Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 1
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
computerweekly.com
12-18 JANUARY 2016
MA
STER
130
5/IS
TOC
K
Open source packs a punchIt’s round two in the fight between proprietary software and open
source, and the latter is hitting well above its weight
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 2
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
NAO: Government has poor track record in delivering major projectsThe National Audit Office (NAO) is concerned with the government’s “poor track record in delivering major projects”, as it has found that a third of the government’s major projects are rated red or amber-red. A progress report published by the NAO found that the Government Major Project Portfolio totals 149 projects worth £511bn, with an expected spend of £25bn in 2016.
Nationwide renews BT network contract for digital transformationBT has won a six-year contract to upgrade Nationwide Building Society’s existing network to pro-vide a new platform to support its digital transformation. The new network will connect Nationwide’s 700-branch retail banking opera-tion in the UK, its head office and regional administration, and its contact centres. It will support apps and services delivered to its 15 mil-lion customers and 17,000 staff.
Amazon WorkMail goes on gen-eral release in EuropeAmazon Web Services (AWS) has raised the stakes in its ongoing cloud battle with Microsoft and Gmail by confirming the general release of its managed email offering, WorkMail, in Europe. The managed email and calendar service – pitched as a chal-lenger to Microsoft Office 365 and Gmail – runs in the AWS cloud and was first announced as a preview release in January 2015.
Aviva partners Beyond the Classroom to attract girls to techAviva has partnered social enter-prise Beyond the Classroom in an initiative to educate young girls in London about career options in technology. During a three-day workshop in the Aviva Digital Garage, a short distance from London’s Silicon Roundabout, eight girls from underprivileged back-grounds were invited to attend workshops on digital jobs such as UX, coders or product managers.
French intelligence ‘could have prevented Paris attacks’The French intelligence services could have prevented the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015, a former US intelli-gence chief told MPs and peers. William Binney, a former technical director of the US National Security Agency, told a par-liamentary committee that intelligence agencies are missing important data on terrorist attacks because they are over-whelmed with electronic data.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
NEWS IN BRIEF
NO
RIO
NA
KAY
AM
A
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 3
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
NEWS IN BRIEF
HSBC suffers major online banking failureHSBC customers were unable to use online banking services for two days as a result of an internal tech-nical issue. The problem began on 4 January when customers experi-enced problems logging into online and mobile banking services.
Hungryhouse adopts Braintree online payments serviceOnline takeaway service Hungryhouse has added the Braintree online platform to the choice of payment methods it offers customers, which include Amex, Apple Pay and PayPal.
Facebook CEO sets personal artificial intelligence challengeWhile Facebook’s artificial intelli-gence (AI) lab is focused on advanc-ing machine learning, the firm’s chief Mark Zuckerberg has set himself a personal AI goal for 2016: “To build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work.”
RFL uses data analytics to boost performanceThe English Rugby Football League (RFL) is using data analytics soft-ware from Qlik to improve perfor-mance and player safety. Richard Hunwicks, head of human perfor-mance at the RFL, says the sport is a leader in sports analytics.
Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent embark on joint futureNokia has successfully taken control of nearly 80% of outstanding shares in competitor Alcatel-Lucent. Rajeev Suri, Nokia’s president and CEO, said: “We are delighted that the offer has been successful.”
Audi drivers go online with European MVNO agreementIrish mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and machine-to-machine communications specialist Cubic Telecom has signed an agreement with Audi to offer high-speed 4G long-term evolution connectivity to drivers in 13 European countries. n
CES 2016: Connectivity drives new business models in car industryAccording to Uber chief strategist David Plouffe, 15 and 16-year-olds no longer want a driving licence. “In my generation, your entire social life revolved around the car,” he said. “Now it revolves around smartphones.” There has been a grow-ing trend in the automotive industry to incorporate software in vehicles, and smartphone apps are being used to steer car makers in a new direction. One big announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was General Motors’ $500m investment in US car-sharing service Lyft.
❯ Yahoo plans to cut workforce by 10%.
❯ EU privacy watchdog to set up ethics advisory group.
❯ UK interception powers need regular review.
❯ UK IoT research hub opens.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 4
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
Digital platform more than taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?Uber’s significance may lie more in its being a data-rich platform that taps into unused human economic resources than in its role as a passenger pickup service. Brian McKenna reports
Uber provokes strong feelings. Some see it as a symbol of a modern app-driven economy, but others see it threat-ening to destroy a business that is rightly regulated for
reasons of passenger safety.Uber’s head of corporate communications is David Plouffe, US
President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager. The very fact that the car ride hiring company has a figure of such stature in such a role says something about its imperative to get its story across in favourable ways.
No photography is allowed at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco, as a group of journalists from outside the US discov-ered on a visit on the eve of Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual cus-tomer and partner event.
At Dreamforce, Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick, came across well – as a thoughtful, rather shy individual. But during a “fireside chat” with Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Benioff, he told a story that leant plausibility to the view of Uber as the harbinger of a new wave of creative disruption sweeping across old industries.
For the firm has come to function – at least in the collective imagination of Silicon Valley and all its clones in other parts of the world (such as our own Silicon Roundabout) – as more than just a provider of a convenient alternative to traditional taxis.
“Uberisation” has come to mean the data-driven transforma-tion of any service, using otherwise untapped resources. In the case of Uber’s car ride service, the company uses mapping data to capitalise on a driver’s ownership of a car and holding of a driv-ing licence to connect him or her to someone who wants a lift, has signed up to get lifts, and has a smartphone.
The sharing economyIt symbolises the so-called new “sharing economy” that some even see as post-capitalist, germinating within capitalism a new, more humane economy.
In the fireside chat with Benioff at Dreamforce, Kalanick recounted how, in his view, the taxi system in San Francisco had been broken from the rider’s point of view, but was failing to give
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 5
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
opportunities to working-class Bay Area people trying to do more than keep their heads above water. Here was an earning opportu-nity, he argued – people could top up their salary by doing about 10 hours’ driving a week.
At the heart of Uber, said Kalanick, is a philosophy that “cel-ebrates the city” – in the first place, the city of San Francisco. The more people who use a service like Uber, the less traffic there will be, he said, resulting in less pollution and fewer accidents. He pointed out that 30,000 people a year die in road traffic accidents in the US alone, adding: “What if it were zero?”
Reducing emissionsPlouffe made similar arguments before an audience of non-US journalists the day before Dreamforce began. The company is about “reducing cars on the road, reducing emissions”, he said.
Uber Pool, the car-sharing service, is particularly about that, he added. Uber operates in 330 cities in 60 countries, but still “there are a lot of world cities that we need to go into to solve their mobility challenges”, said Plouffe.
The big picture, he said, was of a world where “people are mov-ing into cities at a fast pace, but they don’t have money or the room to build new transportation infrastructures”. He suggested Uber could help with this by reducing levels of car ownership, getting people to share rides, and so on.
Like Kalanick, Plouffe also stressed the social benefit of drivers joining the platform to supplement their incomes: 56% of them were doing fewer than 10 hours a week, he pointed out. “There is not one stagnant market for taxis,” he added. “Taxis tend to
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
UBE
R
Uber uses mapping data to connect a driver to someone
who wants a lift, has signed up to get lifts, and
has a smartphone
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 6
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
be in financial districts or near hotels. It is difficult to get around our cities – there are no or few taxis in suburban or low-income areas; they are not near subways, and so on.”
So again, the service provides a social benefit previously una-vailable, he said.
Responding to a needWhatever the cogency of these arguments, there can be little doubt that even the keenest minds in our business IT community – or, more specifically, of the data analytics and business appli-cations communities – do see the value in Uber and Uberisation.
Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer at Teradata, is of this view. “Uber recognised a need and met it very effectively. Uber is, in most cities, more effective, faster and cheaper than taxis,” he says.
“The cheaper bit I don’t necessarily like because it’s not clear to me that it creates a sustainable living for the drivers, especially when their insurance goes up because they are Ubering. I’d hap-pily pay more for an Uber than a cab.
“But what they really did right was build a platform that can be used not just for a taxi service, but for grocery delivery and all sorts of other things. Building a platform is much more powerful than building a product.”
Ray Wang, founder and CEO at Constellation Research, added to this point at the SAP UK and Ireland User Group conference in Birmingham. “The beauty of Uber as a platform is that it is an insight economy,” he said. “It’s a business model that takes data and brokers and re-brokers it.
“Uber doesn’t own the cars. It gives the driver a sensor that works out the best, most valuable routes. It’s the basis of a logistics business. The supply chain information it is capturing is fascinating.”
Ryan Smith, CEO and founder at Qualtrics, a Utah-based
survey software company trained on enterprise customers, expressed this view pithily during a trip to London. “You know why Uber is a great service for me?” he said. “Because I don’t have pounds.” All payments are made via the Uber app, so there is no need for users to carry cash.
It is hard to believe that Uber will continue to bear the weight of social and economic significance that is routinely imputed to it. It seems like every technology conference has a speaker who cites Uber as revolutionary – because it is “disruptive”.
Wouldn’t it be good if we could think afresh about why disrup-tion has come to be so valorised? That might also relieve Uber of some of its Zeitgeist significance, and leave it to get on with being a successful company. n
“The beauTy of uber as a plaTform is ThaT iT is an
insighT economy”Ray Wang, Constellation ReseaRCh
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
❯The pushback against Uber offers a lesson in risk-taking for CIOs
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 7
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?The FCA says cloud computing – even in its public form – is acceptable for finance organisations. Karl Flinders reports
The Financial Conduct Authority has no fundamental opposi-tion to finance firms using cloud technology – but this is far from the starting pistol for its broader and faster adoption.
In a recent note to the companies it regulates, on proposed guid-ance about the use of the cloud, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said that – used correctly – cloud technology is acceptable.
The regulator’s announcement and call for feedback could change the financial services market’s cautious attitude to cloud IT. “We see no fundamental reason why cloud services (including public cloud services) cannot be implemented, with appropriate consideration, in a manner that complies with our rules,” said the FCA guidance in November 2015.
But what do those in the banking, IT and services industries think?
The IT professionalOne senior IT professional in the banking sector still holds fears about the security of cloud services. “Cloud services worry me from a security perspective. If a small number of large global firms dominate these services and build up a lot of clients, they make
themselves a very attractive target,” he said. “If a cloud provider hosts many banks and security is compromised, all their clients may be affected in one attack.” He said there is some safety in diversity, but his “concern is putting a lot of eggs in one basket”.
“Hackers may be able to do a lot of damage to millions of banking customers across many banks in one event. Of course,
ANALYSIS
“There is noThing clever abouT The cloud – iT’s jusT a bunch of servers
in a daTacenTre wiTh an inTerneT connecTion. in The old days we
used To call iT a mainframe wiTh neTworked Terminals”
an it pRofessional
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 8
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
the banks and cloud providers will say that can never happen, but it will.”
He claimed it was unlikely there would be a rapid take-up of cloud services as a result of the FCA publication. “There may be specific products and services which lend themselves to this model, but I don’t think the FCA note will cause much of a change,” he said.
The IT professional pointed out that because large banks have good economies of scale, cloud is less attractive as a way of cut-ting costs. “Can cloud providers really get lower-cost hardware, software and resource than a large bank? Any bank that thinks there is a business advantage is probably managing its IT very badly today. There is nothing clever about the cloud – it’s just a bunch of servers in a datacentre with an internet connection. In the old days we used to call it a mainframe with networked termi-nals,” he said.
The academicDaniel Gozman, lecturer at Henley Business School, said the adoption of cloud services in the banking sector will be “gradual and cautiously optimistic”. He said that, as cloud becomes the norm in other industries, the financial services sector will natu-rally follow. “But this won’t happen overnight. There may be some notable enforcement actions along the way. Firms will be curious to learn how the regulator reacts to different models of cloud and different suppliers over time,” he added.
Gozman suggested finance firms may decide that the costs out-weigh the benefits in meeting proposed guidelines. “For example, the guidelines require that firms collate and analyse a great deal
of information about their provider on an ongoing basis. Will this be worthwhile for cheaper pay-as-you-go software as a service?”
He added that suppliers may be unwilling or unable to disclose some of the required information and meet the obligations firms
require of them, and they may also be unwilling to alter standard contracts to facilitate some of the obligations.
Ultimately, he said, it is the firm that remains responsible for meeting regulatory obligations.
The outsourcing specialistJean Louis Bravard, IT outsourcing consultant and former CIO at JP Morgan, said the fact that the FCA formally approved public cloud will liberate its use if the industry is capable of managing the right level of tiering and security.
But he admitted he had some doubts: “I would applaud the move, but ask the FCA to suggest which services can indeed be
ANALYSIS
“finance firms will be curious To learn how The regulaTor reacTs To differenT models of cloud and
differenT suppliers over Time”Daniel gozman, henley Business sChool
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 9
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
outsourced to the cloud, and which security technologies and outsourcing providers the FCA approves.”
Bravard added that it would be interesting to hear what the FCA attitude is on data privacy between Europe and the US. “Not all cloud providers can certify that no data crosses the Atlantic.”
The lawyersPaul Hinton, IT outsourcing lawyer at Kemp Little, said there was a growing number of companies in the finance sector adopting cloud services, but “a key stumbling block has been a lack of cer-tainty as to exactly what standard in each case would likely be acceptable to the FCA or PRA, which places the risk on each firm to assess each supplier offering, and individually determine if it is sufficient to meet high-level and generic FCA/PRA standards”.
Hinton pointed out that the FCA guidance consultation acknowl-edges that stakeholders have said the lack of certainty about the FCA’s application of its rules in connection with outsourc-ing the cloud may be preventing firms from using the cloud. He said a number of issues need to be resolved, including a dispar-ity between FCA and PRA rules and guidance in different finan-cial services sectors. “Ideally, a clear regulated standard would be produced that cloud providers could subscribe to and comply with. The FCA guidance consultation in its current form is still rather generic, and many of the points raised include suggestions about what firms should consider rather than clear advice about what will be deemed satisfactory for the FCA,” he said.
The FCA needs to recruit more technology experts with experi-ence of managing internal IT systems, according to Hinton. “This
would help ensure the rules are more directly specific about IT standards where necessary.”
Mark Lewis, head of outsourcing at law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner, does not expect a rush to the cloud. “The FCA’s cur-rent thinking shows there is some way to go in bridging the gap between a public cloud utility service for financial institutions and the FCA’s current proposed guidance,” he said.
Lewis claimed the guidance will not really lighten the regulatory burden because it seems no more than a “slightly cut-down – if that – version of the current approach to regulated outsourcing”.
He said the proposed guidance may be unrealistic or unfeasible, given the public cloud technological, operational, business and contractual model. “In fairness to the regulator, public cloud pro-viders need to start stepping up as well – some are beginning to do so – to bridge the gap in approach.” n
“i applaud The move, buT ask The fca To suggesT which services can
be ouTsourced To The cloud and which securiTy Technologies and
ouTsourcing providers iT approves”Jean louis BRavaRD, Jp moRgan
ANALYSIS
❯Survey shows banks underestimate the scale of cloud use on their networks
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 10
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
Departing DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to the centreDVLA’s former CTO returns to Cabinet Office after executing ‘exemplar’ GDS programme. Brian McKenna reports
Iain Patterson, former chief technology officer at the DVLA, is returning to the centre of government IT after completing a major programme at the Swansea-based licensing agency.
Patterson describes the job done at the DVLA as an “exemplar” of the prospectus of the Government Digital Service, which, since the coalition government was elected in 2010, has pressed for a “digital first, cloud first, agile methodologies” technical approach, also trying to give small suppliers a fair crack of the whip.
He became CTO at the DVLA in June 2013 after a successful stint as CIO for the 2012 Olympic Games. Making tax discs for 38 million vehicles digital was one eye-catching element of the work he led. But the burden of the “digital transformation” was to insource the agency’s IT which, in 2014, stood behind 25 million calls and issued 10 million licences. Road tax evasion is now down to its lowest-ever level of 0.62%, according to the DVLA.
The Pact (Partners Achieving Change Together) contract with IBM and Fujitsu, was coming to an end during Patterson’s ten-ure. The agency’s IT had been outsourced for 22 years, the last 12 under the Pact programme.
INTERVIEW
Iain Patterson: “Digital transformation is not just
about moving things online. It’s about changing culture,
mindsets and skillsets”
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 11
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
He decided to insource the Swansea-based staff, which meant taking 303 people from the IBM/Fujitsu group and making 100 voluntarily redundant. There are now 642 people in the IT team that Patterson led, and the £86m-a-year systems integration con-tract, in existence two-and-a-half years ago, is no more.
Patterson says the contract was not just too costly, but was get-ting in the way of more direct technological and business strate-gic talks with primary IT providers, such as MongoDB and Oracle.
Speaking at the Oracle Open World event in San Francisco, he said: “Oracle has been stuck behind the systems integrator
layer. I want to have conversations with the software developers and talk at senior levels with Oracle. The systems integrators had no vested interest in reducing our licensing costs. It is bet-ter to talk to [the likes of Oracle] on a technology as well as a licence cost basis.
“With its transition to a digital cloud-based approach, Oracle will be able to compete well,” he said, but stressed that the approach he advocates is technology agnostic. “We’ve got MongoDB that can talk to [an element of] an Oracle cloud environment. We
want to be agile, to move from product to product, with Oracle providing a service. We’ll mix and match products,” he added.
At Open World, Patterson said the scale and scope of his new role in government IT would soon become apparent – he has since been announced as the new director of Common Technology Services at the Government Digital Service.
Driving change in DVLA ITPatterson describes the change programme at the DVLA as a cultural shift that involved, for example, working with local uni-versities and Swansea’s “tech hub” to “create an ecosystem of skills development and job creation”.
“People were nervous of me because I was from the centre,” he says. “But I sat with my team, did silly things for charity, and so on. Change has to come from the grass roots. We have a mixture of grades, not only senior civil servants, and the people who can solve problems tend to be those that work with them every day.”
As for what is delivered to the public, Patterson says: “Digital transformation is not just about moving things online. It’s about changing culture, mindsets and skillsets to support it. And it is ‘digital first’, not ‘digital only’. You have to cater for multi-channel formats. The trick is to make digital so compelling that people see it as the right thing to do.”
He also highlights the DVLA’s work with the motor sector, look-ing at in-car technologies that will make the agency’s work more effective and help the industry sell cars.
“Government can legislate without thinking through the impact on industries,” he adds. “I’m proud of what the team has done.” n
INTERVIEW
“The Trick is To make digiTal so compelling ThaT people see iT as
The righT Thing To do”iain patteRson, foRmeR Cto, Dvla
❯DVLA’s two-year project to bring its IT back in-house comes to an end
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 12
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
Computer Weekly, 2nd Floor, 3-4a Little Portland Street, London W1W 7JB
General enquiries 020 7186 1400
Editor in chief: Bryan Glick 020 7186 1424 | [email protected]
Managing editor (technology): Cliff Saran 020 7186 1421 | [email protected]
Head of premium content: Bill Goodwin 020 7186 1418 | [email protected]
Services editor: Karl Flinders 020 7186 1423 | [email protected]
Security editor: Warwick Ashford 020 7186 1419 | [email protected]
Networking editor: Alex Scroxton 020 7186 1413 | [email protected]
Management editor: Lis Evenstad 020 7186 1425 | [email protected]
Datacentre editor: Caroline Donnelly 020 7186 1411 | [email protected]
Storage editor: Antony Adshead 07779 038528 | [email protected]
Business applications editor: Brian McKenna 020 7186 1414 | [email protected]
Business editor: Clare McDonald 020 7186 1426 | [email protected]
Production editor: Claire Cormack 020 7186 1417 | [email protected]
Senior sub-editor: Jason Foster 020 7186 1420 | [email protected]
Sub-editor: Jaime Lee Daniels 020 7186 1417 | [email protected]
Sales director: Brent Boswell 07584 311889 | [email protected]
Group events manager: Tom Walker 0207 186 1430 | [email protected]
Can IT dinosaurs evolve and rise again?
The combined revenue of the five biggest global corporate IT suppliers declined by more than $12bn over their past four financial quarters – at a time when the use of technology worldwide is booming.
That $12bn isn’t money that has disappeared from the market – it’s simply being spent elsewhere. A growing number of IT lead-ers are turning to new sources of innovation – whether from startups, fast-growing firms in emerging technology areas such as cloud, or greater use of open source and in-house resources.
So perhaps the biggest question for 2016 is whether the traditional IT suppliers – the ones you formerly couldn’t get sacked for buying from – are able to reverse that slide by proving they can compete in a new digital world. If not, then by the end of this year we may be preparing a series of corporate obituaries for their slow, inexorable, inevitable declines.
Look at the corporate structures of some of these old behemoths and read their marketing messages – it’s all product, product, prod-uct. Yet there has rarely been a time when IT leaders are less interested in the latest product. For most of the history of corporate IT, change has been driven by the newest products from the big suppliers. You all remember the acronyms – ERP, CRM, BPM and all the others. Each represented a new wave of software products, and a new source of income for their suppliers.
That’s left many of those suppliers in the unenviable position of spending most of their multibillion-dollar research and development budgets on simply developing new functionality for their existing products. As a result, the amount of genuine innovation coming from those companies has dwindled – how many game-changing technologies have they produced in the past five years? And they all missed cloud, mobile, big data, social media – and will miss many future trends too.
The balance of power has changed, but traditional IT suppliers are having the same conversations with IT leaders they were 10 years ago. Those IT chiefs – dependent as they are on the suppliers’ legacy systems, for now – listen politely, but increasingly take their trans-formational digital spending elsewhere.
Some observers would say it’s already too late for many IT dinosaurs – and in some cases, they’re right. But there is no doubt the clock is ticking and the asteroid is approaching for all of them. By the end of this year, the purchasing decisions of IT leaders will give us a clearer view of their fate. n
Bryan Glick, editor in chief
❯Read the latest Computer Weekly blogs
EDITOR’S COMMENTHOME
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 13
There is a growing realisation in IT that traditional Win-dows, Unix and Oracle skills are the new “legacy”. From startups to the largest e-commerce sites, open source software has become the infrastructure choice, and
there is demand for hot new open source skills.Until recently, IT ran very much on off-the-shelf commercial
software. Datacentres ran proprietary Unix hardware and x86-based Windows servers, while Windows dominated the desktop. Now the user computing environment has been totally disrupted by the advent of smartphones and tablets, and Linux is becoming an increasingly dominant force in the datacentre.
In fact, analyst IDC noted in August 2015 that there has been a shift to open source systems in the server market. “The recent growth trend in the server market is confirmation of the larger IT investment taking place, despite dramatic change occurring in system software, thanks to open source projects such as Docker and OpenStack,” said Al Gillen, IDC’s group vice-president for enterprise infrastructure.
Web-scale appealAs Computer Weekly has previously reported, some businesses choose open source alternatives for new projects in a bid to drive down the level of commercial database licensing in their organisa-tions. For instance, ABN Amro Clearing Bank has decided to use EnterpriseDB, which offers what it claims is a plug-in replacement for Oracle SE through the PostgreSQL open source database.
Open source pricing is particularly attractive for the web-scale businesses that expect a larger number of users. Rather than licence
Open source – it’s the logical alternative
It’s round two in the fight between open source and commercial software, and open source is punching well above its weight, says Cliff Saran
BUYER’S GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE | PART 1 OF 3
HOME
GST
UD
IO G
ROU
P/FO
TOLI
A
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 14
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
on the size of the server or number of users, which is how commercial software tends to be charged, open source software is free; the business only pays for a commercial support contract if it chooses to.
As Gartner noted when it assessed the open source database market in its State of open source RDBMSs, 2015 report, published last April, the cost of the open source-based EnterpriseDB database server is £41,400 over three years, compared with £473,100 for a comparable Oracle Enterprise Edition configuration.
Software cost is one of the big drivers behind open source adop-tion, but it is not the only driver. Cost aside, open source seems to offer some organisations a supe-rior technical choice. Further, ana-lyst Forrester notes in its report, Application Modernisation, Service by Microservice: “Cloud services and open source software offer new code replacement alternatives. Open source projects and other cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce have made large num-bers of high-quality components and services available that facili-tate microservice implementation and enable organisations to reduce the amount of code they need to write. This has opened up new possibilities for replacing custom code within applications.”
Global ticket distribution company Amadeus serves almost 700 million passengers. It took more than half a billion travel
reservations in 2014. The company needed a sys-tem with extremely low response times and high consistency to support its new Amadeus Cloud Services. It selected a suite of open source tech-nologies, including Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, with Docker containers and Kubernetes orches-tration, together with the Couchbase NoSQL database, to build a standardised and unified
deployment process across a global distributed environment.Christophe Defayet, director of R&D for airline IT at Amadeus,
says: “We are using Couchbase to provide near real-time access – making the system highly scalable.”
For Defayet, using open source technology means Amadeus is not locked in to any one supplier’s tech-nology stack. “We have the [ability] to master the entire software stack,” he says, adding that by contributing
actively to the open source community, Amadeus has an oppor-tunity to influence the product roadmap.
Recommending open sourceBookmaker William Hill’s new recommendation engine is also based on open source technology. To deliver a recommenda-tion engine fast and responsive enough to adapt to the volume of data and frequency of price changes, William Hill has devel-oped a data aggregation layer. Built on a number of open source
open source projecTs… enable [companies] To reduce The amounT
of code They need To wriTe”foRResteR RepoRt
BUYER’S GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE
❯ Closed-source vendors are either tied to the standards
they invested in years ago or have to invest in new standards – open source solutions don’t
have that issue.
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 15
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
technologies – including Spark, Kafka and Cassandra – this aggregation layer brings together both user data and contextual big data to build a holistic, real-time picture of each customer.
Unstoppable successWilliam Hill CTO Finbarr Joy says open source technology has evolved from being too risky to where it is now “unstoppable”. “In the developer community, if you want to make rapid pro-gress, you’ll use an open source framework,” he says.
One of the quirks of open source software is that it is a com-munity effort. People use code, but they also contribute. William Hill has developed orchestration and provisioning technology, which it is looking to give to the open source community. For Joy, the intellectual property is not the code itself, but the data that
William Hill is able to manipulate. “There is a massive advantage for us to give back code to the open source community,” he says.
Talented GithubAmong the benefits often cited is that code quality of open source software is much higher than closed source and in-house IT projects. But for Joy, making his developers’ work open source has additional benefits. Code is submitted to Github, where many other open source developers can give the code a peer review. The fact that people outside the organisation can see the source code means code produced tends to be of higher quality.
Being in the public domain also means the developer is likely to submit cleaner code, and once on Github, the community is able to get involved in improving the submitted software. Second, for
BUYER’S GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE
AN
ATO
LY M
ASL
ENN
IKO
V/FO
TOLI
A
One of the quirks of open source software is that it is a community effort
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 16
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
Joy, Github represents a litmus test of a software developer’s worth, in terms of the code they have contributed to the open source community. It is a similar story at Amadeus. For Defayet, using open source code boosts talent acquisition and reten-tion. “As a leading IT company, usage and contri-bution to open source generates engagement and even passion,” he adds.
Community supportDefayet says organisations that use open source code benefit from a large community and the documentation that is readily available on the internet. “There is extremely good support,” he says. This means the engineering team can pick up new open source skills quickly.
David Byrne, director of architecture at Dixons Carphone, believes open source has a very important part to play in the enterprise. The retailer has used Apache web server for several years and runs the open source NoSQL distributed database, Couchbase. “What tends to happen is you use the community edition in the non-production part of the lifecycle. This makes it easier to find people in the community who are driving development, which drives innovation,” he says.
As a project progresses into pro-duction, businesses then need enterprise support. Analyst Gartner
believes the cost of managing open source data-bases, and the availability of skills, are now close to parity with those of the commercial DBMS offer-ings. Enterprise open source support is a growing market. “The speed of response in the community means flaws are fixed, and this feeds right back into the community,” says Byrne.
This drives innovation. Arguably, it is the inno-vative nature of open source that makes it truly compelling for enterprise IT. “The real innovation in software development is tak-ing place in open source, while the enterprise software provid-ers lag behind,” says Byrne. For instance, products such as Chef and the continuous development process came from the open source community.
Overcoming challengesThe open source community evokes disruptive innovation, accord-ing to Joy. There are people pushing open source technology such as NoSQL databases into areas once inhabited solely by the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Over time, the community
will eventually solve any technical challenges that prevent using open source as a replacement for com-mercial products. So there should be no reason not to put commercial open source offerings on a short-list when looking to renew existing enterprise software contracts. n
BUYER’S GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE
“The real innovaTion in sofTware developmenT is Taking
place in open source”DaviD ByRne, Dixons CaRphone
❯ The FreeNAS platform offers a lot of the checkboxes
that five or six years ago were isolated to higher-end enterprise-level NAS boxes.
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 17
Essentially, every company is now a technology com-pany. IT is no longer just a support function, but is now so ingrained into all organisations that the CIO is facing both his or her toughest time, and most exciting time,
since the job began.CIOs now need to do much more than drive cost efficiencies
in the technology function. They are expected to reimagine cus-tomer experiences, reshape how work gets done and even rewire business models.
Deloitte’s annual CIO survey looks at how technology leaders operate in the organisations they serve. The 2015 survey – Deloitte 2015 global CIO survey – creating legacy – is based on in-depth interviews with more than 1,200 technology leaders across 43 countries, including the UK. It is focused on exploring their career aspirations and personal goals.
Three fluid patternsDeloitte uncovered three fluid patterns of CIOs – trusted oper-ators, change instigators and business co-creators. What is important is that no single CIO legacy pattern is better than the others. They are also not permanent personas, because CIOs are likely to shift from pattern to pattern.
What matters is choosing the pattern that matches the busi-ness need. It is about being able to step back and understand what pattern you are in right now, and where – if the right skills, relationships and investments are achieved – you have the poten-tial to be in the future.
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systemsSo much of what a business does today needs to be
driven by technology that IT leaders have a choice between leading and lagging, says Mark Lillie
ROLE OF THE CIO
MIM
I PO
TTER
/FO
TOLI
A
HOME
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 18
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
Talent and skills: It takes a villageOnly 9% of the CIOs in the survey said they have all the skills they need to succeed. The three skills with the largest gaps were the ability to influence internal stakeholders, talent manage-ment, and technology vision and leadership. Clearly, something needs to be done.
Yet the reality is that no individual can meet all the needs of a complex organisation. Therefore, it is essential to surround your-self with complementary talent. While many CIOs recognise the importance of talent management, few make it a personal prior-ity. That needs to change.
Relationships: The key to unlocking influenceRelationships are also lagging. While the majority of UK CIOs claim to have excellent or very good relationships with CEOs, chief financial officers, business unit leaders and chief operating officers, outside this group there is a long tail of relationships that need more attention. Just 20% of those surveyed said a relationship with their chief digital officer is important.
Establishing strong relationships is key to effectiveness and influence. It defines a leader’s credibility and impact. Map out those most important to you, in the short and long term, and take time to build and maintain these relationships. Also look beyond your firm to build contacts with your peers, industry and beyond.
Investments: Put your money where your mouth isWhile CIOs named analytics, business intelligence and digi-tal as the technologies that will have significant impact on the
business within two years, UK IT leaders still reported the high-est current investments in legacy and core modernisation.
Despite best intentions, many CIOs still focus on keeping the lights on. While that is important, the business will also look to you to drive forward implementation of exponential and disrup-tive technologies. Don’t just talk about them – show the potential.
Be on the front footThose who are prepared and have assessed their competen-cies will be well positioned to succeed. After all, so much of what a business does today needs to be technology-driven that CIOs have the choice – lead or lag behind. Take a moment to ask yourself:n Which pattern do I identify with most in my current business
context?n Is that pattern what my organisation needs today?n What pattern is best aligned to my organisation’s future needs?n How am I preparing for that future and positioning myself
for success? n
Mark Lillie is UK CIO programme leader at Deloitte.
ROLE OF THE CIO
“esTablishing sTrong relaTionships is key To
effecTiveness and influence”maRk lillie, Deloitte
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 19
Implementing a successful storage solution is always a bal-ance between capacity, performance and cost. Given unlim-ited resources, all data would be deployed on the fastest media possible, which today means either NVDIMM or
Nand flash.But that luxury exists only for the most cash-rich organisations.
Instead, businesses have to strike a balance between their capac-ity and performance needs, using methods such as storage tiering.
Tiering ensures that data sits on the most appropriate type of storage possible, based on performance requirements that include latency and throughput. For example, infrequently-accessed data may be placed on large-capacity Sata drives, whereas a high-performance transactional database may sit on Nand flash.
Tiering vs caching – they’re not the same thingBefore diving further into tiering, we should explain the distinc-tion between caching and tiering.
Tiering is the movement of one persistent copy of data between different types of storage, whereas caching places a temporary copy of data into better-performing storage media. Both improve performance, but caching results in no net additional capacity in the array. The cache is a cost overhead.
The process of tiering has evolved and matured over a number of years. Initial implementations were based on placing an entire logical unit number (LUN) or volume on a separate tier and were typically built into systems with multiple levels of hard disk drive (HDD), rather than flash.
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Automated storage tiering boosts storage efficiency and saves money, but why is tiering different from caching, why is it suited for use
with flash and how do suppliers differ? Chris Evans explains
STORAGE TIERING
PAN
DAV
ECTO
R/FO
TOLI
A
HOME
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 20
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
This rather static approach provided some abil-ity to reduce costs, but created mobility issues when the activity level of data changed. The entire volume had to be moved to another tier of stor-age, which needed free space to accommodate the move.
Moving data around an array is expensive. It steals input/output (I/O) that could be used for host requests and could prevent data being accessed while the move takes place.
The next phase of tiering saw a more granular approach at the sub-volume level. With this method, each volume or LUN is bro-ken into smaller units (variously called blocks or pages by suppli-ers) and assigned to multiple tiers of storage, including flash.
The block-level approach provides much more flexibility to tar-get more expensive storage at the data that can best exploit it. Only the active parts of a database have to be moved up to flash, compared with before, when it would have been moved in its entirety, along with its LUN.
Automated storage tiering takes the data placement process one step further and manages decision-making about which blocks of data are placed in each storage tier. The automation process is a natural progression for large storage arrays because the amount of effort required to monitor all active data in a single system is too much for human system administrators.
Flash storage and tiering – a perfect matchFlash storage is particularly well suited to use in tiering solu-tions. This is because of the way I/O activity is typically
distributed across a volume of data. In general, a small amount of data is responsible for most of the I/O in an application, and this is reflected at the volume level.
This effect, known as the Pareto Principle or, more colloquially, the 80/20 rule, allows a small
amount of expensive resource (for example, flash) to be assigned to data that caters for most of the I/O workload. Of course, the exact ratios of flash and traditional storage are determined by the profile of the application data.
There is no reason to assume that tiering has to be restricted just to flash and hard disk devices. The Nand flash device market has started to diverge into a range of products that meet endur-ance, capacity, performance and cost requirements.
It will not be long before array suppliers offer solutions that use multiple tiers of flash in the same appliance. For example, write-active data could be placed on high-endurance flash, with the rest of the data left on low-cost 3D-Nand or triple-level cell (TLC) flash.
Supplier tiering implementations differAs we look in more detail at supplier-specific implementations of tiering, there are two aspects to consider: How tiering is applied to the application, and how the supplier deploys tiering at a technical level.
All suppliers look to apply tiering to application workloads through the use of policies. The aim of using policy definitions is to abstract the workload requirements from the underlying hard-ware as much as possible.
STORAGE TIERING
❯How to effectively use storage tiering to boost efficiency
and cut storage costs.
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 21
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
This abstraction process is important because it allows addi-tional resources to be added to an array when policies are not being met, without having to reconfigure all the existing data on the system.
Some early auto-tiering solutions, such as FAST VP for EMC VMAX and VNX, still have a hardware-centric approach to policy management. Data is placed into pools built from a combination of flash and traditional HDD storage, to which are applied policies such as “highest available” and “lowest available”.
The result is tiering based on a mechanism where one workload competes against another based on the prioritisation assigned to them. Data is moved between tiers using scheduled or manual processes that make recommendations about data movement based on historical activity trends.
As already discussed, moving data between tiers is expensive and should be kept to a minimum. Static data pooling tiering solu-tions are not as agile as required when it comes to today’s more virtualised workloads, where active I/O data could change daily or hourly. Moving data on a weekly or monthly basis means these solutions are always playing catch-up. It is much better to either capture the increased I/O activity when it starts, or to sample and move more often.
STORAGE TIERING
REN
EGA
DEW
AN
DER
ER/F
OTO
LIA
moving daTa beTween Tiers is expensive and should
be kepT To a minimum
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 22
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
Dell’s Compellent storage architecture ensures that all write I/O hits tier 1 SSD flash as a default using a feature called Automated Tiered Storage. If that page stays active, then it can remain in tier 1 fast media. If the page becomes inactive, it is aged to a lower tier of storage, typically within 24 hours.
Tintri uses a similar methodology, called Flash First, in its hybrid flash arrays. Data is always written to flash and only evicted to disk once the data becomes cold, or inactive.
DotHill (recently acquired by Seagate) has used a more proac-tive approach in its tiering implementation, known as RealTier. The RealTier algorithms use three processes to determine data placement across tiers: Scoring, to keep track of I/O or ranking every block or page of data; scanning, to identify candidate pages to move between tiers; and sorting, the process of actually mov-ing pages.
Scanning and sorting occur every five seconds, with only a mini-mal amount of data moved in each cycle.
Issues with storage tieringAllowing the storage array to make all the decisions on data movement makes sense from a general point of view, but there are times when this approach may have its problems.
There may be justifiable reasons to pin some application data permanently to one tier or another. For example, a critical appli-cation may need to be able to always guarantee response time or
an archive application may never need to write to flash storage. Exceptions must be catered for within tiering policy definitions, rather than assuming that active/inactive or the “hot/cold” status
of data should dictate location.Other issues may be experienced
with automated tiering that must be carefully considered. For example, some workloads are time-specific, in that they become active at a par-ticular time of day, week or month. A slow-responding tiering algo-
rithm may cause problems for these applications when data is not moved to the performance tier quickly enough.
There is also the issue of managing contention between appli-cations. Tiering effectively introduces competition between applications for the faster storage tiers. Without adequate telemetry, it may be hard to spot a shortage of resources in one tier that results in application performance issues across the storage infrastructure.
A holistic view is requiredWe should conclude by stating that tiering is only one fea-ture of modern storage arrays, which also deliver performance improvements through caching and data optimisation, through thin provisioning, compression and data deduplication.
All these features are intrinsically linked in the architecture, making it difficult to isolate tiering as the only cost-saving and performance-enhancing solution. n
STORAGE TIERING
Tiering inTroduces compeTiTion beTween applicaTions for The fasTer sTorage Tiers
computerweekly.com 12-18 January 2016 23
Home
News
Digital platform or taxi service: Is Uber an app economy paradigm?
The Financial Conduct Authority is open to cloud – but what of the firms it regulates?
DVLA technology chief says ‘job done’ and moves back to centre
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to open source in the enterprise
Creating a CIO legacy beyond the systems
Flash and storage tiering: Top five things to know
Downtime
Samsung fridge could help solve London housing crisisSamsung’s latest refrigerator promises to make grocery shopping easy and spice up life in the kitchen.
The South Korean tech firm announced its Family Hub refrig-erator at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The fridge enables users to shop from a virtual grocery through a screen. It also has a camera inside to allow users to check the contents of their fridge via a mobile phone app. It can even warn the owner if food is out of date.
And those who want the kitchen to become the centre of their home can even stream music or films directly from Samsung TV.
But the true value of the fridge is its ability to free up rooms in London. With the London Mayoral election ramping up, candi-dates could be missing a trick. The fridge will push people to the kitchen, which will, in turn, free up the living room as a potential extra bedroom. So free tech-enabled fridges for all households should be a key election promise.
But fridges are just the start. Plans are in the pipeline for a two-seat toilet with built-in plasma to relieve more pressure on con-gested London households. And not dissimilar to the fridge’s abil-ity to warn users that food is out of date, the entertainment loo will perform basic scatology then email dietary advice to users. n
DOWNTIME
❯Read more on the Downtime blog
