software | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Securing the industrial internet

GE’s acquistion of Wurldtech is another example of just how seriously engineering companies are taking security in the internet of things, hopefully those building consumer systems are paying attention too.

One of the big concerns with connecting devices to the public internet is security, particularly when equipment that was never intended to be on the net is suddenly wired up.

When the world’s computers started to be connected to the Internet in the mid-1990s it became apparent very quickly that most of the operating systems then in use were hopelessly vulnerable to security problems.

The worry is the same thing will happen today with the Internet of Things, particularly with household equipment which – if the PC industry’s experience is anything to go by – will open up whole new fields of risk to homeowners.

While having your kettle or home networked hacked could be painful, it’s nothing compared to the risks of infrastructure or vital equipment being compromised.

So GE’s acquisition of security company Wurldtech is an important development as it focuses on the software aspects of its products and the Industrial Internet – GE’s own term for the internet of things.

Techcrunch’s Ron Miller has a good run down on GE’s purchase of Wurldtech where Neil McDonnell, the CEO of the acquired business, describes the company’s two pronged approach to security.

First, they do testing to discover vulnerabilities in the system and they certify sites that are secure. Secondly, they provide specific security solutions around a system such as a substation or pump.

For GE, Wurldtech will help them secure existing infrastructure and equipment that’s being connected to the net, what they learn should also help designers of the next generation of equipment build security into their products.

Synergies aren’t easy money

Avis are finding Zipcar’s synergies aren’t as great as they hoped, perhaps they’re looking in the wrong place.

Last year car rental giant AvisBudget acquired the vehicle sharing service Zipcar, at the time it looked like the established player was buying in the tech smarts of younger startup.

Citing ‘synergies’ at the time of a takeover is always a warning sign that a corporate acquisition may not go well and so it has proved with Avis’ efforts with Zipcar as travel news site Skift reports;

Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Gaming, Lodging, Restaurant & Leisure Management Access Forum in Las Vegas earlier this week, AvisBudget CEO Ron Nelson said fleet-sharing has turned out to be more complicated than the company thought because there’s a cost tied to moving the vehicles from one location to another.

That’s a strange statement as a casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that if any organisation understood the costs of moving vehicles around it would be a car hire company.

Apparently that’s not the case and the ‘synergies’ from acquisition will be pushed back to 2015.

Synergies are elusive things and it may well prove that Ron Nelson would be better served by examining how Zipcar’s technology, algorithms and flat management structures can be applied to a more staid organisation like Avis.

The real value in companies like Zipcar and Uber is the way they are applying technology to moving physical goods around – it’s no surprise that Uber’s Travis Kalanick describes his ambition for the future of his company as being the Amazon for logistics.

For Avis, Zipcar’s opportunities lie in more that just enhancing the company’s fleet utilization; understanding the marketplace and predicting demand is where the real gains could be made.

Eliminating the donkey work

Ross Mason, founder of Mulesoft, sees Big Data as one of the challenges facing business

Mulesoft founder and CTO Ross Mason worries about how companies are going to manage the data generated by the Internet of Things.

“I don’t think we’re ready for the amount of data that these devices are designed to build up,” Ross observes in the latest Decoding the New Economy video.

Ross’ aim in founding Mulesoft was to eliminate the donkey work in connecting IT systems and he sees the data moving between enterprise applications being a challenge for organisations

“We have energy companies that have connected their smart grid systems to their back end systems and most of them delete almost all the data because of the cost of storing that much data without doing anything with it.”

“Big data is still in the realm of we’re figuring out the questions to ask.” Ross states, in echoing the views expressed by Tableau Software founder Pat Hanrahan a few weeks ago.

“There’s a little bit of hype around big data right now, but it’s a very real trend;” Hanrahan said. “Just look at the increase in the amount of data that’s been going up exponentially and that’s just the natural result of technology; we have more sensors, we collect more data, we have faster computer and bigger disks.”

The interview with Ross covers his journey from setting up Mulesoft to the future of big data and software. It was recorded a few days before the company announced a major capital raising.

Mulesoft’s elimination of software ‘donkey work’ is another example of how the IT industry is changing as much of the inefficiencies are being worked out of the way developers and programmers work.

In many ways, Ross Mason’s story illustrates how the software industry itself is being disrupted as much as any other sector.

Tell me something I didn’t know

Co-founder and CTO of Sugar CRM, Clint Oram, sees software changing in the way it delivers value to users and customers.

“Tell me something I didn’t know about my customer;” is what Clint Oram demands of his software.

“If you think about legacy of Customer Relationship Management tools it’s really been about entering something I already knew about by customer so my manager can keep track of me.”

Oram sees that changing with Sugar CRM, the open source Customer Relationship Management software company he co-founded in 2004 at a time when the software industry was coming out of the post dot com bust depression.

“There was a huge backlash by customers to the enterprise software market,” Oram remembers. “There were a lot of hopes and promises made of all this fantastic software that would change the world. The reality was a lot of it didn’t do anything.”

Foundations for the cloud

In Oram’s view, that disillusionment formed the basis of today’s cloud based software businesses with the market’s demand that software be delivered as a service, reducing up front commitments to any one product, commercial open source that gave customers a stake in development and annual subscription licensing.

That last factor – a radical change to the traditional software model that saw small businesses buy boxed programs and larger enterprises negotiate complex agreements with expensive implementation projects – is the biggest change to the modern software industry.

Oram sees that as challenging those established giants like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft; “in the past it was ‘here’s my software, goodbye and good luck. Maybe we’ll see you next year.”

“If you look at those names, the competitors we see on a day-to-day basis, several of them are very much challenged in making the shift from perpetual software licensing. It’s been a challenge that I don’t think all of them will work their way through, their business models are too entrenched.”

“Software companies really have to stay focused on continuous innovation to their customers.”

Freemium challenges

From his ten years in business, Oram learned the freemium model is a difficult way to run a business, “we learned that the freemium model is challenging and you gotta really focus on differentiation across your software editions and deliver clear value to each customer segment.”

While the Freemium business model remains a challenge, Oram sees mobile and the cloud as driving the CRM industry with the sector focusing on delivering more customer insights as software increasingly goes mobile and gets better at predicting behaviour.

“We’re taking these cloud, mobile based platforms that can be delivered anywhere and anytime,” says Clint “and now work on collecting that data about your customers and telling you what you should do next.”

“How do you help your customer to get the fullest value out of working with you.”

Delivering value to customers is a challenge not just for the software industry; in an era where business is far more competitive, it’s a question facing all industries.

Bill Gates and the fight for trustworthy computing

Microsoft’s task of securing its software was a huge undertaking, one that isn’t over yet.

One of the great, and possibly under recognised, business achievements of the computer age was Bill Gates’ recognition that Microsoft’s online strategy was flawed shortly after releasing Windows 95. A few years later he had to repeat the task when the company found its products were almost dangerously insecure.

In a sprawling account of the company’s response to the security problems at the turn of the century, Life In The Digital Crosshairs, describes how Microsoft’s engineers responded to their then CEO’s call for Trustworthy Computing.

The problems at the time were vast, compounded by Microsoft’s failure to take security seriously – the first version of Windows XP came out without a firewall which ensured thousands of users were quickly infected by the computer worms rampant on many ISPs networks at the time.

As the story tells, it was a long difficult task for Microsoft to change complex and interdependent computer code involving 8,500 of the company’s engineers.

One suspects the cultural challenges were even greater in getting the managers supervising the army of engineers to understand just how serious the security threat was to Microsoft’s users.

The biggest challenge though was Microsoft’s own product line; because the company hadn’t ‘baked’ security into its software, key products like Microsoft Office relied on lax security practices to work properly.

Office and Windows also had the problem of legacy code and applications; one of Microsoft’s selling points over Apple and other competitor systems was that the company took pride in supporting older hardware and software, this in itself creates security risks when programs designed in the MS-DOS days still want to write to the system kernel.

For Microsoft the journey isn’t over, although the shift to cloud computing has changed – and simplified – the company’s security quest by making legacy issues in Office and Windows less important.

Microsoft and Gates’ success in seeing off the threats posed by the internet gave the company another decade of computer industry dominance, however dealing with security issues was nowhere near successful.

In the end however it wasn’t security issues that saw Microsoft lose its dominance; the internet eventually prevailed as Apple revolutionised mobile computing while Amazon and Google improved cloud services.

With Bill Gates reportedly finding himself getting more involved in the company he founded, the challenges of both the internet and security are two that he’s going to be very familiar with. It will be interesting to see what we write about Microsoft in 2022.

Software’s modern loom weavers

Are we coming to the end of the hand crafted era of software development, Pegasystem’s Alan Trefler thinks so.

Are we coming to the end of the hand crafted era of software development? Pegasystem’s Alan Trefler thinks so.

“Technology has completely dis-served the modern economy;” Alan Trefler, the founder and CEO of software vendor Pega Systems, told the audience at the opening of his company’s new office in Sydney yesterday.

Trefler sees there being an ‘execution gap’ between what software promises and actually delivers; that development is too slow and programs don’t give users what they need.

Ending the hand crafted software era

A key reason for this in Trefler’s view is that too much software is ‘hand crafted’ and that his company’s object orientated methods speeds up development time and delivers a better product.

This may well be true, Pegasoftware’s client list is impressive, however moving from the age of ‘hand crafted software’ may well spell the end of many IT industry worker’s careers.

One of Pegasystem’s key Australian customers is the Commonwealth Bank and the company’s CIO, Michael Harte, gave some comments at the opening that illustrated how the software industry is changing.

Freeing up resources

“Does an IT organisation want to change fast enough to adopt a new model driven approach so they can free up capital and free up resources?” Harte asked.

That freeing up resources and capital is exactly what befell the Luddites when the 18th Century mill owners decided to change the technology they used.

For modern IT workers, the last decade has been tough as a whole generation of business analysts, software engineers and project managers have found the enterprise computing industry has been offshored and automated; Harte and Trefler are describing how that process is by no means over.

“Older project models necessitated people to build a use case and then to design something, go through requirements and start crafting software, that’s on old idea,” says Harte who sees a model orientated approach as being more effective for modern enterprises.

Let the machines do the grunt work

That’s not to say that either men are pessimistic about the future of the software industry; both see an improved industry delivering better results for business.

“Let’s move people into higher order things and allow the machines to do the grunt work,” Harte urges.

“Not that long ago when I was learning how to do this stuff we’d have to fill in punch cards and then fill in Word Documents to write out technical requirement, that’s not much fun.”

“Lets have some fun and get some work done.”

Harte is describing a very different IT industry and workplace, one that doesn’t need older skills and – more importantly – doesn’t need as many clerks or middle managers carrying out routine administrative tasks.

It should be noted that both Harte and Trefler were adamant that their visions did not mean job losses when asked by this writer about the employment consequences, but it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that a fundamental industry change means many skill sets become redundant – again this is what happened to the Luddites in the 18th Century fabric mills.

“What we think the next ten years are going to be about is changing those metaphors,” says Trefler. “There can be a more highly evolved communication between IT and business folk.”

Both Trefler and Harte see design as the future of software with most of the human work being in creating the interfaces that work for the people using the computers, this is where the high level, high value work is to be done.

The changes that Pegasystems are describing is not just an IT industry issue; these are changes that are happening across the workforce and in all sectors. For both managers and workers, it’s a time to refresh skillsets and understand where the value lies in what they do.

Many industries have products handmade by skilled tradesfolk become a thing of the past, it now appears the time has come for the IT industry’s craftsmen and women.

Trusting the computer security industry

There’s something wrong in the way the tech security industry sells its product

I’ve been sceptical of computer security vendors for a long time and it’s interesting that even as threats evolve, the suspicion remains.

That suspicion comes from running an IT support business though the turn of the century virus epidemic, it’s hard to take the same companies whose products failed to detect the malware — and in some cases made problems worse.

At the annual Tech Leaders Kickstart event today, I found that old hostility bubbling up as a series of security vendors warned us of the terrible threats in cyberland and how their product would solve most, if not all, of our problems.

The irritating thing with their pitches is that none of them would articulate how the threats are evolving, or give real time examples.

Not that there’s any shortage of real time examples with corporate security disasters like Sony and Target as great case studies of what can go wrong. Indeed, there’s very good reasons for businesses and every computer user to take security seriously.

There’s something missing in the way tech security is sold and articulates the industry articulates its message.

Becoming an all mobile executive

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says he’s gone completely mobile, will other executives follow?

“I don’t want to use a laptop again,” Marc Benioff told the closing Dreamforce 2013 customer Q&A. “The desktop remains the biggest security threat to corporations — it’s a nightmare. The PC and laptop we never designed to be connected to a network.”

Benioff was walking his talk in promoting his company’s Salesforce One mobile platform, claiming at the Dreamforce conference opening that he hadn’t used a PC or laptop or nine months as he’s moved over to tablet and smartphone apps.

That push to move the company and its customers onto mobile services was emphasised by Peter Coffee, Salesforce’s Vice President for Strategic Research.

“Your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”

Salesforce’s push into into the post-PC market follows Google and Apple’s lead, much to the distress of Microsoft and its partners.

“We saw the phenomenal engineering work of Scott Forstall at Apple and the visionary work of the late, great Steve Jobs,” Benioff told his cutomers at the final Dreamforce Q&A. “When we saw the iPhone we sat up and thought ‘wow, what are we going to do about this?'”

“This is a paradigm shift, we’re moving from the desktop world to the mobile phone world and then of course we saw the iPad world emerge and that amplified it.”

Salesforce’s impressions were shared by much of the business community as senior executives, board members and company founders quickly embraced the first version of the iPad, which on its own triggered the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend in enterprise computing.

In a mobile age, Benioff now sees three key priorities for Salesforce; “we want to be feed first, we want to be mobile first and we want to be social first.”

Regardless of Benioff’s vision, not everyone will go mobile which is something that Peter Coffee acknowledges.

“The laptop will occasionally be used to author creative work like a presentation or to deal with something that needs a large screen like pipeline analysis,” says Coffee.

Marc Benioff though is adamant. “Honestly I don’t ever want to use a laptop again,” he told his audience.

It will be interesting to see how many business leaders follow him in abandoning their desktops and portable computers as the post-PC era of computing develops.

The end of HTML 5?

Does Salesforce’s move to native smartphone apps mean the end of mobile application standards?

One of the big debates in web design since the rise of smartphone apps has been the question of ‘going native’ or following web standards.

In an ideal world, all apps would follow the HTML web standards so designers would only have to create one app that would run on any device — a smartphone, tablet or PC — regardless of what type of software it was running.

However the HTML 5 standard has proved problematic as developers have found applications written in the language are slow with limited features, so the attraction of writing ‘native’ apps that are designed for each system remains strong as users get a faster, better experience.

The problem with that approach is that it results in having to design for different operating systems and various devices which is costly and adds complexity.

For the last two years at Dreamforce, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has trumpeted the advantages of the company’s HTML5 Touch product.

This year Benioff unveiled the company’s Salesforce One product — a suite of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that simplifies building smartphone and web apps. At the media conference after the launch, Benioff even went as far to describe the once lauded Touch product as a “mistake”.

So Salesforce has abandoned HTML5, which is a blow for standard applications.

If others follow Salesforce, and it appears that is the trend, then we’ll increasingly see the smartphone industry dominated by iOS and Android as most companies lack the resources or commitment to develop for more than two platforms and their form factors.

Open standards have been one of the driving factors of the web’s success, it would be a shame if we saw the mobile market split into two warring camps reminiscent of the VHS and Beta video tape days.

MYOB’s journey into the cloud

How MYOB is responding to the cloud computing threat by moving their boxed software products onto the cloud

The big winners of the Personal Computer era were the software companies. During that time firms like Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe became some of the most profitable companies on the planet.

With the arrival of cloud computing those profits started to dry up and those software companies that did so well out of the PC era are now scrambling to develop new products to meet a very different market.

Accounting software provider MYOB is a good example of this changing industry – a business that dominated the Australian small business market and supported an army of certified consultants now finds cloud based competitors like Xero nibbling away at their industry position.

MYOB Chief Technology Officer Simon Raik-Allen describes his company’s journey to the cloud in the latest Decoding the New Economy video clip.

“The cloud has amazing benefits for small business,” says Simon. “For twenty-two years we’ve had desktop products and for the last three or four years we’ve had cloud based services.”

“It’s been a really interesting journey, we’ve been on it for three or four years now where we’re converting the company to a cloud company.”

“But it’s also a cultural journey,” Simon observes. “I love seeing how people start to think differently when stuff is in the cloud.”

“Having things in the cloud opens the opportunity for employees to start slicing and dicing data in different ways.”

“It opens up the innovation curve to what’s possible.”

Bringing partners on the journey

Like Microsoft, one of MYOB’s strengths is its partner community – in particularly the company’s twenty thousand strong Certified Consultant program.

Those consultants, like Microsoft’s partners, are seeing their traditional revenue streams challenged as their business models change, a topic discussed with Growthwise’s Steph Hinds in a previous video interview.

“Everybody takes the cloud journey at their own place,” says Simon. “For bookkeepers in particular this is an opportunity to change their business in a positive way.”

“Normally a bookkeeper would drive around and visit two, three or four customers a day and help then with their books. Now they can help twenty customers in a single day.”

Looking beyond the cloud

Simon sees more than cloud computing changing accounting software with connected devices like the Pebble Watch, voice and gesture recognition along with Near Field Communications technology all being built into MYOB and computers in the near future.

“NFC is a very powerful technology,” Simon states. “Imagine in the accounting world where you are doing your books by moving your phone.”

“In retail NFC is going to be big where you can walk up to a product, wave your phone in front of it and it will tell you about the product.”

“We are very much driven by what our clients want,” says Simon. “It comes down to the use case of will it add to our customers’ business.”

An enthusiastic advocate

One of the things that’s impressive about talking with Simon Raik-Allen is his enthusiasm for technology, whether it’s Pebble Watches, NFC enabled robots or gesture controlled accounting software.

MYOB needs that enthusiasm in its move away from the once immensely profitable box software business onto the cloud where margins are thinner, the advantages of incumbency aren’t great and the competition from well funded competitors like Xero is immense.

As with many other ventures, MYOB is dealing with a huge disruption to their core business and the challenges are immense.

Image courtesy of Morrhigan through sxc.hu

Big Data needs big databases

Investors are making big bets on the databases that underpin Big Data

While the tech industry’s startup hype this week has been focused on the impending Twitter Initial Public Offering, a much more fascinating company quietly completed a major capital raising.

MongoDB provides an open-source, document database program and last week raised another $150 million from investors that values the company at $1.2 billion dollars.

Databases lie at the heart of Big Data and businesses need better computer programs to manage the overwhelming amount of information that’s pouring in every day.

As every business is unique, larger corporations find they spend huge amounts of money on their databases. The enterprise that buys an Oracle, IBM or SAP system usually spends tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in adapting the system to work for them, often with less than spectacular results.

While implementing MongoDB or any other open source program doesn’t eliminate implementation costs, it is often easier to setup and maintain as most of the information about the system is shared and freely available rather than locked inside the vendor’s proprietary knowledgebases.

Probably most important of all, the data structures themselves are open so customers don’t find themselves locked into a relationship with one vendor because all their information is in a format that can only be read by one system.

Open source is where Big Data, social media and cloud computing intersect – without the data itself being open and accessible, most cloud computing and social media services will almost certainly fail.

So MongoDB and the other open source products are the quiet, back of house technologies that keep the internet as we know it ticking along.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports there’s some very serious investors in MongoDB.

The deal attracted new investors such as EMC Corp. (EMC:US) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM:US), along with previous backers Red Hat Inc. (RHT:US), Intel Corp. (INTC:US), New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital, according to MongoDB.

Sequoia Capital are one of the longest lasting Silicon Valley venture capital firms whose greatest success was being one of the first investors in Apple Computers and New Enterprise Ventures have a similar pedigree with companies like 3Com, Juniper Networks and Vonage. Investment by industry leaders like Intel, Red Hat, Salesforce and EMC in the company also shows MongoDB isn’t the standard Silicon Valley Greater Fool play.

When there’s a gold rush, it’s those selling the shovels who make the big money and the investors in MongoDB and similar services are hoping they’ve found some of the modern day shovels.

That may well turn out to be the case and while the smart folk make more money from the technologies that drive social media and cloud computing services, the rest of us are distracted by the latest shiny thing.