Oracle is well and truly pushing engineered (ie proprietary) systems.Speaking yesterday in London, Oracle president Mark Hurd claimed that Oracle's vertically integrated stack combining hardware, middleware, database and enterprise applications, has been pre-integrated so customers do not require expensive IT consultants to connect the system together.

This may be true of the bits within the Oracle stack, but most businesses connect systems across complex, heterogeneous environments.

Hurd also stated that Oracle will spend $5 bn this year on R&D. Now that it is playing in the hardware race, how far will that go? After all, Intel is expected to spend over $18 bn on R&D.

For many years, Microsoft has been building its credentials in the enterprise with Windows Server, providing an alternative to costly Unix systems. It has taken over 20 years since it divorced IBM to build this reputation.

On the desktop, it has had no competition, until Apple finally got its act together with the iPad. Beyond professional graphics and multimedia workstations, so far Apple has not shown much enthusiasm for products and services for enterprise users. But its devices are being used within business, and some companies are even contemplating supporting MacOS. It is with this backdrop, that Microsoft is setting the stage for the next battle over desktop IT.

Windows 8 shows where the company is heading. It can be used as an upgrade to Windows 7 for traditional PC desktop computing. But desktop computing is not what it used to be. Recognising the threat and opportunity of IT consumerisation, Microsoft has made Windows more like Android and iOS, even though these lack the enterprise heritage the company has worked hard to earn.

This new operating system shows where Microsoft is heading with Windows: it will be increasingly consumer-focussed. Windows 8 does work with a mouse and keyboard, but it is certainly not the same user experience as Windows 7. The move from Windows XP to Windows 7 was a comparatively small step; the move to Windows 8 will be a giant leap.

An article on Forbes has quoted the latest research from Forrester, which predicts Apple will sell $7 billion worth of Macs and $10 billion of iPads in the enterprise in 2012. Forrester analyst David Johnson believes Macs can make good corporate citizens in Windows-centric environment.

With IT planning to migrations off Windows XP, the roll-out of new MS server products and Office 2013, supporting Macs is probably the last thing IT admins need.

The biggest issue with Apple in the enterprise is how to engage with a company whose primary goal is to entice consumers with shiny gadgets. Apple's reseller channel certainly does not look like it is growing. Can we honestly expect the Genius Bar to provide a business with an enterprise-class SLA given the Apple Store is consumer focused?

Oracle has said "no comment" to the question I posed on when it would release a patch for a serious security hole in its Java runtime environment, that is currently being exploited.At the time of writing, there was absolutely no info or advice or the company's security blog.

Internet users are at the mercy of Oracle as reports have emerged of a zero-day vulnerability that capable of infecting PCs that run Java within their web browsers.

The next patch scheduled for release by Oracle is 16 October. 

Java, the write once, run anywhere runtime environment is used on websites to add sophisticated interactivity. It requires a runtime download browser plug-in, and it is this plug-in that has been exploited.

During the summer Microsoft gave developers who attended its TechEd developer's conference a Samsung 700T tablet preloaded with a pre-release version of Windows 8 to try out. The new operating system is key to Microsoft's strategy to bridge the gap between the corporate world and the consumer space,that is dominated by the likes of the iPad running iOS and the Samsung Note 10.1 running the Android OS.

Windows is likely to remain king of the enterprise desktop laptop and PC market for the foreseeable future, but how well can it run on a tablet?

The Samsung 700T is what used to be called a "Slate PC". It was originally released in 2011, and is effectively a full-blown 11.6 inch touch-screen PC without a keyboard, which is currently selling on Amazon for £766.

In terms of spec, it is powered by an Intel Core i5 2467M 1.6GHz, and has 4 GBytes of RAM and a 64 GByte solid state disk. The screen looks amazing. With a bluetooth keyboard and wireless mouse, the Samsung 700T can easily replace a notebook PC - the elegant docking station, that measures 11 x 10 x 1.5cm and doubles as a stand, has an Ethernet connector and HDMI port.

The device is well-suited to running the final shipping version of Windows 8, with its touch-screen user interface. As expected, thanks to Microsoft ActiveSync, connecting the Samsung 700T to an Exchange email server takes a matter of seconds, which should not burden the IT support desk. It requires a Windows Live account and connects seamlessly to Hotmail and Gmail.

There are not yet enough applications in the Microsoft Store... no YouTube, Dropbox, no security apps, VPN apps or even BBC iPlayer. Hopefully this changes when Windows 8 ships.

Weighing just under a kilo, and limited battery life of around 4-5 hours, it is certainly not a tablet that could be used on the road all day. But, the Kindle app works well, and the large screen makes reading in landscape format particularly comfortable.

It will be interesting to see how the Samsung 700T works in a full enterprise environment, as and when VPN software, anti-virus software, ERP, BI and apps like Citrix Receiver are certified for Windows 8.

I met John Abel, chief technology architect for Oracle EMEA today, to talk about Oracle's so-called "red stack". Far from being an Oracle-only strategy, Abel said Oracle's main objective with the strategy was to tackle the complex integration issues that exist between different layers of a customer's IT strategy. He says people want agility - ie speed of implementation. Vendor lock-in is less of an issue.

So while Oracle may indeed have a product to fit across all tiers of an IT architecture, Abel sees customers buying specific components and using Oracle's preferred orchestration methodologies to potentially lower the cost of IT integration.

From the hour-long conversation - the first I have had with Oracle for several months - it seems that the company's strategy is to give businesses the same software, whether they wish to deploy in the cloud, or on-premise.

Abel believes that IT needs to change how applications and infrastructure is procured. People today are building private clouds:so they buy each layer of their IT architecture separately. The hardware and infrastructure is separate to the platform, which is separate to the applications/business logic. He feels that IT must consider business benefits throughout all layers of the IT stack - but the constituent components do not have to be exclusively Oracle's.

In this guest blog post, Neil Colquhoun, business sales director, Epson UK, writes about how CIOs and IT managers can improve meeting room etiquette

You know the feeling. You've been in the same chair for the past two hours, looking at the same faces and being shown slide after slide of bullet points. I'm sure I'm not alone in the desire for shorter, more productive meetings...

In a recent survey we ran nearly half of office workers admitted to using a tablet, laptop or smartphone for non-work-related purposes during meetings. Alongside this, 68% are distracted when others use tablets, smartphones or laptops during meetings and 16% blame technology failure for wasted time in meetings. I can understand the power a smartphone can hold in the middle of a dull meeting.

• One of the most impactful steps could be to suggest that management ban mobile technology in meetings for all but urgent phone-interruptions or minute taking. This might sound controversial but it's rare that an email will arrive that couldn't wait 30 minutes to be addressed - after all, only a minority of office workers are involved in life-and-death situations...
• Second, make your meeting room technology fool-proof: Whilst projection and AV technology is hardly rocket science, I've seen many a poor soul try and fail to clone their display while others sit expectantly waiting for the meeting to begin. Nor do people necessarily realise the 3.5mm audio jack should go in the headphones socket of their laptop. That's why I think every IT manager should provide framed and laminated step-by-step guidelines to save time wasted in the meeting through staff trying and failing to get their presentations fired up.
• Finally, don't give people an excuse for cancelling: Scheduling everyone's time can be a challenge in itself, and so I'm a big fan of Doodle.com, which allows participants to vote on their preferred time for a meeting. This saves employees from trying to work multiple calendars around each other. It also works wonders for arranging a stag night with a group of disorganised mates.

In this podcast recorded at the Forrester CIO Summit in Paris, Adriana Karaboutis, global CIO at Dell explains how her IT management team learns from summer interns. She says, "The Gen Ys have grown up with the technology. They provide insights that many of us have never thought about."

Listen to podcast:

Among the sessions at Forrester's CIO Forum Emea, was one that looked at sourcing, and in particular, the role of the big system integrators (SIs).

According to Forrester the major US, Indian and European SIs focus on helping clients lower the cost of IT. This may be fine if your job is to run IT services cheaply. But what happens when the SIs are asked to innovate?

All the experts looking at the role of IT, discuss the need to build new businesses empowered by IT. Forrester calls this "digital disruption" and it involves a recipe of mobile development, social media and IT consumerisation.

If your supplier is focussed on lowering cost, will you get the best developers in these areas from a major SI? It is highly unlikely. As Forrester points out, most large SIs are publically listed companies, and will save their very best people for their largest, most lucrative contracts. It is not a litmus test, but the speed with which a request for proposals is delivered, may indicate how seriously the SI sees the contract.

So where does that leave everyone else? 

For everyone else, the best third-party suppliers may, in fact, be small local specialists, who are able to deliver expertise in a narrow niche. But these niche players may be unknown and the due diligence process to assess their suitability and financial stability will be harder.

The long hot summer of 1977, the Queen's Silver Jubilee, Mungo Jerry sang about being in the summertime and the two Steve's revamped their first Apple computer.

Apple brought out its amazing home computer in June 1977. But if we look back on the history of computing over the last 35 years, standardisation has prevailed. It was the Apple II (running VisiCalc, the world's first spreadsheet application) that convinced IBM that home computing would impact business. IBM embarked on Project Chess, which delivered Big Blue's interpretation of this era of computing. It was ingenious of Don Estridge, the father of the PC, to use standard components (not IBM developed), and run the machine using a common software platform - MS-DOS. This was arguably the biggest breakthrough in the design of the PC. It enabled Compaq in 1983 to develop the first IBM PC clone.

So even though the Apple Mac in 1984 ran superior software, the PC was a standard and its market share exploded.

Let's wind the clock forward. Apple with the iPhone and iOS has again produced a compelling, proprietary product family. It certainly looks like Apple can do no wrong. But, there isn't such a thing as an Apple clone. Apple fiercely protects the look and feel of its devices, which is why it is battling with Samsung over the Galaxy S3 smartphone.

Google, on the other hand, is taking the PC's route to world domination. Arguably, Android still has a bit of a way to go to become a slick OS and software ecosystem, but like Windows, it will eventually get there, and will run on the widest choice of devices.

Now how about Microsoft? In all the years I have looked at MS, it has never been a company that is first to market. But Microsoft slowly chips away at the competition. It waits to develop a rival product, like the xBox 360, and then puts a huge effort into establishing the platform. Internet Explorer was not the first web browser, but it has outlasted Netscape.

The PC market is in transition. Netbooks showed us that people were happy with basic network access devices. In fact, I have one that still runs Ubuntu extremely well. Tablets are even simpler. With Windows 8 RT, Microsoft is hoping to leapfrog iOS, by offering people who would buy an iPad, a similar device capable of running the same software they already use at work. If it succeeds Windows 8 RT will be good for corporate IT, because IT departments can buy, test and deploy software from companies they are familiar with, on Windows RT tablets. It should improve LAN security and data protection as the Windows RT tablet will benefit from all the PC software that exists in this space.

Hybrid devices were on show at Computex in Tapei, giving a glimpse of how the industry sees a merger between tablet-like devices and laptops.

Home users may even see the benefit of having one device that runs the same software anywhere. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has developed a version of its desktop OS that runs on Android smartphones. So it is only a matter of time before Apple eventually puts MacOS on the iPad.

In terms of standardisation, I think Google is quickly establishing the Android platform, Microsoft is coming from the opposite direction, bringing PC-like functionality to tablet and hybrid devices. That leaves Apple, and as the past has shown us, Apple has always been proprietary. Apple is launching iOS 6 today and next month is the 5th anniversary of the iPhone. It is a device that has dominated the Western world. It is still a massively expensive device, compared to the cheapest Android smartphones. Until Apple makes its hardware available to other manufacturers, it will be a world of iPhones, iPads and the rest of us.

Some people may hold out for Windows 8, but my Windows 7 laptop has started running seriously slow. It's a Sony Vaio and less than 18 months old, but now Windows takes ages to boot-up and applications are slow, even though there's nearly 50% of unused disc space.
Why does this happen. Over time Windows tends to slow down because the Windows registry and computer's hard disc get cluttered.

• The first task was to clean up the applications, by using the Programs and Features option in Windows Control Panel to uninstall things not required any more. At the same time, I cleaned up My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos, My Music, browsing history etc. Altogether I managed to get the machine's footprint down to around 55 Gbytes of used disc space.
• Next remove unwanted Windows processes. Here is a really useful site that explains how to go about this: http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-7-service-pack-1-service-configurations/
• Third, upgrade memory. Although Windows 7 64-bit Edition runs in 4 Gbytes, applications benefit from more RAM. I upgraded to  8 Gbytes of RAM, using a system scanner  tool on the Crucial website.
• Finally, there is the option of using a solid state disc (SSD), which improves disc performance particularly start-up and shutdown and launching applications. I decided on 256 Gbytes to future-proof the system, and bought the data transfer kit, which allows you make a disk image of your existing Sata disc drive. My system disk was 512 Gbytes, but the imaging software had no problem transferring the data to the 256 Gbyte SSD.

RAM currently costs around £30 for 8 Gbytes and a 128 Gbyte SSD is under £80 (less if you can squeeze your operating environment in 64 Gbytes). So for little over £100 it is possible to make a big on how fast Windows runs.

Gartner vice president Steve Prentice came to Computer Weekly's office to discuss the future of the internet. He is speaking to CIOs about what happens if the internet changes radically. "We now treat the internet as a utility - rather like electricity," he said.While people pay internet service providers fro internet access, much of the content is free and then there is the cost of the physical infrastructure ie the cabling, network switches, domain name servers etc.Cloud computing, 3G, 4G, smart meters and the internet of things all rely on a pervasive internet.

But what if is not there anymore, or, like in China, countries block or control access? Prentice does not have any answers, nor is he making predictions as to when the internet will start unraveling.

But it is something businesses and governments should consider. Developing internet-enabled products may seem like a great idea today, but what would happen if the internet evolves into walled gardens: a Microsoft internet; a Google internet; an Amazon internet?
It all boils down to the net neutrality debate. As Computer Weekly has reported, at least 20% of broadband users and up to half of mobile internet customers have contracts allowing their providers to restrict certain services, such as VoIP or file-sharing.

In this video recorded at the recent HP Global Influencer Summit in Shanghai, I spoke to HP product manager. Kathy Nielson about the HP EliteBook Folio. This is a new Ultrabook, designed to bridge the gap between consumer and business laptops. HP is banking on the success of Intel's Ultrabook design to woo business users. Intel is making Ultrabooks its top priority for 2012.

With the EliteBook Folio 9470m, due to ship in October. HP hopes the Ultrabook laptop will appeal to corporate IT departments and consumers. The device supports legacy connectivity such as a VGA video port and USB connections. HP says it offers nine hours of battery life, but this can be upped to 20 hours using an extended battery.

I can't be the only person to have suffered a catastrophic loss of Wi-Fi at this year's Infosecurity Europe conference at Earls Court. The network, provided by Ruckus Wireless, was free but required users to accept terms & conditions. The problem I found was that the authentication kept timing out, and even once I had gained access as a legitimate user, it was far too slow to enable me to connect to my corporate network via f5 FirePass. How rubbish is that? One exhibitor actually told a colleague of mine that he didn't expect any better from exhhbtions or conferences.

The organiser roughly knows how many delegates will attend; it knows how many exhibitors will be there. It surely cannot be rocket science to create a temporary WiFi LAN that can scale to this many concurrent users, given the majority of people attending, work in the IT sector and therefore are heavy users of mobile internet.

It goes to show just how ill-prepared the UK is. We have nothing to fear about green furry monsters. But when the world and his dog descends on London for the Olympics, I wonder how the cellular, data and WiFi networks will cope?

Greg Hadfield, a former Fleet Street journalist and internet entrepreneur, is organising the United Kingdom's first Open-data Cities Conference. In this guest blog post, Hadfield discusses the opportunities of open data.

Imagine a city where your car tells you the location of the nearest vacant parking space. Or a city where you are notified as soon as a neighbour submits a planning application. Where up-to-the-minute listings of every cultural event and venue are available - all the time, wherever you happen to be. Imagine if you could discover the asking price of the cheapest two-bedroom home that has just gone on sale, in the catchment area that will guarantee your child a place at the best-performing school.
This is the thinking that led to the United Kingdom's first Open-data Cities Conference, which will be held at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange on Friday, April 20.
It's not technology that is holding us up. Although the rate of change will be greater as we progress towards ubiquitous, free, high-speed internet access available to everybody via a myriad devices.
For open-data cities to become reality, we don't have to wait until connectivity - and the "connectedness" it engenders - is the air we breathe.
Nor do we have to wait for the "internet of things", of which all kinds of objects - not just computers, tablets and phones - will be a part.
Emerging technologies associated with a semantic web of data are already sufficient to power innovative applications, services, and enterprises that will compete and combine to meet the needs of communities in the 21st century.
It is lack of data that will limit our ambitions. It is a dearth of data that risks keeping our cities in the slow lane to the future.
In a post-digital era - when the differentiation between analogue and digital, between "real" and "virtual", will finally be blurred beyond relevance - we will live in the age of data.
Even now, data is everywhere, all the time. It defines, describes and determines the world we live in.
The more data that is released - without strings attached, in machine-readable and non-proprietary "open" formats - the more likely it is that businesses and developers will use it to build the applications and services that world-class cities need.
Of course, I'm not urging the release of personal data relating to identifiable individuals.
The civic data I'm talking about is data about schools, catchment areas, and property prices; about bus times and bus-stops, taxi ranks, car parks, and traffic congestion; about energy use, CO2 emissions, and carbon footprints.
The crucibles for global change will be "open-data" cities - cities which self-consciously and collectively decide to make available unimaginable quantities of data, openly and freely.

 

In this guest blog post, Steve Nunn, managing director, infrastructure consulting group, Accenture, looks at the role of the service catalogue in virtualisation.

CIOs are already well versed on virtualisation, with many having already invested into virtualisation within their data centres and server estates. For those CIOs that have, this usually prompts the question of: where next? Given that they are using their underlying hardware more productively, some CIOs assume that investment should start shifting to other IT initiatives. But this would be a mistake. A major opportunity to better utilise the enterprise's IT assets, while radically speeding up time to market, can be captured through the orchestration and provisioning of IT via a service catalogue.

Getting there requires the completion of virtualisation the IT environment, while also moving to greater level of standardisation. This virtualisation goes beyond the servers, where much attention has so far been placed, as far more can reliably be virtualised. For example, while network virtualisation is now mainstream within many organisations, relatively little has been done on application and storage virtualisation. CIOs that start to virtualise these areas are finding that they can far more flexibly allocate available resources against towards true application requirements. Overall, the goal here is the complete virtualisation of the server, storage and network environment, to provide a commoditised pool of IT capability that can be easily provisioned and orchestrated as needed.

The implementation of a service catalogue for IT assets is an important aspect of a parallel part of the journey. This essentially provides a single view for users that defines what services are available, and at what level. Putting this in place is a major step for CIOs, and should be used to lead the drive towards implementing the automated provisioning of IT assets. Orchestration then adds the necessary intelligence so that IT can dynamically match user demand against availability of the underlying infrastructure.

Achieving this gives CIOs various new options that can help drive out inefficiencies and radically speed up time to market. To give one example, specific operating areas, such as an organisation's test and development setup, can be transformed in how they are set up and run. Rather than taking days or weeks to build and deploy dedicated test and development machines for a new project, hundreds of virtualised test environments, simulating specific conditions or setups, can be created in hours and used for only as long as they're needed. This also ensures far more efficient setups, by only providing the specific test environments needed, for as long as they're needed, before the capacity is switched over to other tasks. One bank cut its test environment from 900 constant images to just 300, simply by restructuring the way it provisioned the workload in a 'just in time' basis.

A further example of how the IT environment can be more flexibly provisioned might be a rethink of how an enterprise ERP system is implemented. Such deployments typically provision sufficient capacity to ensure that any potential spikes in demand can be catered for, even though these peaks are rare. As a result, potential computing resource lies wasted for the majority of the time. In a more flexible IT environment with orchestration and provisioning, CIOs can cater for the typical operating load of the application, while "borrowing" capacity from other lesser-used systems, such as disaster recovery or training, to cater for the occasional surges in demand as they happen.

 Of course, making a successful transition to an IT environment that can flexibly provisioned and orchestrated through a service catalogue is not without its challenges. The initial software investment can be high, and there are several prerequisites: standardisation of the underlying IT assets; complete, or very nearly complete, virtualisation; the ability to share a common IT resource pool; and a service-oriented approach to IT that focuses on application service delivery.

The good news is these goals are also prerequisites for any CIO thinking about a future move into a cloud environment. And more fundamentally, this forms part of the evolution of the role of the CIO: away from being a manager of IT infrastructure, and towards that of being an orchestrator of services.

It seems Research in Motion is playing swings and roundabouts with its business strategy. It wants to clarify about getting out of the consumer market.This came in earlier today:

Thorsten Heins RIM CEO confirmed on the call:

• Whilst we announced we would refocus on the enterprise business, we also stated part of competing in the 'bring your own device' segment is to create a compelling consumer offering.
• Ahead of the BlackBerry 10 launch and throughout the remainder of our FY13, it is critical that we drive BlackBerry 7 sales to sustain the subscriber base. To do this we plan to aggressively incentivize sales of BlackBerry 7 smartphones to both drive upgrades from older BlackBerry products to BlackBerry 7 and to attract feature phone customers to BlackBerry 7 for their first smartphone experience.
• We have new BlackBerry 7 devices scheduled to come out in the next few months to reinvigorate our position in the key entry level smartphone segment, to support our efforts to continue growing our subscriber base by upgrading feature phone customers to smartphones.
• We will seek partnerships to deliver those consumer features and content that are not central to the BlackBerry value proposition, for example media consumption applications.

So basically, RIM wants to concentrate on the enterprise, and, at the same time, allow staff, to bring in their own devices to work - presumably to connect via the Blackberry Enterprise Server.
Again, it wants to partner with companies to deliver features that are "not central" to the Blackberry value proposition. Does that mean not central to "Enterprise IT"??
Point three is a bit of a contradiction, as RIM also wants to deliver an entry level smartphone.
What does it ll mean. Who knows - it seems even RIM doesn't!

Two days ago I left my Kindle 3G somewhere - probably in the pub or or the train - and of course it is most likely now gone for good. 

Hello xxxx,

I'm sorry to hear that your Kindle was lost. I've deregistered this Kindle from your account and noted this in our systems so that it can't be registered by another person. 

Your Kindle's Serial Number is: xxxxxxxxxx. If you find your Kindle, please contact us again and we can reinstate your registration.

US Xpress has implemented a single data analytics user interface that pools in information from multiple sources. The logistics firm collects 900 data elements from tens of thousands of trucking systems - sensor data for tyre and petrol usage, engine operation, geospatial data for fleet tracking, as well as driver feedback from social media sites.

All of this data is stream both in real time and collected for historical analysis. Information fed to appropriate online transaction processing systems, Hadoop and data warehouses,

In this podcast, Tim Leonard, CTO and vice president at US Xpress, explains how the company processes and analyses Big Data to optimise fleet usage, reduce idle time and fuel consumption and save millions a year as a result.

Application Compatibility Update with Quest ChangeBASE

Executive Summary

With this March Microsoft Patch Tuesday update, we see a set of 6 updates; 1 with the rating of Critical, 4 with the rating of Important and 1 with that of Moderate. This is a relatively small update from Microsoft, and the potential compatibility impact for these updates is likely to be low.

 

Notably, the Patch Tuesday Security Update analysis performed by the ChangeBASE team has not identified any compatibility issues across the thousands of applications included in testing for this release. This makes us confident that this set of patches may be deployed with low risk of issue across the entire application portfolio.

 

Given the nature of the changes and updates included in each of these patches, most systems will require a reboot to successfully implement any and all of the patches and updates released in this March Patch Tuesday release cycle.

Sample Results

Here is a sample Summary report for a sample database where the Quest ChangeBASE Patch Impact team has run the latest Microsoft Updates against a test application portfolio. As you can see, no issues have been detected:

 

Testing Summary

MS12-017	Vulnerability in DNS Server Could Allow Denial of Service (2647170)
MS12-018	Vulnerability in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2641653)
MS12-019	Vulnerability in in DirectWrite Could Allow Denial of Service
MS12-020	Vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2671387)
MS12-021	Vulnerability in Visual Studio Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2651019)
MS12-022	Vulnerability in Expression Design Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2651018)

Quest ChangeBASE RAG Report Summary