The ITProPortal Podcast

Silicon Mechanics is a leading manufacturer of Rackmount servers, storage and HPC solutions aimed at the medical, lab, university and research sectors. They have just released a new product solution called Knome and the scenarios it is designed for contain some interesting insights for all organisations that deal with Big Data. Last time we spoke to Silicon mechanics on this podcast earlier in the year we found out just how much hard drive space the human genome takes up so always a fascinating conversation!

Tim Groen, Strategic Account Manager at Silicon Mechanics joins us to tell us more.

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Give us an overview of what Knome is and what lead you to develop it?

Knome is a clever play on “Genome” of course and their goal was to build a complete solution not for performing the G nome sequencing but once you have that G nome sequencing managing what you do with it. They developed an application that actually updates the entire Genome with the known research to date on a given set of genes in that sequence. So, for example it will automatically sort through your Genome data and say this person has blue eyes and then it will link that to academic research that confirms that yes this gene does indicate blue eyes - for example.

Genome research is a key aspect of the future of the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical research and so Knome came to Silicon Mechanics to develop a black box solution that would turn a Genome sequence into this useable information. One of their market advantages with this product is to address the privacy and security concerns that are prevalent in medical lab environments because obviously the human Genome is confidential data and so you can’t upload that to the cloud in a situation where you would risk exposing any of that private consumer data. There are also logistical issues associated with possibly moving this type of data outside of the lab environment in which it begins.

It can take weeks to upload a given Genome sequence because these could be multiple terabits of data so it is actually faster and cheaper to send a truck full of hard drives all the way from New York to LA rather than upload a single Genome onto the cloud via gigabit. So we needed something that was in the lab, to which they could upload the data quickly and they could keep it private and secure and then of course it has to be useable for the customer. The other aspect of our design was to make it quiet and to make it easy. We need to consider that our clients are lab scientists and not necessarily computer science engineers or IT professionals that want to mess with computer hardware so we had to make it an “appliance.”

Give us an idea of the sort of applications Knome will be used for and what sort of organisations arte likely to take advantage of this technology?

This takes a Genome sequence and makes it consumable by a non technical researcher so certainly if you are a PhD in Genome research and Biology you can probably look at a Genome sequence and understand what is going on, but someone like me cannot. So this appliance make it easy to read the sequence if you will. It gives you that annotation and tells you this what part of the Genome relates to which characteristic. Obviously we are talking about a sequence that defines an entire human being so it is very complicated and we don’t understand everything, but it is important to be able to recognize quickly what we know and what we don’t know and by running a sequence through this appliance you can quickly get the real information that you need to continue your research.

The amount of data that this kind of research generates must be one of the main challenges when designing any data handling technology, this solution uses 45 applications all running simultaneously so give us an idea of how you configured the systems to deal with that volume of data and tasks.

This is sort of an eco-system of multiple applications running beneath the surface. So for the user it is an appliance, you have an input of a sequence and you have an output of the annotated data but underneath the hood there are multiple applications performing multiple functions and really the end user doesn’t need to see those. These applications are running on a high performance computer cluster, which we call HPC. Each HPC involves linking heterogeneous servers and storage through different types of hardware into a unified system that is generally managed by software of some kind. In this case Knome selected open source software called Lustre that provides hardware clustering capability to unify multiple hardware components into a unified HPC cluster. This enables all 45 or more applications to run in harmony without the customer or the user even realizing it. What the customer will see is the Knome software on top that makes it really easy to use.

To design this system we really had to start from the ground up because there were a number of applications and each of them had their own performance criteria and requirements and we had to look at each one and make sure that we were building in enough performance at all levels.

The performance levels can be multi tasking for example one application might use more CPU, one might need more RAM, one might need more storage and so we had to really perform a thorough cost analysis and make sure that we were putting money and resources into the things that mattered to make this appliance perform extremely well.

You have a partnership with Intel, how does that relationship work when developing technology like this?

Intel has been a major partner for Silicon Mechanics. They are clearly a leader in technology generally and certainly in CPU’s. Knome had been a customer of Silicon Mechanics and they had been purchasing servers from us but Silicon Mechanics had really been growing into more of a solutions orientated company. Knome had really decided, from their won independent conversations to use Intel on this next generation. It became clear that Knome needed the complete solution not just CPU vendor and so Intel recommended that Knome work with Silicon Mechanics and so it was a great harmony where all three of the companies were already working together and this project really helped us come together with a common goal and develop this unique product.

Given that there are so many choices of CPU’s even within Intel’s product line we had to achieve a few different goals. We had to create a product that would stay current for years to come and we also had to make sure that it would match the performance criteria, the power usage criteria, and the pricing criteria that we had also previously established. We built it from the ground up with multiple options and we had to approach it with a very broad net and try a lot of different CPU options and run the pricing, power numbers, performance estimates, set up lab environments and test and test until we came out with a really good bundle of options that still gives the customer flexibility but also make it easy to deploy this appliance.

How can the challenges that you have overcome here and the solutions you have employed be applied to other types of industries?

A lot of people talk about clouds and private clouds and a cloud is basically an HPC cluster and when you rent a cloud service you are simply renting a portion of another person’s HPC cluster so it is really a question of scale and if you are on a big enough scale it makes sense to have your own HPC cluster instead of going onto the cloud and once you have the HPC cluster and in this case we have customized a very specific bundle of components into a very specific function but the nature of this technology is that it could be applied for many uses for example in manufacturing you could design moulds and you could design aerodynamics and water dynamics . We have had Wall Street type of customers who have been using HPC to do high frequency training. We are doing a lot more pharmaceutical research .We are doing a lot more with Government. We are selling into Universities and labs around the country doing all kinds of research because this HPC cluster gives you a base framework from which you can really do anything that you could do in the cloud or any kind of product. We can customize it to meet your exact needs so really this type of template can be applied to any industry under the sun.

ARM is a Cambridge based technology company with a long history in the UK and abroad. They design the technology that sit’s at the heart of many advanced digital products from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. ARM has recently unveiled the findings of a new comprehensive report by the Economist Intelligence Unit entitled The Internet of Things Business Index: A quiet revolution gathers pace. The report, sponsored by ARM, found that 75 percent of C-suite business leaders are actively researching opportunities created by the Internet of Things.

Ian Ferguson , VP of Segment Marketing at ARM is here to talk us through the findings.

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Ian, why is the Internet of Things so important for ARM to be considering?

Firstly because we don’t make chips and because we don’t make platforms the decision makers in these vertical markets are quite a lot of steps down the value chain for us and one of the opportunities we had with the economist was to actually to interview C level executives from a vast range of markets like energy space, health care infrastructure, financial services, manufacturing, construction, real estate and so on. A technology company like us we would not without the help of the economist been able to find reasons for natural conversations with some of those verticals.

The economist also reached out to quite a few regions across the world. The split was about 30% from Europe, 30% from North America, 30% from Asia with the remaining 10% Latin America and Africa, so a pretty diverse set of people. Reaching out to real estate and construction for example would be harder for us to reach out to on our own so that was one of the reasons.

Arm is a billion dollar company but we are not well known outside our area of success so this was a great opportunity to communicate on a big scale. Especially given the fact that we are all about providing our technology to our partners who are the primary brands like Samsung to name one. We are sort of behind the scenes trying to put our goodness into chips but maybe if the survey had gone out to some of these other people I don’t think necessarily it would have as much of a response than if it came from someone like the economist.

Why is it that some sectors and industries have been faster to take up the principle of the Internet of Things than others that might well be able to apply the technology just as effectively?

My surprise was that before the survey, I would have said that my own industry with IT techie people like myself would have been the first ones to embrace the Internet of Things.

I view it as connected things to the internet whether that is small sensors or gateways so at some point if we go back to the original definition by Mr Ashton when he was at Proctor & Gamble it should be that any of those sensors can talk to anything else so cars talking to street lights, heart rate monitors talking to schools for example.

Actually what this study showed was that the first places where these connected devices are being deployed in enterprises is in manufacturing and the second was actually in construction and real estate. My sense from talking to a few people in those industries is that there are very obvious benefits to deploying these sensors. We have actually seen in manufacturing the use of sensors to give better ground level control of where resources’ are and managing how to deploy and manage equipment more efficiently such as within food plants for instance.

What the study also showed was although there were about 75% of the C level executives having very detailed discussions about Internet of Things, they were still wrestling with what the ROI would be on that particular investment. But in manufacturing at least we are seeing a very clear benefit for deploying these sensors to actually improve the cost of manufacture. I think some of these other industries are looking at areas where there may not be quite such an obvious return on base costs initially and that is why those people might in a more research kind of mode towards the Internet of Things as opposed to actually starting to deploy systems.

One of the things that this survey showed was actually 1 in 4 of the manufacturers interviewed were already deploying a network of connected things.

Aside from the measurement of ROI, what are the other barriers that are preventing some industries getting to grips with the Internet of Things?

I think there are and the survey threw up a few and then one which we have been wrestling with at ARM also.

Some enterprises are saying, yes this sounds very good but we just don’t have the right expertise inside the company or can’t find the right people. The other way of saying that is that, this technology for some people is just too challenging to connect up and that really for those wave of adopters to take it in addition to their need for ROI it actually needs to be easier to connect it all together.

We have seen this with some of our trials with the Cambridge Campus that you mentioned earlier at our headquarters. We have started to put in intelligent lighting systems into the car parks and sensors inside our conference rooms to manage temperature and the lighting system so that in periods of inactivity things power down and when people are there the lights are. We are working on the next phase now where you will have real time available to your conference room based on those sensors so even the room might have been booked but if that meeting has not taken place or they have left early there will be more real time use of those resources. It is not just something you plumb together easily right now so I think there is a hesitation about the technology level.

Another barrier that I was surprised to find didn’t really come out as much as I was thought was around security. There are some places where it is an enclosed system. So, if you’re a Formula 1 team for example, you might have a lot of money to invest in technology and you have a lot of people with very high security around that network. If you are in some of these other industries where your speciality is something other than connecting stuff up I think people are going to become more concerned about the security of that network. Obviously it will depend on the types of things on that network and how important that data is but I predict that is going to be looming as a fairly major issue in the future.

The third is really around connectivity. As I have said the Internet of Things is really about connecting to everything. There is a lack of common frameworks, the joke is that the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them and I think in the IoT area there is a lot of work that still needs to go between all of the industries to actually make it easier to plug and play pieces of technology together. It is probably easy to connect stuff together if it is all from one manufacturer or all from one service. But really for IoT to really get to that massive deployment vision of ‘anything talking to anything’ there is going to need to be some work about reliance on frameworks and how devices communicate, authenticate and send and receive data.

We are currently seeing big debates between governments, energy companies and business on the costs of energy bills within industry. Some of the principles of the Internet of Things could contribute some technology solutions that could lead to some significant savings in the future?

The other thing that came out of the study was that in addition to cost savings a number of the people surveyed saw that there were opportunities to generate new revenue, or improve customer service. One element is within the very high costs in manufacturing like the provision of energy from oil and gas It is very easy to see deployment of technology having a very quick impact on being more efficient with what you have got and we are starting to see the early work where connected things could add new services.

In San Francisco where I sit right now a lot of the parking meters are being connected to a smart network so you can actually book the space if it is available over the phone. That is an efficiency plan so people are saying we can analyze those spaces available, if there are actually less spaces available in a particular area because of an event they might start to put the prices up for instance and there is much more useful analytics you can do on that car parking information to cite one example.

We are also seeing technology being deployed in the insurance industry and you may have heard of in the UK http://www.drivelikeagirl.com where you can have a device put into your car to improve insurance premiums based on your driving patterns. There is a little bit of that in the US coming on now as well, some of the biggest insurance companies over here are doing that and that then throws up the next wave of discussion around who owns that data.

I think in the case of http://www.drivelikeagirl.com where it is their own device but in your car, they are going to say that data is their data and it is probably hard to argue with that. I think that there are going to be other cases where the data that comes out of the connected things like a heart rate monitor for example, where I am probably going to think that it is my data and I would want to control that as opposed to it being aggregated and controlled by others in the cloud.

We talk about a lot here on ITProPortal.com about the use of Big Data and how organisations utilize it and this represents the interface between big data and the customer at the other end. With that link developing how do you see that changing the business landscape into the future?

Our phrase is big data starts with little data. From sensors in forests which send data saying we are on fire come and dowse our flames to data coming out of medical devices, parking meters and street lights. I think the Internet should be about making our lives better and making things more efficient. But it has to be done in a way where that data is being shared in a controlled way from out of those small micro controllers and sensors. At ARM we are wrestling with the technology challenges and we think it is still a massive puzzle and that we are a very small part of the larger overall Internet of Things as our technology and that of our partners integrates more onto platforms and software.

The main area of focus for us is security and building the right products. Also trying to align on frameworks on that communication path and if we can have control of the data from the user as opposed to that data being controlled by the cloud players I think that vision of us having more efficiency around ourselves and being more efficient in terms of saving planet resources through the better use of precious resources like electricity is what we are trying to achieve.

Aruba Networks have launched what they are calling a next generation cloud WIFI solution and Chris Kozup is here to tell us more about the product and what has driven them to develop it.

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Chris, start of then by telling us about the background as to why you felt it necessary to develop this?

Aruba has always had the goal of providing the most flexible architecture options to our customers and this announcement really is continuing with that tradition. Essentially what we have noticed over the past year is that our customers continue to build more flexibility in to how they allow the workplace to take shape. We see almost in some respects disaggregation of the workplace where employees can either be at the headquarters, at a branch office, their home office or they could be on the road. This is how they keep the concept of broader mobility but behind the scenes what is required to enable that is really different types of architecture. On the one hand organizations are looking for flexibility in the types of wireless architecture that they are able to deliver, but on the other hand they are also looking for a more flexible cost models as well. So we saw this trend towards the need for this flexibility in architecture and also at the same time the general readiness I would say of organizations to actually belt and brace the software service model. Aruba looked at these trends and decided it would be in our customer’s best interest to move all of the management functionality into the cloud. The difference that this makes for our customers is they can manage the breadth of their working environment whether it is a home or branch or corporate office. They can manage all of this from a single point but the management is actually housed and maintained in the cloud and they can access that simply through a web browser. This ultimately becomes a service that they pay for as opposed to equipment that they buy and deploy on premise

What sort of businesses and working practices have you aimed this solution at?

We have seen a lot of interest in what I would call the extended branch type of enterprise. I think here of retailers as an example, or even financial services, banking and insurance types of organizations. Anyone who has a large number of small footprint branch offices where it becomes quite costly for them to either deploy solutions in those branches or have professional IT folks located in those branches. This is really a prime solution for them because they can first of all drop ship the access points directly to those branches, they can be plugged in by non IT savvy professionals and the access point will find its way back to the cloud, download its configuration settings and then become completely manageable as part of the broader infrastructure of that organization. So we have seen a lot of interest in that extended branch but we also see a lot of marketing opportunities in the mid size and in some cases the small to medium sized businesses as well. These are really both types of organisations that certainly have demands for wireless connectivity and robust IT communication demands but don’t always have the IT staff in house or flexible options in terms of how they pay and fund these types of infrastructure build outs.

Also within education, we see a lot of initiatives in the UK and across Europe in terms of provisioning schools with more digital learning tools like tablets and Smartphones and all those types of devices obviously require connectivity. Once again, we have the same scenario where the school doesn’t necessarily have the expert IT staff in house so looking for this type of solution is the right size for their type of organization.

We have spoken a lot on this podcast about the trend of IT departments farming out services to third party providers – is that what has driven the demand for this as well?

Yes and in fact it is very much in line with some of the research that Aruba had conducted earlier in the year which definitely points to exactly what you say which is organizations will rely more and more on outsourced and third parties for their IT expertise so there is certainly the human aspect of that where they may look to partners for that skill source but I see that the work that we as a vendor can do is to make the service much easier to consume and that is what this cloud solution does it obviously makes management an ongoing operation of your wireless network that much more simple because you don’t have to deploy on premise equipment and you have an interface such designed really for getting started with the basics but then also can grow with you as you look for more and more deeper knowledge and capabilities within the tool.

Is it purely down to reducing costs why businesses are increasingly going out to third party providers or is it mainly around skills availability within their business?

I think that cost is obviously a factor and obviously if we can build in more flexible cost models shifting away from upfront capital expenditures and moving more into ongoing operational expenditures that is attractive to a lot of organizations because they can budget more effectively for that.

I would also say driving towards just the idea of having consistent wireless connectivity across the broad range of places where the employees would be doing work, the driver for this is enterprises desire to make sure that all of its services and all of its information is as pervasive as possible. So this type of solution allows organizations to meet the demands provision and supply services across any location but in a way that it is far more flexible from a cost perspective and also allows them to manage it more effectively with fewer man hours than what may have been required with previous solutions.

The reliability of businesses connectivity is paramount isn’t it? I know your channel partner PacketLogix ran a lot of beta testing on this for you but talk us through the testing that a product like this goes through before it goes out to market?

The first step is to really understand the needs of our customers and Aruba has an extensive community what we call the ‘airheads’ community and this is really the primary form where all of our customers have access to shared technical experience. They can ask questions and provide feedback and it effectively creates a closed loop process for the company allowing us to engage with the customers and ensure they have the information they need. It also serves as an effective platform to make sure that we are identifying the pay points that our customers are to provide an end solution delivered to market. That is really the first step of course, once we have determined the initial feature functionality we obviously make sure that it fulfills the needs of the market and that we are ahead of the competition.

We then take the tools out to beta, in conjunction with partners and a handful of customers to get real world types of experience with the solution. Once that is complete we go to market in full.

Well, we can’t talk about anything to do with connectivity without the big ‘S’ word, Security. What have you built into this product to supply a secure network for your clients?

I am glad that you brought that up, obviously whenever we talk about moving anything into the cloud then security is obviously very important. Aruba is working with leading industry standards like Trustee to ensure that the whole security framework solution is certified so that we can meet the data protection and privacy policies that is obviously our requirement as part of EU law. We take security very seriously Aruba the company has really built its whole heritage and foundation on security and certainly this solution is no exception to that.

What would your advice to IT managers be when they are considering a solution like this, maybe those that might be worried about relinquishing control to a third party?

I would first qualify that there is really very little relinquishing at all that happens here. Ultimately into the cloud is really just a management data and first of all there is no traffic or security details of any sort as part of the cloud it is purely just the management of the access point infrastructure and that management is something they control completely. If anything what the solution is giving them is actual greater efficiency. Instead of going to multiple management consoles or managing different types of networks that may be in different parts of the world, they can actually build a consistent framework for how they monitor, manage and do things like firm updates, configuration changes and reporting.

In fact the biggest requirement from our customers is for recording PCs by compliance for example, especially in retail environments. This type of solution really brings all of that information into a central point which they have sole control over but it allows them to be much more efficient and effective in terms of how they operate and maintain their network environment.

BYOD is a subject that we discuss here a lot on ITProPortal especially around addressing some of the reliability problems around connecting a range of mobile devices that might be switching from one network to another. I understand that you have built a clever solution to that within this product?

What is encompassed here with this solution is the capable client match. First of all it is intelligence that is built into the top range of our access point portfolio. If you think of it this way, when a user walks into a building and they have their device in their pocket or even in their hand that device is going to connect to the first access point that it sees within that facility. As the user makes their way to sit down at the desk they actually could be located on the other side of the building but that device is still holding onto that connection that it made at the first point where it entered the building. Aruba client match allows us to take a system level view and make sure that clients are connected into the access level points that are closest to them making sure that they have the most optimal performance possible. Again it is another example of the work that Aruba has done to really make sure that we understand what occurs in real life deployments in organizations to make sure that we can optimize for some of those challenges.

Technology and working practices are constantly changing and developing and obviously companies are going to want to invest into a system that will cope with those changes, so how scalable is this solution?

This is the beauty of this type of solution is that it is really infinitely scalable. Ultimately organizations have the flexibility to scale up or in essence to buy another access point into their cloud if you will, or even scale down. Both of which may be equally of concern to many customers. The fact that all the management and capability services are hosted in the cloud means that we are obviously building on a very robust network of cloud providers and global data vendors with a presence in all major regions that allow us to either scale up or scale down based on the requirements of the customer. Again flexibility being a key point here for a viable proposition that cloud offers.

Most of us are familiar with emailing and IM'ing on the move , but mobile working has been a real growth area within organisations in recent times and Virgin Media Business have just announced the results of a study into flexible working. Duncan Higgins, Director of Product and Marketing at Virgin Media Business tells us more about their recent connected collaboration research.

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Tell us then Duncan about the background to this study and why it was important for you to research this subject in such detail?

Flexible working and enabling employees to work in different ways is one of the fundamental things that we hear is an emerging macro trend. What we were wanting to understand is where the industry already was in terms of adoption of that behaviour and what was inhibiting the adoption of this new way of working. We spoke to the 500 UK CIO’s and business leaders, 70% of whom believed that flexible working had absolutely driven productivity benefits not only for the employees but also for their companies. But, only 48% of them today were actually in a position to make that happen and empower their employees to work in that way. So, facts that were interesting to understand as we talk about the broader of context of flexible working.

So what is standing in the way of these businesses offering this flexible working option to their workforces?

One of the main concerns when we spoke to the CIO’s that kept on coming up was the issue of security. 79% of the CIO’s said that security remains their number one worry. It is an understandable concern amongst the CIO’s but actually the way in which the network and the telecoms partners can work with those CIO’s to overcome those issues means that it actually need not be such a worry. There are solutions out there that actually can enable the corporate data networks and the security that is required for them, whilst also enabling the flexibility that their employees and their organizations are looking for as we move forward.

Is it perhaps an issue around awareness around some of the solutions available to businesses to overcome these challenges?

I think that there is a mixture. There is an understanding across the CIO community that things may exist and I think there is some degree to which particularly as you get into the SME segment that perhaps those solutions are perceived not to be fit for purpose for their budgets. I think there are absolutely solutions out there that are fit for purpose for the small organization. But I think it is our job as a telecoms partner to educate businesses and work with them on understanding how they can bring flexible working to life in their organisations. Also to really make them take that step together rather than us just say “we have a box that we can sell you, you go for it.” We need to work with them to bring them on that journey to what they want both their organizations and employees to be able to achieve moving forward.

Could some of the barriers actually be around CIO’s wanting to keep a close eye on what their employees are working on and where and also perhaps the wish of employees to keep their work and home life very separate?

What we found is that CIO’s actually believe that implementing a flexible working policy would reduce absenteeism and engagement would actually go up. It was found that they imagined that their staff would be happier and more productive if they were given the opportunity to work from home. This is in line with another report which came from the Trade Union Congress confirming that the amount of people working from home has increased by 113% over the last 5 years and there has been an increase in productivity from those organizations that have enabled that. So, on the part of CIO’s we are not seeing any reticence around trust in their employee workforce to do the right thing when they are at home. Similarly employees find that the great thing about flexible working can mean being in the office and then going home and switching things off is their preferred way of working. But for some this gives them the flexibility to fit their personal and work life together and to enable them to do what they need to do across their whole life in the most suitable way for them. It can actually be a win win for both employees and employers if it is done in the right way and if it is done with the right contract between the employers and the employee is set out as it is in most cases when flexible working is suited.

What are the things that you advise businesses to start looking at when starting to implement flexible working solutions for workforces?

The critical things are to really make sure that they actually understand what they are trying to achieve. There is a lot of talk at a high level about flexible working but in reality each individual company and organization will have its own requirements based around the type of workforce that it has and the size of the workforce that it has. It will need to consider carefully both its connectivity requirements and how that is best managed and whether it is across mobile, fixed or both and they will need to think about the security elements as we have already discussed. They will need to think about how it creates applications that work across different access technologies that are accessible from anywhere so that the end user or the employee is not hindered by the fact that they are working from home, i.e. they still have exactly the same access they would have if they were sitting in the office. There are lots of things that the CIO would need to consider but the critical thing always to bear in mind is what the outcome they are trying to achieve actually is. It is only useful in so far as it brings benefits to both the employee and the employer and there is no single blueprint for that because each organization is different.

Share with us an example of a business that has been transformed by employing these practices into their working practices?

One of the great successes I would say is Virgin Media Business. A few years ago as Virgin Media were relatively “20th Century” in a lot of the way things were done in the office and flexible working was not necessarily as instituted as it is now. By bringing applications onto Smartphone’s, Tablets, personal PC’s and giving people that flexibility and giving people access to the corporate network from locations other than from the office. We have moved to an environment where productivity increased and employee engagement has gone up as a result of implementing some of these policies. We have still got work to do, as with all of these things there will always be a transition and an ongoing process but in terms of living and buying into the things that we are selling and it has shown a great effect.

How do you see the adoption of flexible and remote working taking off over the next couple of years. Can you see this changing the working culture here in the UK?

I think that this is absolutely not a fad and I think the desire for employee flexibility and for people to be able to work in ways which suit their life is something that we are only going to be seeing more of in the future. Particularly as the evidence shows that an organisation’s productivity continues to grow then this is not a tradeoff between productivity and employee flexibility they are in a correlated positivity with each other. We see that employees who are given this flexibility do offer more discretional effort and do put more into their job because they are frankly happier and more engaged. There are obviously some high profile cases where movements away from home have been put in place but I think for the majority of organisations moving to this flexible working is something we will see more of and I think it will span all sizes and all segments of organizations. I think the really good thing is that it will be really good for business.

A line in your study says that 40% of those you studied had overheard their workforce complaining about being tied to a desk; especially in creative industries being able to move around with your work has got to be a good thing hasn’t it?

I think there is always a place and time for brainstorming and getting together but even with virtual white board etc you need not necessarily all be present in the same location. Allowing people working in an environment that is conducive to them does create a psychologically better environment for better quality thinking whether it is in a true creative industry or just a job that requires some creative thinking - then that can only be a good outcome.

In this video, Tom Salkield, Director of Professional Services at NTT Com Security outlines the key findings of a new research report commissioned by NTT Com Security.

NTT Com Security's global research covered 700 organisations in the UK, USA / Canada, Germany, Nordics, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong. The study shows that while over a third (36 per cent) of UK companies have adopted cloud in the last one to two years, almost a quarter (22 per cent) have yet to adopt cloud technology. This is compared to an average of 14 per cent globally.

Although just 10 per cent of UK respondents have already moved the majority of data and services into the cloud, 42 per cent will transition it in the next two years. Yet, 30 per cent of UK respondents admitted that they would never move their data, a figure only topped by the Nordics with 42 percent.

Decision makers in UK organisations admit that issues around data protection, legislation and regulation are responsible for cloud computing being adopted more slowly than they would like.

While just over a quarter (26 per cent) say these issues have been the 'primary reason' for slow adoption, 31 per cent admit they have 'significantly' slowed adoption and 29 per cent say they have affected it 'to some extent' – a total of 86 per cent against an average of 76 per cent across all of the other countries surveyed.

At a global market sector level, Financial Services (36 per cent), Petrochemicals (39 per cent) and Healthcare (27 per cent) organisations are most affected by legislation and regulation issues, citing them as the primary reason for slow cloud take-up.

The report also revealed that all organisations fit into Five Cloud Personas defined by their levels of enthusiasm for cloud computing and the extent of their adoption. Ranging from Controllers at one end of the scale, distinctive by their lack of cloud enthusiasm, the five personas also include Acceptors, Experimenters, Believers, and Embracers who are the most cloud enthusiastic and have benefited most from its use.

The Five Cloud Personas

1.) The Controller – least likely to be using cloud, wedded to data centres and unlikely to experiment with new and emerging technologies. Controllers see no financial gain and cloud is not part of their IT strategy.

2.) The Acceptor – likely to have adopted cloud in the past two years and to adopt technology where there is a clear business case. Cloud is not central to their IT strategy and they are unlikely to see financial benefits.

3.) The Experimenter – likely to experiment with new technologies and to move the majority of services into the cloud in the next year. Used in half or more departments and a quarter of budget is dedicated to cloud.

4.) The Believer – very likely to actively seek out new technologies and to have moved the majority of services into the cloud in the next year. Critical to the deployment of services with a third of budget allocated to it.

5.) The Embracer – has been using cloud for 3+ years, very active in seeking out new technologies, dedicates over half its budget and is very likely to see an increase in revenues and profits from cloud.

Key statistics: Country differences

Organisations in the USA/Canada are the most cloud enthusiastic, with 28 per cent saying they have already moved the majority of their data and services into the cloud, followed by Germany (24 per cent).

When it comes to innovation, USA/Canada also stands out, with 59 per cent actively seeking out and experimenting with new and emerging technologies, followed by Singapore (41 per cent), Japan (26 per cent), Germany (21 per cent) and the UK (20 per cent).

Cloud adoption has increased in the last two years, with 36 per cent of UK companies indicating deployment within that time-frame, followed by Germany (34 per cent), the USA/Canada and Singapore (31 per cent each), Japan (25 per cent), and Hong Kong and the Nordics (18 per cent each).

While on average less than a quarter (22 per cent) of IT budget is dedicated to cloud versus a global average of 29 per cent, UK businesses are still enjoying the financial benefits – 40 per cent acknowledge an increase in revenue and 23 per cent an increase in profits from cloud computing.

Over 40 per cent of USA/Canada respondents say cloud is 'critical' to how they deploy and maintain services, compared to 32 per cent in Singapore, 29 per cent in Germany and 9 per cent in the UK.

Singapore (45 per cent) places most emphasis on 'cost' as a factor when considering deploying a new service or changing the delivery of an existing service. Hong Kong, however, places most emphasis on 'security' (38 per cent), followed by the Nordics (36 per cent) and UK (33 per cent).

Since the launch of their 4G services two months ago, O2 and Vodafone have more than doubled their mobile Internet speeds in London and surrounding areas.

According to thousands of independent scientific tests by RootMetrics across the capital, Vodafone has the edge on O2, recording download speeds of 9.5 Mbps and upload speeds of 4.7 Mbps (upload) compared to O2’s 7.1Mbps (download) and 3.7 Mbps (upload).

Bill Moore CEO and President of Rootmetrics joins us to discuss the findings in more detail.

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

Bill, lets start then with an overview of what Rootmetrics do and what your mission is?

First and foremost we are the voice of the consumer. For us, it is about consumer advocacy and taking a look at the major operators in London from a consumer perspective. We take ‘off the shelf’ Smartphone’s that we buy at the retail stores just like everybody else and we test the networks from that means, so we don’t alter these phones, we go indoor and outdoor and run a series of tests across all mobile internet and text and then we score each of the networks based on the speed and reliability of them across, calls, text and then an overall measure.

In the first few months of the service being available, you’ve been testing 4G coverage in and around the city of London. Give us the background behind this study and why it’s been important to test these services so early on in their rollout.

We have been in the UK for the last couple of years testing the networks inside the initial rollouts and so we have been into London a number of times. This most recent study we did in excess of 86,000 tests and picked more than 100 indoor locations and drove 2,500 miles. When we talk about London it is more than just Zone 1, it is actually all the way out to the smaller towns, to the east it would be out to Southend-by-the sea, north to Saffron Waldon and Maidenhead to the west. So it is a very large and extensive area where we do a random selection and we go and run tests using phones just like a consumer would do. The reason we are doing this is to allow consumers to have better informed choices rather than just listening to marketing messages. We look at what 4G means and how extensive it is so we can go and talk about the speed variances across providers, the reliability of getting on that network and even how widespread the technology actually exists. A lot of advertising suggests that it is everywhere when in fact it is not everywhere, so that is why we do this and do a benchmark if you will that put everyone on a ‘apples with apples’ comparison so there is no bias across the network.

Well you mentioned there that you use devices in the spec that they would be available to consumers, but what is the technology you use behind the scenes to carry out these tests and ensure accuracy?

We take the off the shelf phones and in fact we take a number from each of the operators and benchmark them separately to determine what is going to be the best-case scenario. If you are making a decision as a consumer you might be looking at the latest and greatest phones. We put each operator in best light possible but we do not alter these phones because we want it to be exactly what you and I experience. So our software runs on the top of that and helps automate the tests and we do things to make sure that everybody is tested at the same place at the same time so everything is time synced if you will so it is an absolute variable controlled environment so that we have a direct comparison.

Your study focused on 4G connection speeds in and around the city of London, what were the headline findings that you found?

We take what is called the large urban zone, which is defined by euro stats, which goes out into the suburbs. The important thing to realise is that we take 4G enabled phones where possible in three of the networks but we allow those phones to switch to whatever is available so, if 4G is there great if it is not it might go to 3G or even 2G so it is just like what you and I would experience. Then we take the average of all those tests and report on them in that speed.

What we have found when we look at the mobile Internet is that it is good news for consumers in that everybody is getting faster. O2 and Vodaphone are brand new into rolling out 4G and that has occurred over the last 2 months, EE has had a network over the last year and so they have had a bit of a head start but they have also seen improvements. Coming soon is Three, they have not quite rolled out 4G yet but that is coming before the end of the year.

The good news is that the cities are great starts with these rollouts and Vodaphone and O2 have seen a doubling of their speeds. In fact Vodaphone had a bit of an edge over O2 if we looked at the maximum speed of download about a 9.5 Mbps versus 7.1 Mbps with O2. If we compare and contrast that to EE who have been in the market place a little bit longer and rolled that technology out sooner they have also just rolled out with double speed and that is even a faster technology than 4G. As a result of that we saw them from the last time increase their speeds by 50% and they are actually at about 19.3 Mbps download speed so somewhere between 2 -3 times faster than what we are seeing on O2 and Vodaphone.

The important thing to remember here is that, it is not that each test is that much faster, it is an average in that area and they actually have as a result of being out there in the market place sooner and they have a much wider spread percentage of LTE in the overall market place. They vary really in the core city with about 84% of 4G coverage to 64% as we get to the outline areas. We can compare and contrast that to O2 and Vodaphone they are more in the region of 45 – 65% in the core city and a little bit less as you get outside where you get only 5% or 18%. What we see typically is these networks come in and generally start in the core centers of towns and to hit the most people as possible to start with and then they build up the masts and technologies as they start to move out. So we are still early and these deployments take more than 60 days, which is really where O2 and Vodaphone are at so we would anticipate that they are only going to get faster.

O2 and Vodafone doubled their connection speeds then, tell us a bit more about why one operator can make so much ground on another is it down to the way they deliver services or more about the infrastructure they have access to?

There are a ton of variables here and some of it is related to what allocations they have and the technology choices they made in terms of deploying that. Furthermore, how far they have actually deployed it. In this case it looks like Vodafone is a little more widespread at the moment in terms of deploying 4G than O2. But it’s important to remember that this roll out is still very early on and certainly EE has had much longer to work on deployment.

As important as speed is, we also need to look at reliability as well. So can we get on the network and do what we need to do without interruption like make calls, download a big files, enjoy web and app usage and generally use 4G without problems. What we are seeing on reliability is that although Vodafone are faster on average than O2, O2 are actually more reliable on average. We believe that is a very important factor because if you can’t get on and stay on, speed doesn’t really matter. So that reliability quotient has edged O2 over Vodafone and Three. EE actually has the highest reliability when it comes to mobile internet and part of that is having one technology spread a little wider and not having to switch between the various different flavours of mobile internet technology.

What is important to note is that when we talk about these maximum speeds, it’s like comparing a car with just the one measure of top speed. We wouldn’t buy a car on that one measure alone. So the other components we look at as well include using everyday tasks like web, app usage and emails. Even Three, who don’t have 4G in the marketplace for example, where Vodafone are at 9.5, O2 at 7.1, Three is actually at 5.5 with just pure 3G. So they have one of the fastest underlying 3G networks out there and what is interesting is that while EE have the fastest speed overall they are almost on a par with just 3G alone in terms of being able to get out and do your basic facebook checking and surfing the web. Sometimes maximum speed means a lot and sometimes it may not translate into an everyday task just like a simple App or web use.

There seems to be a lot of work needed outside of the core of London to improve reliability from the data in your study?

As I was mentioning earlier the core of London is where the stronger levels of deployment are occurring and we see the fastest speeds there and the best reliability. In fact as you move out to St. Albans or Maidstone in those types of areas you are going to probably see as much as a 50% drop in speed. If you are in the core of London and you are commuting into London you are absolutely going to want in my opinion the 4G technologies because you can enjoy speeds that are 2 – 4 times anything else that you could enjoy. But if you are in these outline areas and you are not travelling in you may want to delay. You have got to be careful of where that deployment is because we are still early in that process so if you are an early adopter go and get the phones now because it is coming and everybody is building this up quite rapidly. Again, it is a good day for the consumer because this competitive race has only just started heating up.

If you were advising operators on how to improve their services, what would you advise them to do to improve the infrastructure over the next 12 to 24 months?

I think in the large part they are doing what they need to do and we are seeing this deployment of 4G in London and other major cities in the UK actually coming out very strong. The technology is rolling out quickly and even more quickly than we have seen in other parts of the world. We measure everything in the US and the speeds that Londoners are going to be enjoying as we speak is rivaling and even exceeding what we see in for example, New York. The speed aspect is really really good . One of the things we would say though and where we place a lot of importance is reliability, the ability to get on and make my call and do the tasks that I want the mobile and internet be able to do, like send and receive texts. That is an area that we think can improve as far as the overall networks are and that is where the UK is slightly behind some of the areas that we are seeing in other parts of the world. We are seeing a really strong ramp up in that reliability though and that is where we think the gain is going to be won between the operators. Speed is important but it is only important if you can get on and win the game of reliability, only then will certain operators have an edge over the competition.

Well it was announced that 4G was going to be rolled out amidst huge media hype, do you think it has lived up to expectations so far?

I think it does where it is, the caution is as I said the important point is that you have got to know that the media hype and the messages make it seem as though 4G is everywhere and it is not. It is not ubiquitous yet but everyday it is increasing with every operator EE have that edge because they have been out there for a year, O2 and Vodaphone are making massive efforts to move quite rapidly and are moving very fast from our perspective and Three is right round the corner with a very solid underlying network which has been quite reliable and fast without 4G and we think they have a great foundation to build on to be able to roll out further from 4G.

The full report can be downloaded from the Rootmetrics website here: http://rtmet.com/1gLTSGv

Matthew Finnie CTO at Interoute has been speaking about the recently launched Samsung Smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear. Matthew has been keeping an eye on the launch of this product and considering its impact on the way we interact with technology into the future and some of the implications that has for retailers and business enterprises alike.

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

Matthew, first of all, why is the Samsung smart watch interesting and exciting to you?

I think despite it having been received fairly negatively by the press, what we see with the Samsung Smartwatch is really the beginning of the next phase of how we think about technology and moreover how we interact with technology. To give you an example I have a 16-year-old nephew who doesn’t wear a wristwatch because he uses his phone for everything.

It is interesting to see what the Samsung Smartwatch will do because instead of having to take it out of my pocket and it having the form factor of a phone I can have a piece of technology on my wrist that can be my phone, send biometric information for sports exercise and it can be sending and receiving messages. The point being is that what is interesting about what is happening to technology is that it is less about brand and more about how we interact with the technology. You could argue will Samsung, Google etc be the vanguard of this or will they be in the future there to reap the benefits as we pour technology around ourselves or will it be someone else who understands better how we want to interact with technology and not necessarily the operating system that we use.

We often hear the phrase “Internet of Things” and it is this kind of interaction with technology that the “Internet of things” hinges around isn’t it?

I think the interesting thing about the “Internet of Things” is to really start to understand how we are interacting with technology. Internet of things understands that humans (in our old analog way) are touching technology and trying to get some kind of feedback or response. Whereas within the world of machines itself, a lot of this information can be passed on to other machines which process and present it either to another machine or back to us. So instead of predominately talking to another machine and the machine producing something back to us in some form, what we will see is a lot of intermediate processing between machines and devices as they move information around and consolidate it into the outcomes that we are trying to get.

A consequence of wearable technology is that, currently we produce a lot of content with our phones right now and so as time moves on, will be producing or using content on our wrist as well? So one of the things that you are going to start to see is the need to start organizing that because we are producing too much and we can’t find what we need. So the intermediate processing will take place, which will start to organise that. We already see that now in the Apps that you can buy for online shopping and the technology that exists within your supermarket. Your digital watch is being told offers based on your previous shopping preferences from that store. So, it is saying to it’s user things like, “there is an offer on multibuy of dishwashing tablets because you bought them last time and this time it is 5p cheaper maybe you want to take up the offer.” All these things could be going on as you are walking through the store and that is all machine-to-machine interactions.

What do you think the impact on business is going to be of technology like this, what are retailers going to have to consider?

Most of the impact will be sort of obvious. People talk about augmented reality and one of the simplest things for retail for augmented reality is the example of your furniture store; when you go to buy yourself a chair or sofa you think about what is it going to look like in your house. So what you want to do is use your camera or Smartphone and look at the room and put the chair into that room to figure out how it will look and feel.

Another example, I hear a piece of music and I want to buy that piece of music. I want to add that to my collection and so retailers could be selling that music over the air giving the customer the option to say “I want to buy what I am listening to” and it then adds itself to your cloud music collection.

The point about it is how efficient should that interaction be with the world in terms of what a customer wants and to shorten the decision it takes to look at something, make a decision and then acquire it. If you just take that as your rubric for first flush of technology then there is a whole host of things that retailers can think about. Take a shopping favourites list that is already telling me where to go and what aisle I need and what other items the retailer has an offer in that isle.

Personal shopping to some extent can become a reality and you already see it in a lot of stores who have their own online portal where if you can’t see it on the wall you can still use technology to buy it there and then. What is clever (and some retailers have set this up better than others) is the interaction between the physical and digital world and getting that right gives the frictionless commerce that most retailers are looking for.

These innovations could also change the way that people interact not only with retail but also with their jobs as well. BYOD is a real growth area and we could see devices like these creeping into the world of business fairly soon as well couldn’t we?

It could be and it is interesting that you mention that because there has been talk about the biometric sensing on the next version of the iPhone. The ideas that the device is finally secure and can be controlled in the context of your IT organization is frankly entirely the wrong way to think about it. Every one of your enterprise users is a consumer and leaves with their Smartphone and is very comfortable with the Internet as its means of access. The right way to think about it is to make the assumption that the entirety of your workforce lives in the Internet and they will have or multiple devices, which they will use to get information, to communicate, engage and do whatever they do within their job. You as a corporate entity then have to have ways of preserving data privacy, data confidentiality etc. but not as a means of ‘controlling’ endpoints.

Instead of you going into the office which puts its rules upon you to some extent, we are starting to see that in terms of efficiency and communication the enterprise now have to conform or adapt to how the workforce wish to work and not the other way round. I think that is the biggest impact on enterprises. Whether it will move or take on within the next few years we will have to wait and see, but the point is that the old model enterprise management where you can shut devices down and people can’t do stuff is not practical any more.

Looking at this in terms of cloud, how do you think changes in the way we think about and use technology will affect that’s sector going forward? Is the technology and cloud infrastructure sufficient in most cases to support these behaviors yet?

I think it is still in its adolescence in terms of how we access it. A lot of what cloud computing offers is still constrained by the limitations of the capability the organization has access to and the assets that the organization has. I think what will happen is the same as what we saw with the advent of broadband and the Internet. When you first do it people ask in the interest in the method by which they access the form and they understand the limitations etc. I think with the cloud at the moment people are starting to get their heads around that instead of it being a completely new parable where all the rules have changed. It is actually just a more efficient way of delivering computing, storage and networks than the traditional static model where people used to do it with data centers they built themselves.

I think the ‘relevance’ if you like is that the only practical mechanism for all these devices to evolve (and use a Smartphone in Europe and you get a feel for the impact of the lack of an open access to that kind of model) is that all these devices rely on the assumption that there is going to be computer storage and network available for them to use.

I think you will see a growing convergence of network computing and storage and a level of sophistication that allows people to get different levels of security and different levels of optimization about how they build their backend up services. I think from that perspective it will be seen as a emphasis, in the same way that broadband in Europe drove the expansion of backbones in Europe largely single handedly, Smartphones and devices of that ilk are the ones that are driving the consumption of internet and driving the creation and consumption of computing and storage. They almost have a direct relationship.

What will happen is you will go through the first stage which we have just had and you will start to see people who are just starting evolving upon the key issues which are going to be how do I broaden out my computing storage so it is really highly resilient so it doesn’t go down. It may be problematic or it may cost too much or may be too slow but fundamentally it retains its form and shape 24:7/ 365 days a year. Computing and storage can evolve to that kind of level.

On this episode we are finding out more about the new cloud storage service recently launched here in the UK called Bitcasa. Tony Gauda is CEO and Co-Founder of Bitcasa and I started by asking him how the idea for Bitcasa came about and how it differs from other solutions on the market.

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

What is the background to Bitcasa?

Bitcasa is actually a solution to a problem that I personally had a few years ago I was working for Mastercard designing a fraud prediction system which would take your credit card swipe and determine whether that was a fraudulent credit card transaction or not. Meanwhile, I bought a Macbook Air and I installed all my music and development tools on it and then promptly ran out of space on the device itself. The way that you solved that problem back then was to buy an external hard drive and you move your photos and music over to that actual hard drive or you get a USB stick and you carry the things around that are larger than your device. I thought that there had to be a simpler way to solve that problem and that was when Bitcasa was born. Bitcasa is the world’s first software hard drive so you install Bitcasa on your desktop and Bitcasa creates a virtual hard drive that is literally infinite and it never runs out of space you can move your documents, videos, photos even programme files over to your Bitcasa and they don’t take any space on your desktop and it just never runs out

How does it compare to existing services like Dropbox that people might be more aware of?

It is actually radically different. So, if you think about Dropbox when you install it on your desktop it doesn’t give you more space and this is typical of all the synchronization solutions that exist today. So you install them and what they do with them is they give you a special folder that copies the data from your desktop to the Cloud but it doesn’t move anything it and doesn’t add capacity to your desktop. So if you have a terabit of capacity on a hard drive, when you drag and drop that to your desktop into your syncronisation folder it will just run out of space on your desktop. That is not the case with Bitcasa because when you drag and drop into your Bitcasa drive it never runs out of space, your desktop never runs out of space you can access it all instantly from every single device that you own.

We are living in a multi device age of course, how does this allow you to access files on your desktop, laptop and Tablet etc?

It is exactly like having the storage that follows you every single place that you go so that when you get Bitcasa your phone is now infinite, your tablet is now infinite and every device that you own is too. We are also announcing a 2.0 version of IOS. All the photos and videos you copy to the Cloud can be accessed instantly, all the documents and every single file that I own that is on my desktop is now instantly accessible on my mobile phone, there are no limits, no quotas, there are no file size constraints it is just everything and its infinite.

Is this a useful tool for sharing as well?

Absolutely, over the weekend I took my daughter to the beach and I recorded several videos, took various photos and I wanted to share that with my mother. So instead of me picking and choosing just the videos and photos that I thought were small enough to send I just took the whole experience and sent my mother a link. She was instantly able to access everything; there is no more uploading no more figuring out if there is enough space in an email.

You are launching first of all with a consumer-focused product but are there any plans for business applications with customisable API’s?

There are some things that will be announced within the next few months and some of those will be API’s but today we are 100% focused on consumers and there are some small business plans that will be coming out as well.

What do you have in place to ensure privacy and security of users data and files?

That was one of the first things that we thought about when we built Bitcasa and invented this technology. We need to feel comfortable to copy all of our data to cloud so what we do with Bitcasa is we 100% guarantee your privacy by encrypting everything clients sign on the device. So even though I am the investor of the technology and I have complete access on our servers I cannot access any consumer data for any reason at all because it is 100% encrypted. Even if a third party intercepts everything, there is nothing they can do because it is all encrypted with the consumer’s credentials.

Is this useable across operating systems as well, can use this seamlessly across my Apple and Windows devices?

We are supported on multiple platforms including IOS, Mac, Android, Windows, Google Chrome, Firefox and every single platform that is popular Bitcasa supports. We can transform the contents of the device itself. Say for instance you have a video that you had recorded using your camcorder at home we will actually transform that video to fit on the device that you are watching it from. Also we can transform it so that it can support the format on the band that you are actually watching it on. It is just like a Netflix or a Spotify for everything you own.

Once your users have uploaded their files to Bitcasa, do they still own that completely and exclusively?

Absolutely, your files are always yours and it is the same level privacy that you have on your desktop it is actually a higher level of privacy than you have on your desktop because everything on your desktop is unencrypted. If you lose your desktop and whoever finds your desktop has access to everything that stays on that pc it is not the case with Bitcasa since everything is encrypted inside it is always protected and you are always safe and you are always own your own content.

Do you see this as a new way of backing up your devices?

People use it to never have to back up again. The way Bitcasa works is that as you are using your pc Bitcasa automatically if you chose for it to do so copies your data behind the scenes to Bitcasa for safe keeping so you will save something to your desktop and Bitcasa will automatically copy it to the cloud. There is nothing that you have to do it is automatic so backing up is now a thing of the past. It is something that happens as you use your pc.

You’re boasting infinite storage, is this really true and how have you managed to offer this?

It is absolutely infinite. A lot of times when you hear things like that you always wait for the catch. I am here to guarantee there is no catch it is infinite save as much as you want and we will keep it for you safe and secure and make it accessible across every single device that you own there is no file, size limitations, there is no device restrictions it is infinite.

A problem that you sometimes find when using services like this is when out and about if you start uploading a file and then the 3G connection drops out and the upload doesn’t complete, there is sometimes a risk of losing data how have you managed to get around that with Bitcasa?

Since day one we have been extremely careful with making sure that consumer data is always protected so we will never report back to the device that it is successfully saved unless it has been successfully saved so we do not take shortcuts we make sure that your data is always secure. You have a higher chance of deleting by accident than us losing your data.

Do you see this as the end of the requirement for big local storage on devices; maybe even the hard drive entirely?

This is absolutely the future people have been talking about this for the past 20 or 30 years. In the future we do see the network getting faster and faster We will shortly see the deployment of LPE networks which are lightening fast mobile devices, streaming is now the future most of the things we do now can be accessed like Netflix and other streaming services we see the same trend happening with your personal data where it is all saved in the Cloud and it all backed up, its encrypted its instantly accessible across every device that you own, you don’t have to worry about losing it the biggest concern you have is maybe instead of you taking your device out of your pocket you accidently throw it into the washing machine now what about all those photos you have on your mobile phone. In Bitcasa world that does not even matter because you are always backed up and you are always safe. The things you notice is that you really don’t care about the physical phone itself but you care the most about is the data that is on it so protected that.

In this episode we are talking to the biggest mobile money specialist in the world, they're called Monitise and they aim to make money totally mobile across the globe. They give us an interesting insight into the progression of mobile transactions and to tell us more we speak with, Andrew Griffin, SVP for Industry and Investor relations at Monitise.

He starts by telling us a bit about the background of the company and how things have developed to where they are today.

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

We are a mobile money company and we look at mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile commerce. We are about 10 years old and we originated from the idea from our two founders to allow banks to service their customers via mobile. Back then there were no Smartphone’s, the banks were not too keen on small technology companies hooking into their core banking systems and so our founders had the bright idea of using the ATM network to connect phones to banks and this worked brilliantly. With an ATM you can check your balance, you can look at a statement you can even pay bills and so this enables mobile phones with SMS without touching the delicate core banking systems. Of course, since the advent of the iPhone and other such Smartphone’s we are now seeing banks with good mobile banking platforms seeing more transactions over that channel than all the other channels put together including online banks and phone calls.

Mobile payments are becoming more a part of everyday life but put us in the picture as to what volume of transactions are being carried out through mobile platforms currently and where is the growth coming from?

The last numbers published show that we are doing about 3,200 requests per second over our systems and some of our customers have disclosed their usage. NatWest here in the UK for whom we built their platform are getting 25 logins per month per user from their retail App. So people on average at least once every working day are having a look at their App either to check a balance, transfer to a savings account, pay a bill and more recently to pay their friends on the pay-to-pay payments.

What are some of the latest developments in mobile banking that we should all be paying attention to?

What is interesting to both our customers and us is this very high usage ever since 2000 when people started talking about killer Apps. The technology industry has been looking at killer Apps and it turns out that the humble balance enquiry is just that. We found through surveys that people who have started using mobile banking not only interact more with their bank which the bank is obviously delighted with, but also they pay lower overdraft fees and lower penalties because they are much more in control of their finances. It very much meets the needs of people wanting to have a handle on their balance and not being surprised by going overdrawn. Having created that audience, the banks are thinking about what they can do with that audience now to continue to improve their closeness to that customer. Mobile commerce is one area where this could work. Right now if you are trying to buy stuff on mobile one of the biggest reasons why transactions don’t complete is that you are suddenly asked to type in your credit card details, your name and address and it doesn’t really work on a small screen but if that ability to one click pay were made available via a trusted App like your bank, then that could make that process of whole lot more seamless. If we get it right and people are receiving the kind of offers that make sense to them then it ends up being a win win, the consumer gets what they want perhaps it’s an offer by way of discount from their bank and the bank continues their relationship with their customers.

It seems to have given the relationship between customers and banks more immediacy – is that true with what you have seen too?

Yes it has and it is striking this change in behavior. We did some research with the US population which showed that 50% of people paid lower fees as a direct result of taking on a mobile App and 25% actually visited an ATM less often which is curious because you can’t get money out of your phone? It turned out a lot of visits to the ATM were just to check balances and not to get money out. So it really does change banker’s behavior.

Have the developments in mobile allowed banks to have a closer relationship with retailers?

Like a lot of traditional industries the digital age is creating disruption and clearly for High Street retailers the focus has been around the whole online experience. Many High Street retailers are moving online but one problem has been that unless you have got the kind of audience like the likes of Amazon has and the nice one click payout experience it always tends to be a slightly slower experience to check out using these other ecommerce sites. Equally, if you are a bricks and mortar retailer, say you have got a physical advert on a bus shelter or in a High Street your problem is that people will see your ad and then go and buy it using an online retailer rather than going to the store that is actually doing the advertising. Something we set up last year was a joint venture with Carphone Warehouse and Charles Dunston called Mobile Money Network and this was really to trial what we would refer to as a physical instant mobile checkout. Using this technology retailers and brands could advertise a product and it could come with either a short code on the advert or it could be a QR code that you take a photo of, or you could even just take a photo using your Smartphone of the entire advert. Because you had pre-registered your name and payment details and address with the app that was all you had to do to purchase and that product would be delivered to you the next day, instant checkout was reality.

Having trialed that and seen its success what the merchants and retailers really wanted was a big audience for that app and so we acquired the third party stakes in Mobile Money Network and it became wholly owned by Monitise. We are now in the process of integrating that Mobile checkout into our apps, which are used by millions and millions of consumers. Suddenly it becomes a much more interesting way to checkout for retailers so we are getting huge interest there.

Does that whole change in purchasing behaviour offer opportunities for increasing revenues?

What we are trying to do is help banks, retailers and others with what Google is doing offline and online. It is no coincidence that Google is getting interested into the mobile wallet space as well and right now roughly 5% of retail commerce in developed markets is online. If you click on a Google ad through a Google search or through a Google provided ad on someone else’s website and you go on and purchase something online, Google will receive a lead generation fee. That is something like 5-10% of the transaction value, which is a fairly chunky amount, it is much much more than the payment interchange rate that a bank would receive through a payment on one of its cards. Now wouldn’t it be great if you received an offer on your phone and then you walked into a shop and redeemed that offer. You could get the same lead generation fee so Google were interested in doing that. With their wallet they had some kickback from some of the mobile phone operators who were not too keen on co-hosting it for them and also retailers are a little skeptical about being seen to be giving away their data to Google. The great thing about banks is that they are not trying to steal anyone’s data, they are basically acting as an orchestrator here and allowing what are quite often their own retailer customers on the corporate side to create the same type of transactions and offers, but in a way that does seem the retailers are giving away their data. I think that is the way to think about it.

How do you ensure confidence over security and privacy on mobile platforms when it comes to financial transactions?

One of the things from the survey that we recently commissioned is clear that a trusted brand, a trusted financially instituted brand, goes a long way towards making consumers feel secure here. Some of the companies we work with like Visa for instance took two years of due diligence before they started working with us back in 2009. An awful lot of effort goes into security by banks and other financial institutions and payments companies because you can’t afford to be making mistakes. It takes a lot longer to recover from them afterwards and so I think there is a built up trust there and I think you are going to see for instance Visa coming out with their v.me button is going to begin to appear this year in the UK on ecommerce and mobile commerce websites and that will begin to allow banks using those rails to allow one click purchases through mobile commerce websites.

How secure is the mobile? Well, this is an interesting one, one of the consultants I speak with often says “well how secure does it need to be given that your credit card has your name and your number printed on it for anyone to take” and I think this is an important point. It is impossible to get 100% secure here but you can certainly get good enough security and with the mobile phone the wonderful thing about a mobile is it is very personal to you. I think I saw some statistics somewhere that if you lost your credit card or debit card it took on average a couple of days for you to notice unless you were going to pay for something that day. With a mobile phone, you know you have lost it within 40 minutes. There is an inherent security with a mobile phone that you know you have lost it and of course it is very easy to switch it off, you just call the operator or even there is an App where you can go online and switch them off with some operating systems. The other thing that is more secure with a mobile phone than say online is that when you go online to an App you can pretty much do it from any computer certainly with online banking I can use the computer in my office, I can use the computer in my home or use an internet cafe and I can still log in to my online banking. What we do with online banking applications is to lock them to one phone so I happen to bank with NatWest but I can’t use your NatWest app on your phone to log into my account it has to be on my phone and there are many ways we lock the app to the phone and so that adds another layer of security. I don’t think that is widely understood yet but I think it is something that we and our customers and partners can continue to communicate to consumers.

Mobile phones especially seem to touch every element of our life at the moment, are we edging ever closer to a cashless society with technology developments such as these?

Great question, something like 50% of transactions in developed markets are still cash in value terms particularly when you include all the huge sums transferred from business to business, it is something like only 6% of the value of transactions are now cash. In some ways there is a long way to go in other ways we have already largely moved to electronic. There are many reasons to do with tax collection and to do with fraud prevention and criminal activity for governments to be interested in reducing the cash economy and increasing the electronic economy and actually there are good reasons for the economy as well. It is a lot more expensive in total to handle cash than it is to deal with electronic transactions so you can see a lot of regulations trying to increase people’s usage of electronic means. I think it is inevitable that over time cash will decrease but it will take a long time in my opinion and it is a huge debate amongst colleagues and peers in the industry.

Is the take up of mobile platforms varying in different markets across the world?

It would be wrong to say it is the same but it not necessarily blanket more or less in different countries for instance the survey we have just done shows that Germany compared to the UK, German people are a bit less receptive to doing mobile payments than UK consumers and yet if you ask Germans if they have ever redeemed a coupon or an offer on a mobile phone more of them have done it on a mobile phone in Germany than here in the UK. You get pockets of behavior and it also depends who in the country owns a Smartphone, in Spain the penetration of mobile phones with the young is much higher than it is in Germany and to some extend than the UK. That means that behavior on Smartphone’s is more youth oriented so they tend to use the phones for social networking for listening to music and that kind of thing whereas in Germany and the UK it is a bit more for checking prices and finding directions for instance. You get little different flavours depending on who uses the Smartphone.

Two years ago, Atos CEO and Chairman Thierry Breton announced his plans for a Zero Email initiative across the company. Understandably some were skeptical on the possibilities of eradicating all internal email across the business. But here we talk to Lee Timmins who is Senior Vice President of Atos Consulting to hear whether its been a success or not.

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Lee first of all, explain the background behind where this zero email initiative came from?

Many of us in the organization were not really prepared for Thierry’s announcement. We took some time to understand what we were going to do with it. We understood that he was serious about the commitment and that we were going to get engaged but quite how we in UK Consulting were going to use this took a bit of thought. It didn’t take long to get behind the zero email schemes and work out that it is actually a symptom of a broader frustration. How do the working professional classes, the knowledge worker if you like, make the best of the time we have got available during the day? Is technology helping us to become more effective and productive or is it actually getting in the way? So the way that we have taken on the zero emails initiative in UK consulting is to focus it on the professional working classes, the knowledge worker and to take email along with a range of other things as part of an approach to making our days more effective and more productive.

We are all aware of the time that we all spend sifting through email, but of course email as a communication is there for a reason, so in a zero email environment what is supposed to replace it?

Email as a tool is decades old and it tends to have become the default tool. So it is the only tool for communicating, collaborating, sharing documents and for working together on documents. But it is not always suited to all of those purposes, so the approach we have taken in UK Consulting is to address what the key staff groups, key roles and requirements are in terms of information, contents and collaboration. What is the best set of tools that meets their needs? So for example emails still have a place with our delivery consultants but it sits alongside instant messaging, it sits alongside an enterprise social networking tool, and it sits alongside SharePoint. Our role has been to help people understand for which tasks and under which circumstances email is the right tool for the job or whether one of the others is better.

Is the old-fashioned phone call perhaps part of the answer here, or the change in behaviour to ensure workers aren’t emailing a colleague who is only a few desks away?

I talked about the tools required for job but the behavior aspect is very important too and it is not just get off your backside and go and speak to people wherever possible it is about questioning some of the other behaviors. Regularly we are able to measure internal email generation for our staff and I talked to people who are having more difficulty in reducing volume and you get some surprising things coming out such as; “I am running a big project and I have got 20 guys in my project team and I need to make sure that when we have our weekly meeting that we minute all of the actions and then I send those actions out as an email and store all of that in my inbox and that is the way I make sure that we get things done.” We are trying to change the behavior that suggests that just because you write something down in an email and send it to somebody and store it, doesn’t mean they are going to get it done. There are different ways of doing it so trust people to do what they say they are going to do and cut down the email traffic as one example of the behavior aspects behind this.

Conversations are easy to backup, keep track of and be searchable on email so what is the answer to this using things like Instant Messenger?

I think for some organisations regular requirements that is quite a knotty problem to solve and I don’t think we are there yet is the honest answer, from my business there genuinely is not a need to store conversation in that way certainly by email so we are able to cut through it internally for example when we work with clients in financial services then this is an issue and we have to take a different approach.

There is a link you have with Team Sky the British cycling team and you have been working with them on efficiency improvements, talk us through what you have been doing with them?

The zero email thing is just one aspect of a broader goal which is about improving the productivity of let’s just say knowledge workers. I think knowledge workers are probably the final frontier in terms of efficiency and productivity improvement people who work in direct industry, in direct fields have had help in the past to improve their productivity. Knowledge workers have not and yet they represent 60% of the UK’s wage bill. We conducted some research recently with a number of external organizations in the public and private sector and we were testing a view with them that a) there is an opportunity to become more productive in daily working life and b) that the concept of the aggregation of marginal gains which we borrowed from the sporting world is an idea that might help them to do that.

The example in the link to cycling is that we are all aware of the success of Team GB and Team Sky, their mantra is that if we can get 10% better overall in terms of an athlete’s performance by understanding everything that impacts the performance of that athlete. Also by getting just a little bit better in each area like the performance of the bike, the equipment support chain, the diet of the athlete, and recovery of the athlete, the psychology. They have a pretty relentless and exhaustive approach at driving these marginal gains and making them count. What is the equivalent of that applied to the professional worker as the athlete as the concept we are trying to work through.

Can you see the zero email methods of communicating you are employing shaping the behaviour of workplaces in the future?

I can really see the opportunity and we are not alone. 50% of the knowledge workers that we spoke to said that they believed that they could be up to 50% more effective so that is a big prize to go at. The whole point behind this marginal gains approach is it takes an awful lot of work and time, you need to move a lot of things forward on quite a broad front. Do I see the industry as a whole taking on the consequences of this? I don’t know but we are trying it ourselves with our own business and we are having some success. We have reduced the number of emails that we generate ourselves inside UK Consulting by more than 65% and we are finding better ways to put that time to use and our business performance is improving. Can I show a hard cause and effect correlation between those things not really, but we think it is having an effect.

Well it’s an interesting concept, what’s your final bit of advice for any organisations that are considering a similar scheme to your zero email policy?

My advice would be that there is not a silver bullet it is about moving lots of things forward in small steps every day. It takes time and absolutely the way to go about this is for it to be role based within any organisation there are a number of key roles and our objective to this should be to help people to perform better in their role. To all of this improvement stuff whether it is about email, whether it is about training, whether it is about collaboration tools, whether it is about reducing emails it should be focused back on helping people perform better in their role in that way I think you have got a chance in being successful.