net.work January 2009

december/january 2009

the way business is moving

next generation networks What’s around the corner?

FEATURES://TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTHCARE/CHEAPER BANDWIDTH IN 2009/ HEAD IN THE CLOUDS?_APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE REVISITED

Inside:

Infrastructure_Communications_Enterprise intelligence_Risk management_Storage_Mobility_Product Update

CONTENTS

DECEMBER/jANUARY 2009 - THE NETwORK ISSUE

Cover Story: Next Generation Networks

14 PAGE

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24 PAGE

32 PAGE

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fEATuRES

10

NEXT GENERATION NETWORKS – WHAT’S AROUND THE CORNER? Internet connectivity is the lifeblood of any organization today, regardless of whether it’s transacting on-line or using more traditional services such as e-mail, VoIP and remote access to back-end systems to keep its business processes ticking over.a Recent developments with regards to telecoms liberalisation and infrastructure have the region well poised to catch up with the rest of the world over the next two to three years. net.work investigates.

14

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS? APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE REVISITED The application as we know it is on its last legs and the evolution of software is forcing a change in the data centre as a concept. A new breed is on the way that takes shape as required and pulls its guts together from services living in cloud environments and data sets living where they need to. Say hello to the hybrid composite application.

24

TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTHCARE While eHealth is a pretty common topic in the IT space today, few real examples of the massive performance and efficiency gains technology can deliver to medical disciplines exist locally. That’s until now however. EThekwini has a new hospital that epitomises everything a connected, technologically advanced facility should. net. work went to Durban for a closer look.

SECTIONS 20 INFRASTRUCTURE 22 COMMUNICATIONS 24 ENTERPRISE INTELLIGENCE 28 STORAGE 29 MOBILITY 30 SECURITY 32 ENTERPRISE 2.0

KEYNOTES 28 SYMANTEC EXPANDS SAAS BASE Symantec acquires MessageLabs to grow its SaaS business, and it’s a good move for both companies.

31 STAYING ON COURSE The guide to identifying, managing and reducing complexity.

36 2009: GARTNER’S TOP 10 STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGIES Gartner highlights the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organisations.

38 INTREPID COMMUNICATOR BlackBerry’s new Bold smartphone is up against some stiff competition, but we’ve decided it might just have what it takes to rise above the fray.

REGULARS 03 ED’S COLUMN 04 NEwS 38 PRODUCT UPDATES

32

CHEAPER BANDWIDTH IN 2009 Will it put the squeeze on national backbone prices? If it costs more to send traffic from Johannesburg to Cape Town or from Lagos to Abuja than it does from any of these places to Europe, then national arbitrage will have well and truly arrived. Russell Southwood looks at what is likely to happen.

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ed’s column

02

December/January 2009_

Welcome to this, the December/January

issue of (net dot work).

The big question on every-one’s lips, as 2008 comes to a close, is what does 2009 hold in store for us all?

In the context of unprecedented economic turmoil, rather than trying to ‘preach the gospel’ according to Darren, I thought I’d highlight the words of Pick n Pay founder and chair Raymond Ackerman, who has urged South Africans to “stop the cynicism” ... during a recent speech at the cape Times/Safmarine Business Breakfast. It is a speech which resonates with me, and I would urge you to read it - Full summary: http://www. sagoodnews.co.za/your_good_news/raymond_ ackermans_speech.html Ackerman is an optimistic man, and a jaded view of his words might describe them as ‘Pollyannaism’ ...

But Ackerman is nothing if not a realist. He concludes his speech by saying: “Despite all I have said, none of us can deny that business is experiencing a period of severe stress.

Beset by high interest rates and elevated inflation, and buffeted by a formidable financial crisis which has seen the virtual collapse of banking systems and currencies, we are navigating perilous waters.

As a player on this turbulent world stage and as minister manuel has cautioned us, South Africa

cannot hope to be immune to these difficulties.

However, I am reminded of the ancient chinese curse that dooms us to live in interesting times.

But my experience over a long lifetime has also persuaded me that such times are also periods of stimulating challenge, of opportunity for the brave, and of optimism for those with the courage to hope, work hard and think strategically.

As danger and possibility jostle for the upper hand, I therefore have no hesitation in asserting that we are well equipped to weather the storm. every period of storm is followed by an era of revitalization and reinvigorated energy in which our ability to rise to the challenges and remake the world is tested. our country has time and again demonstrated its capacity to respond with innovation and initiative to changing economic, political and social circumstances - and I have no doubt we shall continue to do so.

And always I return to the reassuring equilibrium of perspective - a perspective that tells me that we must maintain that sense of confidence and promise that is altogether different to the restricted, inward-looking siege sentiment of only two decades ago. our economy has never been better managed. What we often forget in the angst of our growing pains is that we have created a climate in which a whole new generation of upwardly-mobile, ambitious and entrepreneurial South Africans for the first time enjoy access to and participation in the formal economy.

It was the Austrian Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl who taught us that one of the principal avenues by which an individual can find meaning is by doing something meaningful or creating something meaningful. In seeking to live out that maxim, I have lived all my life as an optimist and have never yielded before the force of those who argued that the best was impossible. It was for that reason that I never lost my faith that one day South Africa would emerge from the long night of apartheid and regain its status as an envied land of promise. I have no intention of abandoning my confidence now.” let’s not abandon our confidence now. Have the courage to hope, work hard and think strategically … and this period of stimulating challenge, might just become one of opportunity. more to the point I guess, is asking ourselves the question, can cIos benefit from the economic crisis?

Managing Editor_Darren Smith darren@technews.co.za Editorial dEpartMEnt Contributing Editor_Andrew Seldon andrew@technews.co.za

According to Gartner, instead of waiting for signs of a return to growth, it is better to begin planning for further business growth. Senior vice president and global head of research for Gartner, Peter Sondergaard, said an economic downturn can be a perfect time to undertake projects that warrant priority, because of their impact on future growth.

In the preliminary results of its annual Gartner executive Programs (eXP) cIo survey, Gartner said IT leaders are wary of making dramatic budget cuts because they know it will be difficult to ‘ramp up’ their IT capabilities when opportunities for business growth return. of the 444 cIos surveyed around the world thus far, 48% are projecting an IT budget increase in 2009. However, 52% of cIos are reporting flat or IT budget decreases in 2009. on a weighted basis and considering all 444 IT organisations, 2009 IT budgets are set to increase 3.36%.

“While these are preliminary results, they support what we have observed during 2008 - that enterprises see IT as a way to drive cost out of the business in the face of an increasingly challenging economic climate,” said Sondergaard. “Unlike the post-dot. com era where IT was perceived as wasteful, organisations now view IT as a way to transform their businesses and adopt leaner operating models. While it is prudent to plan for a short-term economic slowdown, IT leaders that are called on to reduce 2009 IT spending should do so in a way that will not impede the organization in the future.”

As business growth is not declining at the same rate across geographies, Gartner said that cIos can exploit asymmetries between regions and industries to find new opportunities.

Sondergaard predicts robust growth rates for some regions and countries. Asymmetry of markets and regions is a continuing feature of the global economy and IT leaders must be aware that more than one style of response may be needed if the enterprise is active in regions or sectors with different conditions.

Gartner said economic uncertainty dictates that prudent IT organisations prepare three alternative budgets: best-case, worst-case and most-likely scenarios. To that end, Gartner presents three global 2009 IT budget scenarios, spread across all industries, and based on the fallout from the ensuing economic uncertainty:

• BeST-cASe ScenARIo: Global IT budget growth is between flat (0.0 %) and 3.3 % • WoRST-cASe ScenARIo: Global IT budgets are between flat (0.0 %) and a decline of 2.5 % • moST-lIkely ScenARIo: Global IT budgets are between flat (0.0 %) and an increase of 3.0 %

Sub-Editor_Zamani Mbatha zamani@technews.co.za

This overall decline in IT budgets is primarily due to the financial services sector, as a huge spender on IT, dragging down the average substantially. Public sector budget cuts are also occurring across many economies, and there is weakness in other vulnerable sectors such as retail and automotive, said Sondergaard.

He also highlighted some key areas that IT executives should focus on right now to help their organisations weather economic turmoil: • Cost optimisation • Virtualisation • IT modernisation • Low-carbon IT • Workforce management • Business intelligence • Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Business Process management (BPm) • Multi-sourcing

ConSulting Editor_ Paul Booth

Full results of the Gartner eXP cIo survey will be available in the first quarter of 2009. enjoy this month’s read business is moving.

- the way

Wishing you all the best for the festive season, and the year ahead.

Sincerely, Darren Smith Managing Editor

PS: All feedback, brickbats and praise, would be welcomed.

Contact me directly on darren@technews.co.za.

portal Editor_Katie Wetselaar katie@technews.co.za buyErS’ guidE_Liz Seed liz@technews.co.za

ColuMniStS Brett Haggard, Simon Dingle, Paul Booth ContributorS Timothy Stammers, Russell Southwood, Graham Titterington, Gary Lawrence, Graham Duxbury, Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, ComputerWire, Richard Edwards SalES dEpartMEnt SalES dirECtor_Jane van der Spuy jane@technews.co.za SalES ExECutivES Shirley McGeer shirley@technews.co.za Malckey Tehini malckey@technews.co.za Tracy Karam tracy@technews.co.za CirCulation ManagEr_Carmen Sedlacek carmen@technews.co.za SubSCriptionS_Justin Grove justin@technews.co.za dESign & layout dESign_Infiltrate Media produCtion_Technique Design rEpro & printing_Intrepid Printers photography_ Whitecliffs Photography publiShEr Technews Publishing www.technews.co.za reg no. 2005/034598/07 1st Floor Stabilitas Chambers 265 Kent avenue, randburg, 2194 po box 385, pinegowrie, 2123 tel: +27 (0)11 886 3640 Fax: +27 (011) 787 8052 url: www.netdotwork.co.za ContaCtS lEttErS to thE Ed_netdotwork@technews.co.za SubSCriptionS_subs@technews.co.za Copyright © 2008 by technews publishing. all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, adapted, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the editors, publisher, or advertisers.

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Bringing virtual meetings to life

Polycom has launched its RealPresence Experience High Definition (RPX HD) telepresence solution in South Africa, available to local companies through Polycom distribution partner, Kathea Communications. According to Greg Darke, CEO of Kathea Communications “We understand the challenges of a dispersed workforce and of course, the importance of building personal relationships through effective communication media. The Polycom RPX HD solution meets this requirement.

The solution’s truly innovative dynamics and design goes a long way to simulate a live meeting environment – while not bringing a new concept, but more a new reality to the world of telepresence.”

neWS

Altech The Minister of Communications has been refused leave of appeal re the High Court’s judgement in favour of Altech and other VANS and their right to self provide. In a separate judgement the DOC also lost its case for an interdict against ICASA to prevent it from issuing a telecommunications licence to Altech.

ADcel Uganda-based ADCEL, a data service company, has opened its operations in that country and is focused on helping the public access information about any company in Uganda free of charge.

AfricA Online John Joseph, the CEO of Africa Online and a subsidiary of Telkom SA, has died in a boating accident whilst on holiday.

04 December/January 2009_

GOOGle’S OperAtinG SyStem ArriveS - but nOt frOm GOOGle Google has long been rumoured to be working on an operating system to compete with Microsoft’s Windows. When it launched its browser product, Chrome, in September, we noted that it essentially was Google’s operating system — a UI for the OS that the web is becoming. Now, tiny Emeryville, California-based Good OS, has taken the browser-as-OS idea a bit further with the announcement of its latest operating system, dubbed ‘Cloud.’ Good OS is most famous for the gOS, a slimmed down version of Linux that is made to specifically play

nice with web applications and web-centric apps like Google Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Skype, YouTube, and Firefox.

The new Cloud OS product, which was announced at the Netbook World Summit in Paris, France, is specifically designed for netbooks and nettop computers. Cloud boots ‘in seconds’ into a browser that is specifically designed to make access to cloud based applications, like Google’s suite of web apps, quick and easy via a built-in Mac OS X-like dock that has been added to the browser.bv

The complexity challenge

John Swainson, CEO of CA, in welcoming delegates to CA World, described the ongoing battle against complexity as the fundamental issue facing the industry and the leading obstacle holding back customers as they seek to get better bigger payback from IT. Swainson identified six disruptive technologies that he maintains are going to change enterprise computing forever, and will require a completely different approach to the management of those environments.

• Virtualisation • Faster and more ubiquitous converged networks; • Service Oriented Architecture or SOA; • Social Networking inside the enterprise; • Cloud Computing; and • An explosion of networked devices, from phones to sensors.

SpeScOm’S neW mArketinG AnD cOmmunicAtiOnS GrOup executive appointment. My primary role at Spescom will be Stuart Vey has been appointed Group Executive: to leverage Spescom’s intellectual depth and spirit Marketing and Communications at Spescom of inventiveness in the market” Limited. Vey will be responsible for managing Vey considers himself a team player and and coordinating the strategic marketing, believes strongly in the power of collaboration. He communications, public relations and investor says, “Everyone has a unique gift and marketing relations functions for the Spescom Group. and communications offers some latitude for the Spescom is a JSE-listed ICT company unearthing and expression of that talent to the focused on the delivery of integrated benefit of the individual and the company.” business communication solutions to the Says Jené Palmer, CEO of Spescom: “We broadcast, enterprise and contact centre, and welcome the energy, enthusiasm and experience telecommunications sectors. Its considerable that Vey brings to Spescom.” expertise and intellectual capital is housed in its four divisions Spescom DataFusion, Stuart Vey, Group Executive: Spescom DataVoice, Spescom Marketing and Communications Telecommunications and Spescom at Spescom Limited Media IT. Established in 1977, Spescom has a long history of success and is now entering a new phase of its existence with a clear and undiluted focus on delivering enhanced integrated business communication solutions.

Says Vey: “My role at Spescom affords me the opportunity to apply all I have learnt to the challenge of positioning the company in a vibrant, fast paced business environment and dynamically changing technological arena.

“I hope to bring the best of my experience in the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds to this

Radical customer service

MCT Telecommunications, a specialist provider of maintenance and support in the South African telecommunications industry, has invested in DVT Holdings’ Radical helpdesk application to ensure operational efficiencies in its customer management.

“Radical will considerably improve our business processes.

The monitoring of optic fibre in the telecommunications network is unique in South Africa, and the use of a solution such as Radical to enhance the process is probably unique in the world,” says Wesley Nash, manager of the network operating centre at MCT Telecommunications.

AnSyS Ansys has acquired AR Process Projects, a company that provides project management services and engineering solutions to a wide range of industries. beGet hOlDinGS Beget Holdings has appointed Advocate Joe Fana Nalane as its new non-executive chairman in place of Tebogo Mogashoa, who remains a non-executive director. belAy SOlutiOnS John Ramatsui has been appointed as Chairman of Belay Solutions, a privately owned company that serves as an entrepreneurial hub for focused, owner operated ICT companies. cOnverGenet hOlDinGS ConvergeNet Holdings has acquired 74% of Chrystalpine, a supplier of infrastructure technology products through its subsidiary, Contract Kitting.

DimenSiOn DAtA 3fifteeen, a subsidiary of Britehouse, itself a subsidiary of Dimension Data, has acquired BMO Software, a CRM specialist, a move that creates one of the largest Microsoft CRM consultancies in South Africa. intervAte Intervate, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a provider of ECM Solutions, has acquired Cape Town-based Synergy Corporate Technologies, another Microsoft Gold Partner.

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hp HP has appointed Steen Lombolt-Thomsen as VP AND GM of HP Software’s EMEA region.

Lombolt-Thomsen joins from IBM where he spent 10 years in its software division. huGe GrOup Anton Potgieter has been appointed as executive chairman of Huge Group (he was CEO) in place of Fensta Lediga and James Herbst as CEO of Huge Group (was CFO). lG electrOnicS LG Electronics has appointed Peet van Rooyen, as its local Managing Director in place of ST Tae. Van Rooyen is the first non-Korean globally to head a LG Electronics subsidiary. mtn MTN has concluded a joint venture with Amaracos Holdings of Cyprus that will give its Cyprus operations an expanded distribution network in that country. It is also speculated that MTN will enter the Indian market under its own steam, following the failure to secure partnership deals in that country, a move that makes sense given that the Indian market is gaining 8m subscribers per month. nASperS Naspers has terminated the planned auction sale of MWeb South Africa, but has sold off MWEB Africa for $63m and 75% of MWeb Namibia to Telkom SA. The two companies were part of MultiChoice Africa and MIH Holdings respectively.

Say What#@?

Under the Table There are 136 countries perceived to be more corrupt than South Africa. Poland, Greece, Brazil and Argentina are among them.

(Transparency InTernaTIonal, 2007 cpI)

06 December/January 2009_

BT partners with Sekunjalo Bt today announced it has entered into an agreement with Sekunjalo Investments Limited, under which Sekunjalo will become a 30 per cent shareholder in Bt’s South african business.

The deal demonstrates BT’s commitment to the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) agenda and will provide opportunities for both parties to accelerate their growth.

The agreement is subject to approval by the Reserve Bank of South Africa.

BT has been present in South Africa for more than 16 years and has grown the South African business to serve an impressive list of more than 300 clients, including several locallybased multinationals.

Sekunjalo was established in May 1996 as a black-controlled economic empowerment group to benefit previously disadvantaged individuals through job creation. The company is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

In 2006 Sekunjalo was

L-R: Brian Armstrong, BT (MEA VP), Mo Kajee, Sekunjalo Investments (CEO), Olivier Campenon, BT (MEA President)

recognised as South Africa’s Top Empowerment Company by the authoritative Financial Mail/Empowerdex Survey of Top 200 listed companies. The following year, the company was selected as one of the top 125 New Champions Global Growth Companies by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Sekunjalo has strong roots amongst historically disadvantaged individuals and community organisations. These groups form over 80 per cent of Sekunjalo’s shareholder base.

Brian Armstrong, BT Vice President, Middle East and Africa, said: “We are delighted to be able to partner with such a high-profile empowerment group as Sekunjalo. This clearly represents another milestone in BT’s development in South Africa and opens a whole raft of new business possibilities for BT.”

cOnverGence pArtnerS Intelsat, the world’s leading provider of commercial satellite services, has announced a $250m joint venture with a South African investor group led

by Convergence Partners that is chaired by Andile Ngcaba, and whose goal is to deliver a uniquely African solution for the satellite capacity constraints facing the region via an innovative partnership and funding package.

To be called Intelsat New dawn, the satellite will carry a payload optimised to deliver wireless, broadband and media applications to the continent and is expected to enter service in late 2010 or early 2011. It will be operated and

Mo Kajee, CEO, Sekunjalo Investments, said: “We are extremely excited to partner with BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. BT has a long track record of success not only in South Africa, but Africa as a whole, and we are excited about the new opportunities this partnership brings to both BT and Sekunjalo.”

Under the terms of the agreement and subject to the approval of the South African Reserve Bank, a Sekunjalo investment vehicle will subscribe for shares equal to 30 per cent of the entire issued share capital of BT’s South African entity.

Sekunjalo will appoint two representatives to BT’s South African board. The remaining five members will be BT appointed representatives.

marketed as part of Intelsat’s global fleet and joins 25 other Intelsat satellites that service Africa.

Pre-launch commitments have already been received from Gateway Communications, Gilat Satcom and Vodacom; and pre-orders for satellite capacity, or backlog, currently totals more than $300m, covering up to 15 years of service on the satellite. Convergence Partners also has several other ICT interests/investment including Seacom, one of the African undersea cable projects; Dimension Data; Gemalto, a provider of smart card technology; Integrat, a wireless applications services provider; and SkillPod Media, an online casual gaming company.

Say What#@? frOSt & SullivAn recOGniSeS beSt-in-clASS innOvAtOrS 20 top international and local companies were honoured at Frost & Sullivan’s first annual African Excellence Awards Banquet held recently at the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton. The awards were made to companies showcasing leading ideas and innovation across a variety of sectors. The awards were made to companies demonstrating leadership in markets from Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria and South Africa to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. The sectors covered were energy, healthcare, industrial automation and ICT. “The companies that received awards have shown innovation, competitiveness and leadership in meeting the particular demands of doing business in Africa,” said Frost & Sullivan Partner and Director of African Operations Phil Howarth. “The

products and services that we recognised should be applauded as examples of how to manage business in the current economic climate.”

The keynote address for the evening was delivered by Johan Dekker, Divisional Director of Barloworld Logistics. Dekker emphasised that companies that embrace Supply Chain Management as a competitive weapon perform better than others.

“I suspect this is true in good times and in bad,” he said. “Supply chains can respond effectively in times like these. For instance, supply chain management offers the unique advantage that “going green” often equates to saving money and addressing the end-consumer’s growing need to be environ-mentally sensitive.”

AFRICAN ExCELLENCE AWARD WINNERS • Netcare: 2007 South African Private Hospital Growth Strategy Leadership Award • Mobilitrix: 2008 South African Mobile Content Product Innovation Award • Medika SA: 2008 South African Advanced Wound Care Product Line Strategy Award • Global Biofuels Limited: 2008 Sub-Saharan Africa Biofuel Emerging Company Award • Tecmed Africa: 2008 South African Ultrasound Market Leadership Award • Copperbelt Energy Corporation: 2008 Zambian Electricity Industry Business Development Strategy Leadership Award • SSEM Mthembu: 2007 South African Market Penetration Leadership Award • Energem Biofuels: 2008 South African Biofuel Feedstock Competitive Strategy Leadership Award • Philips: 2007 Kenyan Medical Devices Market Leadership Award • Wyeth South Africa: 2007 South African Paediatric Vaccines Growth Strategy Leadership Award

Winner of Duxbury Networking Formula One Competition announced monique Scolari from johannesburg has won the netgear-sponsored Duxbury networking Gp prediction competition for 2008.

A first-time entrant, she joined her husband Maorizio in registering as a competitor after seeing the competition advertised in net.work.

“We religiously completed our forecasts online before each of the eighteen rounds of the championship,” says Scolari who admits to being an avid Lewis Hamilton fan.

“I am delighted that he managed to win. He has brought new energy to the championship. He is a great competitor and sportsman.”

• Honeywell Process Solutions: 2007 African Product Life Cycle Price Competitiveness Customer Satisfaction Leadership Award • Alcon Laboratories: 2008 South African Ophthalmology Pharmaceuticals Market Leadership Award • SSEM Mthembu: 2008 South African Patient Monitoring Growth Strategy Leadership Award • Rainbow Nation Renewable Fuels: 2008 South African Biofuel Feedstock Share Advancement Award • GE Healthcare: 2007 South African Patient Monitoring Industry Innovation and Advancement Award • Draeger Medical South Africa: 2007 South African Hospital Customer Service Leadership Award • The CK Scientific Group: 2008 Zambian Hospital Medical Equipment Customer Service Leadership Award • Intel Corporation: 2008 Nigerian Telemedicine Entrepreneurial Company Award • Accenture: 2008 Sub-Saharan Africa Software Outsourcing Market Leadership Award • Elekta Southern Africa: 2008 Nigerian Oncology Market Penetration Leadership Award

Scolari walks away with a RedBull Racing Watch and a Lenovo notebook computer for her efforts.

Graham Duxbury, CEO of Duxbury Networking, paid tribute to title sponsor Netgear for its backing of the competition, highlighting the broad spread of product offerings – including ‘consumer’ and ‘business’ ranges - provided by the networking specialist.

Graham Duxbury (CEO Duxbury Networking), Monique Scolari (Winner), Maorizio Scolari (Winner’s Husband).

More mice The percentage of households which have computer facilities increased from 8.6% in 2001 to 15.7% in 2007.

(7.3% of households had access to Internet facility at home in 2007.) (communITy survey 2007)

OrAScOm telecOm Orascom Egypt and Telecom Egypt have shut down their landline joint venture in Algeria, citing problems with the incumbent operator, Algérie Télécom. prObAbility Proability, a UK-based company and a provider of cellphone gambling, is planning to offer its services in SA following the promulgation of a bill a few months ago that permits online gambling. rSA RSA, a subsidiary of EMC, has established a local office in SA, headed by Rob Watson.

The RSA products are currently distributed via SecureData, but it has appointed Egis Security Distribution as its second distributor for its southern Africa region.

SekunjAlO Sekunjalo has made a R27m (30%) investment in BT Communications Services South Africa, the South African operations of the BT Group.

StreAmServe StreamServe has opened a South African office in Cape Town headed by Birger Lundgren, one of the original founders of the company. SteamServe provides document composition, management and delivery solutions for ECM, ERP and CRM systems. t-SyStemS Mardia van der Walt-Korsten, CEO of T-Systems SA, had been named as the CSSA IT Personality of the Year.

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Dvt DVT Holdings has acquired Cape-based Emerald Consulting, a leading provider of software and related services to the legal sector, with five out of the largest seven legal companies on its books. fOxcOm Israel-based Foxcom, a division of One Path Networks, has announced that it has entered the SA telecommunications market by establishing its operations in Durban. It has been involved in the local market for some 10 years. frAnce telecOm France Telecom has entered into a joint venture with Hits Telecom Uganda that will create Orange Uganda that will be 53% owned by the former. fujitSu SiemenS cOmputerS Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) has announced that the latter has sold its stake in this 50/50 joint venture to Fujitsu, to be effective from 1st April 2009 in a deal valued at about €450m. There was talk of Lenovo buying this stake in order to strengthen its position in the PC market as both FSC and Lenovo are members of the ‘second’ tier of PC suppliers along with Toshiba. The first tier, HP, Dell and Acer, make up about 45% of the market by shipments.

Say What#@?

Books at a steal A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win by Shelby Steele (hardcover) sells for $14.96 (R150 at current exchange rates) on Amazon and R278.30 on Kalahari.

08 December/January 2009_

Predicting crime trends

Mediamap delivers detailed crime insight reports that predict estimates for a particular crime, by area. This service was developed as a direct result of there being a need for organisations to know the likelihood for crime in their geographical areas of influence. This granular view of the likelihood for crime gives companies in the security industry new insights and the ability to more efficiently plan operations, marketing and sales activities.

WOrlD’S firSt lOcAtive DOcumentAry fOr mObile lOOkS At yOuth culture in SOWetO Vincent Maher, the portfolio manager for social media at Vodacom, announced early November, the launch of a 25-episode documentary about youth culture in Soweto. The documentary, called Mobikasi, is the first to be delivered exclusively by a locative mobile social network like the Grid.

Users can explore Sowetan youth culture on their cellphones from anywhere in South Africa through The Grid’s map interface, or by physically touring the famous township and watching documentary clips on their phones at the locations where they were shot.

The location-based documentary looks at people, music, fashion, social issues and places of interest. Instead of showing the twenty-five minute documentary in a linear fashion from start to finish, Mobikasi splits the content up into twenty-five inserts of one minute each. Each one-minute clip covers a different topic that is relevant to the youth in Soweto and is geo-tagged to the location where it was shot. This means that viewers can now explore Soweto’s vibrant youth culture by virtually “travelling” through a mobile streetmap of the township and stopping off at various locations to enjoy the one-minute video clips.

The first Mobikasi episode features, among others, a street fashion crew called the Smarteez,

music producers Hempza and Vikinduku, a popular hair braider named Anna and the reigning Miss Soweto, Rochelle Mothapo. Also featured are Soweto’s premier hangouts Sedibeng, Back Room and the popular Sunday buy-and-braai s pot Panyaza.

What is the Grid? the Grid is a social network that uses your mobile phone to connect you with people, places and events around you. from rom your phone you can see which friends are in your area, chat to people across South Africa and share photos and videos wherever you are.

The Grid is overlayed on street maps, meaning you¹re able to tag content to specific addresses, recommend venues (e.g. restaurants) and even find directions to venues recommended by others.

For your phone, The Grid is available as a downloadable Java application or, to those without Java capabilities, a WAP site. There is also a full-feature website as well as a handy Facebook Grid application for when you’re stuck behind your computer.

feature

Internet connectIvIty Is the lIfeblood of any organIzatIon today, regardless of whether It’s transactIng on-lIne or usIng more tradItIonal servIces such as e-maIl, voIP and remote access to back-end systems to keeP Its busIness Processes tIckIng over.

What’s around the corner?

E

ven though the situation with regards to telecoms services in South Africa has shown great improvement over the past couple of years, much still needs to be done before telcos can confidently claim to offer the same level of service as the rest of the world. Thankfully, recent developments with regards to telecoms liberalisation and infrastructure have the region well poised to catch up with the rest of the world over the next two to three years. Since Communications Minister, Ivy Matsepe Casaburri has decided not to appeal the high-court’s ruling in favour of Altech and rapid deregulation of the market, all VANs licensees will soon be allowed to self-provision infrastructure, in turn giving them the ability to compete with incumbent telcos.

Add this to the wealth of backhaul Internet connectivity coming into South Africa through the likes of the undersea cables landing on our shores over the next two years and it’s clear the entire market will look vastly different to the way it looks today.

So what awaits us over the next couple of years?

Let’s start with what the results from the recent high-court ruling will mean. decisions, decisions It’s been clear for some time now that if some of the larger ISP players gained access to a license that granted them the same rights as the incumbent telcos, they would undoubtedly respond by trying to become telcos themselves, albeit on a much smaller, regional scale.

With no legacy infrastructure of which to speak, that means a greenfields approach to technology rollout – much like the scenario Neotel found itself in a couple of years ago.

As we saw with Neotel’s decision to roll a fibre backbone out across the country and fulfill on much of their last mile using wireless technologies, there’s plenty of room for doing things differently.

The only thing is, it’s a couple of years on from when Neotel made a decision on which technologies to use in building out their network.

So the chances are good that the ‘new kids on the telco block’ will

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December/January 2009_

By BrEtt Haggard >

www.netdotwork.co.za

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feature

“tHE cEllular playErs HavE drivEn tHEir BusinEss modEls witH a prEdominantly voicE focus. But wimaX targEts data first and tHEn tHrougH using voip can HandlE voicE traffic. it’s a smart play.” noel Kirkaldy, Motorola home & networks Mobility

choose a route that’s different still to the one taken by the second network operator.

Plenty of options exist and even the route taken by Neotel could be viable. By and large however, it seems like most players are backing the WiMAX horse.

GoinG With WiMaX Noel Kirkaldy, Marketing Director Wireless Broadband, Middle East, Africa and Pakistan at Motorola Home & Networks Mobility says that WiMAX (802.16) is an intriguing and relevant technology for new telco entrants.

“The problem is however that WiMAX haven’t yet seen a true regional implementation as yet,” he says.

Kirkaldy says that WiMAX is however an important technology because of how it will differentiate the newer players in the market.

“The cellular players have driven their business models with a predominantly voice focus,” he says.

“But WiMAX targets data first and then through using VoIP can handle voice traffic. It’s a smart play,” he adds.

Kirkaldy also believes that WiMAX is a good fit for ECNS players since the ISPs that are likely to get these kinds of licenses understand the marketing and selling of data services better than the cellular players do.

“We can’t however discount the cellular players however. They are already acquiring the expertise required to be strong contenders here,” he says.

Kirkaldy says that WiMAX also allows new entrants to start small and grow from there. “They don’t necessarily have to build out a large nationwide network at the outset. By using WiMAX they could start by offering a limited, regional service, and expand that offering as and when cash flow and the business case allow.

“Importantly, it’s also a fixed nomadic solution,” he says, “so it will allow for mobility in the future. We see it as a strong alternative to DSL and as we know, that’s somewhat of a hot button today.”

Despite the conviction with which Kirkaldy puts forward the point about WiMAX’s viability, it remains to be seen whether it makes good sense in practise.

In fact, Dr. Alapan Arnab, Innovation Manager at T-Systems South Africa says that the high costs associated with building a

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December/January 2009_

WiMAX network coupled with the low average revenue per user (ARPU) in underserviced areas and the inherently exorbitant costs of providing Internet services in South Africa have raised questions around its viability. a different perspective “In particular,” says Arnab, “while WiMAX may make economic sense in areas with high population density, the economic fundamentals are more challenging in areas with low population density, such as rural areas.

“The business case for low population density locales only exists with cross subsidisation (either from the operator’s business case in other locales or from other sources such as the government).

“In T-Systems’ opinion then, cheaper, alternate technologies are more suitable for areas with low population density and WiMAX should be seen as one of a range of technologies for developing countries,” Arnab explains.

Tackling the first set of challenges for WiMAX, Arnab says telcos can conservatively expect to pay in the region of R75m for a 50 base station WiMAX Network.

“They will furthermore have to contend with maintenance and operational expenses of about R35m per annum, for this 50 base station network,” he says.

“These costs are in line with reality, since covering Gauteng for example, would take a minimum of 50 base stations spread out across the three major municipalities in the province – Ekurhuleni, the City of Johannesburg and the City of Tshwane.

When it comes to providing Internet services, Arnab says it’s safe to assume the operator would use a 1:50 contention ratio for Internet access and provision roughly 1Mbps (contended) to each user.

“Add in all of the overheads, such as call centres, marketing, management or the cost of running and maintaining Internet gateways, email servers and the likes, and the cost to the consumer will end at the R999 per user mark,” he says.

Unfortunately, notes Arnab with the price of R1 000 per user, it is probable that the maximum potential market for WiMAX will be much lower than many players originally anticipated – it will quite simply be too expensive to appeal to the mass market.

“And this will naturally have a significant impact on the economics involved with providing such a service,” he says. not the ultiMate solution While WiMAX can be more affordable than current broadband offerings in the South African market (nobody besides Neotel currently offers an uncapped broadband service for less that R1000 per month), the price is still not significantly low enough to allow for large-scale broadband uptake.

“And we’ve based this example on Gauteng – the largest and most prosperous metropolitan area in the country,” he says.

“When this financial model is applied to areas with significantly lower population density (such as currently underserviced areas), the financial business case for WiMax just doesn’t make sense,” he says.

“We therefore do not foresee a financial success for regional network operators in deploying WiMax as the technology for primary network infrastructure.

“Alternative technologies will be required to provide more universal, affordable services – specifically in less dense, rural areas of South Africa,” Arnab says.

This is possibly one of the reasons none of the players with WiMAX licenses have been prepared to bet the farm on this single technology.

Even Motorola’s Kirkaldy concedes that we haven’t yet seen an operator use WiMAX as its sole technology yet.

“While a number of parties have acquired WiMAX spectrum, all of them have other interests,” he says.

“That said though, I do believe that that new entrants stemming from the ECNS process, will make use of WiMAX for their nationwide and regional networks.

“And since Motorola already supports 802.16e (the fixed-wireless deployment of WiMAX), the ecosystem to roll networks out and support them is very much in place at this stage,” he says.

So, while opinions continue to vary, one cannot however deny that it will in some way mean or form be a part of the networks we’re likely to see in the market over the coming years.

Activities in the communications market will certainly not be limited to the moves of the new telco players, however.

As time marches on, so demands change and the technologies being used to deliver communications services begin to age – ask Telkom, the one company that it seems will be playing catch-up over the next couple of years.

In a nutshell, the natural course of things means that telcos, especially our mobile telcos, need to stay on the crest of what their customers are demanding – and more and more it looks like demands centre on faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous data.

And those demands looks like a specification straight out of the LTE (Long-term Evolution) playbook. the proMise of lte LTE is the next logical step for networks premised on the 3GPP (GPRS to HSDPA) or 3GPP2 (EVDO to UMTS) networks being used both locally and abroad; and the reasons for its viability are far reaching.

Kutty Kanagaratnam, Director of Radio Access Sales for Ericsson in South Africa says for starters, the skills required to rollout an LTE network can easily be built on top of existing skill in the market.

A second benefit is its ability to converge the different technologies being used by operators in various regions around the world, namely

GSM and CDMA – here in South Africa, the cellular operators use GSM, while Neotel is delivering its last mile over CDMA. Kanagaratnam says that GSM is by far the bigger standard, with about 88% of the market share. CDMA on the other hand is much smaller with 10% of the worldwide market share of wireless networks.

“It makes great sense because it dovetails with the worldwide move towards IP as the defacto protocol of choice – after all, voice and other services can easily be carried by IP networks,” he says.

Another reason it makes sense, he says it because it only entails an access layer or last mile change in the network – the core backbone operators have built will stay intact.

By comparison to 3G Kanagaratnam says LTE has the ability to cater for a greater number of users, while delivering better performance – it delivers more bandwidth in a similar spectrum range, for a much lower price.

“In the initial stages, LTE will be capable of data rates in the 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink realm. Over time however, that will evolve into services capable of 300Mbps downlink and 100Mbps uplink,” he says.

And unlike the claims for other wireless technologies, which soon peter out into insignificance the moment the user base scales, Kanagaratnam says its plausible that all of the users on a single cell could get that level of performance. too soon for south africa?

To date, he says however that there have a been few discussions with local mobile telcos, but that it doesn’t look like LTE will roll through in South Africa for a good couple of years yet.

“There’s way too much potential left in HSPA,” he says.

A little known fact is that by next year, HSPA networks will be capable of delivering downstream data rates of 42Mbps and upstream data rates of between 11 and 12Mbps.

“This will be a quick win for the operators and therefore, something I see preceding the move to LTE in the local market,” he says.

The international markets could be an entirely different story however.

Because of the pressure being placed by WiMAX on incumbent players with GSM and EVDO/UMTS networks, Motorola’s Kirkaldy says timelines for LTE have been shifted from 2012/2015 to 2009/2010.

“The first commercial LTE solutions will be commercially available during the course of 2009,” he says.

Kanagaratnam too says that target is realistic.

While Ericsson and other vendors are still in the development phase of their products based on this technology, he confirms that his company’s products should be ready during the second or third quarter of next year.

[opinion] One has to ask whether the kind of data rates offered by LTE are needed today – sure, it’s great to have an excess of capability in reserve, but telcos prefer to cater for market demands, rather than creating a glut. There’s no doubt that LTE has a roll to play, but whether or not that role is as close as two to three years away remains to be seen. WiMAX however is a different story – the demand is there and the technology is capable of catering for it. Whether or not an entirely WiMAX network is plausible is questionable. All things considered, it will be interesting to see how the technology being used pans out over the coming years.

www.netdotwork.co.za

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Th e an ap d pli c a ch The aTi ne an e on a w g v re b e olu s w q re in Ti e se uir ed Th on kn r e o i e da vic d a s o da of w i T es nd n Ta so T is Th c f he a l o ll seT ivin pu e en Tw n o s g lls wa Tr ar iTs e To li in i y e vi Ts Th as is las n T Th g cl g a a o u T T c for leg e hy wh ud Ts ak on ci s br er e To es ce ng id e nv g sh pT e co Th iro Th ap . a e er e n m y a po n me f s si ee nT ro Te d s m ap To an pl . d ic sa aT y io n.

feature

in Head tHe cloud

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December/January 2009_

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f the network is the business then applications are its offices.

The software tools we use are vital to running our organisations.

They enable us to get the job done and can provide us with powerful differentiators. Applications must be kept up and running, be managed and maintained, secured, updated and live on reliable infrastructure. But where our applications reside is changing, along with the architecture of the software itself. Cloud computing and Software as a Service are providing new ways of developing, hosting and purchasing applications. Infrastructure now means anything from physical boxes in an office to cloud services hosted on who-knows-what. Or where.

Hosting applications in the cloud is a compelling prospect. It allows you to hand the administration, updating and maintenance of applications over to a third party. You worry about using the software – not about the hardware it lives on or what happens when that platform falls over. It also allows for applications to be utilised via a subscription model, doing away with capital outlay for software and replacing it with operational expenditure. cloud formation Al Nugent is executive vice president and chief technology officer of CA. Part of his role is futurist, predicting what is around the corner for the technology stack, and how best to manage it when it comes.

Al envisions a hybrid environment in the future where applications are mashed-up using local data and services pulled out of the cloud.

Or clouds.

“There’ll be lots of clouds,” he says, speaking to me at CA World in Las Vegas, Nevada. “The CA cloud, Amazon cloud, Google cloud… you’ll probably see the MIT cloud too, for example. The industry will have to figure out lowest common denominators in terms of modality. Then things need to be normalised at the event level.”

The exciting thing about having a number of clouds to choose from is that one could begin to do the likes of failing over from one cloud environment to the other. Given that standards are in place.

“Ah yeah – standards,” agrees Al. “I love standards, because there are so many to choose from.”

“If the network Is the BusIness then applIcatIons are Its offIces. the software tools we use are vItal to runnIng our organIsatIons.” www.netdotwork.co.za

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feature

Il o th ve “a er sta h y e n e ch ar da ah o e s rd – s o o s t se m , B an fr an ec d o y au ar m t s d .” o e s. tHe evolving data centre The data centre as we know

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what they are hosted on,”

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16

The mainframe itself is

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the platforms they run on.

December/January 2009_

But we’re talking years ahead when it comes to cloud-juggling. In the now there are interesting questions that face the development of hybrid applications that only partially live in your data centre and have their heads in the clouds.

“With the notion of anonymous services coming out of the cloud into some instance of an application we expect to see an enterprise version of that composite piece of software,” reckons Al. “But smaller businesses and consumers are looking to compose things with chunks of things from the cloud. So how do you guarantee service levels? If you’re a contract provider sure you can attach services into a composite viewing framework. But if you’ve got something anonymous you need wrapping or front-ending to provide an instrumentation layer and extract a performance layer from that.”

“And then how do you accommodate for pieces of applications in terms of where they live?” he asks. “The questions we face are in how to manage risk, guarantee service levels and measure performance.”

“But we’re not going to see this as a dominant application architecture in the next three years,” he says. “Just like SOA took a long time to catch on, so will this. We’ll see it in five or six years maybe. But that depends on how the first three go.”

The relevant vendors are gearing up, however. If applications are going to live in the cloud, even just as services composed into other applications, then we need a new breed of platform for them to live on.

Conventional web-hosts won’t do either. They need to scale up. Rack space has begun to make the transition to capable cloud application host. And Microsoft has entered the game with an operating system designed for the cloud.

The clear-blue Azure is a cheeky name for the Windows product designed as an operating system for cloud environments. We could extrapolate at length about Microsoft’s vision of a cloudless sky – but lets stick to business. Windows Azure is here and, unless I’m mistaken, is one of a kind.

According to Microsoft the Azure ‘Services Platform’ combines the growing power of web-based cloud and modern computing devices with a suite of services designed to help developers deliver next-generation applications across multiple environments.

Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services model is founded on the premise that users benefit most when software and services exist together, taking full advantage of client devices and delivering maximum flexibility and choice.

“There’s this notion out there that all of technology will be sucked up in to this thing called the ‘cloud,’ and the cloud will virtually replace all the other technology or render it irrelevant,” says Dave Ives, who heads the Developer and Platform Evangelism Group at Microsoft SA. “The reality is that the cloud only complements existing technology and provides people with flexibility and another way of doing things. Our intent with Azure is to seamlessly extend Microsoft’s platform out to the cloud so customers don’t have to choose, or deal with silos of webbased information.”

“When you actually talk to customers, just about all are saying there are some things they need on premise and some things they need hosted entirely within the cloud – but they want all of those things to work together. Services are here to stay, but software isn’t dead.”

Ives says Azure is designed to allow developers to create cloud-based computing architectures that run off of centralised servers that are operated and maintained by Microsoft.

“when you actually talk to customers, just aBout all are sayIng there are some thIngs they need on premIse and some thIngs they need hosted entIrely wIthIn the cloud – But they want all of those thIngs to work together. servIces are here to stay, But software Isn’t dead.”

To curb customer’s fears of their applications falling over in the cloud, Microsoft is employing what it calls the ‘Windows Azure Fabric Controller’ that balances workloads across servers, manages resources and reroutes work instantaneously if a server goes down.

But Azure has also been designed to integrate with local bits and pieces – taking the whole cloud thing one step closer to the prediction of hybrid applications stealing the show. After all – having the mechanics of an app living on a cloud are fine, but we need the data it lifts to sit nice and safely next to the fireplace at home, in case it starts raining outside. precipitation As I take a step back and look at the bigger picture surrounding hybrid infrastructure, I can’t help but feeling that our friends at Sun Microsystems and IBM have hummed this tune, before it became a hit.

The first time I was introduced to the idea of composite applications of this kind was speaking to someone at Sun a good two years ago. IBM has also harboured the idea for some time.

Joe Ruthven, IBM Business Development manager believes that the time for composite applications has come, even though the idea has been knocking about for a while.

“Some years ago when the concept of middleware was born the software industry was at a very different place,” he says. “The idea behind middleware was that we eliminated the duplication that existed within applications. This was mostly done from a security, database, and connectivity point of view. The industry successfully adopted this and a vendor like IBM removed itself from the application space in order to concentrate on middleware. One of the advantages of this was that IBM could have a different conversation with customers, allowing them to choose their own applications, with IBM providing a common middleware layer.”

“The game has changed with the industry moving towards a new paradigm that will introduce the concepts of Software as a Service and a Composite Business Application,” continues Joe. “The idea is that you only invest in the components or services that you need instead of

investing in a traditional application. A SOA based infrastructure is then used to compose or orchestrate your applications and processes as you require them – dynamically with minimal business interruption and with a much shorter turnaround time.”

“But in order for this to become a reality a mind-shift needs to occur between a traditional model of four segments to an idea of services, SOA and events, he explains. “Change is inevitable and there is a great demand to swiftly respond to market challenges and opportunities something that is almost impossible to do when you’re burdened with an inflexible infrastructure. A Service Oriented Architecture is the catalyst for change and can help simplify the impact that market shifts, customer demands and new opportunities bring to an organisation.

Successful adoption of a SOA infrastructure and solutions based on it will enable an organisation to stay ahead of the curve. Change doesn’t have to be daunting. It’s a chance to usher in opportunities like flexibility, business-alignment, and of course, competitive advantage.”

So while Microsoft, Amazon and the other major players are busy rolling out the bits and pieces we need to chuck services into the cloud with all you need to worry about for the moment is what things look like back home. Is your environment ready to benefit from the new application paradigm?

[opinion]

- Matter of tiMe

Traditional applications are still going to have their place amidst the composite application environment - but it’s clear that the latter is the way forward.

Some modern web applications are already taking this form and showing us how it’s done. It’s possible to put it all in the cloud – databases, services, and even the front-ends we need to interact with these via a browser, but big businesses with sensitive data will probably look to the hybrid model where their own infrastructure is extended into the cloud. Cometh the hour, cometh the architecture; composite applications are the answer to a business need for agility and flexibility. It’s about doing more with less and driving an intensified focus on business.

www.netdotwork.co.za

17

Technology In Healthcare, By Brett Haggard PAGe

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INFRASTRUCTURE By offering SMBs the same grade of connectivity many of their larger counterparts benefit from, ADSL has undoubtedly been one of the catalysts for business development in South Africa over the past five years.

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COMMUNICATIONS Technology designed for consumers is making its way into the workforce. Employees get used to doing things with particular tools at home, and want to do this at work too. And why shouldn’t they?

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STORAGE Symantec acquires MessageLabs to grow its SaaS business, and it’s a good move for both companies.

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MOBILITY With the announcement of Office 14 for the Web at its recent Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft has fired a salvo across the bows of Adobe, Google, Zoho, and other desktop-apps wannabes.

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SECURITY Sun has released its Identity Compliance Manager product as a subset of its existing Sun Role Manager product. The headline differences are that it costs half the price but lacks support for roles.

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ENTERPRISE 2.0 Will cheaper bandwidth put the squeeze on national backbone prices? Russell Southwood looks at what is likely to happen.

section keyline

QA

Q&A

WP

WhITEPAPER

cs

CASE STUdY

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UPdATE

oP

OPINION

tl

ThOUGhT LEAdER

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RESEARCh

www.netdotwork.co.za

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INFRASTRUCTURE Finding practical and effective solutions to help cut costs, reduce power consumption and deliver world-class data centre facilities.

EFFECTIvE dATA OP CoST FoR ThE mASSES By offering SMBS the SaMe grade of connectivity Many of their larger counterpartS Benefit froM, adSl haS undouBtedly Been one of the catalyStS for BuSineSS developMent in South africa over the paSt five yearS.

Those benefits aside however, the manner in which ADSL has been implemented in South Africa and more specifically the capacity limiting and high costs of data per megabyte are considered serious drawbacks.

Thankfully however these drawbacks have been a symptom of South Africa’s monopolistic telco environment.

And I use the word thankfully for a reason – the second network operator, Neotel has been building its network out for the past two years now and seems ready to deliver.

Addressing the most pressing needs in the market first, the company started out about a year ago, by providing fibre-grade access to many of South Africa’s larger corporates, who were in turn delighted to for the first time ever be granted access to high-bandwidth data connectivity.

Next in line for relief were home users and SMBs who have in the past year seen a voice and data-focused EVDO handset and premicell-like voice product being launched under the banners of NeoConnect and NeoFlex respectively.

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December/January 2009_

And now Neotel is targeting SMBs data needs.

Neotel has begun priming a data solution that will feature a near uncapped, fixed wireless Internet connectivity at speeds of 3.1Mbps downstream and 1.8Mbps upstream, aptly named NeoFlex Data.

Gregory Kee, Head of Product Strategy at Neotel says that although the company will be setting a capacity limit to the solution, it’s unlikely that users will reach that limit through fair use.

The company hasn’t disclosed yet the figure for its cap, but Kee says it will be above the 10GB mark and users will be able to buy additional capacity once that limit has been reached, at 8c per MB. That’s a massive contrast the anywhere between the R2 and R1 per MB casual data rate users are currently subjected to by the cellular networks and other wireless providers.

Neotel hasn’t been public about what it is likely to charge for the new solution, but speculation in the market indicates that it will try to position the product at under R1000 per month.

“Although the compAny will be setting A cApAcity limit to the solution, it’s unlikely thAt users will reAch thAt limit through fAir use ... it will likely be Above the 10gb mArk And users will be Able to buy AdditionAl cApAcity once thAt limit hAs been reAched, At 8c per mb.”

While the device is capable of bandwidth that rivals Telkom’s current tope-end DSL offering, Kee says users must be reasonable in terms of their expectations of performance.

Even though the solution is based on CDMA Revision A and as such delivers 3.1Mbps/1.8Mbps performance, he confirms that users can expect performance levels of 450-900Kbps downstream and 300700kbps upstream.

The new technology does however bring the network latency right down.

Where Neotel Prime – the telco’s standalone, consumer focused converged

voice and data solution delivers a latency of between 200 and 400ms to sites in the west coast of the US, Kee says that the new SMB data solution will improve that by between four and five times.

In testing, Net.Work found the device capable of ping times of between 200 and 300ms to www.google.co.za.

Kee says that this product is designed to allow Neteol to do the same thing with its SMB data solution as it has with its SMB voice solution.

The company’s voice solutions offer true per second billing and cheaper calling rates

to Telkom lines than Telkom does itself. The data product is destined to be as aggressive in its approach to the market.

The really exciting news is that a converged product on the NeoFLex range is just around the corner. During the course of next Kee says the telco plans to bring NeoFlex Voice and NeoFlex Data together in an ‘office in a box’ solution that provides SMBs with everything they need from a communications perspective.

He however wasn’t able to shed any light on timeframes, cost and performance levels.

Neotel’s approach the market is smart, since its solutions are heavily tailored towards the catalysts for economic growth in the country, namely the SMEs. What’s really encouraging however is the fact that its solutions set the stage for a very rosy telco environment over the coming 12 to 24 months. The legislation looks set to allow players such as Altech, Internet Solutions and M-Web to provision their own infrastructure.

We’re on the verge of a healthy price and service war and the way I see it, there’s one sure fire winner – the consumer.

[opiNIoN] Competition is a great catalyst for value - and we’re seeing the first evidence of this in these aggressive new offerings from Neotel. With legislation due to open the market up substantially over the coming months, we’re bound to see more players following suit.

www.netdotwork.co.za

21

communications Learning about best practices for traditional communications services, how to evaluate and select outsourcing alternatives, and leading the transition to VoIP.

tl Building it in

Technology designed for consumers is making iTs way inTo The workforce. employees geT used To doing Things wiTh parTicular Tools aT home, and wanT To do This aT work Too. and why shouldn’T They?

By Simon Dingle

Instant messaging, social networking, micro-blogging, voice over IP and other new Web phenomenon are common place on consumer desktops. We all use them at home, but for most of us the likes of Facebook are blocked at work. So how do businesses accommodate a workforce that wants to choose it’s own computing tools and services – and when an organisation does deploy its own tools, how can employees be encouraged to use them? A new generation is entering the workforce with a very different take on collaboration.

Instead of bucking this trend, business can achieve a lot by nurturing it.

The other network Blocking Facebook on a corporate LAN is something an organisation should be embarrassed of doing. For generation Y, the Facebook Inbox has replaced email to a large extent, and the platform is used by savvy folk not only as a way to stay in touch with friends, but also to build out business networks. Facebook has advanced filtering and grouping features that allow the two to be kept separate too – so you can have the boss on Facebook without them finding out the real reason why you missed that early meeting last Thursday.

Twitter is also being realised as a powerful tool for business. It’s a great way to get instant feedback on particular issues and try out new ideas. Or publically address issues that face a company or brand. Block it?

Why? It’s been said before – if someone is going

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December/January 2009_

to waste time at the office they will do that anyway. Block Facebook and they’ll play cricket in the hall. But by blocking social networks you are limiting the potential they hold for your business when in the hands of the more motivated and productive employee.

In a report entitled ‘Facebook and the Emerging Social Platform Wars’ Gartner identifies key recommendations for businesses when it comes to new Web phenomenon.

“Enterprises should distinguish between the varieties of social networking sites.

By assuming that all sites are equivalent, enterprises will overlook potential sources of value and competitive advantage, business agility and organizational cohesiveness,” it says.

But key to realising value lies not in technology. As always, people and process must follow.

“Enterprises should supplement the immature security mechanisms and policies in social networking sites with morerobust approaches,” suggests the report, adding, “Users of social networking sites should understand the context in which their multifaceted real-world persona is represented by what is often a single-faceted data model.”

Gartner identifies dynamics in social networking that offer a potential treasure trove for businesses that get it, saying: “There is wide-open contention for going beyond content objects and providing users with access to the entire world of social objects: that is, people and relationships. Facebook and other social-networking sites — selfdescribed “social utility” applications — broker the access to the so-called “social graph.” Social graph is a term used in industry conversation —not in the usual business sense of chart or diagram, but in the computer-science sense of a data structure composed of nodes and arcs. In the case of social-networking sites, the social graph is the set of data and metadata about people (that is, nodes) and their relationships (arcs), that users navigate via the application and programs traverse via application program interfaces (APIs).”

Later on: “It is only a matter of time before the platform crosses the boundary from social-networking application to the domain of what BEA Systems recently termed “enterprise social computing… consumeroriented social networking applications are evolving toward broader-scope platforms that can enable a range of social solutions not addressed by existing enterprise information systems. These solutions, which don’t yet exist, can potentially deliver significant business value.”

IBM would argue that its Lotus Connexions platform fits that bill.

The social economy Microsoft will soon be launching a social networking system on its Windows Live platform. An odd move for the company that spent billions buying into Facebook.

That aside, Colin Erasmus, the head of the Windows Client business at Microsoft SA, believes the rise of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace is driving a new wave of collaboration within company ecosystems that will ultimately have positive business effects.

“People will always find ways of socialising and sharing during work hours in any case,” says Erasmus. “If your employees are going to do it anyway, why not encourage them to channel their socialmedia impulses in smart, safe ways that can potentially help your business?”

“This could include collaborating with colleagues and clients, and setting up an employees-only group on Facebook as a kind of alternative corporate intranet. This group could then exchange documents, update corporate information, and share marketing videos,” he adds.

Erasmus also believes that unified communications, and particularly instant messaging, offer benefits that many businesses are missing out on.

“A lot of professionals use instant messaging to update their blogs or social profiles, and use it in the office to take care of personal matters,” points out Erasmus. “Many companies have in-house IM services, like Office Communicator, and there is a steady increase in the number of people who send

more instant messages than emails to their co-workers and colleagues. Recent research

by Microsoft also suggests that at least half of at-work IM users say that instant messaging makes them more productive at work.”

Questions of security and balance are relevant, however, and the business must ensure that it isn’t opening itself up to data loss or malicious activity by allowing IM or social networking. Also, while some employees may like Facebook, others may prefer to use Orkut, Linked In, MySpace or other similar services. Cohesion could be tricky.

Al Nugent, executive vice president and chief technology officer of CA says that the whole game is changing as a new demographic enters the workplace.

“There’s the social and cultural dimensions of this, and then there’s the implication of employees having their own devices and tools and not wanting to use what is provided to them at work,” he says.

“Studies show that this is only going to get worse. Many of this, generally younger, demographic are really comfortable not seeing the people they work with. ” “The problem is in trying to control the environment enough to ensure consistency.

And this can be done by allowing the use of a technology, but standardising on particular tools,” he continues. “For example, we recently standardised on Office Communicator 2007 at CA.” But Nugent agrees that it is key to allow for the new-generation to bring its social behaviours into the workplace and have these mimicked as business behaviours.

A new workforce and new ideas can either be embraced or repelled, but general sentiment is that the latter will end in tears.

[opinion] At whAt price?

How a workforce is able to use collaboration tools and social utility applications is also dependant on the nature of the business. Some sales environments rely on cohesive CRM tools, for example. It’s all good and well to allow agents to use their own tools – but this is done at the expense of business intelligence and corporate memory.

Embracing the new is cool, but only if it’s really possible.

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OP tEchnology in hEalthcarE

A shining example of what is possible

While ehealth is a pretty common topic in the it space today, feW real examples of the massive performance and efficiency gains technology can deliver to medical disciplines exist locally. that’s until noW hoWever. ethekWini has a neW hospital that epitomises everything a connected, technologically advanced facility should. net.Work Went to durban for a closer look

By Brett Haggard

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The idea for Ethekwini Hospital and Heart Centre (EHHC) started with Dr Diliza Mji, a Specialist Surgeon who had a dream of creating a healthcare facility that would use technology to provide a service that was at the pinnacle of affordability and efficiency.

He approached Keith Bonsal, 25-year veteran of healthcare management and introduced the idea to him. A couple of years later, that dream is a reality But as Bonsal, current CEO of EHHC admits, affordability and technology seem mutually exclusive concepts when it comes to healthcare – especially if one considers

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the capital costs generally involved.

“As it is, the cost of entry for a private healthcare group is high,” he says.

“So the question was, how could we as an independent operator with a completely greenfields environment, find the funding to build hospital that had credibility, used the best technology and had a cost level far lower than any of our peers.

“It was a landmark move in terms of challenging the status quo,” he says, “and we succeeded.”

After a tough time finding interested investors, the funding for the hospital

eventually came from South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), who invested R350m in the 250-bed facility.

Other challenges With the investment part of the equation dealt with, EEHC had to move onto other challenges.

Primarily Bonsal says the company had to get around the issue of the local skills shortage, a particularly taxing task since 85% of the market is dominated by three private healthcare players and as such, those players own the job market.

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But, Bonsal says the EHHC managed to secure the staff it needed by being future-looking and promising healthcare professionals the ability to spend more time caring for patients and less time on administration.

More specifically, he says, nurses should nurse – but today, they spend most of their time dealing with administration and paperwork.

“By taking the administration headache away, our nurses have the ability to spend more time at the bedside. And because they’ve had to become familiar with technology and new processes, they have improved their skill level – something that has only added to their value in the market,” he says.

“We also realized that in giving doctors access to the information they needed immediately, they could make more timeous decisions about patients’ treatment and

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here’s the clincher, cut down on the number of days they spent hospitalized.”

clinical front to make sure data is accurate and clean,” he explains.

Vital differentiators Instead of discounting their rates, Bonsal’s clinic is able to pass savings on to its patients by reducing the time taken for treatment and their stay in hospital.

So, besides technology allowing the clinic to reduce the patient’s stay by offering better care; the mere fact that it offers better care gives it a strong competitive advantage.

“The vast majority of the mistakes made in hospitals today stem either from the wrong information being written down on a chart or information being misinterpreted based on it being noted inaccurately.

“Limiting the interaction people have with the data contained in the care process means less inaccuracies,” he says.

“The future of healthcare is also the use of technology both at the back-end and on the

Integrated Systems So what IT systems reside behind all of this efficiency?

Bonsal explains that a highly-customized version of SAP sits at the core of its IT system and handles the majority of the clinic’s back-office functions like financials, cost accounting, procurement, HR, payroll, patient administration and billing.

The partner that EHHC chose for this implementation, namely T-Systems also brought its own solution to the table, which it developed with Siemens Medical GSD. Called Industry Solution HealthMedical system (i.s.h.med), T-Systems’ software package caters for the more specialized medical processes within the EHHC’s workflow.

These include clinical logistics processes

“The vas vasT majoriTy majori y of The misTakes Takes T akes made in hospi hospiTals Tals Tals Today oday s sTem eiTher her from The he wrong informaTion informa ion being wri wriTTen down on a char charT T or informaTion informa ion being misinTerpreTed erpre ed i based on iT no ed being noTed inaccuraTely.” inaccura

like resource scheduling and clinical orders; a surgery component which streamlines the planning process for elective surgery including assigning surgical staff; and both a radiology and retail pharmacy solution, which helps routing radiology requests and results as well as improving the process of ordering and replenishing medication in real-time.

And since i.s.h.med is already the technology solution of choice for almost 300 hospitals worldwide, it had the track record EHHC needed.

All of these systems would be largely inconsequential if they weren’t accessible to the staff they were designed to be used by.

To improve the usability of the system, EHHC’s IT team and T-Systems built mobile computers called COWs (Computer on Wheels), which can be wheeled around wards, operating theatres and other areas of care so that the systems can be interacted with, easily.

Because nurses and doctors are working with the back-end systems directly, everything is real-time.

The chosen software solutions also give the EHHC granular resource management and billing capabilities, the since swipecard access systems back-end directly into i.s.h.med.

“The technology has truly changed the way our staff work. We are very satisfied with the results,” Bonsal says.

Looking forward Most of us outside of the healthcare market do not have a good grasp of just how much more efficient technology can make medicine.

Bonsal says that the EHHC cost R1.4m/ bed to build and kit out – in the region of R350m for a 250-bed facility.

By contrast, the Medi-Clinic group estimates that one of its facilities without the technological advancements Ekhuruleni includes, costs between R1.5m and R2m to build and kit out.

And Old Mutual concurs with the latter of these figures, saying it is the more realistic estimate.

So not only is it more efficient at rendering healthcare, but it worked out more cost effective.

But Bonsal and his team are not done just yet.

The IDC is already primed to invest in Bonsal’s next project – after all, their investment in EHHC has created 500 jobs and substantially improved the quality of healthcare in the Durban area.

Over the next four years, Bonsal says his company will undoubtedly be expanding, building new facilities and branching out into new geographies.

“We aim to build another 10 or so facilities in the next four years, bringing our total patient capacity to 2000 beds.

“We can’t stop now that we have such a successful formula,” he says.

“And it’s really something that would’nt be possible without us using technology the way we have,” he concludes.

storage Learning how key storage and storage network technologies work together to drive your business. Clarifying how to use storage protocols and technologies.

UD symantec expands saas Base Symantec recently agreed to pay approximately $695m for meSSagelabS, an eStabliShed and SucceSSful uK-baSed provider of online email Spam filtering and anti-viruS ServiceS. the move repreSentS Symantec buying in help to grow itS SaaS buSineSS, and iS good for both companieS.

By Timothy Stammers, Ovum analyst Symantec is buying a platform from which to expand its SaaS presence. The platform is the business that MessageLabs has created over the last nine years, selling online services based on Symantec’s Brightmail anti-spam and anti-virus software.

MessageLabs now has 19,000 customers, operates from 14 data centres on three continents, and is the world’s largest supplier of hosted messaging security services.

Other than its anti-virus services, Symantec launched into SaaS only last year and operates from just two data centres in the US. When the acquisition closes, MessageLabs will become the keystone of a Symantec SaaS group that will be led

by MessageLabs CEO Adrian Chamberlain, and will absorb most of MessageLabs’ 550 employees and all of its data centres. Chamberlain will report directly to Symantec COO Enrique Salem.

Growing quickly MessageLabs is still growing relatively quickly. For its fiscal year ended last July it said

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revenue was $145m, up 20% year-on-year. That means that Symantec paid a fairly low price-to-revenue ratio of five to one. Given MessageLabs’ strong position in a fast-growing market, and its claims to be profitable, Symantec did well to negotiate that price.

The software giant cited estimates that MessageLabs accounts for 30% of this year’s $700m market for hosted messaging security services.

Those numbers are not consistent with MessageLabs’ declared revenues, but they put the company comfortably ahead of the next largest player, which is Google with an estimated 19% market share courtesy of its purchase of Postini.

MessageLabs’ success is the result of an early market presence and high-quality services which according to Symantec have resulted in less than 5% customer churn.

MessageLabs’ customers range from small businesses to the Fortune 500, many of which are potential buyers of Symantec’s existing online services.

Excepting its online anti-

virus protection, Symantec only stepped into SaaS last year when it launched online storage for users of its Backup Exec software. Since then it has added a remote-access service and a consumer-oriented backup service that it gained this summer when it splashed out $123m to buy SwapDrive.

Cross-selling opportunity The biggest cross-selling opportunity will be for that Backup Exec based service.

The overlap between users of that service and MessageLabs’ customers is slightly limited by the fact that the former tend to be small to medium-sized businesses, and the latter include more large businesses. Currently online storage of backups is mostly being bought by SMBs that cannot afford a second data center but want a way get their backups offsite to protect themselves against disaster.

Nevertheless there is an overlap, and Symantec says it hopes to begin winning more large customers for its online backup service, especially among corporations looking to protect data at remote or branch offices.

Unlike many other suppliers, Symantec did not buy itself into SaaS, at least not in the business market. For online backup, Iron

Mountain bought Connected and LiveVault, EMC acquired Mozy-owner Berkeley Systems, and IBM bought Arsenal Digital.

Symantec, however, chose to build its business online backup service in-house. It is not saying how many customers it has for that service, but claims that demand is growing fast. The purchase of MessageLabs looks to be the result of a decision to follow others’ examples by giving its SaaS business an inorganic boost.

The biggest threat to Symantec’s investment in MessageLabs is about people and culture. Having brought in MessageLabs to show how best to handle SaaS, Symantec needs to make sure that it listens to Chamberlain and the other staff it is gaining.

[opinion] Symantec itself identifies this as the biggest risk. It said it is sure that the two companies’ cultures will blend well, and pointed to its successful acquisition of another British company, KVS, which originally developed Symantec’s now very popular email archiving software.

With that acknowledgement and background, the acquisition is very positive for both Symantec and MessageLabs.

moBility Wireless, driving both technology and strategy, is the future of IT and should be at the strategic heart of your organisation’s IT plans.

years, it is still ostensibly a standalone, rather than a collaborative, application.

The delivery and commercial models for these new web-based office applications are as expected: an ad-supported version for the consumer (via Office Live), and a hosted, cloud-based, subscription service for businesses. Enterprises will also be offered an on-premises option, using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as the deployment platform.

UD microsoft to move office to the cloud with the announcement of office 14 for the web at itS recent profeSSional developer conference in loS angeleS, microSoft haS fired a Salvo acroSS the bowS of adobe, google, Zoho, and other deSKtop-appS wannabeS, aS it planS to offer uSerS familiar toolS that will allow them to create, edit, and collaborate online.

By Richard Edwards,

Butler Group analyst

Office web applications are lightweight, crossplatform, cross-browser, web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and are intended to share the same general look and feel of their traditional desktop counterparts.

Although there are several web-based offerings on the market today from a variety of sources, Microsoft will be hoping that the familiarity, deployment options, and synergies with other Microsoft technologies will add to the general appeal of this particular “software plus services” strategy.

Social applications A surprise member of Microsoft’s initial Office for the web family is OneNote, a note-taking and information-management program. OneNote is designed to capture ideas, thoughts, and information on a digital free-form surface. With powerful and flexible information-sharing capabilities including a peer-to-peer option, OneNote is good example of a social and collaborative application, and so the transition to the web should work well.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s hitherto “non-social” applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) take on the new collaborative capabilities slated for this release, as although Microsoft Word has been with us for well over 20

Mobile applications Microsoft has also announced mobile versions of these applications. This would allow users to access their documents “on-the-hoof” as it were via their mobile phones, thereby covering all three bases: desktop, browser, and mobile.

Microsoft has yet to state whether the applications will be accessible through gaming consoles, an as yet untapped sector of the market.

By exploiting both Silverlight (Microsoft’s new web and mobile runtime environment for rich internet applications) and Ajax technologies, Microsoft says its Office Web applications will be able to run on a variety of platforms and browsers.

From an end-user point of view, one might expect an online version of Word, PowerPoint, or Excel to be very appealing, but as relatively few organizations have made the leap to Office 2007, the unfamiliar look and feel of Office 14 for the Web might work against Microsoft in the early days.

Of course there is an argument to suggest that these web-based offerings might kick-start a general migration toward Office 14 from earlier versions, but this will be dependent upon Microsoft producing a palatable set of applications that look and feel more like the versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that most of us are used to.

Microsoft was always going to bring its Office applications to the web, but the issue of “when” was always going to be commercial rather than technical. If we assume that Office accounts for around 20% of revenues (which were in excess of $50bn in 2007), then 2010 could be a very interesting year financially for Microsoft, as it seeks to drive $10bn worth of revenue from its Officerelated software and services.

[opinion] With online advertising revenues faltering, and “cloud economics” generally pointing toward lower profit margins, Microsoft’s days of “printing money” might well be coming to an end.

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SECURITY The best of BPM, CRM, ERP, e-commerce, business intelligence, project management, application management, and portal software.

OP SlImmEd-down IdEnTITY managEmEnT Sun haS releaSed itS identity ComplianCe manager produCt aS a SubSet of itS exiSting Sun role manager produCt. the headline differenCeS are that it CoStS half the priCe but laCkS Support for roleS. Graham Titterington, Ovum analyst This kind of initiative is to be expected in other areas of IT in the current economic climate. However, it also needs to be assessed in relation to the long-standing barriers to deployment of identity management products.

Sun cites regulatory requirements for access rights to be certified, and the threat of insiders stealing or corrupting corporate data, as the drivers for the new product. However, neither of these factors is new or has significantly changed over the last two years.

The timing of this announcement is driven by the economic climate.

Sun is offering a half-price product in an attempt to duck under corporate investment ceilings and also to win market share from its competitors. The reality with IT projects is that deployment costs including consultants, changed working practices, and IT support are usually higher than the software license costs.

High ratio of implementation to license costs Identity management projects have a high ratio of implementation to license costs.

Identifying roles and defining detailed access permissions for each role is a major part of the implementation task, and so eliminating this aspect of the product is also a cost saver in the short term. Cutting out this area of functionality reduces both license costs and deployment costs, but at the price of reducing the benefits of the overall project.

Sun estimates that customers will start to see a return on investment within 90 days of starting an Identity Compliance Manager project, with most of the gain coming from automation of aspects of the compliance process. This will not be good enough to place the project in the “must do” category of investment proposals at the current time, but it will place it in the “credible project” group.

Introducing an entry-level product that addresses the single most pressing business need in the identity management area is a shrewd move. However, it is likely to generate

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more downward price pressure on vendors across the sector. Vendors need to remain focused on ease of deployment as their number-one priority.

Automated and rapid provisioning Identity management systems can deliver massive benefits to organizations including improving efficiency through automated and rapid provisioning, reducing risk through instant de-provisioning of leavers, automating compliance assurance and reporting, and identifying and remedying anomalies in application and data usage, and providing a view of what really happens across an organization.

Some regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley come close to mandating the use of identity

“IdentIty management systems can delIver massIve benefIts to organIzatIons IncludIng ImprovIng effIcIency through automated and rapId provIsIonIng, reducIng rIsk through Instant deprovIsIonIng of leavers, automatIng complIance assurance and reportIng, and IdentIfyIng and remedyIng anomalIes In applIcatIon and data usage.” management. However, the commercial history of the sector shows that vendors have been finding it hard to generate the volume of sales required, as shown by HP’s decision to leave the market earlier in the year. The barriers have been the high cost of deployment and the fear of embarking on an open-ended IT project where costs are hard to anticipate at the outset.

Compliance has been the most important single driver of the market. Sun is therefore presenting a cheaper product with a more limited scope to try to allay these fears.

Identity Compliance Manager is totally compatible with the Sun identity

management suite of products and Sun is hoping that it will become the entry level step towards Sun Role Manager. The main benefit of the latter’s additional rolemanagement capability is in the automated provisioning task, as well as some benefits in presenting the detailed access policy more clearly.

[opinIon] It remains to be seen how quickly Identity Compliance Manager users will upgrade to include roles. Most users are likely to stay with the Identity Compliance Manager product for several years.

looking back at 2008, it suffices to say that this has been one of the most challenging years for businesses and consumers alike. the world is still reeling from the effects of the global credit crunch and the outlook for 2009 remains filled with uncertainty. now more than ever, technology professionals need to get the most out of their technology environments and investments. the true value of it, however, lies in its ability to improve business performance. it managers have come to realise that the effective and efficient management of technology is no longer enough – they have to be in synch with the short and long-term goals of the business.

Ruthless evaluation most large organisations typically have about 150+ it projects underway at any given point. most of these projects resulted from some form of a business need, however, the exact business needs are often not easily articulated or the links to how the investment supports the company’s objectives are not clear. in contrast, leading organisations today are building portfolios of it projects that are clearly aligned to what the business is trying to achieve. the alignment to business drivers takes place prior to the start of any project – not after the fact – and forms a logical part of the it project evaluation process. in addition, there needs to be a clear understanding of the alignment to the business driver; coupled with what resources are required, and how much cost has been or will be incurred – something that is critical to Cios tasked with reducing cost and reprioritising spend. a growing trend that we see emerging is the move towards more ruthless evaluation of it projects. if a project is not aligned to business drivers and it will not help the company to achieve its strategic objectives, then forward-looking companies will simply not embark on the project. it has become as clear cut as that.

STaYIng TL on CoURSE: the guide to identifying, managing and reducing complexity In his final column Gary Lawrence, country manager of CA, looks at what organisations can do to manage their IT environments more effectively and ensure closer alignment to the business

You cannot manage what you cannot measure there are three components to consider when looking to better manage your it environment whilst at the same time ensuring that it helps achieve business objectives: 1. have a crystal clear view of the organisation’s roadmap and strategic imperatives – both for the short and the long term. this might seem obvious to some and perhaps even patronising to others, but i am amazed at how often this element is not understood.

2. assess and document what it services are needed to deliver what the organisation is trying to achieve. if the value of a service cannot be easily justified, or the way in which it supports the future direction of the business is not clear, you need to question the relevance of and ongoing investment in such a service. it is also important to align the cost of an it service with the value this service delivers to the business.

3. gain an understanding of what the it service looks like in terms of people, processes and technology. for example, when looking at your organisation’s email service, do you have visibility of all the components, how they all fit together and ultimately deliver value to the business.

[opinIon] Only once you have this sort of visibility, will you be in a position to detect duplication, identify additional areas for automation and cost reduction as well as areas where user experiences can be improved.

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By Russell Southwood

tL Bandwidth: CheapeR in 2009 Will it put the squeeze on national backbone prices?

Africa’s operators say they cost their national backbone prices based on distance. The basis is that the further you want your traffic carried, the more it costs. However, this logic will soon be challenged by new, cheaper international bandwidth costs. If it costs more to send traffic from Johannesburg to Cape Town or from Lagos to Abuja than it does from any of these places to Europe, then national arbitrage will have well and truly arrived. Russell Southwood looks at what is likely to happen.

Currently SAT3 prices vary from US$1,300-8,200 per mbps per month. Volume prices in South Africa fit into the bottom end of this range. Prices have recently come down in Angola to the lower end of this range, leaving Cameroon and Gabon as the high price pirates on the route.

SEACOM and TEAMS are both saying that their cables will start operating in Kenya by Q2, 2009 and are offering prices that will probably translate into US$500-1,000 if operators pass along the savings made. On the west coast, Main One looks like being the first competitor cable to land in Q2, 2010 and will offer prices that will probably translate into prices for customers in the same range as on the east coast.

Customers aren’t fools And this where the problem begins for operators. About half of Africa’s operators are offering the same bandwidth (usually up to 500 kms) for US$2,000 or more. Only a very few are below US$1,000 and some are as high as US$4,000. These prices do not take into account a series of add-ons like access charges that actually take the global prices higher. The intelligent customers might at this

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cheaper in CAPEX terms and 30% in OPEX terms. As vendors, they would say that, wouldn’t they? But these figures seem to accord with those of operators we’ve spoken to who have made all or part of this transition. Companies with all IP networks (like South Africa’s Neotel) or who have made a real beginning with this transition possess a potent advantage over those who will have to replace their core network over the next five years.

• Most incumbents are very over-staffed and the political pressure to avoid redundancies has been too great for them to avoid this core issue. Not only do they have too many staff but they have too few with the IP skills required in the future. None have any strategy for addressing this “elephant in the room”. For many IP and analogue reside in separate departments and the former is small and not influential in corporate strategy.

“Bankrupt companies don’t employ people for long.”

point be asking themselves: why are operators able to go half way round the globe for the same price they’re charging me for going from the capital city to another city?

One telco in the southern African region with a monopoly gateway gets 65% of its revenues from international traffic. The impact of lower rates will rob even competitive incumbents of significant parts of their revenue. No wonder the Zambian Communications Minister (see Telecoms News below) is trying to retain Zamtel’s monopoly gateway status because the company is already loss-making with that financial advantage. But the bad news cannot be held at bay.

Forward looking For the operators, pressure from customers on national backbone will become irresistible because on the basis of distance charging things will not make sense. So what can the forward-looking incumbent do?

• They need to invest in IP networks where according to Huawei and Nokia Siemens Network speakers at last week’s CRASA event (Migration Towards All-IP) IP core networks are 30-50%

One possible solution? Outsource the core network functions in the way that a small number of mobile carriers (for example Kasapa in Ghana) already have. You can insert focused management and higher levels of skills and control your cost levels. But for Government-owned incumbents this will require decisiveness and a clear understanding that your asset will slip through your hands if you don’t. Bankrupt companies don’t employ people for long.

Cost savings For customers the prospects are more cheery. Infrastructure competition will in the medium term begin to deliver real savings if they are savvy and more demanding. There are vtwo reasons: • Vertically integrated mobile operators want to get into the business of providing core network. All of those we have spoken to – both those planning and those already doing it – agree that there are savings to be made in the 30-50% range. Countries as diverse as South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana already have several core network (or infrastructure) providers. Some claim even higher savings as much depends on how protected the monopoly provider is. The challenge for customers is to point out the national arbitrage and demand better value.

• The second factor that favours customers is the arrival of alternative infrastructure providers. Power utilities already posses fibre over transmission pylons and adding more is considerably cheaper than trenching the same capacity. Over half a dozen power utilities have been either licensed directly to sell the capacity or given permission to tender to licence-holders. One of the more recent ones was Escom in Malawi which will in the not too distant future have fibre links to Mozambique. Where this has not happened, incumbents are trying to argue that this alternative capacity should be in their hands but they are probably fighting a losing battle.

[OpiniOn] In order to speed up competition in the core network at the national level, operators’s customers will have to ask two questions: what is your new international fibre costing you and how much of that saving are you passing on to me? And why is it cheaper to get my traffic to Europe than it is to transfer it around the country I live in? Best to start asking now as the excuses are bound to convoluted and lengthy.

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By russell southwood - The Balancing act

TL No free pass

Global financial crisis will impact Africa’s telecoms sector It’s early days but the conventional wisdom so far has been that Africa will avoid the worst of the backwash from the global financial crisis. Its banks are less over-committed as lenders and its relatively small number of consumers still struggle to find credit. However, as everything is connected globally, Africa is bound to take a hit like every other continent and that hit will impact directly on Africa’s telecoms sector. Russell Southwood tries to read the tea leaves.

over the last five years about half of the countries on the continent have experienced above average economic growth. This growth amongst the “fast track” economies has fed through directly into wealth levels among the people affected. For example, the middle class in Kenya grew by 3% over the last three years: this is a small percentage of a big number so it affects several million people. The slower moving economies have often been those emerging from civil war so any growth has been a bonus compared to past years.

A significant part of the economic growth of the “fast track” African countries has come from the giant emerging economies of China and India buying food and mineral resources. However, if people in developed economies buy less of the consumer goods that have fuelled the growth of China’s economy then it in turn will need less mineral resources from places like Africa. Less demand for mineral resources will mean lower prices for things like oil and copper. The only upside of the latter is that there may be less organised cable vandalism. But if China sneezes, Africa catches a cold.

What is the outlook?

So how does this general economic analysis feed through into Africa’s telecoms sector and what’s it likely to mean for your business?: If you’re trying to raise funds to invest in Africa, life has got significantly harder. Some of those who were in the process of doing this were talking deals with financial institutions that have now been rescued by the US Government. Sovereign wealth funds (largely from oil-based economies) may be more immune to the liquidity crisis but the fall in the price of oil will cut the scale of these funds over time.

Africa’s local stock exchanges may still be good for some fundraising but the scale of funds available is modest alongside the size of past deals. The interesting one to watch is Nigeria where the banks still appear to be anxious to lend and open for business. Also, barring a major financial crisis, the Chinese Government (which

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“However, if people in developed economies buy less of tHe consumer goods tHat Have fuelled tHe growtH of cHina’s economy tHen it in turn will need less mineral resources from places like africa.”

has a considerable amount of US dollars) will continue to support its export drive by offering soft loans to Africa’s impoverished state-owned telco incumbents. Perhaps some mobile operators will join them in this queue?

Africa’s mobile opportunities have been seen as a licence to print money and even with proliferating competition, newcomers have been keen to enter the market, paying top dollar. However, it’s noticeable that some of the more opportunistic investors without a background in telecoms have decided to take money and run: for example, Hits Telecom has sold out to France Telecom (see news item below). Nevertheless, they probably passed coming in the other direction Orascom’s new Africa unit, Telecel Globe. The global tides of financial panic wash people in and out: remember Vivendi who quit Africa during the telecoms finance crisis but returned as things got better.

The logic of the current global crisis dictates that less available money will mean lower prices and less contenders. But the number of opportunities for new mobile licences or market entry points through acquisition are limited. Therefore Africa will do what it’s always done best up till now and “sell shortage” at a premium.

For there are not many places in the world where you can get an above average return on your money within eighteen months to two years and there’s still another 5-10% of the addressable market untouched. And investing in mobile telephony is probably a better bet than giving people 120% mortgages on their houses in the current climate.

The glimmer of hope against this backdrop is that the African consumer (the person with a monthly salary and some disposable income) is largely not in debt to anything like the same level as his or her European or American counterpart. They will not splash out wildly in the current context but they will continue to spend. The poor who have not yet become consumers will continue to scrape by as ever. However, the level of remittances from relatives abroad may drop as they become affected by the downturn in developed economies.

Last month South Africa’s Finance Minister Trevor Manuel was telling people not to panic which is usually a prelude to people heading for the lifeboats. However, the worst that appears to be in store is a strong dose of wage inflation. Telkom’s failure to address its overstaffing may seem like a victory for its employees but if wages continue to rise above inflation, it will begin to squeeze the companies already pressured profits. Whatever the political pressures, hard times will demand drastic solutions.

Economic slowdown means that Government will have lower tax revenues and private companies less income. Both will impact on the replacement and purchase cycle for ICT equipment. SAP commented in its Q3 results that results from BRICs (the key grouping of developing countries) were mixed. And whilst Cisco reported a resurgence in emerging markets orders, bookings in Africa were very weak.

Money spent on rescuing deserving causes like banks may also turn into money not spent on foreign aid. Since the latter supports a great deal of the ICT purchases by African Governments, this will also create a tightening in the market, particularly for the larger IT multinationals with a presence on the continent. All have put feet on the ground in the promise of business tomorrow and the more timid or financially windswept may pull back.

Less investment means less money going into African economies means less growth. Again the specifics are that if a mobile operator invests US$200-400 million in a country operation, a large part of that goes into things like employing people, buying local services and advertising. In advertising terms, the mobile operators have been among the top 5 spenders in any country where tracking exists.

On a counter-cyclical basis, there are two key factors: the big change in the cost of international fibre capacity with the arrival of new cables and for South Africa, the World Cup in 2010. The first (in Q2,2009) will be a welcome boost as bandwidth prices will fall from US$5-6,000 a meg on the east coast to nearer to US$500-1,000 a meg. This will not be good news for those selling high-priced bandwidth as a way of making a living but will benefit those selling services and applications on top of the network. On the west coast, this fall will happen in Q2, 2010 and will be slightly less dramatic.

The World Cup in 2010 will be a welcome boost to growth for South Africa and is allowing it to put in place key infrastructure. The only question is: will it be finished on time?

With potential buyers of mobile services possibly having less money to spend, the competition for the market share they already have will intensify. There will be a lot of soothing talk about the importance of service and new features before price wars set in.

The smaller, one-country or small number of country operations will feel this heat hardest and will come up for acquisition or may even go out of business if the heat gets too intense.

The hardest part to read is the sheer irrationality of financial markets: the kind of cold sweat fear that’s been gripping the markets in the North does not always relate to fundamentals but it may convey itself South. Asia is already anticipating the worst. But this will probably only happen if the global crisis keeps extending and there is a feeling that Government money simply won’t contain the difficulties. Everything hangs on that difficult word confidence.

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GarTner’s Top 10 TL 2009: sTraTeGic TechnoLoGies

Gartner analysts recently highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations, going in to 2009.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.

Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

“Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organization,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market.”

The Top 10 sTraTegiC TeChnologies for 2009 inClude: 1 Virtualization. Much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualization, but virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly. Virtualization to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication) can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information. Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

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2 Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. They key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities “as a service,” 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers.

Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.

3 Servers — Beyond Blades.

Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today.

This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs. The organization tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is in short supply. This eliminates the need to pay for all three resource types to upgrade capacity.

It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations.

The result will be higher utilization because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.

4 Web-Oriented Architectures.

The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Webcentric technologies and standards that promote these principles.

The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs.

However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Webcentric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

5 Enterprise Mashups. Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

6 Social Software and Social Networking. Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking, social collaboration, social media and social validation.

Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a

conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.

7 Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

8 Unified Communications. During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent.

This change is driven by increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry.

Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

9 Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance, dramatically improving its ability to accomplish its mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. BI is particularly strategic because it is directed toward business managers and knowledge workers who make up the pool of thinkers and decision makers that are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.

Green IT. Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint, or to fit into a previously filled center. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centres, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny.

Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

“A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. Companies should evaluate these technologies and adjust based on their industry need, unique business needs, technology adoption model and other factors.”

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product update Product updates on desktops, laptops, accessories, gadgets, software and more. A byte of fresh technology.

intrepid cOmmunicatOr BlackBerry’s new Bold smartphone is up against some stiff competition, But we’ve decided it might just have what it takes to rise aBove the fray.

When RIM initially launched its BlackBerry devices they were one of kind, primarily bringing email to a highly mobile platform and later combining this with other data services and telephony. But now the market is awash with smartphones that do all of the above, from the popular Nokia E71 to the sexy iPhone and Google’s disruptive entrance to the market. BlackBerry’s sales are not a given anymore, but it still has elements that make it one of a kind. And now the Bold is here – RIM’s most feature-packed offering to date.

One of the big differentiators for the BlackBerry platform is its data offering; pay one, low fee for your BlackBerry service and it includes unlimited data to the device, along with the email service that put RIM on the map. And while it is possible to get the iPhone with unlimited data plans abroad, in South Africa the BlackBerry data bundle makes it one of a kind. I took to this immediately, abusing the bandwidth for all it was worth, and enjoying being able to surf, check my email, chat and get the job done without constantly worrying about how much data I was consuming.

And burning up bandwidth is an awesome experience on the Bold.

The phone has every feature imaginable from WiFi and HSDPA Internet connectivity to built-in GPS, two megapixel camera with flash, and Bluetooth. It also has some welcome functionality – like using a standard USB cable for both data transfer and battery charging, unlike the E71 which frustratingly has a USB port for data transfer, but doesn’t allow for charging via it.

“The mosT sTriking Thing abouT The bold is iTs gorgeous Transmissive TFT lCd sCreen ThaT blows jusT abouT any oTher mobile moniTor ouT oF The waTer.” So socially on-the-go Email on the BlackBerry is what you would expect from the people who invented on-the-go mail. But I replaced it with Google’s Gmail app for BlackBerry, since all my mail is routed via the Goole service and without running a BlackBerry server there can be some frustrations in the way it handles IMAP mail – like not being able to mark your messages as read on your computer and having the same status set for them on the device.

Google has a range of applications for the BlackBerry, including Google Search, Reader and others – all excellent.

RIM has also developed Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Facebook and other clients for the BlackBerry platform that are all super handy, barring the Facebook application that requires email notifications from Facebook to work. That’s the downside – the up side is that you can upload photos and videos to Facebook straight from the Bold.

The Bold’s keyboard is one of my favourite mobile qwerty pads on the market and brings some stiff competition to the likes of the Nokia E71.

Typing on the Bold is a dream and even instant messaging is painless. But the most striking thing about the Bold is its gorgeous transmissive TFT LCD screen that blows just about any other mobile monitor out of the water.

The only problem I had with the Bold was the included BlackBerry Maps software. Perhaps I’m spoiled by my Tomtom, but GPS navigation is not something the mobile guys get right at the software level. BlackBerry

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Maps is no exception. Getting navigation from the software is confusing and frustrating. The one good thing about it, however, is that it streams map data from a server and saves you having to download it elsewhere before navigating. A big plus, especially when combined with the unlimited data plan, although the latter unfortunately doesn’t roam with you internationally.

The Bold also has a seemingly limitless granularity in its configurations.

You can modify notification setting for every single application on the device and control where, when and how it rings, vibrates, flashes its LED notification light and gets your attention.

[OpiniOn] There is very little to fault the BlackBerry Bold on, it truly is one of the best smartphones on the market and will keep you happy whether working on the road or taking and uploading pictures of the kids. If you’re an experienced BlackBerry user you’ll feel right a home on the Bold – and for new users the BlackBerry platform is now beefed up with the more consumer-focused and high-speed connectivity features included with other leading smartphones.