desktop dilemma - docs.media.bitpipe.comdocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_12x/io_120848/item... ·...
TRANSCRIPT
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 1
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
cOmputerweekly.cOm
XX-XX MONTH 20156-12 OCTOBER 2015
SH
YLE
ND
RAH
OO
DE/
ISTO
CK
Desktop dilemmaOffice 2016 joins Windows 10 as Microsoft urges
businesses to migrate, but are they enough to make a desktop upgrade worthwhile?
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 2
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Accenture spends€€25m on European centre in DublinAccenture is opening an IT hub in Dublin that will house 200 staff focused on the research, develop‑ment and design of cognitive com‑puting, internet of things, analytics, security and digital technologies. The move sees Dublin join technol‑ogy labs in the US, France, Beijing and Bangalore. The IT services sup‑plier will invest €25m in the cen‑tre, which will be used to test out technologies for customers.
Universal Credit digital service moves into the cloudThe Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has migrated the digital service being developed for Universal Credit into the cloud. DWP procured an infrastructure‑as‑a‑service platform from supplier SCC through the G‑Cloud framework to provide additional capacity for the service. This is to ready it for further roll‑out and expansion in the future.
Most UK users deploy more than one backup productUK customers routinely have more than one backup product in use and for most this is to maintain peace of mind. Many use more than one backup product for different envi‑ronments and consider the biggest headaches to be the time they take and uncertainty over whether they will work, according to a survey commissioned by backup supplier Macrium, which questioned more than 500 UK backup product users.
Legal documents reveal HP’s failings over AutonomyWhile Hewlett‑Packard (HP) sues Autonomy founder Mike Lynch and CFO Sushovan Hussain for alleg‑edly cooking the books, the extent of HP’s oversight of the deal have come to light. Legal papers filed by shareholders against HP allege that experts warned that Autonomy’s technology was outdated and suf‑fered from increased competition from numerous other companies.
Nationwide Building Society deploys artificial intelligence to reduce back-end complexity
Nationwide Building Society is using artificial intelligence technology from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to reduce the complexity of back-end systems as it introduces more digital products. The building society is using the ignio neural automation system from TCS, initially for batch performance and capacity management.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
NEWS IN BRIEF
NAT
ION
WID
E
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 3
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
NEWS IN BRIEF
Lloyds Banking Group launches scheme to develop digital talentLloyds Banking Group has announced a two‑year programme for graduates to develop the skills required to lead digital develop‑ments in the finance sector. The graduate scheme will be broken into three eight‑month assignments in the bank’s digital division.
Brit spooks snoop on users of the BBC, Facebook, Google and moreDocuments released to news service The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed the alarming extent of online monitor‑ing conducted by the UK’s elec‑tronic surveillance agency GCHQ.
Women an untapped cyber security resource, report revealsWomen remain under‑represented in the information security work‑force, yet represent a talent resource that the industry should tap into, a report has revealed.
TelecityGroup to offer private Azure ExpressRoute connectionTelecityGroup is now able to Office 365 users a private internet con‑nection to the cloud‑based busi‑ness productivity suite. The firm is among several partners to have been authorised by Microsoft to offer its Azure ExpressRoute ser‑vice to Office 365 customers.
120-day patching gap puts many firms at risk of cyber attackCompanies regularly leave vulner‑abilities unpatched for longer than it takes attackers to exploit them, according to a study by Kenna. Most companies take an average of 100‑120 days to remediate vulner‑abilities, it revealed.
British Airways picks Juniper to build out cloud, core networkBritish Airways has deployed a private cloud network from Juniper Networks to underpin and reinforce customer‑facing operations such as ticketing and check‑in. n
UKtech50 2015 – help us find the most influential people in UK ITComputer Weekly has launched the sixth annual UKtech50, our definitive list of the movers and shakers in UK IT – the CIOs, industry executives, public servants and business leaders driving the role of tech-nology in the UK economy. Click here to send us your nominations.
❯ Common PKI practices undermine trust in applications.
❯ Spark user survey suggests growth beyond Hadoop.
❯ Businesses fail to test or maintain mobile applications.
❯ Celebrity search results loaded with malware.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 4
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Is Microsoft Office 2016 reliable enough for business?Last month Microsoft debuted Office 2016 – one day after the company’s Skype outage. Cliff Saran reports
Microsoft’s Office 2016 represents an important shift for the software publisher as, with Windows 10 available for existing users as a free upgrade until the end of the
year, the suite becomes the company’s default money maker.In its 2014 annual statement, Microsoft reported revenues for
its Office Consumer line had declined $243m (8%), reflecting the transition of customers to Office 365 Consumer, as well as con‑tinued softness in the consumer PC market. Reported revenues for Office 365 Consumer grew by $316m, reflecting a growth in the move to subscriptions. “We ended fiscal year 2014 with over five million subscribers,” the company said.
Moving to a subscription model means less need for Microsoft to push out new features. One of the main criticisms of recent Office product updates has been the ever‑increasing amount of unwanted pre‑installed software, or “bloatware”.
Last year, Julia White, Microsoft’s general manager for Office, told Computer Weekly: “We are trying to switch from offering lots and lots of features to providing the user with the ones most useful to them, at the time they need them.”
Microsoft faces a challenge in persuading users to adopt new features, with plenty of competition from Google’s enterprise offering, Google for Work, and the open‑source Libre Office suite. Arguably, neither has the depth of the Microsoft product but, for some users, their feature sets are good enough.
ImprovIng collaboratIonOne new feature in Microsoft’s latest release is Office 365 Planner, which the firm said helps teams organise their work, with the ability to create new plans, organise and assign tasks, set due dates and update a status with visual dashboards and email notifications. The planner will be available in preview to Office 365 First Release customers in the first quarter of 2016.
Microsoft has also updated its OneDrive for Business feature. The update – which became available last month – includes a syn‑chronisation client for Windows and Mac, to enhance sync reli‑ability; increased file size and volume limits per user; a new user interface in the browser; mobile enhancements; and new IT and developer features.
ANALYSIS
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 5
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
The latest version of Office adds co‑authoring in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote. It includes real‑time typing in Word that lets users see others’ edits as they make them.
Office 2016 includes built‑in data loss prevention across Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. Microsoft said it has provided IT administrators with tools to manage content‑authoring and document‑sharing policies.
The company has added multi‑factor authentication and enter‑prise data protection – which it said would be available for the Office Mobile apps for Windows 10 before the end of 2015, and for the desktop apps in early 2016 – enabling secure content‑sharing within corporate boundaries.
productIvIty promIsesMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella said: “The way people work has changed dramatically, and that’s why Microsoft is focused on re‑inventing productivity and business processes for the mobile‑first, cloud‑first world. These latest innovations take another big step forward in transforming Office, from a familiar set of indi‑vidual productivity apps to a connected set of apps and services designed for modern working, collaboration and teamwork.”
ANALYSIS
“The way people work has changed dramaTically”
Satya Nadella, MicroSoft
❯Take a look around Microsoft Office 2016 with Computer Weekly’s photo gallery
Office 2016 OneNote (above) and Excel versions (below)
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 6
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
He said he hoped the product would enable people to collabo‑rate more easily and improve the way businesses are run. In a blog post about Office 2016, Nadella wrote: “Our ambition to re‑invent productivity includes re‑inventing the business process.”
The product reflects Nadella’s ambition to offer portability of experience. One such enhancement is the user’s ability to con‑tinue working on a document from where they left off, using Office Online services, Office Mobile apps or Office 2016 desktop apps.
Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice‑president for Office, said: “We’re committed to rich co‑authoring and collaboration across our native clients, starting with Word 2016.
“By the end of 2015, we’ll have Office 365 Groups insights and discovery in Office Delve. We will have a new generation of per‑sonal work analytics in Office Delve to help individuals, teams and organisations be more effective at work by understanding their reach and impact, time allocation and network.”
relIabIlIty or rIsk?For CIOs, the Skype outage two weeks ago will raise questions about the reliability of Microsoft’s cloud services, (Skype runs on Microsoft Azure). Office 2016 aims to provide seamless, cloud‑based collaboration for teams of workers. The challenge for Microsoft is to convince IT leaders that the collaboration features in Office 2016 are reliable enough to make a serious business use.
But without this assurance, co‑authoring, Skype integration and other cloud‑powered collaborative services in the software will look too risky for some. And if people avoid the new features, there will be fewer reasons to continue using Microsoft Office. n
ANALYSIS
Office 2016 365 Groups in Outlook (above) and Delve People View (below)
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 7
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at workAt Dreamforce 2015, Salesforce.com’s Adam Gross and Stephanie Buscemi discussed the internet of things app economy and action-orientated business intelligence apps. Brian McKenna reports
Salesforce’s Internet of Things Cloud service and an upgrade to its Wave Analytics service are significant developments because they are part of a broader trend of action‑orientated
apps, according to two of its leading spokespeople.Chief operating officer Adam Gross runs the supplier’s plat‑
form as a service, Heroku. He was the co‑founder and CEO of Cloudconnect.com, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2013.
At Salesforce’s 2015 Dreamforce event in San Francisco, Gross explained the importance of the cloud computing company’s most recent technical developments with respect to the trend, exem‑plified by car ride hiring company Uber, of “refashioning the cus‑tomer experience” through apps that are event‑driven – pushed out rather than pulled.
He invoked a near‑future scenario of checking into a hotel, whereby rather than having to check in at a desk, a beacon will detect your arrival and send a digital key to your smartphone. You won’t have to telephone for room service. Instead you’ll press an app button and food will be delivered within 15 minutes.
The technology to make this sort of customer interaction work takes the form, in Salesforce’s world, of Thunder and Lightning. Thunder is, according to Gross, the underlying real‑time event processing engine behind Lightning, which is an app development console used by business professionals among the supplier’s cus‑tomers. “We provide tools for developers, under the hood. Some of that is based on open‑source software, like Kafka and Redis, and some of our own proprietary technology. And it all runs on Heroku,” he said.
“The next phase of customer relationship management [CRM] is to think not of what CRM used to mean – you call the support centre or send an email. The next phase turns on the phenom‑enon of you as a consumer generating a torrent of data. This means we need a new data architecture, a new programming model and new applications to support what connecting to your customers means now. It’s moving from a pull model to a push model – sensing and acting proactively. The internet of things cloud infrastructure is about enabling this new, event‑based
ANALYSIS
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 8
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
computing model to operate, and about more proactive and intelligent customer interactions,” said Gross.
He claimed the future is already here in the form of “sophis‑ticated companies such as Uber and Lift which are dynamically changing pricing based on demand. Think about all the data being ingested in real time to enable that”.
Much of the technology behind what he sees as the new wave of CRM comes from LinkedIn and Twitter, said Gross, but he cited the IT team at the Financial Times as another example of a Salesforce customer that “gets” digital in the way that a down‑town San Franciscan company would.
changIng It ownershIpBut he also argued that a key player for companies implement‑ing newer ways of engaging customers is the chief marketing officer (CMO): “More and more we are talking to the CMO. The idea that technology interest ends at the IT person’s door is no longer the case. And these CMOs are amazingly sophisticated.
“Technology has never been more strategic or important to organisations, no question. Either the CIO will evolve to serve that critical function or it will emerge in other places. IT leader‑ship needs to focus on what adds value to the business, be more risk‑taking and accept the cloud. It’s hard to see how you can be an IT organisation that satisfies the needs of the business if you are still debating the cloud.
“IT has an essential role in understanding the risk profile of technologies but it cannot do that in an unsophisticated way,” said Gross.
ANALYSIS
SALE
SFO
RCE.
CO
MSalesforce’s chief operating officer, Adam Gross, told the Dreamforce
conference: “IT leadership needs to focus on what adds value to the business, be more risk-taking and accept the cloud”
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 9
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
the analytIcs waveStephanie Buscemi, chief operating officer, analytics, at Salesforce, joined the company in 2014 to head up its Wave Analytics busi‑ness, launched at Dreamforce 2014.
Speaking at this year’s Dreamforce, Buscemi said business intelligence (BI) and, for more sophistication, analytics, needed to be systematically embedded in workflows that issue actions for sales, service and marketing staff.
“There is a new type of [action‑orientated] BI emerging here,” she said. “Our sweet spot is getting analytics to sales and ser‑vice staff – not analysts, not IT.
“Salespeople have historically used [in Salesforce] the operational reporting they get in the sales and service clouds. But they needed a more intuitive user interface – with the Wave visualisations they’ll now get that through the Lightning dashboards.”
Wave Analytics can bring third‑party and other data, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) data, to bear on business decisions for salespeople and service staff, said Buscemi. It can be embedded in desktop and mobile apps, she added.
“The other piece is delivering Wave actions. This makes a salesperson more productive because they are working within Salesforce, not having to go into email, and it is integrated with Chatter [Salesforce’s collaboration tool].”
But what’s the benefit to companies that already have a lot of BI tools? “Yes, Wave is a co‑exist. But we are seeing custom‑ers getting away from selling using PowerPoint, instead doing so directly from dashboards,” she said.
Buscemi gave the example of Verizon, where global sales sen‑ior vice‑president George Fischer has implemented Wave for his salespeople to get a complete view of their products.
In the mid‑market, she said, Wave is more apt to be a replace‑ment technology for companies that are already using Salesforce strategically. Wave is not focused on data mining as such, though Salesforce plans to put native predictive capability on the prod‑
uct in the near future to support and measure sales reps. “It’ll be about predictive analytic apps for sales, service and marketing people,” said Buscemi.
Wave also has connectors out to the big data world, in the likes of Hadoop, Splunk and Google, she added, but that is in its infancy. It is also early days for Wave in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, she said, but confirmed Barclays is an early customer.
“Personally, I’m having a blast. It’s great that there are hundreds of predictive analytics startups out there, but this is like being on a rocket ship,” Buscemi concluded. n
“wave is a co-exisT. BuT we are seeing cusTomers move away
from selling using powerpoinT, using dashBoards insTead”
StephaNie BuSceMi, SaleSforce
ANALYSIS
❯Read more about the important trends driving the future of cloud apps.
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 10
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applicationsBank believes its investment in cloud applications gives it an edge in business agility. Brian McKenna reports
Al Rayan Bank, the only Sharia‑compliant bank in the west‑ern world, believes it can make changes more quickly than established banks, thanks to its investment in cloud.
Matthew Glover, head of IT and change delivery at Al Rayan Bank, says its use of cloud amounts to a competitive advantage against big banks, and its customer base of 60,000 gives it an edge against challenger banks which are similarly unburdened by legacy.
“We can make changes quickly. For example, we are now rebuild‑ing our online account application system to make it more mobile friendly. That will take us three to four months using Salesforce, whereas for a major retail bank it would take years,” he says.
Being an Islamic bank makes Al Rayan’s business different, too. “Money has no intrinsic value in the Islamic faith,” says Glover. This means interest is forbidden. “We pay profit based on the investment we make with the money.”
When buying a house, rather than take out a loan plus interest mortgage, you pay rent to a bank, which buys the property for you, and a payment for the use of the share that the bank owns.
CASE STUDY
Al Rayan Bank head of IT and change delivery Matthew
Glover says the bank’s use of cloud means it “can make
changes quickly”
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 11
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
All contracts are written in an Islamic way, and no funding is raised from stock markets, which are considered too risky. And no investment is permitted in industries considered unethical, such as pornography, arms, tobacco, alcohol or gambling.
Glover is not himself Muslim, and neither are many of its cus‑tomers, he says.
He heads a change‑focused team of 14 IT and business profes‑sionals, and the bank employs 150 people altogether.
The IT estate is a mix of on‑premise and cloud. Apart from the core banking system, which is a Misys platform running on an IBM AS/400, Salesforce is the most important part of the bank’s technology landscape.
march to the cloudIn 2009, the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB), as it then was, as founded in 2004, began moving its customer relationship man‑agement (CRM) systems to the cloud. It deployed Salesforce in
March 2010, initially implementing the supplier’s Sales Cloud to replace its existing Siebel CRM system.
At the end of 2011 into the beginning of 2012, the bank implemented a new online account application facility, including automatic anti‑money laundering and anti‑fraud checks, on the Salesforce platform. For around 80% of prospects, the entire process is done electronically and the account is set up straight away.
By July 2014, 85% of IBB’s business was coming from its website and contact centre – a rise from 49% in July 2012.
Al Rayan Bank can now update its Home Purchase Plan product in a matter of hours, rather than the three or four days it took previously, and process home finance applications 10% faster.
The bank’s most recent use of Salesforce technology is cashiering, which was put in place in April this year.
The plan is to get rid of technology that is “becoming legacy”, and Salesforce is more likely to be turned to than not.
A management information (MI) system is one of the big projects in the bank’s planning, alongside a refreshed mobility platform. “We want to make sure the browser experience in mobile is just as good as the app,” says Glover.
In relation to its MI and business intelligence (BI) capabilities, the bank is looking at using Salesforce’s cloud‑based Wave data analytics product. Better reporting and clearer customer analytics, predicting future behaviour, are the goals.
The bank is looking at Tableau and Qlik, as well as Salesforce technology for BI. For other aspects of its business, it has looked at Sugar CRM and Microsoft Dynamics.
CASE STUDY
al rayan Bank’s plan is To geT rid of Technology ThaT is “Becoming legacy”, and
salesforce is more likely To Be Turned To Than noT
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 12
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
not just chatterBut one area where Salesforce is proving its business value for the bank lies in the use of Chatter, the social enterprise element.
“Everyone is on Chatter,” says Glover. “There is a head office group, a recognition board for things done well, and ‘could do better’ boards. It is the means of distribution for corporate messages – for instance, from our CEO.
“The thing is our employees are on Salesforce all the time. Admittedly, it was a slow grower, but it is better than an intranet
and more interactive than email. People like to use it, it’s similar to Facebook.
“It would be hard to say if it has made us more productive, but it is better for getting the message out quicker than email,” he adds.
The bank’s overall approach is to try to combine on‑premise with cloud IT to be as effective as possible, says Glover. “Our core bank‑ing system is on‑premise, our corporate website is on Azure, and we use Salesforce, which has high uptime and reliability. But cloud is not right for everything. It’s a balanced approach.” n
CASE STUDY
❯ Is cloud computing almost too good to be true for banks?
“chaTTer was a slow grower, BuT iT is BeTTer Than an inTraneT and more inTeracTive Than email”
Matthew Glover, al rayaN BaNk
MAT
DES
IGN
S24/
ISTO
CK
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 13
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Austerity drives joined-up council IT with Force.comCliff Saran speaks to Peterborough City Council’s IT head about the local authority’s use of software as a service
Peterborough City Council is winding down its server room and has taken up a two‑year contract to migrate its IT infra‑structure onto Amazon Web Services.
The council is also using Box for document sharing, rather than upgrading its EMC storage area network.
But the authority is taking its cloud strategy even further. Offloading IT infrastructure onto the cloud is not the end of
Peterborough’s cloud journey for Digital Peterborough City Council assistant director Richard Godfrey, who heads up the council’s IT. He wants to provide council applications via Salesforce.
“We will move all our applications onto the Force.com platform,” says Godfrey.
The council is looking at moving housing services, regulatory services, adult social care and children’s services onto Force.com, and will use the Salesforce service cloud. Its human resources platform, which went live in June, is also built on Force.com.
By building council applications on Salesforce, Godfrey says Peterborough will be able to pool data, with Salesforce customer relationship management software holding the master data.
INTERVIEW
OLI
VER
MA
LLIC
H/F
LIC
KR
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 14
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
But putting data into the cloud raises data protection concerns. “The roll‑out [of Box] is being done by the governance team, not by IT. Although I introduced Box, we have governance buy in,” explains Godfrey.
The data privacy issues relate to the type of data being stored, he says. “Some people say you can’t use the cloud because it is in America. In some cases that may be true, but in a lot of cases it’s not.”
In a service such as highways, the data stored for logging roads, street lights and potholes is less critical than the data collected by children’s services, adult social care and health services, for
example. “When we go into children’s services to roll out Box, we do a risk assessment of what kind of data is being held and what we can store,” says Godfrey.
The assessment also checks the level of security a supplier has been accredited to, to match the accreditation with the type of data being stored.
Beyond the matter of data security in the cloud, Peterborough also needs to consider how many of its core, line‑of‑business applications that support council services can be moved over to Salesforce.
Godfrey is confident Salesforce is flexible enough to support the council’s software‑as‑a‑service strategy. The authority has part‑nered with a Salesforce specialist to build council applications on the Force.com platform, which will then be sold to other councils on the Salesforce applications market.
It supports austerIty measuresHaving a single data‑sharing platform that can run predictive ana‑lytics across data that was previously in silos could help the coun‑cil to prevent small problems becoming bigger and costlier.
“You can get a much better picture of residents,” says Godfrey. “It will allow us to look at whether a noise complaint, for instance, is linked to an adult social care case, which is linked to a housing issue.”
But data protection laws can often get in the way, he says. Referring to cases that have highlighted a lack of co‑ordination between police, healthcare and social services, Godfrey explains: “If the data protection rules are there to protect people, then they
INTERVIEW
Godfrey: “Having a single data-sharing platform
will give us a much better picture of residents”
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 15
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
are not doing a very good job… a child has died and data protec‑tion has stopped you from sharing data.”
In fact, data sharing is arguably the only way councils and other public sector organisations can work through current austerity measures to deliver services.
“With the cuts we have to make, it is simply not possible for us to wait for things to filter through,” says Godfrey. Joined‑up data, enabling predictive analytics, is one of the ways IT can help the council cope with austerity.
Rather than looking at making the IT department more efficient, Godfrey wants to focus on the use of IT across the whole council. “We are in the same boat as most local authorities, in that we have all had our budgets cut,” he says. “The adult social care bill is £60m. The IT bill is £6m. So let’s take 10% off theirs, not 10% off mine.”
This means the council needs to look at how to invest in IT wisely to enable its departments to work more efficiently.
In the past, local authorities undertaking IT‑driven transforma‑tion programmes would rework internal processes, which Godfrey
says would lead to staff cuts. “But in a lot of cases, you ended up with staff who were stressed and overworked because you did not change the systems they were trying to work from,” he says.
Godfrey’s approach is about combining a workforce reduction with technology, systems and the devices that staff use.
It as a servIce brokerAs council staff are offered more choice in the applications they use, the ability to share and exchange files in different for‑mats becomes important. The council has systems that require Internet Explorer 7 and others that are not supported on Office 2013.
Godfrey says the applications should not hinder the council’s ability to change the way a department operates. “We are trying to give staff as much flexibility as possible,” he says. “We do not want to be limited by the applications we use.”
This represents a change from IT being the department that says no, to one where Godfrey can support shadow IT in a way that does not limit people’s ability to try new software. “For instance, if someone wants to use Evernote, we can make sure it is secure and is connected to the Active Directory,” he says.
Godfrey believes local government IT is moving towards becoming a broker of services. “In a few years, you will end up with a team of relationship managers who own the relationship with Salesforce, Box or Amazon,” he says.
Patching and upgrades will be done by the suppliers, but there will also be a core team that will develop the platforms and work with council departments to improve them, Godfrey explains. n
INTERVIEW
❯Can the NHS avoid major IT expenditure for joined-up health?
“we are in The same BoaT as mosT local auThoriTies, in ThaT we have
all had our BudgeTs cuT”richard Godfrey, peterBorouGh city couNcil
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 16
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Computer Weekly, 2nd Floor, 3-4a Little Portland Street, London W1W 7JB
General enquiries 020 7186 1400
Editor in chief: Bryan Glick 020 7186 1424 | [email protected]
Managing editor (technology): Cliff Saran 020 7186 1421 | [email protected]
Head of premium content: Bill Goodwin 020 7186 1418 | [email protected]
Services editor: Karl Flinders 020 7186 1423 | [email protected]
Security editor: Warwick Ashford 020 7186 1419 | [email protected]
Networking editor: Alex Scroxton 020 7186 1413 | [email protected]
Management editor: Lis Evenstad 020 7186 1425 | [email protected]
Datacentre editor: Caroline Donnelly 020 7186 1411 | [email protected]
Storage editor: Antony Adshead 07779 038528 | [email protected]
Business applications editor: Brian McKenna 020 7186 1414 | [email protected]
Business editor: Clare McDonald 020 7186 1426 | [email protected]
Production editor: Claire Cormack 020 7186 1417 | [email protected]
Senior sub-editor: Jason Foster 020 7186 1420 | [email protected]
Sub-editor: Ben Whisson 020 7186 1478 | [email protected]
Sub-editor: Jaime Lee Daniels 020 7186 1417 | [email protected]
Sales director: Brent Boswell 07584 311889 | [email protected]
Group events manager: Tom Walker 0207 186 1430 | [email protected]
Cloud rings time for the desktop OS suite
Microsoft would be happy with me right now – I just upgraded to Windows 10. It was free, as a consumer, of course, so that helped. But frankly, the only reason I did so was because my seven‑year old Windows Vista laptop was coughing and splut‑tering like a dodgy Volkswagen diesel.
Apparently I have followed the lead of more than 100 million people who have downloaded Windows 10 so far – that’s a little over 5% of all PCs in the world.
And so, I can now happily continue using my Windows 10 laptop at home to do exactly the same things I used my old Windows Vista laptop for – which is basically anything that needs a proper keyboard. Maybe 80% of what I once used the home laptop for is now done on my non‑Windows smartphone or tablet. And I don’t think I’m at all unusual in that.
So the big question that remains for Microsoft, as it applauds itself for the rapid take‑up of Windows 10, is – how many of those 100 million users are businesses? Very few, for a bet.
So what is the compelling reason for an organisation to go through the obvious pain of a Windows migration for all its users – in rolling out the upgrade, re‑educating users and retraining help desk staff – yet again? For most organisations in an age of virtualisation – and when hardware suppliers are building security directly into the processor – there isn’t one. It is perhaps telling that, when Computer Weekly asked an expert to write the first article in the Buyer’s Guide to Windows 10 Migration series starting this week, (see page 17), he wrote mostly about why you don’t really need a desktop anymore.
Nobody justifies IT purchases based on a three‑ or five‑year payback period anymore – the length of a typical Microsoft licensing deal. It needs to deliver a return in a year or two at most, often less. It’s hard to make that case based on Windows 10. That’s even before you consider previous bad experiences with pain points such as application compatibility.
And the same questions now face Office 2016 – do you really need those extra features? Do they really justify the upheaval of corpo‑rate migration? Almost certainly not.
The new Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella knows all this. Windows and Office today are simply vehicles to get businesses onto Azure and Office 365. The real question for IT managers is not how to upgrade to Windows 10 and Office 2016 – but why? n
Bryan Glick, editor in chief
❯Read the latest Computer Weekly blogs
EDITOR’S COMMENTHome
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 17
Windows 10 is already running on approximately 100 million devices. As Microsoft is offering Windows 10 as a free upgrade for users from the decent but old Windows 7, and the badly imple‑
mented and generally disliked Windows 8, consumers have been taking the opportunity to move to the new, continuous‑delivery version of Windows – the last that Microsoft will provide a num‑ber to. From now on, new functionality will be added at regular intervals, downloaded at the same time as the regular patches.
For businesses, this raises a few issues. The end of life of the Windows XP operating system (OS) has been much discussed, with those still using it finding support increasingly expensive – and open to security risks and a lack of a native, up‑to‑date browser. Organisations on Windows 7 and 8 are wondering whether the licence cost, (Windows 10 is not free to businesses, but is covered under volume licences supporting upgrades), and the business cost, (the upgrade work, re‑educating users and retraining help desk staff), of the change are worthwhile.
It is probably a good time to completely review where your organisation is with its user device strategy. As bring‑your‑own‑device (BYOD) programmes have come into broader use, users are no longer necessarily using Windows‑based devices as their main mobile appliance.
Apple iPads and Google Android tablets have gained the lion’s share of the market in the mobility arena – and these do not run Windows applications natively. Microsoft may have released native versions of its Office suite for tablets, but few other Windows application suppliers have gone to the trouble.
The besT deskTop sTraTegy: ForgeT The deskTop
Before licensing and rolling out an updated operating system, it may be time to revise your IT estate, says Clive Longbottom
BUYER’S GUIDE TO WINDOWS 10 MIGRATION | PART 1 OF 3
Home
BITO
NTA
WA
N/I
STO
CK
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 18
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Some commentators have long predicted the fall of Microsoft, with Linux as a desktop OS taking over, and free OS software replacing commercial off‑the‑shelf software. This has not happened to any great extent – the support skills and need for user retraining on using a new OS and supporting new applications is just not very attractive.
Most still use old Windows applications – one of the big reasons many have stuck with Windows XP. After XP, Microsoft changed the way applications were run – and 30% of applications written for XP did not run directly on later OSs. Vista was released in 2007 and any applications you have that would not run on Vista are now likely to be over 10 years old – and due for a thorough review as to their suitability for purpose.
wHat is tHe desktop for?If you do decide to stick with Windows and migrate to Windows 10, then PC suppliers such as Dell, HP and Lenovo will have the capabilities to help with migration – and to put in place the capability to run old applications on the new platform, either by creating a new installation method that will create a working application (as developed by ChangeBASE, now part of Dell; or AppDNA, now part of Citrix); or to run a virtualised environ‑ment on top of Windows 10 for a specific application.
However, many may be starting to wonder just what the purpose of a desktop is, anyway. It used to be a self‑contained computer used for running local applications and possibly saving the data created on a shared platform. Is that really the case any longer?
With the increasing use of software as a service, a lot of workloads are run on servers in a facility under someone else’s control – all the user sees is the graphical interface. Therefore, desktop per‑formance is no longer the main issue; indeed, Intel has realised this and we will see far less in the way of business messaging around how fast desktop machines are, other than for workstations used in
areas such as engineering or media work.This will still leave a lot of applications in business that need
a Windows platform. For those who are mobile, installing these onto a discrete desktop machine doesn’t make much sense – they will only be able to use the applications when they are sat at that machine. Issuing them with a laptop and a parallel set of applica‑tions can lead to licensing and data issues – and they will probably want to use their Apple or Android device anyway. So what to do?
The obvious route is to look at a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). By concentrating all desktops in a central datacentre, organisations not only provide a consistent experience to users across multiple different devices and device types, but also regain control over the data users create.
The main suppliers in the VDI market are Citrix and VMware, although a large ecosystem of other suppliers has grown up to add greater capabilities. For example, RES Software and Centrix Software provide discovery tools that enable organisations to see who is using what before they migrate, to understand what the best desktop systems would be for groups of people, and roll the desktops out in a manageable way.
BUYER’S GUIDE
❯The release of Windows 10 is unlikely to make much difference to the long-term prospects of the PC market,
analyst Gartner warns.
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 19
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
computerweekly.com xx-xx mOnth 2015 19
FSLogix provides software that enables images to be created that have strong control over what users can run and what they can install themselves through virtualising the Windows registry, minimising the need for multiple different server images.
VDI provides the capability for users to access their Windows‑based desktop from their non‑Windows tablets and smartphones – but this can lead to performance issues. Numecent provides an approach it calls “cloudpaging” that can harness the power of the end device to run Windows‑based applications at native speed. Applications too slow to run over the wide area network in a VDI environment can be streamed down to the device and run as a native application, providing a much better user experience.
days are numbered for desktop as a workHorseIn most cases, the desktop and other user devices are rapidly moving from being native devices running enterprise applica‑tions (even in client/server mode) to a pure access device, ena‑bling users to mix and match between Windows, non‑Windows and cloud‑based apps and functionality, through browsers or thin clients. The capability of HTML5 to create a strong user experience should not be overlooked – creating applications that can run directly to any device is becoming far easier.
This can offset the cost of VDI implementation by running exist‑ing PCs for longer, sweating the assets. In some circumstances it will work but, unless a third‑party browser is installed, much web‑based capability will not be available with older Internet Explorer versions, and will leave security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, for example to infiltrate the VDI servers.
BUYER’S GUIDE
Windows 10 brings the Start menu back and allows the user to customise it
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 20
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
Intel has decide that, in its revised approach to the desktop – where it knows it cannot push speeds and feeds any more – it will build security directly into the processor. Multi‑factor authentica‑tion is used – yet the signature created by a fingerprint scanner, iris scanner or other biometric device is stored in the processor and cannot be directly read. Instead, when using biometrics, a signature is created and compared to that held on the chip. If it matches, the chip issues a security token used to provide access. When the device shuts down or goes into sleep mode, the token is revoked, to be issued as new next time.
Such an approach means users will no longer need username/password pairs – so improving security while reducing the need for organisations to have large numbers of agents on helpdesks helping users reset their passwords.
Through this and other changes to the capabilities of desktops, Intel hopes it will still be able to drive the need for organisations to refresh their desktops – but whether or not those organisations will regard such capabilities as retaining sufficient value to the business for broad‑scale refresh programmes to be carried out remains to be seen.
So, yes – it is time to review what is happening at the desktop. It is also time to forget the desktop and concentrate on what the business wants from its end‑to‑end IT platform. In most cases, this will lead to an understanding that a desktop PC is no longer what is required as a workhorse – although it may still be useful as a simple access device. n
BUYER’S GUIDE
Clive Longbottom is founder of analyst company Quocirca
Windows 10 allows the user to show their face or touch a fingertip to log in to the device
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 21
Step aside, MapReduce. You’ve had a good run, but today’s big data developers are hungry for speed and simplicity. So, when it comes to picking a processing framework for new workloads to run on their Hadoop environments,
they are increasingly favouring a nimble young rival called Spark.At least that’s the message from big data suppliers who are
throwing their weight behind Apache Spark, casting it as big data’s next big thing.
At the recent Spark Summit in San Francisco in June, Cloudera chief strategy officer Mike Olson spoke of the “breathtaking” growth of Spark and the profound shift in customer preference that his company, a Hadoop distributor, is witnessing as a result.
“Before very long, we expect that Spark will be the dominant general‑purpose processing framework for Hadoop,” he said. “If you want a good, general‑purpose engine these days, you’re choosing Apache Spark, not Apache MapReduce.”
Olson’s words were chosen carefully, in particular his use of the phrase “general‑purpose”. His point was that, while there is still plenty of room for special‑purpose processing engines for Hadoop, such as Apache Solr for search or Cloudera Impala for SQL queries, the battle for supremacy among processing frame‑works that developers can use to create a wide variety of analytic workloads (hence “general‑purpose”) is now a two‑horse race – and it’s one that Spark is winning.
Quite simply, Spark addresses a number of long‑standing criti‑cisms that developers have levelled at MapReduce – in particular, its high‑latency, batch‑mode response.
spark or Mapreduce For enTerprise iT?
The younger, nimbler Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures. Jessica Twentyman looks at
the pace, scope and scale of replacement
BIG DATA
Home
MIA
KIE
VY/
ISTO
CK
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 22
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
“It has been known for a very long time that MapReduce was a good workhorse for the world that Hadoop grew up in,” says Arun Murthy, founder and architect at Hortonworks.
He points out that the technology was created in the labs at Google to tackle a very specific use case: web search. More than a decade on, it has evolved – but perhaps not enough to match the enterprise appetite for big data applications.
“Its strength was that it was malleable enough to take on more use cases,” Murthy adds. “It’s been known forever that there are use cases that MapReduce can solve, but not in the most opti‑mum manner. Just as MapReduce disrupted other technologies, it’s entirely natural that new technologies come along to disrupt or displace MapReduce.”
speed and simplicitySo what’s so great about Spark, anyway? The main advantage it offers developers is speed. Spark applications are an order of magnitude faster than those based on MapReduce – as much as 100‑fold, according to creator Mathei Zaharia, now CTO at Databricks, a company that offers Spark in the cloud, running not on Hadoop, but on the Cassandra database.
It is important to note that Spark can run on a variety of file systems and databases, among them the Hadoop Distributed File System (HFDS).
What gives Spark the edge over MapReduce is that it han‑dles most of its operations in‑memory, copying datasets from
distributed physical storage into far faster logical RAM memory. By contrast, MapReduce writes and reads from hard drives. While disk access can be measured in milliseconds to access 1MB of data, in‑memory accesses data at sub‑millisecond rates. In other words, Spark can give organisations a major time‑to‑insight advantage.
Gartner analyst Nick Heudecker says: “One cli‑ent I recently spoke to, with a very large Hadoop cluster, did a Spark pilot in which it was able to take a job from four hours [using MapReduce] to 90 seconds [using Spark].” For many organisa‑tions, that kind of improvement is highly attractive, he says. “It means they can move from running two analyses a day on a given dataset to as many analyses as they like.”
At the Spark Summit in June, Brian Kursar, director of data sci‑ence at Toyota Motor Sales USA, described the improvement his team had seen in running its customer experience analysis appli‑cation. This is used to process about 700 million records taken from social media, survey data and callcentre operations, to spot customer churn issues and identify areas of concern, so that employees can intervene where necessary.
Using MapReduce, the analysis took 160 hours to run. That’s almost seven days, Kursar pointed out to delegates. “By that point, [that insight] is a little too late,” he said. The same process‑ing job, rewritten for Spark, was completed in just four hours.
Other big advantages that Spark can offer over MapReduce are its relative ease of use and its flexibility. That is hardly surprising, since Mathei Zaharia created Spark for his PhD, at University of
BIG DATA
❯Apache Spark can supposedly run batch-processing programs
100 times faster than MapReduce. Does the supplier
hype equal user adoption?.
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 23
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
California Berkeley, in response to the limitations he had seen in MapReduce while working in summer internships at early Hadoop users, including Facebook.
“What I saw at these organisations was that users wanted to do a lot more with big data than MapReduce could support,” he says. “It had a lot of limitations – it couldn’t do interactive queries and it couldn’t handle advanced algorithms, such as machine learn‑ing. These things were a frustration, so my goal was to address them and, at the same time, I wanted to make it easier for users to adopt big data and start getting value from it.”
Most users agree that Spark is more developer‑friendly, includ‑ing Toyota’s Kursar, who told the Spark Summit: “The API [appli‑cation programming interface] was significantly easier to use than MapReduce.”
In a recent blog, Cloudera’s head of developer relations, Justin Kestelyn, claimed that Spark’s “rich, expressive, identical” APIs for Scala, Java and Python can reduce code volume by a factor of between two and five times, when compared to MapReduce.
But this ease of use does not mean flexibility is sacrificed, as Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri pointed out in a report published earlier this year. On the contrary, he wrote, Spark includes spe‑cialised tools that can be used separately or together to build applications. These include Spark SQL, for analytical queries on structured, relational data; Spark Streaming, for datastream pro‑cessing in near real time by using frequent “micro‑batches”; MLib for machine learning; and GrapX for representing, as a graph, data that is connected in arbitrary ways, for example networks of social media users.
BIG DATA
MIA
KIE
VY/
ISTO
CK
What gives Spark the edge over MapReduce
is that it handles most of its operations
in-memory, copying datasets from
distributed physical storage into far faster logical RAM memory
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 24
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
early daysA significant hurdle for Spark, however, is its relative immaturity. At financial services company Northern Trust, chief architect Len Hardy’s team are confident users of the Cloudera Hadoop distribution, employing a wide range of tools on top of their implementation, including Hive (for data warehousing), Flume (for large‑scale log aggregation) and Cloudera Impala (for running SQL queries).
But, right now, Hardy is holding back on using Spark in a production environment. “We’re staying away from Spark for now,” he says. “It’s a maturity issue. The technology has great promise and we will be using it, there’s no doubt about it – and we’re already using it in some proof of concepts.
“But it hasn’t been out all that long, so for our enterprise data platform, where we’re delivering data to part‑ners and clients and they’re making business decisions on it, we need tools to be rock solid, and I just don’t feel Spark is at that point yet.”
That caution is not unwarranted. All the major Hadoop suppli‑ers are, naturally, scrambling to bolster their enterprise support for Spark, but as Gartner’s Heudecker points out: “Commercial support for Spark is almost always bundled with other data
management products, but information managers and business analytics professionals must be aware that Spark’s development pace makes it challenging for bundling suppliers to constantly support the latest component versions.”
APIs and best practices are still very much a work in progress, Heudecker adds, and suppliers may struggle to support all the
available components in the Spark Framework equally. Enterprise users should take great care not to deploy mission‑critical applications on unsupported or partially sup‑ported features.
Cloudera’s Olson acknowledges that Spark is still a young technol‑ogy. “It’s still early doors – there’s still a lot of work needed on security requirements, for example,” he says.
But, several months after the Spark Summit, he is sticking to his mes‑sage that, at some point in the not‑so‑distant future, most new analytic
applications for Hadoop will be built on Spark, not MapReduce.“The dominant share of cycles in the average Hadoop cluster
will be on Spark – and that tipping point will come sooner rather than later,” says Olson. “I can’t make a prediction of exactly when that will be, but I will say that some of our customers, especially in financial services and consumer goods, have already hit that tipping point. Many others are bound to follow.” n
BIG DATA
“The dominanT share of cycles in The average hadoop clusTer
will Be on spark – and ThaT Tipping poinT will come sooner
raTher Than laTer”Mike olSoN, cloudera
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 25
Anyone reading the British press would be left with the impression the UK is, at best, a half‑hearted member of the European community and, at worst, positively at odds with its continental neighbours.
While it’s true to say there are some areas of disagreement, there are commercial areas where the UK is not only fully engaged, but actively leading the field.
Cloud computing is one area where British expertise is really showing the way. Take the UK government’s G‑Cloud project, which is currently attracting a good deal of interest across Europe, as an example of how public sector procurement can be done dif‑ferently and more efficiently.
Public sector procurement is a key component of the European Cloud Computing Strategy, launched by former European Union (EU) commissioner Neelie Kroes in 2012.
Speaking at the time of the launch, she said: “Public IT procure‑ment is about 20% of the market, but today it is fragmented with limited impact.
“We can harness this buying power through more harmonisa‑tion and integration and through joint public procurement across borders. It is a true win‑win: The cloud market will grow, bringing opportunities for existing suppliers and new entrants; and cloud buyers, including the public sector, will buy more with less and become more efficient,” she added.
lack of entHusiasm for cross-border cloud strategyIt’s fair to say there hasn’t been much movement in establishing a common procurement policy across Europe to date.
could g-cloud be The answer europe is looking For?
With European public sector organisations looking to overhaul how they buy IT, some are wondering if the UK's G-Cloud model could be
the answer they are looking for. Max Cooter reports
IT SERVICES
Home ERH
UI1
979/
ISTO
CK
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 26
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
There’s been no effort to establish a continent‑wide cloud‑first approach, for example, as the US and UK governments have done, and there’s still much resistance to the idea of European cloud services crossing borders. Some countries, notably Germany, maintain the attitude that IT services should be acquired nationally – and that philosophy remains a barrier.
However, the UK G‑Cloud approach remains a model that demonstrates how public cloud procurement could be enabled in the future, and some organisations are already looking to it for inspiration.
Bob Jones is head of Helix Nebula – the European Science Cloud initiative which aims to establish a Europe‑wide cloud infrastruc‑ture – and is grateful for guidance from G‑Cloud about how the organisation should approach procurement.
“The G‑Cloud has helped. We were keen to learn from G‑Cloud as it’s difficult to find something that’s so well developed in other EU member states,” says Jones.
The EU has also set up the Procurement Innovation for Cloud Services in Europe (PICSE) to advise public sector bod‑ies. According to Strategic Blue CEO James Mitchell, a PICSE consultant, the organisation is also looking to advise small to medium‑sized enterprises.
Jones says PICSE was set up to look at how cloud is procured, particularly by public bodies and research organisations, as there is an issue with the procurement processes organisations are legally obliged to go through.
“Research institutes have to go through request for proposal [RFP] processes, which are not designed for buying utility services,” he says.
Jones also points out some problems faced by procurement bodies: “Contracts will have items such as computing services, so instead of writing ‘computing services’, you’re going to write ‘cloud’ – that doesn’t work very well.”
There are accounting issues too. “A server is an asset, with the cost spread over the lifetime of that server – pay as you go doesn’t fit well into this model,” he adds.
looking aHeadProcurement managers have to look beyond these difficulties and explore new areas. The three partners of PICSE – Cern; the Cloud Security Alliance and Trust‑IT Services – want to build on the work carried out by Helix Nebula to help the process along.
Sara Garavelli, project lifecycle strategist and project manager at Trust‑IT Services, describes how Helix Nebula demonstrated the suitability of cloud services for public sector organisations, but there were stark differences according to size.
“The big EU research organisations are quite aware of what procuring cloud means, but when it comes to small to mid‑sized research organisations, many of them have no clue about cloud. They are attracted by the cloud benefits, but they don’t know how to approach the procurement,” she says.
There are many reasons for this reluctance to adopt cloud. “They are put off by interoperability issues with existing systems
IT SERVICES
❯ Is outsourcing, the dominance of incumbent
providers, or a lack of central government guidance to blame for the low number of councils
using G-Cloud?
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 27
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
and by lock‑in issues. They don’t have any idea how to run a cloud business case and they don’t know what legal and financial impli‑cations cloud brings,” she says.
To aid the procurement process, PICSE has introduced a self‑assessment tool, called the Wizard, to help public research organisations better understand the issues with their procure‑ment processes.
According to Garavelli, the Wizard should help research insti‑tutes procure services, even if it does have limitations. “Of course, it cannot replace the legal and procurement advice provided by experts, but it could give them with warnings and suggestions on how to deal with the full cloud procurement cycle,” she says.
The tool is designed for IT managers from public research organ‑isations willing to procure significant amounts of cloud services.
Garavelli says there are considerable difficulties faced by these bodies. “Writing cloud tenders is quite a challenging and expen‑sive task for public sector organisations. Cloud skills – technical, legal and financial – must be there to run successful cloud pro‑curement,” she says.
However, organisations can get some financial assistance with this, thanks to two instruments launched by the European Commission (EC): The pre‑commercial procurement and the public procurement of innovation instruments.
“Buyers can receive some funds from the EC to procure innova‑tive cloud services. This is quite clever as the EC is not allowed to fund any commercial procurement, so in this case it’s a good opportunity for these public sector organisations,” says Garavelli, explaining that these financial initiatives are not widely known.
tHe cHallenge aHeadThere are serious challenges in trying to procure services across Europe, as the multiplicity of different rules and regulations hin‑der the take‑up of cloud. As Garavelli says: “Different EU coun‑tries have different regulations and laws. Managing a procure‑ment of this type is really challenging and expensive.”
The UK’s G‑Cloud initiative, with its ease of use, offers a good model, but PICSE’s Mitchell admits it has its limitations.
“If you want to deploy infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and Salesforce, and try to do that on one RFP, you’ll need someone to put it all together – it’s going to be expensive,” he says.
Nevertheless, there’s a new awareness across Europe that things have to change and cloud services are on the agenda. The EU has put plenty of initiatives in place to help the process along, recognising the barriers in place.
As yet, the UK’s G‑Cloud initiative is in a class of its own, but there’s plenty of time for the rest of the continent to catch up. n
IT SERVICES
“cloud skills – Technical, legal and financial – musT Be There To
run successful cloud procuremenT”Sara Garavelli, truSt-it ServiceS
computerweekly.com 6-12 OctOber 2015 28
Home
News
Is Office 2016 reliable enough for business?
Salesforce Thunder, Lightning and Wave show the evolving app economy at work
Al Rayan Bank finds business agility in cloud applications
Austerity drives joined‑up council IT with Force.com
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to Windows 10 migration
Why Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures
Could G‑Cloud be the answer Europe is looking for?
Downtime
The rise of the robotic maidApparently, 41% of Brits claim their busy profes‑sional and personal lives mean they would invest in some sort of help that means they don’t have to do housework, if they could afford it. So now, it seems, they are buying robotic maids.
According to AppliancesDirect.co.uk marketing manager Mark Kelly, sales of domestic robotic helpers are on the rise.
“Once upon a time, having an electronic device which would independently clean your house
for you while you get on with your life was only a pipe dream – and even in the time since these devices became a reality, they were often seen as an expensive luxury,” he said.
“But from our sales data and research it seems they are becoming more commonplace and more people are becoming open to the idea of investing in this kind of appliance, as they make the choice to not spend their limited free time cleaning the house.”
That sounds good to us. Where do we sign? n
“pull quoTe here pull BiTTer Bold small caps 22pT xx
xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx”
DOWNTIME
❯Read more on the Downtime blog