Technology Decisions Oct/Nov 2012

I T l e a d e r s h i p & i n n o v a t i o n

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10 | Tech Toys12 | Analyse This14 | @work16 | Fl ip S ide18 | @work20 | Peer2Peer28 | SNIA30 | Sof tware Showcase40 | @work42 | As ia Cloud Forum44 | @work50 | Forward Thinker

04 | 2025: a data centre odysseyCloud, local hybrid – what will your data

centre be in 2025? Anthony Caruana looks

into some of the possibilities.

F E A T U R E S

22 | The role of cloud in enterprise service deliveryStephen Withers consults a panel of experts

and finds unexpected consensus.

34 | Cloudy with a chance of disaster

46 | Every month is adopt a SharePoint month

Legacy - it’s a word that can conjure negative

emotions in even the most hardened technol-

ogy professional. Whenever someone mentions

legacy it usually means you’ve been lumbered

with something that doesn’t work, costs a lot

to maintain but the business has never figured

out how to get rid of.

Technology Decisions doesn’t have those worries.

Technology Decisions will build upon the

foundation of our predecessor, Voice+Data,

and take the heritage it has created to deliver

a premium print and online publication that is

100% focused on the needs of the technology

leaders, innovators and influencers of today.

Technology Decisions will bring the best writers,

analysts and subject matter experts in the ANZ

region together and cut through the jargon,

acronyms and hype to find the information that

can help you make the best possible decisions.

Andrew Collins, the editor of V+D will continue

as the Online Editor of Technology Decisions. As

for me - I’ve been working in the IT industry

in manufacturing, utilities and education since

the 90s. As well being the Editor of Technol-

ogy Decisions, I’m the CIO at an independent

school in Melbourne.

Welcome to Technology Decisions.

Anthony Caruana, Editor

I N S I D Eo c t / n o v 2 0 1 2

w w w . t e c h n o l o g y d e c i s i o n s . c o m . a u

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Company & Title:

Address:

Email:

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Want to experience the BEST WIRELESS HEADSET for FREE ?

TO CLAIM YOUR FREE TRIAL visit www.dwoffice.com.au

or fax this form to (02) 9910 6710

- Offer is limited to one headset per company and only while stocks last. - Product will be delivered to your door and yours to trial free for 14 days.-Terms & conditions apply.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE ?

The only thing too good to be true about this offer is the experience you will receive when using the Sennheiser

DW Office Headset !

The DW Office Wireless Headset remains the best sounding and best performing headset on the market. You have to experience the DW to really appreciate how it can contribute to your comfort and office productivity.

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2 0 2 5 : A DATA C E N T R E O DY S S E YWe are in the middle of the third great revolution of technology delivery. The first was the mainframe era -

where computing power was centralised and end-user devices were unintelligent terminals. Then came the PC

era. Marked by massive increases in computing power, the pendulum swung completely with client computers

having more power and servers being relegated in importance.

Anthony Caruana

5

“THE ACCELERAT ING DENSITY OF COMPUTING POWER

AND RAPIDLY INCREASING RELIANCE ON AN ‘ALWAYS ON’

INFRASTRUCTURE MEANS THAT OUR EXPECTATIONS OF DATA

CENTRES HAVE CHANGED.”

We are now in the third

wave. Many services

are centralised as data

centres have increased

in computing power and capacity while

end users enjoy a massive variety in

the types of equipment they can use

and where they can use it. What does

all this mean if we are planning a data

centre strategy that will see us through

the next decade?

The nature of business and what CIOs

need to deliver to the business is chang-

ing at a pace that is impossible to react

to. CIOs and decision makers are work-

ing at a time where business cycles are

contracting and change is accelerating.

Robert Le Busque, Area VP Strategy and

Development in Asia Pacific for Verizon

explains: “When the curtain was falling

on the Beijing Olympics the iPad didn’t

exist, the iPhone was only an infant

and the digital universe was five times

smaller than it is today.”

The way businesses look at delivering

applications and other services must

adapt. During the mainframe and

client-server eras, the IT department

had control of the technology supply

chain from infrastructure to applica-

tions. According to Trevor A Bunker, a

Vice President with CA Technologies,

CIOs will be designing and managing

data centres that bear little resemblance

to those of today.

“The data centre of the future, from

the CIO’s view, will not include the

infrastructure. The infrastructure will be

completely decoupled. I don’t think that

when CIOs think about the data centre

that they’ll even concern themselves with

the infrastructure.”

This begs the question - what is a data

centre?

In our view, the data centre is where

applications, business communications

and business logic reside. Typically, the

data centre has also included physical as-

sets like servers, storage and networking

equipment but those have always been

in place to serve the business.

Bunker believes that the physical infra-

structure will be less important as time

goes on. “Infrastructure provides limited

competitive advantage. Infrastructure is

ubiquitous. Everyone has pretty much

equal access. The real competitive ad-

vantage is going to emerge from how

we use the IT services running on the

infrastructure regardless of where the

infrastructure is.”

Still, what about the data centre of 2025?

What will it look like? Will we still be con-

structing large rooms filled with hermeti-

cally sealed hallways and aisles of blinking

lights? It’s hard to see a future where data

centres aren’t part of the picture.

According to Gartner Research VP Phillip

R Sargeant, data centres are becoming far

denser with the amount of power that’s

required in a smaller space, the amount

of heat that is being generated and even

the physical weight of equipment. All of

this means that the choices CIOs need

to make when building a data centre

aren’t the same now as they were even

just five years ago.

There is not a single piece of data that

suggests energy prices are going to fall

in the foreseeable future. Every year

we see the cost of electricity rise. The

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federal government’s carbon tax hasn’t

yet had a significant impact on prices

but there’s little doubt that large users

of power will continue to see the bottom

line being impacted. Although there’s no

universally agreed statement on what

will happen to power prices over the

next decade, you can expect your bills

to increase by between 5% and 15% per

year over the next decade.

Google’s answer to this is to build data

centres where there’s access to cheap,

reliable power. The locations Google

chooses for new data centres show that

access to cheap cooling, in order reduce

power costs, is as significant a decision

as proximity to communications.

Google’s data centre in Hamina, Finland,

is able to take advantage of local seawater

for its cooling system. Phillip Sargeant

of Gartner says: “There are a lot of

providers of data centres today building

data centres in areas that they perhaps

haven’t thought about before. They want

to make use of the characteristics of the

location. With cold locations they can

use outside air for cooling for example.’

A critical measure of data centre power

use is the power usage effectiveness

index. PUE is a measure of how much

power is used in a data centre for all the

elements in the data centre. The aim is

to achieve a PUE of 1.0 - where all of

the power being used by the data centre

goes directly to computing. When the

ratio rises above 1.0, the ‘excess’ power

is being used for functions that support

the computing operations.

Fujitsu recently upgraded a data centre in

Noble Park, a suburb of Melbourne, with

the aim of reducing the PUE to 1.7. The

6700 m2 data centre was built in 1988.

Built to Tier III standards, it incorporates

four main data halls for cabinet and

cage installations. The company reports

all greenhouse gas emissions produced

by Noble Park, as well as all others in

its Australian data centre network, to

the National Greenhouse and Energy

Reporting System.

Location, location, locationIt’s interesting when looking back at

past research what the issues were. In

2005, Cisco’s advice focused on protec-

tion from hazards, easy accessibility

and features that accommodate future

growth and change. A significant part

of a research paper described how to

plan for natural disasters and even listed

earthquake statistics.

Today, the location requirements are

quite different. The accelerating den-

sity of computing power and rapidly

increasing reliance on an ‘always on’

infrastructure means that our expec-

tations of data centres have changed.

While the considerations highlighted in

Cisco’s report are still important, there

are new things to consider for the data

centre of the next decade and beyond.

In order to minimise the operational

costs associated with running a data

centre, businesses may need to reconsider

locations. In the past, it made sense to

put the business and data centre close

together. However, given that connec-

tions across and between continents

are getting faster and more reliable, it’s

possible to choose locations with access

to cheaper power and better cooling.

In the aftermath of the earthquakes

that devastated Christchurch in early

2011, we toured the region and visited a

new data centre operated by Computer

Concepts limited. CCL’s facility avoided

being damaged - although the placard on

the door telling us that the building had

been checked was a poignant reminder

of the damage not far away - but it also

highlighted key considerations. CCL’s

facility was planning to secure its own

water supply for cooling so that it wasn’t

solely dependent on power-hungry

refrigeration.

Phillip Sargeant of Gartner highlighted

to us that some data centre operators

are now looking to go it alone when it

comes to power as well. “There are two

or three data centres using trigeneration

where people have their own power

plants to power data centres. Typically,

some use natural gas to provide power

into their own data centres,” he said.

One of the challenges of any power

generation technology is the inherent

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loss that occurs. For example, when

electricity is produced at a gas-powered

power station, significant amounts of

energy are lost in the form of heat.

Trigeneration seeks to avoid that by

using natural gas to provide electricity,

heating and cooling.

In addition, natural gas is a far more

environmentally friendly, and therefore

cheaper, fuel than coal or many other

alternatives. As carbon emissions become

a greater impost on the bottom line, be-

ing able to produce energy with lower

carbon emissions can make a financial

difference.

A recent trigeneration implementation

by the National Australia Bank cost

$6.5m but was expected to deliver $1m

per annum in savings.

What about the cloud?There’s no doubt that the decisions

around what to do about your busi-

ness’s data centre needs will turn to

the elephant in the room - the cloud.

Past decisions were driven by differ-

ent needs. As Trevor Bunker of CA

Technologies puts it: “Whether it was

the purely centralised model years ago,

then client-server, each of the evolutions

we’ve done for business applications has

relied on one thing. That’s LAN-speed

network connections. That’s how we

built our enterprise apps. We assumed

that they would run in the enterprise

for the enterprise.”

But those assumptions have been su-

perseded. Bunker adds that “Anyone

who’s thinking about building a data

centre - I would really have to ask

them why. Why would you make that

capital investment today? Is it really

that strategic and that valuable to your

business? Is it a competitive advantage

for you? Many answer with frankly, it

probably isn’t. But it’s how we’ve done

things in the past.”

Issues of data sovereignty, confidentiality,

reliability, connectivity and commercial

arrangements dominate any discussion

of cloud services. It’s interesting that

service providers are starting to take

a more active role in our region with

Rackspace opening a new data centre in

Australia and making specific mention

of how it won’t be subject to the Patriot

Act although there’s considerable debate

about the veracity of that statement.

Both IDC and Gartner have recently pub-

lished research suggesting that a hybrid

approach will be a viable option. So, it’s

likely that your data centre in 2025 will

have some local services and some either

externally hosted or delivered as cloud

applications. The physical footprint of

your premises will no longer bound

your data centre.

What will your data centre look like in the next decade and beyond?It will be denser with more computing

power per square metre than today. But

it will also require more power and gen-

erate more heat. You’ll be a lot smarter

about where you build the data centre

- if you build one at all - and you’ll

probably start by looking at the energy

and carbon footprint as closely as the

physical specifications of the equipment.

You’ll consider making it either energy

self-sufficient or less dependent on power

from the grid.

Where there’s no competitive advantage

or a clear cost benefit, you’ll probably

use cloud services where providers can

deliver on your operational needs and

energy management goals.

What is clear is that the days of com-

panies building large rooms with raised

floors, expensive temperature manage-

ment and large capital investments are

fading because the criteria for making

the investment decisions are changing.

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“THERE’S NO DOUBT THAT

THE DECISIONS AROUND

WHAT TO DO ABOUT YOUR

BUSINESS’S DATA CENTRE

NEEDS WILL TURN TO THE

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

- THE CLOUD. “

9

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12

A P P S TO R E SC O M I N G TO A N E N T E R P R I S E N E A R Y O U

A N A LY S E T H I S

Brian Prentice is research vice president in Gartner’s web, mobile and application research group. His primary areas of research are the emergence of ‘apps’ and the growing importance of design and simplicity in creating a compelling user experience. Prior to becoming an analyst in 2003, he worked in the IT vendor community for 17 years.

The success of the app store model

in delivering apps has piqued the

interest of many enterprises. The

dynamics that drive public app

stores are consistent with those that will

drive private app stores in the enterprises.

Mobile app downloads will surpass 45.6

billion worldwide in 2012 according to

Gartner’s latest forecast. Some organisations

believe that implementing an app store can

bring some of the engaging experience of the

consumer IT landscape into the enterprise.

Others see app stores as an extension of their

mobile device management (MDM) efforts.

While there is growing interest, internal

enterprise app store implementations are

still in the early adopter phase. If you are

considering implementing your own app

store, there are some best practices to keep in

mind. Choice is important. Individuals can

research a catalogue of options and make

selection based on their own preferences

and reviews. They can make bad choices

without serious consequences (just find a

better $2 app).

Soviet central planners were confident that

citizens had a choice of products but when

people were able to see the differences

between the offerings in their shops and

those in the West, resentment grew and

black markets flourished.

Enterprise app stores require an increase

in the options available to staff. Enhance

enterprise app stores need the addition of

third-party apps, links to public app stores

and enterprise content.

This degree of choice is antithetical to dec-

ades of enterprise application best practice.

However, effective application management

and freedom of choice are not mutually

exclusive under a curation model.

The second foundation for a successful

enterprise app store is to frame it as part

of an organisation’s application, rather than

infrastructure, strategy. Organisations like

Apple, Microsoft and Google see app stores

as an integral part of their platform strategy.

For organisations that are struggling to

rationalise out-of-control application

portfolios an app store will be unwelcome

because its existence will expand the port-

folio. However, those organisations that are

trying to rationalise by creating a managed

application ecosystem (often a large ERP

system) and are likely see a great deal of

synergy with an app store.

Applications can be redesigned as collec-

tions of targeted apps that users choose

from based on their needs. Aps can come

from citizen developers - your employees

- whether it is an Excel spreadsheet or a

link to a cloud-based application.

The operative word in ‘app store’ is ‘app’.

Apps are different to traditional applica-

tions. Apps are simple, purposeful solu-

tions that, if well managed, can be created

en-masse without impacting efforts to

rationalise the application portfolio. The

more application development teams can

redirect their development effort towards

apps, the more options will be available

to users.

work

P R I V A T E C L O U D S A V E S $ 5 0 0 K O N P R I N T I N G P R O J E C T

Think: Education Group, an Australian private education

company, has implemented a virtual private cloud,

enabling a printing project that is set to save the

company $500,000 annually.

The company has 15,000 students undertaking 95 industry

training courses online and in eight college campuses in NSW,

Victoria and Queensland.

“Think was built up really rapidly through acquisitions, so

we had lots of businesses that had been brought together quite

quickly, all of them with IT environments with different levels

of maturity,” said Andy Donaldson, IT Director at Think.

“We had different hosting environments, a lack of consistency,

and a lot of hosting environments that we really weren’t happy

with”.

Specifically, the time taken to get changes made was an

issue, and providers would want their contracts amended to

reflect any such changes.

“We were on this merry-go-round of a week or two weeks

of talking and contract and debate before we actually even got

anywhere near turning the solution on.”

In order to consolidate these IT environments, Think examined

co-location hosting and cloud services in the Australian market,

ultimately selecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) two years

ago. The system has afforded the company greater flexibility

and cost savings.

“With AWS, you go onto the website with three clicks of a

mouse and bing, there’s your box, online.”

The AWS system does require that Think

takes more responsibility for some of

its environments, but “we were ready

to do that”, Donaldson said.

“We’re saving money and we’ve got

a better solution.”

Initially the company used AWS for

web hosting environments. Since then,

the company has begun using the system

for more projects, including a recent

print/cost-control initiative.

As part of the initiative, Think

students who want to print documents

at the company’s facilities must log onto a front end web portal

and add credit to a swipecard. They then swipe their card at a

printer, and the printer prints their job out.

The company had to tie the front end to several behind-

the-scenes systems, including a payment gateway, a core business

information management system and the specific technology

that allows the swipecards to talks to the printers.

Think employed Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to

facilitate the project.

“We’re using VPC to route traffic back and forward, privately,

in the virtual private network, so the other systems can talk to

that front end and deliver that functionality,” Donaldson said.

“We have lots of different colleges all accessing that environment

from different locations, and the students accessing it from the

vanilla internet from their house if they want to.”

“That project’s still rolling out, but our target is to reduce

our printing costs by $300,000 in this financial year, and then

$500,000 in the next financial year [once all the colleges are on

board the new system].”

According to Donaldson, the company is on track to meet

that target.

“For us to implement that project … all up we’re probably

looking at $100,000, maybe a bit more … so it’s an absolute

no-brainer in our eyes.”

14

Andrew Collins

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to create a radically simplified experience for the end user.

Take the example of a database: IBM’s extensive research on topics like transaction processing, honed through thousands of engagements

The good news is IT solutions are now more sophisticated. The bad news is they’re also more complicated. And all this complexity is taking its toll.

In fact, the typical IT department now spends up to 161 days just to specify, design and procure hardware for a new IT project (even longer for software).1

Recently, IBM® unveiled a new class of systems that make all this complexity far less complicated. We call them IBM PureSystems™.

BEYOND CONVERGENCE.

Unlike today’s “converged” IT solutions, IBM PureSystems are more than just prepackaged bundles of hardware and software; these systems are integrated by design, using built-in expertise to balance and coordinate IT resources

LET’S BUILD A

SMARTER PLANET.

WHY TODAY’S SMARTEST SYSTEMS

HAVE BUILT-IN EXPERTISE.

with clients and partners, has been turned into a pattern of expertise. An IBM PureSystem can follow this pattern to automatically set up a database infrastructure in minutes. The system then monitors how the database is being used, tuning it as conditions change.

A SMARTER APPROACH TO I.T.

IBM PureSystems have been able to achieve up to twice the business application performance and up to twice the application density as previous generation IBM systems.3

With IBM PureSystems, computing is not just getting faster and simpler. It’s taking another important step

toward making our companies, cities and planet smarter. ibm.com/au/integratedsystems

1. Based on a 2011 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM. 2. Based upon testing of the IBM PureApplication System W1500-96 with time measured from powering on the system to when it is ready to support application deployments and based upon testing of the IBM PureFlex System Express & Standard models containing one chassis and one compute node with the time measured from powering on the system to when it is ready to support a virtual image deployment. 3. Up to 2X application density based upon simulations of virtualized applications on an IBM Flex System x240 Compute Node as compared to a previous generation IBM system. The IBM Flex System x240 Compute Node is available in IBM PureFlex System and IBM PureApplication System. Up to 2X performance of business applications based upon testing of IBM Storwize v7000 “Easy Tier” on previous generation IBM system. IBM Storwize v7000 is included in IBM PureFlex System and IBM PureApplication System. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, PureSystems, Smarter Planet, Let’s build a smarter planet and the planet icon are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. © International Business Machines Corporation 2012 All Rights Reserved. © Copyright IBM Australia Limited 2012. ABN 79 000 024 733. IBMCCA1419/EISV2/TD/FPC

What goes into a PureSystem?

Built-in expertise

Integration by design

Simplifi ed experience

SMARTER TECHNOLOGY FOR A SMARTER PLANET

Some IBM PureSystems can be up and running in under four hours.2

16

Andrew Collins

F L I P S I D E

B R A I N S TO R M O R J U S T A H E A D A C H E ?

In an effort to end a gangland rivalry

that has exploded into violence,

corrupt cop Vic Mackey locks bitter

enemies, rappers Kern Little and T-

Bonz, in a shipping container for a night,

ordering them to sort out their differences.

Whether Vic - a fictional detective from

television’s The Shield - realised it or not,

his plan bears a striking resemblance to

an archaic ritual that still goes on in

conference rooms, board rooms and cor-

porate getaways around the world: group

brainstorming.

You’re probably familiar with the prac-

tice - maybe you even encourage your

subordinates to do it yourself, though

perhaps you use a different name. Basi-

cally, it amounts to shutting a bunch of

employees in a meeting room or a hotel

suite with a particular problem and only

allowing them to emerge once they’ve

generated a solution.

The concept is generally credited to ad-

vertising executive Alex Faickney Osborn,

who discussed the idea at length in his

1953 book, Applied Imagination. Osborn

based the exercise on his observations

of and experiments on employees at his

advertising agency.

Osborn’s basic idea is that people produce

more ideas, and better quality ideas, when

working in a group, compared to those

generated when working as disparate

individuals. The whole is greater than the

sum of the parts, and all that.

Osborn’s method of brainstorming speci-

fies that group members focus on produc-

ing a great quantity of ideas; hold back

criticism of their own and other members’

ideas; be open-minded towards unusual

suggestions; and consider combining sev-

eral lesser ideas to create a better idea.

Since then (and probably before, but

without the fancy pants name), senior

and middle managers have been terribly

fond of throwing a bunch of people in a

room in order to bash out some new ideas.

Indeed, many a week-long golf retreat has

been ordered, on the company’s money,

in the name of corporate brainstorming.

One man leavesFans of The Shield, however, will remem-

ber that Vic’s plan didn’t turn out quite

how he imagined. When Vic opened the

shipping container the next morning, only

Kern Little emerged from the darkness.

In their forced overnight sojourn, Little

put rival T-Bonz to sleep - permanently.

Hardly an ideal outcome (particularly

for T-Bonz).

Osborn’s idea has similarly been found

quite lacking. Warning: the next few

paragraphs feature psychology-geek-

speak - jump to ‘So, in English?’ below

if you have an (understandable) aversion

to such language.

17

In a 1987 paper titled ‘Productivity Loss

in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the

Solution of a Riddle’, social psychologists

Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe

reported that in 18 previous studies

on the topic, people produced more

ideas when working alone than when

working in groups. Four other studies

that the researchers examined showed

no difference in the number of ideas

generated when working alone vs work-

ing in a group.

As for quality of ideas, things are a little

muddier, due to the different ways of

judging idea quality. (Do you look at total

number of good ideas? The average rat-

ing of a person’s ideas? Maybe the square

root of the sum of a hyperbolic matrix of

a random selection of a group’s ideas?)

The six studies that looked at ‘total quality’

(defined as “the sum of the quality ratings

of the ideas produced by a given subject or

group”) all found that individuals working

alone produced better ideas than groups

of people brainstorming. The other five

studies that assessed idea quality - all of

which used other definitions of quality

- showed “no consistent pattern” in the

difference in quality of ideas generated by

individuals vs those generated by brain-

storming groups.

(Psychology-speak finished.)

So, in English?Osborn was quite wrong. Studies repeat-

edly show that group brainstorming

sessions aren’t useful. Individuals work-

ing alone produce a similar or greater

number of ideas, and produce similar or

better quality ideas, than when forced to

work in groups.

Diehl and Stroebe identified two reasons

for this: free riding and production

blocking.

‘Free riding’ is the idea that people are less

inclined to work when placed in a group.

“WHATEVER THE CASE , IT ’S PRETTY WELL ACCEPTED IN

PSYCHOLOGY THAT BRAINSTORMING DOESN’T WORK THE

WAY MOST PEOPLE EXPECT. “

In such a situation, it’s easy to sit back

and let the more motivated folks do all

the hard work, the theory goes. On top of

that, people may feel that their individual

contributions matter less in big groups, so

they don’t speak up. The researchers found

free riding had only a small influence on

productivity loss in groups.

‘Production blocking’ is a quirk of human

cognition that naturally occurs in groups.

The theory goes that when one person

is speaking, the remainder of the group

must give their attention to the speaker.

Group members either intentionally sup-

press, or just plain forget, their own ideas

that come up while listening. Diehl and

Stroebe found that this was the primary

reason that brainstorming groups were

less productive than individual members

working alone.

Other researchers have since found sev-

eral more reasons for the relatively low

productivity of brainstorming groups.

Whatever the case, it’s pretty well accepted

in psychology that brainstorming doesn’t

work the way most people expect.

So, why then, when it’s been known for

decades that brainstorming is pretty use-

less, do managers at all levels still love

cramming people into conference rooms

for such idea-generation sessions?

Because old habits (and ideas) die hard.

Just like Kern Little.

Consider this the next time you lock your

staff in the conference room, with a free

lunch, and tell them to solve a problem.

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work

M A P P I N G P R O F I T W I T H B U S I N E S S I N T E L L I G E N C E

Real estate franchise the Ray White Group has

deployed business intelligence software to help drive

its geographical expansion strategy.

As a franchise group, Ray White makes money

by taking a commission on sales from its members - the

parent group is more profitable when its children are more

profitable. Around seven years ago, the company identified

a need to measure its market share and be able to analyse

that at a suburb level.

Nathan Krisanski, Senior Analyst at Ray White, said, “We

did have a solution that was built before I came along [four

years ago], and that was a custom-built map/pie chart view.”

But the company decided that application wasn’t meeting

its future needs.

“It was hosted externally, so we didn’t have any control over

the application itself. We had to format our results in a certain

way and upload it to their system, and they’d process it and put

it into the backend, and we’d see the information come back

out. It was quite time-consuming in the sense of being able to

update things and be able to enforce change as well. We ran into

brick walls trying to get new features added,” Krisanski said.

Ray White implemented a solution from Tableau Software to

build a customised presentation layer called documentbuilder. The

software breaks down multidimensional data into visualisations,

to help access geographical sales and performance information.

The solution was initially intended to replace the company’s

existing pie chart tool.

“From there, it’s grown into being our one-stop shop

for information - any of our analytics reports, state-based

reports, salesperson performance, all that kind of stuff. Now

we’ve also built another custom engine

which is for our agents in creating

sales reports for their clients - the

mum and dad who are going to buy

a house in Sydney or wherever,” said

Krisanski.

Through a web-based portal

connected to Tableau Server, Ray

White allows sales representatives to

create their own market reports for

specific geographies, drilling from

the national level down to individual

suburbs. These reports include visual

dashboards, pie charts and maps, to

help close deals and gain insights into

market performance.

The new system has helped fuel

the company’s recent growth, Krisanski

said. It has also helped with the

absorption of real estate agents into the Ray White brand.

“A big push we have internally is for the recruitment of

new businesses. Being able to represent ourselves as knowing

about the market, giving the tools back to their agents, so if

they join Ray White their agents get access to all these tools

and all this data that we have, has made the recruitment

process a lot easier, a lot better,” Krisanski said.

“One of the key parts of our process is evaluating [franchise

applicants] when they come through. A lot of the guys are

surprised to know that before they join us, we know more

about them than they do sometimes. That’s certainly given us

a great deal of power and knowledge in the industry,” he said.

Andrew Collins

3G/4GAntenna

ConnectorsLAN1/WAN

PortUSB Ports

LAN 2-4 Ports

PowerConnector

Reset

20

2 2 4 - H O U R I T P E O P L E

Australia’s energy supply industry

could not function effectively

w i thout robust and re l iable

information systems - they are the

lifeblood of our electricity and gas

markets. Chris Ford is CIO of the

Australian Energy Market Operator

(AEMO), where he oversees three

operation centres that produce

real-time market information on

electricity and gas supply availability

and electricity reserve levels.

P E E RP E E R

The energy supply sector is one

of the most exciting - and most

rapidly evolving - industries in

Australia, and is supported by

highly complex IT systems. Information

technology underpins AEMO’s core

business function as power system and

market operator. We process huge vol-

umes of data to support the needs of

market participants. Ensuring IT delivers

value for money and aligning IT to the

AEMO business is our main focus - IT

is a key enabler of the energy market.

AEMO’s market systems provide a wide

range of forward information every

five minutes for each hour, as well as

half-hourly to the end of a current day,

half-hourly to the end of a current week

and daily for the next two years. The

systems essentially run a five-minute

market that calculates the price of

electricity. They also provide a range of

market sensitivities to address dispatch

and pricing for different demand out-

comes. The provision of this real-time

information assists participants to make

efficient decisions on the commitment

of their generating plant, and my role as

AEMO’s CIO is to deliver these market

objectives seamlessly.

The volume of data that is transferred

to and from our operations centres is

stunning from a corporate perspective:

around 50 gigabytes a day. This data in-

cludes market information such as bids,

prices and dispatch quantities as well

as essential power system operational

measurements and controls.

Chris Ford joined AEMO in February 2012 and is based in the organisation’s Sydney National Electricity Market (NEM) operations centre. Ford’s experience is drawn from energy, water and government organisations, including advanced regulated industries in Australia and the UK, over more than 20 years.

We not only process large volumes of data,

we need to also deliver it reliably - the

dispatch systems must deliver complex

computations within a five-minute dis-

patch cycle. Data also needs to be available,

and to this end, we work to high levels of

availability so that only one five-minute

dispatch cycle or less is lost each year. In

serving market participants, our mission

is to deliver market data that is meaning-

ful, reliable and available. Pleasingly, we

are able to achieve that goal.

Australia has one of the most integrated

energy markets in the world, and looking

ahead, AEMO IT is seeking to further

improve the effectiveness of its market

systems, their interfaces and market data,

to maximise the value from initiatives such

as smart grids and the new-generation

technologies that are evolving.

For example, consistent and efficient

demand forecasting is a critical factor for

AEMO given the increasing complexity

of the NEM. Current demand forecasting

by AEMO is based on historical data,

accounting for future trends; AEMO is

working on new systems to produce more

frequent and timely forecast updates in

the future.

Increasing activities in the area of intel-

ligent grids - including smart metering -

will require the industry to revisit current

arrangements for data management and

the way data can be analysed to provide

improved industry information. AEMO’s

central role in the market is helping to

facilitate development in this area.

22

F R O M T H EF R O N T L I N E

T H E R O L E O F

C L O U DI N E N T E R P R I S E S E R V I C E D E L I V E R Y

‘Cloud’ has become a pervasive part of the IT vocabulary - but how big a

role will it play in enterprise service delivery? Stephen Withers sought the

views of a panel of senior IT executives drawn from the user and analyst

communities and found there was a broad consensus.

QHow important will cloud be in enterprise service delivery, and

why?

Cloud is “really important - it’s a com-

pletely game-changing situation in the

IT industry”, says Donaldson. Companies

such as Think that have grown through

acquisition are well placed to take advan-

tage of it, while those with legacy systems

will soon face the need for replacement

and will consider cloud systems alongside

more traditional models.

Simonsen expects cloud to become the

norm. Prior to joining Equinix, he worked

for Pitney Bowes where he oversaw the

replacement of a variety of sales force

automation and financial systems running

in 13 data centres around the Asia-Pacific

region with cloud services from Salesforce.

com and NetSuite. This move simplified

IT - everyone in the region used the

same applications, software upgrades

and updates were eliminated, data centre

hardware refreshes were avoided, “and

the applications are really good”. The

downside, he suggests, is that SaaS prob-

ably won’t deliver all the functionality of

a decades-old, in-house system that has

been adapted over the years.

QIs it about cost, agility, availability - or just getting rid of

that pesky capex?

“All of those,” says Donaldson. For Think,

the use of cloud technologies has driven

down costs as the company only pays for

the resources it actually uses, and it gains

agility extra resources that can be brought

to bear so easily: a new server can be com-

missioned “with a few click of a mouse”.

“Cost wasn’t the first thing to look at” for

Pitney Bowes, says Simonsen, though it

was a factor. “It was a business problem

we needed to solve,” specifically gaining

visibility of regional operations, helping

employees become more efficient and re-

moving the need to own and operate data

centres. The pay-by-use model associated

with cloud “just makes life easier”, he says,

“it’s taken the complexity out”.

Empired has been using NetSuite for over

a year, and it has proved cheaper than on-

premises software, is readily used by staff

outside the office and was deployed very

quickly. Baskerville predicts cloud will be

used “right across the spectrum” from IaaS

(the provision of raw processing and storage

capability) through to specific applications.

Horizontal applications such as finance and

CRM are already available, and those for

increasingly niche activities are appearing.

“[Cloud] will replace, over time, the current

delivery model,” he predicts.

Oostveen notes significant changes in

cloud adoption over the last 12 months.

Where it was previously seen as a way

of gaining efficiencies and avoiding capi-

tal expenditure, agility has become an

important consideration, as “business is

changing rapidly”. But he believes there is

still a place for conventional on-premises

implementations - “it’s a matter of ‘fit for

purpose’”, he says.

For example, a bank or government de-

partment likely runs systems that have

been developed over decades and that are

linked to specific infrastructure. Since these

systems are critical to the organisation’s

core function, they are likely to stay on

premises. Furthermore, some workloads are

not suited to the ‘scale out’ infrastructure

associated with cloud implementations, but

instead need a ‘scale up’ environment and

so tend to be kept in-house.

QPublic, private or hybrid?

IDC’s research into Australian businesses

suggests the hybrid model will predominate

in the 2013-2017 period, Oostveen said.

Some business-critical/mission-critical

workloads will remain in-house, some

O U R P A N E L

Tony Simonsen,

Managing Director,

Equinix Australia

Matt Oostveen,

Chief of Research,

IDC Australia

Andy Donaldson,

IT Director,

Think: Education Group

Russell Baskerville,

Managing Director,

Empired 23

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generic functions such as email and

collaboration will continue to move to

public clouds, and data centre invest-

ments - whether by service providers or

for organisations’ own use - will reflect

these trends.

“It really depends on your business,” says

Donaldson. Public clouds and virtualised

private clouds tick a lot of the boxes for

many organisations outside the finance,

government and similar sectors, and he

predicts most businesses will adopt public

cloud systems.

Simonsen says the choice will depend on

the organisation and the application, and

one of the considerations will be how to

control access, especially when there’s an

extended community of users such as

customers and suppliers in addition to

employees.

The opportunity presented by a hybrid

cloud to ‘burst’ (expand from an in-house

cloud to that operated by a provider) in

order to meet peak loads is very real, Si-

monsen says, and is especially relevant to

retailers and wholesalers, as they typically

experience seasonal peaks and troughs.

All three models are valid, according

to Baskerville. Larger organisations are

likely to use dedicated private clouds

(though not necessarily from their own

data centres), but specialist providers with

multitenanted infrastructure will also be

acceptable providing each tenant has its

own application instances. While public

clouds will be acceptable for common

functions, most enterprise demand will

be met from private and hybrid clouds,

Baskerville predicts.

Is security an issue? Does cloud put too

many eggs in one basket? Or are cloud

providers able to hire the best security

talent?

Since the hybrid model splits data across

multiple systems - on premises, public

cloud and hybrid cloud - Oostveen sees

it as “putting more eggs in more baskets”.

Oostveen notes the importance of avail-

ability, and despite some perceptions

that in-house operations provide better

availability than cloud providers, he says

“I challenge end users who believe this”

and observes that there is a correlation

between availability and security.

Cloud is not a magic wand, observes

Donaldson, so organisations need to be

aware of their responsibilities and make

good choices. “You always have to be

diligent,” but the issues vary according to

the services being used and so are very

different for an Amazon Web Services

customer (which still needs to patch the

operating system in use) or a Salesforce.

com customer, for example.

Part of that diligence is ensuring that

the provider has the appropriate vendor

and other certifications, says Donaldson.

“We’re comfortable with a cloud environ-

ment, but we’re always vigilant,” he says.

“Security was certainly one of the ques-

tions we had [at Pitney Bowes],” says

Simonsen, which is why providers such

as Equinix have accreditations such as

ISO 27001. While security is important,

the requirements do not become more

stringent just because a system is run-

ning in the cloud.

Security is an issue whether an organi-

sation operates its own data centre or

runs in the cloud, says Baskerville, but

selecting an enterprise-grade provider

should reduce concerns.

Larger providers can afford to employ

people with high-end security skills,

which are not only required by enter-

prise customers but “would definitely

be an advantage for organisations that

can’t afford to do it for themselves”, says

Baskerville.

QFor how much longer will data sovereignty be an issue?

“Data sovereignty still comes up as one

of the big issues surrounding cloud,”

says Oostveen, though it does depend on

the sector - for example, the Australian

Government mandates local storage of

certain data. But he predicts that over

time people will become more used to

cloud services and the idea of data being

stored offshore.

“Customers do worry about where their

data lives,” says Simonsen, but he sug-

gests an appropriate approach is to value

different sets of data and then make an

appropriate assessment of where it should

be stored. Naturally, government require-

ments should be part of this process, but

a broad-brush decision to keep everything

onshore is probably the result of having

insufficient information, he says.

“It’s a complicated issue,” says Donaldson.

Organisations need to understand their

own business requirements in order to

decide the significance of data sover-

eignty. Think does keep some of its data

onshore, as the training it offers to the

health sector involves the storage of real

patient information.

Baskerville’s personal opinion is that

the data sovereignty issue is poorly un-

derstood and that “creates nervousness”.

While it is a fact that different laws apply

in different countries, keeping data in

Australia does not mean the government

cannot access it.

25

26

27

28

Adrian De Luca, Board Director, SNIA ANZ

We Australians are generally a

sceptical bunch, but nothing gets

our backs up more than when we

feel our individual privacy may be

being compromised, especially when

the government sticks its nose in.

A recent Fairfax survey showed

an overwhelming 96% of readers

disagreed with telcos storing

telephone and internet data.

S N I A A N Z

D ATA R E T E N T I O N -A N E W D I G I TA L K I N D O F D I V I D E

The discussion paper published by

the Attorney-General’s depart-

ment in July this year recom-

mending sweeping changes to

up to six acts of Parliament and imposing

a two-year retention of data on service

providers has caused a big stink amongst

the general public, civil libertarians and

certain political figures.

The latest stoush over the proposed policy

is whether the actual content of commu-

nications and data (which includes emails,

SMS, tweets, browser sessions) will need to

be retained or just information about the

transmission such as source, destination,

date, time, duration, type and the equip-

ment used. To help navigate through the

controversial issue the government looked

to the EU’s 2006 Data Retention Directive

that 25 member states have implemented it

as national policy. Last year, after review-

ing its implementation in a number of

states, the European Commission found

that the current laws have the potential

to impose “significant limitations on the

right to privacy”. It went further by recom-

mending an overhaul of the directive to

strengthen safeguards to stop citizens’ data

being used inappropriately, by imposing

stricter controls on the storage, access to

and use of data.

As the debate is sure to intensify in par-

liament and the public arena, those that

will need to comply with the policy, the

telecommunications and service providers,

are already counting the commercial cost.

David Epstein, the head of regulatory affairs

at Australia’s second largest telco, Optus,

has already fired a warning shot estimating

that the cost of implementing technology

to capture and store this information could

be between $500 and $700 million. CEO of

Telstra David Thodey said his concern is

not about how much it will cost Australia’s

largest telco to keep the data but who will

have access to it.

If the recommendations of the paper are

enacted into law, how do service providers

minimise the inevitable passing of costs to

consumers for storing and retrieving this

information?

Thankfully, information technology, par-

ticularly data storage, has come a long way

over the past five years. Recognising the

explosive growth in both data generation

and retention, storage vendors have done

more than deliver greater capacities at lower

costs. Most have introduced capacity ef-

ficiency technologies to their products to

reduce the physical storage required by

removing duplicate data and compress-

ing it. Working together with this, data

archiving standards have greatly matured

over this time by not only automating the

job of filing digital information from ap-

plications in a secure way but being able

to retrieve it with the help of intelligent

search technologies that are specifically built

for industry compliance and regulation.

Although we expect to see far more discus-

sion, consultation, debate and parliamen-

tary enquiries ahead before anything is

enacted into legislation, at least the Aus-

tralian Government recognises the need to

have a strategy to tackle the ever-increasing

threats coming from the digital world and

to protect citizens from criminals and ter-

rorists that want to do us harm.

INTRODUCING

EMC VSPEXSIMPLE. EFFICIENT. FLEXIBLE.Speed to the cloud with EMC VSPEX proven infrastructure.

Visit www.emcvspex.com.au

EMC2, EMC and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. © Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

30

S O F T W A R E S H O W C A S E HUMAN RESOURCE INFORMATION SYSTEM

Epicor Software Corporation has an-

nounced the availability of its latest hu-

man capital management (hCm) solution.

Epicor hCm version 5.7 is a complete

human resource information system that

automates HR processes, enabling com-

panies to track, manage and analyse

employee data throughout the entire

employee life cycle. The release encom-

passes enhanced localisation capabilities

for a global workforce.

The product is an integrated solution

to support a full range of services for

future deployments. It features ‘Deferred

Authentication’, a web service to validate

the users’ credentials to the customer’s

Active directory server and securely store

the domain user name and password,

without the need to keep users constantly

linked to the other side.

‘Service Draft-Web Services’ allows cus-

tomers to gain all the benefits of task

logic for inserting or editing data without

having to run a task from the front end.

When the data is uploaded to the system,

it is validated help ensure data integrity.www.epicor.com

SANSYMPHONY-V STORAGE HYPERVISOR

The SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor

forms a virtualisation layer across storage

devices to help maximise the performance

and utilisation of disk resources in IT or-

ganisations.

The software allows enterprises to accommo-

date rapidly growing and changing demands

of their storage infrastructures, without

having to invest in hardware upgrades or

expansions. This allows IT to reduce the

capital and operational costs of storage.

The data protection, provisioning, caching,

replication and migration functions operate over different models

and brands of storage equipment.

Priced per-terabyte software licences are portable. Customers

can replace or upgrade the hardware on which the software

runs without incurring any additional licence charges.

www.datacore.com

CLOUD APPLICATION SCALING

Riverbed has integrated Stingray Traffic Manager, its

software and virtual application delivery controller

(ADC), with VMware vFabric Application Director,

a hybrid cloud application provisioning solution.

The combined solution allows users to create application

blueprints that can be used to provision and scale multitier

applications in a hybrid cloud environment. These application

blueprints can use application delivery features of Stingray Traffic

Manager software for a higher level of application portability

across cloud services and repeatable deployments of selected

applications with standard deployment settings.

Using a drag-and-drop interface, application architects can

choose to accelerate and load balance their enterprise ap-

plications in the cloud.

www.riverbed.com

©2012 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, InfraStruxure, and Business-wise, Future-driven are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. email: [email protected] • 78 Waterloo Road, Macquarie Park NSW 2113 AUSTRALIA • 998-3810_AU *Authorised under NSW Permit No. LTPM/12/00526, ACT Permit No. TP 12/02264. Promotion commences 1st July 2012 and closes 31st December 2012. Full terms and conditions available online.

Our promise: 24/7/365 availability, speed, and efficiency-driven cost savings

ReliableReliable Fast to deployFast to deploy Easy to manageEasy to manageEasy to manage

Energy-efficientEnergy-efficient ScalableScalableVendor-neutralVendor-neutralVendor-neutral

Introducing Next Generation InfraStruxure Whether your company just doubled its sales or staff, you need to make sure that its data centre can support such business growth — not hinder it. All too often, though, businesses feel constrained by the capabilities of their information technology (IT) and supporting infrastructure. Is there enough rack space to handle more servers? Can power capacity accommodate larger IT loads? Today, APC by Schneider Electric™ eliminates these hurdles with its proven high-performance, scalable, and complete data centre architecture solution: InfraStruxure™.

InfraStruxure data centres mean business! We say that InfraStruxure data centres mean business. But what does that mean to you? The answer is simple. A data centre means business when it: is always available 24/7/365 and performs at the highest level at all times, is able to grow at the breakneck speed of business, continues to achieve greater and greater energy efficiency — from planning through operations —, and is able to grow with the business itself. What’s more, InfraStruxure is an integrated solution that can be designed to your exact requirements at the start, while still being able to adapt to your company’s changing business needs in the future.

The promise of InfraStruxure deployment InfraStruxure fufils our promise of superior quality, which ensures highest availability; speed, which ensures easy and quick alignment of IT to business needs; and cost savings based on energy efficiency. What better way to ‘mean business’ than to enable quality, speed, and cost savings — simultaneously?

InfraStruxure data centres mean business! Only InfraStruxure ensures that your data centre canadapt effectively, efficiently, and quickly to businessgrowth and other changes via the following benefits:

Availability: 24/7/365 uptime is made possible through best-in-class critical power with ’snap-in’ modular power distribution units, close-coupled cooling, and proactive monitoring software.

Speed: Deployment is fast and simple because all system components are designed to work together ‘out of the box’ and the system can grow at break-neck business speed.

Efficiency: True energy efficiency and savings are achieved via advanced designs, including three-stage inverters in UPS units and variable speed fans in cooling units.

Manageability: InfraStruxure Management Software Portfolio enables you to see and manage capacity and redundancy levels of cooling, power, and rack space for optimal data centre health.

Agility: Flexibility comes from enclosures with any IT vendor compatibility and whole system scalability for both power and cooling.

Plan your data centre growth simply and effectively! Download White Paper #143, “Data Centre Projects: Growth Model”. and go in the draw to WIN an iPad®!*Visit www.apc.com/promo Key Code 52810K

Data Centre Projects: Growth Model

Contents 1

2

7

7

9

10

> Executive summary

The only high-performance data centre infrastructure for any business and budget

APC by Schneider Electric is the pioneer of modular data centre infrastructure and innovative cooling technology. Its products and solutions, including InfraStruxure, are an integral part of the Schneider Electric™ IT portfolio.

Business-wise, Future-drivenTM.

32

S O F T W A R E S H O W C A S E

CLOUD SCANNING AND PRINTING APPLICATION

Kyocera Cloud Connect, from Kyocera Document

Solutions, is an application that bridges Kyocera’s

products to cloud service provider Evernote, ena-

bling scanning and printing of files in Evernote

directly from most Kyocera multifunctional product

control panels.

Kyocera Cloud Connect allows users to upload

and store files to their account on Evernote, directly, from the touch

screen control panel of a Kyocera multifunctional product and, when a

hardcopy of any document is needed, retrieve and print files (including

JPEG, PDF and TIFF formats) stored in Evernote, to their Kyocera device.

Users can scan to Evernote to upload scanned files directly to Evernote

from the Kyocera product, removing the need to send scanned files

to, or from, a computer.

www.kyocera.com.au

BACKUP AND RECOVERY

The latest release of

Acronis Backup &

Recovery introduc-

es disk-to-disk-to-

cloud staging into its

unified backup and

recovery platform.

Au tomated d i sk-

to - d i sk to - c loud

backup shor tens

the backup window for live physical

and virtual machines and simplifies

management of both destinations. IT

administrators can get the benefits

of both local and cloud backup in

a unified platform.

The upgrade also includes granular

recovery for Microsoft Exchange and

the option to buy support for Exchange

Server, in addition to the existing sup-

port for Active Directory, SQL Server

and SharePoint applications.

The platform allows organisations to

centrally manage data protection and

disaster recovery tasks for physical,

virtual and cloud environments from

a single management console, and

move data between environments

quickly and easily.

Customers can purchase licences for

the agents and application support

they currently need, with the ability

to access more functionality as their

environment changes.

www.acronis.com.au

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

MicroStrategy 9.3 includes new capabilities and

improvements to the data discovery software Visual

Insight; increased support for advanced analytics from

‘R’ - an open source language for predictive analysis;

and improved connectivity to Hadoop.

It also introduces a new administration product, System

Manager, for automating manual, multistep processes.

Visual Insight includes new features for data exploration and dashboard-

building. Three visualisations - density maps, image layouts and network

diagrams - combined with more than 300 analytical functions, allow for

analysis of data stored in several forms, relational databases, multidi-

mensional databases, Hadoop distributions, web services and personal

data stores, such as Excel files.

The platform includes a Hive Thrift connector for Apache Hadoopas

well as a connector for SAP HANA. Using MultiSource Option and in-

memory technology, organisations can merge Hadoop and SAP HANA

data with other data sources.

www.microstrategy.com

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Mastermind Keynote

34

T E C H N I C A L LY S P E A K I N G

C L O U D Y W I T H A C H A N C E O F D I S A S T E RCarrie Higbie, Global Director for Data Center Solutions and Services, Siemon.

With all the hype about clouds,

2011 was a year of education. The

term ‘cloud’ is overused and has

been sullied by the sheer variety

of definitions used in the industry.

Public, private, hybrid and ‘as a

service’ have left many scratching

their heads and wondering what

all the cloud hype is about. There

are several considerations to keep

in mind when looking to cloud

applications.

To begin with, let’s look at the

definition of cloud. It is an

over-abused term for almost

anything available as a service

these days. Combined with all of those

‘as a service’ terms, you also have to look

at the location of these services - public,

private or hybrid. For the sake of this

article, cloud is a service provided in-

cluding infrastructure, software, backup,

desktop in an easy-to-configure and

rapidly deployed solution.

For any cloud application, there are

several key points that must be evalu-

ated for a successful implementation.

The first and foremost consideration to

build to is what I will call ‘confidence

as a service’. If there is no confidence in

the solution and the provider, there is

no need to follow the cloud bandwagon.

In order to instill confidence in the

solution, I recommend considering the

following points.

Portability should be high on your con-

fidence building list. It is unfortunate

that many of the cloud technologies are

moving to proprietary methods. Once

you move something in the cloud there

is no guarantee that you can port your

information to another cloud without a

35

C L O U D Y W I T H A C H A N C E O F D I S A S T E RBrad Duce, Managing Director, Siemon, Australia & New Zealand

massive rework effort. Investigate what

will happen to your data if you choose

to replace a cloud service with another

(internal or otherwise) in the future.

What works in the cloud and what

doesn’t? This depends on both risk and

functionality. You may have a harder

time moving home-grown applications

to the cloud than COTS (commercial

off the shelf ) packages. It is well worth

the testing and development time to

determine that all functionality is still

going to be there when an application

is moved to a cloud platform.

Vendor dependency is a growing concern

on the hardware side of things. Some

electronics manufacturers are locking

down their components due to the

proprietary nature of their management

and hardware hooks. Some even lock

down the cables that you can use with

their solutions by adding encryption

to the cables. Years ago, the end-user

community as a whole fought long and

hard for open systems. To see such a

regression is a shame. Beware of studies

and marketing literature that promise

that one vendor’s product is the one

thing for everything. There is no such

thing as one size fits all in IT.

Open systems are the key to assuring

interoperability and help to avoid be-

ing locked into one vendor’s products,

before you can meet critical business

needs. With mergers and acquisitions

running rampant, it pays to have an

open system. If the company you have

engaged uses proprietary hardware, and

they are acquired by another company,

you may find yourself with early end of

life on your equipment.

IT can often feel threatened by cloud

deployments. The thought of moving

corporate systems and resources to an

outside entity can be job threatening;

and let’s face it, we all need a job to

feed ourselves and our families. While

companies may embrace cloud technolo-

gies for certain applications, it is very

unlikely that a company can operate

every system in the cloud. But resistance

certainly can slow adoption, or force

a company into a private cloud, when

another perfectly good opportunity is

out there waiting to be used.

Security is always at the forefront of any

savvy CIO/CSO/CTOs mind. And, in

fact, it’s the reason that some companies

have shied away from cloud computing

altogether. When you think about cloud

computing and cloud strategies, one of

the first things you should do is a risk

assessment surrounding the data you

wish to put in the cloud. There is some

low-hanging fruit for cloud - systems

you can place in the cloud, without

exposing yourself to great risk - even at

government level. Think of tax offices

that get slammed at tax time with form

downloads: there are benefits to putting

this system in the cloud, and the risk is

minimal, as the information in question

is already public facing.

For security, it’s also important to look

at IT policy. Savvy end users can put

information in the cloud and completely

circumvent company policies. This is

an area that is not often addressed in

actionable HR policies but may need

to be in the near future. IT security -

and getting around IT security - is a

bit like radar guns/cameras and radar

detectors for speeding. If you don’t have

a policy on where users put company

information, now is the time to make

one, whether you currently use clouds

or not. Users certainly have access to a

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36

lot of information, and proactive beats

reactive, hands down.

Bankruptcy, or going out of business, is

another concern with some providers.

When the term “cloud” exploded, providers

started popping up out of the woodwork.

Vendors, likewise, began offering cloud-

ready products. Granted, it is bad if a

hardware vendor goes under, but if you

are on open systems, you can generally

recover from that block.

Recovery is much more difficult if it’s your

actual cloud provider that goes under. It

is important to understand how long your

provider has been offering such services and

what their financial outlook looks like. I

know of one company that put its data in

a cloud facility - the provider subsequently

was collapsed for its asset value and the

customer was never notified. The informa-

tion was test data, but they lost quite a bit

of development time and revisions of code

that were stored in the cloud.

Geographic diversity is a great thing to

have when storing information. Companies

may plan to choose to build two tier II

data centres, as opposed to one tier IV,

as the tier IIs can be built at a fraction

of the cost but also provide this diversity.

Backing up data or moving data to the

cloud can offer some of the same benefits.

An issue arises with new legislation in

many countries about where exactly

data resides. For instance, European

Union countries require that private/per-

sonal information be stored in-country.

Countries like Australia go further and

require that it be stored in-state. In a

public cloud, it is prudent to try to

ascertain where the information is, and

will continue to reside, so that you don’t

accidentally find yourself in violation of

regulatory compliance.

Tangible and intangible ROI calculations

are difficult at best. It never ceases to

amaze me how some companies com-

pletely butcher ROI and TCO calcula-

tions in marketing literature to justify

their solutions to CFOs, and those with

decision-making powers. You must first

determine what is real and what is vapour

when you look into the calculations.

There are always going to be line items

that work and don’t work based on a

company’s individual circumstances.

In some cases, it may be attractive - in

some, far less. Know what your tangibles

and intangibles are prior to evaluations,

and be open to others as the services

change. Make sure you know the differ-

ence between one-time costs and those

that are reoccurring in your calculations.

Standards are another sticking point

when it comes to the cloud. Unfortu-

nately, this is a world that is largely devoid

of standards, making open systems more

difficult. On top of that, some vendors

love the proprietary hooks they can

implement to lock you in. Management

standards may increase learning curves,

devices required and the intricacy/com-

plexity of a variety of systems. Hopefully

as end-user demands increase for single

open solutions, so will the solutions that

utilise them.

Lastly, you are going to have to require

some significant information from any

cloud provider outside of what is listed

above. They should have the same change

management practices that you would

demand (provided you do). You should

know all of the equipment, vendors and

solutions they are using, if you plan to

use their services long term. If you can

arrange a site visit, all the better. You

should put as much due diligence into

your cloud provider as you would put

into your own systems.

Contracts for cloud services can range

from the very simple for short-term, to

very complex for long-term solutions.

It is in your best interest to do a little

shopping to get a feel for what is be-

ing provided. Some cloud providers are

asking users to forgo SLAs (service level

agreements) and accept a ‘best effort’

service. While that may be fine for a

service you don’t pay for, it certainly

may not be acceptable for one in which

you do! You should put as much due

diligence into your cloud provider as

you would put into your own systems.

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“ YOU SHOULD PUT AS MUCH

DUE DILIGENCE INTO YOUR

CLOUD PROVIDER AS YOU

WOULD PUT INTO YOUR OWN

SYSTEMS.”

37

38

S O F T W A R E S H O W C A S E

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SUITE

Toad Business Intelligence (BI) Suite is a suite of

tools that links traditional and non-traditional data

sources to bridge the gap between business intel-

ligence environments and distributed big data sources.

The suite offers tailored interfaces designed to meet

individual users’ data provisioning and analytic

needs. Technical business analysts have access to

tools needed to provision and deliver complex data in a meaningful

form, while business analysts can consume and deliver this data via

visualisations or existing BI systems to aid decision-making and achieve

faster time-to-value in existing BI investments.

The automated solution facilitates self-service data integration with agile

access to departmental data, traditional RDBMS data, corporate busi-

ness intelligence, cloud databases and big data sources like Hadoop.

www.quest.com

VIRTUAL ASSISTANT FOR MOBILE CUSTOMER SERVICE APPS

Nuance Communica-

tions has introduced

Nina, the virtual assis-

tant for mobile customer

service apps. Using this

product, companies can quickly

add speech-based virtual assistant

capabilities to their existing iOS and

Android mobile apps, enhancing

the self-service experience for their

customers. The product combines

the company’s speech recognition,

text-to-speech (TTS), voice biometrics

and Natural Language Understand-

ing (NLU) technology hosted in the

cloud to deliver an interactive user

experience that not only understands

what is said, but also can identify

who is saying it.

The product is claimed to be the

first virtual assistant customer service

app to incorporate both speech rec-

ognition and voice biometrics into a

single integrated solution. It is also

the first to provide an open software

development kit (SDK) to support the

rapid integration of virtual assistant

capabilities into existing mobile ap-

plications. In addition, the product

allows organisations to brand their

own virtual assistant persona, in-

cluding the visual appearance and

implementation of optional custom

TTS voices.

www.nuance.com

COLLABORATION APP

The Good for Enterprise collaboration app has been updated to

include a refreshed UI, photo share capabilities and attachment

viewing. The application is available for both iOS and Android.

The new user interface makes it easier to move between email,

calendar, contacts or the browser. Secure ‘photo snap and

share’ enables mobile workers to take photos and securely

share them via email from whiteboard sessions or job sites.

To-do lists allow employees to organise and track tasks with

real-time synchronisation of Microsoft Outlook tasks or Lotus

Notes To Do’s. A calendar attachment review function provides the ability

to open and view files attached within calendar invites, allowing mobile

workers to review meeting materials on the fly.

One-touch conference dial with passcode permits mobile workers to spend

less time switching between screens and safely dial into conference calls

with the host or participant code included in just one tap.

The application requires a Good for Enterprise server and client access

licence (CAL).

www.good.com

40

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U N I F I N D S 9 5 , 0 0 0 L O S T G R A D U A T E S

The University of Ballarat (UB) has implemented a new

system to help manage its alumni and its fundraising

activities. The PeopleSoft solution, implemented with

help from ASG Group, has revealed 95,000 previously

unidentified graduates from the university.

Until recently, the university was using an archaic system

to keep track of its alumni.

“We recorded all of our alumni details in spreadsheets,

and that was the extent of our system,” said Michelle Nunn,

Project Manager at the University of Ballarat.

The data gathering method - which involved a series of

voluntary forms on graduation day - also meant the school

wasn’t accurately identifying

all of its graduates as alumni.

As part of a strategic plan

formed in 2007, UB wanted to

create an alumni community

using these records as a basis.

The school also wanted to

clean up its donor tracking

system, which, like the

alumni records, existed as

spreadsheets.

Nunn said they didn’t

have a good way of using

their data to see who their

top donors are and who is

donating every month.

To help with both of these problems, the university

implemented Contributor Relations from PeopleSoft, in part

because of its ability to integrate with the vendor’s student

management system, Campus Solutions.

“In 2008 we implemented Campus Solutions as our student

management system, so it just seemed logical that we’d use

Contributor Relations as well, because then we’ve got complete

access to all of that graduate data … and it can accurately

identify who is really supposed to be an alum,” Nunn said.

When the university selected Contributor Relations, there

was no local knowledge of that specific product, Nunn said.

The school hired technology services company ASG Group for

functional consulting and technical development, on the basis

of the company’s general understanding of PeopleSoft products.

Before implementing the new system, the university had

around 5000 alumni in its spreadsheet-based system. The new

system automatically identified graduates from the student

management system and classified them as alumni.

“We went from 5000 alums to over 100,000 overnight,”

Nunn said.

But the contact details for many alumni were old. The

school hired a marketing company to promote the new system

in social media and local newspapers, directing past graduates

to contact the University of

Ballarat in order to update

their personal details.

“We really reached and

touched the community by

doing that sort of a marketing

campaign,” Nunn said.

The university now

gives students access to the

system around the time of

graduation, allowing them

to update their own contact

details, their employment

status, their interests and so

on. This allows the school to,

for example, notify students

of new courses they may be interested in, inform them of

alumni benefits and send them newsletters.

The system also allows the university to track the threads

of specific donations, providing analytics like how long it

took to get to the point of donation, whether invitations to

specific events were useful or whether it took a visit from the

Vice-Chancellor to seal the deal.

“We’re able to quickly see that this person’s interested in

animals or a supporter of environmental sustainability … so

when you go out to talk to them, you know to take along the

UB environmental sustainability plan,” Nunn said.

Andrew Collins

REGISTRATION OPEN – secure your place today.

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42

A S I A C L O U D F O R U M

W W W. A S I A C L O U D F O R U M . C O M

RSA: top capabilities for the next-gen cloud

Identity management will remain one of the key capabilities that

organisations need, be it in a public cloud or a virtual private cloud,

for the foreseeable future.

“Whether dealing with public cloud providers or your own virtual

private clouds and also with partners and end users, there has to be

a notion of trust at the centre of managing many-to-many relation-

ships in the cloud,” says Eddie Schwartz, chief information security

officer (CISO) for RSA, the Security Division of EMC. “[Last year],

we announced the Cloud Trust Authority (CTA), which basically

[suggests the idea of] a trust broker within the cloud to handle

issues like identity, authentication and authorisation management.”

Trust brokersCTA is a set of cloud-based services that enable visibility and

control over identities, information and infrastructure to facilitate

secure and compliant relationships among organisations and cloud

service providers.

Schwartz says that standards are still evolving for trust brokers but

organisations like the Cloud Security Alliance will play a role in

defining them. “There is a need for greater interoperability. When

you look at the very large commercial public cloud providers and

what organisations are trying to do privately, we have to find a way

to integrate more easily.”

Read full article at:www.asiacloudforum.com/content/rsa-top-capabilities-next-gen-cloud

Hastings Deering drives growth with Dynamics AX

Hastings Deering, a part of the Malaysian Sime Darby

Group and one of the largest Caterpillar dealer networks in the

world, is deploying the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 solution to

support business growth. Microsoft’s Consulting Services Division

will roll out the system in phases over the next 28 months.

The enteprise resource planning (ERP) system will support 10,000

users when fully implemented. Xapt Corporation, a specialist Dy-

namics partner, will provide Caterpillar-specific Dynamics modules

and heavy equipment domain knowledge.

Hastings Deering is the principal Australian subsidiary of Sime

Darby Industrial, operating Caterpillar dealerships in Queensland

and the Northern Territory of Australia, Papua New Guinea and

New Caledonia. Sime Darby’s Industrial Division is one of the six

core divisions of Malaysia-based Sime Darby Group, the world’s

fifth-largest Caterpillar dealer with dealerships across more than

100 branches in 10 countries throughout the Asia-Pacific.

The company, in conjunction with its sister dealerships in Asia, is

expecting substantial growth in the next 18 months to reach its

goal of becoming a US$3 billion business and plans to double its

workforce within the next two to three years. The company’s previ-

ous core business system only covered 40% of its processes and was

supported by a number of additional applications.

Read full article at:www.asiacloudforum.com/content/hastings-deering-drives-growth-dynamics-ax

Building HK’s first government outsourced private cloud

Following the implementation of the Hong Kong government’s

first in-house private cloud platform, the Hong Kong Office of the

Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) is progressing

onto building the government’s first outsourced private cloud, to

be rolled out in 2013.

Called GovCloud, this outsourced private cloud will become a

much larger scale of government cloud compared to the in-house

43

W W W. A S I A C L O U D F O R U M . C O M

The Asia Cloud Forum, an online media portal, has been created to represent the interests of enterprise

users, governments, telcos, vendors, policy makers and others with a stake in the development of cloud

computing in Asia.

private cloud. GovCloud will provide computing resources like

servers, storage and networks. Unlike the in-house private cloud

which is hosted on government premises, GovCloud will be hosted

in a third-party contractor’s data centre, which will be dedicated to

usage by 30 government bureaus and departments (B/Ds).

(The tender process of the provision of GovCloud solutions began

on 24 August 2012 and is due to close on 19 October 2012.)

“When GovCloud is up and running,” said Daniel Lai, Hong Kong’s

GCIO, “the OGCIO will migrate some of its cloud-ready systems to

GovCloud, such as e-procurement, electronic information manage-

ment, paperless meeting and electronic HR management.”

Read full article at:www.asiacloudforum.com/content/building-hks-first-gov-clouds-ii-outsourced-private-cloud

Olswang advises BP on global cloud rollout

Olswang, a technology law firm, has advised petroleum giant BP on

the procurement of cloud messaging services, including its upgrade

to Microsoft Exchange 2010.

The contract was awarded to Deutsche Telekom (DT) to supply

cloud messaging services to more than 83,000 BP employees

around the globe. DT’s corporate customer division, T-Systems

will provide Exchange 2010. The secure private cloud will support

access to email from a range of mobile and computer devices

used by employees in all areas of BP.

While citing benefits for BP - including the pay-per-use func-

tionality and the flexibility to easily scale users up and down

- Olswang partner and sourcing specialist Dominic Dryden

noted the complexity of the work involved: “Whilst its benefits

are causing buyers to think differently about technology pro-

curement, cloud also poses a series of new challenges. We were

delighted to support our client BP in addressing a number of

the challenges, in [this deal].”

Olswang ran and coordinated the deal from London. “From

Singapore, we look at some of the Asian aspects of that,” said

Rob Bratby, managing partner at Olswang Asia LLP. “That is

an example of a very large global organisation dealing with is-

sues in terms of their privacy policies. Some jurisdictions [like

Germany] have strict data protection laws in Europe and that

drove some of the things that were happening here.”

Read full article at:www.asiacloudforum.com/content/olswang-advises-bp-roll-out-global-cloud

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P L U G G I N G W I R E L E S S G A P S A T M A C Q U A R I E U N I

Macquarie University has revamped its wired and

wireless networks in anticipation of growing

bandwidth needs.

Peter Hole, Manager, Implementation at

Macquarie, said, “We’re actually trying to be a bit proactive and

avoid problems, rather than fixing them.”

Hole wanted to strengthen the university’s network in

anticipation of growing demand for bandwidth.

“What we’re seeing is a huge increase in all sorts of traffic

across the network, and indeed across the internet. We expected

a huge increase in wireless type devices. We’re already averaging

more than two devices per human coming onto the network.”

3 VSP9000 switches, and ethernet routing switches (8800, 5500

and 4500 models).

The two priorities of the revamped network were speed

and reliability, leading Hole to implement multiple parallel 10

gig links across the campus, so that it’s “bigger than we need

today, but we’re trying to get some life out of it and not restrict

what we’re doing”.

At each point on the network, the solution provides between

one and three backups, to provide redundancy should a piece of kit

fail. Hole said Avaya’s proprietary SMLT (split multilink trunking)

technology was one reason why the university chose this solution.

In Hole’s words, SMLT means that “there is no packet loss

at all when there’s a failure. You can turn half of it off and

nothing stops. Even if a video is streaming, you don’t notice an

interruption in the video or the audio.”

Following the implementation, network speeds have improved

across the campus, with some buildings exhibiting 100 times the

throughput they had previously.

The university has also been able to “vastly extend” its

wireless network coverage, Hole said.

Previously, the university had only 150-200 wireless access

points, which really only covered the busiest spots of the campus.

Now, with more than 1000 access points, “wireless is everywhere”,

Hole said, and there are no black spots.

This increase in wireless availability is important, given

Hole’s estimate that wired network devices - desktop PCs, for

example - make up only around 10% of devices on the network

and that student bandwidth use is growing at a compound rate

of 25-30% per year.

Macquarie also has a “very strong” drive to demonstrate

sustainability, Hole said, but “it’s a bit hard for IT to actually

find good news stories in sustainability, because we’re usually

about plugging in something else that uses electricity”.

But, he said, he and his team have been able to prove that

the new solution “is much less power hungry and requires

less cooling” than both the previous kit and several competing

solutions that the university could have implemented as part

of this project.

“We’re actually putting in something that is much more

powerful, but uses less energy than the previous technology.”

The network also had to match the increasing demands of

the university’s online learning program. Hole said that 70 to

80% of lectures are already being recorded and made available

for download via the web. This includes audio, visuals and

sometimes video clips.

Hole and his team are also piloting other bandwidth-heavy

applications like projecting close-up video of physiotherapy

procedures onto large screens in lecture theatres.

Macquarie ultimately chose a virtual network fabric featuring

Avaya’s Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture. The network

relies on a variety of Avaya kit, including 10GE layer 2 and layer

Andrew Collins

46

EVERY MONTH I S‘ADOPT A SHAREPOINT S ITE MONTH’

SharePoint is a powerful tool for

enterprise collaboration - when used

well. With the release of SharePoint

2013 pending, now is a good time to

examine your organisation’s use of

the tool, and the merits of migrating

to the new version.

It may seem like everyone’s talking

about SharePoint adoption. But why?

For more than a decade, Microsoft

SharePoint has sustained high growth

rates, year after year. It’s the fastest grow-

ing product at Microsoft to reach more

than US$1 billion in annual sales, with

well over 100 million users worldwide.

With all this use, why is there still so

much talk about adoption? Isn’t SharePoint

pretty well ‘adopted’ by now? Clearly,

no. Sure, SharePoint has pushed its nose

into more than half of the Fortune 1000,

but it’s a dynamic, complex ecosystem,

with no shortage of customisation and

functional pieces. It’s not a commodity

or a one-size-fits-all tool, like messag-

ing. So SharePoint itself differs in how it

appears to different organisations. One

classic definition of ‘adoption’ I like is

“to choose as preferred”. User choice is

the critical catalyst to triggering a self-

sustaining SharePoint reaction. But it’s

a challenge, because choice is as much

about soft preferences as it is about hard

functional deployments.

Chris McNulty, Strategic Product Manager, Quest Software

T E C H N I C A L LY S P E A K I N G

47

SharePoint advocates are a tenacious

bunch. We have a hard time admitting

failure. So it can be hard to tell when

a SharePoint rollout failed. Even for a

failed project, servers are still up and

running and you have a small group of

advocates still posting and using content.

A deeper look, however, will show lots

of subsites that have gone dark, with no

content updates or visits in more than a

year. Usually, there’s no use of SharePoint

for anything beyond document manage-

ment - no social, no business intelligence,

no workflow.

The statistics demonstrate this. Based on

recent conference surveys conducted by

Dell, user satisfaction with traditional

SharePoint document collaboration is

33.2% higher than satisfaction with the

‘rest’ of SharePoint.

Before we talk about how to improve

satisfaction, we need to understand why

this happens in the first place. It really

comes down to two potential problems:

• The mix of deployed capabilities is

completely mismatched to user needs

and requirements.

• The functional mix is ‘right’ but un-

usable because of complexity, lack of

training and interface design.

There’s no end to the broad range of

adoption techniques to be considered.

Governance, of course, is crucial. Es-

tablishing business/IT alignment on

intended uses and outcomes helps steer

users to the ‘right’ solutions.

Cross that bridge to the SharePoint promised landUser behaviour is a tough thing to

change, especially for technologists who

are used to empirical data and technical

solutions. User mandates and browser

home page lock-ins may lead to use but

such users are rarely satisfied.

Emotional bonds to a website are hard

to sustain. Users look for ease, simplic-

ity and functionality but they are also

motivated by group identity. They may

want to feel that they’re at the forefront,

but they don’t want to be first - because

they don’t want to be alone.

Social use of SharePoint holds tre-

mendous promise for transforming

the nature and currency of enterprise

collaboration. One of the best ways to

encourage use is to create a lively news-

feed environment using content updates

and tagging. SharePoint is intrinsically

a strong collaborative environment be-

cause it supports document versioning

and simultaneous co-authoring.

Email, on the other hand, is a horrible

place for collaboration - no one ever

knows where the latest document can be

found and how to update the right version.

Reminding users to save documents to

SharePoint gets tiresome. For better or

for worse, users are comfortable with

sending document attachments around.

Wouldn’t it be great if collaboration

could shift into SharePoint without

disrupting long-standing user habits?

QuestSoftware/Dell’s Attach This pro-

vides a simple answer (and it’s available as

freeware). When users send attachments

via Outlook, they get a simple dialogue

box that offers to transfer the attachments

to SharePoint and replace the file with a

link. That’s all. The server version of the

product adds administration functions

to publish preferred SharePoint locations

to save files, generate reports and set

security on uploaded files.

SharePoint provides a wealth of great

capabilities beyond document manage-

ment and there is no reason to be afraid

of SharePoint and keep users at arm’s

length, ‘outside’ the browser.

Again, there’s no single approach to

adoption that works in all cases. But

shifting collaboration from email to

SharePoint while driving use provides a

tipping point to help cross that bridge

to the SharePoint promised land.

Migrating to SharePoint 2013We know that SharePoint is a powerful

and rapidly expanding platform for

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48

enterprise collaboration, but how ben-

eficial are the new features in SharePoint

2013 and how can enterprises determine

what value they will get? These are the

questions organisations must consider as

they learn more about SharePoint 2013.

Before deciding how and when to move

legacy SharePoint content, Windows

file shares, Exchange public folders and

Lotus Notes applications to SharePoint

2013, whether on-premises or online,

businesses must understand the latest

version’s new capabilities, and more

importantly, why these capabilities are

critical for modern enterprises.

Seven things enterprises need to know about SharePoint 2013Quest Software has identified seven

things every organisation needs to know

about SharePoint 2013.

1. Modernised user interface: Those

who have watched Microsoft’s updates

to its websites, Windows 8 previews

or the Modern interface released

on the Windows Phone will like the

new look and feel, which includes

animated tiles and inline navigation.

2. Putting the ‘share’ back in Share-

Point: The Share Menu item provides

a simple way to share a document

via a personal or team SharePoint

site. Previously, a document had to

be moved to a public area or links

had to be sent around - now, it is

simple to just ‘share’.

3. Adding a social element: In one of

the biggest new features, pictures and

links are as easy to post to SharePoint

as they are to Facebook. In addition

to following people and tags, Share-

Point 2013 lets users subscribe to,

and follow, documents.

4. Borrowing from Twitter: Twitter has

introduced us to using @ and # in a

routine update. @ directs a post to

people (@yourname). # indicates a

topic we can search for and follow.

On SharePoint 2013, @ directs a post

to SharePoint users. # identifies the

next word as a dynamic keyword

to track in SharePoint’s Managed

Metadata Service (MMS).

5. It’s all about the apps: Everything -

custom lists, libraries and, of course,

applications - is now available in

an app. This means no direct server

access is needed to run or install

applications, which can be added

or bought online from the Micro-

soft SharePoint Store or in-house

marketplaces.

6. Managed metadata: MMS is now

much more robust as tag properties,

pins and terms can be ‘anchored’ to

prevent accidental duplication. In

addition, MMS terms can themselves

have properties, like price or colour,

and can then be used directly in

navigation.

7. Enhanced search: Microsoft’s in-

vestment in FAST has been echoed

in a completely re-tooled Search

subsystem.

Any time a new version of SharePoint

is released, companies around the world

ask themselves, “Is now the right time to

move?” To really be able to answer that

question, organisations need a thorough

understanding of what new features are

available and, most importantly, why

these features provide critical benefits

for today’s modern enterprise.

While the SharePoint 2013 Preview is

available, organisations can download

Quest Migration Suite for SharePoint

2013 Preview for free, and move content

to SharePoint 2013 on-premises and

online from SharePoint 2003/2007/2010,

Windows file shares and Exchange

Public Folders. They can then ‘test

drive’ these new capabilities, letting

them make an informed decision about

how and when they should migrate to

SharePoint 2013.

The tool is available at http://www.

quest .com/PRNewsSharePoint-

2013Migration092012.

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“USERS LOOK FOR

EASE, SIMPLICITY AND

FUNCTIONALITY”

Thanks again to the 1000+ loyal subscribers of Voice+Data and Electrical Solutions magazines who took the time to complete our reader surveys earlier this year and help create these two new media channels.

The new titles (and their respective websites) reflect the changes in technology markets in recent times and will better service YOUR business information needs.

INTRODUCING … TWO targeted new magazines from Westwick-Farrow Media.

NOTE: Current subscriptions to each media channel will continue, but if you want to receive BOTH magazines, or update your magazine and/or online preferences, simply go to www.TechnologyDecisions.com.au/subscribe www.ECDsolutions.com.au/subscribe

Voice+Data shifts to pure IT and is reborn as Technology Decisions• ContentfocusisonbigpictureITsolutionsforbusinessandgovernment• Cloud, security, big data, storage, compliance, mobility, virtualisation & more• Moreopinion,analysts,peertalk,casestudies&articles• Newfocusonsoftware,bothinthemagazineandonline

www.TechnologyDecisions.com.au

Electrical Solutions expands to include more comms+data content, along with a focus on key growth sectors in the world of electrical contracting, and becomes ECD Solutions (Electrical+Comms+Data)

• Fourdistincteditorialsections:Comms+Data;Efficiency+Renewables; Automation+Security;andElectricalDistribution • Newperfectboundformatwithheavycoverandsectiondividers• Moreproducts,casestudiesandarticles• Regularcontentonregulations,compliance,trainingandbusinesstips

www.ECDsolutions.com.au

50

F O R W A R D T H I N K E R

T H I N K I N G A H E A D C A N B E TO U G H

Tracey TritschLead Consultant, LongDog & Associates

Korben wakes up grumpy. He’s

a war hero who drives a New

York cab. His apartment hasn’t

been cleaned for at least 10 years.

The only decorations are a few photos and

some tarnished war medals. A woman’s

touch is clearly missing.

As he answers his phone he grabs a cigarette

from the holder on the wall. It dispenses

one of the four smokes he’s allowed today

and robotically reminds him “To quit is my

goal”. He chats with his buddy while he

sticks a pot under the drip coffee maker,

rummages around for a match to light

up and punches a button that opens the

cat flap in response to a plaintive miaow!

As he jumps into his cab he bats away the

fluffy dice hanging from his mirror and goes

to work. The last thing we see is Korben’s

cab flying off to the streets of New York.

Sci-fi buffs will recognise this scene from the

Bruce Willis movie The Fifth Element. Take

out the flying car and it’s New York today.

But it’s meant to be 250 years from now.

Surely by then we’d have won the nicotine

battle and have better coffee. What about

teleporting? And what’s with the TV and

phone … they look just like mine.

Sure, his cab flies, but flying cars are de

rigueur for any image of the future.

What’s the problem? It’s sci-fi so it’s meant

to entertain. But look closely and you’ll see

how much of today is inside this imagined

future world. All the writers have done is

take today’s world and extrapolate. What’s

stopping us from being more creative in

our invention of the future?

We are. When we imagine the future we

lug a huge bag of ‘how to live’ and ‘what

to believe’ with us, and it holds us back.

To be really innovative our ideas must be

more than a reinvented present with new

buttons and dials. We need to dump some

of our baggage.

Our brains are wired to find patterns that

make living easier. If we had to rethink

every little thing we did, from making a

cup of coffee to using a computer, we’d be

exhausted and we’d never create anything

new. So we base our choices and decisions

on our learned patterns. It’s why occa-

sionally I drive to the office almost fully

conscious (I’m not a morning person) and

wonder how I got there. It’s these patterns

that inevitably, often unknowingly, influence

how and what we think.

This isn’t about the technology. It’s about

giving ourselves ‘mental permission’ to

think differently.

It’s not easy, but it helps if you create the

right conditions. Google’s advantage is

its unconventional ideas, so it pays staff

to daydream on a personal project 20%

of their working time. Netapp Australia

signals an open culture when the MD sits

at a small desk in the middle of the open

plan layout, just like everyone else. Market

advantages don’t come from incremental

improvements - they come from quantum

leaps that no one else has either considered

or had the guts to try.

But to really fire up a culture of big ideas,

celebrate failure. Encouraging bold risks,

and their bold innovations, you’ll also get

more failures. But it’s this sustained risk-

taking and acceptance of failure that keeps

eBay on top. It’s what Telstra’s CIO has

enabled by creating a place for failures and

lessons learned to be shared.

The Fifth Element was set in the 23rd cen-

tury. What would you change in the script?

In your organization? What would you

change to give it ‘mental permission’, and a

sustained advantage over your competitors?

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.J. R

ich

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