Have you ever taken time on a break from work to watch YouTube? Maybe catch up on the latest viral video craze or see if anyone you know has done the Harlem Shake or lost a dog called Fenton? Maybe you listen to podcasts or Internet radio while you work. Well, have you ever considered what impact this might be having on the companies network speed?

David Attard and Sergio Gallindo senior product managers at GFi Software are here to tell about some of the things organisations need to consider.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

David, first of all we must say that the use of the Internet within legitimate breaks is a good thing isn’t it?

Yes definitely, people need to make sure that they get their daily dose of video and radio and watching viral videos and checking their emails. This is about making sure people are happy in the workplace. People need to get their daily dose for recreational purposes and just like a cigarette break or coffee break; you get your Internet leisure surfing breaks.

How big is the problem around recreational usage of company bandwidth then, what are organisations seeing as the impact of this traffic?

Having multiple streams coming into the network when people are surfing does have an impact on the business. For instance, using sales force, or when people might be on the phone with customers you will see the impact where phone calls will start to drop out and get jittery. We have actually seen that and what people don’t realise is that when added up, you start to push out what we call ‘good traffic’ where you are actually using the Internet for business.

Surely the obvious answer would be to restrict access to sites and content, but is there anything else, more diplomatic that companies could be doing?

Yes, there are. There is a tremendous amount of value on YouTube when you think about how people are using it for research for instance when they are taking a look at products. More often than not the video is a mechanism to learn about a product or learn how to do something or get a question answered. People really are starting to use that YouTube search engine to get information for their jobs, so blocking it is probably not a good approach. However, monitoring and management is an approach that works. Knowing who is using it is key. There is always the outlying case when one person has decided to stream a ton of videos or watch 2 or 3 videos at a time and we have had experiences where people didn’t realise what they were doing it. In some of the smaller offices that do have limited bandwidth, users often will stream high definition video from their home and say look at this and show their friends, what they don’t realise is that they are taking up all the bandwidth which is a limited resource for many of the small offices. That does impact on productivity so limiting YouTube or blocking YouTube is not the best approach I think management and monitoring is better.

Are there any security risks associated with this sort of traffic be used on the network?

It is a known fact that cyber criminals actually exploit trending topics and people’s natural instinct to actually follow stuff that is trending. Anything that is trending at the moment is bound to be used to lure people into visiting sites that contain malicious items, viruses and Trojans. Because people are naturally curious, they forget about the security risks that are associated with visiting somewhere that is unknown.

What advice would you give IT managers listening to this podcast to start addressing these issues?

You need to be sure that you have the correct tools to manage the problem by having solutions like batch management in place for instance. Another is to monitor to see where people are going and then have the right tools in place to automatically block items that are malicious. So you need to have antivirus engine and software that is basically making sure any places that are visited are safe and also places that are unsafe are actually blocked.  Mainly it is important to educate people; but education by itself is not enough. Worksites that are usually safe might get infected and start distributing viruses. One needs to make sure that they have the necessary tools such as filters and anti-virus management tools.

With high-speed Internet connections getting faster all the time, will this problem not just solve itself?

I think the problem is getting worse because of expectations. Peoples expectations for their home internet has gone from having a small amount of dial up to now having equivalent to what you have in your office and in many cases having better connectivity at your home than you do at the office. Office buildings have not quite kept up with the technology that is coming out in the homes. You will have an office building that may have a 10 megabit connection but when you get home you have a 30 megabit connection, or 50 megabit connection. You are watching these videos and you are streaming your Netflix and your expectation is that this is okay when I get to the office because it works at home. When in reality it is the reverse and there are many more people in the office that are using relatively limited bandwidth. So that is why speaking about the three things that we need to worry about, the monitoring, the management and having those policies in place and a bit of education goes a long way. Having people understand that yes, while it is good that you can go to YouTube and research things watching these videos the expectation does need to be managed a bit.

There are some significant costs attached to an issue like this aren’t there?

The business grade Internet cost is one of the largest costs a business can have. By definition that is their lifeline, whether it is cloud storage or using a sales force for their business processes on line or they have voice over IP for their telephones, the fact is they depend on that internet and they need to, and are, spending more to have that service. Where at home when you have ever been on the internet and it pauses for a little bit, or it goes out for 15 minutes or an hour or even a couple of hours it is not that much of an impact, you kind of shrug your shoulders and you move on to something else. For a business, the Internet is their lifeline. They are investing in it and they do need to protect it. Viral videos and the like, whilst creating a good time for people needs resources to monitor it, manage it and be sure that people are educated at what the usuage impacts are.

In this podcast we have a company spotlight on Axway. John Thielens, Chief Security Officer for Axway speaks to us from Phoenix, Arizona to tell us more about what they provide and how they integrate their solutions into organisations.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Give us a bit of background on what services Axway has been founded on?

Axway started in the business process integration space. We help companies address not really how to build applications but how to connect applications to their business partners and communities. Over the years we have grown by acquisitions, which gives us a very wide suite of products that enable these sorts of integration. In particular, we focus on governing the data flow that binds an organization to another organization, and that gives us a real focus on what it means to be at the edge of the enterprise and to help companies take ownership of that edge. Naturally there has been a lot of pressure as the technology landscape has evolved that has really made it an exciting time for us to look at new styles of integration and to do quite a few innovative things around redefining the edge of enterprise and adding security to it. In my own background I have been with the company for 17 years. I started with one of the companies that we acquired some years ago and my original background was as a developer and I have worked my way through product management.  I have always had a focus on security and I have worked on some of our PKI infrastructure products. So now as Chief Security Officer I look after the security aspects of our product suite, in particular the way they get deployed to our customers in a secure fashion, which is a bit different from a security officer within one of our customer companies who looks after customers internal aspect of the enterprise.

What are some of the main security threats or challenges that you have identified as needing particular focus amongst your clients?

When we talk of the edge of the enterprise I think what these trends are doing is redefining the edge or in some cases even erasing the edge. I think we have in some way had to stop thinking about the classical enterprise boundary model where there is an inside and an outside.  We have all these different approaches which have opened data flow channels into places where they didn’t exist before. So instead I think organisations need to focus on management domains or safe zone compliant areas where particular steps of policy apply, and then try to enforce some kind a filtering management visibility when they cross those administrative boundaries. A great example would be payment card industry security standard PCI. Any merchant that handles credit card transactions had to be compliant with the security practices related to the data around those payments, and they can be fairly strict and onerous but you wouldn’t want to necessarily make your entire infrastructure comply with those requirements.

What are the tools for dealing with these controls that you recommend at Axway?

I think two main areas go beyond traditional network control. The first is taking a deeper look at what identity means of course security cannot really be divorced from identity because the whole concept is “who” is doing what to “whom,” so we have to get a better grip on this “who”. There is no real push away from passwords to try to do more with maybe stronger potential technologies and so we have products that fit into that strong credentialing space, but also a lot more with identity brokerage and federation. I know personally I have hundreds and hundreds of passwords and it is very difficult to keep track of those and in an enterprise business contacts companies try to do more and more by leveraging their existing identity repository and they can make those practices around managing those repositories stronger if they can get more leveraging out of them.  There are some new technologies that are emerging and also driven by some of the open API mobile world that change the way we manage identity in applications where you remove the identity management from the application itself. I should point that the mobile world and also the cloud world is very heavily API driven.

Are businesses taking the sort of risks that you advise on seriously or have some been slower to adopt?

The way companies respond to security channels is based very much by their industry and some types of businesses are heavily regulated and strongly influenced by security position. You can think of financial institutions maybe are the leaders of that charge, there is also a curious inversion principle so what I have seen is that while financial institutions are very focused on security it makes them not fast movers in terms of adoption of new technology. We see more innovation and rapid adoption of the new stuff with some of the younger smaller companies may be in the retail or super space, maybe they have less regulated infrastructure so they feel that they can move more quickly but I also think that they don’t have the burden of such a large entrenched infrastructure and they are already are naturally hybrid or ‘cloudy’ in their approach and therefore that makes them to easier to wire into new technology. Whereas, if you have a large existing infrastructure you have to proceed a bit more carefully. Basically I think the awareness is there.  Discussions around security are in the papers, in the news, in our face every day with the militarization of cyber warfare and attacks on corporates around the globe. Security really is part of everyday discussion.

What message or words of advice would you offer to businesses that may feel that they have security issues still to tackle?

I think the main message in security is of course is that you are never finished, it is a topless mountain that you keep climbing so you should never feel complacent which is what makes you vulnerable. I think that specific trends to focus on today, I would look at two things, one is to focus on the data, try to understand where the data is moving and where and how. Don’t focus on the components of the infrastructure, the firewall, the network interfaces but if we can understand where the data comes from, why it is there, where it is going, how long does it stay around, does it need to be archived does it need to be rejected. That is the kind of inventory focus that will help you make the appropriate investment decision during that data.  The second is to look at the evolution of technologies in the API mobile cloud state.

How do you focus on keeping security measures cost and resource efficient?

One of the tools for having a cost efficient approach to security is to really focus on your data because not all data needs to be secured and treated the same. So if we can begin to apply appropriate security measures to where they are needed then I think that allows a lot more cost efficiency. Security is almost always a trade off and there is a balance between usability and access which may be part of driving your business forward and the level of security and control that you have over that information and so the real coast may not be the cost of acquiring security software, security devices or even the ongoing labour cost of maintaining and operating that investment. The business opportunity cost if you close down a channel that is really meant to be open. It is absolutely not a one size fits all technology.

On this podcast we talk to Lawrence James, CMO of NetApp who have been working with the beauty manufacturer Revlon to transform their IT Infrastructure. Revlon are a very large organisation with manufacturing and products in 100 countries across 6 continents. Lawrence will be talking us through some of the things they implemented and how similar organisations can learn lessons from the technology that they implemented.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

So firstly Lawrence explain the challenges that Revlon were facing with their IT Infrastructure prior to NetApp coming on board?

One of the biggest challenges they have coming from a business perspective is the visibility of the business across multiple geographies. They have got a massive business and a huge number of product lines into the hundreds and millions in terms of the products they have to follow and be able to measure in each of these geographies. The challenge for them was getting an insight of the business from the point of view of knowing where to invest and where not to invest, insight into the product line and insight on the components that make up their products as well. So in a way what we are looking at here is a big data story and what we were aiming at was the analytics engines that they need to put in place to actually improve their view of their business worldwide so it was quite a challenge for them.

And cost reduction must have been a key driver for change here as well?

Yes, significantly, they were aiming at getting costs reduced; just take the energy costs for instance.  The energy costs were reduced by over 70%.

 What were some of the solutions you provided them with to achieve these savings then?

NetApp is a storage company and our prime focus is in making storage efficient for our customers. This is often a big challenge for lots of organisations and you can imagine that for many customers when you are developing new products to market and developing new business elements you create lots of duplication and the infrastructure is not used as efficiently as it might be.  Just take for example what we do in our everyday lives; We create lots of copies of say production databases and on our laptops we create lots of copies and duplicates of files so just doing simple things like de-duplicating data and compressing data reduces the actual physical space the data takes up. So those are some of the key things we focus on but also automatic things such as applications in virtual hosting environments. Analytics of the business is absolutely key to Revlon given the size of market they must monitor. Things like uptime and availability are very important. They were looking for something near to six nines of uptime and I did actually sit down and work it out that it means achieving less than 13 seconds of outage a year, so quite extreme in application uptime. From NetApps point of view one of our key things is to ensure through things like clustering that a customer such as Revlon can achieve such levels of availability as this. 

IT as we all know breaks, you know you will get elements that fail especially on the mechanical side where you have got mechanical disc storage. But, these days it is perfectly possible as it is in a compute layer with virtualization and VMware to maintain a connection from the application to its data and get through those failures without stopping the application and certainly that is one of our big focuses.

 What has been the impact on their business from these changes?

In large organisations when you have to develop a new business product, bring that to market and increase velocity of that application, the development cycle is key. They have seen an increased projects throughput of something like 425% and that has enabled them to deliver products ahead of time and get ahead of the market and get ahead of their competition, which is often key for a lot of us these days. Decreased time to market means the majority of their projects are now seeing well over 99% improvement of product projects hitting their budgets and being delivered either ahead of time or on time.

Well one of the statistics that caught my eye from this is that you managed to reduce energy costs in the data centres by 72%. That is big money for a company on the scale of Revlon isn’t it?

It is! You can imagine that one the biggest costs within the data centre is from what sucks the energy out of the wall sockets through spinning all these mechanical discs. They are energy hungry and they product a lot of heat so you have to cool them as well and often to get performance and efficiencies with other infrastructures, we don’t use them particularly efficiently. So our goal is to enable customers such as Revlon up to 50% physical capacity on their machine rooms and data centre floors and that is achievable by improving the utilization of the storage they have got just by intelligently what I would describe as high function data management features such as de-duplications, compression and thin provisioning. All of these things combined together can significantly reduce the amount of investment needed and the amount of capacity you put on the floor. Also changing that dynamic are things like flash technologies as well.  It is just ramping hugely now. Flash has kind of come of age if you like. When you combine it with traditional mechanical hard disc technology you can use it in different ways it is very powerful. For instance, you can use it for caching, so you cache heavily in the red blocks in the flash layer and you can get some extreme performance out of it. This reduces the requirement for having to put such a physical hard disc on the floor for a lot of our customers. You can reduce the spindle count, the number of hard drives you have to put in the system to achieve a given level of performance, so I see that as a game changer within the industry.

Has the power of these benefits come from combining flash and cloud together?

As the adoption of flash becomes greater it will polarize the storage market. The price of Flash Technologies continues to drop. I had a look at some of the stats around it the other day and in 2008 you were paying something like 65 dollars per flash gigabyte. Today I did a quick search around for an enterprise type of Flash and last week you would be paying something like 8 dollars per gigabyte, so the price reduction in Flash has just been phenomenal over the last 4 years. That is really set to continue and what that will do is eventually polarize the market and more and more workloads will come onto the flash tier as that price drops.

Do you think the days of physical storage are on their way out with these developments?

Not yet I don’t think, I think that there are absolute valid reasons why I would want to keep my “crown jewels.” By that I mean the data and the assets that describe my business. I may or may not want to release those depending on regulation or compliance issues. If these were bound in to a service level agreement with assurances that the company that is going to provide those services that would be fine, but I don’t think we are there yet. 

However, I think there are elements of the business that are development elements, you see developers increasingly going to the cloud because they can spin up, spin down, spin up very quickly different development type of environments. That is about time to market but for the production and customer facing environments I think there is still a lot of scrutiny of whether we can do that today.

What do you think are the main barriers that prevent some organisations taking the plunge and res-structuring their IT systems?

One big thing that affects a lot of the customers I deal with is transition. How to manage the lifecycle of an infrastructure, retire old infrastructure and bring in new infrastructure. That entire process is a challenge when cloud down time is a rare commodity. In other words, you go to the business and say I need to take the system out of production for 2 hours on a Sunday night; you cannot even do that anymore.  I have heard of organizations that have kits sitting in their warehouses unable to bring it into production because they can’t get the planned maintenance windows to do that and when they do get them they have to meticulously plan the time. But, with our solution that is possible today however and that is what the likes of Revlon are looking for in that 6 to 9 of uptime figure. So, times have changed over the last 30 years and I think that is only going to increase to the point where downtime is just not acceptable at all.

What can organisations learn from the approach you have taken with Revlon here?

I suppose the key message for me and the one thing I have learnt over my many years in this business is that actually storage, when you begin to look at it is pretty much foundational. It does represent the foundations on which you build your business on and if today you have a very siloed infrastructure for your storage and actually your compute and your networking as well then you do need to consider how you can unify that and how you can share it. If you are designing “green field” from the ground up then it is easy to take that approach going forward. But, if you are sitting in a very siloed infrastructure then it is a lot more difficult. However, you can make small steps to actually get towards a shared unified infrastructure and start to introduce clustering but, absolutely you should just take on board that the storage is pretty much foundational and you can drive huge efficiencies if you get that layer correct.

What are the technologies we need to be watching for in the future – how do you see things progressing for big scale business infrastructure?

Flash changes everything for me. It will change the whole dynamic within the storage industry so I would absolutely advise everyone listening to this to keep your eyes on that developing market. It is quite confused and quite exciting at the moment and there is a whole bunch of new technologies that are following hard on the heels of flash so if I was going to say one thing I would say that semi-conductor based storage technologies are the future and that is going to be the one to watch. From the cloud side of things the future lies in how cloud enables the business and it brings IT back into the fold of being an enabler for the business if that makes sense.  I think we have gone through this curve where the IT function within the organization has been very much a cost centre. But, IT can absolutely be the enabler for the business and cloud is probably the vehicle for that. The way that I see that happening is with things like self-service, automation of provisioning and service catalogues. Also the measurement and reporting and show back, charge back elements are going to be key in the cloud. Storage plays a huge role in that, how can you provision, how can you automate provisioning, how can you do that against a service catalogue of specific levels of service. Then how can you measure and report on all of that. It is absolutely foundational for cloud once more.

A new piece of research on IT skills within academic institutions released by MicroFocus found that 73% of academics running IT courses do not have COBOL programming as part of their curriculum.  That is despite 71% believing that today’s business organizations will continue to rely on applications built using the COBOL language for the next 10+ years. To help discuss this we are joined by Michael Coughlan, lecturer at University of Limerick and Ed Airey, Product Director at Micro Focus on the line to talk us through the research.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

What brought about this study initially?

Ed Airey

We are very excited about this research, it is part of a conversation we have had for quite some time with our customers who continue to search for talent for critical business applications that were written using the Cobol language. It’s a challenge that we are seeing more and more as the skill set within organisations are retiring and moving on.

Michael tells us about your work at Limerick University?

Michael Coughlan

I have been a lecturer at the university since the 1980s and have been teaching COBOL since then. I have a popular website of COBOL tutorials and instructions.

Explain then how COBOL has a relevance compared to other languages? What is it used for? It has been around a long time hasn’t it?

Michael Coughlan

Yes it has been around a long long time and people keep predicting its demise but it has managed to soldier on. Probably the reason is that it is very good fit for the business domain for information systems, posting of files and that kind of thing. Other languages for example if you were to take Java for instance, they don’t have the built in native types that COBOL has for dealing with currencies.  They have to import them as classes so in a Java programme for example you might have a mixture of operations for multiplying and dividing integers and then to multiply and divide currency and you would have to have a completely different set of operations. In Cobol that is all one thing because in Cobol the facility is present to allow you to do multiplication on decimal data as a native data type to the language. That is what makes it so fit for operations and for business in general. There is a huge inventory, approximately 89% according to Gartner of all the programmes in the world are written in COBOL If you go to the ATM it is probably COBOL behind that. If you get your payroll slip it probably has COBOL behind it too. It is incredibly important for all the mission critical operations that we do in the world and our current problem at the moment is that we have all this code out there but the pool of COBOL programmers is shrinking and we are not replacing them.

MicroFocus has recognised this problem and launched the research that we are talking about today so talk us through how the data was collected. How many universities were involved?

Ed Airey

The research that we conducted was across about 120 universities and I think what was very interesting to us was through the poling we saw some very common trends. Much of what we believed to be true was actually true in that there was an inability to meet the demand that businesses have in terms of being able to find the COBOL talent in the industry. There were just not enough students coming out of university with that skill set and organisations were faced with either internship programmes or perhaps moving to a different technology. Of the universities and academic leaders that we polled, only 1 in 4 today are teaching COBOL so certainly there is some work to do there. In that same data sample over 70% of those people stated that they still believed the COBOL language will persevere and will continue for at least the next ten years and perhaps longer. That leads us to believe that obviously the language is not going anywhere and we are still somewhat dependent upon that technology but there is a question of how we are going to support it moving forward. Very few students were graduating with a skill set in COBOL and I think in total it was about 5% overall of the data sample.

Michael from your point of view working with students on a daily basis what’s the attitude of students towards COBOL languages and could part of the problem be linked to the way that in the world of technology we are always looking towards the next big thing?

Michael Coughlan

Unfortunately you are right there is the attitude that students are attracted to the new and the shiny and even now if you go onto the internet and you do a search on Java you will see lots of material there talking about Java as the new COBOL. In other words students are now being attracted to the much newer languages like Python and Ruby. Students are attracted to the new and the shiny so it is difficult to get them to engage and to realise the importance of the language and I mean it also does much more mundane stuff, you are not writing, you are not operating systems and you are not writing system programmes you are writing business programmes and they tend to be (from the students perception) seen as being a bit stodgy.

Does the answer to promoting and inspiring students to take up the COBOL language lie with academic institutions, the industry or governments? Who needs to be working on changing the perceptions here?

Michael Coughlan

I think it is combination of all those exactly as you have suggested there. MicroFocus for example and the other COBOL vendors are doing some good work in that regard because it used to be very difficult for students to gain entry into COBOL because of the expense of the compiler. Now though, MicroFocus are making that compiler free and Fujitsu have a similar sort of arrangement so at least you can download one and try it out before you buy it. Those sorts of things are allowing students to actually try out the language and reduce the cost of learning the language. That is a tremendous improvement and that movement has happened very recently. So that is one way of doing it, the other way of doing it is for the companies to start advertising for entry level COBOL programmers because there is a definite perception among the students that there are no jobs in COBOL and if they do a search for jobs in COBOL what they find is that the only jobs are for people who have 10 or 15 years experience. Obviously they are not going to go for those jobs and they see them as being not available to them. Companies need to make it clear that they need those people and need to start advertising for entry level programmers if they want to replace their ever shrinking pool of programmers.

So are MicroFocus now looking to promote this language to students? How are you going to achieve that?

Ed Airey

Absolutely. That is a part of what we hope to do within our academic programme here at MicroFocus not only through being able to provide access to software as discussed earlier, but also by connecting them with the market and the opportunity. That goes both ways it is also for the business organisations to help them by promoting the jobs that they have whether they be entry, end or senior positions. So, that is what we are looking at here as part of a talent hub initiative at MicroFocus for people to connect those two together so they can share in the joint opportunity.

There was a recent campaign by code.org with a viral video campaign that we have covered here on ITProPortal recently promoting programming generally as a skill to young people. Is this do you think indicative of a skill shortage in programming generally not just within the COBOL language?

Ed Airey

I would say it does span across generally and applies not just to the COBOL language. You see it within other languages as well but I think it is probably more pronounced in COBOL than in any other language for the reasons that we have discussed. COBOL is found within so many businesses that if they stopped working the situation would become very very critical. So, I think it is more pronounced within the COBOL language but you also see it within many older languages as well.

Well as a result of the MicroFocus study what would you like to see happen now to bridge the skills gap and inspire students to take up this programming language?

Michael Coughlan

I think I would definitely like to focus on persuading other COBOL vendors to address the situation and to encourage people to become COBOL programmers. I would also like to see industry advertising to raise the profile of COBOL in general.  That is what needs to be done but there is still going to be the perception that other languages are more modern and to an extent what else can you expect COBOL has its origins in the 60s. New languages are going to come along and people are going to expect that they more modern, more advanced and more interesting and are going to be drawn to them because of those things.

Should governments be getting involved here? What could they be doing?

Michael Coughlan

Governments can get involved and in fact I came into computing (as my original degree was in history) because of a government initiative in the 1970s when there was a shortfall in programmers. The government then actually paid us to take conversion courses to convert ourselves into programmers and academics of one sort or another. We are seeing a similar sort of thing in Ireland now where fees are being waived for some of the courses in the higher diploma and the one-year conversion type courses. These things come and go in waves, in the year 2000 our numbers on the course were very large and we were having difficulty coping with the numbers of students that we were getting in and then the Y2K problem happened and the departments spent all their budgets. As a result, employment fell off quite dramatically and that information percolated through the schools and people stopped applying for the courses leading to the current shortfall now. Computer science departments all over the world were not turning out programmers or computer scientists and that is what has led to the current crisis. Once that is addressed we will probably have a glut again and then a shortfall and so on.

Well a final thought from you both, what was the most surprising thing about the findings from the MicroFocus study?

Ed Airey

I think what surprised me the most about this study is that we still have more work and more roads ahead of us in making an impact. I think that in many ways we are still falling behind in addressing this challenge. I think time to a degree, is running out and I think if we don’t have a positive change in skills development then I think what will inevitably happen is that we will be forced to take a drastic decision about the technology. Sometimes, drastic decisions don’t typically end well if they are made in haste and made under that type of pressure. I think that there is certainly urgency upon us to make sure that we do what we can to try to and change the trajectory of where this research leads us to believe we are headed.

Michael Coughlan

To be honest I was surprised that there was a many academics as there were who were expressing the need for COBOL because traditionally people have been a bit COBOL resistant one way or another so I was quite gratified that there were that many people who were aware of the need for COBOL.

In this episode we are chatting to Sven Freudenfeld, Business Development Officer at Kontron about the recent launch of the Symkloud Web Cloud Platform server to support the growing shift towards mobile cloud and address the key cloud server challenges facing organisations, data centres, infrastructure providers and IPTV content providers.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Tell us more about the Symkloud platform, how have you designed it to support these needs?

The trend in the market is that a lot of the applications are moving away from the handset and finding their place in the core network infrastructure. So the challenge to launch new mobile devices is primarily battery life and also processing capability on the handset itself. A lot of the applications are moving towards a cloud infrastructure where they are managing computer resources in the back end of the network. So that could be mobile gaming or it could be streaming video applications and transcoding to offload to the mobile device. That mobile device could be pretty much anything from a tablet to an iPhone you name it. There are other mobile devices connected to the network now and one direction where we utilize the mobile device is from machine to machine interaction towards a cloud infrastructure. The difference between the tablet and the Smartphone is that with a tablet transmitting machine to machine data is really is transmitting only data, or in some cases streaming video. With smartphones that includes the location or GPS information and lots of other information as well. So, the end-to-end device is just a gateway to transmit data towards the cloud. The processing takes place in the cloud itself.

What we realized is that in the current environment using standard hardware, for example into Intel CPU processors is if you have a massive CPU as the computer engine in the infrastructure the scalability and the cost are very challenging to accomplish new deployments. In other words if I have multicore platforms the only way I can actually separate multiple tenants in the mobile cloud because we could use the term “multi-tenant environment” is by adding a software layer on the platform itself and do virtualization. When additional software is added that typically brings the challenge of maintaining the software revisions in order for it to be a secure virtual core. The other challenge is the cost of course. We need to add on top an extra burden and it is not easy to manage so the cost is pretty high on average and in manageability and flexibility it is really limited.

So we approached it by coming up with a platform approach where we have more scalability by separating multiple smaller CPUs with dedicated memory and a dedicated hard drive and also a dedicated memory for transcoding and actually separating it into a 2u where we have up to 9cpus for web applications and up to 18 for transcoding applications. So they are more flexible and we can actually scale much better.  The other advantage for computing approach is by eliminating some of the power consumption and challenges. So, again coming back to the example of having a massive CPU multicore with visual layer, the web platform is usually sharing resources, memory and hard drive so this means I cannot just shut down if I underuse my CPU. The CPU still has to be fully active and I can actually optimize the load on the platform itself and in low peak times I can actually consolidate the workload into multiples of smaller CPUs. Even shut down an underutilized CPU so it is much more flexible and more scalable and it also helps on the capital operating expenses low.

With Web 3.0 and mobile cloud gathering attention in the market were there a list of challenges that you were trying to almost tick off while you were developing the SymKloud platform?

Yes we looked at the market conditions first. We have another product line, which is coming soon in the form of an end-to-end platform. If you look into the market demand for end-to-end productivity coming up, the traffic model within the network will have a different shape because we are using machine to machine interaction and the packet sizes are more numerous within interactions but in a smaller packet size so that makes it much more efficient to use smaller scale CPUs, but a lot of them.

The challenge with this model was that, more CPUs means you need to have a load balancer for functionality in the platform itself. This is in order to optimize the traffic load and the workload for each individual CPU. So we broke into the platform in order carry out check pointing to see what the utilization of each of the CPUs is in the platform and redistribute the traffic accordingly. The other advantage of balancing the functionality is that if you have say, streaming video for example you can actually do controlled balancing. This means that if you have an app for insertion you can actually have much more flexibility of including this into a platform by a dedicated note to the 2u platform for only managing the app insertion and have the streaming content on a different note.

So that is the advantage of having balancing and switching in a platform.  The other was when we talked to hosting service providers or customers we discovered that the upfront costs from the data centre in the traditional way is outrageous meaning we currently obscure what they are because the upfront costs for switching, cooling and rack space are the most critical ones. You can imagine if you have to invest in switching gear up front on the top of the rack, switching for let’s say 25,000 hours and you are not really utilizing other ports then you are going to increase costs pretty significantly. In our approach we have a better scheme by actually adding up multiple clusters without the need of a rack switch so again we are reducing costs and providing more scalability on that.

It is important to many businesses to streamline their services does this help them to achieve that in a new way do you think?

Correct, because if you go onto other cloud services or hosting services sites, the infrastructure costs have a fine margin. If I am selling services to end users the infrastructure costs are a big burden for me to actually generate revenue. So if I can eliminate some portion or minimize that, through reducing power consumption, costs for cooling the data centre, etc. then I am able to generate revenue much quicker.

Well the spec mentions the app ready modular system that you have built this around. Explain more about that?

The application already is a bit of a different approach. In the past we have been coming from the embedded computer technology space and we provide it in modules based on Intel and other processors and platforms but the key here is to bring cloud providers and other equipment providers to revenue quicker. So what we are providing is free integration of some of the platforms of the operating system with some manageability to our customers so they do not have to develop an interface to be actually able to use it and provide the cloud developer an interface to actually provision it. So these we call application ready because we have already the capability built in for provisioning of the cloud application development itself. It is basically the framework to get off the ground much quicker.

Looking at the industry as a whole are organizations really prepared for the changing needs that all businesses are going to face regarding data storage moving forward?

The challenges coming right now in the market really relate to the need to manage the modern technology acquisitions alongside the lack of increased profit margin. It is very competitive and our customers need to come up with a more innovative way of increasing the margin on an average revenue business portal. This issue has been out there for a while but it is moving quicker when you see the forecast from all the analysts in terms of the traffic demand for mobile devices on top of the machine-to-machine productivity to the cloud.

On this podcast we have a company spotlight for you on Canonical and we are talking to VP of Products Steve George about the products and partnerships they are most well known for.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Let’s start with a bit of background on Canonical what are you best known for?

We are a limited distribution and the product we are best known for is Ubuntu it is one of basically three or four commercial operating links operated systems out there, many of which people will know such as Red Hat and SUSE. At Abunto what we have been doing over the last few years is particularly focusing on cloud computing and impacts that developers see there in the way that they develop and deploy applications out into their businesses. So that is what we have been focusing on and really trying to understand what is going to change now that we are deploying and developing applications in the cloud and what that means in terms of the sorts of things that Linux distribution needs to deliver for them.

Now if you look at the Canonical.com website you will see the phrase Hyperscale trend. Explain what we mean by that Steve?

I think you see two trends that setting the way that applications get developed these days. First of those is the rise of what I would call the web development stack so using JavaScript and using some of the dynamic languages python, ruby and web scale development and that is making its way both in terms of consumer applications but it is also making its way into business. All of the applications that are developed internally for enterprise are now developed on that type of development stack. So that is one thing that you see. The other thing you see is the impact of that capability and development in delivering very large applications at scale so if you look at Google one of the things they are doing there is fundamentally changing the way that applications are delivered and developed. So when we are talking about Hyperscale what we are thinking about is how can we help businesses take advantage of those new capabilities, and those new ways and developing and delivering applications so that they can get some of the advantages and efficiency in time to market that some of the famous examples in the Google and Facebook type areas take advantage of those efficiencies.

What have been the business needs that have pushed this forward then?

The main things I think have been that a lot of the developments around Hyperscale computing are really about the agility in development. A common phrase that you hear people talking about is the fault line between development and operations and reducing that fault line to develop a greater speed of time to market so rather than the traditional cycle in an enterprise of developing an application for 6 months or 9 months and then doing a deployment which would take 3 to 4 months we are trying to reduce that so that you can get those capabilities out to your business or out to your customers that much faster so can you do continuous deployment. So, it is really about enabling greater agility, greater speed and certainly there are lots of efficiencies that you can also get while you are doing that which will help on the cost saving side of that equation.

Well you are famous as you mentioned for Ubuntu and for those not familiar with this system give us a bit of background on that?

Ubuntu is a type of Linux distribution and we work on both clients’ laptops but also on servers. We have a very agile deployment method so we do two types of releases; every 6 months we release a new version of Ubuntu that has the latest features and the latest pieces of software in it. Then every 2 years we do a big release which is a long term support release and the real critical difference for businesses there is that it answers these dual problems that they have at a technology level around how they can get the latest and greatest features that they can develop their software on because that is what developers want to work on but then how can they also make sure they have a capable system internally which is stable, secure and maintained. This means that people running systems in production can have those systems stable and secure for a much longer period. Our maintenance period on LTS is 5 years for example so for those who are perhaps deploying a CRM system they would chose the LTS release, but those trying to do some fast development on a new feature or on a new capability they would chose our 6 month release. In general we have tended to be focused on fast technology, new technology so things like Hyperscale and big data instead of some of the slower moving aspects of the enterprises like Oracle database compatibility for example.

So from your core product in Ubuntu to this new relationship with HP tell us about how that relationship came about?

One of the things that we noticed from our customers and our users in particular as they start to use this more agile stair box capability is that one of the implications aside from the software level is what happens at hardware level. You now move to a system in the cloud or with these very agile deployments where what you want to be able to do is get the software out there and scale in a horizontal fashion so you want your application to run across multiple servers and then you need to add more scaling to the application rather than getting a larger server you want to just add more servers in. That is the way in which the architecture changes. But of course at a hardware level that has a lot of implications as well because what you are trying to do at hardware level is trying to be as efficient as possible and to use the smallest amount of energy that you can and the smallest amount of physical space that you can and so we have been thinking about Hyperscale for a while working on things like ARM chip so ARM CPUs which have traditionally used a lot less power than some of the X86 ones. So we started working with HP on the Moonshot project and what Moonshot is about is re-thinking how servers are designed, configured and deployed and to take advantage of these new software architectural capabilities.

When you were looking at the developments in your operating system and core products what were the gaps that you identified over the last 12 months in your offerings that you have had to respond to in order to move things forward?

I think the interesting gaps that we are trying to respond to right now is probably at two levels, one at the hardware level and the work that we have been doing with Moonshot specifically is about trying to get the most and highest level of density in servers.  To some degree this is an old problem because server manufacturers and people in Data centres have wanted to get as much density as they can out of servers for a long time but some of the new architectural capabilities there are available for instance with some of the things are around ARM and ARM CPUs mean that there is a sort of a new step down in terms of energy usage and a new level of density that we can manage. That does have implications for the operating system though because the operating system has to be hardware aware and it has to be able to boot this new hardware and bring this new hardware online whenever there is a temporary need. So, imagine an internal application, maybe it is a financial application and it runs once a month or runs at a steady state once a month and then suddenly has a big pile of work and it has to work out how to pay all of the employees. So what you want in those circumstances is a hardware level there so it can chug along on 15 servers and then when there is a sudden spike it should be able to double that amount of hardware that is being used. Of course at a hardware level what you want is the hardware not to be using electricity for 29 days of the month and then for 1 day in the month is to bring that hardware up and use the software and then go back to not using that hardware after that temporary work load spike has finished. There are implications around the software around that in being able to boot hardware, manage hardware and understand hardware’s capabilities and that is certainly something that we have been thinking a lot of with Moonshot.

Has cost saving for your clients been a key driver in the developments at Canonical? Big data has been traditionally very expensive to manage so how have you made it cost efficient for your customers?

I think that one of the things that is going on here is that, one of the challenges with big data in the past has been that at a hardware level and a software level it has been quite costly and complicated. At a software level really big data is starting to become much more ubiquitous and Ubuntu has a lot of big data capabilities. We are doing a lot of work on the software to make it really easy to deploy and manage big data capabilities. A lot of the capabilities around cloud computing help to put that management framework in place. So that has been getting easier but you still need a large number of systems that can process all of that big data. So when thinking about how you can really make it cost efficient for an enterprise to manage big data capabilities and how they can use the hardware as efficiently as possible, we talk about how we imagine that a customer’s internal servers are acting. Just like a public cloud. Rather than you just using the Amazon cloud, we take a customer’s internal servers and start treating those like a cloud. Right now we want to use all of our hardware for this big data job or a significant part of the hardware for this big data job and then we are going to use it for something else later. Thinking about that flexibility and that dynamism in the way that customers can use the hardware is a really big thing and ensuring that it is as cost efficient as possible.

Well we have seen a massive increase in the data that businesses are needing to handle but we have also seen this massive increase during a period where the markets have suffered from the global recession has this combination opened up opportunities for a company with cost saving solutions like yours do you think?

I think so, one of the things that was happening before this tough period was that people were very comfortable with the technology that they had and so as they added more data or more processing to their internal systems the balance of risk for them was that it was better to stay with some of the expensive proprietary systems because they understood those systems. Whereas now, both in terms of the rate of growth in big data requirements but also the fact that everyone’s budgets are under so much pressure that the balance of risk favours something with a step function better than what was available before. Open source and from my perspective particularly, Ubuntu allows us to deliver a much more efficient, capable and scalable systems to customers at a tenth of the price of they are paying for the proprietary systems. It does mean that there is new software for them to learn so there is a cost of change but they get a much better function and capabilities at the other end of it. That has had a big impact and I think people have become just more aware of the richness of the solutions that are out there as the big data issues have become more common. That is helping organisations to experiment with some of the open source offerings out there.

If you could pick out the most important benefit to organisations that Ubuntu and Moonshot offer what would they be?

I think that for organisations that are looking for a greater degree of agility in the sort of application development and deployment methods that they are looking for and they really are in a situation where they want to make those great cost savings and efficiency that you can get from a specialised hardware then Moonshot and Ubuntu is a great solution.

Your predictions for the Hyperscale trend over the next few years, where are we going next?

I think I am looking forward to seeing Hyperscale coming much more broadly into the market and some of the capabilities about management and deployment of software becoming much more mainstream because they are applicable and there are lessons that people have learnt in Hyperscale space that will be coming into the main market over the next year or so.

In this podcast we are talking to Marcus Jewell, Head of Western Europe at Brocade who have announced Hyperedge Architecture to enable agile, application-centric campus networks for the mobilized workforce.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Hyperedge Architecture to enable agile, application-centric campus networks for the mobilized workforce. it’s quite a mouthful so Marcus, tells us all about it!

Let me try and simplify because it is quite a big sentence to describe what is actually a simple view. What we are doing here is just listening to the customer base and listening to what clients need. Infrastructures, particularly network architectures have not really evolved in the last 10 – 15 years. They have got quicker and we have added more features but the way that we go about designing them was really designed for what we call the higher clients server architecture which we have all grown up with and most people with be familiar with. Back then, applications were on a local device, normally a PC and you had your main applications, replication and actual storage back on a server. This was usually somewhere in a server farm, a compute farm, or a computer room etc. Now two things have really changed, the first thing is that cloud technology is changing the way that we access our applications. Virtualisation of the applications is happening so you can no longer really point to a single server farm or single computer room to access your applications. At the same time, there has been an explosion in mobility and also the way that we access data. The architectures that exist are not really suitable for mobility so what we are seeing from the client is that they are reluctant to roll out new applications like video. Highly mobile forces with "bring your own device" have really been held back by the network architectures that people have. So Hyperedge has been designed to address that and allow organizations to run their applications to the ends that they wish to, without having to worry too much about the architecture that they have. In a way, this is the first step to another big topic which is software defined networking.

What is the importance to an organization of their getting their network architecture correct?

We need to remove some of the legacy barriers. People spent far too much money and time in our opinion worrying about their network architectures and those network architectures have a lot of legacy protocol. Let’s take one for example; Spanning Tree protocol, which was designed to stop blocks and loops in networks. What that really means is that you waste a number of ports and you have to think about the flow of traffic that you have. By removing that protocol need and the need to manage it, you can actually free up a number of ports and get more density which has a cost reduction straight away. This allows you to run out your applications without thinking about it. Another point is looking to be able to manage domains as a single logical architecture. That would be very handy because at the moment you have to look at managing switches individually so you have to have some very bright people in your organization to think about how to deploy applications. What we want to do now is to deploy applications very quickly and just know that we have a robust infrastructure that can look after them and adapt to what you are doing.

Is it the case the network architectures still lag behind the demands of the work place especially in terms of mobile working perhaps?

I have heard people say "I can do more with my iPad" and "I can do more at home with my corporate infrastructure" and that is the case for nearly every organization and that simply cannot go on. People are demanding that they have the same flexibility for applications in the workplace as they have at home. The reasons why most organizations lag on that are down to three aspects. The first is the cost of replacement of the network. The second is security, with people accessing information and the third one is the sheer complexity of allowing people to work on what we call an open ended architecture. The productivity gains however will outweigh those barriers and so forward thinking organizations are making their changes now. The other big thing is that within most architectures now, the last connectivity point is wireless. People generally do not actually wire their laptop, tablet or whatever they are using to access information the network. There is an access point which then goes back to the network and that has been a huge change to the way that networks are designed.

Obviously mobility has had an impact on security risks but what measures have you taken to ensure the safest possible network architecture?

Brocade itself is not a security organisation so we see ourselves fundamentally as a infrastructure organisation predominantly around the internet protocols and the fibre channel protocols. What we do is adapt to the open standards but with 8021X for authentication. We also partner with organisations such as McAfee, Symantec and Palo Alto with the next generation firewalls to secure these network access points.  We believe that security needs to be looked at as an appliance and not an infrastructure layer and therefore we don’t see ourselves entering that market but just want to work with the best of breed in that market.

There are open standards around the IEEE which allow people things such as authentication but security requirements are very personal to the organisation I mean clearly if you are financial institution or healthcare institution you have a very different security requirement than if you are a retail organisation so what we are seeing now is people being able to tier their security requirements and then buy appliances or effectively software which allows the security at the correct level. Security at hardware level is really overkill for a number of organisations. When we talk about the edge of the network its mainly an access control and appliance device so you can see why people like Palo Alto are really growing very quickly with their virtual approach to security as opposed to a physical approach to security.

What are the main points that distinguish your solutions from other service providers?

The differentiation in our approach is sometimes difficult to explain because it gets very technical very quickly. The network standard is open and therefore as you know any networking device connects to any others so really the innovation we try and bring can be described in three areas:

The first is simplification; allowing people to run applications that they cannot currently run and to simplify their management. A number of switches or single hardware devices can be compared and collected together to be managed by a single IP address. You can put in any policies that you wish to, maybe it’s a floor of a building, a whole building or a whole campus. You can apply the same policies as if it was one big single logical switch without having to make complete configuration changes. The cost savings on that are massive in terms of the time spent just keeping the lights on.

The second is with a Hyperstack and Hyperedge area. We actually now have an upgrade path which means you can now buy in at a very minimal cost with lower features and then bring more features together later by simply implementing a more intelligent switch in the stack. You do not have to replace every switch, you can in fact just bring in one intelligent switch and that populates those features down the line. So we are looking at future investment protection.

The third thing really, is making sure that we have a complete management system which allows people to manage all their flows, not only for those in the edge of the network but also in the core of the network, to have a single view of all of their traffic. This applies not only in the application world but clearly we are the market leader in the storage world as well so we have a single view of the three aspects above. They are the three cornerstones of the simplification and the benefits which we are trying to bring.

Do you keep a close eye on trends and patterns within the ways that businesses are working in order to design solutions for your customers?

We don’t declare quite how much money we spend on gathering that information here but I can assure you that it is in the tens of millions that is invested every year. I think the important thing is that you need to form your own opinions as a manufacturer. We take all the information we are seeing and take all the trends and then we form our own opinions for our five year roadmap. I think the one thing that everyone agrees on is that the explosion of mobility is huge. The mobile devices (whether you are a Samsung user, an Apple user or a Blackberry user) are getting smarter and their capacity to generate data is growing. There is no end in sight for that.

We were just about getting used to video to the desktop and now all of a sudden high definition video is being used and then we are looking at ultra high definition video within the next 2 -3 years. Customers often say that they don’t need that, but you can see how this could change your processes. For instance, ultra high definition video would allow a doctor to diagnose potential skin ailments over the phone. That changes everything, you don’t need to travel to see a specialist anymore.

What we are now also seeing, to coin the phrase, is the 'Internet of Things'.It is believed that by 2020 there will be over 30 billion devices connected to the internet. Over 200 billion devices with intermittent internet activity path. So those requirements are just continuing to explode along with the requirement for data storage. On both sides of our product lines we see the addressable market growing significantly and what clients are crying out for is complexity  removal.

I guess that means that you need to create a product that is flexible and scalable enough to constantly adapt to changes in demand and usage?

We do and it is a challenge because we are bound by the laws of physics and so it amazes me how our IT departments continue to come up with ways of actually bending those rules slightly and getting the most out of them. But, really we cannot move traffic any faster than a light beam or an electron can move down a wire or a fibre channel so we are really really pushing the boundaries of what can be done in a number of ways. As an organisation Brocade is number 1 in the research network so if you consider 'Internet 2' which is basically the new internet built by the research organisation in the US, that is actually based on our technology.

We are well known for stretching the capacity of what can be done in the networking point and now more and more getting that ethos into the end user community and into the enterprise community where we haven’t been seen as strongly over the last 5 or 6  years

On this episode of the ITProPortal Podcast we have another company spotlight for you and we are talking to Roop Singh, VP and Managing Partner at Wipro Consulting services to find out more about what they do, their view on the marketplace currently and some of the innovations they offer clients.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Give us a bit of background and then your own journey to the position that you are in at Wipro now?

I have been a Wipro for 3 years now and I have been running Wipro Consulting in Europe and recently took over consulting globally. Prior to this I was with Capital Market a niche consulting firm in the financial services market and prior to that I was again with Wipro running financial services businesses in Europe.

Well most of the businesses we have been speaking to on this podcast are relatively new but Wipro as a group of companies at least has been around for a long time since 1945 hasn’t it?

That is correct that was when we started off. Thirty years on from that, we moved into the IT part of the business and as a result of IBM in India we found a gap in that market into which we stepped and ever since that we have been on a tremendous journey and today we are providing services globally in roughly about 54 countries worldwide.

Tell us a little bit more about the early days of the company what would Wipro have looked like if we were here talking about it in its first 20 or 30 years of its history?

Wipro has always been very innovative so when the opportunity to work with IBM during the 70s moved out of India due to issues in terms of nationalization and so on Wipro found an opportunity to service the local market in India and subsequently take its services to the global market.  So the approach really has not changed in terms of always being innovative and trying to find where the next set of technologies or trends emerging in the market is going to be. They are also a very passionate organization in relation to employees and structures so individuals who have joined us over the last 15 – 20 years continue to be with the organisation. We have also always been looking at the emerging technologies such as cloud with a raised mobility so; we have always kept at the leading edge to find solutions for our clients. If you go back through the decades you will find that Wipro was smaller and rapidly growing and we are now larger but still aiming to grow in the market.

Well you pride yourself in having members of the team that have many decades of experience has that been an advantage to you do you think?

There is a balance between holding the heritage and culture together whilst bringing in employees that offer new talents and skills. Having employees with 20 years plus of experience and then having no new employees would never be a healthy balance, but I think the balance that we have at Wipro is very useful for us to bring heritage together with fresh skills and capabilities. That is absolutely critical for our organisation.

What are the innovations that Wipro are most proud to be involved with currently?

We can break that down into 2 or 3 things.  Firstly innovation is really to win in the world of constraints. If you look at the world today, whether it is energy or talent capped most of these are getting constrained because of the availability in the market today. The way we want to work with our partners or our customers is to identify what changes are being enabled for the businesses driven by the innovation that is happening in technology. So for example, if you look at visualisation of technology with the scale of simplification with unit costs that are coming down, we are looking at how it can help to reduce IT costs to reduce risks to improve business insights.

If you look at technology today with cloud in collaboration, which actually allows enterprises to really globalize the asset that they have today, you do not need huge capital expenditure to buy platforms today when you can use cloud.

You can also look at innovation in terms of the way technology has been consumerised today. This is through the use of Smartphone’s at enterprise level on platforms such as Google. These are all actually coming in today and we are interested in how they actually benefit the business rather than just having it just in the IT department and not being able to utilize it.  So we look at innovation as an organization perspective from two angles. One is how do you optimize costs and secondly how do you grow your business using emerging technologies and what additional revenue channels can that add.

So as a global company how has the recent recession impacted both upon your business and that of your clients and how has that changed the innovations and the services that you have provided?

Organizations really started to entrench, go back into their shells and just look purely at cost. This is where we actually stepped back and came up with ideas on how you globalize your cost base, which is built up out of technology platforms. As this has moved forward over 2008 and 2009 and so on you can only do so much around cost optimisation. Next is how you actually start looking at what additional markets we can go to. In the Western hemisphere, Europe or America it faces challenges so we identify emerging markets such as Asia or China where the growth is still strong. This where ‘consumerisation’ comes in, i.e. how do you make your platform and your technology available through devices that the emerging technologies have moved one level ahead of and how can you make your revenue streams through different channels to make them available through those emerging technologies. So our whole innovation platform is driven towards the exit from the economic climate for client organisations.

To that end then do you think those challenges put forward by the global recession have actually helped to develop technology in that, technology has been developed to help cut costs? Is there a positive aspect here?

I think it is positive in the way that we use technology has changed. No longer would you want to spend hundreds of thousands and millions of pounds on platforms that you will need to secure and maintain on an ongoing basis. With the recession hitting organisations and the cost coming down they are starting to look at having centers where that can be forwarded to them so cloud for example has helped organizations reduce costs. Mobility has helped them to get cheaper channels to market if you will. So to a certain extent a lot of businesses have started looking at technology as a mechanism to help provide services. Organisations need to become more aware of what the business is doing; it is no longer an isolated department within a large organization like a call centre. What they need to be looking at is how the organisation can use them more effectively to regenerate revenue.  So I believe it has been a positive trend and when we come out of this we will be much stronger.

A new financial year is upon us now and looking forward to 2014 what are the key focuses for you moving forward?

With the recent announcement of Cyprus and the other challenges that Europe is having and also the market in North America’s difficulties I think our focus will continue to be building on helping our customers utilize technology better. Help businesses look for more revenue streams. Partner with our clients more in terms of getting them to understand how business can really benefit from technology plus at the same time bringing then innovative platforms like mobility cloud. The fundamental thing will be to partner with clients and effectively put ourselves in their shoes to think how they are looking at the world and what channels they have to develop to actually grow their business.

What do you see as the technology development that is going to have the biggest impact to business organisations and the way they work in say the next year or two?

I would say collaboration. I think that with the technology enabling you to now have collaborative development globally you do not need to have large technology centres. You can now collaborate with centres across the world to be able to bring your product to market. I think that will have a huge impact in the way organisations not on

In April 2013 Aruba Networks launched a new Enterprise Mobility app that gives total privacy for personal users and total security for enterprise data on the same device at the same time. Chris Kozup from Aruba Networks is here to tell us more.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

First of all tell us more about yourself and give us a bit of background on Aruba Networks?

My responsibility with Aruba is that I am the Senior Director of Marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa based in Paris, France. Aruba has been in the market now for approximately 11 years and our focus as a company is to deliver end to end comprehensive solutions that allow enterprises and service providers to really deliver the holistic mobility experience so everything from the network piece to the security piece and then extending into what we are going to talk about today which is all about mobile applications and pulling them all together to allow our customers to have a comprehensive mobility platform.

Let’s start by defining what we mean by Enterprise Mobility?

It started very much in the vertical segment about 10-15 years ago where you had retailers and logistics companies needing to have extensions to hand held terminals that they were using for various business processes, think about bar code scanning as a great example. As the market progressed and we sold more and more laptops into the market they started to be received by the general worker who became more and more mobile the enterprise until today with the broad variety of tablets and smart phones. What we mean when we say mobility is everything from how that user connects to information and how they access information over a network and how they move between networks. Also how they move between network environments so in the office one day and on the road or in the airport or potentially at home another day. So it’s all the intelligence, software and the management that make that experience robust and reliable but secure and easy for that enterprise to manage.

Tell us about this new product called Workspace then. What were the gaps in your offerings beforehand that led to the development of this product?

That is a good place to start. The market has been talking a lot about BYOD over the past 2 years “Bring your own device” and what we are really seeing within our customer environment is that BYOD for most people essentially means a shift in who is buying the device, so traditionally IT has always bought and given a device to a user when they come into the company. Typically it was a laptop or a Blackberry smart phone. But, increasingly of course what BYOD means is that the user is buying their device and bringing that device into the network. Now the reality is that we are seeing an evolution of the BYOD challenge. It is not just about whom is procuring the device but we are actually seeing a complete shift in user owned or user controlled IT. So, I as an employee am increasingly making my choices around which devices I buy and which devices I use, which networks I connect into and which applications I use. It is a complete reversal to how we have been in the past really, enterprise computing has always been an IT led scenario and now we are seeing the user actually take more and more ownership of the types of services that they are using. This is on the one hand great from the users perspective because they have a lot of freedom, they get to choose the applications and devices that they like but of course for IT this represents some significant challenges. So it’s these challenges around how I secure my network with these employee owned devices coming into my office, and how I manage those devices within the policies and the parameters that my business deems appropriate. Furthermore, how can I ensure that I can manage the applications that these users are selecting for those devices?

So what Aruba is announcing with Workspace is a solution that really expands our portfolio into the mobile device and mobile application management environment. Leveraging what we already have in terms of secure network connectivity and secure wireless network connectivity for smart phones and tablets and other mobile devices but now also moving into the device itself and managing that. This includes the applications that the user is bringing in on those devices as well.

You mention the challenges around users bringing in their own devices to work and you actually quote some interesting research that you carried out showing that 48% of users would feel violated if their employer had access to their personal devices and 54% admitted that they would not report the loss of a mobile device to their employer. What impact did this research have on the development of the new Workspace app?

Essentially what you are seeing in that data is that on the one hand the user is saying that this is my personal device and I do not want anyone to touch my personal information and at the same time they are saying by the way I am not going to tell you if I lose that device which now has corporate information on it. So you can see here the kind of difficulties that this places businesses into. Essentially of course they want these users to be able to use these devices and users want business information and business applications on those devices but they are not always willing to share or keep IT up to date. So this is a challenge of managing personal with the professional lives of employees because let’s face it all of us increasingly in our day-to-day activities blur the lines between professional and personal.

This challenge is what Workspace is ideally aimed to solve and how it does that is it creates a workspace on that device that allows all corporate owned applications to be managed and controlled on that employees personal device. By leveraging the policy intelligence that we have back in the network we can do things like for example, say okay that employee with his own device has now moved into a restricted zone, we know that because we know how and where the device is connecting so we can instruct that device to block the camera on the device for example, or block any sensitive applications that may be running on that device. In that scenario you are seeing complete integration of network intelligence, device intelligence and application intelligence. This is ultimately what Aruba Workspace is all about and how we showcase really the differentiation that we are delivering to the market with this announcement.

Well the network intelligence of this app is very interesting. You describe this app as network fluent. This must have been very important in allowing it to adapt to different networks and the security required on them?

That is exactly right. I will give you another example, with a lot of the Apple IOS devices whether they be tablets or iPhones, they are always looking to update their iCloud backups. Apple introduced iCloud and of course a lot of the contents are constantly being synched back into the cloud. Well, an enterprise may decide that their network is relatively congested on any given day and so can actually free up information into the device and restrict the amount of iCloud back ups that the device is allowed to do at any given point in time. So again you are seeing a great example of how we can understand what is happening in the network environment and then use that intelligence to affect how we authorize as well.

So how are you finding this app being received by organizations? Are they seeing the benefits from it straight away?

Certainly at the moment we are currently in beta testing with the product and what have found is that the product has been very well received and in fact our customers keep coming to us asking if we can support more and more applications with this platform. At the time of launch we are announcing 40 application partners that are working with us within the workspace solution. We are also announcing the introduction of a program that will allow us to bring in more and more application providers and also those applications that our customers may be developing in-house. That allows us ultimately to scale how our customers can manage more and more mobile apps within our environment. I think that this has been the biggest take away from the initial deployment that we have had in place. It is just the need for a broader portfolio of applications that our customers want to manage.

That leads us nicely onto the partner community, was it necessary to offer all those different aspects?

That is absolutely correct it is very important for us to be able to scale this program and make sure that we are making public the interfaces to the workspace application because being able to support a broad variety of applications like customers own internal developments is critical in making sure that this solution is a success.

What sort of processes do you have to go through as a solutions provider to create a product such as this for your customers?

Obviously it starts with being close to your customers and Aruba always prides itself on being very very customer focused and making sure that we are listening and working with our customers on a regular basis to understand what additional requirements and needs they have. Once we start with that kernel of information of course often at times it helps to be able to segment off a specific target team to be able to go and determine the problems and determine the solution and ultimately get to work in terms of engineering development.

The UK Space Agency alongside other space leaders are currently looking for British people, tech start-ups and developers with ideas for consumer technologies and apps that can take advantage of the European satellite infrastructure known as Galileo. We speak here to Tim Just, Head of the Space and Technology strategy board with Paul Batyer from the University of Nottingham to tell us why we should all be getting all excited about this opportunity.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

For those unfamiliar with the Galileo project, give us an overview?

Tim Just

Galileo is the European satellite navigation system equivalent to the US GPS system and it has been in the making for some years now but the final constellation was launched into orbit and we have the first four satellites operating. On 12th March we had the first position fix from those first 4 satellites. It is fantastic news for the UK space industry because the pay loads and a lot of the ground infrastructure were produced and developed here in the UK. This competition is not about the satellites it is about how we use the improved positioning performance we have got from this new space infrastructure.

Tell us more about this competition then, what have those entering got the opportunity to become involved with?

Paul Batyer 

This competition has been running since 2004 and it started life as the Galileo Masters Competition to develop new applications and ideas for businesses that would use Galileo when it came online. The competition is more commonly known as the European Satellite Navigation competition and it is currently entering its 10th year. The competition opened on the 1st April and it closes on the 30th June and it is basically looking for people to come forward with innovative ideas that use satellite navigation for new applications, ideas that can actually be transformed into businesses that will employ people and use the Galileo services and to make money.

Is this competition something that is open to established businesses and organisations as well as individuals with their own ideas as well?

Tim Just/ Paul Batyer 

Yes it is an all-inclusive competition. Something that is assessed through the application and judging process is how much people have actually thought about the business case. There ought to be a business that can be made out of the application, service or product.

What sort of businesses do you envisage having the most to offer to this project and how have the entrants ideas changed over the last 10 years that you have been running it?

Paul Batyer 

Nowadays we are seeing more and more application developers come to the fore whereas in previous years we had seen people coming forward with ideas for products that would be bespoke and using navigation in their design. To give you some examples, the winner of the UK leg of the competition for last year was a company called Igolize. They were a start-up but people who had experience in creating successful businesses in the past had started it. Their idea was like a paradigm shift in terms of the whole navigation and location direction thing whereas they are looking at time travel or travel time i.e. how long does it take you to get from A – B by using a particular mode of transport following a particular kind of scenario. They are getting lots of interest from companies who offer services like Rightmove looking at a location of a house close to certain amenities.

Other people who have entered have included SMEs or even some larger companies. For example, I was telling you that this kind of competition started in Europe a good few years ago and there are now about 23 regions across Europe that participate in their own regional challenges.  We actually operate the UK challenge but there have been companies for example, like GMV from Spain who entered the Spanish leg of the competition a couple of years ago. They went on to win the national competition with an application that was helping to locate people who had been stuck in disaster situations where it helped to guide sniffer dogs to people who were in trouble. Another example is the runner up in the competition from last year who had an idea around precision sports. His application is basically looking at the performance of athletes by using the technology in tandem with other things to improve the performance of soccer players and athletes.

Tim Just

The beauty of this competition is that it is ultimately an ideas competition and if you have got a good idea of how you can use satellite navigation and you have got a good idea of how you are going to turn that into a business we can help. In the first round of the application process you will get your idea validated and there is a panel of experts who will review that and if you make it to the final you get a chance to meet them. If you are the successful winner of the UK leg you get a business incubation support package and some cash to get the company going which is usually about £5,000. You also get some patenting advice and the knowledge you need to get the company going. Also you get a huge amount of visibility and recognition in the community. To help you take it to the next stage it could be an investor or it could be an industrial partner. It could access some of the governments support infrastructures we have, such as the newly created Satellite applications catapult centre or the business incubator program so that you can turn your idea into a business.

So it is exciting stuff to be getting involved with isn’t it? Do you think here in the UK we are making the most of the Satellite based data and applications that are available to us?

Tim Just

We are starting to and I think we are leading the way certainly in Europe and possibly in the world. The UK has some of the highest ideas and applications within this competition across all the home and European regions. Also, the government is starting to recognise the importance of supporting both start up companies and bigger companies that are changing direction to make use of this technology. We have become very location dependant in our daily lives and we are very dependent upon space technology but don’t actually realise it. Something like 60% of all apps now use location information within some form of how they operate. The majority of searches are location sensitive these days. We often take it for granted that satellite navigation is there and available for us to use. What we want to do is get people to recognise that potential, recognise the improvement in the infrastructure that is coming with Galileo and how we can do more commercial things or just think about how it could improve society by being more location aware in what we do.

Galileo really is seen by Europe, as the long-term solution for location-based technology isn’t it?

Tim Just

Whilst we are in the process of launching the first Galileo program constellation we are already thinking about what improvements can be made to make it more affordable, more efficient and if necessary to improve its accuracy for the next generation of satellites. We have seen a real commitment across Europe that this is a long-term infrastructure program.

Paul Batyer 

Of course it is not just about Galileo it is about the kind of improvements coming forward in GPS and the other global satellite navigation systems that are coming online so now the chip sets that are available within your mobile phones will already pick up the Russian system, GLONASS as well and there is the Chinese system coming on line called Beidou. Pretty soon there will be so many satellites that we can lock on to in order to improve the quality of our positioning. It’s about using the positioning sensors and navigation sensors within the phone or within the device in tandem with other sensors as well. There might be the camera inside your phone and for example the winner of the UK leg of the competition 2 years ago was a company called Instantview and what they did was design an app for a smart phone which allows you to take a picture of an incident with your vehicle and that goes directly to the insurance company to validate your claim. There is a lot interest in that business and there is a whole support structure that is getting stronger and stronger in the UK to help to develop these businesses even further.

The creation of the Satellite Navigations catapult centre in Harwell are working in partnership with centres like Grace at the University of Nottingham to give support to businesses to help them get to that next stage in development, so it s really an exciting time at the moment.

For anyone listening who might have a great idea and want to enter this competition to submit a business idea to utilise the Galileo technology. Give us some good inside tips on how to make our entries noticed?

Paul Batyer 

First of all the database closes on the 30th June if you are applying from the UK. The UK leg is a really good regional challenge and as Tim has already said I think you can win a package which is worth about £10,000. But you will have multiple chances to win in this competition. So it is not only the regional challenge there is a special topic prize that you can go for as well; If you go for the European space agency special topic prize you can win more cash and you can win up to 10,000 Euros and you can get some kind of incubation as well. Then having entered into the competition you can go in for the main prize which gives you 20,000 Euros plus some incubation and so on. One of the innovations that we have in the UK is that the validation phase is built into the submission process meaning you will get actually the opportunity to get advice on your idea when you put it into the database.  The earlier you put it in and the earlier you start the process the better off you will be and in the UK we offer surgeries at events around the country which will be publicised through the www.grace.ac.uk website where you can come and meet the business, accountancy, IP and technical experts. There is a lot of value in there that you can extract to maximise your chances of winning and also as Tim said it is the exposure to the network that’s so valuable. We really rely on the hub of experts and the support that people like Tim give to this competition. As an entrant, you have an opportunity to interact with these guys and the networks that they are connected to.

Tim any advice that you can add?

Tim Just

I think there are probably two bits of advice that I would give the first is that it is not just an ideas competition it is a business competition so a little bit of time and expense and thinking about what the market might be will help. It doesn’t have to be fine detail but just a little bit of thought about what the business might look like and secondly, what sort of technologies we are looking at. We see a huge range of ideas in mobile phone apps but the Internet of things is coming and many of those things need to be location aware so there could be a real opportunity within the Internet of things in this competition.