And then we had lunch ...

... and the IBM VP who I was desperately hoping would not recognise me came over for a chat, which went like this :

"Hi - looked at my badge - Karoona! How are you?"
"Very good thank you, how about yourself ?" with huge fake grin
"We've met before, haven't we ?"
"Umm, yes we have" Nervous laugh, what's the best hiding place in this hotel ?
"Somewhere in Orlando ? ... LoLa ? Yes that's it"
"Yes, LoLa" Stupid nervous laugh again
"Yes I remember, we had quite a few conversations about SaaS didn't we? How did it all go? Has a decision been made yet ? "
"Umm, yes"

So as expected he didn't know, as expected I had to tell him, and as expected he threw me A look and politely avoided us through the rest of the day, except for the times when he mentioned that Panasonic had moved 90,000 users to Lotus Live, at which points he threw us meaningful, if scorching, glances.

I know nothing!

ABC & BPOS

ABC (code name ;-) are currently migrating to BPOS. I had a few "informal" chats with the ABC delegates and they also presented one of the sessions. My notes so far :

• About 130,000 users in about 120 countries
• About 30,000 Notes apps (my heart goes out to them)
  
• Migrating to BPOS (45,000 users moved so far)
  
• Migrating ALL of their history across
  

Not unlike ourselves, ABC have "strategic" rather than cost-driven justifications for their migration to BPOS. Without going into the details, they tell us the experience so far has been good and is progressing on track. They share their lessons with us :

• Do not neglect the deskless option - this can save companies significant amounts of money (up to 3/4 the cost of licences per user)
• Do not assume that the existing infra will necessarily support cloud services (existing AD's, networks). They have had to spend a few millions on revamping their existing AD to suit BPOS requirements.
• Rationalise the application strategy. I do not believe our friends are using any co-existence technologies and it appears from what they told us that most of their apps are based on the same template. Like us, they have not included any budget in the migration programme to migrate their Notes apps - they are leaving it up to Business Units to fund such migration as and when required, between now and 2011. However, they already know that come 2011, they will be under pressure to review the 2011 timeline and will be asked to postpone it : ) They have however already reduced SLA's on the Notes apps (eg. only broke-fixes will be attended to, no CIPs, contained env, pretty much the same as we are planning)
  
• Consider Sharepoint carefully. We get one chance at rolling it out, one chance to get the governance right.
  
• Personalise, do not customise. (Not that we have the option to anyway!)
• Realise that this is a learning curve for our favourite people-ready vendors too. They are still learning from us customers how to deliver SERVICE vs. SOFTWARE.
• It takes time to understand where the boundaries are as far as operations is concerned. Indeed, BPOS is almost a black box solution and it will be important for us to understand clearly how much control we have over ensuring minimal business disruption.
• We can choose to migrate history, but remember that without history we can migrate whole sites (thousands of users) overnight. With the data migration route they have chosen, their deployment plan has stretched out over 18 months.
• They recommend we have a cloud exit strategy. Their strategy is to consider another cloud vendor as a 1st option and to bring back the services inhouse as a last option - the main reason being that most of their savings have been through re-organising (rightsizing :-) their workforce around the cloud solution and should they have to bring the service back inhouse, they would need significant recruitment and reskilling.
• They ran a business change programme in parallel with the technology programme. The BC programme encompassed training as well as championing of the new platform by a significant number of users in the business.

They also had a challenge getting the cloud concept past Security in their company. I think for us, it is important to realise that with the new cloud services, we also have new functionality that we will be deploying, eg. Outlook Anywhere, which will no doubt increase our security risk as an enterprise. However, as one of the Security consultants at the conference said, Security Management is not necessarily about locking down the fort completely, it's about knowing where the potential holes are so that we can mitigate the risks (eg. through training users) and if we can't mitigate the risks, at least we'll know what we need to worry about :-)

Speaking to ABC was for me the most value-added exercise of the whole day. Great advice and I have been able to secure some "offline" time with the head of migration as well as their programme manager where they will talk us through their challenges/reco's/gotchas etc. We've also been invited to join a user forum that has been set up between companies that have migrated to BPOS so far. The forum includes some big names which I will not post here otherwise I'll be told off :p Something to look forward to! (the forum, not the telling off)

"What would make cloud computing safe for business ? "

... was a presentation about the top requirements that, if fulfilled, would make enterprises move to the cloud ...

The only 2 points of interest that caught my attention in between a multitude of bullet points were that :

• 93% of companies want an interface between their ticketing system and the cloud because they want to be able to benchmark their remaining inhouse services against their cloud services. This is likely to be an important point for us as we move to BPOS, because while our ticket numbers will still be measured through GTS & Magic, our ability to track ticket resolution times etc. will be hindered by the fact that Magic will not integrate with whatever system Microsoft uses today, not in the short term, anyway. We need to make sure we have the required processes in place as BPOS is rolled out.

• 78% of companies want dedicated servers. Security is the main concern here, but mostly because the correlation (or lack of) between security and server isolation is not well understood by most companies. In an ideal world, yes we would have assessed multitenant vs. dedicated in detail, but given our timescales for making THE decision, it makes sense that we have gone with dedicated rather than multitenant.
  

Keynote #2 - Stormy Weather

The second keynote was delivered by an ex-BBC employee and was in summary an evangelist presentation of social computing and social media.

He talked us through the pervasiveness of social software and how unproductive it is for companies to ban Facebook within the corporate network. Despite the perception of inanity that enterprises may have of social software and how people use it to tell each other what they had for breakfast (do they? even I have never done that ;-), our presenter argues that in today's world, he would see inanity as a trust builder. In other words, if he cannot find somebody through a search on facebook, he is more and more inclined to mistrust that body. New concept for me, made me stop and think I have to say :-)

We also heard about how social software is a key way to enable sharing of best practice in the corporation and how everybody should have access to it, regardless of whether they are manufacturing, sales, IT ...

Overall, nothing new for us regular readers of social computing articles, and I walked out of that session still unconvinced that social software (the Facebook-type anyway) would add any significant value in a company like ours. In the BBC, where the very heart of the organisation is information and sharing of information is their bread and butter, yes I can understand how social software could enhance productivity in a significant way, but for us, I remain doubtful.

Oh and I could only stare in admiration as he got away with not answering a difficult question at the end of his presentation by looking very grave and saying "This is a point of orchestration", which totally baffled the poor guy who had asked the question.

That moment marked the beginning of BS Bingo for the day, watch the space ;-)

TIF Cloud Computing, London - KeyNote Session1 - Situation Normal, Everything Must Change

Today, James M and I attended TIF's Cloud Computing Conference in London, Victoria Park Plaza, 2 floors underground.

The opening Keynote today was delivered by an enthusiastic geneticist and was very, very good. The presenter focused the opening session around the theme of commoditisation, kicking off the conference with an abstract model of how innovation turns into products which turn into commodities depending on their ubiquity vs. certainty ratio. Sounds geeky? Oh yeah ;-)

On an even geekier note, he also took us through the concept of how products, when they turn into commodities, will not only enable further innovation in their space but also accelerate the product's development itself. This is because as a product gets more stable, so does its capacity to undergo major disruption. To quote him, "the rate of evolution of a complex system is dependent on the organisation of its subsystems" eg. if we look at the computing stack (infra, platform, software) the reason software has been able to develop so fast is because infra and platform have themselves turned into commodities over the years and therefore have been able to support and accelerate development of software.

Which kind of made me think about the Domino vs. Microsoft debate again ... yes I know this is now history, but it did remind me of how IBM seem to have got to a point where they are now evolving the development of the seamlessness & usability of their technologies whereas Microsoft seems to still be focused on getting the technology itself right ... base layer stability anyone? : )

Anywho, back to the real world, it will definitely be interesting to see where innovation takes us once cloud computing becomes a commodity.

He also dispelled a couple of cloud computing myths upfront : 1) That the customer has a choice. According to our presenter, the only thing an enterprise will achieve by not moving to the cloud is to increase the competitive gap between their IT service and the market and this pressure will only keep increasing as cloud services costs go down through in-market competition. And no he was not a vendor. 2) That cloud computing is green and it will save customers money, which made me nod in agreement ; )

He wrapped up his keynote by confirming what has been our opinion in Mars all year : that the question about cloud computing is not IF, it's WHEN. Hmm, 2010, apparently :D

Overall, exceptional (if geeky) keynote.

Content Relevance : 4/5
Delivery : 4/5

Binary Tree ZAPP Design & Planning Workshop

Part of EUT Team is currently on tour in Philadelphia, to conduct the BT ZAPP Design Workshop. The star cast of this episode : Malc, Martyn, PCW and Karoona.

5 days, 2 objectives.
1 - For our technical lead, to design the to-be infrastructure for Lotus Notes co-existence
2 - For our project manager, to draft the project plan

Martyn will send out official updates at the end of each day, but watch this space for the unofficial ones ;-)

We have just now arrived at the Sheraton hotel after some excellent driving and navigation, Jimmy has waved to me wildly from the bar (god please make him forget), we have checked in and our star team has disbanded to glam up before we all go out to the stylish Outback for a gourmet dinner followed by some late-night partying until 20 00. Malc (sorry!) can't wait to find out if the Blooming Onion in on the menu :D

If I'm still awake when I come back, I might even publish the agenda of the workshop.

Microsoft Virtual TechEd - Keynote

The ketnote started with a general overview of the thinking behind Windows 7. Specifically mentioned was the user backlash against Vista, and a general feeling that there wasn't much end user or OEM consultation prior to it's release, and it significant performance problems.

Windows 7 was tuned to reduce a lot of the performance bottlenecks and provide a faster user experience. For high end, multi-core CPU systems the scheduling algorithms have been updated to give better performance on those systems too.

Two new tools were specifically demonstrated.

Resource Monitor is a souped-up tool from Task Manager, which can also show more details about running processes, and show which files are open on the file system and how much readings and writing is happening. It can also show what directories are locked (this is searchable too), so you can find out why you can't delete or modify a file.

Memory usage graphic is also a bit more intuitive, showing clearly how much ram is in use for apps, standby caching and spare.

Likewise, Network usage is effectively the TCPView package from SysInternals with a graphical interface, but linked to the process list so you can see which processes have network sessions open, and to where, and what ports are exposed on the machine.

As a side note, Mark Russinovich's machine he was demonstrating did show "Google Updater" as a running program. Make of that what you will. "Apple Mobile Device" was also running, so presumably he's not using a Zune.

The second tool was Problem Steps Recorder, which is designed as a troubleshooting tool for remote helpdesks (ie. you spouse rings you up and says "It's not working!"). If the problem is reproducible, the user can run PSR and reproduce the problem. PSR will capture the screen on every click and keypress, and store the information in a ZIP file which can be e-mailed through to the helpdesk person.