HP CloudSystem

I attended a seminar today given by HP on their latest proposition for the cloud market.

They suggested the cloud market is divided into three sectors; software as a service (SAAS), Private Cloud and infrastructure as a service (IAAS).

Examples included salesforce.com (SAAS), and amazon web services (IAAS).

My overall impression of their presentation seemed to be “Private Cloud” is the way to go and HP have this lovely BladeSystem (renamed CloudSystem) which will be perfect for an in house virtualisation environment and comes bundled with software provisioning tools (Matrix), all available to purchase with a single part number.

 With regard to SAAS, they didn’t seem to have much to offer.

As for IAAS, they seem to be pushing their very high end blade servers the VS1 (750 x virtual machines) to the VS3 (6,000 x virtual machines). These products are clearly not aimed for the small and medium sized enterprise and are only suitable for large service providers who want to use HP technology to offer a cloud based service to their customer base.

The newest development was a “burst” capability whereby if you’re in house BladeSystem, sorry, CloudSystem, runs out of resources, you can automatically call on external cloud based resources from savvis.com ,the cloud service provider. Only thing is, that’s not actually available until November. Also, it begs the question if you need an overflow or “burst” capability, cloud based service from Savvis why wouldn’t you go directly to them rather than access them via a contract with HP? I wonder if Savvis use HP blade servers and provisioning toolsJ

I can see their blade servers and provisioning tools being attractive to large service providers wanting to wrap it up with a service level agreement and maybe an on line application, but they really are pushing it a bit to portray their entry level BladeServers / Matrix tools as some kind of cloud based offering.

Why did Microsoft spend billions on Skype?

The main assets would be :

extra $800m+ on line revenue

27 million active Skype users

Microsoft can “bundle” their existing on line products such as Bing and Hotmail to the millions of Skype users.

Skype has readymade relationships with Telco’s that terminate their internet based calls onto their fixed line networks. This will be useful in their corporate market where they are pushing Lync hard as a PBX replacement.

No doubt the first development will be a Skype button appearing on your MS Hotmail tool bar.

Also there is an overlap with their Lync unified communications / presence client and the Skype client.  

On the financial side, Skype will add $860m revenues to Microsoft’s on line services division. This is the lowest revenue earner within the Microsoft group with existing revenues of $2.2 billion and is also the only division to have made a loss of $2.4 billion.

Microsoft’s previous attempts to enter the on line consumer market have failed, Yahoo and Facebook’s management turned down Microsoft’s takeover attempts.

Tony Bates, Skype’s CEO stated cinema trailers being swapped over Skype as a growth revenue stream. This will add to Microsoft’s advertising revenue it currently gets from its Bing search engine.

During their joint press conference, I thought it was interesting that Steve Ballmer refused to mention Android when asked about continuing Skype support for non Windows platforms?

All he did say was we will support the Apple Mac platform?

Overall it seems a wise move for Microsoft, so long as it can realise a $8.5 billion increase in on line services (adverting revenue, group video conferencing, calls to non Skype users etc.) over the next two or three years?

Which tablet client device will the corporate market adopt?

Today I attended a meeting where we were planning on rolling out a new product offering based on a tablet device, i.e. Apple iPad or one of the newer rivals such as the Blackberry Playbook or the Cisco Cius.

The initial suggestion was, “everyone wants an iPad lets offer that”.

Our company sells IT and data comms products from several vendors, but not Apple.

Apparently Apple was insisting on a very large commitment to sell a minimum number of products before agreeing to allow us to become an authorised reseller. So that effectively ruled them out of consideration.

Another contributor suggested the new Blackberry Playbook, but apparently they have exclusive deals with the larger mobile vendors who will have access to the product for a period of time before anyone else is allowed to sell it.

A third possibility mentioned was the new Cisco Cius. As a Gold Partner we have good contacts with them and therefore will be able to sell and support the product as soon as it’s released. I’ve had a brief hands-on experience with this new device, but there was a lack of apps on it so I couldn’t really comment on its usability.

For this and almost no other reason, it seems we will adopt the Cius and offer it to our SME and corporate customers.

The various technical / commercial aspects of the three different devices are known and it’s up for debate as to which is better?

Apple

·         excellent user interface, my three year old can use it

·         huge range of consumer based applications

Blackberry Playbook

·         huge installed base of Blackberry users who want a familiar interface

·         back catalogue of business applications

Cisco

·         Existing popular instant messaging, / presence client, video conferencing technology using the Cius’ has front / back cameras

·         Security technology equivalent or better than Blackberry’s

I don’t believe the corporate market will adopt the Cisco tablet based on our decision, but it is interesting that it seemed to be the easiest device for our company to offer?

Sony’s million dollar mistake

Are the bloggers being too hard on Sony over their security breach?

Probably not.

Imagine if a major bank had been breached and had to admit that 70m+ user’s personal details had been hacked?

However I suspect that a major bank has been hacked to a greater or lesser extent to Sony. The difference is that they have kept their online service up and running and made sure their customers money has been protected and or refunded if necessary.

If Sony had kept their online portal up and running would anyone have realised they had been hacked?

If they had kept their Playstation Network up and running and someone had been compromised due to the hack would the situation have been any worse for them than it is at the moment?

At the time of writing their network has been down for thirteen days. Every day it is down users are getting more and more frustrated and I’ve no doubt a minority are giving up and moving to Microsoft’s XBOX network and possibly may never return?


update 22nd May

After their network was re opened, I downloaded and installed the latest software update. Now my "fat" PS3 has just shut down and will not re-boot. I checked the Sony support web site and it seems this has happened to a lot of other users after they installed the latest software update. It doesn't look like this can be resolved without a hands on hardware repair?

Following on from the three week network outage, Sony have just handed another large number of their customers to Microsoft.

Update 28^th May

Got a call from Sony, they want to charge me £134 to replace the PS3 which was damaged by their software update.

A lesson in how to lose your customers.

Interesting article on Research In Motion from the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703655404576292983239364862.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Comment on Cisco’s Security Solutions Webinar

I attended a web based event today on Cisco Security “Vision” which was hosted by Fred Kost, Director of Security Marketing.

First impressions were, nothing new, pushing the any client to any application security model.

Several mentions of “comsumerised end points” i.e. employees using Apple iphones etc. To access their company network.

Their “SecureX” architecture was discussed which seems to be a vision statement based on how to link all their recently acquired security products together, rather than what will this do for my company’s security posture?

There was a “real world” scenario given by Tom Gillis, VP of Security whereby a hapless American corporate executive, “Kevin”, loses his ipad in a bar after a few beers and thereby risks a major security incident because his password was “1234” and therefore easily guessed by a thief.

The saviour in this scenario was the Cisco Security Intelligence Operation which correlated a duplicate logon and killed the stolen ipad after wiping its contents.

Apart from the fact that no corporate application would allow such a password to be setup and used in the first place, I do wonder what real damage such an opportunistic thief could have done with “Kevin’s” login details.

I imagine the unauthorised user could have sent malicious emails to Kevin’s contact list, but apart from that, probably not very much?

Another analogy that was used was Kevin using his company pc to login to a twitter site on a TV program which contained malware, which was automatically prevented by Cisco’s “context aware” technology. Well, again, is that anything new? What would have happened if he had downloaded that malware onto his PC? Any antivirus package / firewall setup could / should have prevented any serious damage?

The only interesting item came from Gordon Thompson their Director of Security for Europe. He announced their plans to launch a security user license which will cover all of Cisco’s security products, thus avoiding the need for organisations to manage multiple Cisco Licenses for their different security products. This is due out in August.

I did think this would genuinely save time and hassle for IT/Security managers keeping track of different Cisco license which run out at different times of the year. It is obviously similar to Microsoft’s Enterprise or Campus license. I asked Gordon if the Cisco equivalent will include non Cisco products such as WebEx. The answers was, no. They have enough on their plate introducing a security only user license and there seems to be no plans to have a single “Cisco Client User license”, at least not yet?

No more phone bills, the promise of SIP circuits

Over the next few months all major Telco’s are set to launch SIP Circuits (Session Initiation Protocol).

If adopted by the SME market it is aimed at, these circuits will make the phone bill a thing of the past for many businesses.

At the moment, a business may have an ISDN30e circuit with 10, 20 or 30 x channels (telephone lines).

They will be billed around $24 per month per channel for rental, and then on top of that they’ll be charged for the phone calls they make over those lines.

As well as phone lines, most SME size organisations will have a separate dedicated circuit for connection to the internet, and will pay around $15,000 per year for a 10M dedicated internet circuit.

By contrast with a SIP circuit Telco’s will offer, for example, a 10M circuit that will combine internet connectivity with connectivity to the PSTN network on the same circuit. They’ll allow for say 10 or 20 “SIP Channels” costing $24 per channel per month, but will include 5,000 minutes of calls per channel per month included in this rental. The result is the customer will effectively get free calls on their Internet circuit and will no longer require a separate ISDN30e circuit.

If your organisation has a modern IP Telephony system, then the SIP circuit will connect directly to it. If you’ve got an older, TDM based telephony system, they’ll put a black box on site to convert the E1 signal from your PBX into IP for use on the SIP circuits.

The reduction in line rental and call costs may save a company tens of thousands of dollars per year, depending on their call pattern.

Voice quality is protected by setting quality of service at the end point and the destination point can be any SIPS or non SIP client.

The only loser in this move will be the Telco’s who will lose out in revenue terms, although by switching to the IP based circuits, their internal management costs should be much less than supporting the platform which the old ISDN30 circuits.