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The Big ChallengesIT Futures Research Centre

© British Telecommunications plc

Introduction

What is BT?

What is Research and Venturing?

What is the IT Futures Research Centre?

What are our challenges?

Where do we go from here?


BT Group CTO - Research & Venturing

BT Exact & BT LoBs

Long

Ter

m R

esea

rch Mobility

ICTNetwork TransformationImproving CustomerExperience

CTO

Research Centres

Ventures

• Business Support• Service Innovation• Partnership

Mob

ility

I

T Fu

ture

s

Net

wor

ks

Per

vasi

ve IC

T

Fore

sigh

t

Inte

llige

nt S

yste

ms

Asi

an R

esea

rch

Cen

tre

External Venturing

IPR Licensing

Sector Programme

Sec

urity

BroadbandB

road

band

App

licat

ions


What we do

The primary objective of the IT Futures Research Centre is to carry out world class research that will generate Intellectual Property and identify new revenue opportunities for BT’s growing business in ICT.

The Centre brings together research experts in areas such as: virtualised computing and storage infrastructures; automated ICT service assurance; architectures for next generation operational support systems; business and customer analysis to support new products and services; next generation semantic web technologies; managing system integration complexity to ensure the delivery of

customer solutions that are on time, on budget and meet customer requirements.


The IT Futures Research Centre Teams

Strategic and Business Analysis Research

Next Generation Semantic Web Research

ICT Application Platforms Research

Future ICT Management Systems

Next Generation Computing Infrastructures


Next Generation Computing Infrastructure

Managing the ICT Infrastructure of the future through:

Distributed Computing Management

Policy Based Management

Service Level agreements

GRID Computing

Large Scale Distributed Storage


Future ICT Management Systems

Architecting Next Generation ICT Support Systems through:

Component Software – MDA

OSS

Open Source

Network Management

Enterprise ICT Support

Rapid Application and Service Provisioning


ICT Application Platforms Research

Stimulating revenues and cost reduction through a better customerexperience

Multimodal technology

Application Development Platform

APIs

Service Agency


Next Generation Semantic Web Research

Enabling Next Generation Business and Knowledge Management

Knowledge and Information Fusion

Search and content management

Collaboration technology (P2P)

Semantic Web Services

Web 3


Strategic and Business Analysis Research

Supporting Strategic ICT Decision-Making through:

Commercial Analysis

Business Simulations

Socio-economic/ ethnographic studies of the impact and use of emerging ICT

Risk mitigation Dynamic Systems Modelling

Services Science


Some Assumptions on the Impact of Technology

There will be an increased demand and provision of network-centric solutions

There is rising expectation on ICT from increased converged services in the home/SoHo.

Outsourcing will grow to provide management of virtualised resources Infrastructure no longer dedicated and physically bound to a task. Infrastructure will be flexible, distributed, dynamic and can be used on a

pay-as-you-go basis. Industries, markets, products, service delivery processes are all growing in

complexity - enabled by technology, driven by competition and regulation At the same time customers expect straightforward, complete, helpful

experiences Automation will lead to increased self-service solutions. Several developing technologies could have a significant impact on ICT

over next 5 years It is unlikely that any totally new technologies will have major impact over

next 5 years


Technology Domains

Infrastructure LayerVirtualised Resources

InteroperabilitySemantic LayerSense-Making and Semantic Technologies

Quality and R

eliabilityService Integration LayerIntegration & Orchestration

Managem

ent Services


Virtualised Resources Key objectives

To provide virtualised computing and storage infrastructure distributed over an IP network

To investigate methods, tools and techniques that will enable the undertaking of total ICT infrastructure and processes health analysis

To undertake research that supports total ICT Service Assurance

Key Research Challenges Automatic Inventory analysis – Virtual Monitoring Framework Analysis of Computer Estate (N/W, IT, Applications) Automatic ICT Service Assurance to assess performance – Total Performance

Knowledge Dashboard ICT Root Cause Analysis Dynamic SLA management

Negotiation and the illusion of choiceVocabularies and translationAutomatic generation of policies – interaction with the computing fabric

Large Scale Distributed Storage ManagementReal-time Access

Business Process discovery and Performance


How did we get here?

Web services

Business process management

Grid deployment

MainframePersonal

InternetClient server

The adaptiveenterprise

Service-centric management

Horizontal architecture flexible, stable, supply matches demand

Leve

l of e

nter

prise

ada

ptab

ility

Silos of technologyinflexible to change, over-provisioned

Time


GRID will become mainstream 2007/08

Focus

GRID technologies

Key drivers

Companies using GRID computing <1% 2% 5% 10%

…BUT early opportunities are emerging NOW

• Academia• Research institutions• Early adopters in enterprise space

• IT seen as a cost centre

Intra-enterprise GRID Inter-enterprise GRIDNascent

• Large enterprise private grids

• Focus on cost reduction and efficiency

• Business process improvement benefits begin to take effect

• Initially single applications• Dynamic partitioning• Network load balancing

• Distributed Storage• Large scale distributed performance management

• Security and Trust solutions

• Enforceable SLAs• Dynamic virtual partitioning Improve operational costsImprove efficiency and hardware ROI

• GRID for commercial use between Corporates

• End to End SLA management

• Shared IT resources and infrastructure adoption

• Self healing/autonomic systems

• Policy based management

• Opportunistic management

2006 2008


Service Integration and Orchestration Key Objectives

To enable the migration towards architectures where desired services are created automatically as required, and integration provided automatically for the duration of the transaction

To support rapid Service Creation and hosting environments based on re-useable application and OSS capabilities, backed by integrated 24x7 operations and guaranteed QoS

To enhance integration of network-based, application-based, and content-based services with (Semantic) Web technologies

Identify SLA requirements at the Application / Service level of Abstraction Key Research Challenge

Take a high level SLA and generate the SLA requirements for the constituents

SLA’s that straddle the Organizations, Business, Application, Middleware and end-to-end Networks

Architectures and Methodologies that support rapid, low cost service delivery

Service Discovery and Composition Automating Network Based Integration Services


Managing ICT Services

21C ICT Management Architecture

Real-Time ICT Service Assurance

& Provisioning

RequestingApplication

DatacentreApps

BranchDesktop

CEODesktop

Policy Direction(Real Time)

Policy Enforcement

Policy Administration

Billing for Complex ICT Services


Open Systems

Realising best in class systems

Customer

IP PBX Order

Partner

ProductShipmentOrdered

Network Provider

CreateConfig

Partner

IP PBX Delivered

Customer

IP PBXAuto

Configures

Service Provider

Active Service

Reported

Reduced Time-to-Market

& Cost21C Architecture& Futures


Convergence – Service Agency Platform

Concept developed in 2005 New opportunity for a

business to intermediate between consumers and 3rd party service providers

Support core consumer services through Identity & Authentication

Management User interaction Purchasing and Payment

Prototype Server – web services Mobile (J2ME and MS)

and PC clients Scenarios such as eBay

bidding SE

RV

ICE

AG

EN

CY

Cap

abili

ty

Exp

osur

e

Paymentmanager

Acc

ess

De/

MU

X

TCP/

IP

HTT

P-TC

P/IP

GPR

S

HTT

P-G

PRS

3G

Aut

hent

icat

ion

Use

r Int

erac

tion

Paym

ent

Loca

tionSelf-care

Web Portal

AdminWeb Portal

MA

NY

MO

RE…

Register/Selector

Locationmanager


Sense-Making and Semantic Technologies Key Objective

To make sense of a Complex and Dynamic Commercial Environments To maximising the value of Unstructured Corporate Information To determine the impact of Web 2 technologies on BT systems Use of semantic technologies to enable interoperability between

systems in the absence of common integration standards

Key Research Challenge Developing tools for sense-making, policy and decision-making (“Tools

for Thinking”) Semantic integration of heterogeneous information sources Intelligent analysis of structured and unstructured information To develop models that manage complexity

System dynamics and Agent Based Models Semantic Grids Real time Business Intelligence


Next Generation Web

Today’s web– Machine-to-human

Tomorrow’s web Also machine-to-machine “an extension of the current web in which information is given well-

defined meaning” (Tim Berners-Lee) making web-based information machine-understandable

Enabling Semantic knowledge management

Intelligent search, integration of multiple information sources Automatic web service discovery and composition

“I want a 10 day holiday in France starting next week sometime. Find me the cheapest hotels and flights and book taxis to and from the airports on my credit card.”

Faster, less costly next generation systems integration via semantic description of components facilitating automatic integration


Semantic technology timelineenabling next generation ICT via rich descriptions

Information integration & KM

System interoperability

2000 20102005 2015

Semantic Intranet

Virtual Organisations

Semantic BPM

Semantic Web

Services

Business integration

Semantic Grid

PervasiveComputing

Ambient Intelligence

Automatic service discovery and composition leading to faster, cheaper integration.30% of all IT costs are on integration (Gartner)

Solution specification at the business level: system integration as a result of BPM updates. “Business processes inside the organization are generally not accessible to machine reasoning “ From business goal to ICT solution. Networked devices

embedded in the environment: continuous and unobtrusive connectivity and services

Service provider alliances torespond to particular market opportunities. The ability to create reliable and scalableVOs on demand in a dynamic, open and competitive environment

Unified access to heterogeneous information sources. 43% of business resort to manual processes and/or new software when integrating data for reporting.Intelligent search.

“The only path to scalable interoperability of data, services, processes and devices”


Business Analysis

Key activities Develop computer simulations to support strategy development. Strategic business and customer analysis, in support of BT’s

strategic plan and new products and services. Socio-economic/ ethnographic studies of the impact and use of

emerging ICT

Volumes

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The way we dynamically deploy our skill pools to deal with

incoming volumes determines what we deliver to our customers

People

People - skills pools total Field Install people

total Field Repair people

total Field Install & FieldRepair peopletotal Build people

total Build & Field Installpeopletotal Frames people

total Frames & Field Installpeopletotal Audit etc only people

total Audit etc & Field Installpeopletotal contingency field people

Create, adapt and apply computational economics,to address BT's business problems


A Vision too far?

Software will be personalised to provide users their own tailored, unique working environment suited to personal needs.

Software will be self-adapting, containing reflective processes to understand how it is being used and implement ways to adapt to users requirements.

Software will also identify the need to commission new or changed software and decommission redundant software.

Software will operate transparently to provide a high degree of resilience against failure.

All interactions with software will be conducted through natural forms and anticipation of user’s needs will be such that any such interactions, natural or otherwise, are minimised


slides

Documents

business analysis research

research experts

strategic ict decisionmaking

generation business

world class research

customer analysis

virtualised computing

knowledge management