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IT is from Mars, OT is from Venus

One of the many roles I have in my work at Atos has to do with the partnership that Atos has established with Siemens.

The challenge in my job is the fact that Atos, a pure IT service organization, needs to understand the position and the objectives of Siemens; a company focused on vertical IT that is amongst others oriented on manufacturing and industrial solutioning.

Simple terminologies like ‘services’ and ‘infrastructure’ have a fundamental different meaning when discussed as part of the Siemens or Atos portfolio.

Where parts of Siemens thinks of maintaining pumps and sensors, we think of process consulting and implementing software; and pipelines and manufacturing belts are not the same as networks, storage and servers.

Still Atos and Siemens believe there is additional value when we look to combine these elements in other and new services. Similar to our clients we are continuously looking to get this value through the convergence of OT and IT.

This topic is now also addressed in a whitepaper by the Atos Scientific community, which looks into the specific issues round IT/OT convergence and suggests methods to master the process.

“Implementing IT/OT Convergence successfully will imply that IT- and OT-Strategies will be harmonized, common governance and process models will be installed, security and data will be managed centrally and resources will be re-skilled to understand and know the requirements of both disciplines”

The quote above from the whitepaper indicates we are dealing with a multifaceted implementation that is by far not easily accomplished.

It is certainly not about tooling and seems to be more about organization and business processes. The whitepaper mentions at least 3 areas of expertise that support a successful IT/OT convergence:

1. Strong change management; because IT and OT are domains on their own, we need to manage the convergence in such a way that we do not negatively influence the value that each domain has on its own.
2. Process Harmonization; standardization of definitions and the way things ‘get done’ is necessary to avoid ad hoc solutions and costly mistakes.
3. A service oriented architecture; standardization in technology and making sure no technology lock-in can happen allow for the necessary flexibility when change happens.

One could argue that IT/OT convergence is not a high priority; we have been very successful without it for a very long time.

But I think it was not by choice we have chosen to look away – it was simply too hard, too difficult to achieve. The authors of the whitepaper seem to agree:

“Now, new ideas and concepts are developing around IT/OT providing major opportunities for those who understand to leverage their IT know-how to the shop floor. Now is the time to capitalize on them! “

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[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/11/22/watch-this-space-it-is-from-mars-ot-is-from-venus/ ]

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Technorati Tags: white paper,IT/OT,convergence,ATOS,Siemens,Scientific Community,Atossc

How many batteries do you need to visit your mother?

Detroit Electric car charging (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I do not like batteries and I do not much like cars. So when my colleagues in the Atos Scientific Community talk about these two things in 1 whitepaper you can understand it is something I cannot ignore.

Batteries are empty when you need them most (look at any horror movie and you know what I mean). Cars are expensive and they pollute our planet.

There is a multitude of battery formats and you have to go to the store to buy them – or you need to charge them and that takes a lot of time (iPhone anybody?).

So, electric cars, cars fuelled by batteries, is something that I find an unlikely combination.

Charging them is time consuming and a charger is not available everywhere. The use of changeable batteries might seems like a good idea, but is it really convenient and what about formats and availability?

Exactly this dilemma of ‘Electromobility’ is described in a whitepaper of the Atos Scientific Community:

“The success of Electromobility depends on addressing two major challenges: User acceptance and the availability of supporting infrastructure and services.”

After looking into the subject it became clear that next to user acceptance and the support infrastructure, we can also see this as a huge area of new revenue possibilities and innovation.

Leasing and pay-for-use in mobility are much better business cases for both the vendor and the consumer. It also ‘fuels’ (sorry, I could not resist making that joke…), the innovation process because you take out the big capex investment for the end user.

“New business models like battery leasing, simple easy to use charging infrastructure and the involvement of all stakeholders are the key to a positive business case.”

Instead of buying a new car every 5 or 6 years, the consumer (and companies) can choose to either own a car or lease one according to his needs of today.

With the right infrastructure he can choose to just change battery or even change the whole car. And through some clever analysis the supplier can even predict the end user behavior.

This prediction leads to a more tailored offering and in itself will drive further innovation. Such analysis, combined with extending the eco system for example into insurance companies, food and beverage providers, holiday brokers and other leisure providers can create whole new commercial eco systems.

“Electromobility needs multi-sided flexible business platforms with open interfaces to create new value.”

This is of course all very much in the future and will mean we need to change our habits, both on the provider and the consumer side of driving a car.

But change is inevitable and with the right standardization to support ease of use, and a well-integrated system for payments and loyalty schemes, I might be persuaded to buy into such a solution for visiting my mother.

For now we just need to start to understand what is at stake, what is possible and which actions we need to take. For this the upcoming whitepaper is an excellent first step. 

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[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/11/13/watch-this-space-how-many-batteries-do-you-need-to-visit-your-mother/]

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del.icio.us Tags: Atossc,Scientific Community,whitepaper,electromobility,emobility,cars,battery

 

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3 reasons why you should embrace mobile payments

iPhone Mobile Payment 100 Euro (Photo credit: monty.metzger)

I once had to go through a very intensive security check because I left a 1 euro coin in my pocket. The pocket had a hole. The euro coin found is way in the fabric and I was setting off all alarms.

The only thing that prevented me from having to strip, was a portable scanner that pinpointed the culprit.

A small knife (not mine) was used and the problem was taken away. It was like having public surgery.

This experience came to mind when I was reading a white paper download location of the Atos Scientific Community. The document explores the world of mobile payments.

Technorati Tags: Mobile,Payments,mobility,finance,retail,Atos,Scientific Community,Atossc

"Mobile payment is not about printing money or inventing a new currency, but about a customer, a merchant (or both) using a mobile device during the payment of a transaction."

The paper describes in detail the technological challenges and looks into the way that business need to adapt themselves to accommodate the use of mobile devices for enabling payments.

Several business scenarios are explored in the paper showing the benefits of this way of handling transactions.

Normally when we introduce this concept we focus on the benefit for the customer.

Mobility, no need for cash and ease of use are obvious positive points.

It becomes interesting if we move our view to the merchant and look at what mobility can do at the 'other side of the transaction'.

- Firstly a mobile point of sale introduces more flexibility in store concepts and a intimacy between sales person and buyer; this enhances the shopping experience and makes the transaction a more natural part of the shop visit.

- Secondly, the investment in the point of sale equipment is lower, any mobile device will do and there is a great choice available.

- Finally the digitalization allows for multiple payment scenarios including different levels of security (each with their own cost level), connecting loyalty schemes and ad hoc sales promotions.

Although the benefits look compelling there are still hurdles to overcome. These include the obvious security challenges as well as the physical capabilities of the devices such as encryption, local storage and Near Field Communication.

Also you do not want your roaming contract or mobile data plan to become an inhibitor when you see that once in a life time opportunity at the local market in that cute little village in Peru.

"Can technology make physical money irrelevant? That may be a statement that is too bold to make today, but it is certainly not too difficult to envision. One of the main enablers for such a zero-cash scenario is mobile payment."

 

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This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/10/22/watch-this-space-3-reasons-why-you-should-embrace-mobile-payments/

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Ascent Journey 2016 - the future trends in IT and business explained

Atos just announced the publication of Ascent Journey 2016 - Enterprise Without Boundaries

"Ascent Journey 2016 is a unique and comprehensive document where Atos’ Scientific Community presents its predictions and vision for the technology that will shape business through to 2016.

It builds on Journey 2014 – Simplicity with Control and is enriched by the new challenges which have now
emerged in reshaping both society and business alike.

Our research suggests that the convergence of key issues affecting Demographics, Globalization and Economic Sustainability, underpinned by Trust, will see a new way of working emerge in which traditional barriers no longer exist, but where security and privacy are more important than ever."

Exiting stuff and I am honoured to say I was part of the editorial board who produced this document.

More information and download here.

Press release here.

 

 

The PaaS cloud computing lock-in and how to avoid it

Cloud Computing changed from choosing an easy solution, into making a difficult decision.

The reason is the proliferation of cloud offerings at all layers; today we do not only find ‘everything-as-a-service’ cloud solutions, but also ‘everything-is-tailored-for-your-specific-situation-as-a-service’ tagged as cloud solutions.

Is this good? I do not think so.

My main objection is that you will end up with a cloud solution that is no different than any solution you have previously designed and installed yourself, at a cheaper rate and lower quality SLA.

True cloud solutions should not only focus on cost reduction, increased agility and flexible capabilities. You should also be buying something that supports portability between the private and public computing domain, and across different vendor platforms.

In early cloud solutions, mainly the ones focussing on Infrastructure-as-a-service, this portability has been heavily debated (remember the ‘Open Cloud Manifesto’?) and in the end we concluded that server virtualization solved a lot of the portability issues (I am simplifying of course).

We also had Software-as-a-service and some publications showed that the portability could be addressed by looking at standardized business process definitions and data normalisation (again, I am simplifying). Now the Atos Scientific Community has published a whitepaper that looks at the most complex form of cloud computing; Platform-as-a-service.

“PaaS offerings today are diverse, but they share a vendor lock-in characteristic. As in any market for an emerging technology, there is a truly diverse array of capabilities being offered by PaaS providers, from supported programming tools (languages, frameworks, runtime environments, and databases) to various types of underlying infrastructure, even within the capabilities available for each PaaS”

So a common characteristic that can be extracted of all this diversity is the fact of PaaS users currently are being bound to the specific platform they use, making the portability of their software (and data) created on top of these platforms difficult.

As a result we see a slow adoption of PaaS in the enterprise; only those groups that have a very well defined end-user group are looking at PaaS – and mostly for the wrong reason: ‘just’ cost saving through standardization.

In the Atos Scientific Community whitepaper they are identified as:

“Two primary user groups which benefit from using Cloud at the Platform as a Service level: Enterprises with their own internal software development activities and ISVs interested in selling SaaS services on top of a hosted PaaS.”

The current situation where PaaS is mostly resulting in a vendor lock-in scenarios is holding back the full potential for applications on a PaaS.

By introducing a general purpose PaaS, we would allow a comprehensive, open, flexible, and interoperable solution that simplifies the process of developing, deploying, integrating, and managing applications both in public and private clouds.

Such an architecture is proposed and explained in detail in the whitepaper; it describes the desired capabilities and building blocks that need to be established and it also offers an analysis of market trends and existing solutions, in order to establish a future vision and direction for PaaS, as well as outlining the business potential of such a solution.

We can all continue to feel positive about the power and the business potential of cloud computing.

Changing your cost base from capex to opex, increasing your speed in your go-to-market strategies and the flexibility in capacity and location are very important for your business.

We should not however confuse vendor specific solutions with cloud solutions only because they promise flexibility in cost and easy deployment; being able to shift and shop around is always better – also in cloud computing.

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This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/10/15/watch-this-space-the-paas-cloud-computing-lock-in-and-how-to-avoid-it/

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Choose your friends wisely

Sharing your personal information with the founders of FaceBook, MySpace,  Pinterest, Friendster, Twitter and LinkedIn is probably something you would think about twice. The association of your private stuff with each of these networks is something you want to take very seriously.

There is an interesting tension between social networks and the concept of Privacy. Not only because some people will share what others will want to keep a secret; also because the social networks love to know more about you and continuously challenge your boundaries.

Let’s face it (pun intended) – the more you share, the more traffic you generate, the more money they make. It is that simple. So when social networks need to ‘take their responsibility’, they are acting against their nature (remember the story of the scorpion that wanted to cross the river?).

“If you are not paying for a product, you are the product being sold”

This tension between your privacy and their business model is described in detail in a recent whitepaper by the Atos Scientific Community (find it here) and they conclude:

“Social networking sites have been traditionally reluctant to take into consideration the data privacy concerns brought up by users and public authorities.”

The paper continues to look into the legal aspects of this subject and describes how we are dealing with the challenge of privacy in social networks. Several examples are cited and explained against the existing rules in Europe and the US.

In addition the paper goes beyond the legal aspects and also explores the technical aspects of privacy in social networks. Most interesting is their observation that there is not a single technology that will support the need for privacy:

“Privacy needs, inside and outside social networks, are quite different and should be tackled using specifically tailored technologies.”

You can imagine that privacy related to personal finance, banking information or on the other hand your holiday pictures are totally different datasets that need a different approach. The whitepaper shows this and explains how a difference can be made; it even explores the possibility of a ‘safe’ social network.

A full analysis is done of several technologies that can support a safer social network and allow for better control by the end-user. Also a word of caution is expressed by the authors on the possibilities of cross authorizing using for example your Facebook account log in on other sites.

Finally the observation is that the social networking domain, in which vendors and end-users struggle to get a grip on privacy, is in fact not ignoring the issue. So there is hope – but that does not change the fact you still need to think twice before you hit ‘Like’.

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This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/10/08/watch-this-space-choose-your-friends-wisely/ 

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6 reasons why Open Innovation is happening now

When is the last time you watched Sesame Street?

I was thinking about a wonderful song that has been going around a long time on collaboration and co-operation. (see Sesame Street - "Cooperation Makes It Happen" - first performance in episode 2040 / March 1985).

It seems that this way of creating new things is already promoted very early in our childhood and part of our collective memory of positive actions.

So, if Open Innovation is about collaboration and co-operation, you would think we should be doing it more often? Well, an upcoming whitepaper by the Atos Scientific Community explores this question and comes to some interesting conclusions.

"…innovation in the 21st Century is increasingly open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and global, resulting in greater opportunities, and challenges for traditional R&D approaches."

Apparently there are a couple of changes in the current society that enable Open Innovation to be a more natural way of doing things (together).

Firstly there is the increased pressure on cost and the need to go to the market with new products and services much faster than before; having access to a bigger pool of knowledge without having to invest a lot of time building that same pool, supports the adoption of Open Innovation.

"The key limitation of Closed Innovation is the lack of leverage of external knowledge and expertise in unknown emerging fields for internal innovation processes."

Secondly we now see new business models emerging that allow for support of joint development of new products and services. Previously it was quite difficult to do so, but there are more and more support companies that will take care of the groundwork – Amazon for flexible compute power and SalesForce for flexible marketing activities just to name a few well known examples, but there are multiple other services available that take care of the basic services in a flexible, pay-as-you-go, get-the-size-you-need delivery models.

Number three is better approaches to intellectual property and protection of ownership. This takes away the need to keep things secret and allows for more sharing between companies. In addition the understanding and broader agreement on the different ways in which we can apply Open Source is also helping companies to take a more relaxed attitude towards collaboration.

At number four we see the increased capabilities in social networking and easy communication between different locations and companies. Setting up meetings and long distance virtual teams has become much easier.

"The walls of the enterprise are (therefore) no longer solid; ideas can filter into the innovation funnel via a ‘bi-directional, semi-permeable membrane’."

And at number five we see the increased understanding that each company holds the key to greatness hidden somewhere deep in the fabric of the organization, waiting to be discovered. While at the same time we know that we need a fresh new perspective to get this to the surface and we need the additional intelligence of somebody outside that will make it grow.

Or, probably most of all, at number six, the generation that loved, watched and learned from Sesame Street is now grown up; they know about this great song “co-operation … makes it happen” and are now putting it into action.

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This blog post is a repost of http://atos.net/en-us/about_us/insights-and-innovation/thought-leadership/bin/wp_open_innovation.htm

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Cloud Orchestration and your Interoperability Strategy

What did you pay for your corporate smartphone?

The Power of Moving Pictures

When I came home from holiday, I connected my HD video-camera to my computer and was able to publish my recordings to YouTube in just 1 click (publishing on YouTube was actually even easier than putting it to a DVD).

Last month when I wanted to replace the hard disk in my MacBook, I found more than one detailed video on the internet with perfect instructions how to do that.

The Khan Academy has library of over 3,400 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice academic lessons available for anybody connected to the internet.

I can set up a video conference with anybody in my company who is online, in less than a minute.

Is it any wonder that video is high on the list of technologies that are important for organizations to communicate, train, support and sell their products and services?

(Increased) revenues are hidden in better communications and in targeted communication on different channels; Television, Internet and in-company broadcasting.

The Atos Scientific Community has researched the importance of video, the major technical and business challenges that industries face, and describes the opportunities opening up for system integrators. The result will be published in an upcoming whitepaper. (here)

“Video will become so omnipresent and embedded that it will be the normal medium of communication”

According to the research, we will see video technology appear in every part of our communication, supported by increasingly capable mobile devices and better connectivity.

It is even expected that the importance will take over from photography and written text.

“Interactive capabilities and integration with social networks provide a large potential market that has not yet been completely monetized”

This newly found importance of video is certainly not yet understood by everybody and still some time will pass before the right revenue models are available – most models now are based on counting the amount of views or the potential amount of people that are reached.

Increasingly we will see the value of data (including video) to be calculated against the impact of that data in social networks, the speed of distribution and the amount of response generated.

Last but not least I believe video will grow because it will just simply increase the quality of our communications – people talking with each other on the phone or in instant-messaging (I dare not mention email here…), especially across different continents, are just missing a big element of the part where communication leads to understanding.

True understanding in any conversation only comes from actually seeing you smile.

 

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This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/09/18/watch-this-space-the-power-of-moving-pictures/

 

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Cloud Orchestration and your Interoperability Strategy

English: Diagram showing three main types of cloud computing (public/external, hybrid, private/internal) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Life for a CIO or CTO used to be complex.

Then came Cloud Computing.

Now life is even more complex.

A year ago the Atos Scientific Community published a whitepaper on Cloud Computing. In the paper the concept was explained and we predicted that interoperability among clouds was going to be a major headache.

The paper also showed the result of a proof of concept in which we connected multiple private and public clouds to perform a single business workflow.

The hypothesis of the paper is that organizations will end up with multiple cloud environments:

“This will be driven by what is most fit for purpose for any given application (or part of it), based on an SLA trade-off between cost and business criticality. The corporate application landscape will therefore also fragment into those layers and into many business processes, requiring access to multiple applications and data connections that will need to span those layers. Unless enterprises consider these implications in advance, they risk building a heterogeneous IT infrastructure, only to discover that their key business processes can no longer be plugged together or supported.”

I think the authors (full disclosure: I was one of them) were right in their assumption and the situation nowadays is not any better than 1 year ago.

There are a couple of reasons I wanted to bring this to your attention again.

First because the paper has been re-launched on www.Atos.net , secondly because the paper has been accepted as a submission to the yearly Internet conference WWW2012 (www.www2012.org ) and thirdly because on February 10, 2012 the United Nations announced they will take initiatives to “Aim for Cloud Interoperability”.

At least for me this was a surprise as I saw the UN mainly as an intergovernmental body looking to create lasting world peace.

But if you think this through it actually makes sense. The UN’s International Telecommunication Union (source: www.itu.int) “is committed to connecting all the world’s people – wherever they live and whatever their means. Through our work, we protect and support everyone’s fundamental right to communicate.” And there is a lot more on vision, collaboration, achieving standards etcetera, etcetera.

During the January meeting of the Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group an initiative has been taken to start a study on this subject of cloud interoperability.

Apparently this was done on request of “leading CTO’s” to “investigate the standardization landscape in the cloud computing market and pursue standards to lead to further commoditization and interoperability of clouds”. (Source: ITU-T Newslog January 17, 2012).

This is good news and it is not the only initiative that came out recently.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), previously known as SGML OPEN, has started a technical committee on “Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications” (TOSCA) aiming to make it easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in, “…while maintaining application requirements for security, governance and compliance” (source: www.oasis-open.org/news/pr/tosca-tc).

The newly formed committee is supported by vendors like CA, Cisco, EMC, IBM, Red Hat, SAP and others.

In addition I recently Googled “Cloud interoperability” and when filtering for the last month, I got about 60.000 hits, so I can say that the subject is very well alive on the internet.

The point of all this? I firmly believe that in addition to your cloud strategy, you need to have a cloud interoperability strategy. You need to be aware of emerging standards and you need to talk to your vendor about it.

It is inevitable that some parts of your business will be run “in the cloud”; nowadays it is not only important how to get there, but also how to (securely) stay there while maintaining the flexibility to move around, interconnect your processes and still take end-to-end responsibility.

Like I said at the beginning. Life gets more complex.

 

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[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/03/02/cloud-orchestration-and-your-interoperability-strategy/]

The whitepaper can be downloaded here

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Technorati Tags: Cloud,Cloud Computing,Interoperatibility,Cloud Orchestration,Cloud Orchestration Bus,Atos,Whitepaper,Scientific Community

What did you pay for your corporate smartphone?

[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/02/22/what-did-you-pay-for-your-corporate-smartphone/ ]

I bought my own bed. I like it, it is a big bed with a proper mattress and pocket springs.

I also bought my own pillow and now that I think of it, I also bought my own milk and decided, by my own, that I really needed to eat a hamburger and chips last night (with a Heineken beer, at Silversant in Amstelveen, the hamburger wasn’t really what I hoped for, but that is a different topic).

Employee of the Month Reserved Parking Sign (Photo credits: myparkingsign.com)

The choice I made for my bed contributes to my good health, my choice for food does probably not.

The point is that nowhere in the process of purchasing furniture and food, I was guided by my employer. Most people will find that normal, but they are also happy that the employer provides them with a standard company laptop, standard (smart)phone and standard application suite.

Arguably there is a big difference between IT equipment and furniture but it opens up the discussion on the freedom of choice for these type of company supplies.

This topic is very much in-depth looked into in a Atos Scientific Community white paper called “Consumerization Technology. Is it really good for business?”.

“So why has the corporate world stood still and remained such a monolithic and homogeneous environment when the way of working is evolving, despite legacy foundations? Why shouldn’t organizations take advantage of the vast array of information, skills and consumer devices in the world today? This is the concept of consumerism. Devices, services or software that is intended for the mass consumer market can cross over and equally be used in a corporate environment.”

I firmly believe that the tools that I use for my work should fit my objectives and if the standard is not good enough, more flexible choices should be available. It helps me in my motivation and effectiveness.

”Positive feedback from employees and an attractive working environment for the workforce of tomorrow will have a significant positive impact. This, combined with the removal of the de-motivating factor of having to struggle with an IT department to be able to work efficiently and an increased level of trust, will be seen as reward enough by many. This could even be extended by offering supplementary benefits, such as insurance schemes, negotiated prices or other options…“

In general we see an increased interest in this ‘Bring-Your-Own’ (BYO) concept and it has unexpected valuable side-effects:

”Personal productivity can increase as a result of the user using a device that they are used to and that suits their style of working. Also, if an employee is using a device they choose or one with personal data on, then they are more likely to respect that device and as a result lose less time dealing with support issues or worse. Combine this with the fact that the new found flexibility is highly appreciated by employees and the result is typically more dedication and commitment.”

The whitepaper also addresses the fact that there are serious risks associated to a BYO strategy. Both in lack of productivity (Facebook versus Excel) and in security or confidentiality of information.

An approach to handle this as well as an explanation how this affects other parts of the IT landscape is addressed in the paper, with special attention to networks, information management and utilizing corporate applications.

But this is most of all about technology, is it not? Well as it turns out, it is not. A BYO strategy also needs to address non-IT related subjects such as HRM, TAX, privacy and compliancy. In the end, I like it. It creates a relationship between me and my employer that focuses on the delivering of objectives, not the provisioning of supplies.

It also leaves me at the helm and allows me freedom in the choice of stuff that helps me do my work. So why stop there?

“As consumer technology improves, and consumer IT proficiency increases, many organizations will consider consumer solutions to be ‘good enough’”

I am looking forward to a working environment that lets me choose my applications, my location and maybe even my own language.

(Blogs schrijven in het Nederlands die automatisch worden vertaald – dat zou mooi zijn) http://tinyurl.com/7ou77b6

 

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The Atos Scientific Community whitepaper can be downloaded here

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Technorati Tags: whitepaper,atos,BYOD,consumerization,scientific community