Big Data 2.0

We were only just beginning to get our heads around Hadoop and Big Data in general when we find everyone is starting to talk about Big Data 2.0 – and it’s bigger, faster, and cleverer!

Hadoop, as I’m sure you know, is an open source project, and it’s available from companies like IBM, Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR. It provides a storage and retrieval method (HDFS – Hadoop Distributed File System) that can knock the socks off older, more expensive storage options on databases using SAN or NAS. It also means that more data can be stored. And that means not just human-keyed data, but data from the information of things (point of sales machines, sensors, cameras, etc) as well as social media. It’s an OCD sufferer’s dream come true. No need to delete (throw away) anything. But with all the data, it becomes important to find some way to ‘mine’ it – to derive information from the data that can be commercially useful. And that’s what’s happening, deeper and richer sets of results are being derived from the data that are beneficial to organizations.

With Version 2 of Hadoop, everything is faster. Data is processed at amazing speeds in-memory. The analysis is taking place at speed on terabytes of data. It also allows decisions to be made at speeds unavailable to humans. Research shows that algorithms with as many six variables out-perform human experts in most situations. This was tested on experts predicting the price of wine in future years and stock marketeers. So now, Big Data 2.0 means better decisions can be made at incredible speed.

It’s also possible for machines to learn using these techniques – such as the Google classic of having software that can identify the presence of a cat in video footage and no-one being quite sure how it is doing it.

For mainframe sites, Hadoop isn’t just some distant dream. You don’t need a room full of Linux servers to make it work – in fact that’s the clue to the solution. Much of this works very nicely on Linux on System z (or zLinux as many people still think of it). And once the data is on a mainframe, it becomes very easy to copy parts of it to a z/OS partition for more work to be done on the data. Cognos BI runs on the zLinux partition, so the first level of information extraction can be performed using that Business Intelligence tool. Software vendors are coming to market with products that run on the mainframe. BMC has extended its Control-M automated mainframe job scheduler with Control-M for Hadoop. Syncsort has Hadoop Connectivity. Compuware has extended its Application Performance Management (APM) software with Compuware APM for Big Data. And Informatica PowerExchange for Hadoop provides connectivity to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

So what’s it like on the ground and away from the PowerPoint slides? At the moment, my experience is that really big companies – Google, Amazon, Facebook, and similar are pushing the envelope with Big Data. But it seems that many large organizations aren’t strongly embracing the new technology. Do banks, insurance companies, and airlines – the main users of mainframes – see a need for Big Data? Seemingly not – or not yet. Perhaps they are waiting for money to be spent and mistakes to be made before they adopt best practice and reap the benefits. Perhaps they are waiting for Big Data V3?

Big Data is definitely here to stay and those companies that could benefit from its adoption will gain a huge commercial advantage when they do.

Augmented reality

One of the areas that I’m quite interested in is augmented reality – where computer-generated images and information are superimposed on, well, what’s real! You see it a lot in sci fi movies where information about weapons appears on a heads-up display. But there is much more to it than that, nowadays, augmented reality can be found in aviation and tactical displays, in lots of gaming and video devices, and in training and simulation tools – which means it can be used for business and for leisure.

For example, suppose you were standing in an unfamiliar town centre and wanted to find an Italian restaurant. An augmented reality display could not only show you in which direction the restaurants were and how far away, it could also show you the menu and prices, and also reviews. I thought it would be interesting to see what was in the news about augmented reality – just to get a feel for how things are progressing.

Well, the first thing that I saw at http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047325/google-buys-foxconns-hon-hai-display-patent-portfolio.html was that Google has bought a portfolio of Head Mounted Display (HMD) patents from Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry for its Google Glass project. Google Glass is a wearable device with a head-mounted display.

There’s another Google Glass story at http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/google-glass-gets-augmented-reality-sightseeing-app-20130822-2sd1m.html showing how Google Glass can be used as an automated tour guide. You need to use an app, called Field Trip, which is made by Google-owned Niantic Labs. The app tracks a user’s whereabouts and automatically delivers alerts and informational snapshots about nearby historical landmarks, tourist attractions, restaurants, and local shops. Apps for Google Glass are apparently called “Glassware”.

Meanwhile over at http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/22/augmented-reality-gives-surgeons-a-virtual-look-at-real-world-organs-during-operations/ is a story about German research institute Fraunhofer MEVIS, which has “created an app that lets surgeons use the iPad as a real-time viewfinder during surgeries. Not only does the app let doctors better plan their operations, but it also gives them digital overlays of key blood vessels.” This helps surgeons not cut through blood vessels – although holding an iPad and performing surgery would be quite a skill!

Even IKEA is launching an augmented reality app, which enables shoppers to preview furniture in their own home from their own home using a smartphone or tablet. Customers look through the printed catalogue, and when they come to a plus symbol on a page, they hover their phone or tablet over it until a screen pops up asking them to scan the images on the page. At that point users will see the bonus features, which could be a 360-degree view of a room, videos, additional product information, or the option to place a piece of furniture in their room – according to http://www.mnn.com/your-home/at-home/blogs/ikea-aims-to-eliminate-buyers-remorse-with-nifty-augmented-reality-app.

At http://www.sparpointgroup.com/News/Vol11No35Augmented-reality-app-for-construction-industry/, we find out about an augmented reality app for visualizing construction job sites called SmartReality. JB Knowledge Technologies, who developed it, says the iOS app is the combination of AR and construction technology. Users focus on a given design or plan file with the camera on their iPad

The article also mentions Maptek Pty Ltd, who have an app (PerfectDig) for the mining industry, allowing operators to use handheld devices to compare laser scanned surface data during excavation against 3D mine plan designs for conformance in the field.

And can you believe that Häagen-Dazs, the ice cream-maker, has launched an augmented reality application called “Concerto Timer”, which provides consumers with a virtual violin concerto while they wait for their ice cream to reach an ideal temperature and consistency. The virtual melody lasts for two minutes. You can read more at http://www.qrcodepress.com/augmented-reality-application-launched-by-haagen-dazs/8522792/.

And in the “me too” world of technology, you’re probably not surprised to find that Microsoft may be working on a pair of augmented reality glasses for Xbox gaming, according to a patent application published last week. There are more details at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/10223287/Microsoft-files-patent-for-augmented-reality-glasses.html.

According to a market research report of the “Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality Market” at http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Purchase/purchase_report1.asp?id=1185, the market could be worth $1.06 Billion by 2018. So it’s no wonder lots of companies are getting involved.

If you haven’t come across Augmented Reality (AR) yet, it looks like you very soon will.

Being a good sport

Love it or hate it, here in the UK it’s a summer of sport. At the moment the Euro 2012 football competition is in its early stages, then we have Wimbledon, and August is dominated by the Olympics and Paralympics.

IBM has great plans for Wimbledon, and has been showing off some of its technology at the French Open tennis championship. IBM’s SlamTracker maps a match in real-time and highlights the key turning points. The predictive analytics software determines which three things any top player needs to do to enhance their chances of winning. So, for example, you might see something like: “win more than 46% of points on second serve”, or “win more than 51% of 3-8 shot rallies”.

IBM has redesigned the Wimbledon Web site for 2012. It has also provided an upgraded radio, TV, and video broadcast services known as Live@Wimbledon, and studio discussions shown on the website can now ‘drop in’ on live matches at key moments.

It seems that in 2011 there were 451 million visitors to the Wimbledon Web site, of which 28% were using mobile devices. This year IBM expects more than 500m visits. IBM’s senior IT specialist, David Provan, says: “With advanced analytics, such as those embedded in the SlamTracker at Wimbledon, organizations can tackle the explosion in data”.

IBM probably doesn’t need to use Wimbledon to raise its corporate profile with sport fans because, according to consultancy Futerra, it is what they call a “planet brand”. Futerra assessed which brands had the greatest recognition and loyalty, a global reach, and the most impressive green. Their Planet Brands Index drew on in-house Futerra research, data from studies published by Millward Brown and Interbrand, Newsweek’s annual Green Rankings, and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. As well as IBM, the 100 names included Google, Apple, Samsung, and Amazon.

IBM has also been involved in its favourite sport of beating Oracle. It seems that IBM’s Storwize V7000, storage array, has beaten an Oracle/Sun ZFS array by delivering almost the same performance for less than half the price and 4 percent of the capacity.

The devices were tested using the SPC-1 benchmark, which tests the performance of a storage array doing mainly random I/O in a business environment. The two teams involved were an IBM Storwize V7000, fitted with 18 x 200GB SSDs in a mirrored configuration, versus an Oracle Sun ZFS 7420 with 84TB of mirrored disk storage with single read and write accelerating SSDs.

And the final score: IBM delivered 120,492.34 SPC-1 IOPS, at a cost of $181,029, ie $1.50/IOPS; Oracle delivered 137,066 SPC-1 IOPS, at a cost of $409,933, ie $2.99/IOPS. Without using SlamTracker, you can see that IBM’s hardware delivered 88 percent of the Oracle box’s performance for 44 percent of the price with 4.3 per cent of the capacity.

When it comes to supercomputers, IBM is now back in the lead. IBM’s Sequoia is officially the world’s fastest supercomputer. In second place in Japan is Fujitsu’s K Computer. IBM lost its top spot to China a couple of years ago, but it’s now back at the top of the leader board.

Keeping up the sporting theme: Desert Mountain, a golf and residential community in Arizona, is planning to install IBM Intelligent Operations Center software for Smarter Cities, with UgMO Technologies’ Wireless Soil Moisture Sensor Solution, to manage irrigation of all six of its golf courses. And it expects this will reduce its water use by 10 percent and generate an additional 10 percent savings in energy costs related to water pumping and distribution.

Anyway, let’s hope the competitiveness of the Fortune 500 companies rubs off on the athletes this summer and we have really competitive, drug-free, sport, which the fans will talk about for years to come.

Cloud wars

There was a time when mainframers simply claimed that they’d been using the cloud computing paradigm all along. Then IBM came up with SmartCloud, its vision for cloud computing, offering SmartCloud services and SmartCloud solutions. Last week saw the announcement of the PureSystems private cloud packages. But for non-mainframe users or non-IBM technology users, the clouds are getting darker!

Now, I’ve been using a Pogoplug as cloud resource for a couple of years now. Next to my router, I have a small Pogoplug box. And attached to that box are a number of big memory sticks with files that I want available wherever I am. I can upload and download the files to any computer and I have the app on my phone and tablet – it’s all very convenient.

But for people who don’t have a Pogoplug, there’s been Microsoft’s Skydrive offering online storage space to (originally) people with an MSN account. It’s handy to keep a copy of your files in the cloud and then access them when you go somewhere else. It also allows file sharing. But you may get irritated by the need to download Silverlight.

And that’s the area where Dropbox is such a success. It allows users to share folders with other people and those folders can contain very large documents. Dropbox, in many ways ,became the de facto standard – everyone had heard of Dropbox. And now, BitTorrent lhas aunched Share, which is its equivalent – and is perhaps aimed at younger people who might be more familiar with using BitTorrent offerings.

The problem with Dropbox and the other similar providers is that any self-respecting IT department is going to have to stop its staff using them. Now sharing a photo of my new grandson is one thing, sharing a business-sensitive policy document on the cloud is something else. Who knows what organizations at some time in the future may have access to those cloud-based files? Internal IT security can no more allow staff to use cloud solutions for sharing files than it can allow staff to carry around unencrypted memory sticks.

There are some sites where you can upload your files anonymously, although you get a slow connection. You can open a free account, which gets you a slightly faster connection, or there’s the paid for service with the fastest connection. Once a file is uploaded, you get a URL that you can share, and then people can download your file. Examples include FileDropper (up to 5GB), FileFactory (upload up to 50 2GB files), FileServe (up to 500GB with an account), and HotFile (you pay when your files are downloaded).

Some organizations have limits on the size of files that can be sent as attachments or received as attachments. That’s why some of these other Web cloud hosts have sprung up. People like: Bigupload (up to 50MB), Box.net (1GB of storage, but the maximum file size is 25MB), Crocko (up to 1GB), DriveHQ (1GB ), Humyo (10GB), Kontainer file storage (50MB), MediaFire (up to 100MB, MegaSWF (Flash SWF files up to 10MB), RapidShare (up to 200MB), ShareBase (up to 200MB), Sigmirror (5GB of free storage), TzFiles (2GB), and uploaded.to (250MB file size maximum).

And there are many other hosting sites that I haven’t mentioned. And many that charge varying amounts for storage.

Up to now, Google, has offered Google Docs as a cloud solution. You could create your Word files and, assuming you had the Google Docs plug-in, store a copy in the cloud. Or you could just create documents using Google Docs and share them.

But now, it appears that Google is going to launch Google Drive – 5GB of free storage available to all users. Users will get a Google Drive icon on their desktop and use it as a virtual drive. And 5GB is quite a lot of storage – although arch-rival Amazon’s Cloud Drive offers exactly the same free.

Bitcasa, which is still in beta, is offering free storage while it’s in beta and paid for unlimited storage afterwards.

With the growth in cloud storage, more IT departments will have to get involved in making sure that there is some way that business-related data can be kept secure in the cloud. And with Google joining the growing cloud space race, end users are going expect cloud storage to be available to them.

Move over Google Docs, IBM’s back in the game!

Over the years, Microsoft has controlled the Office market – with Word and Excel being used everyday by millions of people. Even schools are teaching children to copy and paste etc using the familiar Microsoft products that they most likely also use at home.

People may fondly remember WordPerfect or VisiCalc, or may have tried OpenOffice and other alternatives to Microsoft, but for most organizations, the de facto standard has been MS Office.

And then, as the world became aware of cloud computing, those freethinkers at Google gave us GoogleDocs – an online equivalent for the basic Office functions. And the big advantage was that you could access your files from whichever computer you were on (provided you had Internet connectivity). There was no excuse about bringing the wrong memory stick and not having a copy of the document. I use the GoogleDoc plug-in to Office so that my files are stored in the cloud in case I need something at a client’s site.

Of course, Microsoft also has a cloud-based version of its Office suite called Microsoft Office 365.

But now IBM has thrown its hat in the ring. It has announced the beta of IBM Docs, which is tied into its SmartCloud for Social Business Suite. So how does IBM hit the ground running with its own Office suite? Well, it got its hands on Lotus Smartsuite in 1995, when it also got Lotus Notes.

IBM Docs allows organizations to collaborate on word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. The plan is that there will only be a Web-based solution – no need for any browser plug-ins. In addition, its LotusLive has been rebadged as SmartCloud for Social Business. This provides users with easy access to social networking, file sharing, meetings, e-mail, calendars, and instant messaging.

The Web site at https://greenhouse.lotus.com/wpsgh/wcm/connect/lotus+greenhouse/lotus+greenhouse+next+site/home/labs/ibm+docs says: “IBM Docs is a new office productivity suite for working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations – together – in the cloud. With IBM Docs there is no desktop software. You only need a browser and an account, and you are able to easily create professional looking documents and share them with others. IBM Docs is simple yet powerful – letting you get started quickly, but delivering the advanced features you need. 

Once you’ve signed up, you can create and share documents, you can comment on documents, and you can assign parts of documents to teams to complete. In effect, everything you would look for in a cloud-based Office equivalent. Does it provide workflow features like Microsoft’s SharePoint? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

Will it work? It will be interesting to see. The linking with social networking is something that many enterprise organisations will find beneficial. There’s certainly room for another heavyweight to enter the fray. And it should be beneficial for us users if the big players offer more-and-more facilities for us to use as a way of keeping our interest and our business.

I’m sure we’ll be getting far more information about this initiative (and it is still in beta), but I thought it was worth noting now. Personally, I’d like to see a cloud version of the Adobe suite – InDesign, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, etc.

Mainframe maintenance – a new paradigm with new challenges

For many organizations, we’re beginning to see a new model of how IT customer support can be organized – and the model is coming from management who are completely platform-agnostic. To them, IT is IT – it doesn’t matter whether something runs on a mainframe or a distributed platform. And this new way of working brings with it new challenges.

This whole change in staff structure is also being encouraged by the advent of the zEnterprise hybrid machines with their zBX blades running everything from AIX to, potentially, Windows. A consequence is that a mainframe specialist could be dealing with a Linux error message, or a Windows SharePoint guru might be trying to understand what’s going on inside CICS. What can you do to help them?

Or let’s suppose in a more traditional mainframe environment, for whatever reason, you lost some of your top technical people. Perhaps they got jobs elsewhere or perhaps they retired early, but suddenly you find yourself with a huge knowledge gap. Maybe you can transfer someone across from the distributed team. Or maybe you can recruit one of the new generation of youngsters who are learning the benefits of mainframe computing. But whatever you do, there will be a fairly long period of time during which anything out of the ordinary occurring is going to leave everyone scratching their heads and searching Google – whereas, previously, your in-house expert knew exactly what to do. So, in this situation, what are you going to do?

Let’s not worry too much at this stage about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance targets. Let’s simply focus on the problem. How can any organization, irrespective of how its IT team is constructed, ensure that appropriate expertise is available at all times to whichever staff members are available?

Obviously you can have the manuals, and some could be on the IBM mainframe portal, but that doesn’t give you speedy access to the necessary information. A Google search will reveal hundredsof pages of results, but it takes a degree of expertise to sift through those and find the correct one quickly. And someone without any expertise could spend a very long time reading solutions to completely different problems before ever finding the right one. Not a satisfactory way to provide IT services to customers – whether internal or external to the organization.

So what would be a good solution? How can these issues of staff working outside their comfort zone be dealt with in a way that is good for the business? And what kind of a solution will still be able to ensure those business-critical mainframes are being supported in a year’s time, in five year’s, or even further into the future?

This is where a new breed of solutions that can address this coming challenge are positioning themselves. One of these, Softlib with its iSolve product (www.softlibsw.com/mvs.aspx), allows an organization to combine all its IT-related information into a single virtual library. That means users – your harassed staff – have to search in only one place, not as previously in many places, to find a solution to any problem. And once you have a single location for information available, you can allow product champions and other IT-literate staff access to it – which should result in more empowered and satisfied users and fewer calls to the Help Desk.

It makes sense to organize the information in this single virtual library using themes, so CICS information might be one theme, IMS another, Linux a third, etc. The information in the library starts from IBM and third-party software vendors’ manuals, and can be supplemented with information from newsgroups and other online resources. Plus, you can add your own technical expertise.

Access to the information can be from a Web browser or a terminal server. It can be hosted locally, or as a cloud-based resource. The advantage of the cloud route is that the information is looked after by Softlib and they already have access to a huge number of the resources you’ll need. So you can start using the facility almost immediately. Plus the online documentation is automatically updated when new information becomes available. Other benefits include knowledge usage analytics that can help address missing or outdated knowledge, and seamless integration with CRM, bug-tracking, Service Desk, content-management applications, etc.

All in all, Softlib’s iSolve product has a lot to offer most mainframe sites, and certainly provides an answer to the question of what to do if you restructure your IT customer support and need to extend the working expertise of your staff onto other platforms such as AIX and Windows. It also offers a solution to the problem of losing key mainframe experts in a mainframe-only environment.

All change!

It’s been a funny old week. IBM offering apps for mobile phones instead of sticking strictly to big iron, and Google buying a slew of IBM patents. When the British surrendered to the rebel American army at the end of the war of independence they played a tune called the world turned upside down. That’s what this week feels like.

It seems that Windows 7 smartphones aren’t really up there with the top three yet, because IBM has only made its app available to the app store for iTunes, Android, and the teenagers’ favourite, Blackberry. For IBM, the idea is to make their social networking platform, IBM Connections, available on smartphones – like Facebook and Twitter (and other social media). To be fair, you could access IBM Connections through a browser on these phones, but now there’s a proper app. Obviously there are different processes for making the app available for the different organizations, which will affect how quickly it will be before you can download the app on your device. The good news is that the app is free.

So what is IBM Connections? According to IBM’s Web site: “IBM Connections is social software for business that lets you access everyone in your professional network, including your colleagues, customers, and partners.

“The latest capabilities in IBM Connections, such as Moderation, Ideation Blogs, and the Media Gallery, enable you to embrace networks of people who are engaged and to work in transparent and nimble ways to create business value.”

It seems that the ideation and media gallery modules are natively available in the mobile apps. This allows users to vote on ideas, comment on ideas, and manage the ideas from their phones. In addition, users can take photos and upload them – so they can be shared immediately.

Built in to IBM Connections 3 are ‘moderation’, ideation blog’ and ‘media widget gallery’. Moderation allows users to review content in blogs, forums, and files before lications and approve, reject, or delete as appropriate. There’s a template available for each community to generate ideas, gather feedback, and come to consensus on the best ideas. This is the ideation blog. The media gallery widget is obviously somehwere to upload and share photos and videos.

Meanwhile, Google has confirmed that it bought 1,029 patents from IBM. These include SEO, servers, routers, relational databases, object-oriented programming, and fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips. It seems that no-one is revealing how much was paid.

Why would they buy so many patents? Perhaps to avoid litigation because they are using someone else’s idea. Or perhaps it’s to stop a rival company using someone else’s idea. It may be little more than synchonicity that Google has recently launched it’s Facebook-like Google plus. The more cynical among you may suggest they are looking for a way to stop Facebook doing something as yet undisclosed that will affect their business! Or it could be to do with the Android versus iPhone smartphone war. Or maybe its because Oracle is seeking billions of dollars in damages and royalties because of Google’s use of Java in Android phones. Or maybe, late in the day, Google has realized how important patents are in the modern business world.

Interestingly, Google was after 6,000 patents from Nortel Networks, but lost out to a consotium including Apple and Microsoft, who paid $4.5 billion for the patents. This could be the year of patent sales.

So there you have it. A week when the king of big iron turns up on the smallest of smart devices, and when Google gets itself a stash of patents. What will next week bring?

Mainframes, cloud, and trans-derivational searches

Communication is a bit of a hit-and-miss business at the best of times. Suppose I was sitting in a large comfortable leather armchair and I wrote the word ‘chair’. I would be thinking about my armchair. You might be sitting at your computer on an office chair with wheels and no arms. When you read the word ‘chair’, you might think that your office chair was what I had in mind. Perhaps a trivial example, but you get the idea.

What happens if I write a complicated sentence and it’s not immediately clear what I’m saying. You would read it and perform a trans-derivational search in your mind to try to find meaning. What is a trans-derivational search? Well, it’s a bit like going to Amazon and typing the word ‘cloud’ into the search box. Amazon will search in ‘Books’, ‘Film, Music & Games’, ‘Kindle’, ‘Electronics’, etc and display all the answers. You can then make a choice. When it happens in your mind, you do a similar search and select the search result that seems to be the best fit for the unclear sentence.

The reason I mention this is because when one person says the words ‘cloud’ and ‘mainframe’, the image in their mind may be quite different to the image in anyone else’s mind. I like to think of mainframes as interesting and powerful bits of kit that keep the business world turning. Someone else may picture rusting hardware that should have disappeared in the 1990s! It’s much the same with the word ‘cloud’. One person may envisage an outsourcing opportunity, while another may view cloud as a security nightmare – a disaster waiting to happen. You can see now just how tricky this communication stuff really is!

There are people who argue that the mainframe is a cloud already. Suggesting that both are resource that can be dynamically allocated and de-allocated on demand, and can be made available within a company with the necessary security and management controls.

Typically the users of cloud computing have x86 platforms and need to be able to get what they want when they want it – ie on demand. They use primarily Amazon, Google, or Microsoft services. And, of course, everyone is now talking about cloud with announcement of Apple’s iCloud.

Going back to the mainframe, recent surveys have shown mixed interest in cloud computing from mainframers. It seems that the closer to the coal face (or whatever the mainframe metaphor for systems people might be) people are, the less interested they are in cloud. Whereas more high-level thinkers are interested to see what advantages cloud computing offers their organization.

Same words, different mental picture. It’s that communication conundrum again.

If you do have any experience of using cloud and mainframes, I’d be interested to hear about your experience over on IT Toolbox (http://datacenter.ittoolbox.com/groups/strategy-planning/data-center-infrastructure-sp/featured-cloud-computing-in-a-mainframe-environment-4234328).

And for those of you who are IMS professionals, don’t forget the Virtual IMS user group meeting on Tuesday. Gary Weinhold and Verna Bartlett from Data Kinetics will be talking about MSU reduction due to in-memory table management with (any) IMS applications. Full details including how to register are on the Web site at www.fundi.com/meetings.htm.

Cloudy but good

All this talk about 2011 being the year of the cloud rings true. I say that because marketing hype is usually a bit ahead of the curve. But I realize that I’m using cloud computing a lot these days – and I don’t mean (necessarily) for work.

Firstly, I’m using Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. This is a small piece of code that’s free to download from http://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudconnect. Once installed, you can save all your Word etc files on your laptop AND there’s a copy in Google Docs. Now, the reason I find that so useful is not simply because I know my documents are backed up (and to be honest that’s a really important reason and the one that I’d use as a selling point to most people), but it also means that I can access the documents from other computers. I have two laptops that I use all the time, and a third one, that’s usually away at users’ sites. I can now access my documents wherever I am and not have to say that I’ll send on the information after the meeting (or whatever).

Google also say on their site that this system allows users to simultaneously edit their files – which again is a great idea, although it’s not something I’ve tried.

Previously to using Google Cloud Connect, I used my Pogoplug for the same reason. I’ve mentioned Pogoplugs before in these blogs because they are so useful. It provides my own personal cloud. A Pogoplug is a little piece of kit that connects to your router. I then have four or five memory sticks plugged into it, but I could have a 2TB external hard drive. I can upload files to the Pogoplug from anywhere using a simple browser interface (https://my.pogoplug.com/) and I can share files with people, so they can see photos I’ve taken or short videos, or even Office documents. And, again, it provides me with a back-up copy of my important files.

The third piece of cloud computing I use is Wyse PocketCloud. I’ve downloaded the free app for my Android smartphone and I’ve downloaded the software for my laptop. Once they’re password synchronized, I can control my laptop from my phone. Which means, if I haven’t got a document with me, I can use my phone to launch Word on my PC and read the document. Last week I sent a document from someone else’s computer to my e-mail address. I used the PocketCloud software to log-on to my e-mail, download the file and print it. So when I returned back to base, there was the document ready for me to take to the next meeting (a school governors meeting – they don’t have wifi, hence I couldn’t be paperless). I’ve sat in McDonalds and called up files! It is a really impressive piece of software. Now, with the other cloud facilities mentioned above, I don’t know how much I’ll need to use it. But it just seems so amazing to be able to do it!

What I’m suggesting is that cloud computing is getting in under the radar and people are beginning to use it already. So, when IT departments suggest rolling out Cloud services in whatever form that takes for them, they will be pushing at an open door. There won’t be usual user resistance because the users will be perfectly happy with the concept. And, of course, mainframers will be saying that they’ve been using these cloud concepts since the 1960s – or whenever they first started working with mainframes.

Which all goes to show that 2011 really is the year of the cloud.

All change in the office

It started with me looking for the best ‘office’ application to run under Honeycomb (Android 3) on a tablet – but I got sidetracked. It seems that Oracle has dumped OpenOffice, and Microsoft has a beta of Office 365 – it’s new cloud variant of the ubiquitous office software.

Oracle has given OpenOffice back to the user community, while at the same time strongly supporting open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format). Oracle got OpenOffice with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems a few months ago. Last September, unhappy community members set up the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There was some talk of Oracle rewriting OpenOffice using JavaFX, but nothing seems to have come of that. There was also talk of Oracle cloud office, but again that seems to have sunk without trace. You can download the latest LibreOffice version from www.libreoffice.org/download/.

It’s worth noting that IBM is a fan of OpenOffice. IBM did try to sell the office suite it got from its Lotus acquisition. Word Pro was based on Ami Pro, which Lotus had got from acquiring Samna back in 1990. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, which included a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Version 3 came out in October last year.

Google Apps free offers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites (to create Web sites and group wikis), and Google Docs (for online documents, presentations, and spreadsheets). Google Apps for Business offers Google Apps Marketplace, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and more.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is moving ahead with a cloud version of its Office software. You can join the beta program for Office 365 at www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/small-business/beta.aspx.

The Office 365 beta is a subscription service providing Office Web apps and online communications and collaboration services. So you get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus e-mail and calendar facilities, team sites (like SharePoint), and instant messaging and online meetings. Look out for Microsoft Lync 2010, which replaces Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

And remember, to sound like you know about cloud computing, say things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud storage and processing platform.

If you’re tempted, Office 365 Small Business costs $6 per user per month. Google Apps for Business cost is cheaper at $60 per year or there’s a free version. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Microsoft offering is more complete and Google’s lacks Outlook integration. It all depends on how dedicated a Microsoft site you’re at or how keen you’ve been to embrace Google’s products.

Now, what am I going to put on that tablet?

Johnny head-in-the-clouds

Almost everyone is predicting 2011 will be the year when cloud computing becomes a reality for many organizations. CA produced surveys towards the end of last year showing this to be part of the planning of most of the organizations they surveyed. Other surveys, like BMC’s and the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook found that cloud computing wasn’t quite on the radar of many of the people who actually do the day-to-day systems work.

This week has seen a report from IBM suggesting that 70 percent of small and medium businesses – perhaps not its usual massive mainframe users – are either planning to, or already do, deploy cloud-based IT infrastructures to improve their performance and reduce costs. For the report, IBM surveyed 2,112 business and information technology decision makers at midsize businesses around the world, and the publication is called Inside the Midmarket: A 2011 Perspective.

Also in the report was a finding that these same SMBs were moving from cost control to growth in terms of cloud computing. The report says that 62 percent of surveyed organizations are planning to increase their IT budgets in the next year or so. Now one spin on that would be that the world is out of recession and all’s good with the world. An alternative way of looking at it is to say that most sites have reduced or kept spending the same for the past two years and there’s a huge amount of pressure – like a boiling kettle – to update hardware and software.

The survey also found that 70 percent of respondents are actively pursuing business analytics to help give them some kind of insights into the huge amounts of data they’ve generated. The survey also found that 66 percent of respondents say they are embracing the benefits of cloud computing to optimize costs and redundancy while increasing uptime and scalability.

Obviously cloud computing is new to so many of the organizations surveyed and perhaps not surprisingly it was found that more than 70 percent are looking for local business partners with industry expertise for more of a consultative – rather than a purely transactional – relationship.

In other news (as they say) the new CEO at HP, Leo Apotheker is looking to make his company a leader in the development of infrastructure and platform Cloud services with an open Cloud, which many people assume will compete directly with Google's similar Cloud-based offering.

My final words of ‘wisdom’ on this matter is that we all think we know what we mean by cloud, but for many organizations it might be like shopping for a ‘car’ or ‘automobile’. You could end up with a Rolls Royce or second-hand Reliant Robin! As you work your way down into the nitty gritty details of what your organization needs, you can find cloud computing to be a fairly nebulous term!

Mainframes and cloud computing

Picking up IT trade papers might make you think that the only real players in the cloud computing world were Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Microsoft, with its ‘mega data centre’ in Dublin has been enthusiastic about its Office Web Apps and Facebook integration. Its Windows Azure is an environment for development, service hosting, and service management based on the cloud. It’s designed to allow developers to compute, host, scale, store, and also manage the Web apps they create. Google is working with VMware to develop a new operating system for the cloud, and plans to push the Web as a platform for enterprise-standard software development. Google now has a version of the Google App Engine for enterprise users. Amazon has its Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – a Web service providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers. So where does that leave the mainframe?

To answer that question, Vanson Bourne, a market research company based in the UK undertook a survey that has now been published and is called Mainframe – The Ultimate Cloud Platform? Vanson Bourne conducted more than 300 interviews during August 2010 among IT decision makers. The sample comprised respondents in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.

The survey results were published by CA Technologies, who revealed that 79 percent of IT organisations believe the mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy. They also found that 74 percent of respondents believe that the mainframe will have a role in any cloud computing initiative, with 70 percent agreeing that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment.

Interestingly, and quite independently, the 2011 Arcati Mainframe Yearbook has two questions about cloud computing in its user survey. If you haven’t completed a survey yet, you can, by going to www.arcati.com/usersurvey11.

According to CA’s Dayton Semerjian: “This survey provides indisputable evidence of the mainframe's agility to perform in new IT models such as cloud computing, and on-going durability as a critical data centre platform for decades to come”. Semerjian added: “CA Technologies is addressing these needs through its revolutionary mainframe management strategy, Mainframe 2.0”.

The survey also found that 82 percent of respondents stated that they intend to use the mainframe in the future either as much or more than today – which, sadly, implies that one in five sites are reducing their mainframe usage.

54 percent of respondents felt that the most pressing issues facing them in the next 12 months is an increased demand for training.

When asked why the mainframe is considered a valuable organisational asset, responses included reliability (55 percent), its position as an established technology (52 percent), platform cost-effectiveness (48 percent), and IT attitudes toward change (40 percent).

Linked to training is the problem of an increasingly ageing experienced workforce and a reduction in the number of experienced people available to work on mainframes. The study concluded that 44 percent of IT organisations are grappling with staffing issues created by the greying workforce and difficulty in hiring new staff, and they are concerned that these challenges will make the mainframe less viable in the future.

IBM v EU

Just as IBM was basking in the success of its zEnterprise mainframe-in-a-box, along comes the European Union regulators to take it to task for not allowing its operating system to run on other hardware, and not being fair to spare-part vendors.

The European Commission has already warmed up for its probe into IBM’s workings by taking action against Intel and Microsoft. EU antitrust laws ensure that big organizations deal carefully with small competitors. The EU can issue a range of fines and sanctions should it believe a dominant organization in the market place is abusing its position. IBM’s legal team are used to this kind of battle. Back in 1956 the US Department of Justice reached a consent decree with IBM that, in effect, created a market for used mainframes and mainframe parts. In 1984 the EU agreed with IBM that competing mainframe companies would have access to the mainframe platform.

As we’ve mentioned before, the first complaint comes from T3 and TurboHercules saying that IBM ties its mainframe operating system to its mainframe hardware – and thereby destroys the emulation market. The second investigation was initiated by the Commission alleging discriminatory behaviour towards competing suppliers of maintenance services – spare parts to you and I.

How does IBM respond? The company said that it intends to cooperate with any EU inquiries, while denying there was any merit to the complainants’ claims. It then alleged that the accusations were being fuelled by business rivals. Microsoft is a minority stakeholder in T3. IBM went on to suggest some of its larger competitors want “to mimic aspects of IBM mainframes without making the substantial investments IBM has made and continues to make”. IBM declared these competitors, “are violating IBM’s intellectual property rights”. It continued: “IBM is fully entitled to enforce its intellectual property rights and protect the investments we have made in our technologies”.

It will be interesting to see what comes out this. Bear in mind there’s the NEON zPrime case waiting in the wings as well.

In its on-going watch on successful companies, the Commission has also launched a preliminary anti-monopoly investigation into Google, examining its power in the online search and digital advertising markets.