A new survey of IT decision makers by SAP and Harris Interactive reithat the rise of machine to machine (M2M) communications - more commonly referred to as the "Internet of Things" - is on the cusp of transforming our homes, our cities and how business is conducted.

How, you ask?

• By leveraging Big Data and real-time analytics to improve parking and traffic flow, which could reduce pollution and traffic accidents as well.
• By managing all the gadgets in our homes, from lights, computers and smartphones down to our coffeemaker and garage door. Wake up, the coffee is brewing, the house is heated, the car already knows the best route to work and the news we need is showing on the screen of our choice - prioritized, obviously.
• Connected cars, roads and smartphones will guide us to the nearest open parking spot - and bill us automatically.

This Internet of Things will also let businesses increase "efficiency, productivity and collaboration," as it delivers real-time data and insight when and where it's most needed, including to a widely dispersed, highly mobile workforce.

Buried within the survey results are such nuggets as:

• Mobile devices will outnumber humans this year. 
• 90% of consumer-connected devices will have access to some personal cloud in 2013.
• 24 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
• 66% of IT professionals surveyed believe business and consumer technology will converge within 3-5 years - great news for consumer tech leaders like Apple, Samsung and Google.
• At least 4 billion terabytes of data will be generated this year alone.
• The trend toward BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has clear and present business repercussions: 75% of the surveyed IT professionals believe that employees' personal use of mobile devices impacts how the business itself uses the cloud. 
• 65% think the Internet of Things' biggest challent in managing and analyzing the resulting real-time data.

(Note: SAP and Harris have also prepared an infographic of the survey results, visible here.)

Global Phenomenon

The business-funded survey of 751 IT "decision makers" was generally upbeat about the Internet of Things. A statement released with the survey suggested connecting data from CRM systems, social media and billions of devices, all in real time, will result in "the ultimate social media collaboration of man and machine." 

That said, it is somewhat surprising that IT decision makers in developing countries - China, India and Brazil - appear more eager eager for the M2M revolution. Consider the response percentages to specific statements regarding the Internet of Things:

• Gives companies greater insight into their business: China (96%), India (88%), Brazil (86%), Germany (79%), U.S. (74%) and UK (61%)
• Enables businesses to respond to real world events: China (92%), India (86%), Brazil (82 %), Germany (82%), U.S. (78%) and UK (73%)
• Increases business efficiency:  Brazil (54%), UK (53%) and U..S (49%)
• Increases productivity for employees:  China (69 percent) - significantly higher than any other countries surveyed

Nearly all decision makers (89%) across all surveyed countries agreed, however, that widespread availability of LTE/4G infrastructure was vital for the success of the Internet of Things. This will likely not come cheap, however. A recent statement by Cambridge Wireless noted that today's mobile networks are "lacking ubiquitous coverage" and suggested that "service tariffs are too high to support" the full potential of the Internet of Things.

(See also Futurist's Cheat Sheet: Internet of Things)

The hope of the Internet of Things is that greater connectivity, vastly more data, improved data analysis - and response - will make our lives better in ways we can scarcely predict, at home, on the road, at work; everywhere.

Note: Per SAP, "the survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf of SAP among 751 IT decision makers in Brazil (n=126), China (n=125), Germany (n=125), India (n=125), the United Kingdom (n=125) and the United States (n=125) between January 15 and February 1, 2013."

Enterprise IT keeps trying to shove the public cloud genie back into a private cloud bottle, but the majority of developers are having none of that, according to Forrester principal analyst James Staten (@staten7), speaking at the Open Business Conference (OSBC) on Tuesday in San Francisco. Interestingly, these cloud-savvy developers aren't newbie troublemakers just getting started in enterprise IT, but instead skew older and more experienced. Perhaps with Twisted Sister cranking on their Walkmans, this rising breed of middle-aged cloud developer isn't "gonna take it anymore."

Which, of course, is exactly how open source made its way in the enterprise.

Open Source: Not So Young But Very Restless

Back in 2002, Boston Consulting Group surveyed (PDF) the open-source developer community to get a feel for the demographics of the movement. While early open-source development was thought to be marshalled by anarchists and free code-loving hippies, BCG's study revealed that the open-source community was actually comprised of experience IT professionals with an average of 11 years of programming experience.

And while the open source ranks weren't filled with Baby Boomers, they also weren't being pushed by Generation Y. The average age was 30 years old. While not exactly middle aged, it skewed much older than expected.

This shouldn't have been surprising. Often, those who have the most value to contribute are more experienced programmers. In addition, such programmers have also been working in enterprise IT long enough to recognize a better, more efficient way of developing software, and to have the job security needed to take a risk on coloring outside the lines of enterprise IT policies.

Cloud As An Antidote To Corporate Bureaucracy

It's therefore not surprising to see cloud computing also driven by experienced developers, rather than newly minted graduates. According to Forrester's Forrsights Developer Survey, Q1 2013, 71% of cloud developers have at least six years of programming experience, and some 11% have been writing code for over 20 years. These aren't novices trying the cloud because it's "cool."

Indeed, delving deeper into Forrester's data, the primary reason developers turn to the cloud is speed of development:

In other words, as with open source, these developers can't be bothered with corporate bureaucracy. In an earlier Forrester survey, developers said the primary benefit of the cloud is that it's the "Fastest way for me to get my project done and deployed." This calls to mind Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady's assertion that "Convenience trumps just about everything" when it comes to cloud adoption.

A Race To Capture Middle-Aged Hearts And Minds

Amazon was the first to spot this market, and is now the preferred  Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering for 71% of developers, according to Forrester, with Microsoft Azure (25%) and Google (23%) playing catch-up. Cloud developers overwhelmingly want IaaS because they want "deep platform access" to things like app servers, web servers, and databases, as Staten noted in his OSBC presentation.

Again, cloud developers are not neophytes. They're serious developers who understand core IT infrastructure but want the freedom to get work done without waiting on corporate procurement or legal policies to catch up.

As such, the IaaS platform that best serves this need will win.

Image courtesy of Jørund F Pedersen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Legacy enterprise IT vendors may be scrambling to spread the blame in the wake of earnings misses, but one mega-vendor is not, and it's the one open-source advocates have argued for years was doomed to imminent oblivion: Microsoft. For all its stumbles in mobile and online, Microsoft continues to soar in core enterprise infrastructure sales.

The reason? Microsoft pressures the Oracles and HPs of the world in much the same ways that open source and cloud do.

Low Cost, High Value

By most measures, Microsoft's Server and Tools business is booming:

• Product revenue up 11% (Multi-year licensing revenue up 20%)
• Enterprise Services revenue up 11%
• System Center revenue grew 22%
• SQL Server revenue grew 16%, outpacing the market

And while growth has slowed a bit in fiscal year 2013 compared to fiscal year 2012, it's still impressive growth, especially in light of the struggles other enterprise IT vendors have had recently.

Why is Microsoft different? Most obviously, because Microsoft tends to make complex infrastructure affordable and easy to use, while appealing to developers. This has long been Microsoft's recipe for success: lowering the bar to use complex software while also lowering costs.

In other words, Microsoft keeps chugging along in the enterprise because makes life easier for enterprise IT, similar to what cloud and open source do. Or as Apprenda vice president Rakesh Malhotra puts it, "it's less about licensing and more about the complexity/cost/value."

And while Microsoft persists with its proprietary license model, a model out-of-favor in a market trending toward open source and cloud, it still tends to be much cheaper than alternatives like Oracle in the database market. As BMO Capital Markets analyst  Karl Keirstead recently opined in a client note, "Countless customers have told us that the cost advantage of SQL Server is so compelling that their deployment of Microsoft SQL Server databases is ramping."

In short, Microsoft improves enterprise value and lower costs, relative to the other legacy IT vendors.

But What About Mobile?

Ironically, Microsoft has thus far failed in mobile precisely because it has taken the opposite strategy: while Apple and Google (Android) have essentially lowered the cost of mobile operating system licenses to $0.00, Microsoft has continued to try to impose license fees. When that hasn't worked, it has sued Android licensees to try to raise costs to match Microsoft's.

It hasn't worked.

Microsoft has a lot of work to do to catch up in mobile. But in core enterprise infrastructure? Microsoft may be the vendor to beat. 

Not Shrinking From The Cloud Fight

Not that Microsoft rests easily. After all, with trends shifting IT spending to mobile and cloud, Microsoft's traditional Server and Tools division stands to take a beating. According to a new Baird Equity Research Technology study, Amazon, in particular, is siphoning off dollars from the legacy IT pie:

We estimate that for every dollar spent on [Amazon Web Services], there is at least $3 to $4 not spent on traditional IT, and this ratio will likely expand further. In other words, AWS reaching $10 billion in revenues by 2016 translates into at least $30 to $40 billion lost from the traditional IT market. 

In this, however, Microsoft is playing a solid offense, and stands a good chance of succeeding. Among both enterprise developers and CIOs, Microsoft remains their go-to vendor, according to both Piper Jaffray and Evans Data surveys. More pertinently to Amazon, these same enterprises plan to expand their Microsoft Azure adoption significantly, according to Forrester:

Breathing Room...For Now

Amazon stands clear as the 800-pound cloud gorilla, but Microsoft is no slouch. By embracing the cloud early and by continuing to pressure its proprietary peers with low-cost, high-value infrastructure software like SQL Server, Microsoft has kept itself top of mind with CIOs. These same CIOs are therefore willing to give Microsoft breathing room as it transitions its business to the cloud.

This could get interesting.

Who knew that IBM's sales team was so bad? Or Oracle's? Or Tibco's? In a string of earnings calls, each of these titans of enterprise software put their respective sales teams to the sword, blaming them for the companies' poor earnings reports. 

If only it were that easy.

Shooting The Sales Messenger

While we've talked about the decline of legacy software vendors for years, it's only now that the rise of cloud and open source are showing up in the earnings reports of legacy IT vendors. First it was Oracle, signaling an end to the traditional enterprise software licensing model. Then Tibco. Now IBM.

As IBM chief financial officer Mark Loughridge argued,

We had solid profit performance in January, but as the quarter ended hundreds of millions of dollars of very profitable software and System z mainframe deals fell short of the goal line. On the software side of the house they had a very good listed deals and I think this was just pure execution. We should have closed those on a sales side.

It would be easier to believe this if similar results (and excuses) weren't popping up across the legacy IT vendor landscape, and this despite a flat to improving spending outlook by CIOs, according to recent Barclays survey data:

Perhaps the problem isn't the sales teams' execution - a "lack of urgency we sometimes see in the sales force" as Oracle president Safra Catz opined - but rather the very foundation for legacy enterprise software sales: the software license.

It's The Data, Stupid

As Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady persuasively argues, the value of software as software has been declining for years. Value has been shifting to data, and software has either become free (open source) or distributed services made available over the web (cloud). Software revenue growth for the big vendors, not surprisingly, has slowed to a trickle, according to IDC data.

This shifting emphasis away from software sales, toward data-based services, has crowned Google as the market capitalization leader among its "peers," a trend that will likely continue for many years:

In fact, as O'Grady highlights, among the PWC global top-100 software vendors, none of the top-20 was founded after 1989. He concludes: "The data is clear: while there is substantial money in software, the difficulty of employing it as a primary revenue mechanism is increasing."

A Flight From Software To Cloud

For this reason, we've seen IBM and others diversifying out of software, bulking up in services, differentiated hardware, and more, as PWC's segmentation of software revenue among the world's top-20 software vendors indicates:

Source: PWC, 2013.

Such a shift won't happen overnight, and will be painful along the way. Very painful.

For example, SAP has been struggling to become a cloud-friendly company, and it's having deleterious effects on its earnings. As Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard spotlighted in a recent SAP research note, "increasing demand for cloud solutions is creating a negative drag on software license revenue growth."

Having lived through this at Novell, when we had to replace super high-margin NetWare revenue with lower-margin, lower-priced SUSE Linux revenue, I can state with some certainty that it's a long, tough road (fortunately, one that SUSE seems finally to have completed). Still, some companies, IBM in particular, have managed to make the transition, though no legacy IT vendor has gone to the lengths that Google, Facebook, Salesforce and other new-breed "tech" companies have, essentially making the sales function an automated credit card transaction over the web.

This friction-free, license-free model is the future. 

In this new world, purchasing power moves away from CIOs to developers, in the case of open source, and to line of business executives, in the case of cloud. Where it's not moving, and likely never will again, is to the top lines of the legacy IT vendors. Software has become a service, not a big revenue driver. That fact won't change, and shooting the sales messenger won't help.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Two surveys surfaced last week that paint widely divergent pictures of enterprise adoption of open source. But based on the continued rise of open source in the enterprise, only one is likely correct.

The first comes from Univa, a data center automation company that also offers an open-source version of its Grid Engine product. Univa found that while 76% of enterprises surveyed are using open source, a full 75% experience problems running it in mission-critical workloads.

Given that so many enterprises apparently struggle to use open source successfully, one might wonder why so many persist in doing so. Back in 2008, Gartner found that 85% of enterprises were using open source, but even that high number is surely underreporting actual adoption of open source because, according to Forrester, "developers adopt open source products tactically without the explicit approval of their managers."

Conflicted Much?

Fortunately, Univa doesn't leave us to guess how to resolve this seeming conflict between mass adoption and poor quality. While open source is rarely mentioned on its website, the one page that gets a lot of open source mentions presents a highly conflicted view on open source, like the following customer testimonials:

"...we were finally able to switch our focus away from a malfunctioning [open source] Grid Engine."

"If I went to another company that was using purely an open-source Grid Engine, I would take Univa with me to assure this kind of flexibility and security. I know Univa has my back."

And this product pitch:

"Univa Grid Engine is the next generation product that open source Grid Engine users have been waiting for." 

These sorts of statements would be a great way to bash one's competition, but in this case Univa's marketing is designed to bash itself. Or rather, the open-source project upon which it is based. This message carries through in its survey, which found that 64% of enterprises will pay for better quality, which translates to stability (25%) and enterprise-grade support (22%).

"That open-source product we give away? It's not very good! You should pay us instead of using our open-source software" seems to be the message.

Different Survey, Very Different Results

It's a very different message conveyed by the results of Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners 2013 Future of Open Source survey.  While vendor support was a top-three consideration in 2012 for adopting open source, in 2013 it falls to number 11, well behind competitive functionality, solid security, and better TCO as reasons to use open source.

In fact, this survey finds that "Better Quality Software," which was the fifth-placed reason for using open source in 2011, is now the top reason:

So open source goes from quality nightmare for 75% of enterprisesr in Univa's survey to quality king in Black Duck's survey. What gives?

Reading Between The Lines

Well, vendor motivations may help to sway the kinds of questions asked, and the recipients of the survey itself. I'm not suggesting that either company set out to skew results, but neither data sample is likely purely random.

Still, I'm more inclined to give credence to Black Duck's results, despite it being an open-source management and consulting firm. After all, open source is driving the top-three trends in enterprise computing: Big Data, cloud, and mobile. If enterprises were struggling to make open source work, they wouldn't be using so much of it, and in such business-critical areas.

Which is not to suggest that open source has "won" and all proprietary software is doomed. Indeed, according to a recent Barclays survey of IT executives, a mix of proprietary and open-source software will likely persist for some time:

But let's not kid ourselves: the days of open source failing because of a lack of enterprise support or insufficient quality are well behind us. There is no shortage of quality companies providing support for leading edge open-source software. And there is no shortage of exceptional enterprise-grade open-source software.

The proof? Open source is being adopted in droves. That's really the only number that matters in figuring out whether open source provides high-quality software.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The infrastructure rich keep getting richer, and that's just fine, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogel. As he declared at AWS Summit NYC last week, "infrastructure... is not a differentiator" for the enterprises and startups that keep buying servers to fill their own data centers. Given that Amazon has better scale and operational efficiency, Vogel's argument goes, there's no reason to continue trying to reinvent a wheel better built and operated by Amazon.

Self-serving? Sure. But true? Very likely, yes.

Amazon To Enterprise IT: Fall In Line

As much as enterprise IT may like to pat itself on the back for operational excellence, and naysayers like to point to Amazon Web Services' occasional outages, the reality is that AWS uptime is at least as good as that of enterprise IT, and arguably better. Even more pertinently, regardless of enterprise IT's claims, whether valid or not, developers and others are going to consider using public clouds like AWS. It's too convenient for them to ignore.

As Vogels argues:

"You have to stop wasting time and effort for things that do not matter for your customer. One of those things is your infrastructure. It is not a differentiator... [Our quest for efficiencies] helps you with economies of scale and drives our costs down. We've made the decision to pass those benefits back to you [in reduced costs]... If we are able to drive the cost of this compute and storage down to a point where you no longer have to think about it, tremendous products are going to be built. You will no longer be constrained by your infrastructure."

It's a compelling vision. But is it correct for all companies, all of the time?

The Infrastructure Rich Get Richer

Google doesn't seem to think so. As GigaOm's Derrick Harris points out, Google spent $1.2 billion on infrastructure in the last quarter, which represents a 20% jump over its infrastructure spend ($1.02 billion) in the previous quarter. Google clearly feels that infrastructure helps to differentiate it.

Or ask Microsoft, which has spent $15 billion on its data centers.

The same holds true for Zynga, which used to run 80% of its business on AWS but announced in 2011 that it would be moving to its own private cloud for most of its operations. By 2012 80% of its game activity was running on its private zCloud, with only 20% still hosted on AWS.

While there are some companies - Netflix stands out among them - that continue to run on AWS at large scale, it seems that many enterprises feel that infrastructure does matter. At least, at a certain scale.

However, my guess is that most of these don't truly appreciate why their infrastructure matters. While Zynga argued it could save money by going to a private cloud given its scale, the real value of running one's own data center isn't a cost advantage. It's a competitive advantage, but only when infrastructure is considered a profit center, not a cost center.

Making Data An Essential Aspect Of One's Business

Tim O'Reilly honed in on this point back in 2010, arguing that back-end infrastructure becomes critical to controlling front-end user experiences:

"We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away... We’re entering a modern version of 'the Great Game,' the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing... This rivalry is seen most acutely in mobile applications that rely on internet services as back-ends."

We're already see data, and its underlying data centers, become an advantage for Google, Facebook and other new-breed tech companies, while the legacy tech vendors have become a "rust belt" of sorts, to use The Wall Street Journal's phrase. But data isn't merely an advantage for so-called tech companies. 

Data powers the rise of more effective trading strategies for Financial Services firms. It enables better patient care in Healthcare. It wrings efficiencies from supply chains in Retail. Indeed, data is finally taking shape as the driving force for business in the Twenty-first Century.

So Do You Need A Data Center?

Which brings us back to Amazon. Most enterprises - even large ones - aren't running at a scale where their data-driven applications can't be managed in the cloud, be it Amazon's, Google's, Rackspace's or someone else's. Indeed, I suspect that many, if not most, applications currently running behind an enterprise firewall could conceivably be run in the public cloud.

But as we've seen with Zynga, at a certain size many companies are going to see advantages to running their own infrastructure. Not to lower costs, though they may well find that they can operate their data centers more efficiently than Amazon. But, rather, to increase control of how the manage their data centers to capture, manage, process and put to use data.

Yes, even stodgy old insurance, manufacturing and other "old world" companies. Facebook, after all, is a social media company. Google is a search and advertising company. Zynga helps people play games. And Amazon? It sells books. And yet each of these non-tech tech companies feels that infrastructure is critical. At least, at scale.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Esmeralda Swartz is chief marketing officer at MetraTech.

At the inaugural Chief Digital Officer Summit in New York in March, where I moderated a panel discussion with CDOs from such companies as Disney ABC Studios, BBC, PBS and Rogers, defining the emerging role of the CDO was a key topic.

The role of the chief digital officer (CDO) in the enterprise has gotten a great deal of attention in recent months. For example, Gartner predicted that by 2015, 25% of organizations will have a CDO and further estimated that 20% of chief information officers (CIOs) have already taken on the responsibilities of the CDO.

Perhaps the best known example of the impact and influence of CDOs came last fall, when the Obama campaign successfully leveraged a team of digital leaders. All the tools of the trade - text analytics, social network/media analysis, Web personalization, computational advertising and online experiments and testing, among other things - were used for re-elect the President of the United States.

So what exacty is a CDO, and what do they actually do?

Demystifying The CDO

In the digital age, how well information is used may determine the commercial success of products and services. Converting legacy thinking, skills and business practices - along with legacy systems (both back office and front office) - to react to the new digital reality can determine the how competitive legacy businesses can be - especially versus companies that were born digital.

Adapting to the digital era requires a new skill set that existing leadership teams, including CIOs, don’t necessarily possess. At many modern companies, it’s hard to find anything that is not related to digital in some way. How do you separate digital strategies from business strategies?

The answer is you can’t – and you shouldn’t. A successful digital strategy requires a holistic approach, involving Web, mobile, social and traditional platforms.

CDO: Hybrid Of Marketing & Technology

In order for a CDO to be successful, he or she must have the authority and responsibility to execute a digital strategy and not have to beg, borrow and steal from other organizations to get the job done. This is not about running an IT infrastructure. CDOs are responsible for analyzing information and knowing how to leverage it. They are also responsible for knowing how to reach audiences across different platforms.

This is why the CDO role is more of a hybrid between marketing and technology and sits at the right hand of the CEO. Digital expertise, once a subset of the marketing and IT departments, is becoming a growing discipline in its own right. The CDO is part chief marketing officer and part technologist, but an outward-facing rather than inward-looking business leader.

CDO vs. CIO

While it is true that all things digital are powered by technology, CIOs typically focus on back-office technology. They are not generally the internal champions of front-office innovations. The CDO has the responsibility to use technology to connect with the modern customer and craft the experience they get.

Technology must deliver the experience the customer wants, not just what the underlying systems happen to be able to support. The CDO has to be able to acquire information, use analytics to understand customer behavior, and make adjustments based on that data.

That means CDOs need to be able to adjust products, offers and pricing as well as how it is marketed and delivered to the marketplace.

In the digital era, business models cannot be limited to what legacy IT is able to support. Instead, all business systems, including monetization platforms, must adapt to deliver the experiences customers want. Making sure that happens is the true role of the CDO.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Matt Ammerman is a co-founder and VP of client services for Apprenda.

As an enterprise software developer, I understand where frustrations lie in today's IT organization and different lines of business.

Here are 10 things developers like me want their CIOs to understand:

1. We're the fastest moving part of the company’s IT organization and we want the everyone else to catch up. Under the right conditions, I can develop applications very quickly. Unfortunately, the wrong conditions slow me down. Having to wait for IT to provision dependencies that I might have drastically diminishes my productivity. IT needs to offer services that streamline their processes and let me work at my pace.

2. We can work faster and for less money with the right tools. We can leverage small investments to go a long way. Every developer has a tool belt. I have tools that I prefer to use when developing software. Make an investment in the tools that I use, from text editors to IDEs to platforms and frameworks. I can use these tools to make excellent software that benefits the company.

3. Coordinating disparate teams within IT to roll out a single app is how I spend most of my time. I can typically write an application in 4-6 weeks, sometimes quicker. At that point I should be able to deliver the app to the customer. Unfortunately, I end up spending a great deal more time coordinating the rollout of the application by talking to disparate groups responsible for things like security, networking and servers.

4. Virtualization alone makes IT's life easier, not mine. The software I write is complex. Making infrastructure easier to deploy does not make it easier to write these complex apps, even if the infrastructure is available on demand. That just makes one part of the job go faster. I prefer to tap into existing systems for complex things instead of trying to become an expert in all of them. Providing those systems is how you can make me more productive.

5. I want to know that I am a part of a single organizational vision for software and services. Sometimes I feel like I'm working on apps or pieces of apps that are part of a larger project or vision that I don’t know enough about. If I'm working on a new initiative that is strategically important to the company, let me know that. I want to feel like I’m contributing to something big.

6. Standardization on technologies within our company will make our lives a lot easier. I have my own way of doing things, and each developer here has their own way. This doesn't bode well for our company's software strategy. If we're not all doing things the same way, lots of things are sub-optimized - from testing, to rollout, to overall code quality. If we standardize on systems, we have expectations that are transferrable between our projects.

7. We'd rather be building new apps or modernizing older ones than keeping up legacy apps. I go to user groups and I talk to other developers. They're doing cutting edge things because they have initiatives to build modern apps. For example, I have friends who are building mobile apps. Meanwhile I am maintaining legacy back office software that could be modernized to provide much more value to the company.

8. Our company should be supporting mobile apps. We can build them, but can IT support them? Mobile apps have interesting backend requirements, like scalability and distribution. Any developer can build a single app for a mobile device. It becomes far more complex to build connected apps and the backend services that support them. We need systems in house that make this part easier. With that, we can build mobile apps very quickly.

9. We should run our IT infrastructure the way the best managed service providers in the world do. Our company has more developers and more end users than many companies that develop software for the public. It stands to reason that we would run our datacenters just like, if not better than, the best managed service providers in the world. I should be able to expect this from IT, because I depend on them to host my apps. It should be easier for me to work with our IT than with an external hosting provider.

10. We could build more reliable software if we had the ability to test constantly in a production-like environment. My ability to deliver quality software is only as good as my ability to test that software. I need reliable and accessible infrastructure resources so I can test quickly in order to implement solutions. Introducing differences between my testing environments and the production environments make it more difficult for me to test my software and meet expectations.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It's official: the cloud is boring. While some of you already felt like cloud was BOA (boring on arrival), the reality is that it's been causing all sorts of headaches within the enterprise. Until now.

As Forrester analyst James Staten suggests, new product announcements from both OpenStack and Microsoft Azure got a muted yawn this past week, which is a Very Good Thing, as he explains:

"[H]o-hum releases like these are signs of maturity that signal to enterprises that it’s now okay to invest. Let’s face it. Most enterprises are conservative. We don’t like to be first with any new, risky technology. That’s why we wait for the 2.1 release before trying something new... We’d like other companies to work all the kinks out of the system, live through all the stability issues and fix all the bugs so we can get a solid release to work with."  

As much as people have tried to hype the cloud over the years, hype is precisely the opposite of what was needed to make cloud mainstream. As such, it's arguably a great sign that cloud is about to surrender the hype crown to Big Data, at least as measured by Google searches (as pointed out by Timo Elliott):

It's about time. As a Unisphere survey (PDF) of Oracle users indicates, cloud is becoming strategic within the enterprise, and much more pervasive. As the survey reveals, 37% of enterprise managers are running or piloting private clouds, which is a jump from 29% two years ago. More significantly, an additional 26%  use public cloud services for enterprise applications, a big boost from 14%. 

This jibes with a new Barclays survey of 100 CIOs, which found them piling into the cloud. Indeed, cloud, second only to Big Data, topped the list of IT spending drivers:

In sum, for years we've known that cloud computing would be big. But that's not what CIOs needed to hear. They needed to know that it could also be boring. We have arrived!

It's perhaps one of the industry's great ironies that today's hottest enterprise technology is yesterday's leftovers at Google. Hadoop, an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce technology, is all the rage in the enterprise as a primary tool for tackling Big Data, and probably will remain such for years to come.

But at Google, MapReduce may already be too slow and not nearly scalable enough.

This isn't news. Mike Miller, CEO of Cloudant, made this point in 2012, and Bill McColl, CEO of Cloudscale, made it two years before that. As McColl argued in 2010, "the people who really do have cutting edge performance and scalability requirements today have already moved on from the Hadoop model."

Which is another way of saying Google lives in the future.

I've told the story before about a wealthy friend telling me his money lets him "see into the future a few years" by affording expensive things today that will be cheap for everyone in the future. In a similar fashion, Google, not to mention other web giants like Facebook and Twitter, is building things today, to solve problems of scale and data processing, that will likely be commonplace for mainstream enterprises tomorrow. 

Today Google's data and scale problems are almost magical. Tomorrow they will likely be average.

Which may mean that peering into the future, whether you're an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist, may be as simple as watching Google. While Facebook releases much of its code as open source, the place to gaze into Google's soul is its treasure trove of published research. There you'll find "Efficient spatial sampling of large geographical tables" and more information on "Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database."

You will see, in other words, the future of enterprise computing, otherwise known as Google's leftovers. 

Image courtesy of AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.

Apparently, native apps have won. We even said so right here on ReadWrite. After all, Facebook apparently likes native more. 

Unfortunately, CIOs missed the memo, and the dirty little secret is that most of the world's software, including apps, is written for use, not sale. That means that most of the world's software is not going to follow what Facebook's mobile strategy is, but rather what those stodgy enterprises do.

Those stodgy enterprises? They're all in on HTML5.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with a who's who of enterprise CIOs and CTOs in New York City, talking about Big Data, cloud and mobile. With the Facebook Phone in mind, I polled the group on its mobile applications. Every single executive - not one exception - was building hybrid HTML5 apps, meaning the bulk of the app is written in HTML5 with a native wrapper to improve performance, add camera access, etc.

Every. Single. One.

And not just a few such apps. The bulk of their apps were hybrid HTML5 apps, both for internal employees and for external customers. 

Going Native?

Sure, there were some native apps, though generally not yet written for Android. ("We can't figure out what to do about Android," said one executive of a major financial services firm.) But overall, the CIOs I talked to, and there were roughly 100 in the room, were basing their mobile app strategy on hybrid HTML5 apps.

The CIO needs are different from Zynga's, or those of other consumer app developers. Many of the apps they're building are informational in nature, or have such a stringent need for broad access that these enterprises simply can't afford to alienate a particular mobile device demographic. They need to support iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc. And with the vast majority of mobile OSes now sporting HTML5-compatible browsers, the time is ripe for HTML5 apps.

Still Hiring For HTML5

The job numbers bear this out. While HTML5 can get pooh-poohed by consumer app developers like Facebook, it remains the hottest technology skill, as measured by jobs, more than holding its own with iOS and Android in absolute number of jobs:

And trouncing both iOS and Android in terms of relative job growth:

This corroborates Evans Data's finding in early 2012 that 75% of mobile developers were using or expecting to use HTML5, a number that seems to have moved from aspirational to actual in 2013. 

Hence, while the media will tend to focus on what it knows best - consumer apps - CIOs are working away on HTML5 strategies. Just ask Accenture. Yes, there are tradeoffs when going HTML5, just as there are tradeoffs when going native. For enterprise CIOs, however, broad, cross-platform access to employees and customers makes HTML5 a winning solution.

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Sadly, the only news coming out of PyCon last week was Donglegate. In a sad case of he-said-she-blogged, two people lost their jobs and the technology industry took a deep look inside and discovered that (surprise!) it's a male-dominated, sometimes misogynistic bro-fest. Lost in all the finger pointing of the past week, however, was a central fact:

Python is doing exceptionally well.

This is evident from PyCon attendance alone, which saw 2,500 people attend (up from a mere 20 in 1994), some of them the beneficiaries of the $100,000 in sponsorship money raised. Importantly, 20% of the attendees were women (which makes the inappropriate "dongle" comments even more frustrating). Another $10,000 was raised in an auction for PyLadies.

Python's popularity is particularly interesting in light of programming language fragmentation. Whereas once enterprise IT had to choose sides between Java or .Net, today's empowered enterprise developers are spoiled for choice, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady opines. Despite a myriad of programming languages from which to choose, Python continues to more than hold its own, ranking fourth overall in terms of adoption.

And when it comes to relative job growth, Python is rocking, even compared to the other top languages:

Nor is Python faring much worse in absolute job numbers, as its growth has it gaining on Java and JavaScript.

Big DataTailwind For Python?

Interest in languages like Java and PHP has fallen over the last few years while Python has remained steady. But there's reason to believe Python is about to see an upsurge in interest.

Part of Python's popularity stems from how easy it is to learn, especially for enterprise developers coming from a C/C++ or Java background. Developers also turn to it because of its general purpose nature. Developers and the enterprises that employ them often turn to technologies that fit multiple use cases, particularly when they're easy for newbies to pick up.

But Big Data may well be Python's big selling point.

While PHP still dominates the web, Python is making headway within the traditional enterprise, its libraries for data manipulation and analysis make it a great fit for the Big Data boom. 

As AppNexus Director of Optimization and Analytics David Himrod tells Computerworld:

Key to Python's usefulness is its simplicity...One of the biggest challenges that [AppNexus] faces is how to get a diverse set of employees working on the same technology stack. Python provides employees with different backgrounds--notably engineers, mathematicians and analysts--a common, easy-to-understand language that can be used to prototype new functionality for the company.

As anyone that has been around open source over the years knows, "prototype" today turns to "production" tomorrow. "Complex but powerful" tends to be a losing formula for new technologies that depend upon developer adoption. "Powerful but easy to use," however, wins most every time, particularly in an area like Big Data, which has enterprises experimenting with their data. 

Python's Big Data ambitions also recently got a cash infusion from DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which invested $3 million in Continuum Analytics to help improve Python's data processing and visualization capabilities.

A Bright, Big Data Future For Python

None of which means Python has won the language war. As O'Grady notes, fragmentation is here to stay, given that developers increasingly determine the tools they use, and opt for a languages tailored to specific applications. But given Python's ready-made fit for Big Data, Big Data's importance, and investments in Python to make it even better for Big Data projects, it seems safe to project a healthy future for Python. 

With or without juvenile and demeaning dongle comments.

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The meek may inherit the earth, but at this rate, DevOps will inherit the enterprise. At least, that's one lesson to take from a Puppet Labs survey of over 4,000 IT operations and development professionals. Whereas developers used to be second-class citizens within the enterprise, today they're taking on new authority and forcing a change in mindset as to how software is developed and deployed.

(DevOps, for those not in the know, is a relatively recent style of collaboration between software developers and IT departments intended to speed the deployment of new applications and services.)

This enterprise shift reveals itself in a number of ways. As 451 Research analyst Jay Lyman illustrates, DevOps communities around Puppet and Chef, two of the industry's most popular configuration management tools, have been booming, as have the commercial opportunities for Puppet Labs and Opscode, the two respective companies behind these tools. But there is one particular sign that DevOps is making waves in the enterprise, Lyman notes:

Further evidence of these tools and practices going mainstream lies in expanded integration and support for Windows management and Microsoft environments, which represent a growing number of customers for CFEngine, Opscode and Puppet Labs.

Small wonder, then, that Puppet Labs found a 26% increase in the rate of DevOps adoption by organizations of all sizes, compared to 2011, with 63% of organizations now indicating they use DevOps practices. This could be easily discounted — "Well, of course a DevOps-oriented vendor survey would find lots of DevOps adoption" — except that one would expect the numbers to actually be higher. Given that Puppet Labs presumably sells to the converted, why isn't the number 100%? Presumably because even among those interested in Puppet Labs configuration management tools, the ambition to deploy DevOps practices outpaces real-world adoption of them.

But that's changing at a 26% clip. More revealingly, such DevOps adoption translates into a 75% jump in job listings: 

Why is DevOps reshaping enterprise IT? Quite simply, because it works. Because IT operations and development are better in collaboration than in competition. As the survey uncovered, high-performing, DevOps-savvy organizations deploy code 30 times faster with 50% fewer failures. And, strikingly, the longer DevOps practices are followed within an organization, the lower that organization's app failure rate and the faster its recovery from failure:

Source: Puppet Labs

While some of DevOps' rise can rightly be credited to a startup ethos and the evangelism of companies like Puppet Labs, it also gets a boost from IBM, ostensibly the most fuddy-duddy company on the planet. RedMonk analyst Donnie Berkholtz notes:

IBM’s people really get it. They understand trends that are happening at the frontlines of tech today in startups and in open-source development. IBM is way out in front on enabling DevOps in big enterprises....A lot of my experience with enterprises is that they’re slow-moving and often lagging trends by years, to the point where it’s nearly laughable, but in this case IBM is definitely a front-runner.

Embedded in that comment is perhaps the biggest reason for the rise of DevOps within the enterprise: it mirrors the rise of open source. Or, rather, follows it. Open source puts developers in charge of their IT. Hence, as we find a massive spike in demand for Linux professionals, and as we see the top job trends dominated by open-source technologies, we should expect DevOps to rise along with it, both in the startup and in the enterprise, with significant benefits for all.

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For decades the enterprise software industry has grown fat on outsized, upfront license fees coupled with ongoing, high-margin maintenance streams. Cracks in the model have threatened  to dismantle the system for years, as reported by The Wall Street Journal back in 2009, with CIOs chafing at paying for low-value, high-cost maintenance.

But if Oracle's big earnings miss last week is any indication, one of three disappointing quarters over the past two years, the cracks have widened to a chasm. As bellwether for the enterprise software incumbents, Oracle's miss suggests that the legacy vendors may struggle to adapt to the world of open-source software and Software as a Service (SaaS) and, in particular, the subscription revenue models that drive both.

It isn't going to be pretty.

Changing How Vendors Get Paid

This isn't just a matter of improving legacy software products. It's a matter of fundamentally changing how these legacy vendors deploy and charge for software. For example, Oracle's entire cost structure is built around the premise of a hefty upfront license and high-margin maintenance (Over 20% of the license fee). Ever read The Innovator's Dilemma? Clayton Christensen's classic addresses just this sort of inability for established companies to change. It turns out to be brutally hard, and often impossible.

Small wonder, then, that SAP has been raising its maintenance fees, trying to milk more money from its customer base as it faces serious headwinds maintaining its license model against upstart competitors like Workday:

Such actions basically force customers to start looking elsewhere, if they weren't already.

If this were just a matter of technology, Oracle, Microsoft et al. would likely weather the storm quite well. Oracle makes great software. There's a reason it's the enterprise database leader, and by a wide margin (though smaller rivals are gaining in popularity).

But building great technology is not enough. Oracle's peers, from SAP to IBM to Microsoft, also charge for software in this way, and across the industry they've been taking a beating as enterprises look to the improved productivity and OpEx of open source and SaaS. Oracle, for its part, blamed its miss on "sales execution," but as Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher points out,

...[W]e have a hard time believing that almost all the legacy software names are suffering from poor sales execution at the same time. We believe the primary issue is a fundamental shift in the technology landscape away from legacy systems towards a new breed of better products at a lower cost both in Apps and in Data Management. Virtually every emerging software trend is having a deflationary impact on spend.

Not everyone sees it this way. Wells Fargo senior analyst Jason Maynard urges investors in Oracle to "keep calm and carry on," and expects Oracle's license revenue to grow 5% year over year. 

Good luck with that. 

Developers Rise In Importance

The problem isn't that Oracle and the mega-vendors have lost their hold on CIO affections. They haven't. The problem is that they have little to offer enterprise developers, who increasingly are the gateway to software adoption. Explaining this shift in his excellent The New Kingmakers, Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady argues:

With the rise of open source...developers could for the first time assemble an infrastructure from the same pieces that industry titans like Google used to build their businesses -- only at no cost, without seeking permission from anyone. For the first time, developers could route around traditional procurement with ease. With usage thus effectively decoupled from commercial licensing, patterns of technology adoption began to shift....

Open source is increasingly the default mode of software development....In new market categories, open source is the rule, proprietary software the exception.

The top-down approach, in other words, is losing its currency within the enterprise, as both open source and cloud enable developers (not to mention line of business executives) to get work done without getting permission.

The effect on the mega-vendors is overwhelmingly negative, as Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz posits:

We believe something more secular is occurring as cloud computing increasingly entices CIOs to refresh their legacy IT systems with cloud services rather than infrastructure. Additionally, software purchasing is becoming more decentralized with decision-making power shifting away from IT and weakening the selling advantage as a "one-shop supplier." These trends dampen big-ticket on-premise software purchasing and remain a headwind for the infrastructure vendors.

None of which means the big vendors are going out of business anytime soon. In my years at Novell, for example, I witnessed a serious decline in the company's fortunes, even as revenue remained above $1 billion.

Time To Change?

In fact, Novell is a great example of what might happen to the mega-vendors. Ultimately, Novell had to be bought out and then split into pieces in order for its SUSE business unit, now an independent company, to thrive. SUSE can now support its subscription model without all the overhead Novell's legacy business imposed on it.

The same may well prove true for the other enterprise mega-vendors.

Not all enterprises will be affected equally, of course. Years ago IBM reshaped its business to be more services driven, which allows it to embrace new trends like open source enthusiastically. And even Oracle has built out a considerable cloud business (despite starting years later than it arguably should have), to which it can move current customers. Microsoft has been doing the same, transitioning customers to Office 365 rather than lose out on customers moving to Google Docs.

But the revenue profile for these businesses differs significantly from the traditional license/maintenance business, and it's an open question whether any of these companies will be able to turn the corner in their current form.

The Wall Street Journal echoed this sentiment, suggesting that Oracle's "business is being eroded at the edges by smaller, more focused companies offering newer technology," and, I would add, by the very different business models these firms employ. It's a great time to be in enterprise technology...so long as you're not selling a legacy business model. 

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Guest author Kevin Prendeville is a global managing director with Accenture’s Product Lifecycle Services practice.

The tables have turned on many large high-tech companies - market leaders have become followers while followers have become leaders. What’s behind the seismic shift? The ability of those former followers to leverage investments in product development processes to deliver more innovative and successful products. These processes, known as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), extend from idea gener¬ation through product launch to product retirement.

An analysis by Accenture has found that large high-tech companies can spend $1 billion or more per year on Product Lifecycle Management in hopes of substantially boosting revenues and cutting costs. But Accenture also found that many C-suite executives view PLM as the engineering department’s black box - a critical enterprise business process poorly understood, measured or managed.

Today’s competitive business environment requires that top management see PLM as a strategic corporate asset, a cross-functional, enterprise-wide business discipline that augments innovation, helps drive revenue growth, and reduces costs of everything from engineering rework to regulatory compliance.

What Is Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)?

PLM integrates a multitude of critical cross-functional activities, such as:

• product strategy
• portfolio management
• product management
• idea and requirements gathering
• product design
• product engineering
• product validation and compliance
• product costing
• product quality
• direct material sourcing
• manufacturing
• after-market services product retirement

PLM capabilities support PLM activities to drive activities, decisions and data within the end-to-end PLM process. Examples include

• intellectual property management
• product structure and reuse
• engineering changes
• stage-gate approvals
• ideas and requirements
• software configuration
• quality tests and defects
• product costs
• development project status

For global enterprises to maximize the business impact of PLM, they need to examine two dimensions: effectiveness and efficiency.

Large high-tech companies are making substantial investments - often 5% to 25% or more of revenue - in PLM. But according to Accenture’s analysis, nearly half of PLM ends up wasted on products that do not meet market needs or timing. High-tech enterprises have thousands of highly skilled and well-paid designers, scientists and engineers working inside global PLM processes across hundreds of current and future products. But due to lack of central coordination, prioritization and integration of processes, systems and data, they’re often working on essentially useless or redundant tasks. That means there’s a huge opportunity for improvement.

Technology can help improve PLM – if it’s implemented with an integrated plan focused on a distinct business process. Most global companies have deeply fragmented PLM systems comprising 20 or more applications. PLM software vendors provide powerful and field-tested applications – but not the kind of end-to-end business process coverage available in leading customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Most high-tech companies use three or more PLM vendors to span the various PLM capability areas.

Four Ways To Improve PLM

True enterprise PLM requires building an end-to-end framework that spans multiple solutions and accom¬modates business processes and data from marketing, design, product portfolio management and more. A one-size-fits-all answer does not exist, but Accenture has identified four best practices to get the most out PLM:

Step 1. Create an enterprise-wide framework to define PLM capabilities. Define what is and is not PLM, then formally break down and re-evaluate current PLM capabilities. Review all processes, applications, metrics, organization and data that underpin product development process flow from initial concept to product retirement. Then examine the performance and maturity of each as objectively as possible. High-performance businesses structure PLM as a hierarchy of capabilities that span the process, represent various organizations and competencies, and connect all corners of the PLM landscape with each another. Most companies that go through this exercise are surprised by how disjointed and fragmented their overall PLM approaches are and by how many gaps and redundancies they uncover. And they are often alarmed to find how few metrics and how little docu¬mentation supports their PLM activities.

Step 2. Link the PLM framework’s capabilities to key corporate and product priorities. Settle on five-to-ten business metrics that track the effectiveness and efficiency of innovation and product development outputs, transcending any one department or function. They might relate to pipeline throughput, cost of engineering, reuse of platforms or components or resource use. For instance, if plans call for more new products to be developed in lower-cost countries, the PLM framework would link that objective to the corresponding capabilities and metrics.

Step 3. Use the prioritized PLM framework As An investment planning tool. It is relatively straightforward to turn the results of these exercises into a powerful tool for ongoing planning activities. The organization’s varied constituents can more easily analyze trade-offs, guide investments in product development improvement projects, and measure the impact of those projects over time. For example, one high-technology company used this framework to concentrate its future PLM focus and investment to improve software product development processes rather than mechanical design. Basically, the firm chose to improve the productivity of its thousands of software designers instead of its hundreds of mechanical designers.

Step 4. Establish a group to own and update the PLM framework and corporate roadmap. As with CRM, ERP and supply chain management, there has to be a single, formal organization to advance and support PLM. That organization should have visible, unambiguous sponsorship from a senior executive. This helps ensure PLM becomes part of the company’s innovation fabric rather than a one-time project.

Three PLM Success Stories

Using these best practices, several high-tech companies have made significant progress with their PLM strategies:

1. One version of the truth. A provider of servers and storage equipment re-designed its business processes to better leverage PLM technologies. The firm created “one version of the truth” for a single engineering change process for all its hardware products including several from large acquisitions.

2. Integrating hardware and software. A provider of electronic gaming equipment developed new processes, data models and a central application to manage the relationship between its hardware designs and corresponding software designs, as they evolved through development and change processes.

3. Increasing re-use. A global consumer electronics company implemented a streamlined portal and graphic user interface - providing a fast and visual way for designers and engineers to search, find and re-use components, solutions and information stored in its PLM databases.

The good news is there are many cross-industry cases proving the merits of improving PLM. The better news is that many industries have already blazed PLM trails, providing proven strategies, lessons learned and methodologies for high-tech companies to leverage.

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Guest author Sanjay Poonen is head of SAP's mobile division.

Mobile devices have become the world's steady companions that we take anywhere and use everywhere. A recent forecast by McKinsey & Company estimates that by 2014, 1.7 billion mobile devices will be accessing the Internet - and a steady diet of online content. Widespread smartphone and tablet adoption is giving birth to a new ecosystem of mobile apps. Apple with its iTunes App Store is currently the gold-standard of the mobile experience, and it enables distribution to millions of users. In early 2013, Apple announced that users had downloaded an astounding 40 billion apps from its App Store, with almost half of that total logged in the last year.

The rollout of smart mobile apps yields numerous benefits not only to consumers but also for the enterprise. Mobile apps for business must offer the expected, Apple-easy download experience, but the enterprise requires quite a bit more for apps to be successful and risk-free. Many companies are struggling to manage the proliferation of mobile apps and connect to business content.

Here are seven critical areas for enterprises to address as apps multiply through the mobile enterprise ecosystem.

1. Not Point Products: Using An Enterprise Mobility Platform

The basic foundation of the mobile enterprise begins with deployment of the devices - employee and corporate-owned — along with a portfolio of productivity apps. The goal is simple: The user downloads an app and starts using it. All onboarding, app registration and bootstrapping is done by the enterprise mobility platform — the server strings, logon information or certificates are pushed to the user’s device automatically.

2. Configuration: Based On Roles And Responsibility

Deployment and configuration policies have to go hand-in-hand. Ultimately, enterprise workers want to be able to use any device and any app, accessing content without any roadblocks. Ideally, if an employee has an iPhone or Android phone provided to them, they will immediately have the secured content and correct business apps configured based on their roles and responsibilities (finance, HR, sales, etc.).

3. Deployment: Cloud vs. On Premise

Enterprises have a choice of where they get content and apps. They can come from the cloud, be stored on premise, or in some hybrid combination. This piece of the mobile equation doesn’t have a correct answer, but IT has to remain keenly aware where each component of mobile content resides and (most importantly) who has authorized access.

4. Beyond MDM: Managing Devices, Apps, Content And Things

IT must maintain control over how mobile devices access corporate information: At the very least, IT has to be able to turn off the device, content or app if the mobile hardware is lost or stolen. A key component of that is creating lockable configuration and security policies. Mobile Device Management (MDM) software helps IT centrally manage, secure and deploy mobile data, applications and devices, including tablets and phones. The journey continues beyond MDM to Mobile App Mgmt (MAM), Mobile Content Mgmt (MCM) and eventually takes you on the journey to securing not just devices but every machine in the Internet of Things.

5. Security: At Every Stage In The Lifecycle

A Symantec study calculated that the average annual cost of mobile breaches for an enterprise business was $429,000. Security has to be part of the fabric of mobile throughout the enterprise. It must be integrated into the initial mobile strategy - and into each subsequent stage in the mobile lifecycle. It must be nimble and designed for the post-PC era of mobile computing.

6. Interoperability: Take A Cross-Platform Approach

In a mobile enterprise, all devices, apps and cloud services need to recognize each other and be able to share content. As we deal with a combination of HTML-based mobile-Web apps and device-native apps, three key factors contribute to interoperability.

First is cross-platform support. Most enterprises will have to cater to Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows and BlackBerry.

The second factor is backend connectivity: While all mobile users will run Tripit, for example, against the same hosted backend, your enterprise apps needs to run against your company’s backend systems. For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) app needs to access your customers in your CRM system. A Leave Request app has to run against your own enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Third, enterprise apps must adhere to your company's information technology security standards. Employees will access your corporate data from the open Internet, and you need to safeguard your business data.

7. Mobile Apps: Buy And/Or Develop Your Own

Mobility starts with the app creator, which could be an individual developer, a customer who wants to develop an app, a partner or an internal development team. Many larger organizations will benefit by designing their own apps for mobile-enabled business processes. These mobile solutions can tap into different applications and workflow tools using dashboards to monitor everything from sales to the health of the entire business in real time.

Some apps may be developed and used internally to solve a specific task in the company. Others maybe standardized to be sold via the various app stores, both platform specific outlets such as the Apple App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone App Store or BlackBerry World.

Guest author Seth Payne is a senior product manager at Skytap.

The rapid emergence of cloud computing is part of a fundamental shift in how IT services are developed and delivered. There are plenty of upsides: The cloud is faster to deploy, allows businesses to be more agile, flexible and innovative, and can often lower overall costs.

But cloud computing also introduces new risks for technical managers. Questions regarding security, data ownership and reliability of the cloud are justifiably top of mind for CIOs and other IT managers.

Time To Stop Hugging Your Servers

When enterprises embrace cloud computing they are, in essence, entrusting a portion of their IT operations to a third party – an outsider. Relying on a cloud provider makes them an integral part of various IT operations, so it is imperative that cloud providers and the enterprises they work with find ways to transcend the traditional, transactional relationship and enter into a truly cooperative partnership.

So, how can cloud providers and enterprises build a cooperative, trust-based partnership?

Communication Comes First

To set the stage, clear lines of communication should be in place so that when issues inevitably arise, enterprises and cloud providers can work together to find resolutions – without pointing fingers and playing blame games.

Cloud providers must hold up their end by offering complete transparency when it comes to their policies, underlying infrastructure and support/maintenance procedures.

While operational risk is inherent when adopting any cloud platform, most enterprise consumers recognize that no IT implementation, whether cloud or on-premises, can be undertaken without some degree of risk.

Cloud providers can help mitigate any concerns by clearly outlining potential risks and the procedures in place to deal with them. Key areas for discussion should include

• High-level storage, compute and networking architectures
• Datacenter specifications
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for outages, and recovery plans
• Disaster mitigation processes

What Enterprises Need To Do

Enterprise cloud consumers must also play an active role in building a cooperative partnership with cloud providers. The importance of clearly communicating the planned use of the cloud services they’re buying cannot be overstated. Sharing a realistic and accurate plan allows cloud vendors to provide the best possible performance and user experience - as well as mold their offerings to meet the enterprise’s present and future needs.

There is no doubt that IT will continue its march toward cloud computing – the benefits are just too compelling to ignore. But enterprises moving to the cloud have to understand that they are not simply purchasing a specific product or service. Rather, they are entering into a core partnership with their cloud provider.

With up-front communication and transparency on both sides, cloud providers and enterprise IT can adjust to this new paradigm together as they work to design and deploy better solutions to increasingly complex technology problems.

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Guest author Robert LeBlanc is Senior Vice President of IBM Software Group.

The era of the mobile enterprise has officially arrived. Half of American workers are now using smart devices for work as well as personal usage. The use of those devices is now at a critical mass and it's just the beginning.

Yet Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company, says few organizations plan and manage mobility with a truly strategic or proactive approach. They’re mostly reactive and tactical.

Mobility Isn't About The Device

For enterprises, mobility shouldn’t be about the device. Instead, it needs to be about figuring out what an organization can do differently and better now that its employees and customers use mobile technologies so frequently at work and in their private lives, and can access processes and data anywhere and anytime. 

Simply put, mobility changes everything for the enterprise. And that puts business leaders on the hot seat — forcing them to grapple with one of the biggest challenges of business today. Its a question of when, not if, mobile technology will impact the business.

A mobile enterprise is an organization built on a foundation of technologies and business processes that enables people to connect, share information and participate in the business processes no matter where they are. This facility allows businesses, employees and customers to better understand the world around them so they can make smarter and quicker decisions. And just as importantly, it helps them interact more effectively with all of their constituents.

How a Mobile Enterprise Works

Mobility forces leaders to rethink how they operate their businesses, how they deal with employees and customers and how they manage their information and their technology. By its very nature, mobility makes it more difficult and challenging for IT leaders to control people and information. So they have to achieve a judicious balance between the need to loosen their hold on many aspects of their businesses with the need to assure the security and integrity of business processes and information.

What are these challenges?

How to operate the business? Many fundamental business processes were established in an era when companies tightly controlled every aspect of their operations. Mobility disrupts those linear flows of work and information. Now, business leaders have to restructure their business processes to take into account new kinds of interactions with customers, employees and business partners, and new sources of information. Example: How can a B-to-C company run an outstanding marketing program without taking into account the locations of customers and their real-time communications via social media?

How to interact with clients? Today, most businesses recognize the importance of their clients, but mobility and the emergence of big data add new elements to this calculus. CEOs understand that their most important assets are not just their employees but also the vast storehouses of information they possess and the day to day interaction with their clients. Leaders have to deal with the fact that, because of the mobility revolution, many of their most important clients have choices in who they interact with, when they interact and the type of interaction. It is imperative they take advantage of this new paradigm, embrace it, innovate around it and improve their client experiences.

How to manage employees? For all the talk about flat organizations and employee empowerment, many organizations still operate under the command-and-control management model. Today, thanks to mobility technologies, employees have the means to gather information and make decisions on the spot, and, increasingly, they’ll want to act. Leaders should empower them to exercise their judgment and creativity. Mobility is a great enabler. At the same time, though, organizations need to establish policies, practices and training programs that protect the company and its customers from undue risks.

How to manage information? Many companies keep their information in silos aligned with particular business units and functions. Most of what they gather sits in databases in rows and columns. But the coming era of big data means a tremendous amount of information of different types is now available—including unstructured data from sensors, video and Web pages. This information must be shared across the enterprise, and, naturally, it will be pushed and pulled via mobile technologies. Companies have to manage their information so it is easily accessible for those who need it and, at the same time, protected from unauthorized access.

How to manage technology? For established business, most of their technology was installed before mobility became such a big factor. It makes no sense to rip and replace it. Instead, companies should add-on capabilities that make it easy for the data and business processes managed in legacy computing systems to be available via mobile devices. New business processes and software applications should be developed with a “mobile first” mindset. That way, accessibility and security will be designed in from the start. Mobility should always be evaluated in the context of the other major technology shifts that are around it today, namely, cloud computing, data analytics and social business. These new capabilities are all game-changers individually, but together they can transform a business, making it more efficient, dynamic and productive.

Embracing change and the impacts of technology like mobility is a great opportunity for most businesses. Change is inevitable. Those that harness it and exploit it correctly will be leaders. But technology for technology's sake is not the full equation. The combination of technology along with new business processes, insights derived from data analytics and the evolving interaction among people is the game changer.

Note: This post originally appeared on IBM's Building A Smarter Planet blog. IBM has recently announced a new generation of mobile enterprise technologies that are based on the point of view in this post.

Guest author Vijay Dheap is a Mobile Security Strategist at IBM.

Security is a balancing act, especially when it comes to emerging technologies that promise to unlock massive business potential. Each new wave of change requires an enterprise to adapt its security posture, or risk being left behind - or exposed to unmanaged risk.

Mobile is no different.

What was predominantly a consumer-oriented phenomenon is rapidly becoming a top business priority. Individuals, product teams and marketing departments are all scrambling to seize the benefits mobile presents, while security organizations are scrambling to regain control - or at least awareness - of all the enterprise's mobile-related activities. Enterprises recognize that going mobile requires a strategic perspective.

The importance of defining a security strategy for mobile carries greater urgency than ever. While 84% of consumers now use their personal smartphones for work, mobile malware has increased more than four times since 2010. Recent reports indicate that 51% of companies have experienced data loss due to insecure mobile devices - and the average cost of a breach was a hefty $5.5 million. Enterprises have a very real need to reduce this risk while not affecting business objectives focused on mobile. (For a visual look at mobile security stats, see the infographic at the end of this post).

Given the dynamic nature of the mobile market, it can be difficult for an enterprise to define a mobile risk management strategy. Organizational inertia alone can lead to increased risk. One approach is to concentrate on four focus areas of mobile security:

1. BYOD
2. Protected Access
3. Secure Mobile Solutions
4. Mobile Security Intelligence

1.BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, has become a defining characteristic of mobile adoption in the enterprise. While not exclusive to smartphones and tablets, these new devices led the way with rapid, organic penetration of many enterprises. But every organization can customize the policies that govern the use of employee-owned mobile devices within the enterprise. BYOD policies should reflect the organization’s risk appetite based on its industry, regulations and culture. Policies can modulate the degree of device choice and which employees participate. Of course, before it can enforce its BYOD policies, an organization needs to gain visibility and control over these new devices.

2. Protected Access: Mobile devices empower employees to access relevant information whenever they need it. No matter how much enterprise data is stored on the device, users will frequently need to access additional enterprise data and resources. The enterprise must not only establish secure connectivity channels but also manage risk associated with user authentication and authorization. Given that mobile access typically takes place predominantly outside enterprise boundaries, special care is needed to prevent unauthorized access and reduce risky behaviors. Plus, protecting mobile access provides security teams another lever to gain awareness over their mobile audiences even when they cannot have visibility over the devices themselves (i.e. consumers, partners and unmanaged employees).

3. Secure Mobile Solutions: Apps have emerged as the primary interface for delivering mobile solutions to consumers, partners and employees. Apps enable the rich, task-oriented functionality and user experience that mobile consumers demand. Some mobile solutions are outsourced, while others are built by various parts of an enterprise. Security design needs to be incorporated in each step of the software development lifecycle. Mobile app developers - who are generally not particularly security aware - need tools and processes that help them bake in the enterprise's security standards and best practices. And the enterprise must also enforce a baseline of security standards across the entire range of mobile solutions it develops.

4. Mobile security through risk management requires constant vigilance. With rapid innovation comes new capabilities that promote new behaviors. And as mobile adoption accelerates, it becomes a richer target for attackers. The threat landscape indicates a growing affinity towards targeted attacks at individuals or organizations, leveraging mobile as a primary socialization platform. To identify risks and take appropriate mitigation steps, enterprises need to gather intelligence across all the touchpoints of mobile engagements. Intelligence gathering should include aggregating security events from the device, users, apps and the network for analysis - including tracking compliance with existing risk management policies.

Mobile is a transformational technology giving individuals unprecedented freedom and flexibility in how they engage professionally and personally. Enterprises cannot afford to ignore that opportunity, but can't put themselves at risk in their rush to embrace the new technology. By focusing on BYOD, protecting access, securing mobile solutions and developing mobile security intelligence, enterprises can balance the risks and rewards for individual workers and the organization as a whole.

For more on mobile enterprise security, see the infographic below.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Chris O’Connor is chief executive of mobile solutions provider Taptera.

The booming mobile applications market is a hot topic right now at many a water cooler in Silicon Valley and beyond. I've toiled in the mobile market since 2007 and in those  years I've witnessed more than my fair share of changes - some entirely predictable - others not so much. Relying on the wisdom that comes with a decade-plus in the business, I'd like to offer a few educated guesses as to what's next in enterprise mobile apps.

A Mobile Crystal Ball

Here are seven predictions for the mobile apps market in the coming year:

1. Mobile Tools For Salespeople. Mobile devices are the business tool of choice for most salespeople. As a result, there will be even more new apps that cater to these often-mobile employees. Look for apps that allow salespeople to more effectively pitch prospective clients, make presentations to existing ones and update opportunities, all while they’re away from the office. 

2. Enterprise Platform Vendors Continue To Stumble. Enterprise software giants SAP and Oracle stumbled in 2012 with application-development platforms that were intimidating and offered limited cross-platform support. Expect the next few months to be no different: customers will continue to avoid single-vendor solutions in favor of a more open approach. In mobile, that means apps able to connect into heterogeneous environments will be clear winners.

3. iOS And Android Dominate. Last year marked the advent of BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone, two new competitors in the mobile operating system market. But both BlackBerry 10 and Microsoft’s Windows Phone may be too late to pose legitimate threats to Google and Apple's mobile operating systems. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are far more mature and entrenched platforms that offer developers a flexible framework. And they have proven security measures. They are simply too good for developers and users to ignore.

4. New Leaders For Mobile Projects. Sales-and-marketing department heads and business unit managers are mobile’s advocates within the enterprise. Increasingly, they hold the purse strings for new mobile initiatives. If and when these new initiatives spread across the enterprises, budgetary control may return to the information technology department. At least for now, any new mobile apps should be designed for the non-techie audience.

5. Security Remains A Bottleneck. Allowing employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) is a trend that will continue to gain strength in 2013. But security continues to be a serious concern. App makers that offer compelling security features in their products will find a receptive audience among enterprises transitioning to BYOD.

6. Employee Expectations For IT Service Continue To Rise. Employees want the gear they use at work to be as powerful and easy to use as the stuff they have at home. Enterprises that don’t offer employees decent tools they will be at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring and retaining talent. 

7. Mobile Security Vendors Will Overlap. Selecting a mobile device management (MDM) system was often the first step businesses took toward implementing a mobile strategy. MDM is becoming a commodity as app developers and platform providers incorporate it into their menu of services.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.