Corporation (IDC) demonstrates that service providers are already reporting increasing enterprise and independent software vendor (ISV) activity -- centered upon the new commercial mobile apps ecosystem that has emerged.

These latest developments are establishing mobile initiatives for a variety of horizontal and industry-specific business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) application scenarios.

Enabling Mobile Enterprise Agile App Development

Furthermore, third parties are increasing their mobile application life-cycle investments to meet the growing demand for mobile applications -- such as native, Web-based or cross-platform -- with an emphasis on accelerating client mobile applications to market at lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with higher productivity and quality.

An insightful IDC study has analyzed the emerging new mobility services market and reviewed vendor investments in infrastructure and mobile intellectual property (IP) -- across fourteen different providers.

The following are key factors influencing growth in this segment:

• Accelerating mobile IP creation or investment and partnership activity through component reusability, application factories, and use of internal IP for rapid cross-platform portability are central to service provider investments.
• Partnerships with mobile enterprise application platform vendors are on the rise as are initiatives that integrate smart device technology with cloud-based back-end applications to improve efficiency, reduce cost, and generate new revenue streams.
• The importance of usability and user experience (UX) is becoming a critical best practice to accelerate development timeframes and ensure alignment to business expectations.
• Mobile development is frequently being packaged as part of broader mobile application life-cycle services -- with heightened attention to mobile platform selection, business case development, architectural planning (e.g. back end integration), and agile mobile development and testing.

"As third-party service providers move forward, they will need to address the broader spectrum of enterprise customer needs, from new entrants to the mobile space to more mature customers that have been engaged in a mobile road map strategy for a few years," said Rona Shuchat, director, Application Outsourcing Services at IDC.

The focus will be on building relevant and innovative business-centric solutions -- using mobile device apps as a key enabler.

As such, it's important to conceptualize new use-cases that will increase operational efficiencies and facilitate higher worker productivity, lower the cost of end-to-end order and supply chains, or introduce effective new ways of marketing products to end-customers via mobility.

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Business Objectives Drive the Shift to Cloud Services

Adoption of cloud computing services continues to accelerate as organizations move from limited deployments to comprehensive solutions, according to the latest market study by CompTIA, the non-profit trade association for the information technology (IT) industry.

More than half (56 percent) of the organizations surveyed for the CompTIA study said their investment in cloud computing will increase by 10 percent or more over the next 12 months.

“This additional investment will likely be accompanied by greater complexity in the overall cloud strategy, such as moving to a hybrid cloud model or adopting more advanced services beyond Software as a Service (SaaS),” said Seth Robinson, director, technology analysis, CompTIA. ”Organizations may begin exploring options such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), which will allow them to experiment with custom application development.”

IT departments are often a key driver behind the transition to managed cloud services, but the CompTIA study suggests individual business unit leaders within an organization are equally or perhaps more likely to now seek out the benefits of a cloud service deployment.

About one in five (21 percent) companies surveyed said that line of business leaders championed the transition to a cloud solution -- independently of their IT department.

“Most SaaS applications are easily accessible through the Internet, making it relatively easy for business employees to use them without involving the IT staff,” Robinson said. “But there are risks in this approach, as lines of business often do not have the same awareness of security and reliability as the IT department.”

Demand for Procurement and Implementation Guidance

That being said, apparently the results from the study provided no specific evidence of where CIOs or other IT managers demonstrated security breaches -- as a result of business leaders leading the shift to managed cloud services.

However, the CompTIA study findings did indicate that there's growing interest throughout these organizations to invest more in cloud computing education and thereby learn about the technology deployment considerations.

Although the mainstream business manager's understanding of cloud computing has improved over the past year, many users continue to have questions regarding details of cloud service implementation.

The 2010 CompTIA cloud computing study found that 60 percent of end users desired a clearer definition of cloud computing. In 2011, that number increased to 66 percent.

Areas where users want more clarity include the types of cloud computing offerings (Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service) and the types of deployment models (public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud services).

Attainment of Business Objectives Drives the Shift to Cloud

Organizations that have invested the time to learn about -- or are experimenting with -- cloud solutions indicate they have a higher level of comfort with cloud computing offerings. Approximately 72 percent of these organizations feel more positive about cloud computing now than they did one year ago. Another 25 percent of survey respondents report no change in their perception.

“For those who feel more positively about the cloud than they did a year ago, the primary reasons are the technical benefits and the ability to achieve other business objectives,” Robinson noted. “This finding is in line with data from other CompTIA surveys, where the primary advantage of cloud computing appears to be increased capability, not cost savings."

Note: the survey included 500 IT business professionals and other key decision makers within the U.S. market.

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Many Unprepared for BT Disaster Recovery

Disaster strikes. Your primary place of business is destroyed by a fire tomorrow, are you prepared to recover? According to the historical statistics, fires permanently close 44 percent of the businesses that are affected.

Business continuity planning is the creation and validation of a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will restore interrupted critical functions within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption.

Business Technology survivability is an imperative for many organizations that operate in the global networked economy, yet some are unprepared for a natural disaster. Cisco recently shared the results of an insightful nationwide survey.

Informed, but Otherwise Unprepared
The market study uncovered that while many organizations appreciate the increased employee productivity and other benefits offered by laptop computers, smart phones and virtual private networks, they may be unprepared to enable the majority of their employees to effectively telecommute.

Without the proper networking infrastructures to support remote work by a high percentage of their employees, these organizations will be unable to maintain their operations should their team be blocked from coming into the office for an indefinite period.

The telework preparedness survey, conducted by InsightExpress for Cisco, interviewed 502 information technology decision makers from U.S. businesses of all sizes. The survey questioned IT professionals in the health care, retail, finance, government and education sectors.

Highlights from the study include:

• 53 percent of the of the IT executives surveyed said that less than half their employees were currently enabled to work remotely; 21 percent said that they have no employees enabled to work remotely.
• Asked why more employees didn't have access to technology that would enable them to work outside the office, 38 percent said that business requirements did not necessitate it.
• Only 22 percent of the respondents believe that their current remote-access solutions have positioned their companies for disaster preparedness and business continuity.
• Just 15 percent of the respondents listed 'pandemic or other disaster preparedness' as a top business driver for providing remote access to employees, and only 5 percent listed it as the primary business driver.
  

Service Providers Offering Guidance
The results indicate that the majority of companies are not considering the importance of remote-access solutions for potential business interruptions -- focusing more on business technology needs under normal conditions.

In most cases, the cost to implement secure remote access across an entire workforce is a fraction of what the loss of business would be if employees could not work remotely during a crisis. Contact a managed service provider to learn more about the best-fit solution for your particular business needs.

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A Managed Service Antidote to Organic IT

The accelerating Organic IT phenomenon is being driven by executive frustration that today's business technology demands are not being fully met by their internal support organization. Some IT teams, however, have taken decisive action to free-up time to become more responsive to their savvy user's requests for new capabilities.

Perhaps that's a key leading indicator why remote managed services have emerged as a rare growth area within this tough economic environment. Clearly, proactively increasing business process agility and cutting operational costs has never been more popular.

As a result, annual spending on remote managed IT services by the North American Small and Medium Business (SMB) sector is expected to increase 3.3 times in the next five years. That represents a compounded annual growth rate of 28 percent, according to the latest market study by AMI-Partners.

Extracting Value from Business Technology
"While SMBs have been steadily increasing their reliance on IT over the last several years, they have always been challenged in managing their growing IT infrastructures. The severe economic conditions of the last one year have forced SMBs to look for more cost effective ways to manage their IT. Remote managed services offered by 3rd parties provide 24/7 availability of critical IT infrastructure -- without increasing the need for internal IT staff," according to Anil Miglani, SVP of IT Infrastructure and Managed Services at AMI.

Apparently, SMBs increasingly use remote IT services to selectively out-task critical areas like security and storage, while others are now extending the use of remote services to manage PCs, servers, networks, communications equipment and various other business technology devices.

Yet, many more businesses could benefit from a managed service solution. "Of the total installed base of 60 million PCs and 8 million servers in North America, only a tiny fraction is currently managed remotely," says Miglani.

Enabled by Cloud-Based Infrastructure
Managed service providers are increasingly offering remote managed services to better serve their customers with fewer resources. While some deliver remote services from their own infrastructures, others have started relying on cloud-based infrastructure solutions.

"By using automated software to remotely monitor and manage their customer's infrastructures, solution providers have increased their productivity while also improving their service levels," according to Melissa Chong, Senior Research Analyst at AMI and chief architect of the study.

The potential growth of this market is also attracting several new types of providers like telecom companies, IT vendors, distributors, retailers and online resellers in the SMB IT services market -- currently dominated by local channel partners.

Given the diverse nature of the SMB market, AMI believes that vendor channel partners will continue to play a critical role, as more IT organizations willingly embrace the out-tasked managed service delivery model now -- rather than react after Shadow IT has taken hold.

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Revelations from Online Collaboration Adopters

Cisco conducted one of the first comprehensive studies of the factors associated with successful adoption of network-based collaboration solutions. You can use the study results to maximize your return on investment from today's online collaboration tools.

One way is to implement business practices shown to lead to more enthusiastic collaboration. Another is to identify and then actively support the employees who are most likely to benefit.

Twenty First Century Collaboration
Collaboration is a process that brings people and information together to accomplish a common goal. What's new today is that in a connected world, people no longer have to be in the same location, time zone, or culture to collaborate.

Tools such as videoconferencing (or TelePresence) and web sharing enable real-time collaboration across distance. Blogs, wikis, and shared workspaces enable online collaboration across time boundaries.

Cisco conducted the first formal segmentation study of collaboration tool users. Their objective was to understand how workers choose to collaborate, which tools they use, and how they believe those tools positively affect productivity, innovation, and cost savings.

Study participant collaboration habits and attitudes placed them into one of four segments: Collaboration Enthusiasts, Comfortable Collaborators, Reluctant Collaborators, and Collaboration Laggards.

Lessons Learned and Best Practices
The results from the Cisco collaboration segmentation study suggest that organizations experience the greatest productivity benefits from collaboration when they:

• Recognize that personal attitudes and organizational culture regarding collaboration are as important as collaboration tools.
• Begin by introducing collaboration tools to people and groups meeting the characteristics of Enthusiasts and Comfortable Collaborators. These people tend to be managers or supervisors, have held their job position for 3 to 10 years, and are already using Web 2.0 tools at home.
• Encourage executives to model the desired collaboration practices.
• Reward collaboration by including it in performance reviews, offering rewards for successful outcomes, or both.
• Implement formal collaboration processes. Provide the tools, IT support, and training needed to foster increased collaboration.
  

The survey studied 800 people in a wide variety of U.S. medium-sized and enterprise organizations who: spend at least 20 percent of time at work using a network-connected computer; use a mobile phone or handheld device; and participated in two collaborative activities within the past month.

Enabling the Early-Adopters to Thrive
The researchers conducted a segmentation analysis, separating individuals into distinct groups based on a large set of attitudinal and behavioral variables. Previous knowledge of collaboration habits did not include the personal or cultural factors that influence success.

Do you proactively nurture a culture of collaboration in your organization? What obstacles did you have to overcome before your employees could fully utilize the latest online productivity tools?

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IT Power Users Will Lead the Way

Have you ever wondered if your company's utilization of Business Technology is in line with the creative market leaders? The Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting commentary by Susan Cramm entitled "How to Support Your IT Innovators."

Ms. Cramm believes that to realize the full potential from business technology, all enterprises need IT-smart business leaders -- up, down, and across the organization.

According to the results of her ongoing survey, however, business leaders apparently don't feel very smart about their IT adoption and application practices.

• Only 11% personally use and fully leverage the capabilities of the technology currently in place.
• 50% agree with the statement that "business leaders don't understand how to use their systems and technologies."
• And, only 25% of business leaders consider themselves "IT-smart."
  

Liberate the Business Technology Innovators
One person she interviewed said "business groups that have somebody on their team who is an IT expert do much better -- in terms of leveraging technology to meet their needs -- than those who do not." While that may not be profound, it's a noteworthy comment.

Tech-savvy business users perform a valuable function for their less-informed peer group. They are able to determine what is truly possible, with current technology. Why? It's because power-users sometimes have better productivity enhancing tools in their home-based office than they do at their place of work.

How can this be possible? Well, IT managers focused on total control of all physical infrastructure are consumed by operational tasks and remedial user support activity. They have little or no time available to research, test and adopt the best-fit productivity tools for their business user needs.

Don’t Assume, Follow the Informed User
Moreover, there's often a major disconnect between what business users say they need, and what their IT team assumes they would apply. Most organizations use only 64 percent of their enterprise systems core functions, according to a recent Accenture survey.

"About half said they don't need all the capabilities, while a fifth explained that they didn't make use of all the functionality due to lack of time to learn how to apply them," said Accenture.

In summary, Ms. Cramm says that you should identify your lead users, give them more of what they really need, free up your IT team's time to study what they are doing (and why), and then decide how to standardize and scale the most promising innovations to benefit the whole enterprise.

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Discover the Pathway to Cloud Services

Do you have your head in the clouds? Well, if so, then you're surely not alone. In breaking news, eWeek reports that Cisco Systems is pulling together key pieces of its data center and networking portfolios to create a blueprint for building a cloud computing infrastructure for service providers.

Is this yet another business technology hype-cycle, or is there something truly remarkable occurring that builds upon the escalating widespread adoption of IT managed service and hosting service offerings?

Cisco's Simon Aspinall provides the context for the launch of the Unified Service Delivery solution, as he shares an analogy that explains why innovation sometimes requires starting the design process from a totally different point of view.

The cloud computing phenomenon is generating a lot of interest worldwide because of its potential to offer services on-demand -- at lower cost than current options, and with significantly less complexity, greater scalability, and wider reach.

Motivation for Cloud Services Adoption
A study by the University of California, Berkeley entitled "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing" looked at cloud computing from the end-user perspective. It focused on three features that are major advancements for you, the business and IT decision maker:

• The illusion of infinite computer resources available on demand that eliminate the need for you to plan far ahead for provisioning.
• No need for an up-front commitment by your business, allowing you to start small and increase your use of cloud services as needed.
• The pay-as-you-go model that allows you to buy just what they need, and what you can budget, either on a short-term or ongoing basis.
  

The study also emphasized that companies with large batch-oriented computing tasks can get results more quickly and cost-effectively than ever before when using the broad resources of a managed cloud services provider for a short period of time.

Cloud Service Call to Action
The on-demand nature of cloud computing is also a productivity boon to both the enterprise CEO and the CIO, allowing them to quickly react to changing market conditions and opportunities. Are you ready to out-task your next IT or enterprise networking related project?

If you need to gain a deeper understanding of how this emerging space of new business technology is developing, then consider the "Working in the Cloud" Industry Round-Up Report series from THINKstrategies.

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IT Survival in the Hunt, Kill, Eat Economy

Business Technology related market research used to be targeted primarily at the CIO or IT manager roles within an organization. How times have changed. Research and Markets has added the "Business Technology Trends & Impacts Advisory Service" subscription to their market study offerings.

The service is designed to help all savvy business decision makers develop and implement an effective IT strategy, plus take advantage of the opportunities -- and face the many challenges -- today's rapidly evolving business technology changes will bring.

Developing a Plan of Attack
Clients will receive the usual forecasts and predictions, as well as the strategic implications of those predictions. Subscribers receive advice on practices they can employ now to help organizations succeed within the turbulent economic environment.

The Cutter Business Technology Council is the source of this insight, which includes a team of IT authorities who use a collaborative forecasting approach to provide clients with monthly Council Opinions and present future scenarios for business technology and its many applications.

Monthly council opinions provide a steady flow of predictions, including commentary from each Council Fellow and the logic behind their concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the apparent trend.

TelePresence and Other Innovations
Recent opinions have focused on software delivery versus compliance; removing barriers to collaboration through TelePresence; the new IT governance model; IT in the "hunt, kill, eat" economy; systems acquisition and management; timing IT investments, vernacular computing, and more.

Twice-monthly Executive Updates include statistical results of related market research. Cutter's market research focuses on topics such as IT funding, organizational agility, information security, instant messaging, IT litigation, and more.

Weekly Trends E-Mail Advisor alerts subscribers to new technologies, the latest advancements in technology implementation, and new thinking on technology management -- such as managed and hosted services.

The Data Center Metamorphosis
Significant transformations within the realm of the evolving data center, such as the emergence of Unified Computing models, will be an incremental topic included in our ongoing commentary -- right here on the Business Technology Roundtable.

Many forward-looking organizations are eager to develop next-generation data centers that unleash the full power of virtualization. Unified Computing is an architecture that bridges the silos in the data center into a single unified architecture -- using industry standard technologies.

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Progressive Business Technology Adoption Trends

Business leaders are still upbeat about the benefits of technology adoption. It's key to their market penetration, central to competitive differentiation, and vital to their supply chain and distribution strategies.

However, according to Forrester Research, they are less than satisfied with their own IT organization's contributions. In fact, reducing the cost of operations is believed to be one of the few attributes where expectations are aligned.

Members of the Forrester Leadership Boards (FLB) CIO Group recently discussed this challenge. Forrester presented results from their business technology survey of 600 executive leaders.

The study uncovered the following significant gaps:

IT teams rarely are aligned around key business priorities. When asked to rank business drivers by their importance to the firm's technology strategies, business executives identified customers, productivity, and costs as the most important themes.

But, when asked to rate their IT organization effectiveness, there was a wide gap between critical business drivers and the perception of IT's focus -- even in the key areas of cost reduction and workforce productivity.

Business executives consider several sourcing alternatives to fulfill the IT requirements of their enterprise. When asked to rate sources of technology solutions, leaders continue to rank their IT organization as a primary source.

However, they also referred to a wide range of other viable sources -- from their own staff, consulting firms, as well as out-tasked subscription-based managed service offerings.

Proven Strategies for Success
CIO Group members noted that these survey results accurately reflect the overall situation for IT organizations today -- an unfortunate scenario where many CIOs typically spend considerable effort.

These CIO Group members have adopted best practices for IT-business alignment ahead of the general population. Almost all have dedicated relationship managers, as opposed to only 37 percent of surveyed IT organization. All have a PMO dedicated to IT governance, whereas only 47 percent of the typical firms do.

Proven strategies to integrate business and IT include: formalizing IT's role in the overall planning process; formalize, embed, and expand the role of relationship managers; embed IT skills within business organizations; create centers of excellence for business change skills; and, separate business enablement functions from IT delivery and operations.

End of the Do-it-Yourself Era
Forrester concludes, the era where IT said "we can do it all for you" is no longer viable. Business executives see IT inflexibility as a detriment to their agility. They're aware that internal IT is but one of many options.

Therefore, CIOs who insist that their role is the "sole source for technology solutions" will be marginalized. The savvy IT managers have embraced a coexistence scenario, where selective out-tasking is a welcomed addition to their solution portfolio.

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Managed Service Scenarios: Choosing the Best-Fit Solution

Are you puzzled about how to choose the best-fit managed service solution for your particular business needs? As a basic guide, the following are three typical high-level scenarios for deploying managed network services.

Scenario 1: Customer Owns Network and Shares Management Responsibility

Companies that already have an internal IP network can continue to manage it while out-tasking the management of onsite equipment -- usually known as customer-premises equipment (CPE), used for the managed service (see Figure 1).


The Roles and Responsibilities are as follows:
Managed service provider -- Sets up, maintains, and administers the equipment needed for the managed service, including company-owned equipment such as servers.

Company -- Managed service customer maintains and administers its internal network.

Scenario 2: Service Provider Owns the CPE; Customer Can Share Equipment Management with Service Provider

Some companies do not own a LAN, either because the location is new or the company already out-tasks its LAN services. In this situation, the service provider can manage the equipment needed for the corporate network as well as the managed service.

Many large enterprises like this arrangement because they can maintain physical control of the equipment while relying on the service provider for 24-hour network operational support (see Figure 2).


The Roles and Responsibilities are as follows:
Managed service provider -- Sets up, maintains, and administers the equipment for the managed services as well as the corporate network.

Company -- Monitors its corporate network through a Web interface provided by the service provider, receives regular reports on the network status and managed services, and is notified in case of a defined emergency.

Scenario 3: Service Provider Owns Equipment in its Own Facility; Customer Monitors Service Provider's Management of the Equipment

The difference between this scenario and the previous one is that most of the equipment is physically located in the service provider's "hosting" facility instead of on the customer premises.

The Roles and Responsibilities are as follows:
Managed service provider -- Sets up, maintains, and administers the corporate network and related managed services; most of the network equipment is physically located in the provider's computing center; the exceptions are the equipment for the LAN and network connections, as well as gateways for computers and IP telephony.

Company -- Monitors performance of its systems through a Web interface provided by the service provider, receives regular reports on the network status, and is notified in case of a defined emergency.

Summary: each of the three basic scenarios can be customized to meet your particular requirements. In upcoming posts, we'll identify some more specific application examples.

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Managing Enterprise IT Operations, from Afar

According to a recent McKinsey & Company report, their research results demonstrated that the potential for managing servers and other IT resources remotely is essentially underutilized.

However, changes in the current business environment will increase the adoption of this approach. Plato, a wise Greek philosopher, wrote about how "necessity is the mother of invention." Certainly, that perspective is equally valid today.

The motivation for utilizing the resources of a service provider can be considerable. A case in point: Fortune 50 companies, with budgets of $2 billion, can save as much as $500 million of their IT infrastructure budgets.

How, you may ask? Apparently, it's mostly from reducing fully-loaded labor costs.

Evaluation of IT Assets and Liabilities
McKinsey surveyed 141 CIOs at multinational corporations, and 34 percent of them said that they anticipate utilizing some infrastructure management services over the next three years -- which is an increase from 19 percent of respondents in a similar survey performed during the prior year.

Economic justification is the basis for the expected growth. As hardware costs fall, labor has become the focal point. They estimate that costs for non-labor IT components -- the hardware, software, maintenance, and facilities -- declined by almost 44 percent between 2000 and 2008 as prices have dropped.

McKinsey also estimates that total costs will fall by nearly half from 2000 to 2010, however the labor component will more than double -- to 62 percent, from 30 percent.

Apparently, the attraction of a managed service solution is due to changes in the deployment of infrastructure. Many organizations have simplified their IT and network architecture, making it easier to decouple components, and utilize service providers.

Selectively Out-tasking the Drudgery
Besides, standardization has made some management tasks ready for automation. As a result, it is now easier to manage some complex IT tasks, like network security monitoring, from a remote location.

Furthermore, organizations can selectively out-task parts of their IT infrastructure management. Some companies will choose to only out-task network monitoring, while others seek assistance with the total management of their data center needs. Clearly, it's a flexible model that can adapt to shifting business requirements.

In summary, McKinsey believes that the greater speed and security of data networking has made interactions between the service user and their provider more stable. This progress has therefore increased acceptance of the managed service delivery model.

By the way, before you rush to reduce your Business Technology deployment plans, you may also want to reflect upon McKinsey's guidance on IT spending cuts: they believe that "IT investments deliver more value to a company's top and bottom lines -- by creating new efficiencies and increasing revenues -- than any savings gained from traditional IT cost cutting."

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Opportunities for Advancement in an Economic Downturn

Can the current economic environment actually create an opportunity? Even though the present financial crisis will adversely affect capital investment, the uncertainties are also creating new demand for the application of certain business technology offerings.

"In particular, ICT solutions that shift costs from a capital to variable component, focus on productivity increases and cost reduction, and support organizational restructuring and acquisitions are likely to see growing demand," says Andrew Milroy, ICT director at Frost & Sullivan.

Four Areas of New Demand
This belief that there will be a strategic increase in IT demand is the result of the consulting company's latest global market study.

While their assessment acknowledges some ICT setbacks, it identifies four key areas that are likely to experience heightened demand -- sustainable IT; outsourcing, managed and hosted services; information management tools; and those services that support mergers and acquisitions.

Sustainability initiatives range from server or storage virtualization and low-energy consumption hardware, through to the use of online collaboration tools, thin client technologies and power consumption modeling. Most of these activities have the dual aim of reducing costs, as well as lowering carbon emissions.

An Increase for Online Collaboration
The anticipated reduction in business travel will create a corresponding increase in demand for conferencing tools. These applications will allow more employees to work remotely, further cutting travel costs and emissions. Secure remote access solutions will therefore experience demand.

The need for cost controls and a desire to minimize risks will place greater focus on variable costs, leading to an increase in demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) and hosted service models.

Frost & Sullivan's research suggests that the hosted model will be adapted to suit a wider range of services -- including storage and unified communications. New opportunities are expected in many areas of managed services -- such as managed handsets, managed network services and leasing services.

Change Creates Abundant Opportunity
In a summary of their findings, Milroy adds, "We believe that there are opportunities for solutions and services that can help organizations to cut costs, change cost structures, or increase productivity."

The lean times ahead of us will foster the environment where all "business as usual" thinking is challenged -- and, rightfully so. Forward-looking leaders will not falter; they will grasp that potential for new sources of advancement and take the appropriate action.

Perhaps all IT and business decision makers must now ask themselves the ultimate question -- is my organization preparing for a purposeful advance, or an unpredictable decline?

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IT Financial Management - Now is the Time

I've heard many excuses, during my years as an ITIL consultant, as to why a client did not want to start IT Financial Management -- the business is not ready, we don't have the tools, we don't know where to start, etc.

However, in these troubling economic times, it is imperative that IT adopts IT Financial Management in order to respond to the increasing pressure to reduce costs.

IT can reduce costs through service-based cost transparency and charge-backs. This method does not mean IT is a profit-center; it just means that IT is educating the business on the cost to provide the services.

With this knowledge, the business can adjust their consumption to better manage their budget and ensure spending is aligned with the value of the service they are receiving. Contrast this with a nebulous IT overhead charge which does not incent the business to use scarce IT resources wisely.

A Roadmap to IT Financial Management
The secret to successfully starting IT Financial Management is to develop a roadmap with increasing levels of maturity.

For example, in Phase 1, pick four to five key services for consumption based costing, e.g. number of servers, storage consumed, network bandwidth consumed, etc., then allocate the remaining costs (i.e. Service Desk, data center operations, etc) as a surcharge against this base price. In Phase 2 and subsequent phases, continue to expand the number of services covered by consumption-based charge-backs.

Another dimension of maturity is the approach to charge-backs. In Phase 1, you may want to just publish costs (i.e. cost transparency with no dollars changing hands). In Phase 2, you may want to provide invoices that show consumption and a hypothetical charge-back amount but stop short of consummating the transaction.

Finally, in Phase 3, implement the actual charge-backs. This gradual approach will allow the business to adapt and prepare for a new way of interacting with IT.

By establishing and communicating a roadmap, you can start IT Financial Management today and be better positioned to manage the IT budget.

About the author: Reg Lo is the VP of Technology Solutions at Third Sky Inc. He has over 14 years of IT consulting experience in ITSM/ITIL consulting, research compliance and healthcare, and custom solutions. He is a frequent speaker at itSMF and HDI events and a contributor to "The Forum", the offical newsletter of itSMF USA.

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Top Ten Business Technology Trends

Gartner analysts recently identified the top ten key technologies -- and related trends -- that they believe will be strategic for mainstream organizations. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner's Symposium and ITxpo.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as having the potential for significant impact on the enterprise -- within the next three years. Factors for significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major financial investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

The technologies were chosen because they could affect an organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They are deemed strategic because they’ve matured to broad market use, or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:
Virtualization; Cloud Computing; Servers (beyond blades); Web-Oriented Architectures; Enterprise Mash-ups; Specialized Systems; Social Software and Social Networking; Unified Communications; Business Intelligence and Green IT.

As you consider each of these technologies in turn, and the associated applications within your own business environment, it would be wise to reconsider the notion that embracing a new technology always must equate to a financial investment in infrastructure.

In this context, is the purchase of an on-demand managed service an investment, or is it more accurate to characterize it as an expense? Let's consider the Gartner description of Cloud Computing, as an example.

"Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. The key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities 'as a service,' 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers.

Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing."

According to Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, "Companies should evaluate these technologies and adjust based on their industry need, unique business needs, technology adoption model and other factors."

Lowering the Barriers to Progress
Perhaps one of those other factors would be an candid assessment of what advantages are being gained by competitors who have already chosen to take action. Meaning, can you make a determination of the direct and indirect cost of your potential inaction?

Moreover, by utilizing a selective out-tasking model, it's now possible to minimize the financial impact on new technology pilots and full deployments, while at the same time creating the environment to maximize the strategic impact.

The perceived barriers that may inhibit you from taking action have essentially been lowered.

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