Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz | November 2007

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November 2007

November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Google agrees to disclose IP address of Israeli blogger

We’ve had this discussion before but it is probably worth having again since it does not appear that the problem will go away anytime soon.

As reported in The Register, Google has agreed to handover the IP address of an anonymous blogger to a Tel Aviv, Israel district court.

The case involves three Israel local politicians who are suing the blogger for slander.

At first Google refused saying, "disclosing the blogger’s identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person’s right to his reputation."

However, once the presiding judge ruled that the anonymous "blogger may be guilty of criminal conduct" in that what he was accusing the politicians of was an outright lie, Google consented.

The question is, criminal or not, should an online identity be sacrosanct? Say as sacrosanct as client lawyer privilege or what is said in a confessional to a priest?

Both, as far as I know, protects the lawyer or priest from criminal charges even if their client confesses to a crime.

Clearly there are times when the Web site or ISP should not disclose the identity as in the case of the Shi Tao and Yahoo which resulted in the jailing of a dissident in China.

In the case now working its way through the Israeli courts, the litigants and Google have agreed to give the anonymous blogger 72 hours to come forward or Google will disclose his IP address.

Much to consider here. I’l like to hear some comments.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 28, 2007 11:44 AM

November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Survey says companies would rather settle than fight in court

A survey, conducted for Fortiva, an email archiving solution provider, by a company called iTracks, unoovered that 20 percent of the corporations in the survey said they preferred to settle law suits out of court to avoid the costs incurred by archiving and or searching through old emails.

While this may surprise some, in my experience large companies have always preferred to settle out of court rather than risk having their name mentioned in a negative light in the media, this often includes discrimination suits brought against a company as well as for unsafe working conditions.

The survey was conducted among 90 legal and IT professionals with a median business size of 600 employees and a mean of 1405 employees.

Last year when the rules were first going into effect I wrote up some guidelines on how to be in compliance with the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure [FRCP] that went into effect last December 1st.

By the way, here's a helpful hint. If you store your voice mails in an email server, this can be done with Exchange for example, then your company is just as liable for retrieving those documents that are now considered electronic documents.

This is a topic that will not go away and you cannot bury your head in the sand, either. More on this will be coming from Reality Check.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 28, 2007 09:21 AM

November 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPhone, What is good for U.S. is not good for Europe

When the iPhone launches tomorrow in France and across the rest of Europe there will be one distinct difference between that market and the U.S. market. Europeans will be able to buy an unlocked iPhone from Orange, the France telecomm carrier.

That’s the law in most of Europe where the option for an unlocked version must be available.

Of course, consumers will have to pay dearly for the right to have a warranted, unlocked iPhone. Some, like techno savvy users here, may want to just unlock it themselves.

An unlocked iPhone in France is expected to sell for 650 euros, $964, U.S. and for a whopping 1,000 euros, $1,484 U.S., in Germany.

With a two-year contract, locked, iPhone buyers will see a saner, but not inexpensive price tag of about 399 euros, about $592. U.S.,plus the monthly voice and data charges that start at 49 euros per month, about $73 U.S.

Orange says it expects to sell about 100,000 devices in the first month, a not unrealistic number according to Vincent Poulbere, senior analyst at Ovum.

However, Poulbere says there’s a great deal of competition in the European market, especially for similar devices that are more highly subsidized.

“There won’t be any queues at the stores to buy an iPhone,” said Poulbere.

The European market will share one similarity with the U.S. market, said Poul-bere, users can expect a price reduction at some point in 2008, especially if a new model is introduced.

With the exchange rate extremely favorable to European shoppers some may get creative and fly to the U.S. buy an iPhone here, take it back and hack it so it can be used in Europe with a local SIM chip.

Technology is fun, isn't it?

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 27, 2007 08:42 AM

November 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The future of communications

Lightweight, viral systems that grow with use will define how we keep in touch in the years to come

Reality Check: The future of communications Late last week I spoke with Andy Lippman about the future of communications.

Co-director of MIT's Communications Futures Program and associate director of the MIT Media Lab from 1983 to 2001, Lippman is a deep thinker. And for the past 30 years, Lippman has been thinking deeply about personal communications and computing. As you might expect, Lippman took the conversation to some heady places:

"A lot of people are thinking about telepresence: feeling what is happening remotely...almost like being there."

"When things are connected, all things become opportunities for services."

"We will see real-world mashups between people, between people and machines, and machines talking to machines."

But you would be wrong to think that Lippman has his head in the clouds. Holding 11 patents, mainly related to TV and radio signals, Lippman is currently on a year-long sabbatical, working with Nortel's R&D group as a visiting fellow. Moreover, he was deeply involved in creating Nortel's Wireless Mesh Network Solution through MIT.

So what I enjoyed most about our conversation is Lippman's ability to switch between the highly practical, applied science, to the way-out stuff such as telepresence and hyperconnectivity.

"Hyperconnectivity is where the person is fully in the loop," Lippman says. "It will allow you to control stuff on Mars or do surgery from 3,000 miles away."

Funded by commercial companies, the MIT Media Lab came up with the novel idea of creating a consortium. That way, it does not have to apply for funding from each company individually.

"We owe our soul to none of them or all of them collectively," Lippman says, adding that this has allowed the lab to choose research topics that its members feel passionate about.

Of late, Lippman and his students have been working on "viral" communications -- systems that are agile, light on infrastructure, and optimized for invention. He calls such systems viral because, similar to other viral systems, they are built to "catch on person-to-person."

Traditional communications systems are anti-scalable, Lippman says, in that the more people you have tapping them, the more interference you get, and the smaller the bandwidth allocation becomes. Instead, Lippman asks, what if communications systems could grow as the number of users of the system grows?

A fine example of what the good doctor means can be seen by examining the current cellular network. Instead of having a cell phone blast its signal to a distant tower, what if it could jump from computer to computer, or cell phone to cell phone? It would require far less bandwidth and power and could scale organically, because as the number of people using the system grows, the system gains additional connection points.

A simple and elegant idea, isn't it?

And it has a very practical use. The entire one-laptop-per-child idea, also known as the $100 computer movement, will depend on deploying communications in societies where the big, wasteful infrastructure is just not available. But communications will work nicely in "mesh" mode, with each computer passing on data to a nearby computer, using little power and small amounts of bandwidth.

Light and agile, like the doctor says.

I think Lippman's real genius is not in his skills as an engineer but rather in his ability to look at problems from a different perspective: for example, Fluid Voice, the hyperconnectivity technology that he and his students in the Media Lab built.

Fluid Voice is a phone system that acts like a big party line -- push to listen, instead of push to talk.

The default is you can hear everyone in your group who is talking. Instead of a dial, each person is a dot. If you move the dot in or out, the voice becomes louder or lower. Or you can move the dot, and the person, off the screen entirely. You can hear anybody and can decide how much attention you want to pay to each person.

On the practical side, in case of an emergency, firefighters could use Fluid Voice to tune into a police emergency or tune out the ambulance driver, for example.

Lippman's greater point is that the current limitations on radio-enabled communications systems are not due to the physics of the technology but rather to its engineering history. In the old days, radios were expensive, while spectrum was underused and inexpensive. And because receivers were dumb, it became OK to waste spectrum.

Now, the radios are cheap, and spectrum is relatively expensive.

"Mesh is an attempt to break the barrier and history of communications as a limited, fixed, and unscalable system," Lippman says.

"When I went to school, a lot of what you studied was how can you do something given certain constraints," Lippman says. Students were asked to write a program that didn't use more than this much memory, disk space, or processing cycles, for example. Engineering was taught in the context of its limitations.

At some point, engineering courses changed, Lippman says.

"Now students are asked to write a computer program where memory is free, disk space and processing cycles are unlimited," Lippman says, adding that, because of this shift, "we can challenge students to stretch their minds."

Sounds like Lippman is stretching his students' minds in worthwhile directions.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 27, 2007 03:00 AM

November 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Hard disks on verge of capacity breakthroughs

For those of you, like me, who thought there wasn’t much new in hard disk drives [HDD], i.e., rotating disks, and all the action was around solid state, flash, drives, I gave a call to Dave Wikersham, president of Seagate Technology.

I figured if anyone knows about the future of HDDs it would be him.

The first obvious question was about Flash versus HDD. As prices of Flash continue to drop and capacity continues to increase I wanted to know if hard drives were on their way to extinction.

Wichersham, not surprisingly, said not by a long shot. He sees Flash as a niche that will be up to 5 percent to 8 percent of the overall market for storage by 2012.

The reason for those low percentages revolve around cost and reliability.

For example, a notebook PC with 32GB of Flash will cost a user $500 more than the same notebook with a 120GB HDD, says Wickersham.

Reliability is the other issue. A typical Flash device has a six month warranty, a hard drive typically has a 5-year warranty.

"Flash is good for many read times but it is not good in a compute environment with lots of read and writes," Wickersham told me.

As the lithography gets closer and closer together, says Wickersham, there are significant reductions in reliability of the tracks.
So in consumer handheld devices it might be fine, but not in commercial uses where reliability is the number one concern.

That is not to say it won’t be used in commercial products and that brings us to a couple of the latest developments in storage devices.

We will start to see solid state in boot drives in a blade server, with capacities of 32GB and perhaps 64GB in the future.

This is part of a trend toward hybrid drives that most of the major suppliers will be offering within the next 12 months.

A hybrid drive will also use solid state for caching. The Flash is put on the printed circuit board assembly and in this capacity it will start at about 256MB up to 1GB.

Obviously, with that much cache the system can spin down the HDD and put it into a quiet state more often, increasing the life of the drives and still maintain a rapid response as it returns from the sleep state.

There is also a major transition taking place in the HDD industry due to a technology called Perpendicular Recording.

As Wickersham explains it, imagine how many people you could fit in an elevator if they were stacked up across the floor versus if everyone were standing. Standing, or being perpendicular to the floor, gives you more capacity.

The industry has known this for 20 years but it is only now being developed for commercial use.

Perpendicular recording will give a hard disk a 5X bump in capacity per drive. Seagate already has product here and it allows them to do 1TB across 4 platters in a 3.5-inch drive.

Next up is HAMR [Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording], pronounced Hammer, Technology. This change is more revolutionary. HAMR will use some kind of light, like lasers, to record on very hard media.

Add 5X capacity to a 1TB drive using HAMR.

Finally, something simply called Bit Pattern Media [BPM] allows the drive to record in islands of bits rather than in the conventional narrow tracks. By writing in these islands, Wickersham says, you get another 5X improvement in capacity.

There you have it. I guess there is still plenty of life left in those rotating platters.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 26, 2007 09:31 AM

November 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Report refutes claims of dire need for more H-1B visas.

Last Friday, November 16th, in an address at the National Society of Black Engineers Region VI conference Bill Gates perpetuated the belief that the United States is not graduating enough science and engineering majors and that that the overall performance of high school students in science and math is declining.

Typically, these two myths are used as an excuse to promote the need for more H-1B visas.

High tech industry leaders have dismissed as not true any suggestion that the real reason for wanting an increase is in order to hire cheap labor.

Now a new study, Into the Eye of the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand, by Lindsay Lowell, Georgetown University and Hal Salzman, The Urban Institute refutes those claims.

The Urban Institute describes itself as a "nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research and educational organization that examines the social, economic, and governance problems facing the nation."

The 51 page report, issued last October, is available here.

The report confronts two major issues, that of a labor shortage and a decline in educational excellence in science and math of U.S. students.

According to the report available data indicates increases "in absolute numbers of secondary school graduates and increases in their math and science performance level."

The report compares performance not only with national test results over a number of years but with test results of student performance from other countries as well.

For example, the study found that in 1982 high school graduates earned 2.6 math credits and 2.2 science credits. By 1998 the average was 3.5 for math and 3.2 for science credits.

In addition, the percentage of 13-year-olds taking algebra increased by 38 percent over that time period.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] shows steady improvement in both math and science test scores.

In another part of the report, the authors cites studies that looked at six international tests administered by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Devlopment.

The aggregate data concluded:

"U.S. students have generally performed above average in comparisons with students in other industrialized nations."

As far as a shortage in computer science graduates to fill available jobs in the States the study concludes that "the education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand."

Finally the reports concludes that, "assessing the claims of labor market shortages is crucial. Purported labor market shortages for scientists and engineers are anectdotal and also not supported by the available evidence."

But this doesn't seem to stop the steady drumbeat from high tech executives who keep saying over and over again that there is a shortage both in qualified computer science graduates now and in the pipeline in our schools to meet future needs.

Read the report. I found it both provocative and enlightening.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 21, 2007 10:03 AM

November 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Pure-play BI vendors strike back

Operational BI is just one of many ways to compete against the acquisition-hungry big guys

Reality Check: Pure-play BI vendors strike back As I've said in three recent blog posts on consolidation in the BI (business intelligence) industry, BI will disappear as a separate application category soon enough. Its inevitability is part of a larger trend, in which point-solution vendors disappear through acquisitions by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM.

It is only fair then that I let the other side have its say. As you might guess, pure-play BI vendors don't subscribe to my bleak view of their future. My first comeuppance came from Sanju Bansal, COO of MicroStrategy, a 17-year-old BI pure-play.

Keying off IBM's acquisition of Cognos, I proclaimed in my Nov. 12 post that BI will be subsumed into the database, citing the fact that Oracle can now offer Hyperion technology, Microsoft has announced reporting and analytical tools for SQL Server, and IBM can now add Cognos analytics to its DB2 database.

Bansal parried: "It would be hard to justify spending $3 billion, $5 billion, and $8 billion for Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos, as did Oracle, SAP, and IBM, respectively, and give them away for free," Bansal told me in no uncertain terms.

Rather, Bansal says the acquirers are buying access to customers in order to cross-sell, upsell, and tap distribution opportunities, meaning that SAP's acquisition, for example, allows it to leverage Business Objects' strong presence in the midmarket.

Bansal adds, as many have before him, that customers have a plateful of heterogeneous systems that require a BI company willing to optimize for a wide array of databases and platforms.

A point well-taken and true. You have to believe that when SAP buys Business Objects, it is going to focus on integration with NetWeaver first and foremost. Finally, to make amends with Bansal, I'll allow him this free plug for MicroStrategy.

As price points and architectural decisions change, pure-plays allow for flexibility, Bansal says, noting that if you want to switch from, say, SQL Server to Oracle to Teradata over time, you have complete freedom to do so if you go with a company like MicroStrategy.

The counterargument to that is familiar: It is better to deal with one vendor and a single platform. Even if its BI solution is not perfect, it will get there.

However, consider this. What if IBM, Oracle, and SAP spent a total of $15 billion on three aging dinosaurs?

That is what Charles Nicholls, CEO of SeeWhy Software, and Måns Hultman, former CEO and now chairman of QlikTech, believe to be the case.

Nicholls talks about the new focus on operational BI, as opposed to strategic or managerial BI. Despite promises from the acquirers that they too will offer "operational" BI, Nicholls believes the companies they acquired are in fact too steeped in the old way of doing things: collecting data in a data warehouse and writing reports after the fact.

From a business perspective, Nicholls claims that somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of a BI vendor's budget is allocated to connectivity to middleware, applications, and the database or to integrate with all the various platforms and systems -- both off the shelf and customized, as companies often tweak what they buy.

At the same time, the target audience of these companies is small. Traditional strategic BI is targeted at the top of the pyramid, about 5 percent of the total number of PCs at a given company. So how can they remain profitable selling into such a small market as their overhead increases?

On the other hand, Nicholls claims a company such as SeeWay, which targets 45 percent of all the PCs at a company, has a much healthier business model.

Operational BI is suited to a service-oriented world with loosely coupled services strapped together with an ESB (enterprise service bus). Today, valuable information is going through that bus, not through the applications. As a result, operational BI makes a great deal of sense, as it can be used by many more employees.

"We analyze data continuously, as opposed to storing data and running a query," Nicholls says.

The beauty to me is that now BI imposes itself, in a good way, into business processes by changing the processes as the analysis warrants.

Take, for example, QlikTech. This company offers an architecture it calls "associative in memory" technology that is far different than a typical OLAP report generator. It searches in a nonhierarchical way, which means it is not constrained by searching in a predefined path where an IT engineer has to decide for you which way you want to analyze or attack the data. Hultman says the only way to realize an associative approach is to place the analysis in memory, so a user can change sorting order, or the way data is organized on the fly.

The real point is that perhaps I was overly hasty. Perhaps point-solution BI vendors will not only survive but flourish and that the recent acquisitions by the giants only serve to reinvigorate rather than replace the pure-plays.

Recent Reality Checks on business intelligence :
• IBM Cognos deal highlights a resurgence in upgrading the database
• Reading between the lines of the Oracle bid for BEA
• SAP's Business Objects acquistion: The death knell for point solutions?

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 20, 2007 03:00 AM

November 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online, for when Wikis are just not good enough

We all know the problems Wikipedia had in the past over misinformation and their efforts to correct errors in their community-generated information.

Now from Merriam-Webster, a fairly well-respected source of information comes what the company calls the Visual Dictionary Online.

It reminds more of a great encyclopedia, albeit limited to the amount of topics it covers, more than just a dictionary.

It is a great teaching source for those who just like learning new things or for those in some form of educational environment.

My guess is the site will become extremely popular and its popularity will embolden not only Merriam-Webster and its partner, QA International, that creates the graphics, to expand its topics but other encyclopedia companies as well will follow.

Yes, I know Britannica has a site but they charge $70 a year, for unlimited access to their 32 volumes.

Not a bad price but if there are enough potential advertisers that could very well change to a free service.

Wikipedia has the benefit of immediacy. This is what we now call being in real time. Traditionally a publisher of encyclopedias uses scores of editors and takes years to incorporate changes.

Nevertheless shouldn’t there be a premium placed on accuracy over immediacy?

I’m not naïve enough to believe everything I read, even from a so-called expert, but at the same time, I think being well-informed requires us to trust those experts who take the trouble to become informed to the nth degree in their specialized field.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 19, 2007 08:20 AM

November 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VoIP transitioning to High Definition Voice

I’ve written about the problems and some of the solutions to the use of VoIP before.

Now a new yet old standard, Wideband Audio, may turn out to be one of the best solutions so far.

We’ve all heard of high def [HD] TV but did you know about HD Voice?
HD Voice, a Polycom product line designation, is based on an ITU [International Telecommunications Union] standard called Wideband Audio that goes back to 1987.

In a nutshell most phone networks and handsets are limited to the 300-Hertz [Hz] to 3000 Hz range. Unfortunately, the human voice extends from 80-Hz to 14,000-Hz.

Wideband Audio increases the telecommunications network capability to go even beyond 14-Hz all the way up to 20,000-Hz.

The good news is as the telecom transitions to Internet telephony the network is no longer limited to 3000-Hz. The bandwidth limitation in theory goes away.

The simplest way to understand the difference between talking over a device whose audio performance is set at 3000-Hz versus one that is say, 7000-Hz is by reminding yourself of the difficulty in understanding whether or not the person you are listening to was using a word that began with "F" or with "S".

Was it "heard your kid was failing" or "heard your kid was sailing, in college"?

Other sound combinations that are hard to distinguish include "G", "K" "T", "P", "D", "B" and "M", "N".

Making those distinctions has become a lot more important in recent years for a number of reasons.

As companies go international people are finding that they need to work with more and more non-native English speakers. In addition, the ubiquity of conference calls combined with the level of reverberation over speaker phones creates another set of audio problems.

To get a better understanding of Wideband Audio and Polycom’s efforts in this area I spoke with Jeff Rodman, the Voice CTO at Polycom.

For your information, Rodman, along with his team, is credited with inventing the Polycom speaker phone.

Some Polycom speaker phones and handsets are already supporting the standard at 7000-Hz.

Rodman says the difference in voice quality between 3000-Hz and 7000-Hz is major: ithits you in the face," he told me.

For private corporate networks, Wideand audio is already deployable. There are PBX manufacturers, VoIP service providers, and handset and speaker phone vendors like Polycom making products that work at 7000-Hz.

Rodman says that the Internet telephony service proivers are in fact forming a coalition to create SIP trunk connections between them because they recognize that as smaller players in a huge telecom industry they need to differentiate and gain scale.

Perhaps another unintended consequence will be to push the major telecom carriers into adopting and deploying Wideband Audio more quickly.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 16, 2007 11:05 AM

November 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

It's not Mad TV...it's Mac TV

The FCC has mandated that as of February 2009 all television broadcasts must be digital. Goodbye analog.

But just in the nick of time we have AMD--and there will be others--launching its ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB for Mac.

That’s quite a mouthful but then it does quite a few things.

Now I haven’t seen it in action, but like all technology geeks I want one anyway.

The 650 Combo is a USB device that plugs into almost any Mac to receive both digital and television broadcast signals over, or as they call it, off-the-air.

Plus it has two ports on the back. One for cable digital and or analog TV and a port for an analog TV antenna.

The product is new for Mac and has been out for the PC for a few months.

For me the beauty of the system is if you’re not one of those "I want my HBO" folks you can get an awful lot of shows without having to pay the exorbitant cable company subscription fees.

These companies, like Comcast and others, have had their hand in my pocket for far too long. If I can now watch TV on my Mac I’m set.

By the way, the device is already being used as a business tool
Matthew Kreiner, product marketing manager for the AMD Multimedia Group tell s me.

It is being set up in news rooms where reporters and editors can watch the news on their laptops.

Even the cable companies are using it to check the signal during installation and in financial services brokers are using it to watch the ticker scroll on CNN’s financial channel.

"If you are familiar with the low quality TV with bleeding red into white we clean that up," says Kreiner thus making the crawl across the bottom of the screen clear and readable.

Here’s what you get with the Combo box for all of $149.

• High definition free off-the-air service. In other words all the major channel affiliates of CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, for example, broadcast local channels for free. Connecting a pair of rabbit ears or one of those typical Radio Shack antennas to the box gives you all of those shows.

• Basic analog stations that are broadcast through the local cable company, until February 2009.

This could be channels 2 through 125 or whatever, that the cable company sends to a basic subscriber.

• ClearQAM – the box is also hardware ready, as Kreiner says, to receive unencrypted digital cable television channels that are broadcast free over the air.

A ClearQAM-ready box will give Mac and PC users the ability to watch basic cable, which will now be broadcast only in digital, for free off-the-air.

"Whatever is freely available over the air that the cable company transmits will be available," Kreiner told me.

The FCC will offer a $40 coupon toward the purchase of a converter box for analog TV owners to convert digital TV off the air to an analog signal.

But if you don’t want to subscribe to satellite or cable and you just want the major networks that are now transmitted for free over analog, you will be set with the Combo 650.

Happy Holidays.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 16, 2007 05:52 AM

November 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Capgemini deployment of Google Apps points to world of application segmentation

To the list of unintended consequences add the creation of a two-tiered system of applications and application users thanks to the phenomenon of Web 2.0 applications.

I realized this after speaking with Robert Brillhart, global practice lead, Customer Care and Intelligence [CC&I], Business Process Outsourcing Services for Capgemini.

As Brillhart tells it, Capgemini deployed Google Apps for the first time at a new CC&I service center in Junction City, Kansas, training 165 customer service reps and supervisors in only two hours on how to use Google Apps.

This is the first group of agents at Capgemini, there are a total of 2,500 agents worldwide, who were not given the full Microsoft Office suite for use with its customer care, CRM, application.

"These agents are not power users and number crunchers," Brillhart told me.

What Capgemini is doing is segmenting its users making a decision on which application to deploy based on what best suites that group.

"We are living in a blended environment and there is not one set of common apps," said Brillhart.

In other words, although all 80,000 Capgemini employees need word processing, spreadsheets and the like, not all of them need to use the same application. And now that there is a choice, a low cost choice, large companies like Capgemini will be taking advantage of it.

Think about this. With Microsoft owning a 90 percent plus market share for productivity applications, you could say for every new business user of Google Apps there is likely one less user of Microsoft Office.

Google Apps Premier Editin which includes Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calen-dar,Google Talk and Start Page, will cost Capgemini $50 per user, annually.

That’s right, not per month but annually.

Brillhart believes that this kind of segmentation, where the power users stay with the power apps like Microsoft office while those employees who mainly live in a single application like CRM, will use less complex software that includes all the essentials, will spread across enterprise-level companies.

"This will happen rapidly, especially for companies that have a pyramid of labor, with a larger portion of employees having a lower end demand usage."

If your company has an inverted pyramid--more power users than part-time users--it won’t work.

However, Google Apps is by no means a bare bones set of productivity applications. It gives Capgemini’s service reps the ability to share a spreadsheet where all agents can see, view and edit on the fly to identify issues that ordinarily they would bring up after the fact.

Instant messages, emails are also part of the package.

The use of IT resources are also reduced simply because there is no need to support an email server and file share servers.

Google Apps may not answer all a company’s needs. That is the point I’m trying to make. But with little need for support, a low barrier to training and enough capability to keep a large segment of the company happy we, will see segmentation not only in productivity applications but in other kinds of applications as well as Web 2.0 and SaaS extends its reach.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 14, 2007 01:04 PM

November 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IBM needs to stop worrying about Microsoft

So now once again IBM is hot on the trail of trying to knock off Microsoft Office.

Big Blue has been gunning for the Redmond giant ever since Bill Gates outsmarted them back in the last century.

It is probably time to say to the giant of Armonk, “let go.” They need to move on to other things. But they won’t have it.

IBM’s latest gambit, IBM Lotus Symphony, was unveiled in September when they announced the free productivity application, which is not unlike Open Office, Star Office or Google Apps. It is not hosted but it is downloadable and free.

Of course the company is making the usual download claims, such as, "in its first two months, the software has been downloaded by more than one quarter-million registered users."

Big deal. What does that actually mean? There are lots of curious people out there whose curiosity is probably very much enhanced by the word "FREE."

I also find it astounding that IBM boasts that 88 percent of the downloaders are Microsoft Widnows customers.

Duh.

Since Microsoft has above a 90 percent market share in operating systems that sort of comes with the territory doesn’t it?

To garner a wider audience IBM is trying to be very hip and offering a video guide on YouTube as well.

For my money I think IBM should spend its research dollars on the kinds of technology that no one else does better such as improvements in storing and retrieving unstructured data, predictive analytics, voice command databases or video search capability, and the like.

The world just doesn't need another free productivity suite.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 13, 2007 10:56 AM

November 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Stop overpaying for support

Feel like your vendor is failing to live up to its maintenance fees? Consider third-party options

Stop overpaying for support If you are paying 20 to 25 percent in maintenance fees for an ERP application, you are burning a big wad of cash.

Think about it. If you buy software every 10 years, at those percentages, you are paying 2.5 times the original license cost simply to maintain the app, says Ray Wang, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

"I don't know anyone that is getting that kind of value out of their software," Wang told me. And he should know, because he spends a lot of his time talking to CTOs.

Wang believes the financial arguments for taking your maintenance and support needs to a third-party enterprise software support vendor are huge -- in some cases, cutting the cost of maintenance in half.

Two of the biggest third-party support companies are Rimini Street and TomorrowNow.

"Customers we talked to say they are getting the same or better performance from third-party suppliers," Wang adds.

How is that possible?

While there may be many reasons for this, including the fact that up until very recently, maintenance and support from the major software vendors was poor, the real reason has to do with the fact the entire generation of software from the likes of Oracle, Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards have all reached a high level of maturity during the past decade.

Seth Raven -- founder, president, and CEO of Rimini Street, and before that of TomorrowNow, and before that head of service for PeopleSoft -- says that when a new product line rolls out, it may take a year or two to work through the bugs.

"There has been no generational change in [enterprise] software, and the next is due somewhere between 2015 and 2017," Raven says.

That may sound like some far-off time in the future, but it is actually only 7 to 9 years out.

Raven is right when he says we will hear a lot about SAP NetWeaver and Oracle Fusion, but it will take time before the code is written, the case studies are completed, and the products are adopted globally by the enterprise. In the meantime, as changes take place, the core is mature and likely to stay that way.

Forrester's Wang says companies such as Rimini Street and TomorrowNow can halve the cost of maintenance simply because the profit margins for maintenance and support are incredibly large.

"By year three, the margins for the vendor are 40 to 50 percent; by end of life, it is about 80 percent," Wang says.

Wang concedes that Oracle and SAP have improved their support programs. However, "for a lot of people, they left a bad taste in their mouth," he adds.

The bad taste Wang mentions comes from a failure to return phone calls and a support process that required the customer to step through escalating hoops before being connected with an engineer who could actually resolve the issue.

By the way, Wang also says that Microsoft has done well in this area during the past several years.

One of Rimini Street's key competitive differentiators focuses on just that aspect of escalation, Raven says.

From the beginning, customers are assigned an engineer who knows the product inside and out, making escalation unnecessary, Raven claims.

Although Rimini Street does not deploy offshore support, "we do time-zone parity," Raven says.

Wang believes the Chinese will get into this market in a big way, adding that Indian outsourcers could have done this 5 or 10 years ago but are now too beholden to the major enterprise vendors to risk antagonizing them. The Chinese are better positioned to offer third-party support, he says.

For those considering third-party support, however, Wang adds a note of warning.

Because maintenance is such a huge part of the software business, anyone who offers that as a stand-alone service will be seen as a competitor.

Suddenly, a company using such a maintenance vendor may find itself without access to all the services and updates from its software vendor, or it might not be given access to future product direction. Simply put, a company may not be treated as a partner.

I suppose this is the big leagues and these companies know how to play hardball.

But you can play hardball, too. Remind those vendors that when the time comes to adopt that next generation of enterprise software, your company will have a long memory of who its friends really are.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 13, 2007 03:00 AM

November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IBM Cognos deal highlights a resurgence in upgrading the database

Gartner put it in perfect perspective when it positioned Cognos as the last remaining pure play $500 million plus business intelligence vendor.

Now it, like Hyperion and Business Objects, is gone.

I’ve written on the demise of the pure play or point solution vendors before and discussed how enterprise-level companies will have far fewer choices.

They will also have to make even more important decisions about whose platform to deploy, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft or IBM. See Reality Checks for October 8 and October 12.

However, something else is in play here as well.

We are witnessing the end of BI as a separate application. It is now being subsumed by the three major database vendors. It is turning into, you might say, a check list item.

Colleen Graham, research director, at Gartner points out that BI has always straddled two worlds, infrastructure on one side and applications on the other.

BI is in the neutral zone between the two.

"A lot of vendors on both sides of the line want to carve out apiece and bring it into their space," Graham tells me.

So we see companies like Microsoft offering reporting and analysis services as part of SQL Server, SAP buying Business Objects, Oracle has Hyperion and its SBase technology that fits in nicely with its OLAP option in their database.

IBM was the last.

"IBM has filled a big competitive hole in their database," says Graham. And with it, we will see business intelligence disappear.

Because it will become part of what every database does I have my doubts if we will see many new point solution vendors appear. And the fate of the ones that are left,like Actuate, MicroStrategy and Information Builders, as independents is at this point somewhat tenuous.

For years the databae vendors have been looking for a way to get their largest customers to upgrade to the next version, with the incorporation of analytics into the picture they may have finally found a way.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 12, 2007 01:00 PM

November 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Vetting the quality of VoIP

When it comes to measuring quality of service, experience is all that counts

quality of VoIP Judging by the gamut of responses to my recent blog post "The lie that is Voice over IP," the verdict on VoIP is still out.

Sure, plenty are crowing the virtues of VoIP, but just as many are hanging up. And the fact that some users think VoIP is fantastic, while others have cancelled their services and are switching back to PSTN (public switched telephone networks), proves my point: VoIP quality is uneven.

In following up on that post, I picked up my landline and called Mike Hollier, CTO of Psytechnics, a company that measures the QoE (quality of experience) of VoIP and Video over IP rather than the more common QoS (quality of service).

The difference between these assessments is huge, and the fact that somebody is attempting to measure the quality of the user's experience represents a refreshing change from the typical analysis, which assures us that, technically speaking, the equipment is working flawlessly without taking the user into account.

It reminds me of the punch line of that old joke that says the operation was a success, but unfortunately, the patient died.

With deep roots in science as a lead researcher at British Telecom Labs for voice, video, and multimedia, Hollier worked on codecs and developed mathematical models of how the human senses work, all in an effort to better align the results of various measurement methodologies with how people describe their experiences of perceived phenomena.

So rather than just analyze the behavior of packets, Hollier's team looked at the waveforms of signals to see how humans would perceive them.

"We were trying to solve a whole family of perceptual engineering conundrums," Hollier says.

For example, on the visual side, BT Labs wanted to find a means for interpreting what the human eye sees and, by virtue of the boundaries of the information your eye can extract and your brain can interpret, use that as a basis for scientific measurements.

The results is a solution Psytechnics calls Experience Manager, which is a performance management solution for measuring voice and video capability over IP.

Voice has to be the first concern. Video, I suppose, will grow in importance once we get used to watching our favorite programs on a 2- or 3-inch screen.

Targeted at enterprise-level users, but not yet ready for major network providers at the IP trunk level, says Hollier, Experience Manager will give companies a tool that is lacking on the operational side of voice.

Current tools are not adept at recognizing poor voice performance. Network monitoring tools can't tell the network administrator that sounds are muffled or distorted or accompanied by an echo.

When Experience Manager identifies a problem, it sends alarms and alerts and troubleshoots the problem. The tools know the source and destination of each call and take measurements along the way to discern whether levels are "cold," a.k.a. too low, at a particular gateway, Hollier says.

According to Hollier, Experience Manager can even recognize a low-quality headset as the source of the problem or a low-quality sound card in the client.

What does this tell us about the state of the art of VoIP?

As is often the case with technology still in its infancy, the consumer becomes the beta test site on a grand scale.

The fact that Psytechnics thinks it alone has developed the tools to identify and provide relief to suffering VoIP users tells you that there is still a long way to go before VoIP comes close to offering the same quality provided by POTS lines.

This should also tell us something about the next hot high-tech space, UC (unified communications), touted by Avaya, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and Siemens, among others.

Think about this before you move forward on UC: Initially, companies will probably choose multivendor solutions. Each vendor will monitor and report and send alerts about their equipment, meaning, of course, when there is a problem the standard response will apply: "Oh, you're using our router with THEIR handset? Well, testing devices show us our equipment is working fine. The problem is with the other guys."

I'm sure over time there will be other vendors offering similar QoE solutions, but at the moment Psytechnics is the only game in town as far as I can tell.

What I like about Pystechnics' technology is that it looks across all vendor offerings, collecting end-point data and aggregating it for an overall view of video and voice performance. It is unique in that regard.

In the end, however, whether to buy into VoIP now is all up to you. When I was a kid, I kept asking my father when we were going to get a color TV. His standard response was, "When they improve the technology." Of course, I would have been happy with the technology as it was. After all, my friends all had a color TV.

You and your company are in sort of the same boat. Adopt an arguably flawed technology now or wait until they improve it?

Your call.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 6, 2007 03:00 AM

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