Posts by DavidKelly

Secrets of SOA Standardization Success

Posted on by DavidKelly

In general, it’s hard to get things right. Well, maybe not hard, but it definitely takes more work (or at least more focus) to do just about anything right. Unless you have superhuman abilities, like Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps — but I guess it’s taken even him a huge amount of work to win all those gold medals, even with his great natural abilities.

It’s the same with SOA development. Doing SOA right requires a lot of hard work and some dedicated focus. Doing it well also usually requires that organizations standardize their SOA development efforts and processes. So doing SOA well is a long-term process, not a one-time accomplishment.

That’s why over the past few weeks I’ve been spending time interviewing a wide range of IT and business executives to learn their secrets for standardizing SOA development and achieving SOA success. Here’s the top five recommendations:

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Top Seven White Paper Approaches

Posted on by DavidKelly

White papers provide a range of benefits—from articulating technology or business vision, to providing detailed examples of how a new technology or product can address a specific business problem, to establishing thought leadership. Custom white papers can be written to elicit a range of results. However, we’ve found through experience that most white papers fit into our Top Seven list of White Paper Approaches.

1. Thought Leadership. When it’s important to establish a thought leadership position, white papers are a particularly good approach. Thought leadership white papers can be used to establish credibility, to steer purchase decisions, and to set the agenda.

2. Business Benefits. Many white papers are aimed at business executives to help them understand why their organization needs a specific product or technology. Business benefit-oriented white papers help put technology into a business context.

3. Technical Education. White papers can provide an in-depth discussion of technical issues and help educate key technical decision-makers on new technologies or alternative solutions.

4. ROI Analysis. ROI-oriented white papers provide a framework for understanding the value and benefits that can be derived from a software investment.

5. Setting the Sales Context. White papers can also help set the sales context by providing prospects with an understanding of the financial and technical components of a solution. They can also be used to specify the decision criteria that organizations should use when selecting products. These papers provide a framework for a salesperson to walk through the sale.

6. Competitive Positioning Papers. Competitive positioning papers articulate how a product, company or service should be compared to alternatives.

7. Position Papers. Position papers articulate a company’s position on a technology or business matter, such as a technical standard.

For information on how Upside Research can help your company create a winning white paper, contact us at info@upsideresearch.com

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Maximizing User Experience and Perfomance

Posted on by DavidKelly

What’s happening? Unfortunately, that’s a question I ask (well, okay, I think it) a few times a week as my laptop seems to go into “zombie mode” — some background service or process suddenly decides it needs to jack up its CPU usage, and I’m left sitting and twiddling my thumbs waiting for a simple Microsoft Word document to open up. Lately this has been happening to me because of some problem with my iTunes Outlook synchronization process, which after upgrading to the latest version of iTunes suddenly decided that it never finishes — it continues to take up to 40 percent CPU utilization even after the synchronization is done. Such problems with PCs and applications can occur for hundreds (or thousands) of different reasons and with different causes.

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Increasing Productivity and Profitability

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Increasing Productivity and Profitability by David A. Kelly
August, 2008 : Profit Magazine

Over the past few years, IT services giant Unisys has embarked on one of the most extensive makeovers in the industry, refocusing itself from a hardware-oriented company to one focused on services and solutions.
At the same time, Unisys has also transformed its IT infrastructure. The company has reduced the total number of applications in its portfolio by 35 percent, decreased its server footprint by 50 percent through virtualization, increased its use of off-the-shelf applications to 60 percent, and achieved costs per end user that are 30 percent lower than comparable organizations.

But one area that had eluded Unisys’ transformation was critical to its future profitability—the area of resource management and professional service automation (PSA), including project setup, budget and funding, online resource requests, résumé searches, assigning resources to projects, and more. With about 22,000 employees in billable jobs, Unisys had to make sure its consultants focused and executed efficiently.

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The Next Steps for SaaS

Posted on by DavidKelly

A few months ago, I wrote about some of the variations that organizations should consider when it comes to thinking about software-as-a-service (SaaS). Traditionally, many organizations have thought about software-as-a-service as something that allows organizations to simply connect to a network (or “cloud”) and access data, applications or services dynamically and remotely.

Want to learn about security architectures for SOA? Attend ebizQ’s upcoming webinar. Learn more.

A key poster child for such an approach has long been Salesforce.com. Since it’s summer, and there’s a bit more space for spreading out (hopefully on the porch, with lemonade, in a hammock) and considering new ideas, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the topic of my previous column and delve a little deeper into new approaches for software-as-a-service.

Endeavors Technologies is a good example of a different approach to software-as-a-service, with impressive capabilities in the application virtualization and streaming areas.

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Best Practices for Business Intelligence

Posted on by DavidKelly

Sometimes thought control isn’t such a bad idea. And by thought control, I don’t simply mean a “big brother,” Apple computer, 1984-type situation, but a situation where people’s thoughts are influenced (yes, I guess that’s a nicer word) by certain knowledge. Influenced (perhaps educated) so that they have the information to make better decisions and take the best actions at the right time.

The goal of any good business intelligence implementation is to reflect the model of an organization’s business and enable employees to use that model to analyze, answer and decide important questions or decisions. As I noted in my last column, BI solutions can be particularly helpful for organizations during turbulent economic times because they can help companies answer questions about their business (what’s most profitable? What is the impact of making these product changes? What products or service are our customers buying?), and then help them change to adapt to the new business requirements.

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BI as a Boon to Business: Now More Than Ever

Posted on by DavidKelly

When times are good, it’s easy to let things slide a bit. For example, last year was a good year for me — my family was healthy, I had steady work, and things were good financially. I didn’t have to worry too much about the day-to-day details of what I was doing — everything was working well and there weren’t any worries.

This year is a different story. Luckily, my family is still healthy and things are good in terms of business, but I’m feeling much more impacted by our nation’s economic challenges — much more so than I was last year. Gas costs a lot more. Food costs a lot more. And the prices for the rest of the services we consume and products we purchase are going up as well.

The result? Like many people, I’m looking for ways to save money. Carpooling the kids to baseball. Consolidating what would have been multiple individual errands last year into single, better planned excursions this year. Saying no to selected purchasing. Making sure we eat all the leftovers and use all the food in the freezer before purchasing new groceries. When you stop to examine things, there’s usually a fair amount of ways to save money and/or identify new ways to make some additional money (yard sale, anyone?).

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Endeavors Application Jukebox

Posted on by DavidKelly

Endeavors Technologies believes it is one of the best-kept secrets in application virtualization and streaming. From its roots as a research project at University of CA Irvine more than ten years ago, the company has grown and developed three new versions of a commercial product, Application Jukebox, aimed at providing on-demand application delivery through a portable application virtualization and streaming architecture. Perhaps most interesting is Application Jukebox SaaS Edition, which extends the flexibility of on-demand virtualization and streaming beyond the enterprise to deliver applications to users when and where they need them. The applications of Application Jukebox are numerous, from enterprise IT application distribution and license enforcement and version control to consumer gaming through a web portal. Currently, 500,000 users are utilizing Application Jukebox (or one of its previous versions). If rumors regarding an upcoming pilot program from Microsoft that will allow service providers to stream Microsoft Office through a SaaS model prove true, Endeavors will be poised to make an even more significant impact on the SaaS market.

Company Strategy
– Today, offer three different versions of Application Jukebox to appeal to enterprise IT departments, individual developers, and consumer-focused ISVs.

– Deliver fully configurable virtualization by enabling administrators to choose between sandboxed and integrated virtualization, or any combination of the two.

– Partner with Service Providers and ISV’s to enable them to offer a variety of application virtualization and streaming options to their customers.

– Extend channel development in enterprise market through channel partnerships that define the benefits of Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition.

Implementation Strategy
Application Jukebox includes three primary components to enable application virtualization and streaming. The Application Jukebox Player is the client installed on end-user machines that creates the virtual environment for the application to execute in. The Application Jukebox Server is based on an Apache server, and provides the interface for the SaaS environment as well as the administration component to oversee license enforcement and a database to manage users and provide reporting capabilities. Application Jukebox Studio is used to create streamable and virtualized application sets from an original installer. As a SaaS implementation, Application Jukebox enables applications to be streamed to the user desktop with zero footprint – once the user is finished using the application, it is removed. This is a significant advantage of the solution from an implementation perspective because it doesn’t consume any bandwidth on the desktop and also provides protection from piracy as the application is never installed on the client. The server can be installed by following the install wizard and documentation. Installation typically takes several hours for someone who understands the prerequisites: Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS (optional for a SaaS Edition), Apache Tomcat/Java KRE and Active Directors (optional service for Enterprise Edition).

Critical Success Factors

– Successfully build out channel relationships to extend reach of Application Jukebox into target vertical markets.

– Educate market about advantages of application virtualization and streaming for the enterprise.

– Leverage recent market momentum of SaaS to extend reach to undeveloped channels.

– Communicate specific benefits of Application Jukebox in relation to competitors and illustrate how Application Jukebox is being used by each category of users (IT, service and content providers, consumer, etc.)

Upside Analysis
SaaS is an approach to enterprise software that is gaining steam across corporate IT departments. Its benefits are numerous – the ability to better control and manage application licenses, upgrades, and usage while delivering exactly the application services that users need, when they need them and where they need them. Endeavors Technologies has been working to bring the benefits of application virtualization and streaming in a SaaS model for quite some time, and Application Jukebox is the culmination of its decade-plus efforts. Among the benefits of Endeavors’ solution are its light footprint, standards-based foundation, portability, flexibility of applications, and rapid deployment. The fact that Application Jukebox enables the administrator to control whether an application is launched in a “sandbox” or integrated virtualization environment, or any combination of the two, is a key differentiator from the competition.

When Endeavors Technologies calls itself one of the “best-kept” secrets, it wasn’t far off the mark. Upside Research believes that the technology that Endeavors has developed has a wide range of applications, and the company is pursuing several of them currently. The consumer application of streaming games is an intriguing one and has been very successful to date. However, we believe that the enterprise capabilities of this technology are equally, if not more, valuable, and we encourage Endeavors Technologies to further develop these channels with specific enterprise-focused applications and success stories. The ability to optimally control application distribution, licensing, and updates will deliver significant benefits to overworked IT departments. The biggest challenge that Endeavors Technologies faces is having the bandwidth to develop all of the potential that Application Jukebox presents.

Download the Complete Endeavors Application Jukebox Product Brief.

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Putting Oracle Database 11g to Work

Posted on by DavidKelly

Putting Oracle Database 11g to Work by David A. Kelly
May 2008 : Profit Magazine

Your IT staff may get excited about the nuts and bolts of a new software release, but the ultimate success of an upgrade is based on the benefit it delivers to the business. Profit took a look at Oracle’s new database—Oracle Database 11g—to get an executive’s take on it. Here are five ways it will benefit your enterprise:
Protect and manage unstructured data. Unstructured data—the volumes of information stored outside the database—is the fastest-growing type of enterprise data. From XML datatypes to geospatial objects, organizations are storing and managing more large data files—without the added protection, security, and management capabilities associated with traditional database solutions.

Oracle SecureFiles, a new feature in Oracle Database 11g, allows you to deliver this information from the database with the same speed and performance of a file system. But SecureFiles allows you to compress (for reduced storage requirements), encrypt, (for greater security) and deduplicate (for greater information accuracy) this data. By moving unstructured data into databases, you can better track and secure important data that is currently spread around your enterprise.
“We think this is the last remaining piece to really help nudge customers to move more and more of their high-value business documents out of file systems into databases, and get all the benefits of a database—the reliability, availability, security,” says Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle’s senior vice president of database server technologies. “It makes it easier for them to deal with their auditors who are always auditing them against compliance requirements.”

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Software as a Service–The Next Step

Posted on by DavidKelly

I really like the idea of software-as-a-service. But I’m not ready yet to give up my own applications. They’re too powerful, too handy, and too hard to live without.

But maybe that’s about to change.

For me—and for many other people—that’s what software-as-a-service has been about. Web-based solutions designed to be used by people connected to the Internet. Of course, another approach to software has a service has been technologies like Java or browser plug-ins, which enable people to selectively and dynamically download and use software programs.

But there’s another angle to software-as-a-service. It doesn’t just have to be about using Web interfaces and browsers to access hosted software, or downloading plug-ins. It can also be about streaming full-blown Windows applications from a centralized location (hosted environment, corporate servers, etc.) down to local computers (laptops or desktops). Most users have plenty of raw processing power available. What’s been missing is a way to easily package applications, stream them efficiently, install them correctly, and manage any licensing requirements on an on-going basis.

That’s were companies like Endeavors Technologies comes in. While Endeavors (based in Irvine, California, www.endeavors.com) has been around for a dozen years or so and has had successful application streaming products available for years, their new Application Jukebox SaaS Edition directly addresses the issues of packaging and managing the delivery of desktop applications, upgrades and patches to customers in a software-as-a-service model.

I believe that there’s a big opportunity for both software companies and organizations when it comes to the “virtualization” of traditional desktop software programs and software-as-a-service, and that the market is going to see a significant expansion of their use over the next years.

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