Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: software

  • Getting academics onto the cloud

    Getting academics onto the cloud

    Offering free products to students and academics has long been a tactic used by software companies to build their market presence. The current fight for dominance in the cloud is seeing the same tactics being used.

    Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Amazon Web Services’ Glenn Gore about his company’s academic support program.

    Part of that conversation ended up in a story for The Australian about how researchers are now using cloud computing services and it’s worthwhile looking at how AWS are using this program to cement their products’ market positions.

    “We work with the majority of universities across Australia,” Gore said. “It’s part of an international focus around how we support the education sector in general.”

    In some respects AWS’s behaviour isn’t new, for years Microsoft, Autodesk and Adobe have had programs offering free or deeply discounted products for academic or student use. The success of those schemes in becoming defacto industry standards is no small reason why these companies have dominated many sectors.

    Microsoft themselves have the similar Bizspark program for tech startups and it’s easy to see how that initiative is helping push Azure’s adoption into a field that has been dominated by AWS.

    One of the drawbacks though with cloud computing services is the risk of ‘sticker shock’ where customers end up with big bills. One of the universities I spoke to in researching the story recounted how 0ne of their faculties was presented with a huge AWS invoice because their engineers didn’t provision the services correctly.

    This is where AWS’s team steps in with advice for researchers, “in the case of Koala Genome Project use the on-demand model, the standing pricing model for the cloud,” recounts Gore in pointing out the nature of their work could use spot-pricing to take advantage of cheaper prices in off-peak times. “As a result of making that one change they were able to do eighty percent more research.”

    Getting more research time is always attractive for researchers and Dr Rebecca Johnson who leads the Australian Museum’s part of the koala consortium was particularly effusive about the support from AWS staff,

    “What we have been able to access via this partnership with AWS is compute time and compute capacity that we just would not have had access too,” Dr Johnson said in a media release. “It would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars to create and we just would not build such a computer system these days. You would not create your own computer infrastructure as we would only use a fraction of it anyway. So, it is great for us to piggy back off these already built systems.”

    Being a relatively small institution, the Australian Museum is a good example of how cloud computing can work for those without the resources of big universities or corporations in the same way small businesses and startups can access resources formerly only available to enterprises.

    Amazon’s programs though show the Microsoft model of getting students and startups onto their systems early pays dividends. It’s good for academic institutions but one wonders whether it’s also another form of vendor lock in.

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  • Reaping the security dividend

    Reaping the security dividend

    Boards and executives have finally got the message about security John Stewart, Chief Security and Trust Officer at Cisco.

    For most of the computer era security has been seen as an inhibiter to innovation and speed to market, but now with most businesses finding they face a three year time frame to transform in face of digital disruption Stewart says corporate managments now see security of their products as being a valued feature.

    Stewart bases his view on an online survey, Cybersecurity as a Growth Advantage, where Cisco polled 1,014 senior executives with extensive cybersecurity responsibilities in 10 countries and 11 in-depth interviews with senior executives and cybersecurity experts.

    From this, Cisco found a third of businesses now sees security as being a competitive advantage.

    Digital disruption drives the shift

    Stewart puts this down to boards and senior executives realising how widespread digital disruption is, “it’s highly unlikely Weight Watchers saw the disruption coming from Fitbit,” he muses. “In fact it’s hard to see how anyone could have seen that coming.”

    As a consequence of these widespread and often unexpected disruptions, corporate leaders are trying to shore up their existing positions against unforeseen competitors by shifting to digital platforms as quickly as they can.

    “We have to do digital and if we are going to do digital we have to have strong cybersecurity controls,” says Stewart in explaining why cybersecurity is an important part of this strategy.

    Security as a cornerstone

    “By making cybersecurity a cornerstone of their businesses, security-led digital organizations are able to innovate faster and more effectively, because they have significantly greater confidence in the security of their digital capabilities,” Stewart says.

    Certainly managers are worried about the risks of going digital with Cisco reporting many businesses have put projects on hold due to concerns about security risks, “a lack of cybersecurity strategy can cripple innovation and slow business, because it can hinder development of digital offerings and business models.”

    According to Cisco’s findings, seventy-one percent of executives said that concerns over cybersecurity are impeding innovation in their organizations. Thirty-nine percent of executives stated that they had halted mission-critical initiatives due to cybersecurity issues.

    Encouraging moves

    While the possibility that corporate leaders are taking cyber security seriously is encouraging, that change is yet to be seen in the marketplace, particularly in the consumer Internet of Things market where being first trumps security, design considerations or even basic safety.

    The real test for how important cybersecurity really is remains in the marketplace — will customers pay more for secure products?

    One sense that in Cisco’s marketplace of enterprise customers where security failures could have expensive, embarrassing and possibly catastrophic consequences, customers will pay more for trustworthy devices. In the consumer field it may well be different.

    Probably the most important finding from Cisco’s survey is that businesses are now understanding security has to be designed into products and processes rather than being bolted on as an after thought. If that is true, then we have come a long way.

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  • Transforming a dysfunctional company

    Transforming a dysfunctional company

    Once dominant IBM is facing another major market transition, do they have the management skills the navigate that change?

    Robert X. Cringely writes a depressing account of the company’s tactics in cutting its head count but the main thrust is how IBM are cobbling together a bunch of disparate products under umbrella brand names as a bloated, bureaucratic management puzzles with a marketplace change.

    At the heart of everything is the question of what IBM’s customers really want, as Cringely points out.

    The lesson in all this — a lesson certainly lost on Ginni Rometty and on Sam Palmisano before her — is that companies exist for customers, not Wall Street.  The customer buys products and services, not Wall Street.

    While investors are important, businesses only exist if customers want to pay for their wares. If a company can’t convince people to buy their products, or find a way to subsidise it like the media industry did for most of the Twentieth Century, then there is no reason for the venture, or its industry, to exist.

    For many technology companies this is the situation they are facing right now, many other industries aren’t far behind.

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  • Amazon Web Services and the new rules of business

    Amazon Web Services and the new rules of business

    The one company that has driven both the adoption of cloud computing and the current tech startup mania is Amazon Web Services.

    Later this week AWS celebrates its tenth birthday and Werner Vogels, the company’s Chief Technical Officer, has listed the ten most important things he’s learned over the last decade.

    The article is a useful roadmap for almost any business, not just a tech organisation, particularly in the importance of building systems that can evolve and understanding that things will inevitably break.

    Importantly Vogels flags that encryption and security have to be built into technology, today they are key parts of a product and no longer features to be added later.

    Most contentious though is Vogels’ view that “APIs are forever”, that breaking a data connection causes so much trouble for customers that it’s best to leave them alone.

    Few companies are going to take that advice, particularly in a world where changing business needs mean APIs have to evolve.

    There’s also the real risk for businesses that their vendors will depreciate or abandon APIs leaving key operational functions stranded, this could cause major problems for organisations in a world that’s increasingly automated.

    Vogel’s commitment to maintaining APIs may well prove to be a competitive advantage for Amazon Web Services in their competition with Microsoft Azure, Google and an army of smaller vendors.

    Werner Vogel’s lessons are worth a read by all c-level executives as well as startup founders looking to build a long term venture, in many ways they could define the new rules of business.

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  • When software ate the network

    When software ate the network

    I’m attending the Asia Pacific Cisco Live in Melbourne Australia this week which is starkley illustrating the shift in communications technologies and the business models around them.

    To kick off the press program Cisco made a joint announcement with Australian incumbent telco Telstra on the rollout of a smart software defined networking product.

    Software Defined Networking uses basic computer hardware, basically glorified personal computers, to do the jobs of the expensive routers, switches and network appliances that were insanely profitable for companies like Cisco a few years ago.

    It wasn’t so long ago when Cisco executives were taking technology journalists out to earnestly explain how Software Defined Networking (SDN) was feasible.

    Today, SDN is defining both the telco and communications industries as companies like Telstra look at bundling IT networking and software services into their offerings to prop up their falling margins. India’s Reliance Communications are a good example of how providers are trying to shift into new marketplaces.

    For telcos, communications vendors  and IT hardware sellers the changing technologies illustrate what Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreesen meant when he described how “software will eat the world.’

    Software is eating the IT hardware industry and telcos are seeing – hoping – it’s another lucrative opportunity. Businesses in other sectors should be thinking about how software is going to change their world.

    Paul travelled to Melbourne for Cisco Live as a guest of Cisco

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