• Save money. Overinvesting in computing power by giving a worker “too much machine” and over-investing in software licenses for applications that won’t be used are common implications of One Size Fits All enterprise computing. You can save money by provisioning appropriate hardware and software to various classes of workers.
• Preempt BYO. While IT departments are coming around to the virtues and values of BYO, managing excessively diverse BYO comes with management costs. You can preempt some types of BYO by providing the right tool to the right worker at the right time… obviating the need for them to bring their own.
• Drive worker productivity and innovation. Innovations like tablets and Chromebooks can empower certain classes of workers to achieve new levels of productivity. Providing the right worker – for example, a traveling salesperson – with a tablet can enable new scenarios and create tangible returns.

Tablets are driving new interest in workforce segmentation. When we asked IT decision makers whether tablets would provisioned for general employee use, only 15% agreed. But when we asked IT decision makers which roles they would consider offering tablets as standard issue devices today, and which roles they would likely offer tablets tomorrow, specific classes of workers emerged as tablet-empowered:

According to IT, executives lead the pack with double-digit growth, followed by traveling sales, heavy travelers, and field workers. All of these groups will see swift increases in tablets. But for non-traveling sales and the vast majority of information workers, tablets won’t be standard issue devices. Tablets are being distributed on a value basis, not as a universal standard issue.

Segmenting the workforce this way can lead to segment-specific innovations. I spoke with the VP of Infrastructure and Operations for a global company that sells many of its products via consumer retail. The company employs a large sales force that visits thousands of retail locations in Asia. They developed a custom tablet application that fundamentally changed these salespeople’s visits to retail: With the tablet app, a salesperson goes into a retail store location and takes photos, allowing them to assess inventory counts, the accuracy of displays, etc. Most interestingly, the app uses location tagging. This tagging isn’t merely used to judge whether salespeople are doing their jobs or not (though it is). Instead, it’s generating big data in the background: Let’s say a specific SKU isn’t selling in a particular region. Data analytics derived from the location tags, in relation to the other data, now helps this enterprise to diagnose problems with its channels and products. Sales visits using tablets generate an entirely different set of information, meaning the company can solve its business problems much more effectively.

Without a segmented device strategy (providing tablets to salespeople) and an app strategy (designed specifically for the sales role), the company wouldn’t be gaining this business value. And it all started by departing from One Size Fits All computing.

Broad storage support:  ViPR's controller software is designed to work with EMC's storage systems (Isilon, VMAX, VNX), in addition to third party systems and commodity hardware.  EMC is making the APIs for ViPR open for customers and other storage vendors to use, and the software will take advantage of the capabilities of the underlying arrays (snapshots, replication, etc).

Storage virtualization: ViPR separates the control and data plane in its storage virtualization.  At this point the data movement can be done using VPLEX or RecoverPoint.

Self-service provisioning: EMC is using software from its iWave acquisition in its ViPR provisioning engine, which has also been used in the VMAX Cloud Edition.

Object data services: Is the first service that will be available with ViPR, and will allow customers to add object storage capabilities to existing storage systems.  ViPR's object service will have compatibility with EMC's Atmos, Amazon's S3 and OpenStack Swift.

At this point it is important to remember that the move to SDS will be a long, multi-year journey and we are just in the first phase. So what's missing and what questions remain?

EMC built it, but will rivals come? Though EMC's APIs will be made available to the public, the vendor's rivals will not be eager to accelerate the integration process.  EMC claims it will be easy for customers to integrate ViPR with existing kit, though I'd be more apt to believe it when I see this in action.

What about other data movers?  At this point only EMC's RecoverPoint and VPLEX are providing the important storage virtualization capabilities to move data to systems with ViPR. I'd like to see support for other popular platforms such as IBM's SVC.

Additional Software Services? I'd like to see EMC release virtual, software-only versions of the Isilon scale-out NAS platform and the XtremIO flash array out into the wild.  Though these platforms are sold as tightly integrated appliances today, the core innovation is all in software and could potentially run on commodity hardware.

In the original ‘Jurassic Park’ movie (which will be 20 years old this June), the young girl Lex Murphy (played by Ariana Richards) asks Dr. Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill) what happened to the dinosaurs. Dr. Grant replies with the thesis from his academic works (as quoted here):

Many scientists believe the dinosaurs never really died out 65 million years ago. These scientists believe dinosaurs live on today — as birds. The dinosaurs were too large and their food supply was too small, so the dinosaurs became a likely example of natural selection — in short, they were forced to adapt or perish.

The personal computer already experienced a large tectonic shift, evolving from velociraptor to sparrow in just a few years. Back in 2007, end-user computing looked very different from today: It was a simpler world of form factors, operating systems, and ecosystems. Even so, in 2007 we predicted:

By 2012, the industry won't include just two form factors, laptops and desktops, but five or more form factors that are universally viewed as differentiated products.

We were correct, and computing “biodiversity” bloomed: smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, eReaders, phablets, and form factors that peaked and fell quickly (like netbooks). In fact, we are living in an era of unprecedented experimentation — a flowering of myriad computing form factors attempting to carve out their own evolutionary pathways. The descendants of the velociraptor include a wide array of connected devices, each blazing its own trail.

Extending the metaphor further, we can ask: which species will rule the genus? As Wikipedia puts it: “Homo sapiens... are the only extant species of the genus Homo.” Homo erectus, Homo rhodesiensis, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), and other, now extinct branches of the extended human family lived in the past. They were out-competed by modern humans.

While the platform wars will remain vigorous, another set of Darwinian battles are being waged inside ecosystems (or genuses): Forked vs. standard Android, for example.

Microsoft is — like all competitors in the market — in the midst of an "adapt or perish" transition. We are all familiar with Microsoft's attempt to move users to Windows 8. But that's not the only interesting evolutionary struggle. It's important to also look at intra-genus speciation: The Windows ecosystem is producing an astoundingly wide array of devices, from megafauna to niche competitors, including (but not even remotely limited to):

• The 27” multi-user Lenovo IdeaCenter A720 furniture tablet.
• The 23” HP Envy 23 Touchsmart all-in-one desktop PC.
• The 18” Dell XPS 18 All-In-One tablet/desktop hybrid.
• The 15.6” Toshiba Satellite S855D-S5148 laptop.
• The 13” Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga convertible touchscreen.
• The 11.6” Asus VivoTab TF810C tablet, stylus, hybrid.
• The 10.6” Microsoft Surface Pro tablet/laptop hybrid.
• The 10” Dell XPS 10 tablet with ARM processor.
• The forthcoming category of 7” to 8” Windows 8/RT tablets.

The sheer diversity of options that have evolved in the Windows 8 device ecosystem means two things. First, would-be buyers and users face a dizzying array of choices and, consequently, confusion. Second, these users also have an opportunity to find the device that fits their usage case impeccably. These are two sides of the same coin; you don’t get the positive effects of specialization without the negative effect of market confusion.

Survival of the fittest means that only some of these form factors will survive... meaning that many of them will fail. Competitors within a genus will win on characteristics like user experience, brand, bundling, market segmentation, and channel. But some of them will surely find their niche. Others will die off, victims of the evolutionary competition, eclipsed by form factors that compete better. (Something quite similar — and in many ways even more fragmented — is happening within the Android genus as well).

In an "adapt or perish" world, when people ask “What happened to the PC?” the answer might well be “It evolved into that 7-inch Windows RT tablet in your backpack, and into that 27-inch Windows furniture PC in your office,” in addition to “survival of the fittest left Apple’s iPad the apex predator” and “Android devices led to habitat loss for the PC.” An ever-evolving PC will still be the right tool for the right job, even if it lives alongside numerous other species of computing devices. Anticipate both form factor failure and form factor diversity side-by-side over the next few years.

J. P. Gownder is a Vice President and Principal Analyst. Follow him on Twitter: @jgownder 

Wednesday evening at the Service Desk and IT Support Show, the main topic of discussion was about the rumor of Capita winning the "ITIL auction." The odd thing is that it was probably the only time we were talking about ITIL, the ITSM best-practice framework, outside of the sessions over the two days (other than some vendors who were still spouting that their tools are “ITIL-compliant”). But that is a topic for a later date.

If you want the “scoop” on the Capita announcement then please look at:

• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/10019090/Government-forms-IT-joint-venture-with-Capita.html (how I found out this morning)
• https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-deal-will-market-government-professional-qualifications

But if you want opinion please read on … infact the best opinions might be in the comments section ;)

ITIL in 2013

Many of us have written about ITIL from how to get started, common adoption mistakes, how ITIL needs to change, to that “We need to talk about ITIL.” James Finister’s and Rob England’s blogs (www.coreitsm.com and http://www.itskeptic.org/) are both great sources of opinions and advice.

One important item in the latter of my blogs (and often speak about to both enterprise and vendor clients) is that, despite what people think of it from an adopter-success-perspective, ITIL is by far the most successful (in terms of brand awareness and adoption) ITSM framework, methodology, or standard. I couldn’t see it losing that position as more people opt-in than opt-out of the ITIL club.

However, I was rather short-sighted not to consider the potential for fallout dependent on who won the ITIL auction.

My first observations on the ITIL/Capita announcement

If we start with the news items I link to above, other than one of them being written by someone who is not close enough to ITSM to write about it, it is unfortunate that both lead with something akin to “£500m boost for (UK) taxpayers expected from innovative joint venture deal to own and trade on Best Management Practice professional standards” (which is taken from the latter).

Unfortunately, we jump straight to the value of ITIL in this one statement. Not that it is a wonderful “tool” to be used to help IT organizations deliver better IT services to internal or external customers. Rather, it is the proverbial cash cow which is set to be franticly milked for the benefit of UK citizens (as it also helps those that pay no tax if you think about it). While I would like to like this on a personal (read “selfish”)-level, it has to possibly be the worst advertisement for ITIL ever released and one that could even start to adversely affect Capita’s ability to get a return on investment before they even start.

The real knock-on IMO is that it could and probably will hurt the ability for ITIL to evolve into the support mechanism the industry really needs – that is better not more content.

What it means (as my opinions begin to form)

This “arrangement” offers up a number of questions on a number of levels. Let’s start with the ITIL-support ecosystem:

• Will those who have previously invested so much of their time into creating and enhancing ITIL (such as Stuart Rance of HP and David Cannon of HP, then BMC, and now Forrester) still volunteer their services to bring ITIL up to speed with modern IT service delivery needs?
• Will ITIL now be written by Capita? Will the writers and key advocates be poached by Capita or will they “make-do”? It offers an interesting set of people dynamics.
• Will other IT service providers still want to use something that “advertises” their competitors?
• I’m not an analyst that follows Capita but I do see “client horror stories” in the press. Unfortunately mud sticks so how will ITIL’s already-suspect reputation be affected?

From an ITIL focus and content perspective:

• Capita is close to the real challenges of those working in IT. It would be wrong for me not to link it to the fact that I believe that the future of ITSM and IT service delivery is in the hands of some, but definitely not all, ITSM software and service providers. They have the experiences but just as importantly the customer touch points to make a real difference.
• This break of the cycle allows for a refocusing of vision and at a more practical level a reconsideration of what is needed. But will the commercial realities of ROI and payback-period overrule the need for change as we just see more intense selling of the same old stuff? I might be a cynic but I don’t see anything changing until the cash registers have been filled. Capita please prove me wrong and I will send you a photo of me eating humble pie.
• Some also take an “it ain’t broke so why fix it” perspective with ITIL. Unfortunately, these comments are often drowned out by the sound of coins being counted (told you I am cynical).

From an “alternatives” perspective:

• It’s great news and an opportunity for the creators of ISO 20000, COBIT, USMBOK, etc. (some mentioned here). Although it is wrong for me to call them alternatives, they are complementary options, many will see them as alternatives if ITIL loses face (read “reputation”).

From an enterprise perspective:

• Will ITIL’s customers really care that it has changed hands? IMO – no.
• Those that are overly obsessed with ITIL will continue to be so.
• Those that can’t see that they missed a great opportunity to deliver better IT services to their customers will continue to do so.
• And those that have used just enough ITIL to make a real difference will most likely continue to push forward using ITIL and other means … but most importantly they will use common sense and a lens that looks at the bigger “IT service consumption rather than IT creation” picture to help ensure they succeed.

I’m sure there are many more things that need to be considered (this as usual is a quick brain dump) and I encourage you to throw them in here.

Jack Nicholson wasn’t wrong when dressed as the Joker he pronounced that “This town needs an enema” but perhaps we ought to check the vital statistics of the patient first before administering treatment. But letting the patient continue with its symptoms untreated is perhaps the cruellest treatment of all?

The IBM-UrbanCode deal has already closed. Financial details were not disclosed, though the purchase price is inconsequential in the huge scale of IBM's finances.

Forrester holds UrbanCode's capabilities in high esteem, so this is a great technology addition to the IBM war chest. Assimilating UrbanCode into the IBM machinery will be relatively straightforward, but reconciling the product overlaps and integrating the various technologies will not. We expect true integration in the form of a complete and integrated IBM suite across the lifecycle to take well over a year and maybe two. Overlapping Rational tools will be combined with or migrated over this period to UrbanCode’s equivalent capabilities.

The DevOps movement is gaining steam at an aggressive pace. Forrester client inquiries focused on DevOps through 2012 and 2013 have been rapidly increasing, whereas such discussions were almost dead silent prior to 2012. After years of Development and Operations standing on either side of a wall lobbing things at one another, the walls are breaking down as Dev and Ops are discovering that they are (or need to be) on the same side. There is no "us" and "them" anymore, just us!

While Dev and Ops have distinct perspectives and historical trajectories, the need to drive rapid innovation and creation of business value going forward is bringing these two historical adversaries together. With Agile being largely mainstream in leading development organizations now, the focus is shifting toward the bottleneck that occurs when agile delivery hits the production change management process. Today's announcement validates that this area is heating up and will be of great interest to every organization looking to improve its ability to respond rapidly to new market opportunities. 

UrbanCode's model-based automation is a great approach that will be helpful beyond just application development and deployent. One example of the extended possibilities is in broader automation in other IBM initiatives like cloud computing and its PureSystems converged infrastructure offerings. The emerging software-defined data center (SDDC) vision has merit and is a logical beneficiary of DevOps principles and the associated technologies. After all, software is software, and systems software (e.g., underlying SDDC mechanisms) should be treated just like application software in its lifecycle. The primary difference is the pace and level of human intervention. System software is actually a perfect use for this level of extreme automation. Human intervention must be non-existent in SDDC and cloud platforms.

There is a notable link between Serena Software and UrbanCode. Already a key player in application lifecycle management, Serena is a credible DevOps force. Serena wisely purchased source code and its rights from UrbanCode a year ago, developed more upon it, and folded it into its release management offering. Forrester sees no risk to Serena’s DevOps future as a result of IBM’s acquisition. In fact, in a bold move to steal some of IBM’s thunder, Serena made its own DevOps announcement the following day.

UrbanCode now resides within the Rational business unit. In the true spirit of DevOps, IBM needs to infuse the UrbanCode DNA well beyond Rational, especially into the Tivoli and PureSystems units.

Forrester analysts Kurt Bittner, Tom Grant, Jeffrey Hammond, Diego Lo Giudice, Glenn O’Donnell, and John Rymer collaborated on this article, in true DevOps fashion!

The show followed on the heels of the Grizzly release, the 7th release of the OpenStack platform. Along with stronger support for VMware and Microsoft hypervisors, Grizzly widens block storage options and includes 10+ new enterprise storage platform drivers and workload-based scheduling. A wide range of new network plugins expand the platform’s software-defined networking options and a sexier Dashboard to access, provision and automate resources.

Most every major infrastructure and cloud provider vendor has an OpenStack story, from EMC, NetApp, and AMD to HP, IBM, Arista, Cisco, and VMware. A few sessions focused on how to make money with OpenStack (it’s starting to happen), and more than 20 companies are now contributing code every week, led by Red Hat, Rackspace (as expected), IBM, Nebula, and HP. OpenStack is no longer a Rackspace project but an active community populated by vendors who fully expect to monetize the open-source cloud.

But the real stars of the show were the customers, led by Bloomberg, Best Buy, Comcast, HubSpot, and eBay. While the use cases varied, the common theme was clear: every one of these enterprises is using the open source cloud to give developers what they want and, in turn, push new products and services to market faster. Comcast uses OpenStack to adjust developer behavior and encourage devs to make better use of infrastructure. Cable companies are traditionally slow to release new features, limited by the set-top box delivery model. OpenStack allows Comcast to deliver new features faster from the cloud (like a new X1 xfinity interface, in limited customer production release today) and integrate third-party content in a matter of weeks, not months. Mark Muehl from Comcast also praised open source for encouraging his developers to look to the community for help and guidance, since “our problems are not unique.” He stressed that he wants a choice of clouds to optimize costs, but wants to abstract those decisions away from his developers.

The Bloomberg team also went open source for agility (to be able to pull out a bad or immature layer in the stack if they wanted to replace it with something better) and devops efficiencies. Bloomberg’s now focused on improving monitoring and orchestration, effectively operationalizing its cloud in production, and has shared its Chef cookbooks with the community to foster collaboration around the best ways to turn OpenStack into a truly programmable infrastructure. Best Buy has built what they call a continuous delivery cloud to help get 40+ parallel dev teams on the same page. The retailer was spending far too much on QA for each major release of its ecommerce site, with much of that going to fixing discrepancies between dev, test, and QA environments. Its new product detail pages run browse and search functions from elastic OpenStack-based cloud resources to handle demand spikes, which can be up to 7x over the Thanksgiving holiday shopping period. AtThanksgiving 2012, Best Buy served 25% of its holiday traffic from the cloud. Customers see a cleaner, faster product detail page and developers see a common cloud platform to develop and test new features provided by Best Buy IT, not Amazon AWS.

These types of use cases – developer agility, learning from the community, rolling out new functionality incrementally, redesigning apps to leverage cloud for elastic, bursty workloads, etc. – are all signs of increasing cloud maturity in the enterprise. Business-unit aligned developers are leading cloud adoption in the enterprise, but the Summit showed that IT operations teams are increasingly guiding them in the right direction. Across the board, the enterprise IT teams at the Summit were proactively reaching out to engage with shadow cloud buyers, understand their needs and constraints, and stepping up to provide push-button cloud environments that drive innovation, not just cost savings. These open-source cloud leaders aren’t just moving apps to the cloud, they are transforming them by adding elastic services where they make the make the most sense—and in the process they’re fostering a new era of developer productivity and user experience.

But what does this mean for IT leaders in practice?

My colleague Simon Yates and I have spent a good bit of time recently discussing the role of IT in creating engaging experiences for employees. 

Look at a group of employees who are currently creating the types of outcomes businesses seek: those willing to advocate for their business as a place to work and as a place to do business. According to our Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q4 2012, around two-thirds of this group feel IT understands and meets their needs.

These positive attitudes toward the IT department's performance stand in stark contrast to the views of employees who aren't achieving these outcomes.

For example, while 65 percent of employee advocates are satisfied with the service they receive from the IT department, just 27 percent of employees not fully advocating for the company share a similar opinion. So what creates this chasm in opinion?

We find clues when we look at some of the attitudes employee advocates have about what their organizations allow them to do:

What is clear is that these employee advocates feel that their organizations give them a transparent, flexible and collaborative workspace. This environment lets employees know their work matters, allows them to do what they think is best to solve customer problems and provides a collegial environment where information sharing is encouraged. In other words, these employees work in organizations that create engaging conditions.

Obviously, the corporate culture and policies create the conditions that allow for these working conditions. However, in a global, mobile and cosmopolitan business environment, technology is essential to keeping employees connected, motivated, engaged and productive. But this is by no means a simple task, as our data shows.

Helping the business engage employees through technology experiences means IT leaders must not view their jobs as providing technology.

They must see their mission as serving fundamental employee needs: ensuring employees have clarity into the company's mission; enabling employees to share information as necessary; giving workers flexibility to work in the manner necessary to best serve the business's needs.

This means that the IT department has to be in the design business -- thinking through how an employee accomplishes specific tasks and applying technology at critical junction. IT leaders must embrace new disciplines to make this work: Voice of the Employee, iterative deployments, journey maps and ethnographic research are but a few concepts CIOs need to leverage as they create technology roadmaps. 

I'll be touching on these concepts with State Street's Ed Flahive, Razorfish's Ray Velez and CHGHealthcare's Mike Peterson at our upcoming CIO Forum in Washington, DC. Leading up to that event, I'd like to get your opinions on this topic as we think about the importance of experience design in IT departments and the changes IT leaders must make to their organizations in order to truly help the business engage employees. 

These are features that Microsoft should indeed provide to its customers in the next release.

Some analysts and designers might argue against these moves. To truly reimagine Windows, the argument might go, users must be taught a completely new way to navigate. Key to the Windows 8/RT user interface (UI) are charms, which take the place of the Start Button and which provide a simplified navigation system that's particularly suited to touch screens.

Users should segue to charms full time, even when they are in Desktop Mode, if they are to build a bridge to the modern UI.

Those claims might hold some truth. Yet Microsoft should reinstitute the Start Button anyway, because:

Users aren't living in the modern UI environment alone yet

While March, 2013.

As one PC World reviewer 

Hybrids and convertibles are more like laptop replacements than tablets

As usual, when users are unhappy, they find work-arounds. Numerous Start Button emulators with names like StartIsBack, Pokki, and StartMenu are proliferating — and many of them are free. Yet I&O departments can't support users easily with these emulators and would prefer a Start Button that's simply part of the OS.

We live in what Forrester calls The Age of the Customer, a time in which companies that obsess about their customers earn a competitive advantage in their markets. During the period when the Windows Store's modern UI apps continue to grow in number and sophistication, Windows 8 users need to have the strongest possible Desktop Mode experience.

Empowering users with familiar tools wouldn't be a sign of surrender, but rather a sign that Microsoft listens to its customers.

J. P. Gownder is a Vice President and Principal Analyst. Follow him on Twitter: @jgownder. 

It reminds me very much of the automotive industry. Automakers have had over a hundred years to get here, but today they compete in a series of specialized form factor micro-niches: Sub-compact. Compact. Sport. Sedan. SUV. Minivan. Pickup truck. Add to this energy models: Gas guzzler. Gas-based but efficient. Gas-Electric Hybrids. Plug in Gas-Electric Hybrids. Electric. Toyota (to take one example) competes in most of these market spaces, as seen at this link.

Comparing the end user computing space to the automotive industry isn’t a new metaphor, of course.In 2010, Steve Jobs compared PCs and tablets to cars and trucks:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.

On a purely historical basis, Jobs’ statement wasn’t quite accurate. (See Figure 1). Plotting the demand of cars versus trucks from 1931 to 2012, cars dominated for almost 60 years, before trucks caught up quite recently. Well, that’s interesting, right? I don’t think Steve Jobs imagined “trucks” as “PCs” in quite that context.

It’s important to note that automobile manufacturers makers have moved up and down the product chain to track demand.Carmakers constantly revisit their portfolio mix of cars and trucks, as this article shows. Evolving form factors haven’t necessarily benefited any single automobile vendor. Toyota, as of 2009, offered 70 different models of vehicles, each filling a specific market niche. But then, so does GM. They adapt, change, and compete as needed.

Nevertheless, Jobs’ metaphor offers a helpful lens for thought exercises. In recent blog posts, we’ve noted that:

• Tablets are being used in places where workers don’t take their PCs. Tablets are driving worker productivity via hyper-productivity – distinguishing them from PCs. Tablets are agile cars you can drive into the city and easily parallel park.
• There are PC-dominant apps… but there are even more tablet-dominant apps. Tablets are differentiating themselves from both PCs and smartphones in the apps that are commonly used. They’re more production-oriented than smartphones but more contextual and mobile than PCs. PCs take care of the truck-like heavy lifting (spreadsheets, word processing). See Figure 2 for more detail on PC- vs. Tablet- Dominant apps... recalling the disclaimer about the early adopter character of tablet users from my earlier blog post.

So far so good; the automotive metaphor seems to have some value for a discussion of tablets. But does this similarity between the automotive industry and the tablet computing market mean that mean that the hardware space is destined to look like the automotive industry? That is, will it break into sub-markets (with “semi-nonsubstitutable” products) in which (for instance) “Sub-Compact Category Captures Almost 5% of Industry Sales” is a key headline? Following an automotive industry pattern, will tablets devolve into micro-niche categories instead of today’s discrete form factors?

The short answer is yes, the tablet market continues to fragment into differentiated niches. We’re undergoing a period of great experimentation in computing – everything from myriad tablet types to furniture PCs to wearable computing devices that run on the same platforms. Tablets will fill more specific enterprise niches; the tablet that works for a flight attendant on an airplane might not be the same tablet best suited for a field engineer climbing a tall electrical tower.

But the key to specialized tablets lies in device hand-offs.  While workers (and consumers) can own multiple devices, the coherence of the computing experience requires seamless handoffs. (For example, the way a photo taken on an iPhone can be synced to an iPad and a Mac via iCloud, or the way a document saved with Microsoft Skydrive Pro can be accessed across tablets and PCs).

Once device hand-offs are established, however, there’s still wallet share to contend with.There’s always a limit – both for IT departments but also for individual workers – to the amount of money that can be spent on multiple devices. Specialized devices will suffer from their lack of universality (and single purchase)… while even “single device” tablets like iPad struggle against laptops. One battle in the tablet wars pits specialized use devices vs. tablets that can replace laptops, desktops, or even phones. I&O pros will face unprecedented choice but also, in the short run, a great deal of complexity in navigating these myriad product permutations.

J. P. Gownder is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Follow him on Twitter @jgownder.  

Its initial attractions – an extreme density low power x86 server platform for a variety of low-to-midrange CPU workloads – hides the fact that it is probably a blueprint for both a family of future products from HP as well as similar products from other vendors.

Geek Stuff – What was Announced

The Moonshot 1500 is a 4.3U enclosure that can contain up to 45 plug-in server cartridges, each one a complete server node with a dual-core Intel Atom 1200 CPU, up to 8 GB of memory and a single disk or SSD device, up to 1 TB, and the servers share common power supplies and cooling.

But beyond the density, the real attraction of the MS1500 is its scalable fabric and CPU-agnostic architecture. Embedded in the chassis are multiple fabrics for storage, management and network giving the MS1500 (my acronym, not an official HP label) some of the advantages of a blade server without the advanced management capabilities.

 The power of this of this announcement lies in what it portends for the future.

At initial shipment, only the network and management fabric will be enabled by the system firmware, with each chassis having up two Gb Ethernet switches (technically they can be configured with one, but nobody will do so), allowing the 45 servers to share uplinks to the enterprise network.

HP’s initial announcement is deceiving in its simplicity, only offering an initial choice of Intel Atom CPUs, a limited portfolio of storage options, and a single switch option. The power of this of this announcement lies in what it portends for the future, as HP has laid out a strong roadmap for the year, including ARM-based as well as other x86 cartridges, higher-speed network switches and more storage options. More importantly, when looked at in the context of the changes happening in the larger IT world, the announcement takes on additional significance.

Why is this Important?

In case you haven’t been reading Forrester’s research (or just about anything, really), the Internet of Things, the Galactic Internet and Google and Facebook are driving data transfer, storage and processing requirements through the roof. This escalating global workload, when combined with continual pressures on efficiency and energy consumption, is driving demands for alternative compute platforms, particularly dense, low-power servers for large web workloads.

To date, the major systems vendors have been only marginally effective in addressing this workload segment, with what we can call 1st generation Atom products based on the original Intel Microserver concept, which we were never fond of, achieving densities of approximately 4 server nodes per rack, but with little additional integration value to offer.

Startups such as SeaMicro (funded by Intel and acquired by AMD) offered innovative options, but with non-mainstream architectures and little in the way of ecosystems. HP’s MS1500 is the first product from a major vendor to offer major jumps in density (by a factor of ~2.5x other mainstream products), an architecture which has obvious implications for future scalability and adaptation, and an active ecosystem that includes competing architectural offerings.

Who Should Look at The MS1500?

At the initial announcement, HP is emphasizing web front-ends and dedicated hosting environments, but has clearly spelled out a roadmap that expands the targets to include big data and analytics, gaming and virtualized hosting environments.

The MS1500 architecture is flexible enough that I expect that it will become the basis of an extended family of systems products which will be capable of addressing a wide range of workloads. I think that HP will not have any problem with overall market acceptance of these products in their target markets, and I fully expect that this concept will attract a host of competing products, including those based on some of the recent Open Compute Project designs and derivatives.

Future Analysis

I will be writing a more detailed analysis of the Moonshot project and products in an upcoming Forrester Product Spotlight report this quarter, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, comments are welcome – does the new Moonshot 1500 interest you, and why or why not?

The focus and drivers for SAM have changed

Since the early 2000s, risk-focused IT professionals have voiced their concern over software compliance and the potential for vendor audits, large financial fines, damage to corporate reputation, and even the imprisonment of company directors. But these concerns weren't necessarily shared by the rest of the organization, which also viewed the SAM technology available as too difficult and complex to justify. As a result, SAM was a low priority on the IT management to-do list.

But this is starting to change as IT organizations realize that their software estates and procurement and provisioning processes are in a state of under-management, if not mismanagement. As a result, these organizations are wasting a significant amount of their IT funding each year on license procurement when they don't need to, maintenance agreement costs for more licenses than they actually use, and supporting and hosting software that should have been decommissioned.

Three of the 19 infographic elements:

If you are starting out with SAM, or looking to improve existing capabilities, Forrester recommends the following:

Plan for success: ensure you address the 6 key SAM initiative challenges

While the drivers for SAM are clear — better risk and cost management — the issues or challenges associated with commencing SAM initiatives aren't always as apparent. With 39% of organizations having implemented SAM and another 52% currently implementing or planning to within 12 months, now is the time to overcome known challenges. To succeed, Forrester recommends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders:

1. Connect SAM to business goals to justify investment. Tie your SAM vision into business goals to show how SAM will positively affect the business through lower cost and risk, not counting software installs.
2. Source fit-for-purpose people.  SAM cannot be done by a part-time employee with other operational responsibilities — at best you will end up with a suboptimal SAM program; at worst you will have an expensive SAM tool full of data that is rarely used. For many organizations, outsourcing SAM operations to benefit from third-party people availability, skills, and experience is an increasingly viable option.
3. Remain focused during SAM tool selection. As with most software solutions, one size does not fit all — so focus on what you actually need and avoid being enticed by cool capabilities that you may never use. Realize that compliance will only get more difficult with virtualization and cloud. Virtualization brought with it the dual issues of increasingly complex licensing and entitlement models, as well as increased difficulty in understanding what software is being used where. Cloud now adds an extra degree of complexity. To date, SAM programs are not keeping pace with technology change.
4. Go beyond compliance to save costs. Beyond achieving compliance, processes and enabling tools must also provide capabilities to optimize licensing and manage application usage, software management (including automated provisioning and software metering), and robust reporting and audit facilities to make software-related decisions.
5. React to the changing business landscape. The unsanctioned use of personal devices in the workplace — from laptops and ultrabooks to Macs, tablets, and smartphones — and the rise of corporate bring-your-own-device (BYOD) schemes bring their own software risks.
6. Avoid the temptation to spread available resources too thinly. Trying to accomplish too much too early or everything at once can be fatal. Start small and focus on specific areas, such as the workforce computing estate and mobile devices, or data center assets and virtualized environments. Alternatively, focus on specific software vendors based on known compliance issues or the vendor's propensity to audit its customers.

Final words...

Well that’s enough Edward Scissorhands from me. Hopefully chopping the report down to 700-ish words has worked. Many more of the SAM Survey infographic charts are available via a webinar with BMC. 

Also look out for the Forrester crowd-sourced ITAM Best Practice Report for much more advice on starting or improving an ITAM or SAM program.

The top question I’ve received about tablet hyper-portability is this one: “Tablets are very portable, sure, but are people using them as creation devices or as (mere) consumption devices?” The general assumption behind this question tends to be that “creation” activities are equal to “productivity,” while “consumption” activities are not. I believe this is a false dichotomy, however. Consuming the right information at the right time can increase worker productivity in and of itself. Let me offer a few examples showing how that can work:

• Retail sales associates using tablets with customers. Retailers are equipping sales associates with tablets to use on the retail floor, creating richer interactions with customers – and driving higher sales.
• Physicians conducting patient rounds with tablets. Physicians can gain rich, immediate insight into their patients’ health records – saving time and driving more accurate diagnoses in less time. They also use the tablets to show patients results (like x-ray images), creating a better patient experience.
• Sales professionals using tablet presentation tools. A variety of presentation apps, including Slideshark, Keynote, and, on Windows 8 and RT tablets, native PowerPoint, allow sales people in all verticals to use tablets as a presentation platform – educating buyers and driving higher sales.

All of these scenarios are both physically mobile and also – interestingly – customer-facing activities.Yet tablets can do far more than even these examples suggest. It’s actually not hard to find a writer who composed an entire novel on an Apple iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. Nor is it hard to find workers who travel with only a tablet on business trip, leaving their laptops behind.

To get a more rigorous picture of how workers use PCs versus tablets, Forrester’sForrsights Workforce study surveyed information workers about their use of 26 work applications. We compared those who use PCs (the vast majority of information workers) to the 21% of information workers who use a tablet for work. We found that 9 of the 26 applications were “PC dominant”: The penetration rate of usage of those apps was higher on PCs than on Tablets. That means that 17 apps turned out “Tablet dominant.”

Let me start off with one clear disclaimer: There is a significant early adopter bias among tablet users today. Even at 1 out of 5 of all information workers, tablet users remain early market adopters with more technological savvy and higher incomes than PC users (who represent almost allinformation workers). Self-selection means that these early adopters are going to use *any* technology to its fullest, so we expect them to push tablets to their limits.

Even with that bias in mind, however, we can see that tablets can be used productively across a wide variety of applications. I’ve plotted the differences in penetration rates (i.e. PC penetration rate minus Tablet penetration rate), yielding the curve below:

The green region (above the x axis) shows PC dominant apps. These include unsurprising work-horse applications such as word processing (PCs lead Tablets by 21 percentage points) and spreadsheets (PCs lead by 19 points).

Toward the middle, we find CRM software (PCs lead by a meager 3 points). CRM software can be useful in a consumption context; imagine the sales professional consulting Salesforce.com on her tablet right before a meeting with a prospect. Calendaring ties: PCs and Tablets enjoy the exact same usage rate (which is 46% of information workers using each device -- see the second chart, further below).

The red region (below the x axis) shows Tablet dominant apps. These include file sync & sharing (Tablets lead by 14 percentage points). This supports what I call “device hand-offs” – starting a document on a PC or Mac, continuing working on this document on a tablet, then sharing back and forth via cloud services. (Example: Using Pages to create a document using both a Mac and an iPad, continuously synchronizing the file via iCloud). Presentation tools (Tablets lead by 9 points) probably involve doing the presenting on the tablet having created the presentation on a PC or Mac. Other Tablet dominant apps include a lot of social networking and communications activities.

The conclusion here is that tablets are being used dynamically and deeply for a wide variety of work-related applications.  At least among early adopters who can take great advantage of their best features, tablets hold their own (and better) compared with traditional laptops in app usage. And all of these activities, whether "creation" or "consumption," are driving worker productivity.

As a final bonus, a few of the penetration numbers behind the analysis. The percentages in the "PC" and "Tablet" columns represent the percentage of (global) information workers who say they engage in each application on that specific device for work purposes:

Some technologies radically reshape productivity. Take, for example, the cotton gin (1792), which fundamentally transformed labor. A quote from Wikipedia claims: “With a cotton gin, in one daya man could remove seed from as much upland cotton as would have previously taken a woman working two months to process at one pound a day.” By profoundly increasing worker productivity, the cotton gin revolutionized both the textile and agricultural industries.

We’re living through several technological revolutions of our own right now – in, for example, cloud services, mobility, and big data. One technology that leverages all three to some extent is the tablet, a device I follow very closely.

Read this

iPad 5 features that are coming your way

• Read more

Tablets drive worker productivity through a variety of vectors. One of those vectors is portability. In our Forrsights Hardware Survey, we asked IT decision-makers who either support tablets today or plan to support them soon why they would do so. IT decision-makers’ #1 answer, at 62%? Because tablets are a “more portable form factor than the traditional laptop.” This response eclipsed end user preferences, ease of use considerations, and other possible answers.

So I&O is on board, but are workers taking advantage of this hyper-portability? In our Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, we asked global information workers who use PCs and tablets (respectively) where they use each device in a typical week. We found that:

• Tablets empower workers to be productive in (far) more places. The Figure below shows that information workers use their tablets much more often than PCs in heterogeneous locations. The differences are significant for use in a different room or building at work, or in another work location or client site. The differences are vast for truly mobile locations like coffee shops, or for use while traveling or commuting. Tablets span the gamut of locations, while PCs don’t.
• PCs, in fact, dominate only in one spot – at the work desk. Workers’ desks haven’t gone away, even if 29% of workers fall into the category Forrester calls “Anytime, Anywhere” information workers. Today, 91% of workers say they use their PCs at their desks. Certain hardcore computing tasks – think the creation of complex spreadsheets – might optimally be accomplished on a PC (or Mac). But the growing picture is that of a primary computer used at one’s desk, but a highly flexible adjunct computer – a tablet – being used everywhere else.
• And tablets are rivaling PCs as the go-to device for taking work home. The #1 spot where information workers who own a tablet do work on it? At home: 68% of tablet users say they do so, compared with 43% of PC users. For applications related to staying connected – email and instant messaging, for instance – tablets fit the bill nicely, obviating the need to take a full-fledged work PC home on evenings and weekends.

Workers have become very adept at making both contextual device trade-offs (choosing which device to use for a particular task at a particular moment and in a particular context) and what we can call device hand-offs: Cloud sharing and storage services (whether via Dropbox, iCloud, Skydrive, SharePoint, or any number of others) facilitate device hand-offs, which involve using multiple devices to complete a task in iterative fashion. As a worker, I can (1) start the creation of a document on my PC or Mac, (2) read the same draft later on my smartphone while waiting in line to get lunch, (3) make edits later at home on the couch on my tablet, and then (4) share the document with a variety of co-workers from any of my devices. I have iterated across multiple devices on multiple occasions to accomplish my work goal.

Device hand-offs allow mobile workers to fit more work into a given day, optimizing the form factor they choose to suit their context and goals. Other Forrester data shows that workers are engaging in more computing applications, more often, in more places, and across more devices. They can complete work tasks more quickly, with higher quality, and – just possibly – more creatively. 

While perhaps not rising to the revolutionary impact of the cotton gin, tablets are nevertheless driving business success by increasing worker productivity. 

The CIO at a large software vendor with a reputation for great employee engagement said it best: "Technology is expected, but [business leaders] do not think about how it enables people." Technology is an ambient part of the workspace. Businesses outfit their workforces with a range of gadgets and give them access to numerous systems which facilitate interactions, manage orders, track projects, store data, and more. Of course, deficiencies in these corporate toolkits lead employees to find and embrace things like iPhones, Galaxy Tabs, Dropbox, and Evernote on their own. But has anyone given serious consideration to how these disparate tools come together to help engage employees so they can properly support the customer?

Here is where the CIO can make a difference. Business leaders and employees cannot independently string together these diverse tools into a reliable, holistic, seamless, and secure experience that helps engage the workforce. The problem is the workforce does not believe the IT department can do this either. IT leaders will never be able to expand the conversation about how technology can enable employees or redefine the relationship between IT and employees if the focus is on provisioning and managing technology. The conversations CIOs should be driving is how to design technology experiences which align technology with specific work tasks to drive actions that help employees achieve the outcomes they, and the business, desire. Making this shift means IT leaders must:

• Create employee-obsessed IT organizations. A CIO at a healthcare services firm told us he had to change his department's perception of itself from a "technology company" within their organization to a customer-service organization focused on creating great experiences for employees. Making this transition isn't easy. The CIO told us he had to invest heavily in change management and hire new IT staffers who were animated by the concept of service. The CIO also had to deal with attrition.
• Work with business leaders to align technology with the workforce vision. Every company highlighted on "great places to work" lists, like the one Forbes publishes, have a strong vision for the relationship between the employee and the business. The IT department must seize upon this vision to direct their actions. For example, The IT department at Forbes entrant SAS worked with the internal communications group to create a communication platform, The Hub, to facilitate transparent communications between executives and employees.
• Partner with the HR department to measure success. These efforts are all for naught if the IT department cannot draw a link between what they do and positive business outcomes. My colleague Simon Yates recently put forward a measurement framework for assessing IT's contributions to the workforce experience. However, most IT departments don't have expertise in measuring employee engagement. This is where a fruitful relationship between IT and HR leaders can be built. The CIO can use HR's assessments of employee satisfaction to guide her technology roadmap.

We don't pretend that this transition is going to be easy. There is a history of poor interactions between employees and IT which has resulted in workers giving their IT departments low satisfaction scores. However, businesses need technology to support their emerging global, mobile, cosmopolitan workforces. We are working on a strain of research, which we refer to as Workforce Experience, focused on helping IT leaders tackle the issues raised above. I will be moderating a panel at our CIO Forum in May in which I discuss this transformation with State Street's Ed Flahive, Razorfish's Ray Velez, and CHG Healthcare's Mike Peterson.

As we delve deeper into this research, we're interested in hearing from you. How is your IT department supporting employee engagement? How has it changed the organization? How has it changed your relationship to the business? This is an important conversation and we hope that you're interested in engaging in it. 

VMware's public cloud service - yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Service, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others - won't be fully unveiled until Q2 2013, so much of the details about the service remain under wraps. VMware hired the former president for Savvis Cloud, Bill Fathers, to run this new offering and said it was a top three initiative for the company and thus would be getting, "the level of investment appropriate to that priority and to capitalize on a $14B market opportunity," according to Matthew Lodge, VP of Cloud Services Product Marketing and Management for VMware who spoke to us Tuesday about the pending announcement. 

VMware is calling the service "hybrid" to set expectations about how enterprises should view the solution and to reinforce its claims about vCloud Director, the software upon which this offering is based. The company has long claimed that vCloud Director, which instantiates an IaaS environment, empowers I&O professionals to manage workloads in exactly the same way, with the same vCenter tools whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud. Prior to this announcement VMware was delivering this hybrid value through internet service providers (ISPs) who carried the vCloud Poweredor vCloud DataCenter monikers which required them to expose the full vCloud API to enable this level of consistent control. However it found a reluctant partner reception as ISPs feared full vCloud implementation would commodize their offering and limit differentiation (and even more ISPs balked at the VMware licensing costs compared to open source alternatives). 

The second reason for the "hybrid" name is to prove to its army of VMware Certified Professionalsthat the public cloud isn't the enemy but is instead an extension of the data center but one that isdifferent from the static virtualization environments they operate today. This means showing them how vCloud Director should really be deployed - with a self-service portal exposed to the developer (not to the administrator), with cost transparency and full deployment automation. As discussed in this blog previously, this is a major challenge for the company as they have trained an entire generation of administrators to run the virtual infrastructure one way and now need to teach them to run it entirely differently. 

VMware said its public cloud will be aimed at its existing customer base and sold through its existing VAR and SI channel. This explains CEO Gelsinger's strong comments from last month's Partner Exchange -- it wasn't public clouds he was worried about but non-VMware public clouds. But for this channel fulfillment strategy to come true, its partners will have to get with the cloud program too and like the I&O clients they serve, many don't see more revenue at the end of the public cloud rainbow. And most channel partners don't have the skills or the trust level to help their I&O clients transition from static virtualization to cloud - that's a culture and career path change more than a product they can sell them. This requires consulting skills and real cloud experience and most VMware partners don't have either. 

But even if turning the channel will be a challenge VMware is hedging that bet too -- its public IaaS cloud will be directly consumable by developers -- with a credit card. So it could disrupt the channel, the I&O professionals and the corporate data center. More enlightened I&O professionals will probably say, "well if I have to let my developers use the cloud, maybe I can push them to a cloud that I can manage." Not a bad strategy.

So what does this mean for Forrester I&O clients: At this point, wait and see. Until full details of the offering are made available, understand its pricing model and learn about how effectively this be leveraged in a hybrid fashion, all we can do is speculate. VMware said a new version of its vCloud Connector tool (that links data center environments) will coincide with the launch of this service and will be delivered at no additional charge to existing vCloud Director clients. Will this really be easier to integrate and more seamless? Will VMware get the developer experience right? A lot remains to be seen.

Pat, you and your market have the Innovator's Dilemma and the enemy isn't public cloud but private clouds.

According to CRN's article on the event, Gelsinger was quoted as saying, “"We want to own corporate workloads. We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever."

You need to learn from the clouds, not demonize them.

Forgive my frankness, Mr. Gelsinger, but you just don't get it. Public clouds are not your enemy. And the disruption they are causing to your forward revenues are not their capture of enterprise workloads. The battle lines you should be focusing on are between advanced virtualization and true cloud services and the future placement of Systems of Engagement versus Systems of Record.

VMware and its vSphere hypervisor have been the catalysts for significant IT efficiency through P to V migrations. Enterprise workloads that used to occupy the resources of physical servers are now safely sharing these vast resources so enterprise IT can slow down its server buying (sorry HP and Dell), and raise the ROI on its capital purchases while still increasing the number of applications they deploy and manage.

And there's a long runway ahead for this type of virtualization. Forrester's ForrSights Hardware Survey conducted in 2012 shows that there's still nearly 40% of enterprise workloads that haven't been virtualized. These are the migrations of enterprise workloads you alluded to in your statements and this is VMware's opportunity to capture.

But for the most part, vSphere is used to manage static workloads and it's best suited to these types of applications. The bulk of the workloads flowing into our vSphere environments are steady state applications that capture and record the state of our business. We cherish the live migration and disaster recovery capabilities on the vSphere platform as they let us to raise the SLA for these critical applications and slowly wean business- then mission-critical applications off physical resources.

But what vSphere isn't capturing are the new applications that are built to engage clients and partners in new ways. The applications that connect to mobile devices, have irratic resource requirements and unplanned and unpredictable capacity needs and the new efforts to gain greater business insight. It's not that vSphere isn't capable of hosting these applications – but that the buyer values functionality that lies at a far higher level than where VMware has its strength.

Systems of Engagement are built by front-line developers using modern languages who are driven by time to market, the need for rapid deployment and iteration, and value enablement just below their skill level. They value solutions that make it easy for them to deploy their application code with as little friction as possible – both in what needs to be configured below their executable and in the cost and time to do so. This is why front-line developers love public clouds. And today's vSphere environments aren't even close to satisfying these requirements.

The average corporate vSphere environment – even if the enterprise I&O team has chosen to deploy vCloud Director -- isn't self-service. It doesn't provide fast access to fully configured environments. It wouldn't know what to do with a Chef script and it certainly couldn't be had for $5 on a Visa card. For VMware and for enterprise vSphere administrators to capture the new enterprise applications they need to rethink their approach and make the radical and culturally difficult shift from infrastructure management to service delivery.

You need to learn from the clouds, not demonize them.

Taking an approach that paints the public clouds as the enemy serves only to reinforce the way of the vSphere administrator and if you are trying to appeal to your front-line developers, this approach is wrong. A cloudwashed vSphere environment that takes two days to deploy new workloads, fulfilling requests through the help desk and having no cost transparency will lose every day to a public cloud.

And don't even try the security or reliability card. Really? You honestly think your static VMware environment hiding behind outdated firewall-based security hosted out of a 1990's era data center on servers bought in 2011 is going to trump a public cloud with 6 availability zones, across 3 data centers and 4 geographic regions being protected by a team of top security professionals?

And by pitting the public cloud as the enemy you forgo any opportunity to partner with developers around helping manage and monitor these public cloud environments – which is where I&O should really be concentrating its energies.

What you should be doing instead is teaching your vSphere admin community how to evolve into a true cloud. Help them understand why the front-line developers value self-service so much and how it doesn't breed chaos in the data center – but just the opposite. Help them understand that a career path towards service definition and cost transparency is better than the path of vSphere 6 certification and continued manual deployment and management of VM images.

What you should be doing is admitting you screwed up with vCloud Director 1.0 and 1.5 and kicking ass in engineering to get a true cloud to market ASAP.

Your real threat? CloudStack and OpenStack atop Xen or KVM sold to a new cloud administrator inside the enterprise who starts with the service elements of a cloud the DevOps crowd values and worries less about the underlying abstraction layers and infrastructure. This is your real threat.

VMware executives wisely stated at the Partner Summit that they haven't invested appropriately in cloud technologies but then patted themselves on the back for their growing success with service providers. Don't rest on your laurels, gentlemen. You may be picking up share in traditional hosting (and most of your claimed “cloud wins” are just that) but you're losing the true IaaS game. You need to step up your game both in product and customer evolution. The vSphere administrator crowd can't linearly evolve up from vSphere to a cloud and get to the end game in time. Understanding cloud delivery is a hard culture change for enterprise I&O and if the VMware buyer doesn't make this change, he and VMware itself will be disrupted.

And you won't have AWS to thank for your new share price. You'll only have yourselves.

“Why on earth did you write a SaaS-only ITSM report?” I hear some cry

It’s simple – Forrester client demand. In 2012, a good 25% of my 1000+ a year client inquiries related to IT service management (ITSM) tool selection; and the SaaS-delivery model (along with key vendors) was covered in nearly on all of them. That’s not to say the client ultimately went SaaS, however; inquiries are very much about rapid information exchange in helping clients make important decisions. It’s not about making the decision for the client.

What the SaaS ITSM market looks like

The following figure shows the 23 vendor tools split by average customer subscription (seat) count (described as Enterprise, Upper Midmarket, and Lower Midmarket) and their degree of customer success (the number of paying customers):

There are of course other ITSM tool vendors who declined to participate for a variety of reasons. One would be that they were not briefing Forrester analysts and thus not on our radar.

The key benefits of SaaS for ITSM

The software-as-a-service delivery model can offer fast deployment speeds, low upfront costs, and ongoing flexibility to scale up or down as needs change. These benefits are universal, whether applied to customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), collaboration, or ITSM. Key benefits of the SaaS delivery model for ITSM include:

• Subscription-based pricing that lowers total cost of ownership, initially. For many firms, the key benefit of SaaS is its simple, subscription-based pricing model: Firms pay a subscription fee per month (or year) per user that covers everything needed to operate, including support and maintenance.
  
  This model provides a lower and consistent level of opex without any of the capex investment required for on-premises hardware and software licenses. As a result, the total cost of ownership of SaaS is lower.
  
  However, this is often only temporary, as the total cost of ownership of SaaS often can become more expensive than on-premises after three to four years, depending on customer ITSM maturity. Also, some vendors offer subscription-based pricing (opex rather than capex) for their on-premises offerings.
  
  
• Simple implementation and upgrades that minimize staff effort. An SaaS-delivered ITSM tool only requires a web browser and an Internet connection to function — no client to install, no hardware to support, and nothing to upgrade locally.
  
  SaaS also offers seamless, automatic upgrades, typically two to four times per year (a caveat here is that customer customizations can still cause issues with the ease of said upgrades). This means that users can access the latest features and functionality faster than in an on-premises deployment, where upgrade cycles often take 18 to 24 months.
  
  
• Reduced support needs. SaaS can reduce or eliminate internal IT support since the SaaS provider typically includes support and maintenance in the subscription (with the provider responsible for patching and bug fixing).
  
  
• Greater opportunity of use. The simplicity of pricing can also be viewed from a value-for-money perspective, in that a per-seat subscription will usually cover access to capabilities across multiple ITIL processes rather than the traditional need for organizations to buy multiple licenses across multiple ITSM products (or modules). This gives an organization the freedom to continue its adoption of the ITIL framework over time without additional cost, other than for additional users and seats as necessary.
  
  
• Higher user satisfaction. Although Forrester hears frequent complaints about ITSM tools, the data suggests that satisfaction is higher than dissatisfaction. However, SaaS customers are far more satisfied. While all other models maintain an about 70:30 satisfied/dissatisfied ratio or worse, SaaS is an impressive 88:12.
  
  We believe it's a combination of the benefits above. Software-as-a-service's ease of use, instant availability, and pay-per-use nature are in stark contrast to older on-premises experiences that firms perceive as clunky and which take months or years to rollout, all while spending significant capital investment upfront before value is received.

The report also covers the risks of SaaS. One should also remember that modern ITSM tool vendors can also deliver these benefits via on-premises tools.

Finally, if you want to find out more about…

• The risks of the SaaS delivery model
• Key selection criteria for selecting a SaaS (or on-premises) tool
• Overviews of 23 tools (from 21 vendors) and their functional capabilities

For clients, the report is available here. For non-clients I am hopeful to add a link to a publicly-available copy via vendor website at some point.

As always, your thoughts and comments are appreciated. Who else would you have liked to have seen included?

 anyone?)

We don’t have the capability to invest in every new technical advance that comes down the pike, so we need to be able to tell the seventh wave technologies from the others that might provide incremental productivity benefits or cost reduction, but that don’t change everything we do or think.

I’ve personally seen three seventh waves in my 20+ year development career. The first was at the start of my time as a professional developer – the Client/Server wave. The second was Web 1.0 – I remember watching long established ISVs struggle to adapt to the revolution that Mosaic touched off.  Now we’re a few years into another seventh wave – the shift to “Mobile First” development.

It’s easy to miss the structural changes when you’re in the middle of it. It’s like being a gardener  – you don’t see how quickly your crops grow when you see them every day; but if you go on an extended business trip, it seem like everything grows like crazy while you’re gone.

This “step back and see the change” point was driven home to me by this data nugget from Forrester's Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q4 2012, which is featured in Ted Schadler’s latest report on 2013 Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends. In particular, this graphic jumped out at me:

I was struck that the ONLY place where global information workers use a computer more than a tablet or a smartphone is when they are sitting in their cube or office! Then it hit me – we’ve made the transition to mobile first. It’s in front of our eyes, but we’re not seeing it. 

Think about how this graphic plays out in your day-to-day activities. When you walk into a conference room, how many people are using iPads vs. Android devices vs. Windows laptops? Now that I consciously think about it, the change in the past two years is substantial, but it happened so gradually that it was almost invisible.

We’re in danger of becoming this generation’s mainframe developers – still a lot to do and with a very important set of tasks, but no longer at the edge of business innovation.

Now I’m a bit worried. Our latest data indicates only ~20% of developers are actively engaged in mobile projects, while our customers have moved to a mobile first world. We’re collectively behind the crest of the wave, and I fear many of us might lose the edge and get stuck in the trough behind it.

Our development organizations will not be able to keep up with what our customers and co-workers demand. As a result, we’ll be maligned as laggards and perhaps even replaced by a new generation of modern application developers who understand what it takes to build these new systems.

We’re in danger of becoming this generation’s mainframe developers – still a lot to do and with a very important set of tasks, but no longer at the edge of business innovation.

Our development shops have to start moving faster so we can catch up with the habits of our customers and co-workers. It’s in this spirit that we’ve launched our Mobile Application Development playbook. It’s designed to help identify and overcome:

• Development technology challenges. The number one question I get asked about mobile development is: “HTML 5 or Native”? My answer: “It depends”. When you understand the benefits and drawbacks of native, hybrid, middleware and web based development and how they match to your customer’s engagement expectations, making a technology choice becomes a lot easier.
• Difference in development culture. Developing mobile apps is very different from the traditional systems of record your teams have been building for the past 20+ years. The technology choices are easy to make in comparison. If you’re not using Agile and dev-ops practices, continuous delivery or don’t know how to launch a minimum viable product, you’re going to struggle with mobile development. 
• Integration challenges. I’ve seen a lot of client that have implemented a first round of mobile apps by working with a third party design agency or regional Sis. Now these apps are evolving into connected products, and they need to tie into existing system of record and system of operation. These phase two mobile apps are a lot more complicated and the business can’t simply go around IT to get them built.
• Evolution in systems architecture. Many development teams try to port the tightly coupled, stateful, MVC-style apps they’ve written on big application servers into the world of omni-channel mobile clients. It doesn’t work very well. Modern applications are built different, scale different, and are deployed differently than what many of us are used to.
• Evolving success metrics. While a “5-star app” is the ultimate measure of consumer success, there are also financial and productivity metrics that guide the evaluation of B2C and B2B mobile efforts. Understanding what to measure (and why) is an important part of the mobile shift.

Jeffrey Hammond is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @jhammond. 

Forrester analyst Lauren Nelson and I get this question often in our inquiries with enterprise customers. We've found the answer and published a new report specifically on this topic. It's core finding: Your approach is wrong.

Your asking the wrong people to build the solution. You aren't giving them clear enough direction on what they should build. You aren't helping them understand how this new service should operate, or how it will affect their career and value to the organization. And more often than not, you are building the private cloud without engaging the buyers who will consume this cloud.

And your approach is perfectly logical. For many of us in IT, we see a private cloud as an extension of our investments in virtualization. It's simply virtualization with some standardization, automation, a portal, and an image library, isn't it? Yep. And a Porsche is just a Volkswagen with a better engine, tires, suspension, and seats. That's the fallacy in this thinking.

To get private cloud right you have to step away from the guts of the solution and start with the value proposition. From the point of view of the consumers of this service — your internal developers and business users.

To them, a private cloud is a service, not an infrastructure stack. They value the speed in which resources can be allocated to them, the simplicity of getting their work done, and the lack of friction involved. To get private cloud right, you have to start here, and that requires a completely different set of skills — skills your virtualization administrator, frankly, doesn't possess. And honestly, your virtualization administrator probably doesn't see how he benefits from a private cloud. In fact, he's probably threatened by it.

Cloud developers look at the private cloud through the lens of the public cloud and the benefits it provides: self-service, a low entry price, strictly limited sets of predefined resource configurations and services, and speed — where fast is defined as fifteen minutes or less. Cloud developers want these same characteristics in a private cloud, and won't tolerate compromises in autonomy and agility. And the end customer of the private cloud doesn't care at all about the VM container their app will eventually run on or the underlying infrastructure — these elements have all but disappeared for them.

Bottom line:Your private cloud is very different than your static virtualization environment.

In looking at the organizations who are having success with their private clouds, their approach is completely different. And usually, starts with a different person in charge — a developer or architect who approaches the cloud, not from the infrastructure up, but as a service. And they start their service definition with the public equivalent. The approach: How can I deliver the same value and experience of the public cloud from within our own datacenter? Those who have had the most success with this approach have also started with a complete Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service solution, rather than trying to build one up from a virtualization foundation.

So if your team is struggling to deliver a private cloud and you have taken the bottoms-up approach, stop. This is the difficult, culturally challenging and slow approach to cloud value. Instead, put a new cloud admin in charge. Someone who understands and has direct experience with the public clouds, has a service orientation (not an infrastructure orientation), and is willing to start fresh with solutions that meet your developers needs out of the box.