Microsoft aims to Reverse Downward Trends
A new report from market research company comScore Inc. shows that Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is continuing to lose its already shaky footing in the smartphone market. The announcement shows that Microsoft's market share has fallen from 5.7 percent to 5.2 percent of the market between the August and November ranking. This is particularly disappointing for Microsoft as the "Mango" update arrived in the fourth quarter with the inclusion of commendable improvements billed as Windows Phone 7.5 and comScore measurements include total subscribers not just new shipments. Conversely, Apple Inc. iPhone and Google Android devices achieved new subscriber highs reaching an average of 1.5 million new activations per day during December, according to reports. Microsoft plans to increase sales with updates in Q2 and Q4 with competitive pricing, an enterprise push, and new high-end phones.
Experton Group Opinion: Microsoft is hell-bent on making a splash with its Windows Phone products, and despite the company's penchant for abandoning poorly performing markets, it is clear that its commitment to smartphones is secure for the foreseeable future. While sales barely register compared to Android and iOS, the Windows Phone platform is attractive, offers a friendly interface, and has nice enterprise tie-ins with backend Microsoft management and collaboration technologies. While its market position is bleak, IT executives should consider devices’ using the platform, as Windows Phone is a serious smartphone contender worth testing and deployment.
Top Ten Reasons To Consolidate Data Centers
The top ten reasons to consolidate data centers - priorities and impact of course vary from company to company.
- Cost Reduction – there are several areas where this is the case:
- Real Estate – elimination of redundant unused space;
- Real Estate – move data center(s) to cheaper space;
- Operational Staff Reductions.
- Service Level Improvement – opportunity to centralize, automate and standardize processes, etc. leading to service time improvements.
- Data Protection Improvement – simplify backup/recovery, disaster recovery and/or business continuity processes.
- Physical Security Improvement – elimination of multiple physical environments.
- Facility Upgrade Opportunity – newer, more stable infrastructure with built-in redundancy.
- Architecture Improvements – improvements in network architecture will lead to improved flexibility and improved performance.
- Application Portfolio Rationalization – elimination of redundant applications;
- Resource Pooling – consolidation of storage, network and computing sets the stage for virtualization and the benefits of resource sharing;
- Energy Conservation – opportunity to improve energy use (cooling and electricity);
- Growth Constraint Elimination – consolidation can be used to eliminate cooling, electricity and space constraints;
Business and Strategic Planning
The latest trends and best practices for Business and Strategic Planning are built on the premise that in order for Information Technology to be considered successful it needs to exceed business requirements. To that end, the strategic planning process should start with identifying and thoroughly understanding business objectives. Once these are understood, the objectives and associated measures within IT should be derived to support those business objectives.
Furthermore, the IT organizational infrastructure needs to be designed and continually re-evaluated to make sure it is structured from cultural, managerial reporting and measurement perspectives to reflect and support those business objectives. If that isn’t enough of a challenge, the rapidly changing technological landscape is creating both opportunities and obstacles for CIO’s and their staff. With the adoption and integration of cloud computing, smartphones, social networking and such, the need for technologists to become well versed in both business and technology has become paramount.
It is therefore, important that any business/IT strategic planning approach look at the outcomes and what is needed to support those outcomes from a holistic viewpoint – in other words technologists need to carefully review every decision from an organizational value perspective.
The Role of Program Management: While Strategic Planning is the responsibility of the CIO, the Program Management Office has a significant role in the formulation, approval, implementation and review processes. Typically, strategic planning results in a number of initiatives and/or programs. They can also be used in a business liaison role to collect requirements, communicate changes in plans and/or new developments, and gather feedback. One of the key skills of the Program Office, facilitation, should be used throughout the planning process.
The Strategic Planning process is relatively straight-forward. There are several steps in the process:
Information Gathering: In this phase information is collected in a number of ways, from a number of areas and participants: Communities of Practice, Program Management Office, Innovation Process, and Current IT Baseline.
Review and Analysis: Once the inputs have been collected, it has to be analyzed to determine what changes should be made to the current environment. This includes review of ongoing initiatives to determine what value has been realized and whether these programs should continue to be funded. All of this information should be broken down according to business objectives.
Drill Down: Once the master list is determined, a small steering group reviews the list and automatically eliminates items based on historical success, appropriate interpretation of business objectives, etc. This group is composed of a few key business executives, the Program Management Office and the CIO.
Prioritization and Validation: The next step is to prioritize the initiatives based on a number of factors including perceived value (as defined by the degree of support for business requirements), resource requirements, cost, difficulty, and timeline. This is an iterative process and can be accomplished during a facilitated session. Ultimately, the result is a validated initiative ranking.
Budgets: As a result of this input, IT budgets are put together separated by initiative and linked back to business and administrative groups.
The Innovation Process: This is a continuous process and should be used in parallel with any planning process to identify technological potential, applicability to business requirements and provide input to strategic planning. There are four phases to the innovation process: focus, ideation, ranking, and execution.
The Bottom Line: In business applications and appliances, commerce in an increasingly digital world is demanding a more critical dependency upon the “always on, real time access” model, but with a different design twist. This is not so much about the design of Crack-berry and Palm Smartphones as it is about the design of the interface, lowering unwanted complexity and providing smoothness of communication and transaction flow.
Review: Infrastructure 2011 Reality vs. Prediction
Experton Group was quite on target with its predictions for 2011 in this area. IT executives attacked their data center infrastructure initiatives both globally and locally, with the aim of consolidation, standardization and virtualization. This approach allowed leading companies to contain IT expenses and move workloads to core computing facilities while closing down those that were less environmentally and financially justifiable. Moreover, an increasing number of leading-edge IT executives have begun efforts to restructure their operations with the objective of becoming more agile, leaner, and more efficient.
Cloud computing has turned the corner and become a mainstream concept for targeted IT solutions. Most IT organizations are now implementing or planning on using clouds somewhere within their operations – private, public and hybrid models are on the table. In addition, virtualized pools of resources – networks, servers and storage – are gaining ground now that vendors are starting to provide automated tools to enable and manage pooled resources.
Companies continue to consolidate data centers to cut costs and gain efficiencies. Executives are better managing their performance, using tools such as performance per square foot or per watt as well as servers/administrator and terabytes per administrator. In the latter case, newer storage management tools have enabled companies to make massive strides in terabytes/administrator. Where once in the distributed environment a company struggled to get to 1 TB/administrator, today some companies are able to reach 100 times that or more.
2012: The 10 CIO Priorities
The sequence for the list of CIO challenges for 2012 is built on the IT organization maturity concept. As each company has a very individual situation and business requirements the list needs to be prioritized accordingly:
1. IT Strategy adjustment for Agility & Business Needs
While most companies have accomplished a stable IT environment and have improved their efficiency a lot over the last years, still most of them have not accomplished building an agile IT. This means being able to adjust the spending and resources very quickly to changing markets. Similarly most companies have an IT Strategy but the chapter on business vision, direction, and requirement is empty.
2. Service Catalog Benchmark
While some companies do regularly benchmarks the traditional cost based benchmarks are outdated. What is required is a price based benchmark against the service catalog. This means it compares the internal charge rates against external service provider. The benchmark will show potential problem areas but also outsourcing opportunities and gives a good feedback how competitive the internal IT is.
3. Security pro-active as Business Enabler
Security has been one of the top three IT priorities in the last 5 years. But a couple of new developments need to be correctly addressed. First security needs to be pro-active to enable business and not just focus on their charter to “secure” the company. Second the new computing paradigm is cloud and security in and for the cloud is a big concern. Thirdly the broad use of Social Media requires adoption.
4. Cloud Strategy & Use Cases development
80% of all server based computing will be external by 2020. Companies need to understand the trend and prepare for it. It is important to find the right Use Cases and to pilot them in order to build the internal knowledge as well as to gain the acceptance within the IT organization. Many end users are already using privately Public Clouds and some for the business and the overall trend cannot be stopped.
5. DC & Storage solutions, Best Practice Implementation
While Datacenters have been regularly updated many still lack the support for modern demands on power and cooling. The penetration for server virtualization has not reached a sufficient level. In the Storage area most companies have not implemented the newest technologies such as de-duplication, thin provisioning, data compression and encryption. Also Business Continuity needs to be updated.
6. BYOD analysis, start with smaller groups
Bring your own device has started many controversy discussion. But the fact is it cannot be stopped. In most companies those devices are first brought in by the executives themselves. Employees will use their preferred personal productivity tool(s) and make their own decision about notebooks, tablets, and smartphones. IT has to act and build a strategy. Starting with smaller groups is strongly recommended.
7. BI, DW, EPM enhancements & Big Data review
Business Intelligence has been on the top of the list for quite some time but the implementation is still relatively slow and most of the time it happens in islands. It is necessary to move to the next level and implement an Enterprise Performance Management concept. With the increasing amount of data from many different sources “Big Data” concepts might provide excellent value for the enterprise.
8. Social Media Assessment, Strategy & Guidelines
Again, it happens everywhere as we have learned latest from the Arab Spring. It is seen in the companies but nobody takes the responsibility to address this phenomena correctly in order to build recommendations, guidelines, and an overall strategy. A quick first assessment can deliver very valuable insights. Afterwards the communication and cross-functional work becomes a challenging task.
9. Business Excellence: Business Process Master Plan, Self-Service, Total Customer Experience (TCE)
Business owns the processes but IT has to build the process knowledge to support and integrate them. Many new opportunities for automation and horizontal process improvements, such as Self-Service offerings, need a full understanding and redesign by the IT organization. The Total Customer Experience should be the ultimate goal and needs to be measured as the TCE quality is often not very high.
10. Creation of x-functional Innovation Teams
Nearly every company has put innovation on the top of their agenda. Why? Innovation and especially Business Model Innovation can help to outperform the competition. Product and Process Innovation is the bread and butter for all companies to survive in a world of increasing global competition and market challenges. IT needs to build x-functional teams to pro-actively address all areas of innovation.
2012: 10 Technology Areas to Act on
Experton Group has selected 10 technology areas for 2012 IT organizations need to act upon. While the individual level of implementation will depend on the company’s overall strategy and profile of early or late adopter, those topics still need to be addressed.
1. Traditional Client
Typically WINTEL client installations need to execute the Windows 7 migration in 2012. There are not many reasons why the migration should be postponed. Choosing the right licensing and maintenance strategy is very important. While this is not a strategic technology area it has a big impact on the client and the support cost. Windows 8 will be used selectively and an OS cleanup is strong recommended.
2. New Client Strategy
Parallel to the migration and clean-up in the Windows environment companies are experiencing strong increase in usage of smartphones and tablets. Therefore a Bring your own Device strategy should be evaluated and for a selective group be tested. Too many apps development for smartphones and tablets should be avoided due to the fast changing market, many operating systems, and complexity.
3. Virtualization
After most companies have started with Server virtualization, even though the penetration rate is often below 30%, the next fields are Client and Storage virtualization. Client virtualization is seen as a way to control and manage the BYOD environment while keeping up the security for the enterprise apps. Not many enterprises have started with application virtualization.
4. Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is strongly pushing into all fields of IT, from enterprise areas such as IaaS or als Storage as a Service to more personal use fields and SaaS applications. The IT organization needs to look at the different technologies throughout the entire stack, review the existing architecture and business requirements and develop an adjusted strategy. Pilots should be started to build experience.
5. Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 is moving into the enterprises and some have already taken advantage of it while many others are helpless in addressing this issue. Instead of having static web pages full of information available now suddenly the game has dramatically changed. It is a challenge for most organizations to understand the opportunities and to include or even integrate them into the corporate IT systems.
6. BI/EPM/BPM, Big Data
While this is also looked at from a different view point in the CIO priorities it also needs to be analyzed from a technology standpoint. Most companies have built BI islands without a clear master data definition behind it and have difficulties moving to the next level of integrating those islands into an enterprise performance solution. Big Data has many technology challenges which need to be looked at.
7. Identity Management
Has Identity Management been already on the top priority list for some time so will it be fundamental for the rollout of many Cloud Solutions. Organizations need to build a framework for the Cloud including also Single-Sign-On, Provisioning, Charge Back, and Security. Identity Management is a focal point in the future way of computing as users will access from anywhere to anywhere with any device.
8. ERP, CRM, SCM Future
Most IT organizations have established a solid and stable ERP environment. It runs but it is not agile and even worse, it costs a fortune. Some companies are spending as much as 1% of their total revenue on ERP. This is no longer acceptable and needs to be strongly improved over the next years. The existing ERP solutions are legacy applications and need to be modernized over time.
9. Software as a Service
Part of Cloud Computing but still it is important to look at SaaS from a different perspective. While many IT organizations have an issue with IaaS the user community enjoys the benefits of SaaS. Many solutions, often only needed for a small group, can now be used very quickly and inexpensively. This delivery business value immediately and the digital natives are very used to this style of computing.
10. Consumerization
When Apple introduced the iPod it went out of the traditional computer business. With their focus on the consumer Apple did become the most valuable technology company and is back in the enterprise through the iPhone and iPad. ARM chips, used in smartphones, will deliver better price performance in server and compete with Intel. Google and Amazon are other example of consumerization.