The survey asked workers in 12 countries: US, UK, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Singapore. There were some cultural differences in some of the answers but overall there was a big gap in attitudes by workers at companies they consider technology leaders versus laggards -- with outdated technologies.

"It's a new digital workplace divide and the technology laggards are taking a big risk because this survey shows that their workforce is frustrated and many are thinking of quitting," said Mickey Davis, Global VP of Managed Workplace Services at Unisys.

Workers at companies using outdated technologies are 750 percent more likely to report high levels of frustration in getting their work done and 450 percent more are thinking about quitting their job. It takes an average of nine months to replace an employee.

"Companies that are trying to stretch their investments in technology and delay upgrading are taking a risk of a larger cost later in hiring people based on short-term savings today," said Davis.

Claire Brown, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Work, Technology and Society at University of California at Berkeley, said, "It's not enough to give workers new gadgets if you also don't provide the training, support and engagement they need. American workers don't want shiny gadgets. They get excited about technologies that can help them do their work. And they become very frustrated when they aren't given the tools they need."

Brown's recent book "Buddhist Economics: An enlightened approach to the dismal science"advocates for a different approach to building a sustainable economy that rewards social and community gains. She believes that new technologies will greatly improve worker productivity and we will be able to work a shorter week.

However, there is a technology productivity paradox in that productivity gains seem to be missing from the economic data despite decades of IT investments.

Brown explains. "We aren't very good at measuring productivity or the increase in its quality. We can measure costs very well but when we look for productivity gains we can't find them in the data."

The Unisys surveys show that technology investments and trainings are appreciated by workers and they feel more motivated, engaged and far less frustrated on the job. This high level of employee morale represents a significant gain for the company -- which comes in addition to the potential productivity benefits from deploying new technologies such as AI and the Internet of Things.

Unisys will release the results of the other country surveys over a two-week period because of the FIFA World Cup. The results will show some small cultural differences but have much common ground.

A lack of IT skills was reported by 82 percent; 91 percent are struggling with technical debt; 20 percent have huge application backlogs of more than 50 new app requests; and 72 per cent said they don't have confidence in being able to scale IT to meet the needs of the business.

"Companies are being told they have to think of themselves as software companies but they can't do that, they have too much in the way as this survey shows," said Matt Calkins, CEO and founder of Appian.

The struggle to stay on top of the old and new IT projects likely explains why 93 percent cited artificial intelligence as their top focus - presumably in hopes of improving the productivity of their IT department.

Applications are the key to unlocking the fruits of digital transformation. Apps become very important for engaging customers and also internally - in raising productivity and effectiveness of each business group.

This has placed enormous pressure on IT departments to produce high quality applications in addition to their many traditional duties. Backlog of more than ten new applications or major feature requests was reported by 61 percent. And those projects typically up to three months just to get started and almost a year to finish.

"The business opportunities from digital transformation will be won by the the first companies to have the apps and infrastructure for business agility. There's too many challenges internally such as technical debt," said Calkins.

Technical debt was reported by 74 percent as the main reason for delays in responding to business needs.

Appian offers a "lego-like" approach it calls low-code to creating custom enterprise applications in as little as ten days.

Appian's app development systems speed up production of apps by using a development process that can be mastered by non-software engineers. Line of business departments can develop their own custom apps without needing much at all from a hard-pressed IT department.

The 2018 Digital Transformation Readiness Survey of 463 respondents was conducted by DevOps.org.

Millennials will leave jobs that use technologies “not up to their standard” and they prefer to have “high-tech perks” than free food and ping pong, according to a global survey commissioned by Dell and Intel. 

The Future Workforce Study questioned almost 4,000 employees in 10 countries working at various sized businesses. It found:

- Almost half of global employees believe their current workplace is not smart enough, while 42 percent of millennial employees say they are willing to quit their job if office technologies are not up to their standard.

- More than 50 percent of employees expect to be working in a smart office in the next five years

- More than 80 percent of millennials say workplace tech would have an influence when deciding to take a job

- Half of all employees and three in five millennials believe technology will make face-to-face conversation obsolete in the near future

- More than 60 percent of millennials would rather receive high tech perks at work versus low tech perks like ping pong and free food

Read more here: http://www.dell.com/workforcestudy

Foremski’s Take: Asking millennials what they want at work is a pointless exercise because as we all know, when you are young, job choices aren’t abundant and in your first jobs you do what you are told to do with the tools available. 

And as for millennials wanting better technology at work such as “augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) and Internet of Things (IoT) than low-tech perks like ping pong, free food, etc,” I detect the cynical response of the mischievous millennial mind. 

The study does have a spattering of insights but it comes across as very self-serving for Dell and Intel to drum up sales for more tech products. And it is disingenuous to portray the opinions of a tiny number of millennials — a demographic with the least work experience — as experts on workplace technologies. 

Millennials predicting technology will soon make obsolete face-to-face conversations in business, is an example of the lack of work experience in this survey group.

Marketers love to say that millennials are “born digital” but doesn’t mean “born knowing all digital technologies.” It just means they are a little faster at learning game player controls and user interfaces but workplace productivity is the sole responsibility of the employer. 

Workplace technologies that deliver high productivity boosts will succeed —regardless of what employees want or not. 

iCharts founder and CEO Seymour Duncker

The future calls for enterprise apps becoming aggregators of trusted IT micro-services from many sources   — does that mean they can become effective data integration platforms? A low-cost path to Big Data’s promises of profitable business insights?

Today's announcement by iCharts that its visual intelligence software is now available inside Netsuite Enterprise is an example of how an application can integrate data from many sources both internal and external inside the application. Where better to have insights into the business than inside accounting software?

From the news release:

Powered by the Google Cloud Platform, the new iCharts offering will empower NetSuite customers that rely on external business systems and data sources to visualize their entire business within NetSuite, thereby giving them a true 360-degree view of their business.

In particular, NetSuite customers can visually blend data from sources such as:

-Other business systems (e.g., CRM, Marketing, web analytics)

- 3rd-party market data such as Nielsen and Dun & Bradstreet

- Historical or legacy data if you they are migrating from a legacy ERP system to NetSuite

Winning in Big Data will be all about: which screen are you on? Netsuite users live inside Netsuite screens and that’s true for other key users and their apps. Reaching users inside the applications where they work all day also means they have the information they need at precisely the place where they can do something about it. 

Here’s an iChart user:

“Our live production data resides outside of NetSuite, yet it is important for us to see this data alongside the other key indicators we manage inside of NetSuite,” said Brian Krosschell, Finance Director, fairlife, makers of value-added dairy products.

“iCharts has given us the platform to bring this data to life, allowing us to seamlessly integrate external data live for our users directly inside our NetSuite dashboard.”

 More info here: http://icharts.net  

When I first met Gary Bloom more than 15 years ago he was second to Larry Ellison at Oracle, and when he jumped to run Veritas, I was one of the first reporters to interview him. Then came a short stint at Symantec, eMeter, then consulting with private equity firm TPG. With over 30 years in key positions he’s become one of Silicon Valley’s top business leaders.

Since 2012, Bloom has been CEO of MarkLogic, a fast growing Silicon Valley database company riding the hot wave of interest in NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, as large organizations attempt to mine their diverse stores of big data for business insights. 

Relational databases still run at the core of every large business but they are seen as too limited and too structured for the digital business world where there is a need for highly scalable, highly adaptable database architectures that can easily add unstructured data sources, run on clusters, and support complex web sites — without first mapping all the data into the correct rows and columns of a relational database. 

A NoSQL database doesn’t do away with SQL — the standard query language used by relational databases, it simply means “not just SQL” — users can query the data in a variety of ways. Structured Query Language (SQL) is hard to use and requires detailed knowledge about the data, requiring highly trained specialists to run reports. MarkLogic offers an alternative to SQL, a semantic technology that Bloom says can understand queries in natural language sentences. Anyone can interrogate vast stores of data without needing data scientists and SQL specialists.

It might seem strange to group MarkLogic, founded in 2001,  with the same hip, young crowd of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Cassandra, Couchbase, Hadoop, MapReduce, HBase, Hypertable and many more. But MarkLogic fulfills the definition of a NoSQL database and it also has something the others don’t: enterprise-ready features.

And Bloom’s long experience in enterprise IT means that he knows how to speak to large corporations, he knows what they need, what scares them, and he knows what isn’t working.

“What isn’t working is the data integration projects that large companies have tried to do with relational databases. Many of those projects have become stalled because of the limitations of rows and columns. We can handle both unstructured and structured data and that means integration is faster and far less costly.”

Searching for data…

MarkLogic was founded by Christopher Lindblad, a former architect at InfoSeek — one of the first search engines. His goal was to apply search-based approaches to indexing data and searching metadata. MarkLogic is document-centric, which is why media companies were early adopters because they could use it as a very sophisticated content management system.

Media companies are still buying MarkLogic, customers such as NBC, which used it to create a highly popular app for streaming Saturday Night Live comedy video clips. Two sectors: healthcare and financial services are the most important sectors today. 

Business has been very good Bloom says, with annual sales topping $100 million. The driver is Big Data:  large corporations are convinced there is an El Dorado of untapped commercial opportunities — if only they can run their reports across all their data sources. But integrating all that data is too costly, and takes too long with relational databases. The future will be full of data in many forms, formats, and sources and how that data is used will be the differentiator in many competitive battles. If that data can’t be searched it can’t be used. 

Companies have been able to easily test NoSQL databases for data integration projects because they are  open source software or there are free developer versions. The results have mostly been good but moving to the next stage of deployment is not so easy because of the lack of enterprise-ready features. This is the MarkLogic differentiator over its younger competitors.

“When you use Oracle, for example, you don’t have to worry about security because it is built-in.You shouldn’t have to worry about enterprise issues such as implementing policies,” says Bloom. “MarkLogic is the only NonSQL database that is enterprise ready. And we are also the only transactional NoSQL database.”

Bloom knows how to speak to risk-averse IT organizations, and he knows what keeps CIOs and CEOs awake at night. One of their biggest challenges he says, is all the data spread around the organization and held in silos. This obstructs companies from generating a single view of their business operations and discovering valuable insights that can be turned into new revenues. 

MarkLogic v Oracle…

The timing looks perfect for MarkLogic, it has the right leadership and its technology is in the right place to capitalize on the pursuit of Big Data. Its revenues have grown tremendously as some of the world’s largest companies seek not only Big Data insights but also some relief from the international complexity of regulatory compliance across all their business groups.  Relational databases cannot provide the data agility that they need to do what they want.

Although MarkLogic is tiny compared to Oracle there are some interesting parallels. “MarkLogic is at about the same size as Oracle was when I began working there. It took a long time for Oracle to get security and other enterprise features right, but when it did, that was when company really took off.”

Oracle rode the industry-wide move away from mainframes in the 1990s, to become a giant in the IT sector. These days it is losing deals to MarkLogic Bloom claims. The government’s botched Healthcare.gov launch was corrected by moving from Oracle to MarkLogic, and Bloom says many other customers have had to pull the plug on Oracle based projects. 

Another similarity with the early Oracle is MarkLogic’s work for government spy agencies, a booming business for Silicon Valley’s Palantir Technologies — a venture-backed startup valued at about $20billion.

“Unlike Palantir,  which brings in data scientists for a single project, we sell systems that enable agencies to analyze all their data sources in real-time, all the time, with real-time notifications — not just one-time projects,” says Bloom.

Is it still possible to build a large tech company such as the next Oracle in Silicon Valley, when the IPO market continues to be weak, and the huge incumbents have global platforms that will take years for challengers to match?

MarkLogic is one of the few Silicon Valley companies that has the technologies, the positioning, and the revenues to have a successful IPO once the markets return. The IT department is changing rapidly, it is being re-organized, re-tooled and re-imagined so that it can support a fast moving digital business. MarkLogic is betting on IT becoming strategic again, that IT matters once more. It’s a good bet.

Working at Delphix, a virtual technologies startup in the heart of Silicon Valley, I've been learning a lot about enterprise software and the challenges facing global corporations as business becomes ever more digital. 

Data security is critical and its importance was underscored by the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco -- the world's largest gathering of computer security experts. About 40,000 people -- a jump of nearly 20% compared with last year -- attended its awards ceremonies, hundreds of presentations, and demonstrations from thousands of vendors of data protection technologies.

But if you bought everything at RSA would your organization be completely secure? 

Likely not -- you will always need to buy something new. This is troubling, especially if your job security relies on effective data security.

Computer security and CIO job security

A 2015 study by Big Data company Actian found that 43 percent of CEOs said they would fire their Chief Information Officer or Chief Technology Officer (CIO/CTO) in the event of a significant security event.

But with so many high-profile data breaches lately, even those with large IT budgets haven't been able to spend enough, or choose the right technologies to protect their organization.

And current trends don't bode well for CIO job security because they increase the risk of a major data breach. For example, the rush by global enterprises to develop more applications is particularly troubling.

Application development teams require fresh copies of the production database for testing. Finding bugs early is vital and speeding up application delivery speeds up business initiatives. But every database copy multiplies the risk of sensitive data being exposed in some way.

Protecting 20 database copies is hard and it is easy to lose track of where they are being used.

If you don't know where your data is, then you don't know if it has been stolen. A recent survey by RSA and ISACA found that 24 % of computer security professionals had no way of knowing if they had suffered a data loss.

But there is a solution -- at least for the increasingly common user case of cloning the production database: data masking.

Data masking removes the sensitive data and replaces it with realistic looking social security numbers, credit card numbers, etc. Data replacement would be a more accurate term.

If hackers get access to a cloned production database that has been data masked then there is no danger of any sensitive data leaking out because it is not there. It is a 100% secure data protection. You cannot steal something that isn't there. 

Encryption is vulnerable to decryption but data masking is irreversible. 

So why is data masking such a poorly understood security technology? Why were there only four companies out of hundreds at RSA, offering data masking? 

Why isn't data masking more widely used to deal with the security issues caused by the epidemic of proliferating database copies? 

I don't have the answers. One answer is that data masking can be hard and labor intensive.  And you have to do it again and again for each copy. The shortcut quickly becomes: skip it. As a CIO it can be a shortcut to losing your job but the pressure to support key business initiatives is high. 

Data protection is often juxtaposed against business innovation.

Gartner warns,

Is your information security program a roadblock to business progress?...You must protect enterprise data from compromise and drive innovation at the same time.

CIO Magazine's "State of the CIO 2016" states

...you [the CIO] are expected to be the driver of enterprise digital transformations. However... you face a wide range of tactical challenges -- from defending against increasingly sophisticated and potentially damaging cybersecurity threats to managing mass cloud migrations to leading agile development projects. 

Data protection and driving business goals are not in opposition if you choose the right approach.

Mask Once -- Copy Many

By combining data masking with data virtualization you only need to mask one database copy-- then you can create unlimited virtual copies  -- or let the app dev teams do it themselves with the self-service user interface.

That's the unique Delphix approach: mask once - copy as many times as you want while keeping data fresh. It's a true Data as a Service technology - data where it's needed on demand.

By allowing developers to self-service their test environments in minutes compared with hours or days,  application delivery can be accelerated by as much as a factor of ten. Data security with faster app delivery is a killer combination.

Data masking with data virtualization not only saves CIO jobs but also makes them look like IT heroes. 

Geoffrey Moore's 1991 book "Crossing the Chasm" was incredibly influential in the tech sector with more than one million copies sold and it gave birth to the Chasm Consulting Group.

Earlier this week I went to see him speak at Kahuna - a fast growing mobile marketing startup — about his latest book, and how companies survive when business is increasingly digital.

I asked about the importance of IT as we head into an increasingly digital business world. Is IT strategic once more? Does IT matter? These were questions that Nicholas Carr asked in 2004 in his book "Does IT Matter?" — a well received argument that technology was no longer a differentiator in business.

Carr was right and IT organizations became slow changing cost centers inside the global enterprise. Now, 12 years after Carr's book, IT us not the same and things are changing. Some businesses are trying to revitalize their IT infrastructure to behave more like tech companies and where application development is a vital weapon in their competitive battles. IT needs to support agile digital business platforms on a global scale.

What does Moore think? Click the short video clip to find out.

There's a new business reality that few companies know about. If you want to be a player in global markets you will need a top-notch IT department. It won't be the same as the current one but whatever you do, don't buy the hype that you can just use off-the-shelf technologies and that the cloud makes IT departments obsolete.

Business edge will be defined by IT edge. IT matters and the performance of your IT department matters a lot.

The following is from my ZDNet column: IMHO:

The IT department will be transformed from a slow changing cost center and into a vibrant, creative organization essential to every business competing on a global scale.

More than ten years have passed since the publication of the book, "Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage" by Nicholas Carr, the former Executive Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

Few people disagreed with Carr's argument. In a world where every large company has the same IT systems, the same ERP apps, the same IT infrastructure, the same commodity hardware, no one has a strategic advantage.

Carr was right but that was then...

Times have changed and these days IT clearly does matter. The rise of the global digital corporation will require extraordinary levels of IT agility. Even the slightest IT edge will offer tremendous benefits at scale. Where else will that edge come from? It won't be from off-the-shelf solutions.

And don't be distracted by the red herring of arguments about the cloud versus owning your own data center. The IT department is fast becoming transformed into a software organization, and into the most strategic and most valuable resource within every global enterprise.

Deadly dull IT

Ten years ago I remember writing posts about how IT enterprise markets had become dull and boring. All the innovation in tech was with web companies such as Google. Oracle was rolling up huge swaths of the IT industry with its acquisitions, and few major IT companies remained. There was virtually no innovation, that is until virtual IT technologies from VMware and others began to emerge.

IT is far from dull these days. Over the past decade the successive waves of IT virtualization: from servers, to storage, networks, and now data virtualization -- have transformed the data center beyond recognition.

VMware talks about the "software defined data center" -- hybrid data centers combining private and cloud based IT systems. But software defined data centers are not yet a reality -- we still need to complete the emerging data virtualization wave -- but it won't be long.

The software defined corporation

Software defined data centers will make possible the software defined corporation. All global enterprises will become software defined businesses because how else will they compete and survive in a data driven world? IT agility will be tightly bound to business agility and in being the first to exploit new business opportunities.

Don't be distracted by all the red herring chatter about owning data centers or using the cloud; or how IT departments are irrelevant when every department can use cheap, off the-shelf software services. That's old thinking, a continuation of "Does IT Matter?".

Every global enterprise will need an extremely agile IT platform, and an IT department full of highly skilled technologists capable of giving it a competitive business edge. Software is the only scalable way to differentiate any and every business.

IT matters, and the IT department matters a lot.

I was at SAP in Palo Alto earlier this week to see computer pioneer Alan Kay give a talk and also to meet with him for an exclusive interview.

I’ll have more on the interview coming up. I just uploaded the video of his talk here: Alan Kay @ SAP - YouTube

Alan Kay is a computer pioneer, he was part of the the Xerox PARC team of about 30 researchers who developed many of the key concepts of the PC and notebook. Here he talks about the lack of forward thinking in technology design and innovation.

He advocates designing products for how we expect to use technologies decades from now instead of trying to replicate old technologies.

He also talks about system thinking rather than discrete products such as apps and hardware, the goal is integration and collaboration among our technologies because that’s what’s important for humans: more collaboration.

He also mentions that Steve Jobs missed a lot when he visited Xerox PARC and replicated the graphical user interface and mouse — he didn’t see the computers were all connected, used Ethernet, and they connected to the nascent Internet then called ARPAnet. Steve Jobs missed half of it and didn't see that the computers were all networked "because he's a visual guy."

Above, LinkedIn's Head Designer Amy Parnell interviewed by Adam Leventhal CTO of Delphix.

The recent Delphix Tech Talk series featured Amy Parnell, Director of User Experience at LinkedIn. Adam Leventhal, Delphix CTO interviewed Amy on several key topics that helped surface some of the best practices she has developed at LinkedIn over the five years she's worked there. She leads more than 60 designers.

Here's the link to the WebEx video recording of her excellent talk: Amy Parnell @Delphix Tech Talks

Some of the key points that stood out for me:

 - Leaders should not be afraid to say they were wrong about something. Recognize it and move-on. It allows team members to pursue "intelligent" risks.

- Leaders are not expected to have all the answers -- use your team as an advisory board before making a decision.

- Your team has first rights to your time and attention and you need to provide as much as they need. Good managers need to be great listeners. She acquired the skills of active listening similar to those used in therapy to help her interact with team members. 

- Cultural fit is very important in recruitment and everyone in the department has to be comfortable with new people because they might be working with them on the same team in the future. Getting along is an important skill. 

- There's often a misunderstanding between designers and engineers because each has a different agenda and goals.

- When doing A/B testing LinkedIn waits for a few days on new changes to see if users are able to adjust rather than testing immediately.

- There's a move away from a one-user interface and message approach at LinkedIn. It is creating mobile apps for specific sets of users such as recruiters, job seekers, etc., It found that targeted apps based on events such as looking for a new job improved user experiences and engagement with LinkedIn's services. The challenge now is how to do that with the desktop product. 

- She is glad that the gender imbalance issue in Silicon Valley is getting more attention and she hopes perceptions of gender bias won't get in the way of performance reviews and team collaboration.

- She joked that she joined LinkedIn because she didn't like the design of her page. 

Watch the video for lots more great advice from LinkedIn's Head Designer Amy Parnell.

The Delphix Tech Talks series is organized by Darci Moore. 

Below: From Far right to left, Rahul Nair, senior engineer at Delphix was a former colleague of Amy's at Yahoo! and introduced her to Delphix;  Adam Leventhal, and Amy Parnell.

 Delphix HQ in Menlo Park.

Delphix, (my employer) is building some excellent momentum with the announcement of $75m in funding led by Fidelity Management and Research, with new investors Credit Suisse and The Kraft Group. This follows recent recognition in two top IT awards from Computer Weekly and Computing (I used to work for Computing).

The latest funding comes three years after a $25m round in June 2012 led by Jafco Ventures, with Summit Partners and Battery Ventures. Delphix investors also include Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Icon Ventures. Both rounds were oversubscribed.

Delphix is the leader in Data as a Service (DaaS), and its customers include 25 of the world's 100 largest corporations.  Delphix technologies are used to accelerate app development by more than two times; speed-up migration of IT resources to the cloud; and mask sensitive corporate data with unbreakable security.

Delphix was recently recognized in two highly prestigious IT awards: "DevOps Solution of the Year" in Computing's Vendor Excellence Awards competing against Amazon Web Services, Chef, Splunk Enterprises, DBmaestro, and many others.

Delphix customer European Bioinformatics Institute won "Best Data Centre Project of the Year" from Computer Weekly for a project that used Delphix technologies to consolidate 500 databases that the judges called "innovative and forward-thinking."

Jedidiah Yueh, CEO of Delphix said: “Our mission is to help companies unlock the value of data trapped in heavyweight legacy infrastructure and databases. With our virtualization, masking, and self-service delivery technologies, we can deliver data 100x faster than traditional methods, while consuming 10x less infrastructure.”

Delphix has raised a total of $120.5m since its founding in 2008. This is a relatively small amount compared to many other enterprise software companies because it has been able to generate substantial revenues to finance its expansion.

Stewart Grierson, Delphix CFO said:"We’ve grown revenue at a 220 percent CAGR over the last five years while primarily funding operations from cash flow. We have a proven business model and the market has validated our technology.”

The new capital will be used to speed up expansion and extend its lead in DaaS markets. Earlier this year Delphix made its first acquisition, Axis Technology Software based in Boston.

Foremski's Take: Speeding up apps projects by more than 200% is a killer use for Delphix technologies —  a 12-month project can be completed in less than six months. This is a huge competitive advantage for Global 500 sized companies because they can deploy those apps at enormous scale. 

DaaS — the right data at the right time, to the right app — will only grow in importance as companies around the world transform into digital businesses. Their ability to constantly deploy apps will be critical to success and vital in defining the customer experience. 

But the majority of enterprise app development is handicapped by slow provisioning of IT resources for app dev teams, and the time-consuming resetting of testing environments for debugging. These are the top two constraints identified by Gene Kim in his popular DevOps book "The Phoenix Project" and that Delphix eliminates. 

This global digital transformation of business also requires migrating more and more IT resources to the cloud for greater operational agility. Delphix customers report faster completion of IT migration projects while reducing their costs and risks. 

Please see: 

Delphix Announces $75 Million in New Funding Led by Fidelity Investments

Delphix Customer European Bioinformatics Institute Wins Best Datacentre Project of the Year at Computer Weekly European User Awards 2015

Delphix Positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement - Delphix

I came across a great interview by Danny Palmer at Computing, with Mike Lear the CIO of City Index, which provides spread betting services to tens of thousands of financial markets traders.

Faster delivery of apps is key in the competitive market for financial data that City Index provides but so is data accuracy. Testing is extremely important especially since customers can complain to government regulators.  

Lear needed his developers to be able to self-serve their own data in controlled areas, and he needed to speed up the checking of the integrity of the datasets, which required IT specialists and could take several hours each time — a serious bottleneck.

When he discovered Delphix offered a solution to his problems he was surprised.

"It was something we didn't know existed," says Lear. "We weren't particularly looking for something which did what Delphix did, because we weren't aware something could do that as it's innovative technology."

That's the challenge all innovative technologies face: companies don't go looking for them because they don't believe they exist. Or, if they come across them, they don't believe they can do what they do!

It used to be said that the world will beat a path to your door for a better mousetrap. But we know that's not true. Innovation means having to have to beat a new path to the world, time and time again.

The Mike Lear interview is well worth reading in full: Betting on testing, mobile and DevOps - an interview with City Index Group CIO Mike Lear - Computing Interview

(BTW, I used to work at Computing, based in London's Soho district in the mid-1980s and became its US editor for ten years. In those days, the weekly newspaper had a huge editorial staff and was fat with advertising and job ads. (Digital disrupts media companies the most because the web is a publishing technology (two-way).))

Delphix received a big boost today recognition from Gartner, which placed Delphix in the top Leader's quadrant in its latest Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement. It's key in cloud migration projects, a complex and risky move made far simpler with Delphix and it's great to get the recognition from Gartner.

With Delphix, customers can speed up the complex migration to the cloud and test as they go. Hybrid IT data centers have become essential in enterprise IT plans for all large companies seeking business agility.  Delphix provides an "undo" button that takes away many of the risks that IT departments face in migrating their data and applications to hosted services. Delphix preserves all functionality and state enabling databases to be restored in minutes if there's a problem.

Gartner's recognition of Delphix, the most recent entrant into the market, is important for both Delphix and the enterprises planning cloud migrations. Gartner's evaluations of tools and technologies are closely followed by IT departments as they try to minimize risks to their businesses.

Cloud migration is a major undertaking and it abounds in operational and security risks if mismanaged or the wrong tools are used.

The other companies in the Gartner Leadership quadrant are: IBM, HP, Informatica and Solis Technologies. There are eight additional companies in the other quadrants. 

Using Delphix for cloud migration comes with many additional advantages because the technology has many other important uses:

- A single clone of a production database can be used for testing by multiple app development teams, which speeds up app development by months.

- Its data masking creates an unbreakable security layer by over-writing any sensitive data.  

- It can be used for quick backup and recovery in minutes.

- It can free-up large amounts of IT resources in servers and storage because it eliminates the need to host multiple copies of production databases. 

The Gartner Magic Quadrant report can be found here:  Delphix.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant

But it's a hard slog for those startups when they have something truly innovative to sell because who do they sell it to when there is no category for what they have? Who holds the budget for something that didn't exist until a year or two ago?

There's budgets for databases, servers, for networks, and hundreds of other IT components. But where are the budgets for as-yet unknown technologies that could be transformative across the entire business?

Innovate or go home...

Corporations are constantly talking about their need to acquire innovative technologies as a key to survival in this faster-than-ever changing world.

Alan Boehme, Chief Innovation Officer of Coca-Cola, said at a recent CIO conference, he looks for technologies that can give Coca-Cola at least a six months lead over competitors because he can quickly leverage that advantage across the entire organization and its partners.

Companies know that innovation is vital to their futures but they haven't created a process for innovation to come into the organization.

How can innovative startups succeed if budgets are only for the existing catalog of products? It is understandable why there's so many products that provide incremental improvements to existing systems because at least there are budgets. And what if your innovation does away with the need for many IT products? There's no incentive for budget owners to find ways of doing away with their budgets.

Global companies have the scale and the most to gain from rapid discovery and integration of innovative IT technologies. But the year-long internal processes for acquisition and deployment works against their goals of agility and speed to markets.

Innovation in budgets...

We need a better approach to harnessing IT innovation by large enterprises. Maybe it'll come in the form of new executive roles such as Chief Information Architects, that have the means to evaluate the business impact of novel solutions across the entire organization and the budget to acquire it. And then have the communications skills to champion those solutions inside the organization.

Innovation will wither on the vine if there's no budget for it. And enterprises will miss unique opportunities to jump ahead of competitors. 

I attended a very worthwhile roundtable this week, organized by Actian, a Big Data business analytics company. It was a very good mix of analysts, investors, media and users.

I learned a lot about Hadoop, and Actian, and enterprise use and misuse of analytics primarily because the discussion was not all about how wonderful everything is, but a warts and all, frank discussion of the challenges in the enterprise space for Hadoop based analytics.

Alan Boehme, CIO and Chief Innovation Officer at Coca-Cola Company, spoke at IDG's CIO Perspectives conference in San Francisco. Maryfran Johnson, Editor-in-Chief of CIO Magazine, introduced him by saying he had "cracked the code" on startups.

I was skeptical there would be much from Coca-Cola after the fallout from the innovation of "New Coke" in 1985 but I was wrong. It was a surprisingly interesting presentation and refreshingly frank in places.

Boehme spoke about his company's recent quest for innovation in Israel, where it planned to launch an incubator, then changed its mind and decided to set up an accelerator, but pivoted once more to become a "Bridge" that connects startups with US markets, and with top US execs such as John Cambers, CEO of Cisco Systems; plus 200 of Coca-Cola's top marketing experts.

Startups are as terrible at marketing as large companies are at innovation but, "Coca-Cola is great at storytelling. We've been doing it for a long time," said Boehme."Startups are terrible at marketing. Coca-Cola is great at storytelling, we've been doing it for a long time," said Boehme. Coca-Cola is 129 years old and its iconic bottle is 100.  [Helping startups tell their stories sounds like Coca-Cola is moving into the PR business!]

Here's some of my notes from his talk:

- Corporations are terrible at innovation because they have so many processes in place and those processes are designed to protect against any changes to the business.

- As CIO he is always looking for enterprise technologies that can provide his company with a competitive advantage. It won't come from traditional enterprise IT vendors. 

- There's no competitive advantage from IT such as ERP systems. 

- CIOs are like lemmings, they follow each other, there's no advantage in doing the same as everyone.

- Software is changing everything inside the corporation, it is a competitive differentiator. Being the first to find innovative software is key.

- Boehme wants to find key innovations first, so that Coca-Cola can have at least a six-month advantage. [Why not buy the startup? and keep the advantage for longer?]

- He looks for very small teams, less than a dozen or so, maybe just a year or so old but with a reasonably well developed product, so that Coca-Cola can become the exclusive launch customer. [It's a very narrow window of qualifying startups and with barely tested technologies— it'll require a lot of patience from his IT teams in deployment.]

- Coca-Cola looked at more than 130 startups and whittled them down to several dozen for its training programs, which involved flying the startup teams to Paris, and Atlanta, and meetings with top US execs, Coca-Cola marketing experts, etc.

- Its goal with the Bridge program is to end up with at least one startup that becomes hugely successful, just as VC firms make many investments but just expect one to be big. 

-He spoke about some innovative ideas such as the use of high frequency sounds to transmit payments between a soft drinks vending machine and a smartphone. "Only your dog will be able to run off with your credit card info." 

- Every smartphone, even if it is in airplane mode, is listening and can be turned on by the right frequencies. Sound could be used instead of Wi-Fi radios to transmit Internet data. Coca-Cola isn't using this technology, yet.

- Coca-Cola came up with a self-disposing bottle after seeing the trash that people left on beaches in Rio de Janeiro. The bottle was made from ice.

- When Dennis Rodman visited N. Korea he was seen on TV drinking a Coke. The State Department wanted to know how he got it. "There's many ways to get a Coke."

I had an interesting media roundtable meeting with Birst, the cloud-based business analytics company that recently raised $65 million in a Series F, and a total of $156 million.

Major VC firms such as Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad, are backing the company as it seeks new customers and battles for a dominant position in cloud-based analytics.

Jay Larson, CEO (above) is 25-year industry veteran of SAP, Oracle, SuccessFactors, and Jive Software. He says the business opportunities for Birst are extraordinary.

Larson said there's a $15 billion market opportunity in displacing the 25 year old legacy business intelligence applications that many enterprises are still using. 

I pointed out that there's many companies now offering business intelligence solutions and services. All the "Big Data" software companies are essentially talking about business analytics.  So how do you stand out?

Larson said that Birst's analytics are far superior to the competition. But every company says that about itself, and it's not something that can be easily checked by a potential customer. 

One key area where Birst looks to have an important advantage is in its abilities to access clean data. Birst can take many types of complex data sets and combine them to produce analysis of thousands of factors and spot patterns that are significant to large companies.

The structure of data...

The challenge of "Big Data" and the coming Internet of Things tsunami of sensor data, is how to make all that data usable, relevant, and analyzable. It's a very difficult challenge especially when dealing with application data.

Larson says Birst is able to pull out the right data and do it in real-time. But there is no need to translate data into new databases, its technologies sit on top of the client's data and can run a complex business analysis in real-time.  

Wall Street M&A analysis...

I also spoke with Birst founder Brad Peters, Chairman and Chief Product Officer. Peters said after he graduated as an economist, his first job was on Wall Street. This was in the early mid-1990s when M&A was big business, especially at Morgan Stanley.  He and his colleagues were expected to be able to create an M&A financial spreadsheet model in less than three minutes, in order to analyze the benefits of potential mergers. Rolling up industry sectors into giant companies was a huge business.

[These days Wall Street is keen on splitting up the huge companies they helped create.]

Peters says everyone worked insanely long hours, 100 plus hour work weeks were normal. He managed to find ways to automate some of the financial analysis and financial models that were key to Morgan Stanley winning lucrative M&A business deals.  

But he says his bosses liked to do things the traditional way — such as double-checking financial information by hand using calculators. They would insist that a human check key financial figures by hand believing computers were more error prone than humans. He says he was unable to persuade his bosses to adopt technologies that would have improved financial accuracy and enabled faster analysis of complex mergers.

From those experiences at Wall Street, and later, leading the analytics product line at Siebel Systems and Oracle, he developed the core ideas for Birst, founding the company in 2005.

Garbage in...garbage out

Peters spoke about the importance of data sources and how it is very important to know the data and its quality. Application data can be very complex and in today's app-driven world it is vital for companies to be able to harness that data.

Software engineers have a saying, "Garbage in — garbage out." I told Peters I often use that saying because it applies to the decline in the media sector and the increasing amount of poorly researched, low quality reporting that we see everywhere.

I often warn people that if we continue to have "garbage media" then we won't be able to make the right, informed decisions about many important subjects such as energy, the economy, environment, education, elder healthcare — and that's just the issues that begin with the letter"e"! 

Birst is focused on ensuring it can access high quality data because it's the only way the business analytics can be trusted. Peters says Birst is able to identify correlations between data that would be missed by other analytics packages, and present that information in a visual format that makes it easy to understand. And no specialist programmers are needed to create the analysis. 

Below: Doug Leone, Managing Director of  Sequoia Capital, is a Birst board member.

Secure Islands, a privately held Israeli computer security company, opened its US HQ earlier this year in New York City. The company is confident in repeating the success it has enjoyed in Europe,  here in US enterprise security markets, with its approach to data protection.

Its technology automatically classifies and if required, encrypts sensitive data upon creation, as opposed to when it leaves the organization, which is traditionally how encryption has been managed.

This process, which it calls "Data Immunization," enables organizations to set classification polices which are automatically applied when a file or email is created. If encryption is required, the protection stays with the data wherever it ends up.  This way, if it is stolen, no one can read the data except the intended readers. 

I recently spoke with Aki Eldar, co-founder and CEO of Secure Islands. Here are some of my notes:

- Secure Islands was founded about eight years ago by two brothers. One had skills in sales and marketing in enterprise IT markets, and the other was a software developer.

- The brothers realized that you can't win against cyber criminals because they always have a head start. Breaking into a computer network, or having sensitive files leaked from inside, will continue to happen no matter how good an organization's perimeter security is.  But, if those files are encrypted and can only be opened by specific people, it no longer matters if the data was lost or stolen, as it will be useless to anyone but its intended recipients. 

- Secure Islands product, called the IQProtector Suite,  is a real-time monitoring technology that will detect [it classifies the content and checks if a security policy applies] data that's sensitive -- as it is being created. It will then encrypt the files and assign user access rights, if a policy applies. It also has a services arm where it can help its customers create data security policies appropriate for their business. 

-Secure Islands also has an audit function and once data is tagged, it can track all of the unstructured data of the organization. 

- Unstructured data is a big problem for organizations because as it moves around an organization and onto a variety of mobile devices, and beyond -- there's a loss of control over sensitive company information. 

- Had Sony used Secure Islands products, it could have prevented the embarrassing emails from executives at Sony Pictures from being leaked with a single policy: "Encrypt all of executive management's emails."

- Secure Islands says a big part of its success is that it works transparently across platforms and apps, and does not disrupt existing uses.

-It's important to encrypt the data files at the point of creation, before it gets changed or "tainted."  

- The technology works with Microsoft's Active Directory for ID management and it uses Microsoft's encryption engine, which is the standard in European financial industry.

-The protection is persistent as the data is managed over its life cycle.

- I asked about the need for regulators, lawyers and auditors to be able to access archival business data for a variety of reasons. The company said that because its protection is policy driven, there is no problem complying with all legal and fiduciary data access requirements. 

- Its technology can understand the content and context of the data and index the information. It's too costly to encrypt everything created by an organization, and also unnecessary.

- Secure Islands received an investment of unspecified amount, last year from Credit Suisse, one of its first customers. That investment is helping to fund the company's US HQ and marketing push. 

Sustainability gurus from Facebook, Yahoo and Ebay all agreed that green energy is good for their users and good for the planet, on a panel Tuesday evening in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club of California.

The "Clean Cloud" event was part of The Commonwealth Club's sustainability initiative, "Climate One." Its goal is, "Changing the conversation about energy, economy and environment" by broadcasting live events featuring local business leaders and advocacy groups.

The panel was moderated by veteran TV and radio presenter Greg Dalton, and founder of Climate One, and will be shown on Northern California stations KRCB TV 22 and heard on PBS radio station KQED.

The problem with the panel was that they all agreed with each other. Even the policy analyst from Greenpeace agreed with the corporate giants, that sustainability was good.

There was nothing much new learned about the green policies or politics of these Silicon Valley giants and their massive data centers. 

Climate One has a significant challenge ahead in its mission to change "conversations" if it chooses to hold such conversations among the choir.  Everyone agrees on all of these types of  issues, which they do around here.

There were some lost opportunities Tuesday evening to push some of the assembled panelists on some key issues: such as their practice of locating data centers in poor municipalities that offer the best tax incentives.

And also on the Silicon Valley giants' political contributions and lobbying efforts and which politicians are funded. They stayed away from those subjects and anything slightly controversial, that might indeed have started a conversation.

Would Ebay, Yahoo and Facebook actively push for green initiatives with their users, someone asked? No, not directly was the answer but their platforms enable many groups to organize, and that counts, they said. The Freecycle "movement" began on Yahoo Groups.

Would Yahoo directly promote Green/Sustainability issues through its media efforts?

Yahoo creates a lot of original media content these days in promoting technology news and tech products and has hired many top reporters such as David Pogue and Rafe Needleman. Would it hire top reporters for a Green media initiative? I'd love to know.

What are these companies doing to support green energy initiatives locally? Among their users? Among their staff? Climate One should dig a little a little deeper and see how much is talk and how much is walk — otherwise it's a free PR slot. 

The panelists spent a lot of time patting each other on the back. 

"Clean Cloud" panelists were: Gary Cook, Senior Policy Analyst, Greenpeace International; Lori Duval, Global Director, Green, eBay; Christina Page, Global Director, Energy and Sustainability Strategy, Yahoo; Bill Weihl, Sustainability Guru, Facebook.

Home page | Climate One

Cybereason is a Boston based security startup that offers clients the ability to reveal a cyber attack in their corporate networks in real-time and not shut-it down -- at least not right away. 

The company's approach to security is based on the assumption that hackers will find a way into the corporate network someway anyway, so any attacks have to be detected in real-time otherwise once they are inside they can lurk for months or years.

The three founders worked together in Israel's military cyber espionage Unit 8200, which is the single largest unit in the Israeli Defense Forces and performs similar activities to the National Security Administration (NSA) in the US. 

Here are some notes and observations from my conversation with Lior Div, CEO of Cybereason:

- The company was founded in 2012. 

- I asked if the solution offered is based on work that Div and his colleagues engaged in when they worked in Unit 8200. He laughs and says he cannot say anything about the organization however, he said there is a Wikipedia page entry. 

- Div says that the computer training he and his colleagues received in the Israeli military was very good and taught them to think creatively about cyber attacks, just as hackers do. By thinking creatively it is possible to get ahead of criminal hackers, instead of the hackers always being ahead of the game.

- The training covered many aspects of computer security rather than creating specialists with narrow knowledge. This is important because you have to understand the whole security picture if you are to preempt future exploits.

- His team is recruited based on its ability to have a free mind, to think out of the box, but first to think there is no box. It is important also to have coding abilities, to read code and be comfortable working in a complex environment.

- Hacking is rarely performed by individuals. It is usually large groups, as many as 50 people, made up of teams of specialists. The teams must meet milestones just like software development teams.

- One team breaks into the corporate network while other teams specialize in finding the right data, or covering up tracks, while another team engages in deceptive behavior to mask the real activity.

- He says that the recent Sony hack blamed on the North Koreans was likely from another country and that it was a typical deception tactic.

-Cybereason's software is offered on-premise or cloud-based. If a data center has been compromised it is an advantage to use the cloud-based service. The software incorporates the experience of its security experts and their expectations on what could be new, creative ways to mount a cyber attack.

- This predictive security engine is constantly updated and works in real-time to detect and reveal what the cyber attackers are doing, as well as what they might try to do.

- The average length of a cyber attack is 200 days but with Cybereason's service, that can be reduced to less than a day, or even just a few hours, although Div recommends to not shut down the attack right away.

- Why not? Once detected, it's important to monitor the attack to make sure that it is not a deception, and to see what's the aim of the intrusion. You have to see the whole picture before shutting it down.

- Corporations are beginning to understand that there is no silver bullet to security. Hackers will always find a way in so the question becomes how fast can you hunt them down?

More information:

Collecting Endpoint Data Like No Other: Cybereason Silent Sensor

IoT Security: It's Not Too Late to Get It Right

Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer speaking at a media roundtable at 25 Lusk.

I was at a media roundtable earlier this week hosted by Datameer, which runs business analytics on Hadoop databases hosted as a service. Hadoop is a fascinating story because its simplicity pays off in its speed and agility. It's very easy to spin-up new databases and you can run analytics on data that isn't structured in relational databases.

With more data analyzed, it means more chances of getting accurate predictions and insights.

Om Malik (right), founder of GigaOM at SF Jazz Center

I had lots of great feedback this week from my participation on panel organized by Castlight Health, a San Francisco based startup focused on making healthcare choices easier for employees. Design is tremendously important when it comes to the complex subject of healthcare where employee decisions can have life or death outcomes. 

The GigaOm Roadmap conference had the theme of "Invisible Design" and my job on the Castlight panel was to provide some context and a long view from my perch as a Silicon Valley watcher, and my many years as a beat reporter covering enterprise tech.

Fellow panelists were: Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, the moderator; Zia Yusuf a lecturer at Stanford Design School and former senior exec at SAP;  Christine Evans enterprise marketing for FitBit; and Maeve O'Mara of Castlight speaking about lessons learned from designing a platform for enterprise healthcare. 

I've sat through hundreds of panels in my career and hundreds were bad and intensely boring. Granted, conferences are about the connections, the conversations in the hallways and the parties and the panels are considered marketing platforms rather than a serious attempt at discussion. But it doesn't have to be that way.

I sat quietly for a while but I couldn't stop myself from interrupting Zia Yusuf, when he was talking, and talking, about the importance of design, designing for the customer experience, how design is so important to everything at SAP, etc, and how SAP had 40 or 50 full-time designers... 

I'm a fan of the company and its people but SAP software is not noted for incredible design. Its user interfaces are straightforward, form-based, lots of small rectangles and small words.

I was flabbergasted and asked, "What do forty or fifty SAP designers do all day?!"

Yusuf, replied, "It's not forty or fifty, it's 450 SAP designers." 

I was shocked and asked again, what do they do all day? I would find it hard to imagine that Versace or Pierre Cardin had 450 designers let alone SAP, a solid, dependable, enterprise software company used by nearly every Fortune 1000 corporation. Do they sketch out new designs for payroll software interfaces? 

I did not understand Yusuf's reply it seemed full of trendy and obvious statements about teaching engineers design methodology, design thinking, focus on users and functionality, etc. 

Just because someone says design is important doesn't mean we get good design. Google Glass is a great example, here the design failed spectacularly even though big name designers were involved, it failed on looks and it failed on social design — it completely ignored the social environment, and included bizarre anti-social controls, such as using the wink of an eye to take a photo. 

The beauty of cloud-based apps is that the developer can see in real-time how the app is used, what features are clicked, how long is it taking users to finish tasks, etc. Yusuf made a fair point that SAP grew up in the days before the web and most of its apps run on data centers rather than the cloud and so that's partly why it has so many designers.

Cloud based enterprise apps can evolve and optimize their designs faster, and in ways that enterprise apps never could. The cloud could lead to marked improvements in worker productivity from improved enterprise app interfaces.

I still don't know what SAP's 450 designers do all day but I would suggest they look at Castlight's, and other cloud enterprise apps and try to import the best practices they find. Those designs have been refined through the observation of millions of user interface interactions. 

There's no sense in reinventing the wheel — common UI features speed things for everyone, no one wants to learn a new interface. And they shouldn't need to.

After the panel I had several people thank me for speaking up and challenging some of the speakers. And it turned into a far more interesting event. 

Greenpeace Senior Energy Campaigner David Pomerantz said: "While we would like to trust that Amazon's new [Frankfurt, Germany] facility will actually be powered by renewable sources, Amazon's refusal so far to disclose any data about its energy use makes it difficult for customers or the public to accept the company's claim on good faith alone."

"If, however, Amazon is buying renewable energy credits or carbon offsets while continuing to power its Frankfurt facility with coal or nuclear energy, then its latest data center will continue the company's track record as the dirtiest major cloud computing provider."

Greenpeace estimates that more than 60% of Amazon Web Services computing capacity comes from Virginia in the US, where 97% of the electricity is coal, gas, and nuclear. 

Greenpeace report: Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet. 

Tibco CEO and Founder Vivek Ranadivé. [Tibco is a founding sponsor and a former sponsor of Silicon Valley Watcher.]

Tibco Software agreed to be taken private in a $4.3 billion sale to Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm specializing in software firms.

Tibco is one of Silicon Valley's oldest tech companies and its technologies are used to power real-time data systems such as those used by banks, stock exchanges, and news networks -- Reuters once owned 49% of the company. 

Michael Calia, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, writes that Tibco had spent much of the summer examining its options before deciding on this strategy:

 David West, a member of the company's committee in charge of exploring options, said in a news release. "Ultimately, the board concluded that the sale alternative was the best alternative, and that Vista's offer to acquire Tibco is the best way to maximize value for our shareholders." 

Tibco Software to be Taken Private for $4 Billion - WSJ

The Wall Street Journal reported that the $24 a share offer represented a 23% premium compared with Friday's close of market.

Foremski's Take: Tibco's technologies aren't easy to explain but they are extremely important in powering the infrastructure of heavy-duty IT systems supporting critical business processes and are used by many of the world's largest corporations.

Tibco has been transitioning its revenues towards a subscription based model and such transitions take time and cause volatility in revenues. By becoming a private company Tibco's management can focus on long term goals. Dell chose a similar strategy.

Vista Equity clearly sees the value in Tibco's IT technologies. Its domain expertise can help Tibco complete a reorganization started last year that shook up senior management and aligned its products and services to focus on IT technologies for hybrid cloud and owned data centers. These will need real-time messaging capabilities across a dynamic IT landscape, and fast enough to respond to billions of daily business transactions and interactions.

Every large organization is building what is essentially a corporate operating system that in its ideal form will give it the agility to create and exploit business opportunities better than anyone else. Tibco's technologies are key to such a future.

However, the complexity of such systems combined with the conservative nature of IT departments, means deals take a long time to close.  Revenues are lumpy and hard to forecast. By becoming a private company Tibco can avert the potential for wide swings in its share price, which harms staff morale, and alarms customers and shareholders.

Once Tibco's pipeline is refilled and revenues are steady and predictable, Vista can take Tibco public. There has always been a very healthy IPO market for IT companies with large revenues.

Wall Street blindness...

But there's a potential to make a lot more money, and a lot more quickly, too. Vista is not blind to the hidden jewel in Tibco: the Tibbr social network which has more than 6.5 million paying enterprise users. Its success has been extraordinary under senior executive Ram Menon but its value hasn't been reflected in Tibco's share price. It's been a point of frustration within Tibco.  Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for Yammer, a similar service, with about 800K users for $1.2 billion in 2012.

Tibbr could be worth as much as $10 billion on a Yammer per user valuation -- more than double Tibco's sales price. That's a scenic vista for this specialist private equity firm.

Update: Maybe the pickings are a bit too rich.  The Dallas based securities litigation firm Powers Taylor and the former SEC attorney Willie Briscoe, announced an investigation into the Tibco board's decision making, to make sure shareholders got the best deal.

Tibco runs a very tight ship on governance. The low share price is the result of too few Wall Street analysts that understand Tibco's business and its markets. A specialist private equity group such as Vista can unlock the value of Tibbr, and revamp Tibco, and make billions in profits. It's Wall Street's loss.

NTT Group senior strategist Tsunehisa Okuno outlines NTT's future.

NTT Group, Japan's $112 billion communications giant, unveiled ambitious plans for expansion by leveraging its strengths in global communications infrastructure, its aggressive investments in its IT services division, and in the rapid monetization of key technologies and services created by its new Silicon Valley based research center, NTT Innovation Institute.

I was the only journalist at a recent strategy briefing at NTT's research and development center in Palo Alto. The company's representatives laid out an ambitious plan to grow out its overseas business into a $20 billion annual revenues operation by the end of its 2016 fiscal year (March 2017), a 33% jump from this year's projected $15 billion.

Key to this growth will be integration of its US acquisitions in IT services, and new apps and technologies developed by its Silicon Valley research center.

A quiet giant...

NTT is huge. It employs 240,000 people in 79 countries, and offers communications services in 196 countries; it is #53 in the Fortune 500 and its customers include 80 of the top Fortune 100 corporations. It operates more than 50 data centers ranking it #2 in data centers, and #2 in global IP backbone, and it is in the top ten in marine cable.

Since 2008 NTT has made many key overseas acquisitions such as Dimension Data, Keane, and Solutionary. Now it intends to leverage those investments into a rapid expansion following several years of slow growth from $11.4 billion in fiscal 2011 to $12.2billion last year. 

Core to its growth strategy is the expected demand for global cloud services, and for IT services from large corporations struggling with the complexity of managing hybrid IT and cloud computing platforms, said NTT Group senior strategist Tsunehisa Okuno (above). 

NTT says it now has a full stack of communications infrastructure and data center services for any type of global business. And it has new technologies on the way that will essentially provide a full business operating system that can manage multiple data centers and communications networks, along with an agile software infrastructure to support e-commerce and business operations across a full catalog of data center, desktop and mobile applications. It's a very big picture.

It's not only a very ambitious plan but it also has an ambitious schedule of development. NTT wants to monetize its Silicon Valley research center's applied technologies in as little as 18 months, said Kazuhiro Gomi, CEO of NTT America (below). 

He said that cooperation between the various US business groups such as Data Dimension, and Keane, will be crucial to winning new business and to take advantage of $1 billion in cross-sales opportunities. "We now have the full IT stack for enterprises and we have a global footprint to help them expand. It's how we differentiate ourselves from anyone else."

IBM is NTT's largest competitor in IT services but NTT says it is ahead of Big Blue because it owns a global communications infrastructure and over 50 data centers while IBM is trying to fill those gaps in its offerings. IBM is also tied to sales of its own hardware and software products while NTT says it can offer and support a broad range of products, depending on customer needs rather than vendor needs.

Srini Koushik, CEO of the Silicon Valley based NTT Innovation Institute (above), knows IBM very well. He is a former senior IBM executive and IBM Fellow, and he also used to run Hewlett-Packard's Worldwide Strategic Services business. He's confident that his 100 researchers will be able to quickly monetize more than $2.5 billion of NTT's annual R&D spending and develop critical enterprise technologies.

"Every company is a now a digital company and that means they need scalable, secure, and flexible enterprise technologies and services," he said.

He is focusing his researchers on developing commercial applications in areas of security, scalable computing, and machine learning. He says that the enormous amount of data being generated by a large digital business, plus the future flood of sensor data and machine logs, will require systems that automatically can monitor and learn from this mass of data. 

Koushik plans to increase NTT's intellectual property by patenting current technologies, and new ones in development in its Silicon Valley center. One of those technologies is a washable shirt (demonstrated below) containing biometric sensors that could find widespread use in healthcare (or eldercare in underwear).

Foremski's Take:The next two years will be crucial in determining if NTT's aggressive investments in its overseas business group is a successful strategy and one that can dramatically boost revenues following several years of modest growth. 

Growth of an IT services business is people-constrained and customer acquisition takes a long time. NTT's challenge will be how to effectively coordinate the work of teams from different business groups in identifying customer opportunities and then fulfilling complex IT service obligations. 

The pace of commoditization of data center computing, storage and communications technologies is another challenge. The deflationary aspect of this downward trend in IT costs means that customers can defer some decisions because the enterprise stack will be so much cheaper tomorrow and the next day. Those economies, however, have to be weighed against business opportunity losses from inflexible IT systems and outdated processes.

NTT Group is using its IT services to integrate its business groups and acquisitions but a structural reorganization might be neccessary to speed up customer acquisition and services deployment — if it is to reach its aggressive revenue goals.

NTT needs to keep an eye on less traditional competitors such as Google, which has a small but expanding enterprise cloud business. Google has an extensive global communications and data center network and recently announced it was part of a consortium financing a marine Internet cable connecting the US and Asia. Its internal business "stack" is looking similar to NTT's.

But Google also has a large business: search-based advertising that acts as an important driver in the development and deployment of scalable computing technologies, which form the foundation of its commercial IT services. NTT lacks a single large business to drive similar economies of scale.

NTT is preparing a new five-year strategy as the current one ends next year. Will it seek a major Internet business acquisition to complete its business stack? 

I recently received this note from Pablo at Secsign Technologies... It looks like an interesting application especially for the enterprise market where security is a never ending battle. 

Sorry for disturbing you, sure you get 1000000 emails per day :-)

We are a small tech company from Nevada that just released the World´s first fingerprint login for Wordpress, using iOS 8 Beta.

It's free for beta developers and we also made a tutorial on how to use it: https://www.secsign.com/fingerprint-validation-as-an-alternative-to-passcodes/

We will really appreciate if you can help us, we are small company trying to fight hard. Your help, for us is like the top of the sky, and we will do literally what ever you ask, to have the chance that you write some lines about us. We don't have budget for a professional PR firm, and our future truly depends on getting a bit of help from you.

- We solved the problem to integrate Apple's Fingerprint with current back-end and IAM systems from corporations, so now any business can use iPhone Touch ID to login in their intranet , etc.

- We also have a secure storage portal solution and a two factor authentication app and free plugins.

Jason Moody (above) an evangelist for Dell Software's Enterprise Mobility Management group, spends most of his time meeting with large enterprises and finding out how they are faring with the rapid fragmentation of employee technology.

Bring your own device has been a major headache for IT departments, and is further fragmenting into "wear your own device." Here's some notes from our conversation:

- Enterprises are still in very early stages in getting to grips with managing staff with multiple devices. 

- IT departments usually have a separate group managing mobile devices and the networking group is managing other aspects. There needs to be operational changes in the organization of IT departments to better manage the increasing number of computer devices used by staff.

- Dell's goal is to integrate desktop and mobile admin consoles into a single view and with a single approach to policies.

- Enterprises are worried about everything. They worry about cookies, they worry about popular cloud apps such as Dropbox because they can act as a backdoor into corporate data.

- Dell has a special secure "container" to run corporate apps and view documents on mobile devices that prevents other apps from accessing that information.

- Identity management is built-in to Dell's solution. 

- Enterprises are concerned about NSA snooping but their biggest concern is with corporate espionage and they worry about hiring the right people.

- Most now have special new staff training to control which apps are used, and what can be shared in social networks.

- Enterprises are building apps and Dell also offers app development. Web apps have proven less popular because the user experience is not as good but that will likely change.

- Enterprises worry if the user experience of the corporate apps is poor then staff will use other apps with better performance but with potential security issues.

- Dell offers app testing and has discovered backdoor vulnerabilities in many popular apps.

- Dell's software can wipe apps and data from remote devices in case of loss or change of job. 

Multinational companies are concerned about the different laws related to technology. For example, Russia doesn't allow encryption and this has been a factor in deicing where to outsource app development.

It was “Day 52” for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his first visit to San Francisco as head of the software giant. The local media were out in full to see him as he introduced Office on the iPad, and speak about the importance of Microsoft’s “Mobile First” and “Cloud First” strategies.

When he bounded onto the small stage at One Kearny building in downtown San Francisco, he was dressed very casually. At first, I wondered if he was one of the technicians who had been there just minutes before, checking the equipment for the demos. Clearly, he was dressing in a hip-er style for the audience.

And so was Julia White, a general manager at Microsoft, in high heels and a leather jacket (below).

After the presentations there was no question and answer period, instead he tried a quick exit, but he didn’t get far.

Feeling the heat…

Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s Communication’s chief (center above) finally managed to extricate his boss and leave the building.

I attended the Actian's Big Data roundtable earlier this week. I was thrilled to be sitting next to Terry Garnett (far left) from Garnett & Helfrich Capital, a very savvy buyout firm that has managed to carve out some great companies from inside larger organizations.

Also at the table: Dave Engberg, CTO of Evernote; Avanish Sahai, VP at Salesforce; Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Group, and analysts from IDC and Cowan. Here are some of my notes:

- Garnett is an investor in Actian, a "Big Data 2.0" firm, that was hosting the dinner. I mentioned that, "2.0" doesn't work, that it is too dated, too 2006. It's an understandable attempt to get beyond the "Big Data" term.

I've proposed "All Data." An All Data enterprise is a business that analyzes more than just the 10% or so of its data, as most businesses do, according to Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData.

- Big data and the cloud will require new business processes. They will have to be far more agile than the ones currently used and so far, there are no good tools for such enterprise application development.

- Today's data sets are different and include mobile and geo-location data. The way databases are used will have to change. 

- The enterprise IT sector is due for significant changes in order to take advantage of Big Data tools and applications. 

- Retailers are finding interesting connections. One retailer now runs a special algorithm when a big storm is coming. It knows to stock sheetrock and bottled water.

- I was astounded at some of the common sense connections retailers are finding, according to Actian's executives. They could just call me up. But apparently, companies can't see the trees for the forest, and need software to help them analyze their data. They'll discover Christmas day next, and save a fortune by not having to staff their stores for one day.

It was good to catch up with Roman Stanek, CEO and founder of data analysis startup GoodData. There's some interesting news coming up that I can't talk about just yet.

We talked about Big Data and how the term is sounding very stale. Not only does it already sound so 2013, it's also so 1993, because we've both been hearing IT companies talk about Big Data for more than two decades -- and in the same way as they do today. We spoke about how it is time for a new term in 2014.

My proposal for a replacement term for Big Data is: All Data. 

It might fit because Stanek made a point that most companies are only analyzing subsets of their business data, often as little as 10%. It's classed as "Big Data" because there's lots of it but it's certainly not all the data. And that means the analysis can produce results that management doesn't trust. 

It's hard to use all the data because it is highly fragmented within most organizations. But that's where GoodData steps in and does the heavy lifting, by being able to hook into the databases, and enterprise apps, to provide a complete operational view.

An "All Data Enterprise" would be a business that's moved to the next stage -- from Big Data to All Data. It's able to analyze every aspect of its business not just a small fraction. It's the only way vital correlations can be uncovered, say between customer call center data, website usage, and sales.

Big Data is big but it's not big enough to ensure management is making the best decisions. Company executives could be blind to important trends because every analysis is incomplete. 

The marketing is easy:

If your business is not All Data all the time -- you don't know what you could know -- and that's not good for business. Get good data.

Above, Anil Kurella, Intel failure analysis engineer, prepares boards for corrosion testing.

That smog that hangs so heavily in the air in China, India, and other countries in Asia isn't just bad for human lungs, it's corroding server boards and connectors and creating a "surprising" amount of damage reports Intel. 

Sulfur in air pollution from masses of coal-burning power plants is causing damage to server boards which are being returned to Intel. The irony is that the servers are being destroyed by the very same electricity they need to run their computing tasks. The more electric power they consume, the more the pollution gets worse. 

"We are starting to see corrosion on systems (returned to Intel) that are higher than what we would have expected," said Tom Marieb, a vice president in Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group. "They were disproportionately from Asia-Pacific and it gave us pause. The only other times we had seen this level was from known industrial usage segments like inside a factory, not data centers that are supposed to be controlled, sealed-off environments with air conditioning."

Intel says that it first started to see the problem about two years ago but that it has increased in scope. A combination of high humidity, high temperatures, and air pollution are creating a perfect storm of corrosive damage.

Intel hopes to develop a new set of standards for building server components resistant to air pollution at high humidity and temperatures. 

I attended a dinner organized by Eastwick Communications that featured several of their security clients and a security industry analyst. The discussion grew ever more interesting as the wine glasses emptied and refilled. Here’s my notes from the evening:

- List of participants is below. Each of the security companies is working in important areas and focused on helping enterprises deal with the many risks.

- One of the companies said that security used to be difficult for startups to get funding but these days, it’s a very good sector and VCs love security companies. There’s also lots of revenue potential because of the complexity of enterprise security.

- The complexity of the security risks facing companies was repeated time and again by each of the companies.

- Deborah Gage from the Wall Street Journal asked a good question: Can private industry deal with the security issues or does it need government involvement? She didn’t receive a good answer beyond the usual response that government involvement isn’t necessary .

- We were reminded of the “fiduciary duties” that executives have towards making sure their business is protected from security risks.

- I asked what exactly are those fiduciary duties when it comes to security risks? How much is enough security? Is there a standard set?

- Private Core has an interesting approach to it’s goal of making cloud IT services as secure as your own data center. It encrypts the entire computation of an app from within the cache memory of microprocessors. It’s a much smaller attack surface. 

- NSA revelations haven’t caused much concern among US enterprises but in Europe it is having a very large effect on enterprises. 

- Enterprises often don’t know what devices they have connected to their networks. There are typically 5,ooo applications used by staff in a large organization.

- Apps such as Dropbox are a problem because they have APIs and their contents are shareable by many other applications, greatly magnifying risks.

- “Free” apps on phones and tablets are a worry because they are making money by sharing data on their enterprise users — it’s one of the problems with the bring-your-own-device trend.

- Security is a very good business because it is one of the few things that will get a CEO out of bed at night. 

 Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said security risks have increased because of the use of mobile, the increase in malware, and the problem that no one talks about: a big shortage of people with cyber security skills.

- I mentioned that people were still the biggest security risk and that people such as Edward Snowden were motivated by ethics and not money. It’s difficult to guard against ethical hackers  — at least with money theft there’s a silver trail to follow. And I’m surprised we’ve only had one Edward Snowden.

- There was some discussion that Millennials might be a security threat because they are upset with large college debts and poor salaries. I disagree, they are much more likely to be motivated by ethics — doing the right thing — than by money.

- Security analyst Jan Oltsik ended the evening with a bang. (Despite all the security companies at the table, and the many more in the industry), he said that the enterprise security situation is bad and will worsen further unless there is a radical new approach/technology developed. But what is that radical new technology? No one had an answer. 

Foremski’s Take: The security industry is constantly warning of ever greater risks to enterprises — the sky is always falling. When has a business bought enough security?

The answer seems to be that there is never enough security that you can buy. You can never have enough security is great for vendors but it’s very bad for enterprises because it leads to indecision. 

The complexity of the security risks is another issue. Some of the exploits are extremely sophisticated and can only be understood by experts in their fields. To expect CIO’s to be able to asses the risks of exotic malware and other new exploits, and then take appropriate steps is not realistic. It’s overwhelming.

The complexity needs to be outsourced in some way, even though the legal liabilities can’t be outsourced easily. Enterprises need specialist service providers that stay up to date on threats and can quickly implement protective measures and policies. Otherwise, the security situation will get worse.

Also, I wonder about the competitions that companies are advertising to find bugs and flaws in their software. Only a few people are rewarded but many others become familiar with the software and better able to discover and exploit additional weaknesses. Are the bug competitions training grounds for a new generation of hackers?

What was clear from the evening’s discussion is that security is a shimmering mirage that can never be reached, and can never quench your thirst for more. It’s a very good business to be in. Between the money lost to criminals and the money spent to prevent that loss, it’s a costly tax on doing business. And it does absolutely nothing to enable commerce or improve productivity. 

- - -

Participants:

Lasse Andresen, CEO, ForgeRock
ForgeRock is the only unified open source identity stack to protect enterprise, cloud, social and mobile applications at Internet scale.

Patrick Peterson, CEO, Agari
Agari provides global brands with the experience, tools, and analytics they need to eliminate email threats, protect customers and their personal data, and proactively guard brand reputation.

Arvind Purushotham, Citi Ventures
Citi Ventures is Citi's global corporate venturing arm, chartered to collaborate with internal and external partners to conceive, partner, launch, and scale new ventures that have the potential to disrupt and transform the financial services industry, drive client success, and generate new value for Citi.

Peter Long, CEO, Lockbox
Lockbox is an end-to-end, client-side encryption platform that allows users to generate and maintain encryption keys for secure and private file sharing and storage in the cloud.

Paul Stich, CEO, Appthority
Appthority provides the industry’s first all-in-one App Risk Management service that employs static, dynamic and behavioral analysis to immediately discover the hidden actions of apps and empower organizations to apply custom policies to prevent unwanted app behaviors.

Rob Rachwald, Senior Director, FireEye
FireEye is the leader in next generation threat protection, stopping advanced malware, zero-day, and targeted APT attacks that bypass traditional defenses.

Steve Weis, CTO, Private Core
Private Core is a venture-backed company delivering an industry first: the ability to protect enterprise data in use by encrypting memory.

Scott Gordon, CMO, ForeScout
ForeScout delivers pervasive network security by allowing organizations to continuously monitor and mitigate security exposures and cyber attacks.

Last year I visited GE Software -- the Bay Area's largest startup -- General Electric's new software research center in San Ramon. It was hotter than 110 degrees and I vowed never to complain about San Francisco's cold summers.

The new business group has about 700 engineers and is primarily focused on the industrial Internet, or the "Internet of things." It has an ambitious roadmap. One of its goals is to use Big Data to help its massive jet engines (above) run more efficiently and reliably.

This week it revealed Perdix, a single common platform designed to be used for many different types of industrial systems monitoring and analytics, rather than the thousands of separate, incompatible systems that are in use today. 

When I met with Bill Ruh, head of GE Software, (above) he said that the development of a common architecture for the diverse number of industrial systems that GE produces and operates was a vital first step. It will enable quicker development of new apps and make it easier to share important capabilities between applications and thus better scale the work of 700 software engineers -- a massive payroll that constantly needs to prove itself. 

Kyle Vanhemert, reporting for Wired: GE's Radical Software Helps Jet Engines Fix Themselves

Predix, a flexible software platform intended to dramatically streamline the monitoring and maintenance for all the industrial technologies GE provides. Whereas field engineers currently wrestle with idiosyncratic systems and separate interfaces for all the different hardware they service-sometimes armed with little more than a briefcase full of paper manuals-Predix and its card-based UI will gradually become the interface for all those machines.

But the software's promise goes beyond cohesiveness and convenience. The real vision is to link all these diverse machines to the cloud, quantifying their performance and benchmarking them against each other-all in the name of eliminating the number one bugaboo of all these industries: unscheduled down time. Imagine an engineer walking up to a wind turbine with tablet in hand, and the turbine telling him that a fuse should be replaced not because it's broken but because it will give out in three weeks time. That's the future GE's really looking toward.

A 1 percent efficiency in jet engine performance can provide a $15 billion savings in jet fuel. For an arline industry that operates on narrow margins, that humble 1 percent is very significant.

GE this week added 14 new analytics packages to the the ten launched last year, which have generated $290m so far, with orders for $400m. It expects to grow its software revenues by more than 15% annually.

Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE, said, "Industrial data is not only big, it's the most critical and complex type of big data. Our greatest challenge and opportunity is to manage and analyze this data in a highly secure way."

I met Mr. Immelt briefly when he visited late last year for an event (he brought along a GE jet engine, top). He said that GE Software is looking for help from Silicon Valley startups.

That might be a tall order because few have the domain experience to be able to figure out how to analyze the trillions of data points that a jet engine produces, or any other industrial kit. But the Silicon Valley area can certainly provide GE Software with the engineers it needs to implement the heavy duty industrial apps that GE and its customers require. 

Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's business groups leaves little room for the next CEO to choose a different strategy from the current "devices and services" focus of outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer.

The deal had been in the works for many months. 

Matthew Campbell and Aaron Kirchfeld reported on Bloomberg: Microsoft Raced to $7.2 Billion Deal With Soul-Searching Nokia - Bloomberg

Discussions began in earnest after a meeting between Ballmer and Risto Siilasmaa, the Finnish company's chairman, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. 

The timing of the deal appears to indicate that CEO Ballmer's announced exit was sudden. Otherwise the board would have waited for the new CEO to have the opportunity to set a new strategy for the company unencumbered by legacy deals.

Some Microsoft watchers have urged the company to ditch its consumer business and focus on its lucrative enterprise markets. That'll be near impossible now.

Please see:

Giving Microsoft Free Advice: The Best So Far...And My 2 Cents -SVW

There has been rush from people (journalists and bloggers) who have never run a lemonade stand or any business, to give copious free advice to Microsoft [$MSFT] in the wake of CEO Steve Ballmer's resignation. 

I read some of them, the best one so far is from John Gapper at the Financial Times. His advice is simple: 

Exit the consumer business because it is businesses that buy Microsoft products and not consumers. [To Microsoft’s new chief executive: stop chasing consumers.]

He reminds those with long memories of the struggle IBM had in responding to the challenge of cheap computing in the mid-1990s. It appointed Louis Gerstner CEO, the former head of American Express Travel Services group. Mr. Gerstner famously said: "The last thing IBM needs right now is vision."

Mr. Gapper writes:

The absolute last thing Microsoft needs is the last chief executive's vision for it to create "a family of devices band services for individuals and businesses.

It's not hard to make the point about exiting the consumer market because Microsoft's efforts have failed time after time, more recently with the Surface Tablet $900m fiasco.

There's also the Zune, the iPod challenger; the short-lived KIN social media phone OS (which was ahead of its time).  And the venerable Xbox gaming console, which barely makes any money for Microsoft. And some will remember "Clippy." Oh, and the consumer satellite communications business, TV news; magazines…

Foremski's Take: I've never run a lemonade stand but I did used to cover Microsoft, IBM, and other large enterprise IT businesses at The Financial Times, which means I won't resist giving some of my free advice to the embattled software giant.

- Mr. Gapper doesn't mention Microsoft's Bing search service but it is another good example of failing in the consumer market. If it shut down Bing Microsoft would save about $2 billion a year and create a big monopoly problem for Google since it couldn't claim that competition is always just a click away.

- It could spin-out its consumer businesses instead of shutting them down, and retain just its enterprise software business, which has been bankrolling the rest of the company's mis-ventures for decades. Wall Street would love that scenario and so would the bankers.

- A more focused Microsoft would be able to produce new ventures in the enterprise market where there's far more money than in consumer markets.

- Microsoft should follow IBM's example of appointing an outsider who has also been a large enterprise customer. As a former major customer of IBM Mr. Gerstner knew exactly where IBM's value lay and he spent ten years rebuilding IBM as a computer services company. [His "Who Says Elephant Can't Dance?" book is very good and explains the tough job he had in remaking IBM's culture.]

An outsider is most definitely needed because Microsoft's culture is stagnant; and a large customer knows where Microsoft's value lays and what could be done to build on it.

- Time to revive an old partnership: with Intel. It too, is unable to make its consumer market ventures succeed. The old CEO's consumer TV project should definitely be ditched.  And like Microsoft, Intel's tablet and smartphone efforts continue to fizzle as it strikes out in chasing the diminutive British chip company ARM.

- The rise of tablets and smartphones drives enormous demand for servers — that's where both companies make their fattest margins. It's a market rife with opportunities.  Such as: producing a range of embedded software and highly-tuned, secure hardware from these two companies would do very well in enterprise markets. Low maintenance and high throughput systems would hurt competitors Oracle and IBM while winning grateful data center customers. 

- It's time to bring back Bill Gates. I saw the recent 60 Minutes report by Charlie Rose on Bill Gates 2.0. He has more than 1,100 people working at his Foundation, including his wife. He showed-off bis huge bag of books, which demonstrates he has plenty of spare time on his hands.

His top projects are a solar-powered toilet without running water, a new condom, and the war on Malaria. There's absolutely no special expertise that Bill Gates brings to those projects.

Taking over at Microsoft again, he could turnaround the company, and turn heads in ways that no one else could. 

It's time to ditch the 2.0 and work on Bill Gates 3.0. It would make a killer chapter in his biography; and it would keep billionaire upstarts such as his neighbor Jeff Bezos from overtaking him in the "stuff that really matters beyond money" competition.

Let's face it: giving away billions of dollars is easy. Saving Microsoft is a challenge even Bill Gates would have to think thrice about. Which is why he should do it.

David Linthicum in his Cloud Computing column writes: The proof is in: Amazon fully controls the cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently cut prices for its dedicated instances, the basis for its Virtual Private Cloud offering. If you've been keeping track, this is its 37th price reduction.

The day AWS announced the news, the price of Rackspace's stock dropped as well. The smaller providers competing with AWS got one more tough call to make to their investors: when to drop their prices. (Rackspace did so on Wednesday.) Finally, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and the other big guys also have to lower their quotes to be competitive with AWS.

He argues that lower prices are great for moving companies to cloud adoption but is AWS building a position of market dominance reminiscent of Microsoft?

The bad: That already-a-winner controls the market, and it can get lazy or stupid, hurting everyone. . .we have to remember we'll want other providers around should AWS ever go off track.

There's another aspect to Amazon: it has huge revenues and doesn't care if it makes a loss or a very small profit. 2012 revenues of $64 billion and it still managed to lose money. And importantly: its shareholders stick with it.

That's not true for Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, etc. If they miss earnings then Wall Street punishes them. 

Who can win against a competitor that isn't all that concerned about making money? 

OpenText, based in Waterloo, Ontario, is betting that CIOs will want to reduce their organization's use of cloud-based services and bring them in-house because it will eliminate complexity, risk, and cost.

The company specializes in enterprise information management systems. It recently announced its Web Experience Management (WEM) software suite designed to help enterprises boost their marketing and sales through more effective web sites and digital marketing. OpenText believes it makes more sense to run the software in-house.

I recently met with Kevin Cochrane (above), CMO of OpenText. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- CMOs are putting pressure on CIOs to provide better IT support and to understand what they are trying to do.

- CMOs were in trouble five years ago and the average amount of time they spent between jobs was just 18 months, now it's three years. This shows that CMOs are figuring out how to succeed as their organizations become more digital.

- CMOs now know what they want, and what they need to be successful. They want a single view across their marketing channels, programs, and all the other silos. They want their CIOs to know how to provide that service.

- Companies have been using various cloud-based services but this doesn't integrate into the single view that CMOs need.

-The CMO wants marketing services from the CIO but this requires that the CIO understand the business requirements while the CMO needs to understand how costly using third-party services is to the organization.

- There's a lot to be said for using an in-house software suite that runs on your data center. It cuts costs -- cloud based services can get very expensive and sharing data between them and in-house systems is difficult. It's better to have everything running on one system.

- Cloud based services carry many risks, organizations are very concerned that sensitive customer data will be exposed to hackers, or criminal groups. 

- WEM replicates many different cloud-based marketing solutions combined with detailed analytics that shows engagement and other important business statistics. Plus, it never goes away, unlike if a service provider goes bankrupt or is sold to a new owner that makes changes, companies have few options. 

- The privacy issues around the cloud are causing a lot of companies to reevaluate how they use the cloud. 

- The cloud isn't going away, the future of the enterprise is a hybrid IT architecture where critical business services are run by the IT department.

Foremski's Take:

Kevin Cochrane sees a large gap between the CMO and the CIO, and that the CIO needs to cross this "digital divide" over towards the CMO, and provide the IT services needed in the increasingly complex world of marketing, which has to operate across multiple, fragmented media channels.

OpenText's WEM suite is designed to provide out-of-the-box IT services for a CMO's needs and replace the use of some outside services. But it's likely best used in organizations that have yet to implement some of the sophisticated media technologies that are available. The successful CMO that knows what they are doing,  is already doing it using a hybrid mix of internal and external IT. And convincing people to change what is already working is not realistic. 

However, the use of the cloud is causing problems for many corporations, the increased business risk from an insecure cloud is a big worry. CIOs will certainly want to reduce that risk by replacing the need for certain cloud based services with internal services. If OpenText can demonstrate that its software is up to the demands of what a CMO needs then that will help CIOs that are trying to bring more services in from the cloud.

But this requires CIOs that understand what CMOs need, they have to speak the same language and that's not easy. The CMO's job is probably the most difficult job of all in the C-suite. Digital marketing's constantly shifting rules, metrics, and processes are difficult to understand and track. It would require a CIO with the skills of a CMO. Maybe that's the skill set that enterprises will look for in the future but it's not the case today. Educating the CIO to think like a CMO is a tough call given all the other things that need to be done in a large enterprise.

- - -

- Web Experience Management Solutions ECM, Vignette | OpenText

CMOs vs. CIOs: The Myth Of 'Zero Sum'

By Gaurav Manglik, CEO CliQr Technologies

For many businesses the promise of cloud computing has been the ultimate paradox. What company can argue with having access to almost infinite, third-party supplied and staffed information technology resources on-demand, topped off with a utility billing model that allows companies to only pay for what they use?

Yet even with these promised efficiencies, moving to the cloud remains intimidating for many organizations.

So what's the barrier to entry?

Despite the many promises, most activity around the cloud still involves large companies deploying merchant cloud infrastructures (such as AWS, Microsoft, HP, Google, etc.), simple web 2.0 apps, or using one of the new PaaS platforms to develop new applications for the cloud.

But what about the estimated ten's of millions of enterprise applications -- most of which were architected to be able to scale and leverage the elasticity of the cloud?

In many cases, the answer is simple -- it has been hard due to costly and complex required migrations, unknown costs and performance, and concerns about security on the cloud.

What's needed to really unleash the cloud for businesses?

Let's look:

- Maturation of Cloud Infrastructure Providers. The majority of these providers have only been generally available for less than two years and businesses are looking for stable platforms, reasonable pricing and staying power.

- Strong Service Level Agreements (SLA's). SLA's have only just begun to become more robust based on market demand with businesses wanting SLA's approaching what they expect in their own operational environment.

- Migration Simplicity. Despite what seems to be hundreds of migration vendors, most incumbents make it hard to get to the cloud.

In addition, the majority of these vendors make cloud portability questionable, and in instances when portability is provided, application visibility, scaling and monitoring is compromised unless hard-wired scripting is developed, again compromising portability.

Businesses want a means to move applications to the cloud without having to re-code them, or create a bunch of scripts and cloud-specific virtual machine (VM) images.

-Managed Risk. No more "Blind Corners." Businesses are now sophisticated enough to know that some clouds can support their apps and some architecturally cannot.

They know that some perform better than others with different types of applications and they know that pricing on the cloud continues to change extremely fast. Businesses want to concretely understand these variables before - NOT AFTER - committing to move an application to the cloud.

Not being able to make informed decisions makes it very difficult to confidently move one or more apps to one or more clouds.

- No Cloud Lock-In. To date, most migration tools and approaches have been cloud-specific. Despite messaging around "multi-cloud," incumbent migration vendors require multi-migration efforts to get from one cloud to another for all but the simplest web apps.

Businesses have identified the fact that they do not want to trade the constraints of their own datacenter resources for the constraints of a single cloud provider, especially given the immaturity of the industry.

Companies today want to not only move to, and between, any public cloud with NO additional migration work, they want to be able to move fluidly between private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

- Enterprise/Cloud Connectivity. Very few applications a business uses in production are, or can be, completely siloed on the cloud. Businesses require a means to actively and securely coordinate with other applications, data sources or services such as analytics, license management, printers, fax, etc., that reside in an on-premise datacenter.

This is the true extended enterprise and is required for enterprise-class cloud computing.

- Security. While most clouds provide a secure infrastructure, businesses require more. They need the final layer of cloud security to be able to protect their data and applications as they move to and between clouds, along with key management and network isolation.

The use-cases and benefits of cloud computing are real and understood. With any new topological approach to computing, innovation and new vendors are rapidly emerging with completely new approaches to transparently placing application workloads on the cloud.

For the first time this can be done by enabling newly developed and legacy applications to be moved to the cloud optimally and securely by de-coupling the need to have any knowledge of disparate cloud infrastructure architectures.

This approach uniquely enables applications to fluidly move to, and between, any private, public and hybrid clouds without requiring any costly, complex migration.

This liberation of an application from the inherent constraints of any specific cloud supports choice, portability, benchmarking of price and performance across cloud environments, and ultimately enables free market pressures between cloud providers that will inevitably enhance their offerings, SLA's, security and ensure competitive pricing.

As these forces come into place, businesses will be able to unleash the real potential of the cloud.

The survey also found that even though many companies have data scientists, more than 60 per cent of them have a poor knowledge of advanced data analytics techniques.

The full survey is here: 2013 Big Data Analytics Report | Skytree – Machine Learning on Big Data for Predictive Analytics

- - -

Automated data analysis is certainly cheaper than paying a salary but, there's no one to fire if the box gets it wrong.

I recently met with Ethan Oberman (above) CEO and co-founder of SpiderOak, a cloud based data storage service used for backups or syncing data. It promises a very high level of security because everything is encrypted -- SpiderOak has no idea what you are storing.

This is the same strategy that Kim Dotcom, the infamous founder of Megaupload has recently taken with his latest storage venture Mega. Megaupload was shut down by US authorities because it is alleged that it stored huge quantities of pirated movies and other copyrighted materials.

Here are some notes from my conversation with Ethan Oberman:

- Security and privacy are not the same thing. Our servers are secure but our service is also private because everything stored is encrypted.

- SpiderOak talks about "Zero Knowledge" because it's far more secure than putting up firewalls , etc., The company knows nothing about what's stored because it's encrypted before it's stored. The server never sees a plain text file.

- Users upload files via a small app.

- This is different from how other services store data, such as Dropbox which has had security problems. 

-SpiderOak hasn't had any requests by authorities to release files and if they did, they wouldn't be able to read them.

- If you lose your password we can't help you.

- The company was founded in 2006. It has enterprise customers and individuals but its focus is now on business users.

- Enterprises get a virtual machine that sits behind their firewalls. They can then also better monitor how staff are using it and control the passwords. 

- SpiderOak can see what links are being shared but not what is shared. We haven't had any problems with users sharing copyrighted materials.

- Users share files by generating links that can decrypt just that one file. There is a nested series of encryption keys for each file.

- Our service also de-duplicates your data so that only changes in a file or folder are uploaded. This creates a central data repository that can be shared among all your computers, and you can share parts of it with anyone.

- The company started because I was frustrated that there was no easy way to access my files from several different computers.

- Users get 2 gigabytes to start with for free for life. We support PC, Mac and Linux.

Foremski's Take: SpiderOak's approach to data is sensible and the privacy aspect is essential for many business users who are taking a risk whenever they send out a file to the cloud or share any data outside of their firewall.

Recent news about Chinese hackers attacking US corporations is just one example of how even inside the firewall data is vulnerable. But not if it's encrypted and stored elsewhere, where the encryption keys aren't stored too.

Companies could use this type of system to prevent finding themselves in awkward positions in terms of being forced to hand over data about their users to foreign governments. For example, Yahoo! gave Chinese authorities information about it's e-mail users that led to a Chinese journalist receiving ten years hard labor for sending a government note about the Tiananmen Square anniversary to foreign journalists.

Yahoo! could have had a similar system for encrypting user data and complied with authorities by handing over encrypted files that would have protected its users. 

It has created a live dashboard at NFL.com/Honors that publishes statistics around the top eight finalists.

“Fantasy football fans love stats almost as much as watching the action on the field," said Jonathan Becher, CMO.  “The SAP dashboard enhances the NFL.com Fantasy experience by distilling millions of data points and allowing fans size up their favorite players more easily. Soon fans will be able to use the analytical power of SAP to predict the most valuable players for their fantasy teams.”

In addition, SAP has created another live analytics dashboard that will be unveiled during Super Bowl week called the SAP Football Experience, with a visual representation of statistics that it promises will "take football statistics to a new level."

SAP has a large presence in Silicon Valley and it is also a founding partner in the new Santa Clara stadium, which will feature the local team the San Francisco 49ers. SAP is providing the technologies that will help game day function more smoothly in enabling transactions between fans and vendors.

More information: SAP Newsroom

I can't count how many times I've been pitched about identity management systems over the past two decades and it's still happening to my great surprise because you'd think it would be a standard solution intrinsic to every enterprise environment.

Clearly, it's not easy to produce an ID management system that works well, or that doesn't have high implementation and admin costs. And with the added complexity of semi-open but always-connected corporate IT systems, there's a universe of identity tasks that have to be handled outside the firewall, in addition to the traditional internal needs of large organizations.

I recently spoke with Ranjeet Vidwans, VP of Marketing and Business Development about how SCUID was developed and how the cloud and a core focus on user interface design promises a breakthrough in ID management systems.

Here are some notes from our conversation:

- The startup has recruited an impressive executive team of Identity management industry veterans who've worked at large vendors and integrators, such as Oracle, IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, CRT Group, Thor Technologies, and Oblix.

- SCUID stands for Secure Cloud-based Unified Identity. It is designed to be one-tenth the cost, and take a fraction of the time to deploy by leveraging the cloud and preconfigured setups that eliminate the need for expensive consultants and integrators. This means it can be rolled out in a matter of weeks compared with the traditional IT process of implementation and testing new systems, which can take up to a year or more before they can be used and begin payback.

- Customization is greatly simplified through the development of 30 frameworks based on 150 use cases, designed to provide standard features from the outset while being easy to customize with additional features.

 - The frameworks are designed for the needs of companies in specific industries, including detailed support for regulatory compliance rules for those industries. This helps companies abide with regulatory laws that often have high penalties for non-compliance and avoid accidentally missing important safeguards.

- Ongoing maintenance costs are considerably reduced because the application is updated and run by a large staff of top IT specialists at Indentropy, which makes sure it is always optimized and working at its best performance.

- Administration of SCUID is made easier because of the companies focus on designing user interfaces that are easy to understand, and pre-configured to make it easy to carry out routine tasks. 

- Identropy is very proud of its user interfaces, it spent six months perfecting the design before starting the software development. The user interface us based on the company's executives' long experience with how enterprises use ID systems, and on focus groups testing the interface.

- Identropy is betting that its approach should be a winner because the cloud-based system provides fast, low-cost implementation, it has  low admin costs, and it removes updating headaches. This all adds up to considerable savings in total cost of ownership that can be less than one-tenth of traditional implementations.

- Many organizations have blind spots in implementing their ID systems. For example, interns within financial organizations can often accumulate clearances for nearly the entire organization -- more than almost anyone in the entire organization -- because they work for short periods in many departments. Identropy's ID system prevents such lapses in security by looking out for common ID management mistakes.

- SCUID constantly searches for unusual activities and either blocks the activity or alerts administrators.

Foremski's Take: SCUID appears to tick all the boxes in terms of what is needed in a modern ID management system that has to deal with a masses of identities within and outside the enterprise, while taking advantage of considerable benefits of a cloud-based IT solution.

Identropy might find it challenging in getting the word out about its near off-the-shelf approach because large integrators and consulting groups have far smaller roles and less incentive to promote SCUID.

However, the SAAS approach also makes it easy for enterprises to quickly test and taste SCUID before rolling out larger installations. 

ID management systems are crucial to the security of any company and their importance will grow tremendously because they touch everything that is core to every business, and in the activities of all types of commerce -- inside and outside the enterprise.

The complexity of managing IDs will grow as enterprises themselves become hybrid entities, cloud-like and nebulous. Identropy takes away a big chunk of complexity by allowing businesses to outsource the technology, and simplify daily admin tasks. IT staff can then focus on making sure that their ID management systems are protective without becoming obstacles to the smooth the running of crucial business processes.

SAP, the world's largest business software company, launched a suite of enterprise business applications running on its real-time platform HANA, that it says provides massive increases in performance and advanced analytics capabilities.

The company provides most of the world's largest business groups with enterprise IT applications used to run their core business operations.

Hasso Plattner (above), SAP co-founder and chairman, announced the business software suite at SAP's Silicon Valley Research campus, as part of a global launch in New York, and Frankfurt, Germany.

He said that the increase in business app performance is so great that SAP had been accused of "hype" by sceptics. Some applications can run several hundred percent or more faster on the HANA platform, largely because the underlying database technology is loaded into massive solid state drives.

"This will change how our customers do business and they are very excited," he said. "We are even winning over startups, they are saying that they never thought they would be working with SAP."

The German software giant has been investing in rebuilding its core business applications and has been making large acquisitions over the past five years to better support mobile IT applications, and support crucial data center trends such as the increased use of massive solid state drives.

Key features of the announcement are powerful business analytics capabilities that can produce reports in a matter of seconds compared several hours or more. The analytics can help companies predict demand, output, and profits while communicating with suppliers and customers.

Mr Plattner said that the real-time suite of business applications shares the same code-base as that used by current customers so there won't be any compatibility problems. The key is the HANA real-time database technology.

However, it will take time for customers to figure out how best to use real-time data and then integrate it into its business processes, says Ray Wang, principal at business consulting group Constellation Research. "They will have to clearly state the advantages for companies in different industries."

SAP is recruiting early adopters, such as the 150 year old Deere & Company, as part of a long term strategy in educating customers about the competitive advantages of its real-time platform.

Analytics is an important competitive battleground and one where Tibco Software (an SVW sponsor) and others such as Oracle, and IBM, are fighting for customers. Real-time data is important but figuring out what's next, the predictive analytics, is where organizations can reap competitive advantages.

Analytics also has the potential to replace many routine mid-level management decisions and distill the decisions that need the expertise of company executives.

SAP did not announce pricing but sources close to company say that the pricing will be aggressive and it will be "priced to go," especially for early adopters.

Tufin is interesting because it is rethinking the way firewalls should be managed. It's because of rise in the number of applications being produced by enterprises.

Firewall administrators are spending more of their time dealing with application related change requests. Yet the app developers know little about firewalls and potential conflicts, or security holes. Earlier this year, Tufin launched SecureApp, a suite of admin tools to help manage this important security relationship between apps and firewalls.

This application centric approach to enterprise security is a different way of thinking about security. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Our latest survey shows that nearly half of all firewall changes are related to application connectivity. And most companies report that they don't have confidence in their IT staff being able to fully address the compliance and security risks that arise when managing application connectivity.

- We realized that the best approach is to address security through the app layer first, to document the resources an app needs and how it behaves, and then to communicate what's needed in the firewalls. Our new product helps to automate this process. And it's integrated with our two other firewall products, SecureTrack and SecureChange.

- It's a paradigm shift and it might take some time for this to be understood but you have to tackle security first through the app layer not the network.

- Here's why: Large enterprises have a high degree of complexity because of multiple locations, multiple IT systems and hundreds of firewalls to manage with multitudes of rules. Developing new applications is tough because they must work across all of a corporations firewalls.

- The situation becomes more complex when changes are made to an application and those changes have to be communicated to hundreds of firewalls.

- If firewalls aren't configured right, apps will fail. But the apps developers have to be better at communication, and documenting, how their apps behave, so that the right changes can be made by the network security teams.

- Anytime you change the configuration of firewalls, other things can break. A key feature of SecureApp is that you can simulate the entire network and test changes safely.

- CIOs want to deploy apps faster but this can compromise security if there is little communication between the app developers and the security teams.

- There's often a cultural problem within large corporations in that the apps developers don't understand the security issues and the security people don't understand the apps.

-There is often little or no documentation, and when people leave a company, a lot of knowledge about an app leaves too. SecureApp makes sure that there is documentation and that knowledge isn't lost when people leave.

Foremski's Take: Tufin's application centric approach to improving enterprise security makes sense and it won't take corporations long to realize its the right approach.

What will take longer is the internal shift in culture, in the app developer teams, which traditionally have not been very security minded.

It's a leadership move by Tufin and one that's well timed. The explosion of apps in the consumer web is driving a tremendous amount of app development in the enterprise. Firewalls can quickly become brick walls or leave security holes open because of badly designed apps.

Managing hundreds of firewalls while trying to support a deluge of apps will quickly turn into a nightmare unless the whole process of application development can be mapped against an organization's firewalls. The app and the firewall have to be in sync and that requires new sets of tools.

Tools such as Tufin's not only provide an easy interface for managing security policies and compliance but they can also be used as an agent of cultural change within organizations because they offer a common ground for the apps and security teams. It helps them communicate with each other, which should lead to better apps.

Intel also announced a new Itanium microprocessor designed for high-end mission critical systems such as HP's co-announced Integrity Superdome 2 high-end servers.

Today's announcement reaffirms Intel and HP's commitment to a long future for Itanium, which failed in its original bid to establish a high-end IT systems market.

Itanium is based on Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC architecture and there are many companies that have large legacy systems that rely on continued improvements in Itanium design to keep up with data center demands.

However, with a relatively small market, compared with Intel Xeon servers, there were fears that the continued development of Itanium would become too costly and it would be dropped. This would force users to carry out expensive ports of their mission critical software applications to other, less reliable platforms.

Oracle was convinced that Itanium would have a shortened life and wanted to end support, a move that resulted in a high profile court battle with HP the victor.

Rory McInerney, vice president of Intel's architecture group (above), said that over the next few years, Itanium will gradually share the same designs as Xeon microprocessors, except for the Itanium microcode, but all other features of the two chips will become identical.

This will help reduce the costs of supporting Itanium and will make it easier for large data centers to run both types of computers.

Mr McInerney said that customers running mission critical systems have welcomed the latest Itanium 9500, because it can be used to build IT systems with the highest reliability, compared with Xeon or other IT architectures.

The latest Itanium has more cores, uses less power, and runs about 2.5 times faster.

I recently returned from Las Vegas and Tibco Software's user conference, TUCON12. It was a good place to catch up with Tibco, one of my most loyal and longtime sponsors.

This year the theme was: "Everything is different. How do you prepare for the future when everything keeps changing?"

The need for an agile IT infrastructure that can respond in real time and also anticipate what's coming next is more important than ever.

Tibco's technologies live in the very heart of large corporations' IT systems, they tie many different systems together, and they also unite employees and partners into social enterprises that unlock the tremendous stores of knowledge and experience already within organizations.

Tibbr

Tibco's Tibbr social network app has more users than Yammer, which was bought recently by Microsoft for $1.2 billion. Yet often, Tibco doesn't receive the recognition from the stock market for the value of its business groups.

Ram Menon, president of Social Computing at Tibco (above) says that Tibbr is a strategic asset that has become a vital component in its stack of enterprise IT technologies and there are plans to expand its usefulness. In November a new version of the Tibbr suite will be opened up to external developers. He says that people are the real API of an organization and Tibbr is the best expression of a company's top asset.

Mr Menon said that Tibbr is finding new users all the time, including by police authorities. Jay Grant, Secretary General of InterPort Police, (above, speaking with Ram Menon), said that Tibbr allows police to quickly span the globe with information that can be used in real time to stop terrorists and smugglers.

David Kirkpatrick, (above) formerly a senior editor at Fortune, and now heading the Techonomy conference, moderated several panels at TUCON12.

The panel on Big Data featured: Justin Eggart, General Manager GE Energy; N.X. Morini Bianzino, Senior Manager at Accenture; Sandeep Dadlani, Head of America at Infosys; Fabrice Pizzi, Chief Information Security Officer at Eiffage; Michael Swartz, Strategy and Business Development at Perkin Elmer. A key takeaway was that "Big Data" is less important than the right data at the right time. Context of data has been a key theme at Tibco for many years.

James Murren, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MGM Resorts International.

John Shewell, Director, Product Management at McKesson Provider Technologies delivered some very scary statistics about the cost of healthcare in the US and the need for technologies that can anticipate where care is needed. He said that about 5% of patients consume about 50% of healthcare costs.

Tibco announced support for Tibbr from Dropbox, COO Dan Levin above.

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, now chairman of Wayin also spoke at the conference (video below).

More info:

Vivek Ranadivé - Real Time With Vivek - Forbes

TIBCO: The Dark Horse of Enterprise Social Software? - Forbes

Tibco's Tucon is an Event About Events

Big Data is watching a million fireflies | Successful Workplace

TUCON® | Streaming - Day One

TUCON® | Streaming - Day Two

The TIBCO Blog

Rose Ross, founder of Tech Trailblazers, describes the awards as "a kind of Startupworld focused on enterprise IT."

The prizes consist of about $50,000 worth of services, "Exclusive coaching, mentoring and development from VCs, financial experts, and leading CTOs within large industry-vendors in their technology area."

Two runners up in each category will also receive prizes. All entrants will receive some form of services valued at about $3,000 per company. The total prize fund is estimated at $1 million in value.

The winners will be announced December 3. Entry costs $295 for the first category, additional entries are $150 each. There are 34 judges.

How to Enter | Tech Trailblazers

Betting big on software is a key business strategy for GE. The business group's annual revenues were more than $142 billion in 2012. In 2008 they were nearly $180 billion. Software businesses have high profit margins especially if they can be applied across a large user base. 

Software is a far more scalable business than services, which are constrained by staff numbers. And software can be used to help scale some types of services and save on staff costs, all great reasons for GE to invest in software. 

Its goal is to create a unique asset, a cutting edge software group capable of supporting the many varied business groups that make up GE's industrial conglomerate. From monitoring jet engines to building sustainable energy projects, the breadth of GE's software needs cross a wide spectrum of applications.

It will require common software platforms that can integrate many different applications, plus development of cutting edge user interfaces, and the integration of hundreds of tools and third party technologies.

It's a massive undertaking that's being led by William Ruh, vice president and director of the Software group. He was formerly vice president at Cisco Systems, where he headed global development of services and solutions.

I visited GE Software at it's headquarters in San Ramon (above), a place that locals like to describe as being half-way between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, (if you head 30 miles east of both).

Here are some notes from my meeting with Mr Ruh (photo top).

- GE realized that more than $2.5 billion a year in revenues was due to software licensing. It decided it needed a new business group to make its software development more efficient, and more useable across divisions, with better user interfaces, and development of new types of mobile applications.

- GE believes that software is its most vital technology, and it has the potential to transform every one of its industry sectors.

- The goal is not to become another Oracle, or any other software company but to pursue common technologies and analytics for some very important areas.

- Key areas of focus are sensors, data analytics, predictive analytics, energy efficiency, user interfaces, mobile technologies, and transportation logistics.

- A year ago the division consisted of just two people now there are almost 400 engineers and researchers, with a goal of more than 800. GE has more than 9,000 software engineers across the globe.

- Key problems to tackle: predicting when and where a jet engine will fail; technologies for repairing equipment remotely; making devices more intelligent and self-monitoring; integration of consumer technologies; improving and standardizing user interfaces, developing networks of sensors, and best use of cloud technologies.

- Healthcare is another important sector, how to improve hospital efficiencies, reduce infections, and predict healthcare needs in individuals based on sensor data such as monitoring how people walk. Improving imaging technologies is key and it's also where GE already has an important expertise.

- GE Software is not competing for the same talent as Silicon Valley web startups. It is able to attract software engineers with eight to ten years experience. These people are usually settled in young families, which makes San Ramon a highly attractive location because of good schools and abundant, reasonable priced housing. For engineers in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, San Ramon is an easy 30 minute reverse commute. (When I visited from San Francisco in mid-summer it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, at 110 degrees.)

- The projects are important and difficult - this attracts top software engineers.

- GE makes investments in startups and makes small and medium sized acquisitions all the time, mostly related to specific industry sectors, not necessarily Silicon Valley startups but from all over the US.

- Cybersecurity is also very important and this is where there is potential of cooperation with other sections of GE.

- Advise for new engineers: If you focus on mobility, cloud, analytics, or cybersecurity — you will have a great career.

I also spoke with Veeru Ramaswamy (below), Technology Leader for Digital Industries at GE Software.

- Mr Ramaswamy runs a research group of about 25 people, with a goal of expanding to around 50 people.

- GE is trying to digitize as much of its business and services as it can, this generates a lot of data that can be used to improve efficiencies across all operations.

- With all the different software projects across its operations, the company is keen to choose common platforms.

- Developing predictive analytics is important, algorithms that can analyze big data and make predications. Analysis of image data is another important subject, in healthcare and other studies such as jet engine monitoring.

- How to apply existing technologies to solve important problems in GE sectors.

- Investigate collaboration technologies and how to utilize the knowledge of GE experts across remote geographies. This can help repair wind turbines, for example, by having the right parts already on hand along with the right instructions to local workers. This can cut repair turnaround time dramatically.

- The opportunity, and the challenge, is to create a new research group from scratch, to investigate the application of powerful new technologies, some of which are sourced from consumer technologies such as Microsoft's Kinect. 

Additional info:

GE Global Research

Press Releases : The Latest : GE Global Research

Videos : The Latest : GE Global Research

Blog : GE Global Research

If the Palo Alto based startup can deliver on its promise it could result in significant IT cost savings. Enterprise applications are notoriously difficult to rewrite for cloud platforms and their performance can be unpredictable.

"With CliQr we can port an app in under one day," said Gaurav Manglik, co-founder and CEO. "You can also test run your application across different vendor platforms and choose the one with the best price/performance."

CliQr itself, is a cloud based service that ports the customer's apps and monitors their security and performance.

The cost savings for IT departments would also be matched with considerable time savings. It can take many months to port an enterprise application to cloud platforms. These are large business applications that are essential to every organization and ports could introduce new bugs.

CliQr also offers an additional advantage: it helps prevent lock-in when critical apps are tied to one host service. "Because you are using the same application you can move it easily around public cloud vendors," said Dave Cope, chief marketing officer.

CliQr also offers an additional advantage: it helps prevent lock-in when critical apps are tied to one host service. "Because you are using the same application you can move it easily around public cloud vendors," said Dave Cope, chief marketing officer.

Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google, is one of the investors. Although the technology is probably not useful for Google's internal apps, CliQr could possibly become part of a future service offered by Google to large enterprises.

Google already sells a suite of cloud-based productivity apps such as docs and email. The next step could be to expand that service to hosting customer apps in its datacenters. Google's data centers are finely tuned, with custom built equipment and software, to be highly efficient -- far more efficient than most corporate datacenters, with their layers of legacy equipment and poor design.

Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, has said that a key goal for the company is to be able to host the IT needs of any business, in addition to handling all of its e-commerce, marketing, and advertising operations. Technologies such as those from CliQr are a crucial step in that direction.

Silicon Valley VC firm Emergence Capital Partners was an early investor in Salesforce.com and now works exclusively with cloud-based startups primarily focused on business customers. Gordon Ritter writes that they can learn a lot from consumer services companies.

By Gordon Ritter

Consumer internet companies have always been good at harnessing behavioral data from their customers to serve their customers better (and help themselves in the process). Many enterprise cloud companies have the same opportunity but have not focused on the importance of this data.

Maybe it is because there is not the direct correlation between product changes and resulting advertising monetization.

Or that the scale of user interactions seems too small to warrant focusing on it. Whatever the reason, the value of using aggregated customer data to help avoid churn, increase upsell, and ultimately create a more strategic relationship with customers, is at stake.

Here are three steps I encourage all our companies to take as they transform from being "tools" companies to thinking of themselves as "insight" companies:

1. Embed your employee insights into your offering.

Start by getting your key product, marketing and sales teams in a room and ask a simple question:

"What's the most important piece of advice that we tell our customers every day about how to get more value out of our service?"

It could be a common wisdom that your customer success people mention every day when they talk with customers. It could be the little secret that diligent customers find buried in your FAQs.

In my experience every company has these little gems. The key is to embed the insights directly in your service and to use this to build your data strategy.

At Salesforce.com, they saw early on that customers who forecast their sales pipeline were much more likely to stay as customers and add seats. Armed with this knowledge, the product team focused attention on making forecasting easier and encouraged sales reps to predict what a sales opportunity might be worth in the future.

This discovery about the value of forecasting led to a dramatic decrease in churn. I bet your company has 5 or 10 of these same insights but you have not codified them into changes in your offering.

2. Automated benchmark reports bundled with enhanced versions.

Gather aggregate behavioral data from your customers, and create reports that quantify how your customers are doing, compared to other customers. This is commonly called "benchmarking," but for a cloud company, the data is much richer because it is more granular.

Cloud companies can report detailed data about precise usage patterns and the correlation between those patterns and customer success with the product.

At Lithium Technologies, their depth of knowledge on how to build successful customer and marketing communities, led to a "Community Health Index" (CHI). A customer's CHI score is based on detailed usage patterns and is highly predictive about whether a community will succeed or fail.

Once you have automated the creation of these reports, bundle them with more expensive versions of your service as a way to begin to monetize this valuable data.

3. "The Death of McKinsey": C-level recognition that only your company has the data-driven insights.

The reason I call this final stage "The Death of McKinsey" is because you may already have what a strategic consulting firm uses to come up with their CEO-level advice.

Typically, a consulting firm will start their project by interviewing employees and gathering data from a client's IT systems, and then look for patterns to support some strategic change.

You may already have the employee, or end-customer usage patterns, and be able to provide the insights that a consulting firm charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

Getting to this final stage will take some time for a young company, but know that some of the largest public cloud venders are starting to think of themselves as "insight-engines" for their customers.

The end goal for your data strategy is to continuously derive so many insights from customer usage patterns, correlated with success metrics, that you can help predict more about their success than your customers can. This will lead to higher productivity for your customers, and far higher ASPs and lower churn for your company.

Whatever industry domain you are in, you have the opportunity to be the best provider of insights for your customers. Take this step to break the "tools" mindset in your company.

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Please see: SVW Interview with Gordon Ritter and Jason Green.