Digital Bulletin - Issue 31 - Aug 21

DIGITAL BULLETIN Issue 31 | Aug ’21

THE LAST JEDI What next for the Pentagon’s cloud megaproject?

DEBATE

Tracking the trends to watch in data analytics

DESIGNING FOR DELIGHT Financial software leader Intuit places emotion and feeling at the heart of its design philosophy. Digital Bulletin finds out more

JAMES HENDERSON Content Director

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t’s been proven beyond doubt that people produce their best work at companies where their skills are valued. Recognition, appreciation, growth and development are just as important as salary and benefits when it comes to retaining your top employees.

Our cover story this month features financial software company Intuit in a case study that gets right to the heart of empowering a workforce to work with passion and creativity.

The importance of design has been a central pillar of the company’s approach since Intuit was founded in the 1980s. It is famed for encouraging its design teams to “delight” the customer base with its products.

“Organisations that embrace design create far better products and business outcomes,” Intuit’s Design Director, Gus Machado, tells us. “When everything you do starts and ends with the customer at

the heart of it, you’re in a great position to create consistently delightful experiences for your customers.”

Elsewhere, we take a look at one of the biggest stories of 2021 so far after the Department of Defense announced its $10bn JEDI cloud computing contract has been scrapped.

It is a story we’ve followed closely here at Digital Bulletin and this month’s analysis looks at how the new project, known as Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, will likely bring together AWS and Microsoft and whether there’s scope for the likes of Oracle, IBM and Google.

What’s for certain is that now the Pentagon has signalled its intent to go down the hybrid route, providers are going to be lining up for a piece of the pie.

For that and much more, read on. We hope you enjoy the issue!

PUBLISHED BY STRANGERS MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 DIGITAL BULLETIN

TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

Contents 06

Month in Review

20

Case Study

36

Security

46

News, regulations and analysis

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Intuit Bringing the delight to design thinking

How technology is changing air travel

Data Intelligence Debate The next big trend in data analytics

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36

+

56

74 6

78 56

66 66

+

Connectivity Could hollowfibre replace fibre broadband?

IT Services British Rowing’s cloud journey

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A Life in Tech

78

Closing Bulletin

Industry veteran Ken Charman shares his life lessons

An exclusive column from Mulesoft’s Ian Fairclough

MONTH IN REVIEW

NEWS UPDATE Digital Bulletin rounds up the news that shaped the enterprise technology space over the last month

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NEWS UPDATE

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS Medallia’s unaffected closing stock price on June 10, 2021. The transaction is expected to close in 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.

Headline: Zoom has made its biggest ever acquisition, snapping up cloud software provider Five9 for $14.7bn.

Info: The deal has been made to bolster its Zoom Phone offering, its cloud phone system which recently surpassed 1.5m seats, as well as its conference software, Zoom Rooms. “We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers,” said Eric S. Yuan, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Zoom.

Headline: Private equity outfit Thoma Bravo struck a deal worth $6.4bn to take enterprise software company Medallia Inc. private.

Info: Medallia shareholders will receive $34 per share in cash, which represents a premium of approximately 20% to

Headline: Microsoft has acquired cybersecurity platform CloudKnox Security Inc. Info: Microsoft said CloudKnox helps organisations right-size permissions and consistently enforce least-privilege principles to reduce risk. The deal builds on Microsoft’s recent acquisitions of RiskIQ and ReFirm Labs and shows its “focus and execution in acquiring, integrating and expanding the strongest defences for our customers.”

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FUNDING Headline: Cloud security platform Netskope has closed a round of funding worth $300m, taking its valuation to $7.5bn.

Info: The raise was led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel and Sequoia Capital Global Equities, amongst others. Netskope said it will continue to aggressively expand its platform and go-to market strategy to meet strong demand.

Headline: Industrial cloud services company ServiceMax Inc. is to go public via a SPAC merger.

Info: It announced it will be merging with a SPAC called Pathfinder Acquisition Corp. that’s backed by investment firms HGGC and Industry Ventures. The agreement values ServiceMax at $1.4bn 8

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and will see it receive $335m that has been raised by investors.

Headline: Untether AI has raised $125m for its AI acceleration chips.

Info: It enables the company to extend its leadership position, enhance its software offering, and build its next generation tech. Untether AI says its at-memory compute architecture “breaks through the computational bottleneck and changes the paradigm for AI compute efficiency”. Funding was led by an affiliate of Tracker Capital Management.

NEWS UPDATE

PEOPLE Headline: IBM President Jim Whitehurst is to step down from the organisation.

Info: Whitehurst was Chief Executive of Red Hat and joined IBM when it acquired Red Hat in 2019. He oversaw the integration of the two companies but will now depart as part of a wider IBM leadership reshuffle. “Jim has been instrumental in articulating IBM’s strategy,” said CEO Arvind Krishna. Whitehurst will continue as an IBM advisor.

Headline: Amazon has bolstered its global connectivity capabilities after acquiring a team of more than a dozen wireless internet experts from Facebook.

Info: A report from The Information says that the employees made the move in April and will work on projects to develop low-orbit satellites by the

middle of the decade. The team includes physicists and optical, mechanical and software engineers.

Headline: US cloud services provider Rackspace will lay off 10% of its workforce, around 700 employees, as part of a restructuring plan.

Info: The company has said that 85% of these roles are set to be replaced through its offshore service centres. It will use the money saved to reinvest and expand its product offerings in “fast-growing” areas of the business.

Rackspace will spend around $80m on exit costs.

Stay right up to date with the latest news shaping the enterprise technology sector with The Bulletin, available at digitalbulletin.com

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MONTH IN REVIEW

C ining the digital future €

Each month, Digital Bulletin analyses one of the digital policies that countries are enforcing with the goal of regulating the online world. In this issue, we look at the European Union’s digital euro project

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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DIGITAL POLICY

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s paper money dead?

Although physical money was suffering a slow but steady decline, the pandemic has greatly diminished its use. In addition, over the last few years, digital coins are on the rise, with Bitcoin reaching an all-time high in March 2021. But, despite the fact that cryptocurrencies are on the up, they are still too volatile to become mainstream, as shown by Bitcoin’s recent drop in value to $30,000. As a result, the appearance of a central bank digital currencies (CBDC) seems to be closer to becoming a reality.

A few weeks ago, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced its plans to start the investigation phase of the creation of a digital euro, a plan that has been in discussions since January 2021. This phase is predicted to last one year, after which the EU will decide whether to officially launch the currency.

“We will commit the resources necessary to design a marketable product,” ECB board member Fabio Panetta says in a statement. “But a decision about whether or not to issue a digital euro will only come at a later stage. And in any event, a digital euro would complement cash, not replace it.”

The ECB has been adamant about the fact that a digital euro will not replace other types of payment. It is envisioned as an electronic form of money issued by the Eurosystem and accessible to all citizens and firms. Since it will be backed by a central bank, the digital euro will be unlike cryptocurrencies in that its value will be regulated. It is, in short, like a banknote but digital.

“The ECB’s announcement that it is starting its digital euro project is a welcome development and it makes sense that it wants to spend two years ISSUE 31

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MONTH IN REVIEW

Bhairav Trivedi Group Chief Executive Officer, Crown Agents Bank

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in an investigation phase to address key issues regarding design and distribution,” says Andy Coyne, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Cobalt.

“It’s vital that the Euro CBDC will be interoperable so that PvP or atomic settlement becomes possible between currencies, and the industry can enjoy the many benefits this will bring. These include the 24/7 operation of a digital ledger aligning central and commercial bank operations with the global economy, the cost of issuing cash decreasing, forgeries becoming impossible and settlement becoming central bank-backed with the commercial banks facing their clients.”

But the Eurozone is not the only institution that is considering a move towards CBDCs. As of this year, 86% of central banks actively work on CBDCs. In addition, over the past 12 months, numerous other central banks, including those of Japan and the UK, have begun to explore the idea. China is the country that leads the way in this move towards national digital currencies and many are worried that this would possibly lead to the replacement of the dollar for the digital yuan as the international currency.

“The digital yuan is the largest threat to the West that we’ve faced in the last 30, 40 years. It allows China to get their claws into everyone in the West and allows them to export their digital authoritarianism,”

DIGITAL POLICY

J. Kyle Bass Founder of Hayman Capital Management, L.P

says J. Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital Management.

Although they are inherently digital, CBDCs are not cryptocurrencies. They are a form of central bank money pegged 1:1 to a country’s flat currency.

However, they do have significant benefits over traditional forms of money.

CBDCs use centralised blockchains managed by institutions of trust. This means that states and central banks can control the network, while at the same time reaching unprecedented transaction capacities. While Bitcoin can handle seven to eight transactions per second; the Chinese CBDC pilot handles far more than 200,000 transactions within the same amount of time.

Moreover, CBDCs will make payments more secure, efficient and accessible.

Because CBDC can be accessed through a phone app, their use will give millions of rural citizens access to financial services and their digital nature will

allow for greater protection and easier international transactions.

“This is an increasingly global world,” says Bhairav Trivedi, CEO of Crown Agents Bank. “People no longer feel confined to living and working in the same country. Trade overseas is commonplace. Digital currencies make sense because they’re international they work everywhere. What’s more, distributed ledger technology has huge potential to help us overcome the challenges present in our existing international banking and financial services infrastructure, such as inefficiency, processing costs and the threat of fraud. Digital currency could also solve the problem of financial inclusion, by giving people access to financial services from anywhere.

“While no one can predict the future entirely, what’s certain is that digital currencies and DLT will transform the way our international banking and payments system operates.”

Andrew Coyne Co-Founder and CEO, Cobalt

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MONTH IN REVIEW

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH MULTIPLE CLOUDS? As the American Department of Defense ditches its JEDI cloud infrastructure contract amid legal wrangling between Microsoft and Amazon, we examine the possible implications of the decision and what might lie ahead

AUTHOR: Tom Wadlow

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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he US Department of Defense dropped something of a bombshell when it decided to scrap the $10 billion cloud infrastructure contract.

The JEDI, short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, agreement has become one of the most troublesome contracts for the DoD in recent times, the deal being the subject of a legal battle between cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

At the time of the tender AWS held the edge over Microsoft in the cloud computing space, but since then that advantage has been eroded with the latter securing several major cloud deals.

This, according to Nick McQuire, Chief of Research, Enterprise at CCS Insight, added fuel to the fire and helped create a situation that left the DoD little option but to go back to the drawing board.

“As it dragged on and on and on, it got to a point where no one was winning,” he says. “It got to that stage where the customer, the US Department of Defense, wasn’t benefiting from the project.

“Amazon was facing mounting legal costs, and Microsoft couldn’t proceed with implementing what they were originally contracted to do. This was not an off the shelf type of deal. With a cloud contract worth $10 billion, there’s going

to be a lot of customisation, and there’s going to be a lot of investment input on both sides of the coin.

“Ultimately, I think the bigger issue was the fact that Bezos and Trump didn’t get on. It’s inescapable from certain viewpoints that there was influence coming from within the top of the White House.”

Officially, the Department determined that, due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI cloud contract no longer meets its needs.

Announcing the decision, John Sherman, acting DoD Chief Information Officer, said: “In light of new initiatives like JADC2 and AI and Data Acceleration (ADA), the evolution of the cloud ecosystem within DoD, and changes in user requirements to leverage multiple cloud environments to execute mission, our landscape has advanced and a new way-ahead is warranted to achieve dominance in both traditional and non-traditional warfighting domains.”

Indeed, the DoD is working on a new contract and soliciting proposals from cloud providers, with Amazon and Microsoft both likely to be involved in what is now framed as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC.

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WHAT IS THE JWCC? The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, represents a series of cloud contracts that are expected to be awarded by April 2022.

It will initially be based on direct awards to fill the Department’s urgent, unmet requirement for a multi-vendor enterprise cloud spanning the entire department across all security levels, and is expected to operate for a performance period of no more than five years.

“The strategy, it appears, is to break up the original RFP into different chunks and put those components out to tender,” McQuire says.

“It marks a shift from a single provider model to looking at specific needs in certain areas, and breaking it down into smaller and, in my opinion more executable, chunks of the contract.”

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The Department is eager to move on quickly. However, are there wider ramifications to this unravelling that we should be aware of?

“The JWCC aligns very much to how the market outside government is approaching cloud at this current moment in time,” McQuire says.

“What we’re seeing is very much a workload-by-workload decision, and vetting suppliers in the interest of wanting choice, wanting to manage costs, and sourcing the best of breed for that particular use case.”

Edwin Elmore, Director of Federal Sales at Versa Networks, also believes that the breaking up of the JEDI agreement reflects the wider direction of travel in the cloud sphere.

“The Department is best served by a multi-cloud strategy,” he says. “The cloud industry has quickly evolved.

“Cloud companies have continued to invest in DoD-specific services and service hardening, with their cloud services being accredited at Impact Level 4 and Impact Level 5, which provides the DoD with more vendor options.

“The future is a world of many clouds, public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. The DoD is unique in its consumption of IT resources, and the cloud is a critical component of its strategy. For example, the tactical edge is experimenting with cloud edge services

NEWS ANALYSIS

disconnected from the internet.”

And the market continues to evolve at a speed that leaves customers looking for agility and flexibility with cloud vendor agreements.

The $10 billion JEDI contract could be one of the last of its kind, the sheer size and scope of the work for one party perhaps representing its most significant hurdle. Indeed, the limited flexibility offered in the original JEDI framework appears to be a key reason for the shift to an alternative approach in the form of the JWCC. But what does this mean for vendors and how they position themselves in front of customers, especially large organisations with complex requirements such as the DoD? “The challenge is about whether you are fit for purpose in terms of the direc-

tion of where the market is heading,” McQuire explains.

“From a customer standpoint, they will be asking if they are protected if their requirements change, or whether their original requirements are going to cover them for any potential change down the line.

Nick McQuire

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“I think that’s what we’re starting to see companies get really clever about today – they want flexibility; they want flexible guarantees from their cloud providers.

They may not necessarily be going in that direction at this moment in time, but they want the agility to do so. This is the major learning to be taken from the JEDI story.”

McQuire is one of many interested onlookers as the US DoD cloud story progresses into its next chapter.

With contracts expected to be awarded around April 2022, it is still too early to predict with any real certainty what the final line-up of vendors and responsibilities will look like – however, based on 18

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what we know about the major cloud players at this moment in time, speculation is already mounting.

Indeed, McQuire believes that many if not all of the largest cloud protagonists - including Microsoft, AWS and Google, along with IBM - will assume some form of JWCC contract.

“There are patterns that have emerged already,” he adds. “Microsoft tends to be the back-office solution provider of choice in the workplace via SaaS solutions like Office 365.

“You often see Google in the database, data analytics, and potentially machine learning environment operating as a form

NEWS ANALYSIS

Edwin Elmore

of data transformation provider. Equally, you see AWS being the preferred vendor for the migration to cloud for existing applications and from a developer tooling perspective, where developers want to build new things.

“IBM is a go-to for the traditional on-prem, hybrid type of setup – and some customers are starting to think about IBM more in a leveraging Red Hat capability context to help them with multi cloud management and orchestration as well.”

Whatever the combination of vendors the US DoD selects next year, the result will be a consortium of experts that provide the agility and flexibility needed

to meet the Department’s detailed requirements.

This is critical in the eyes of Elmore, who points to the need to develop a robust zero trust approach to rolling out cloud across its architecture to better defend the country against state-sponsored adversaries.

“Operations, expertise and resources will also become a challenge,” he says.

“Selecting and implementing agile solutions that reduce costs, provide advanced connectivity, ease of management, and advanced security features managed from a single pane of glass will be critical.

“Continuing to invest in legacy systems is not in the best interest of the government. The time to modernise network and security capabilities to allow a multicloud zero trust strategy is now.”

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CASE STUDY

BRINGING DELIGHT TO DESIGN

Intuit is famed for its financial products but what people don’t often see is the meticulous skill and effort that go into designing these much-loved platforms. Here, in an exclusive deep-dive, Digital Bulletin speaks to a number of the company’s design team to find out how Intuit has carved out a reputation as one of the world’s most innovative design centres

AUTHOR: James Henderson VIDEOGRAPHER: Fraser Harrop

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INTUIT

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CASE STUDY

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ntuit is a company that was founded with design excellence in mind. When it was formed in the early 1980s, there were already a number of businesses offering software to help people manage their financial lives. But co-founder Scott Cook saw an unique opportunity to create a better product by focusing on delivering the value customers wanted the most saving time with financial admin - through a simple and elegant solution. This was the beginning of Intuit’s original product ‘Quicken’ which became market-leading in a matter of just a few years.

Since then, the company has made its name with products like QuickBooks, Mint and TurboTax. In 2008 its upper management and leadership teams were seeking ways to create the new chapter of growth 22

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and innovation and one of its main strategies was to place Design Thinking at the heart of the organisation. Since then, Intuit has prioritised world-class design and is consistently recognised as one of the industry leaders when it comes to design innovation and culture.

At the heart of Intuit’s commitment to design excellence sits ‘Design for Delight’, a philosophy first conjured during the 2008 refocus. It is a three-pronged concept that focuses on exceeding customer expectations and delivering value to their businesses.

The first pillar of Design for Delight is ‘Deep Customer Empathy’, whereby Intuit seeks to completely understand who their customer is, the issues they are facing and their pain points by observing their behaviours and understanding how they can

INTUIT

benefit the most. Only then, the company believes, can it truly build products that answer customers’ specific needs.

Next is ‘Go Broad to Go Narrow’, where ideation and prototyping sessions derive many different solutions, which can then be tailored to achieve the greatest customer benefit. The third and final pillar is ‘Rapid Experimentation with Customers’, built on the belief that testing solutions with users early and often will always lead to better products and services.

Gustavo Machado, Design Director at Intuit, tells Digital Bulletin that Design for Delight is an integral part of the

company’s DNA, so much so that every single employee that joins the organisation completes an in-depth training programme on it. It is an approach that makes Intuit’s design strategy unique, he believes.

“Through this process and with those iterative loops, we are able to evolve our ideas and solutions to create an experience that is going to bring delight to our customers. As designers, we play a critical role in leading and teaching the organisation Design for Delight,” he says.

“This is something that we truly believe is a factor that not only drives alignment across the organisation but is also one

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CASE STUDY

When everything you do starts and ends with the customer at the heart of it, you’re in a great position to create consistently delightful experiences” Gustavo Machado

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of the catalysts for Intuit being one of the most innovative companies in the world.

“Organisations that embrace design create far better products and business outcomes. When everything you do starts and ends with the customer at the heart of it, you’re in a great position to create consistently delightful experiences for your customers. Design is a huge positive for any business as when you have customers that are delighted, they’re going to stay with you, buy more from you and recommend you to others. We focus on delight and everything flows from there.”

It is clear that for Intuit, design goes beyond simple functionality and features and is instead viewed as a tool to elicit feeling, to emote and produce outstanding experiences. In a conversation that could come right out of Apple’s playbook, Joe Preston, VP of Design at Intuit, says one of its guiding principles is to design with “integrity and emotion” in order to produce ecosystems that businesses “love”.

“Those are words that are really important because design can have a major impact on influencing decisions and we want to make sure that those decisions are as honest and truthful as possible. Emotion is a really important aspect because with so many of the products and services we use in our daily lives, it is not enough to just complete a task.

“If we are to compete, we expect our digital products and services to have an

INTUIT

emotional impact on us. At Intuit, we use the word delight a lot and that is where designing for emotion comes into play.”

As you would expect from a company that has embraced design thinking, design - and, therefore, its designers - is integral to the company’s product vision. Natalie Harmon, Product Designer at Intuit, says that design teams are able to shape products because of their unique vantage points.

“I think we’re good at seeing the world as it is with its flaws,” she says. “And then we’re good at imagining the world as it should be. So for our products, we can kind of paint a picture of what the ideal state would be and really bring that to life in a way that gets our partners on board and reminds us who we are serving.

“I like to think that if sometimes we have our heads down in one, taking like baby steps at a time, design’s role is to lift people’s heads and remind us of which direction we can be heading in and using empathy for the customers to guide the rest of our teams.”

To speak to Intuit’s employees is to understand how highly design is regarded, with designers often spoken about in a sense of awe. More than once, the term ‘superpower’ is used when it comes to the ability to craft and deliver products that make life easier for customers.

Preston has no doubts at all, calling design “a unique superpower”. He takes an example of a company lunch room, a place where everyone has their own ideas about ISSUE 31

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how the business can be improved, how show us how often very complex problems employees’ wellbeing could be better priori- can be translated into simple and elegant tised or how culture shifts could take place. solutions. Designers have this unique “For the most part, those ideas are going ability of translating abstract concepts into to come across in conversations, or maybe tangible prototypes,” he says. words on a page, whereas a “By doing that, we bring the designer that has ideas is actually different perspectives of either the going to start visualising them, designers or the teams that are they’re going to start sketching working in solving that problem and beginning to build into something a prototype,” he says. that everyone can “That’s where see from the same design superpower perspective. We comes in because can test and we that designer that can iterate and sketched out that that becomes an prototype concept incredible source of is going to walk into alignment, but also it that room and is galvanises the teams going to have a very in the organisation different impact as behind a vision far as influence over that everyone gets people. Because excited about and effectively, they’ve helps us really undergot the visual artefacts stand where we are heading.”

Joe Preston that we as humans really Underpinning everything connect with.” is Intuit’s DesignOps team, which creates Continuing the theme, Machado says value for designers and the wider business he thinks about designers “a bit like super by amplifying the impact of design teams, humans” in the sense that they are able enabling them to get on and do what they to use their skills to make demonstrable do best - design. Processes have been improvements to the world around us. simplified or automated where possible “Designers have the ability to imagine with design processes harmonised for the future and use their creative muscles to Intuit’s global design teams.

We expect our digital products and services to have an emotional impact on us. At Intuit, we use the word delight a lot and that is where designing for emotion comes into play”

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INTUIT

In Partnership: Intuit and Optimal Workshop Optimal Workshop supported Intuit with its User Experience research platform that enables companies to test, iterate and optimise their websites, apps and services

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Build better user experiences, backed by data.

We help companies like Intuit, IBM and Uber understand how people interact with their websites, products and apps. Now you can too.

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CASE STUDY

Bernice Lee, Head of Design Operations, says DesignOps at Intuit revolves around a standardised framework that adds rigour and process to the product design workflow, allowing teams to have flexibility to create while also following a process that helps them to design in a more efficient and effective manner. DesignOps, she says, “is a mixture of science and art”.

“The role of DesignOps at Intuit really is unique because of the fact that we have so many different design programme

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managers, design operation professionals in our community, and they’re spread out across all of our business units and support various products and within our brands,” she says.

“We are a catalyst for the design function. Our key strengths are in identifying those areas of opportunities that exist to help our designers scale and to help facilitate the design process. It could be as small of a task as defining what a tool should be, or as broad as leading

INTUIT

community and we try to be a common thread that runs through all of the teams to help them stay focussed and sure of what the priorities are. The success of DesignOps is ultimately in solving problems for our designers, unblocking issues or just being a supportive guide and teammate.”

Another crucial component of Intuit’s design framework is rigorous testing to ensure the final product has been finely tuned to suit its clientbase. Central to this effort has been Optimal Workshop, a User Experience research platform that helps companies test, iterate and optimise their websites, apps and services.

Having started with just a few enterprise users of the Optimal Workshop platform, a meeting between the two companies led to it being used more widely across Intuit, with workshops from stakeholders of both companies deepening the relationship. sprints for our design teams to be able to really hone in on what the customer problem is.”

One of the key requirements for DesignOps at Intuit is to amplify the impact of design, ensuring that designers can create first-class experiences for customers.

“The goal of our community is really to define what those frameworks and processes are,” says Lee. “DesignOps looks at itself as another part of our design

Joe Preston

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I think we can see how design is so valuable to the creation of products and communication and I’d love to see the impact that we could have on things like social systems and largerscale issues” Natalie Harmon

“Working with Optimal Workshop has been super empowering for me as a designer, because oftentimes, when we have a hypothesis, we have to lean on analysts or engineers to help us either run tests and products,” says Harmon. “With Optimal Workshop, I’m given the keys to the investigation myself. So when I have my hypothesis, I can quickly run tests with customers and get results sometimes in a day. It’s like, ‘poof, magic’.

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INTUIT

“It also really helps us test at scale.

With one of the projects that we were working on recently, we were able to run 600 different tree test. And in the process of doing those, we really narrowed in on a direction that we feel confident in launching a product because it could have a really major impact. Optimal Workshop has been both empowering and has helped us design with databacked decisions.”

When you speak to some of Intuit’s leading lights about the future of design, you notice that they are taking a broad view. Of course, there are grand ambitions on a micro level, to improve design yet further, to bring in more design expertise and to fine tune its processes on an ongoing basis. But the real excitement comes when talking about the impact design can have on a far broader level.

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“I think we could already attest that design has changed the world, through the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age,” says Preston. “Where it probably has the ability to change the world now is its application with really grand challenges, so how do we get to space differently, how do we overhaul

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power and energy infrastructure to become more sustainable, how are we going to solve climate change?

“Those are grand challenges that are going to involve design, they already do involve design. I think it is going to be really interesting to see the design process transcend from where it has been traditionally,

INTUIT

The success of DesignOps is ultimately in solving problems for our designers, unblocking issues or just being a supportive guide and teammate” Bernice Lee

which is to make products and services, to being a tool to really power the world and impact our daily lives.”

Looking ahead, Harmon says her hope for design is that it becomes more diverse and boundaryless and that designers can increasingly use their skills outside of their usual confines for the benefit of all of society.

“I think we can see how design is so valuable to the creation of products and communication and I’d love to see the impact that we could have on things like social systems and larger-scale issues.

It’d be really awesome that in the next few years if there are major advances in education, or sustainability or social justice and things like that, these improvements wouldn’t have been possible if design didn’t have a seat at the table.”

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SECURITY

AIRPORT 2030

THE TECH OF TRAVEL COVID-19 has radically transformed travel and its infrastructure, none more so than airports. But, as businesses and consumers look towards a postpandemic future, how will technology play a central role across the airport sector?

AUTHOR: David Howell

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AIRPORT 2030

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omestic and international air travel has been one of the most impacted sectors as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. As the world unlocks, airports will once again become travel hubs.

However, by 2030, airports will be different environments utilising a range of technologies to improve services and keep travellers safe.

Speaking in 2017, Paul Griffiths, Dubai Airports CEO, said: “We need to take a leaf out of the books of Uber, Amazon, Facebook and eBay and all of those who have applied technology and 38

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process design to reimagine their entire business around customer convenience... this would trigger a dramatic redesign of airports.” Fast-forward to 2030, and this statement will see reality with a raft of technologies in use across the world’s airports.

“The central premise with COVID-19 has been to reduce contact between people and remove bottlenecks in airports, and technology has been asked to mature rapidly to meet these needs,” Jeff Lennon, head of strategic sales and global partnerships at Vision-Box that implements biometric and contactless

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technologies at airports around the world explained to Digital Bulletin.

“We envisage a modern vision of the airport in the year 2030, where the passenger journey is automated through contactless biometric identification systems, airport management is characterised by multi-source data stream orchestration, and data-informed collaborative decisions are made at the distance of a click.”

Also, the ‘new normal’ for airports is to embrace the range of technologies that have come on-stream to support their growth ambitions, but critically, to

meet the expectations and demands of today’s and future passengers. Increasingly this means more automation and self-service. In addition, the burgeoning IoT (Internet of Things), edge data networks, and virtual modelling will be fundamental technologies that will shape the airport in 2030.

Parallels can be seen across manufacturing, where Industry 4.0 drives how digital tools and services are implemented. Airport 4.0 will make similar fundamental changes using a range of technologies. The maturity of airports as they look to re-shape their digital transformation roadmaps is accelerating.

However, operational performance is often the focus of the investment. Here, technology will be an enabler that will help airports vastly transform their day-to-day operating systems and allow them to look further and deliver new experiences to their customers.

To make air travel the seamless, efficient industry it strives to become, digital technologies will have to be integrated. Security is always front of mind.

The airport of 2030 will use biometric identification to speed travellers through passport control and security.

“Testing is the immediate solution to safely re-open borders and re-connect people,” says Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s (International Air Transport Association) Director General and CEO. “And ISSUE 31

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The central premise with COVID-19 has been to reduce contact between people and remove bottlenecks in airports, and technology has been asked to mature rapidly to meet these needs” Jeff Lennon

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eventually this is likely to transition to vaccination requirements. In either case, a secure system to manage COVID-19 testing or vaccination information is critical. The IATA Travel Pass is a solution that both travellers and governments can trust. And it is being built with data security, convenience and verification as top priorities.”

Airports have been moving increasingly towards more self-service. The pandemic has accelerated these technologies. For example, touch terminals will be replaced as we enter a posttouch environment to reduce the potential transmission of infection. In addition, Etihad Airways is testing a kiosk that can monitor a passenger’s heart rate, temperature, and respiration.

Jorg Oppermann, Vice President Hub and Midfield Operations, Etihad Airways, commented: “We are testing this technology because we believe it will not only help in the current COVID-19 outbreak, but also into the future, with assessing a passenger’s suitability to travel and thus minimising disruptions.”

Passengers can even become touchless and self-service even before they reach their airport with technology from AirPortr. Airports will allow luggage to be collected and checked in from passengers’ homes or offices up to 24 hours before their flight. With the first drop-off point planned at the Heathrow Express

AIRPORT 2030

train platforms, customers will be able to quickly and securely drop off their luggage at peak times before traveling bag-free straight through to security.

Passengers can track their luggage online from the moment it leaves their doorstep, or at the T5 key access areas, right up to the bag loaded onto the aircraft. Customers using the services also receive digital bag tag receipts.

Robotics may be novel now – Munich Airport’s Josie Pepper, Fraport’s YAPE self-service robot, and British Airways’ collaboration with BotsAndUs will test autonomous robotics in Terminal 5, but

this technology is on a rapid upward trajectory which will see these devices becoming commonplace across the world’s airports. And as AR expands, the Japanese airline ANA is experimenting with avatars and telepresence and how this can be used to aid passenger journeys.

Many of the technologies and digital services airports will have in place by 2030 will rely upon the smartphone.

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Digital twins can model related impacts on passengers and their surroundings, ensuring that airport managers can implement the right steps to guarantee the safety of all passengers and staff” John Kitchingman

of devices enables them to create integrated services that can be personalised to each user. The seamless experience that removes friction from a traveller’s journey is the endgame for these technologies.

“Phones, which will effectively replace the need for passports or boarding passes – although, thanks to biometrics and automation, they’ll rarely be used in that capacity – will now connect travellers to every aspect of their pre-flight journey. And in realtime,” says the Future of Air Travel report from Netflights.

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AIRPORT 2030

the terminal. Connecting with passengers throughout their journey starts long before their date of departure.

Connecting OTAs (Online Travel Agents) with the systems airports have in place removes anxiety and replaces this with a great experience delivered via a range of digital devices.

Wayfinding, for instance, is now using AR (Augmented Reality) to enable passengers to navigate an airport easily they may not be familiar with. The next wave of digital spectacles is on the near horizon and will further enhance the traveller’s experience of airports as they access a range of services.

Airports become digital ecosystems that use embedded IoT sensor technol-

ogies connected via fast mobile broadband networks. Here the digital twin will deliver massive operational benefits to airports and their users. “Digital twin technology can simulate the propagation and exposures of the virus to highlight potential cross-infection areas in the airport,” says John Kitchingman, managing director EuroNorth, Dassault Systèmes. “Using this data, digital twins can model related impacts on passengers and their surroundings, ensuring that airport managers can implement the right steps to guarantee the safety of all passengers and staff.”

The smartphone will form the hub around which many of the technologies airports will use and leverage burgeoning technologies, including AI and edge computing, Thomas Rehberg, head of aviation and Public Safety at Nokia, told Digital Bulletin: “The objectives of the airport of 2030 are likely to revolve around providing a consistently frictionless and safe passenger experience. Airport teams always need to monitor operations and activity and react quickly, especially where security is concerned.

Rehberg continued: “When an incident occurs at an airport, it is of utmost importance that it is resolved as quickly as possible and minimise the impact on turnarounds. Technology, such as AI and Edge Computing will be ISSUE 31

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able to support ground staff by helping to manage and process data, enabling them to make quick decisions and reduce the impact of adverse activities on passengers. These advanced capabilities must be supported by a robust, private network based on 4G or 5G to create the wireless foundation for Airport 4.0.”

Like many other industries and sectors, airports are data businesses.

The ability to collect masses of information about every aspect of their operations and customer behaviour enables airports to unlock the value that this data reveals. But, more importantly, technologies like machine learning will offer airports insights that 44

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airports can use on a practical level to reduce their costs, increase efficiency, and above all else, improve their customer-facing services.

Speaking to Digital Bulletin, Billy Shallow, director of innovation and technology at Airports Council International (ACI) World, commented: “Digital processes are no longer ‘nice to have’ but have become crucial to ensure as minimal impact as possible to the passenger experience as traffic resumes. It is therefore critical to accelerate their adoption. We must continue to build passenger confidence. Several countries have set up portals to allow passengers to lodge their information. This provides

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Connectivity can no longer be treated as a commodity, but rather as a strategic asset that is as important to an airport as the runway” Thomas Rehberg

passengers with the assurance that they are compliant before departing.”

Airports over the next decade will embrace new technologies that will deliver a seamless experience to travellers. Nokia’s Thomas Rehberg concludes: “As the journey towards Airport 4.0 continues, the importance of connectivity grows. Connectivity can no longer be treated as a commodity, but rather as a strategic asset that is as important to an airport as the runway. Alongside this, airports must invest in the type of technology that aligns with their sustainability goals. The aviation industry will remain under scrutiny for its contributions to green initiatives and it is key to make the type of decisions now that will have positive impacts later.”

The airport today is a crowded and often confusing space to navigate through. Airport owners have embraced some technologies to improve overall service delivery. The more transformative technologies have suddenly become prescient as fallout from the pandemic has pushed them to innovate.

And innovate they must, as the IATA estimates in the Asia-Pacific region alone, passenger numbers by 2036 could add an additional 2.1 billion new passengers. With many airports already at capacity, technologies will help these airports better manage their services.

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DATA INTELLIGENCE

DATA ANALYTICS WHAT’S NEXT? The big question this month asks four industry experts: What is the next big enterprise trend in data and analytics?

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Data literacy Daniel Pell

GM, EMEA, Tableau Software

For employees across diverse industries, the ability to read and interpret data has become an essential part of their role.

Whether it’s retail, manufacturing, financial services or other key sectors, data literacy is an increasingly vital skill. Digital skills are now part of the entry requirements for two-thirds of UK occupations, and these occupations account for 82% of online job vacancies.

Once siloed within data analytics and business intelligence teams, there is now an opportunity for employees across an organisation, whether in the finance, legal, HR or marketing department, to work with dashboards and make datadriven decisions that impact the future of their business.

However new research from Salesforce and IDC finds that one in six UK workers have low or no digital skills. The digital skills gap is a major concern for businesses up and down the country and needs to be addressed urgently.

This has a severe impact on our economy - costing as much as £2 billion annually. With employees unable to understand or use data, businesses will

have lower levels of productivity and efficiency and will fail to fully adapt and digitally transform their operational models.

Organisations know that data is integral to making important and informed business decisions. Despite this, many companies have yet to prioritise upskilling their workforce or developing a data-first culture. However they do this, it is imperative that data literacy training isn’t treated as simply a box-ticking exercise. Arguably, this should be one of the first things that employees are taught when they join a company, and should be a continued investment throughout their development.

Ultimately, businesses will play a pivotal role in levelling up the UK workforce.

Tableau offers data literacy e-learning courses to help anyone learn the foundational data skills they need to meet the evolving needs of employers. The UK’s GDP is driven by the digital economy, and one in three UK businesses expect to create new digital services. Therefore, providing those in employment and those still in education with the tools they need to see and understand data is more crucial than ever.

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Customer Experience collaboration Matt Conner

Chief Growth Officer, Paragon DCX

We recently commissioned research among decision-makers in large businesses to determine what they view as the next enterprise trend in data and analytics. While the research report is yet to be released, preliminary results indicate a strong propensity towards increased customer experience (CX) collaboration, driven by the pandemic.

The respondents agreed that a great CX team is essential to their company differentiating itself from the competition.

Covid-19 elevated the digital customer journey as a determining success factor. Yet, while the pandemic spurred the amplified focus on the discipline, the respondents also found that it has complicated collaboration, citing the lack of face time and busy schedules as major issues.

To improve CX interactions at their organisations, enterprise decision-makers put collaboration technology and more personalised, timely, and coherent communication at the top of their wish lists. Not surprising considering that more 48

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than three quarters have worked on a CX project in the last 12 months, most of whom have collaborated with colleagues in other departments. However, this collaboration appears to occur on an ad hoc, informal basis.

When it comes to internal CX collaboration, the respondents mentioned several stumbling blocks they have to contend with. These included lack of time, internal politics, people protecting

DEBATE

their ‘turf’, disjointed data, and poor internal communication. Seemingly, many organisations find the optimisation of their CX resources challenging.

Just under half of them also say that customer data captured in the CRM isn’t used appropriately.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of our research is that half of the respondents keep their views on topics outside their departments to themselves. This tendency contrasts with their seniority and the fact that many acknowledge that businesses fail because they aren’t ‘joined up’ enough - many indicated that collaboration simply isn’t part of their company culture.

To improve CX interactions at their organisations, enterprise decision-makers put collaboration technology and more personalised, timely, and coherent communication at the top of their wish lists”

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Empowering developers Patrick McFadin Vice President Developer Relations, DataStax

Enterprises have taken huge strides around making their applications ‘cloud-native’ - taking advantage of approaches like containerized microservices and new orchestration tools like Kubernetes, they can scale up their applications to meet global demand and move those applications where they want to run them, in the cloud or on-premise.

The next wave is in containerized data services and bringing everything into a common control plane.

The challenge here is how to standardize and scale up around data alongside the applications that create all this information. Open source projects like Apache Cassandra and Apache Pulsar already support some of the world’s largest data deployments, but these components are often disconnected from each other. Getting a complete open data stack in place that can scale around the whole process. From where data is initially created, through to analytics and eventually where data is at rest. Ease of 50

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use and fewer trade offs will help more companies improve how they use data.

Alongside this, those involved in data and analytics projects have to start thinking about new ways of integrating into the total stack. Developers don’t want to spend precious time evaluating database technology, so they pick the easiest service to implement – even if that decision turns out to be wrong over time. Instead, we have to bring the right database services to the developers and make it easier for them to consume those services over time without long term technical debt accumulation.

Developers think in terms of API access, so supporting standardised approaches through a data gateway service will help them get implemented faster. Open source projects like Stargate make this process around integrating data and applications easier for developers as well as for any DevOps or IT infrastructure team that has to support them.

There is still a lot of discussion - and

DEBATE

a lot of hype - around AI and machine learning (ML). The next year will see more mainstream enterprises look at how to integrate across areas like data pipelines for AI and ML with their existing database deployments. Uber’s Michaelangelo is a great example of this - they have a large Apache Cassandra instance which they use for fast lane AI workloads. More companies will take up this approach so

they can use their database clusters as feature stores for AI. So what is the biggest trend in enterprises around data and analytics? It will be how they can turn the hype around being data-driven into operational reality.

That means optimising how to run these services in production, and that involves getting all the different pieces working together as part of an open data stack.

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Data accessibility Daniel Homoki-Farkas

UK Managing Director, Supercharge

A key challenge currently facing organisations is data accessibility. Most by now understand that raw data by itself isn’t enough to transform themselves into an entirely data-driven entity.

Data becomes valuable only once it’s been transformed into something understandable which an organisation can then use in its operations and other processes. Well-established data visualisation practices, frameworks, practises and tools can discover and extract this value. Businesses should revamp their data systems using logicbased features such as nomenclature, taxonomy, and funnels.

Employees will no longer be required to analyse data: instead, their focus will shift to using their creativity and expertise to realise any new possibilities unearthed by the automated analysis.

Explaining business decisions with relevant supporting data insights will become the norm.

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should build a Data Analytics/Business Intelligence team that can communicate effectively with the business and also frame their thinking in terms of the priorities of the business. Empathy and understanding others are key to this communication, which is why setting up this time requires different hiring decisions and training processes. A Business Intelligence division cannot solely consist of “data geeks” anymore.

Turnaround times for data analysis are also crucial. The decision-making process is accelerating. If it takes too long to unearth insight and trends from a body of data, analytics will be simply left out of the decision process altogether.

In order to answer more complex and infrequent questions, data teams must prioritise improving data accessibility.

This means building systems that automatically turn information into easily digestible insights that can be accessed by all employees working in relevant fields. However, if they fail to automate these processes with a

DEBATE

Data becomes valuable only once it’s been transformed into something understandable which an organisation can then use in its operations and other processes”

systematic approach, data accessibility suffers. The result? Analysts will drown in a never-ending stream of one-off custom requests.

Ultimately, the direction of travel is to phase out the dedicated data analyst role by giving employees the tools that allow them to directly access the data insights that can support their day-to-day decision making.

This means processing data to turn it into actionable insight for knowledge workers, and then exposing it through well-designed, easy-to-understand employee experiences. With the proliferation of simple data visualisation tools plus the ongoing development of machine learning, expect to see significant breakthroughs in this process over the next few years.

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Open source Matt Peachey

Vice President, EMEA at EDB

Enterprise leaders are standing at a crossroads between two options for storing and managing their data. Open source software is code that anyone is free to use, modify and distribute. With closed source or proprietary software, the public does not have access to the source code, which is the intellectual property of a single organisation. All signs suggest that the former is set to win out, and that enterprise is on the cusp of a seismic shift towards open source.

Just five years ago, many open source projects were regarded as something of a playground for developers who work on experimental projects for fun. Today, heavyweight early adopters, including governments and global brand names, lend considerable credibility to open source – and industry sentiment has swung in its favour.

Commercial organisations also provide valuable support, fast-tracking the development of complex software applications; for example, EDB devotes

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full-time developers to the PostgreSQL project, allowing for focused collaboration. This couldn’t happen organically within a community of volunteers.

In 2021, customer-centricity factors into business decisions more than ever and enterprise customers are losing patience with opportunistic providers.

A number of major closed-source vendors have fallen out of favour with clients for relentless revenue-generation tactics, inflexibility and wilful incompatibility with new technologies. Open source is a true community project, driven by developers who want to

DEBATE

contribute to the greater good and build for excellence.

The pace of innovation within open source communities is unrestricted, and the code is of high quality. Anyone can contribute to the project, at any time – and experts across the globe can scrutinise the source code, rapidly removing bugs.

Cost is always a deciding factor, and as open source solutions reach enterprise-ready maturity, they now offer ultimate value for money. Open source software is free to use, though organisations must budget for hiring tech professionals with relevant expertise.

Some IT leaders are hesitant to part ways with closed-source vendors due to the enhanced customer support they provide: when enterprises must be ‘always on’, they need a guaranteed service level agreement, which isn’t available within the volunteer-run open source community.

Fortunately, commercial partners like Red Hat for Linux have stepped in to fill the gap, building enterprise-ready applications and offering 24/7 customer support. When enterprise users can experience the best of both worlds, open source becomes a no-brainer.

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FINDING NEW FIBRES Fibre broadband has been key in the development of fast internet connections, but it can’t sustain the speeds that new technologies will require. To address this, BT and Lumenisity are partnering to test an invention that could power the future of telecommunications: hollowcore fibre

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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t the start of 2021, the internet had 4.66 billion users, and this number increases every day.

Currently, the growth in active internet users worldwide is more than seven times faster than the total population growth. As more and more people benefit from the services that the internet provides, there is a growing need for faster and more reliable broadband services, such as fibre connections.

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With a growth rate of 13% between 2019 and 2018, fibre is the fastest-growing broadband technology in the world. The majority of global networks run on single-mode optical fibre cables, made of solid strands of glass. The glass in these cables carries information over long distances by channelling light from laser transmitters through the glass strands. However, due to the characteristics of glass, the light travels marginally slower inside the fibre than it would in air.

BT & LUMENISITY

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In order to fully take advantage of the benefits of new technologies, such as IoT, edge computing or 5G, there is a need for better and faster connections.

A new type of fibre developed at the University of Southampton might just be the perfect answer telcos have been searching for.

“Amazingly, the fibre that we, and a large number of operators around the world have, is not much different from what from the single-mode fibre, invented back in the 1980s,” says Professor Andrew Lord, BT’s Head of Optical Network Research. “The manufacturing is better, it’s stronger. But, essentially, it’s the same thing.

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“There’s nothing dramatically new that has come in the last 50 years in optical fibre, until now, when we have a new fibre type with nothing in the middle.

The core is hollow, like a cylinder of glass. It’s not that no one has had that idea before; it’s just that making it is really difficult because this inner surface of glass has to be a perfect mirror to keep the light in and to stop it from escaping. And this is what Lumenisity has achieved. In almost every single parameter you can think of, this new fibre could be better.”

In contrast to the types of fibre used today, hollowcore fibre has an air-filled centre that runs the entire length of the

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cable. The presence of air allows the signal to pass through it while maintaining a speed very close to the speed of light. Essentially, it has a really good mirror, which ensures that the signal isn’t lost or delayed. As a result, hollowcore fibre reduces latency by up to 50%, opening the door to high-frequency trading, 5G networks and increased geographic expansion in data centre interconnections.

Although hollowcore fibre was first discovered in 2008, it was not until the past few years when a group of researchers from the University of Southampton were able to design a prototype that was commercially viable. Their findings led to the creation of the spin out company Lumensity.

Now, alongside BT and mobile vendor Mavenir, they are kicking off trials of the new technology at the BT labs in Adastral Park, Ipswich.

“In a conventional optical fibre, light signals travel through a core region that is made of solid glass, whereas the light inside a hollowcore fibre is guided along a core structure that comprises air,” says Russell Ellis, Lumenisity’s Product Line Manager. “Since light travels more quickly in air, data signals travel 50% faster in Lumenisity’s hollowcore fibre cable.”

“We’ve known about this for years,” Lord adds. “It’s just finally now that

hollowcore fibre is reaching a point where it could really compete against this standard fibre that’s been there for 40 years or so. Now is the time for us to sort of look at it, and to really take it seriously to see what it can do.”

In almost every single parameter you can think of, this new fibre could be better” Prof Andrew Lord

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Lumenisity has recently published the first results of its tests, showing that their fibre is at least on par with current fibre technologies, if not better. Performance analysis carried out by carriers and equipment providers has shown that Lumensity’s fibre can achieve a 100% longer reach with 40% the data-rate over other types of fibre.

“Compared to other types of hollowcore fibre, such as photonic band-gap fibre, for example, CoreSmart has both lower attenuation and dispersion and can be operated over a broader wavelength range,” Ellis says. “This makes it able to handle higher power levels than conventional single-mode fibre. These performance benefits could also be exploited to help overcome the capacity and reach challenges in today’s optical networks.”

In order to test these capabilities, Lumensity has provided a 10-kilometre long hollow core fibre cable to BT to conduct trials at BT’s research and engineering campus. From benefits for 5G networks, allowing ultra-secure communications, high-frequency trading to lowering mobile network costs, hollow core fibre has endless use cases.

“We are delighted to be the supplier of field deployable CoreSmart hollowcore cable for these trials with BT,” said Mike 60

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BT & LUMENISITY

In a conventional optical fibre, light signals travel through a core region that is made of solid glass, whereas the light inside a hollowcore fibre is guided along a core structure that comprises air” Russell Ellis

Fake, Lumenisity’s Director responsible for Product Management. “This is further evidence of the impact our unique low loss, high performing cables can have on the networks operated by our carrier partners.”

The first stage of the trials is a proof of concept, in which BT is aiming to show that hollowcore fibre can increase the distance between street antennas and the back-end processing in exchanges The lower latencies that hollowcore

fibre permits would allow telcos to leave more space between antennas, something that would significantly reduce the cost of building 5G networks.

“For the 5G system to work, there has to be a limited amount of time between you doing something on your phone and there being a signal reaching a base station and coming back,” Lord explains. “And if you exceed that, then the system breaks. And so you have to make sure that your base station is a ISSUE 31

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BT & LUMENISITY

With quantum, the whole idea is to do something different, to try to be ultra secure by building a system that can’t be broken into” Prof Andrew Lord certain distance because the processing of the radio signal in the building is also very time consuming. So, actually, you’re quite limited to how far you can put these buildings.”

Lord calls this cost a “legacy budget”.

Optical fibre can reduce these costs by 30% by allowing telcos to separate these buildings more, and therefore build fewer of them, which would directly result in a cost-reduction for both companies and consumers.

Another application of hollow core fibre is related to quantum experiments.

Over the last few months, BT has been

A cross-section of Lumenisity’s hollowcore NANFTM fibre 1

testing single photon transmission over the fibre and looking at the possibility of simplifying the end-points in quantum experiments. The main use case of hollowcore fibre in this content would be to make communications safer, but also cheaper.

“With quantum, the whole idea is to do something different, to try to be ultra secure by building a system that can’t be broken into,” Lord says. “And the way you do that is you send information in single photons, one at a time.

A single photon can’t be hacked; it’s just too small.”

“The problem with single photons is that they’re very delicate things. It’s the tiniest thing you can get in the universe, so you have to protect it.

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But if you use standard glass the light messes around with the photons. For example, if you try to look at a star or planet through a telescope in a well-lit area, it’s hard to separate what you’re looking at, because other sources of light get in the way.

“With hollowcore fibre, you don’t get that. Because there’s no other light kind of messing around so you don’t get this overlap. It’s the glass that causes that problem, so it’s going to be really exciting to see how hollowcore fibre and single-photon secure transmissions can work together. We have already done the first trials of

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that and we’ll publish the results in a couple of months.”

But BT is not the only operator interested in this technology. Lord recounts how he has been approached by companies such as Orange France and Nokia with praise and questions about the technology. Proof of this is the fact that Lumenisity has begun its project of building its own dedicated fibre fabrication facility in Romsey, UK. But, is it an improvement so big it’s worth replacing existing networks?

Lumenisity thinks so. “CoreSmart cable has the potential to re-write the network design rule-book,” Ellis says.

BT & LUMENISITY

Lord is still not fully convinced, but he is very excited by the technology’s potential, as well as the many possibilities that optical technologies can open up for the future of telecommunications. If we want connections to continue to develop and become better and faster every year, the equipment that supports them needs to change as well. In Lord’s view, the key to the future is optics.

“Electronics can’t carry on getting faster,” Lord says. “Because, as it gets faster, it gives away more heat, and that creates problems in managing that heat, so you lose reliability. Currently

both electronics and optics are hitting limits that we knew were coming. So, the question is ‘What do we do? What technologies are we going to use to get us beyond those limits?’

“There’s a whole range, one of them is changing the fibre type. But another one will be a convergence between electronics and photonics. At the moment you’ve got a smartphone in your pocket that has an electronic chip in it, but in the future, it’ll be an optical chip. Optics is going to commoditise through volume; it’s going to become something that will be much more generally available everywhere.”

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BRITISH ROWING

POWERING OLYMPIC ROYALTY With the Olympic Games finally under way, Digital Bulletin speaks to British Rowing’s Head of Technology, Harvey Davies, to find out how technology is powering insights and its successful partnership with cloud platform Pulsant

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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fter a false start caused by the global pandemic, the starting gun for the jewel in the world’s sporting crown has been fired. And while the venues that host the Tokyo Olympics 2020 will be mostly empty, a global audience of billions will be tuning in to see the best athletes in the world compete for sporting immortality.

At the elite level of sport, the very smallest marginal gain can be the difference between being top of the podium and missing out on a medal altogether.

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and technology to give their athletes the best possible chance of performing on the biggest stage.

There are few teams with as storied Olympic history as British Rowing.

Indeed, rowing is Great Britain’s most continuously successful Olympic sport.

The GB Rowing Team has won a gold medal in every Olympic Games since 1984 and has won six Paralympic golds since the sport was introduced to the Paralympic Games programme in 2008. London 2012 was an exceptional Olympics for Team GB, not least for its rowing squad, which won nine medals.

BRITISH ROWING

Founded in 1882, British Rowing is the governing body for both indoor and on-water rowing in England. It is responsible for the training and selection of individual rowers and crews representing Great Britain and England and the development of grassroots and community rowing across the country.

British Rowing operates several mission-critical platforms to provide online services to its 30,000 members and run its data-intensive Olympic and Paralympic team sports analysis. As one of the most admired sporting institutions in the world, there is a recognition of the importance of leading the way when it comes to technology utilisation.

“For our Olympic and Paralympic teams and for pathway rowers that compete to get to the top level, the fine margins that contribute to success are becoming smaller and smaller. Being leaders in the use of technology helps British Rowing to exploit these opportunities and to maximise our performance on the water,” says Harvey Davies, Head of Technology, British Rowing.

Reflecting on the rapid evolution of technological requirements at the highest level of sport in recent years, Davies adds: “Probably the biggest changes have come in the ability to capture and analyse an ever-growing range of information from the athletes, the equipment they use and the environments they compete in.

For our Olympic and Paralympic teams and for pathway rowers that compete to get to the top level, the fine margins that contribute to success are becoming smaller and smaller” Harvey Davies

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Team GB joins NFT bandwagon Team GB has become the first Olympic Team to create its own storefront for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Working in partnership with leading NFT commerce provider Tokns, Team GB will launch an NFT store.

The partnership will run from the beginning of the Summer Games to the end of the Winter Games in Beijing next year, and includes the celebrations of 125 years of British Olympians at the Games, which the team is marking throughout this year.

Nightly NFT releases will feature auctions of unique “one of one” items and collections of fixed price NFTs available for purchase with crypto currency or normal currency.

As part of the collection, Team GB Gymnast Max Whitlock will launch an NFT celebrating his double gold medal winning achievements in Rio, ahead of his bid to win gold again in Tokyo.

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“Capturing, managing and analysing this data, and providing access globally while ensuring the integrity and security of what can be highly sensitive information, is probably the biggest change we see in every four-year Olympic and Paralympic cycle.”

The organisation previously hosted a number of its online services on-premise. However, maintaining the platforms and ensuring their security

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and backup levels were satisfactory was neither cost-effective nor sustainable.

In 2017 the organisation turned to Pulsant, looking for a unified platform that could bring those systems together and provide constant availability to the large amount of data around its membership services and complex training programmes.

“Before partnering with Pulsant, several of the platforms critical to both

our membership and our Performance programme were hosted on our premises. Maintaining the platforms and ensuring their security and backup levels were satisfactory was neither cost-effective nor sustainable, but since partnering with Pulsant we’ve been able to focus on the delivery of services rather than mitigation of platform failure. This has been a really positive move and a real benefit to the organisation,” says Davies.

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It builds on a long-term relationship between the two organisations, with Davies describing British Rowing as a “long-term partner of Pulsant”.

“It has provided us with consistently excellent service going back to the London Games cycle.

The opportunity to partner with Pulsant came about in the period into the Rio Games and at this point, we also partnered with SAS. A combination of the expertise of the Pulsant system architects, our internal technical team and the platform requirements for our analytics solution gave us a scope from which to assess the best private cloud solution.”

Lessons had also been learnt from past Games, with data spread across various platforms, some hosted, some on-prem. British Rowing needed a unified platform to maximise its ability to provide consistent data analysis.

Davies says: “We are also carrying out detailed analysis into membership, which makes constant access to data extremely important. The integrity of

this data is another vital issue and so we also required disaster-recovery backup as well as a high level of security. Partnering with Pulsant means we can focus on the delivery of services rather than worrying about platform failure because we have lost power or connectivity on our own premises.”

Pulsant designed and now hosts a bespoke private cloud platform with the primary site in its Milton Keynes facility, which British Rowing uses to run the GB Rowing Team’s performance data analytics projects. British Rowing also makes use of Pulsant’s managed backup service with the aim of keeping its IT solutions secure and scalable.

It also hosts the British Rowing Online Entry platform which supports competitive rowing across England and Wales from beginner to international team selection level. Its two critical functions are competition administration; setting up regattas and head races, and event structure; covering

Partnering with Pulsant means we can focus on the delivery of services rather than worrying about platform failure because we have lost power or connectivity on our own premises”

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payment and results management, and competition entries from clubs and competitors.

Pulsant’s infrastructure also supports the new digital content platform British Rowing Plus, which hosts a wide range of content including training programmes and dietary advice, and another newly developed platform, Challenge Hub. “Data is at the forefront of everything British Rowing’s Performance team does, and having the security and accessibility which Pulsant’s support affords us means all of our data

analytics projects can continue to power both our Olympic and Paralympic squads,” says Davies.

Looking forward, Davies says: “Analysing data plays a key role in our strategy to continue the organisation’s long-term success. This applies to information about the Olympic and Paralympic teams and studying the pathways that make successful Olympic and Paralympic athletes, and it’s this work on the pathway of our athletes which will stand us in good stead through this summer’s Games and into the future.”

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A LIFE IN TECH

A life in tech Ken Charman has been involved in major enterprise software projects since 1987, specifically in financial consolidation and reporting systems, and has built high-performance teams in IT start-ups that were acquired by Oracle, SAP, IBM and Sungard. Here, he tells Digital Bulletin about his storied career and why he still has work to do

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KEN CHARMAN

I

would describe myself as the most determined person in the room.

I was first attracted to the tech space by Visicalc, the original spreadsheet. I used it to transform my work in business planning and forecasting at 3M. Before that I was writing models in BASIC. It made me want to work in tech and change the world.

Back in 1983, I was an analyst attack dog who got seconded to a 3M IT guru, Pater Watkin. He was brought back from the European HQ to turnaround a struggling sclerotic UK business.

IT was called DP (Data Processing) back then and was stuffed with careerists. Peter was counter-establishment.

He briefed me on the importance of change and how personal computing could give power to the frontline. We were a two man team with the power to make change. The message stuck. He changed my life.

I was a frontline business user in the PC revolution that grabbed computing from central IT. That war seems to have lasted my whole career.

I was and still am an early adopter of new technology. It makes me more productive. It is ironic that corporate IT

and the big tech suppliers often seem to be the blockers.

There are so many differences between working for a multinational and a startup.

Let’s focus on one: time. The CERN Physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time” is an eye opener. He explains that Time is always relative.

In a global firm it moves slowly. The shortest unit of time is one month. One month is the measurement cycle for closing the books (taking the pulse).

Performance reviews are built around divisions of the year by month. One month is about how long it takes to get a meeting date for six people. If you miss a decision in a meeting you wait a month for your next chance. If you have to create a $1 billion business in five years then you have 60 decision points to do it. That’s not enough.

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Startup time moves faster relative to multinational time by collapsing it down.

We decide on a weekly or daily interval.

We know that taking a decision is more important than having all six people in the room, so we decide amongst who is there. We know we need mistakes to adapt to progress, so if it takes 12 time units to blast a path of discovery, we can get it done in a couple of months.

Multinationals, even the ones that think they have adopted Agile, take an Earth year to travel 12 time units.

The ability to make the clock run fast and our courage to take decisions that might be wrong, is the biggest difference for me.

The biggest mistake I see made by startups is planning. It is done in too much detail, too much time is spent perfecting it and then the authors become welded to it. The thing is, all plans are wrong!

Between 2006 and 2010 I was CEO of a spinout from KCL, (War Studies) that developed behavioural simulations to test the Grand Plans of governments, multinational firms and NGOs. Their plans were always wrong, von Moltke said “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

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Unhappiest? The year after being acquired when you watch your precious creation being smothered under a pillow of metrics by teenagers with MBAs” Here is a recent example. Eight months after we launched uFlexReward the whole country entered lockdown.

We have not met a client face-to-face since February, 2020. This was not in our plan. We adapted. Obviously, you must have a plan, but keep it high level and essential and let everyone know it will change. Take the MVP approach.

Plan less. Act early. Learn from experience, Adapt the plan. Repeat.

I was persuaded by “if you run a sound business the exit will come looking for you”. So, no shortcuts, strong systems, good people, no dodgy deals or accounting. This allows you to look buyers straight in the eye, and remember, you will usually have to move with your business, so it really helps with post-merger integration if there are no post acquisition surprises.

KEN CHARMAN

One night when I was bored I did a grid analysis of my 40 year career.

Time down column A and column titles across for: type of firm (startup, multinational etc), happy or unhappy, income (including negative income years), job function. It revealed some interesting stats.

I have never worked anywhere for more than five years.

I have spent 16 years on negative income.

Happiest? Usually that period of rapid growth shortly before we are swallowed by a big company.

Unhappiest? The year after being acquired when you watch your precious creation being smothered under a pillow of metrics by teenagers with MBAs. The biggest global risk is not climate change, pandemic or a banking crisis, it is inequality. I believe inequality is the engine of societal conflict (Trump, Brexit etc). Piketty’s book was a landmark in statistical proof. In tech we have to take some of the blame.

and set examples that make normal life seem like failure. There has been a huge interest in pay analysis since the tragic death of George Floyd. uFlexReward fills the data gap that I believe can solve inequality.

Big firms, who influence pay in the global economy have very poor pay data because reward is so globally administered. Every country has its own norms for salary, bonus, benefits, pensions, shares, tax and governance.

We digitise and consolidate from every local source, so all that data for all employees is now managed in realtime. By closing the data gap we have given global firms the data they need to tackle the inequality question. It might sound naïve but I believe our data will change the world for the better.

I would like to play my part in creating a more equal world. I am a visiting fellow at Newcastle University, with an interest in income related health inequality, so I have a second iron in the fire.

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Ian Fairclough, VP of EMEA Customer Success at MuleSoft, says an APIled approach is key for businesses to overcome integration challenges and drive true value from their data

O

ver the past year, demand for digital services has soared, and transformation has become pivotal as organisations try to keep pace with consumer expectations. However, many IT teams are struggling to leverage the data needed to deliver this transformation. According to MuleSoft’s Connectivity Benchmark Report, 90% of IT leaders point to data silos as a major blocker to progress. Organisations that are struggling to connect systems and apps to free up data will inevitably face difficulty in delivering digital-first services – which could ultimately impact revenue.

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mation, integration challenges are costly.

Many organisations are spending large sums of time and money on custom integrations, costing around £2.5 million per year. To overcome this, organisations need to move away from point-to-point integrations and find a more effective approach to connecting platforms, systems, and applications. Many are now looking towards API-led integration, which offers greater flexibility and agility, all while reducing maintenance costs. For organisations looking to build out their API strategies, there are key steps to follow that will put them on the roadmap to becoming more data-driven.

IAN FAIRCLOUGH

Integration’s building blocks The first step in an API-led integration strategy is, naturally, to build APIs. To start, organisations need to unlock the value of their data through a layer of system APIs, which unlock data from core systems of record within an organisation, making this data easily consumable and reusable by any employee. They should then create process APIs that orchestrate this data into a single view of a subject, like a customer or product line. Finally, organisations should create a layer of experience APIs to feed these insights into their services, such as a mobile app for customers.

To help accelerate this process, organisations should also harness tools to simplify the building process. Previously, developers familiar with APIs were essential.

However, low-code solutions now enable a drag-and-drop approach to integration, enabling business teams to integrate without writing a single line of code. API templates and pre-built connectors for popular SaaS applications can also reduce time

and effort for developers, increasing the productivity of teams. By reusing existing capabilities, organisations can accelerate project delivery, eliminating the need to start every project from scratch each time. For instance, a customer data API could be used to enable a self-verification capability, along with delivering more personalised offers. Creating a central repository where APIs ...>>>>>>>>>>>>> can be discovered for reuse across the organisation will simplify this process.

Many organisations. are spending large sums of time and Shoring up your money on custom defences breach .integrations, costing.Ahassecurity the potential to around £2.5 million undermine customer trust and seriously per year” disrupt innova-

tion. Data security is therefore a key pillar of an API strategy. Organisations must work to eliminate vulnerabilities which could derail the journey towards becoming data-driven, through measures such as network edge protection, tokenization, and policy configuration. A comprehensive, multi-layered approach to security will protect the data at rest and in transit within the API itself, as well as around the perimeter.

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IT departments have had a difficult job over the last year, but choosing the right integration strategy will help ease the pressure on teams, empower business users to build for themselves, and help accelerate digital innovation” To achieve this, organisations must ensure that their integration platform is compliant with industry standards, including PCI DSS and HIPAA. They must also have controls in place to guarantee that only authorised users can access their integration platform, so that sensitive information isn’t compromised. Tokenization can prevent data breaches by scrambling protected information so it cannot be read, without impacting functionality. Edge policies should be applied at the perimeter to act as a firewall and defend against common attacks, and API policies such 80

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as automated IP whitelisting can be used to ensure only internal users can access data.

Manage and monitor Once organisations have built their APIs, they must manage them. Setting alerts, defining SLA tiers, and establishing access management are sure-fire ways to support this. API-strategies help take the pressure off developers by empowering business teams to access vital data. Therefore, organisations should identify which business users can benefit from the APIs and then establish mechanisms to enable, authenticate, and govern their API usage.

IT teams must also monitor APIs closely to quickly identify performance issues. In modern digital ecosystems, data is often distributed across several departments, systems, applications, and services – so organisations need the ability to monitor them from one place to maintain clear visibility. Identifying which metrics are most important to their business, and establishing dashboards to closely monitor them will be essential. Configuring alerts and conducting root-cause analysis will also be key to quickly spotting and resolving issues. Finally, monitoring business metrics alongside IT metrics will provide a clearer picture of the ROI driven by APIs.

IAN FAIRCLOUGH

Embracing data-driven innovation One company benefiting from API-led data integration is online loan marketplace LendingTree. Its business units were previously disconnected, making it difficult for teams to gain a single view of the customer, which limited their ability to improve services and grow the business. LendingTree deployed Salesforce to create a 360-degree view of the customer, and used API integrations to keep this up to date by drawing in data from its

multiple systems and databases in real-time.

IT departments have had a difficult job over the last year, but choosing the right integration strategy will help ease the pressure on teams, empower business users to build for themselves, and help accelerate digital innovation.

Taking these first steps on their API journey will place organisations on the road to becoming data-driven, delivering more connected experiences and supercharging business growth.

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