TOM PLEWNIAK
Stop seeing technology as just about better and better transactional efficiency p.12
MANOJ SAXENA
Watson today represents 10% of what cognitive systems will come to represent in the next ten years p.16
May/June 2013 VOLUME 3 NUMBER 3 www.itincanadaonline.ca
CANADA’S TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH AUTHORITY
THE CASE FOR CLOUD
A COMPENDIUM OF CLOUD INSIGHT AND DEPLOYMENTS
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Contents
www.itincanadaonline.ca
Vol 3 No 3 May/June 2013
22 Stratocast: from PaaS to VSaaS
Features 4 Editorial 12 Vendor perspective Microsoft Canada’s Tom Plewniak talks SMBs and ERP 16 Watson for everybody IBM’s new ‘Watson’ hardware/ software solution to support customer service and customer engagement 18 Cisco evolves open cloud vision Cisco is ‘open’ for cloud business
6 Cover Story: Carving the IaaS pie… Departments
9 IaaS Case Study Building in the cloud 10 SaaS Case Study Cloud app streamlines event planning 21 PaaS Case Study Stratocast: from PaaS to VSaaS 24 IaaS Case Study Timing is everything in the cloud
28 From the inquiries desk How do you ensure you have the proper network for cloud? 29 PaaS Case Study PaaS play for “time” and “money” 30 Book Review How the net is replacing older knowledge institutions
26 Q&A: Big Data Jill Dyché of SAS talks about big data and public sector
Online Extras: www.itincanadaonline.ca 6 Technospective
Missed an issue? Misplaced an article? Visit www.itincanadaonline.ca for a full archive of past It in Canada issues, as well as online extras from our many contributors. May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 3
CANADA’S TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH AUTHORITY
EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
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Each year IT in Canada devotes a whole edition to the topic of cloud computing, and this year is no different. In many ways the conversations around cloud haven’t changed much in the past three years: users are eager to take advantage of the cost savings, flexibility, speed and agility promised by the cloud, but still wrestle with security and privacy concerns, choosing a cloud environment and infrastructure, and governance and management requirements. What has changed though is the number of people having the conversation. Gartner Research predicts that 30% of global Fortune 1000 IT organizations “will broker (aggregate, integrate and customize) two or more cloud services for internal and external users” by the year 2014. That’s up from just 5% today. It’s clear cloud is growing up out of its infancy as more IT organizations make the case to jump to cloud. In this edition of the IT in Canada print magazine we’ve assembled a compendium of features and case studies that examine real-life cloud deployments and use cases to provide you greater insight into how cloud computing technologies can assist your own business. In this issue Mary Allen contributes three features including an in-depth analysis of how IaaS vendors are competing for their share of the young Canadian cloud market, a view into Cisco’s cloud strategy and their support of the OpenStack Foundation, as well as a look at IBM’s new Watson Engagement Advisor, which was unveiled at the IBM Smarter Commerce Summit 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee and aims to provide the “cognitive computing power” of IBM’s Watson (of TV quiz show Jeopardy fame) to the everyday end user. I had the opportunity to speak with experts from both Primus and Allstream to learn a little more about what you should consider when building a cloud network and IT in Canada is also joined this month by Microsoft Canada’s Tom Plewniak, product manager for Microsoft Dynamics, for a Q&A on the state of the small business market in Canada and how enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions like Microsoft Dynamics can help. This issue also offers a series of case studies on various SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS deployments. Inside you’ll find a look at Shaw Media’s migration to public cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services; an investigation of Salt Technologies’ choice to leverage Savvis cloud as the provider for its e-payment platform; a look at a new Video Surveillance-as-aService (VSaaS) solution built in Windows Azure by Montreal-based Genetec; a view into how Vana Workforce used PaaS capabilities from Force.com to develop their cloud-based HR software; as well as an examination of how Ottawa’s Brookstreet Hotel is using BlazeLoop Event Engagment – a SaaS cloud app – to help manage and plan large-scale events. I hope you find out something new about the cloud or are inspired by the people and companies leveraging cloud to improve their own business as you flip through the following pages. Happy reading and best of luck on your journey to the cloud!
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Kevin Priddle Associate Editor, IT in Canada
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© 2013 VCE Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Vblock and the VCE logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of VCE Company, LLC and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Numbers based on IDC Whitepaper: “Converging the Datacenter Infrastructure: Why, How, So What?” May 2012.
TECHNOSPECTIVE
ON IAAS
Carving the IaaS pie
By Mary Allen
The elephant’s out of the closet. How are IaaS providers positioning to capture fair share of growing market opportunity?
I
aaS markets are alive in Canada, but are they well? Analyst firms have predicted a healthy uptake of infrastructure-as-a-service for the coming year. Gartner, for example, has estimated that in 2013, the public cloud services market will grow 18.5% to total $131 billion worldwide, while the fastest growing segment, IaaS will grow at a whopping rate of 47.3% to $9 billion (Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 20112016, 4Q12 Update). And if cloud accounts for a relatively small portion of the total infrastructure market (together IaaS and PaaS account for 15%), Gartner forecasts much faster growth for this segment than the whole. Meanwhile, back in Canada, anticipated increases in demand for IaaS has translated over the past year into the construction of new capacity for delivery of cloud, and the launch of new infrastructure offerings by a number of local players. But darkening this bright horizon is the elephant in the closet - a lumbering beast that established early market presence and continues to dominate the market for IaaS. Amazon, according to The Synergy Research Group, accounted for 36% of global IaaS markets in the fourth quarter of 2012, followed at a distant, distant distance by IBM with 6% market share and British Telecom with 4%. Gravity towards adoption of Amazon Web Services is especially marked within the SaaS community. In Canadian cloudfingr research into the behaviours of 250 cloud providers, IT Market Dynamics has discovered that approximately half of 150 SaaS companies maintain their own servers, and half contract out their infrastructure requirements: of the latter, ap6 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
proximately 70% are identified as Amazon customers. So while IaaS markets are expanding, a key question for Canadian infrastructure providers is how to claim a respectable share of growing Iaas demand. To avoid the commoditization of service delivery that often emerges in competitive environments where a low cost standard has been established (set in this case by Amazon), most providers have set their sights on the creation of upmarket, value-added infrastructure services targeted at a traditional customer the enterprise. Within this framework, IaaS providers operating in Canada have evolved several differentiation tactics, some of which are described below.
Tailored track As of the earliest vendors to launch public IaaS, IBM invested heavily ($42 million) back in March 2011 in a Canadian a multitenant offering that was initially reserved to IBM enterprise customers (typically for test/ dev). This past October, IBM announced a formal channel strategy around enabling MSPs who would source IBM infrastructure, and add value to its cloud utility with new niche or complimentary services. IBM also provides colocation services for enterprise customers, including RackForce Networks, a Kelowna B.C. provider of green hybrid cloud and hosting services that opened a second Toronto service delivery centre this April in IBM’s new Barrie, Ontario, facility. The new delivery centre is a response to 100% growth in Ontario demand over 2012 for its infrastructure services, which RackForce VP, Brian Fry attributed to challenges in building private cloud. According to Fry, RackForce services (unlike Amazon’s, which cater to the developer
or ISV communities) are designed to address the needs of large enterprise IT departments for production environments: “over 70% of what we deliver is mission critical,” and “outside the scope of customers’ IT capabilities.” Much of recent growth, he claimed, “comes from customer need for expertise to deliver a very complex cloud solution,” which IBM recognizes in RackForce when it refers customers to the service provider. “Our relationship with IBM is quite unique,” Fry explained: “when their cloud won’t suit the requirement, then they typically will bring the opportunity to us. Their cloud is a fairly narrow, specific design; it’s more like SaaS delivery of IBM cloud software. But in many cases, there are customers that want a customized, complex, mission critical cloud service, and that’s when we work with IBM.” Outlining the source of RackForce ‘expertise’, Fry cited the company’s early experience in the hosting service provider industry (back in the early 2000s), precocious adoption of virtualization and knowledge of the networking/carrier requirements.
Location, location, location Taking a page from IBM’s lead, a number of providers have built capacity over the past couple of years to service the needs of enterprise customers with local data residency requirements - both perceived and real. This includes new global players, such as CSC which launched a Canadian cloud last April, as well as more established regional players, such as CentriLogic or Savvis, which both entered the Canadian market back in 2010. Recently, CentriLogic put a new twist on data sovereignty requirements with its international multi-zone Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud offering which enables customers to launch VM instances in any zone (across
services, “traction has been “good” Dutta explained, due to pent up demand from existing Canadian colo customers, but also from the rest of the world: the Canadian operation has been able to connect with global Savvis clients who require services in Canada, as well as Canadian businesses that are growing with their own branches abroad, finding in the Canadian location a source of unanticipated opportunity.
“OVER 70% OF WHAT WE DELIVER IS MISSION CRITICAL,” AND “OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF CUSTOMERS’ IT CAPABILITIES.” — Brian Fry, VP, RackForce Networks
the company’s U.S. and Canadian clouds) at any time, while keeping the zone in which each instance runs consistent. According to CentriLogic VP Jim Latimer, “VM instances and associated data never cross zones without the customer specifically directing the move... This means Canadian customers always know in which zone their virtual machines and data reside.” The company’s location-based offering are also known in Canada as “privacy zones” - referencing the way CentriLogic’s solution has addressed concerns arising from differences in crossborder privacy legislation. Missouri-based Savvis has also demonstrated its commitment to investment in Canada and now operates three data centres in Mississauga, Montreal and Vancouver. According to Bik Dutta, director of market development, Savvis Canada, part of Savvis’ recent $20M investment in the ‘Toronto’ data centre was devoted to implementation of the “standard Savvis kit” (infrastructure technology and range of offerings) so that a Canadian customer would receive the same services in Canada as in the U.S. or London or Asia Pacific. In addition, to address data sovereignty requirements, the Toronto site was also designated as one of six Savvis global cloud centres, from which the company delivers its virtual private data centre and Symphony cloud storage offerings. Since launch of the Canadian cloud infrastructure
Differentiating by design As a part of a global organization, Savvis Canada is also able to rely in cloud development on the substantial R&D efforts of its parent. As Reed Smith, Savvis director, cloud business strategy, explained, the company conducts substantial research into new “up and coming” vendors, incorporating the best emerging technologies once they have reached maturity, and engages in continuous functional update that is automatically passed on to customers via the cloud model. For domestic provider, Q9 Networks, the goal of design efforts is reliability. Describing the company’s value proposition, Q9 CEO Osama Arafat noted, “all of our products and services are optimized first, second and third for reliability because of the type of customer that we are focusing on. The mid and large enterprises have mission critical computing systems that run multi-million dollar businesses and they demand the highest levels of reliability.” Q9 SLAs guar-
“THE CANADIAN OPERATION HAS BEEN ABLE TO CONNECT WITH GLOBAL SAVVIS CLIENTS WHO REQUIRE SERVICES IN CANADA” — Bik Dutta, director, market development, Savvis Canada
ON IAAS
TECHNOSPECTIVE
antee 100% network and power availability, a feat that is achieved through redundancy in individual data centre components and manufacturers: as Arafat explained, “we have a lot of manufacturer diversity to make our network, our electrical systems and our HVAC systems much more resilient. We don’t just have two or three or five of each component, but rather two or three or five manufacturers of each component.” Q9 also features a unique selling model where customers are billed according to reserved power usage, with racks, space and cooling custom fit for power requirements, a design approach aimed at ensuring a precise match of compute density requirements and infrastructure resources.
The network’s the thing For Vancouver-based PEER 1, the key to delivery of enterprise-class cloud services lies in building out the required infrastructure. This April the company launched a Mission Critical Cloud based on the Tier 3 technology (a VMware platform) that boasts built-in DR, advanced security and high availability, features that depend on investments in data centre and communications. Over the past two years, PEER 1 has added new facilities in Toronto and the U.K. to its data centre contingent, and has built its business on the ownership and long-term management (10 years) of its own high performance, intelligent 10Gbps FastFiber Network – 25,000 miles of fibre that connects 20 data centres across Europe and North America. Dedicated for customer use only, this network resolves one of the key challenges in cloud – the need for fast, reliable data transfer – delivering the speed, resilience and redundancy that act as a competitive differentiator for PEER 1. TELUS also lays claim to advanced network capabilities, as well as long-term experience in the development of IT infrastructure designed to support its communications business. TELUS has also been in the managed IT space for several decades, “offering cloud services before the term was even coined,” Adi Kabazo, manager, products & services, cloud & hosted services at TELUS claimed. Over the past five years, Kabazo has witnessed steady growth in company acceptance of cloud models, May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 7
TECHNOSPECTIVE
ON IAAS
“ALL OF OUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES ARE OPTIMIZED FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD FOR RELIABILITY BECAUSE OF THE TYPE OF CUSTOMER THAT WE ARE FOCUSING ON” — Osama Arafat, CEO, Q9 Networks
and more recent customer willingness to place certain workloads in on-demand, self-service multi-tenant infrastructure compute and storage service environments and in virtual networking. According to Kabazo, the shift away from use of dedicated resources towards use of virtualized, multi-tenant cloud is close to complete, as it is now “the default option” for most customers. To support growth, TELUS has been building capacity (with recent launch of Super Internet Data Centres in Rimouski and Kamloops) and now boasts 275,000 square feet of data centre capacity to meet the company’s communications delivery needs, which are increasing IT based, as well as the voice and data needs of consumer and business customers. TELUS IaaS is typically delivered out of its Internet Data Centres which feature shared/ virtual platforms and “highly redundant network connections through our backbone link,” cross-site redundancy and Tier 3 Uptime certification. At the baseline, its IaaS service has been designed for availability and segregation of customer resources, but depending on customer skill and compute needs scales to cover a variety of services up to management of the operating system, virtual networking and communications/ collaboration applications. “We offer every8 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
thing from very simple web servers to really highly clustered systems and between those two edges of the spectrum there’s a solution for everyone.” The goal of this breadth of TELUS offerings is to service customers of all sizes, but also to ease transition to cloud. As Kabazo explained, “we’re really designed to complement the IT organization, to provide them with another option. We’re not looking to force anyone to rip and replace their IT infrastructure, or do a wholesale outsource or complete transition to a remote facility.” Cloud adoption is also easier, he claimed, due to the fact that TELUS does not use proprietary technologies. “We are not a vendor,” Kabazo proclaimed, and will use whatever commercial grade technology (including open source) is required to build a reliable service. And we can support customer management of multiple hypervisors or operating systems (provided they run on x86) on our infrastructure - on the Agility private cloud, for example.”
Strength in numbers This competitive differentiation in enterprise markets appears to be based on two assumptions: that Amazon Web Services is a stationary target and that the company’s client base is largely restricted to small business, ISVs and developers. Ongoing pricing reductions, however, combined with the
“THE SHIFT AWAY FROM USE OF DEDICATED RESOURCES TOWARDS USE OF VIRTUALIZED” — Adi Kabazo, manager, products & services, cloud & hosted services, TELUS
layering on of enterprise class services such as the CloudHSM security service (which was reportedly launched this spring to support an upcoming Amazon contract with the CIA) or Virtual Private Cloud and the onboarding of enterprise sales staff suggest that Amazon is more moving target. Another tactic in the war on Amazon that is attracting attention from infrastructure providers is the adoption of open source to gain market share by feeding customer demand for cloud portability. With its public embrace of the OpenStack platform this March, IBM joined a growing Foundation that includes the likes of cloud vendors HP, Dell, Cisco, Rackspace and Red Hat, while Microsoft this April included support for Linux in its now publically available IaaS capabilities. For its part, private cloud specialist VMware, recently announced a collaboration with Canonical’s Ubuntu cloud infrastructure involving the creation of plugins needed to use OpenStack with vSphere, building on its support for the Quantum OpenStack networking project offered through the open source Nicira NVP acquired last year. This shift is building at the next tier as well through programs developed by major vendors such as Red Hat, which recently announced an OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network to help develop an ecosystem around OpenStack distribution. And it is advancing back in Canada as well - the Montreal-based IaaS provider iWeb’s new membership in the OpenStack Foundation’s partner program for third-party commercial providers is just one example. Among the providers highlighted here, the approach has been cautious, through interest is growing. While Savvis remains comfortable with the vSphere platform due to strong VMware market share among its customer base, it is now testing OpenStack, Cloud Stack, Eucalyptus and Red Hat. And while CentriLogic has built its clouds on the Xen platform, other providers including Q9, TELUS and PEER 1 pointed to hosting offerings that would support customers with multiple hypervisors or operating systems as well as their intent to keep an eye open source adoption. As RackForce SVP Brian Fry explained, “It’s not that difficult for us to adopt OpenStack if the market is shifting that way. We have invested heavily in cloud so we are ready for it and we’re watching.” Will watching be enough? As they say, “timing is everything.”
By Kevin Priddle
IAAS
CASE STUDY
Building in the cloud Migrating to an IaaS platform like Amazon Web Service can help save both time and money. Shaw Media is a division of Shaw Communications that operates the Global Television network via 11 regional stations across Canada, as well as 18 other popular specialty channels including HGTV Canada, Mystery TV, National Geographic, Showcase, History, Food Network Canada and TVtropolis. In addition to its conventional TV networks, Shaw Media also operates more than 20 multi-media websites, four dedicated video-on-demand channels and a number of mobile applications. Augusto Rosa, Shaw Media’s manager of server operations, joined the company shortly after its founding in 2010 (through the acquisition of Canadian broadcaster Canwest, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009) and was given the task of implementing a new content management system (CMS) and infrastructure to manage the growing technical complexities that faced the company.
Business challenges “Shaw Media had gone through some acquisitions and there was this huge disarray,” Rosa said in an interview with IT in Canada. “We had one data centre here [in Toronto] and another data centre [in Winnipeg] that were a challenge to manage.” Frequent power outages and hours of downtime, as well as expensive hosting fees associated with the old CMS were among the main challenges faced by Shaw Media after its creation, according to Rosa. The solution? Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
An IaaS partner emerges In an effort to consolidate data centre operations and deal with of the downtime and cost challenges, Rosa and his team turned
Augusto Rosa, manager of server operations, Shaw Media
to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and began migrating Shaw Media’s infrastructure and CMS into the cloud. “We use a broad range services from Amazon. Two years ago we started and we moved into EC2 – the public cloud,” Rosa said. “Essentially, it only took us four weeks to have the first website live in production.” The team then began a full migration of Shaw Media’s 29 websites and related web services using AWS, which took a mere nine months. “We moved those 29 sites in nine months,” Rosa said. “That is a full redesign to a new CMS and full-on new infrastructure… and to be honest the majority of that time was not spent on the infrastructure.” In total Shaw Media is now using over 10 AWS solutions including Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudFormation, Amazon SQS, Amazon Route 53, Amazon VPC, Amazon EBS, and Amazon S3.
Benefits and lessons learned “Infrastructure-as-a-Service is a cloud computing infrastructure that lets you have full
control over the OS stack up,” Rosa said. “What’s great about cloud computing is the speed to market [and] how nimble you are. You save on capital and operational costs [and] a lot of time is saved because you need smaller teams.” Before migrating to AWS, Shaw Media experienced about 10 to 20 hours of downtime a month, according to Rosa. With AWS, downtime issues have been significantly reduced and between January 2011 and May 2012 the organization’s average uptime increased rapidly from 98.8% to 99.9% without re-architecting applications. AWS also helped make it possible for Shaw Media to implement a disaster recovery plan for a fraction of the cost of operating an on-premise data centre. “We have never been down for more than an hour,” Rosa said. “[And] our backup costs are less than $4,000 a month.” Looking to the future, Rosa said he is championing the use of AWS for additional purposes across the corporation and offered some words of advice for other IT managers that might be looking to leverage the platform: • Build for the cloud: “You really have to plan for failures. To some extent you have to be crazy about it. You have to assume things are going to fail because it’s not a physical environment.” • Backup is important: “I can not stress this enough – back up, back up, back up. Back up in multiple ways because you never know what is going to happen. We have triple copies of almost everything.” • Engage AWS solution architects: “People should really engage their solution architects very early in the process. It’s free.” May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 9
CASE STUDIES
By Rachel Levy Sarfin
Cloud app
streamlines event planning Event planners give high marks to the Brookstreet Hotel for deploying Benbria’s cloud solution.
Nyle Kelly, operations director, Brookstreet Hotel
Background Ottawa’s Brookstreet Hotel opened its doors eleven years ago. In addition to hosting guests, the 18-storey structure houses a banquet hall for events. The Brookstreet Hotel currently employs 180 staff, 30 of whom work in the banquet hall. Since opening, the hotel has won awards nearly every year for the quality of its food and service. Brookstreet Hotel hosts approximately 1,000 events per year, in gatherings of ten people to affairs with 500 guests. The hotel works with external event planners, who communicated with Brookstreet Hotel banquet staff by either house or cordless phone, even during an event. This approach had limitations: there was no way to track event planner’s requests or whether they had been fulfilled.
The solution The Brookstreet Hotel searched for a way to ensure effective communication between external event planners and banquet hall employees. Whatever the hotel chose to implement had to be simple and easy to use for everyone. Nyle Kelly, operations 10 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
director, the Brookstreet Hotel, noted that the hotel was already using a real time guest feedback program from Ottawa-based SaaS solutions provider Benbria. Benbria introduced the Brookstreet Hotel to BlazeLoop Event Engagement, its cloud application to streamline the event planning process. Kelly explained that he and his colleagues were attracted to the solution because it allowed them to log and track event planner requests, which they had been unable to do when the planners placed orders over the phone. BlazeLoop Event Engagement lets event planners and banquet hall or conference facility employees communicate with each other quickly and effectively. Through the application, event planners can place orders for food and beverages, make requests regarding the meeting room, such as how to set it up, ask for audio visual equipment or any other miscellaneous needs that might come up during the course of an event. BlazeLoop Event Engagement then alerts facility staff that the event planner made a request, and they can record that the order has been fulfilled. Kelly and his colleagues met with Benbria to discuss the hotel’s needs. Benbria’s development team created a branded web portal for event planners and the hotel’s banquet staff. Kelly added that Benbria tailored BlazeLoop Event Engagement to the Brookstreet Hotel’s requirements. The process of customizing and implementing the application took approximately four weeks. Kelly described BlazeLoop Event Engagement as “user friendly,” noting that event planners can easily create profiles in the application.
The Brookstreet Hotel’s operations director admitted that he and his colleague developed some hard won knowledge during the implementation process. “We had to go back to make changes to the system as we learned how to use it,” he said. While they thought that certain customizations would work well during the planning stage, this was not always the case in practice. “Sometimes, something is a good idea on paper,” Kelly observed. “It doesn’t work in real life.”
Business benefits Kelly credited BlazeLoop Event Engagement with improving event coordination at the hotel. “The software increases transparency,” he said. Event planners no longer have to wonder whether their requests will be fulfilled, and banquet staff can see exactly what event planners want. If an order is unclear, banquet staff can send a message to the event planner to ask for clarification. Unlike a telephone conversation, requests made through BlazeLoop Event Engagement are tracked. As a result, “fewer things slip through the cracks,” Kelly remarked. Deploying BlazeLoop Event Engagement at the Brookstreet Hotel has also had a positive effect on the facility’s relationship with event planners. “We’re seeing a better response to meeting planner feedback,” he noted. Satisfied event planners could lead to an uptick in event business for the Brookstreet Hotel. Although Kelly believes it is too soon to tell exactly what the result on the hotel’s bottom line will be, he believes that BlazeLoop Event Engagement has had “a big impact,” even though only a few of the Brookstreet’s employees use it.
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The right candidates. The right opportunities.
VENDOR PERSPECTIVE
SMB
Business Management:
By Kevin Priddle
A Q&A WITH MICROSOFT’S TOM PLEWNIAK
IT in Canada recently caught up with Microsoft Canada’s Tom Plewniak to learn more about how small and medium businesses (SMBs) can leverage ERP solutions likes Microsoft Dynamics to better manage their business and customers. Read through the Q&A below to see what insight Plewniak offers for SMB owners and CIOs. IT in Canada: What new trends and developments in business management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are coming in 2013? Tom Plewniak: There are four key trends we see in 2013. People -- There is always a new generation entering the workforce – but now, for the first time, that new generation is one 12 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
that has grown up always connected and always on-line. They enter the workforce approaching technology with new attitudes and new expectations. This both demands evolution from business software, and enables new scenarios. Economy -- In early 2013 we are observing many signs of recovery from the adverse economic events of 2009. Situations vary in different geographies, but the Canadian
VENDOR PERSPECTIVE
Conti
business. This helps to focus on the most profitable customers, improving processes, thus increasing margins and ultimately driving growth.
IT in Canada: What business management and ERP solutions does Microsoft offer to the SMB space and why are they a good fit for small businesses? Tom Plewniak: Both Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics NAV provide outof-the-box business management functionality specific for SMBs. These solutions come with capabilities for financial management, manufacturing and supply chain management, business intelligence and reporting and much more. They are also designed to get up and running in days rather than weeks. economy is very strong. Still, some impacts appear far more permanent – defining a new economic reality or a “new normal.” This has implications on how SMB’s are approaching ERP projects, expecting quicker implementations and lower TCO. Technology -- The cloud is emerging as the most significant technology shift in a generation. Beyond running today’s applications in a new way, the cloud is enabling a set of business solutions that were previously impractical at best. Connected supply chains, powered by cloud hubs, are changing the way many businesses operate. The role of the cloud will be different for every business, but it is likely to drive significant change across nearly every industry Geopolitics -- As business becomes increasingly global, changing geopolitical conditions such as policy, regulation and energy costs must be rapidly understood and factored into operational strategies. Disruptions in one part of the world can ripple quickly through connected supply chains. This has been true for Enterprise companies for a long time, by now most SMBs are fully affected by this as well.
IT in Canada: How have the SMB buyer and the SMB market changed over the past few years?
Tom Plewniak: SMBs are the backbone of the Canadian economy. We’ve seen many of them thrive in the last few years, become more successful and outgrow their entrylevel accounting systems. They are still asking for comprehensive solutions, but since they’ve experienced so much change in the past few years they know that nothing is permanent. So they are less focused on a set of pre-defined functionality, but rather look at a system’s flexibility. How future-proof is this? Also, they became more cost-conscious. Time to value is now an essential component of any investment – shortening the time between initial expense and positive economic benefits returned to the business is critical.
IT in Canada: Why are business management and ERP solutions and important technology for SMBs? If an organization isn’t leveraging these kinds of solutions why should they? Tom Plewniak: Business Solutions deliver comprehensive business management functionality for small and midsize businesses. It’s a combination of business intelligence, collaboration and communication tools that connect many moving parts of an organization, providing better visibility into and control over what’s going on in the
IT in Canada: What is your strategy for successfully designing solutions for the SMB market? Tom Plewniak: Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions focus on the people that make things happen in an organization. People garner insight from business applications to drive decisions that advance the organization. People manage relationships internally and externally to drive relevant actions forward.
“THE CLOUD IS EMERGING AS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT TECHNOLOGY SHIFT IN A GENERATION. BEYOND RUNNING TODAY’S APPLICATIONS IN A NEW WAY, THE CLOUD IS ENABLING A SET OF BUSINESS SOLUTIONS THAT WERE PREVIOUSLY IMPRACTICAL AT BEST. ”
May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 13
VENDOR PERSPECTIVE
IT in Canada: What is the future direction of the product? Tom Plewniak: In 2013, we plan to release
“ANOTHER BIG FOCUS AREAS IS CONNECTING ORGANIZATIONS, AS WE BELIEVE THAT BETTER INFORMED PEOPLE MAKE BETTER DECISIONS. TODAY’S SOCIAL CONNECTEDNESS, MOBILE DEVICES, AND GROWING OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTERACTION “ANY TIME ANY PLACE” HAVE CHANGED THE WAY MANY LIVE AND WORK.”
Microsoft Dynamics NAV “8”. The following year, we plan to release Microsoft Dynamics GP “14”. We will focus on driving down the costs of both on premises deployment and cloud deployment. As well as enhance the compelling core functionality in our ERP solutions. In addition we will align those solutions with new product releases across the Microsoft product portfolio including Windows, Windows Server, and SQL Server. Our ambitions for Microsoft Dynamics extend well into the future. We will continue to ensure that Microsoft Dynamics has the appearance and behavior of other Microsoft products and works with Microsoft products and online services. We will continue to drive simplicity, value, and agility into all that we do. Our success relies on our ability to help our customers become a dynamic business.
IT in Canada: What advice would you offer an SMB CIO or IT manager to help them more efficiently and cost-effectively manage their business organization? Tom Plewniak: Stop seeing technology as just
The most successful businesses are powered by individuals who are contributing fully, able to make a difference, and committed to their company’s success. Microsoft can help individuals – and organizations – realize their full potential and drive significant impact by offering an end-to-end business solution that is flexible and easy to use. Our solutions use a role-tailored concept, meaning that the start screen and the information displayed differs whether a sales manager, an HR executive, the CEO or an order processor logs on. It will show personalized tasks and activities that need to be performed, and helps everybody focus on what’s relevant and get the job done. Another big focus areas is connecting organizations, as we believe that better informed people make better decisions. Today’s social connectedness, mobile devices, 14 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
and growing opportunities for interaction “any time any place” have changed the way many live and work. People are increasingly dependent on connections across the global network. Modern business solutions not only connect people inside and outside the organization, they also give them context and insight which drives better decisions and boosts productivity. An important part of Microsoft’s mission is to drive connections with people, with customers and with business partners across processes, data and the ecosystem in which organizations operate. This commitment to connected organizations includes our vision of anywhere, in-context collaboration services that links people and companies to the right people in the right place, in the right context, at the right time, across multiple avenues of communications.
about better and better transactional efficiency. It can actually help a business transform. CIOs know how fast today’s business moves. It’s their job to stay ahead of it. Retail, Logistics, Manufacturing, the Cloud. They need to turn technology into dollars, drive revenue for the business. The modern CIO will have to combine business and IT leadership. Impress the business by showcasing areas where you go from rationalizing IT investment or realizing business value to actually leading the business. For example, through an ERP application’s simplified lifecycle you could help the business simplify and speedup international or cross-company business processes. An acquisition could thus be integrated it a much faster timeframe and the business would realize benefits sooner than ever.
Do your sales reps spend more time looking for special pricing approvals than talking to customers? Is your purchasing team struggling to keep up with requests to validate pricing and discounts?
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SPOTLIGHT ON
By Mary Allen
Watson for everybody IBM has transformed Watson of Jeopardy! fame into a commercial solution to support customer service engagement
T
he cognitive computing power of IBM’s Watson technology broke into popular consciousness with Watson’s challenge – and ultimate win – over champions of the Jeopardy! TV quiz show last spring. The Watson win provided compelling demonstration of IBM’s development of massive parallel computing capacity, but also of its research into natural language processing, or a computer’s ability to understand and process the language humans speak to each other. Successful Jeopardy! contestants require an eclectic and encyclopaedic knowledge of human culture and science, the ability to draw conclusions from different contexts, as well as the dexterity to reshape answers in the form of a question – capabilities that elude most binary-logic computer languages. At the end of May, IBM nudged this research platform a step closer to commercial distribution with launch of a Watson hardware/software optimized solution designed
16 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
to support customer service and customer engagement. At the Smarter Commerce Summit 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee, IBM announced the Watson Engagement Advisor, a powerful analytics engine designed to help customer-facing staff, primarily in call centres, and consumers with real time, data-driven answers to service inquiries. Delivered as an appliance, or as a cloudbased subscription, the Advisor assists either customer service agents or consumers who can access Watson analytics via their mobile devices for answers to questions, feedback on purchase decisions, or for troubleshooting. It is this self-service, “Ask Watson” consumer feature that has the solution dubbed, “Watson for everybody.” Solution buyers, on the other hand, are likely to hail from a more select group. According to Manoj Saxena, GM of Watson Solutions, depending on the solution, required resources, number of
regions and users, the Advisor subscription fee will range from $200,000 - $500,000 per month. So far, the solution is being piloted by large brands from a number of industries, including the ANZ Banking Group, Celcom, HIS, Nielson and the Royal Bank of Canada, representing hundreds of thousands of end users. The Watson Engagement Advisor forms part of IBM’s three-year-old Smarter Commerce initiative, a division of IBM devoted to helping ecommerce customers take advantage of cloud, mobile and social trends. According to IBM, a primary challenge for today’s brands is how to manage the consumer expectations that these technologies have wrought. The ‘digital consumer,’ in IBM’s schema, demands recognition of his/ her individuality (preferences, contact history, social networks) as well as delivery of personalized products and services. To build brand in this environment of heightened expectations, vendors must improve customer experience through faster, more accurate and personalized interactions. Watson, in IBM’s view, is an apt solution to address these challenges: with its powerful processing capabilities, the solution can quickly sift through massive amounts of structured and unstructured Big Data to find the right information to tailor custom-
SPOTLIGHT ON
Manoj Saxena, general manager, IBM Watson Solutions, IBM
er responses; through analysis of customer and social data it can identify requirements or even offer predictive product/service suggestions based on trend analysis; and with its natural language capabilities, the Watson platform provides easy and direct agent or consumer access to these insights. While a good deal of the information that customers are likely to mine with the Watson solution resides in the call centre (customer preferences, trouble tickets, etc.), IBM is positioning the Engagement Advisor as a broader, cross-industry solution. Saxena explained, “The way we are building Watson is not just one channel. Other channels could be mobile, web or ATM. So Watson will work not just on call centre data, but on all types of data, including product manuals, online support forums, call centre notes, product literature, Tweets, emails... The Watson corpus comes from all these sources.”
“IN WHAT INDUSTRIES DOES SAXENA BELIEVE INFORMATION LIQUIDITY PLAY A KEY ROLE, AND WHERE ARE POTENTIAL WATSON USE CASES BASED ON THE GENERATION AND SHARING OF VAST AMOUNTS OF CUSTOMER INFORMATION THROUGH VARIOUS MEDIA?” The technology has also been built to integrate with other products such as IBM’s TeaLeaf or Unica as well as API-based CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM, assuming, Saxena noted, “there is a way for us to get to that data using IBM middleware and integration technologies. We would like Watson to integrate as much as possible, and sit like a fabric on top of other systems.” Since Watson’s television debut, IBM has worked to develop application of the technology to different, data-intensive industries. In March 2012, the company announced formation of the Watson Healthcare Advisory Board and formed agreement with Citi to explore the use of Watson in financial services. IBM also partnered with organizations, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the Cleveland Clinic, the University of Rochester and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to test Watson capabilities, and in February of this year, announced with WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering the first market solutions for healthcare. Over this time, the company has also managed significant performance enhancements, while shrinking the original Jeopardy! Watson down to size to prepare for commercial deployment. The Watson of today boasts a 240% improvement in system performance over its progenitor and a 75% reduction in physical requirements: the solution can now be run on a single Power 750 server using Linux. As Saxena explained, while the CPU utilization in the Jeopardy! system was approximately 15%, Watson now operates 16 cores (original system had 2,880 cores) with a 65% utiliza-
tion rate. To achieve these improvements, IBM researchers have introduced serialization and enhanced session and thread management to drive better performance. The solution, he added, is based on a “sprayer-type architecture, so if you spray on additional data, it will pull in additional ‘baby Watsons’ [resources] to enable scale on demand, making it an ideal deployment for cloud computing.” Saxena described Watson’s current capabilities as the “first generation of cognitive systems. Watson today represents 10% of what cognitive systems will come to represent in the next ten years.” Going forward, IBM intends to build on Watson’s ability to read and understand text and tables by developing cognitive capacity to read and interpret images and video, and to enable self-learning and perceptual capabilities. IBM also plans to explore Watson solutions for additional, information-intensive verticals, including electronics, energy/ utilities, government, insurance, oil and gas, retail, transportation, telecommunications and financial services. Or in Jeopardy! parlance, “In what industries does Saxena believe information liquidity play a key role, and where are potential Watson use cases based on the generation and sharing of vast amounts of customer information through various media?” The interesting question, of course, which will provide necessary context and insight into Watson’s commercial viability, is “How quickly will the Engagement Advisor be adopted, and what impact will this have on progress of the next vertical solution?” Stay tuned... May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 17
SPOTLIGHT ON
Cisco evolves open cloud vision
Building on intelligent networking, Cisco has outlined a strategy that relies on OpenStack networking support and SDN to create the application-driven cloud
18 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
By Mary Allen
C
isco’s Lew Tucker recently beamed in via TelePresence to sketch out the evolution of the company’s cloud strategy. In a word, Cisco is ‘open’ for cloud business. With support for multiple hypervisors and orchestration, and programmable APIs that support OpenStack for its networking gear, Cisco has embraced the open source movement with the enthusiasm that is typical of many Cisco projects. Tucker was brought into the Cisco fold back in 2010 as Cloud CTO with a mandate to manage the development of cloud solutions across multiple Cisco business units. Drawing on experience with the design of large, scalable open architectures, (as Cloud CTO at Sun Microsystems, he worked on development of the Sun Cloud), his aim was to make the company “even more open” to help Cisco prepare for the coming cloud storm. Currently, Tucker is a sitting board member of the OpenStack Foundation, an open source software project for building highly scalable public and private clouds initiated by Rackspace in 2010, which includes many industry competitors that, Tucker claims, have decided to work together in recognition of the mutual benefit cooperation can bring. Since Cisco joined in February 2011, it has provided considerable support to the Foundation, contributing expertise and code to the Quantum open Network-as-a-Service project. So what is driving this open momentum? According to Tucker, “it’s all about giving customers choice,” about meeting the expressed demand of businesses to avoid vendor lock-in. Cisco is not alone in this evaluation of market direction. The past couple of years have witnessed launch of a number of open source initiatives (the Open
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SPOTLIGHT ON
Lew Tucker, VP and CTO, cloud computing, Cisco
IN TUCKER’S VIEW, HOWEVER, THESE MEGA TRENDS ARE ALSO DRIVING “A VIRTUOUS CIRCLE OF INNOVATION,” THE AIM OF WHICH IS AUTOMATION, SCALE AND CONTROL BY APPLICATIONS OF DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CREATION OF “’AS-A-SERVICE’ EVERYTHINGS” WHICH IS BEST ACHIEVED THROUGH OPEN SOURCE CROWDSOURCED DEVELOPMENT. Data Centre Alliance, for example, was established in 2010 to promote interoperability in the cloud/data centre ecosystem to encourage cloud adoption), swelling of their ranks (the OpenStack Foundation now boasts 185 members), participation by many less likely candidates (Microsoft has contributed open source code for Azure) as well as the more likely, most notably IBM, which announced commitment to the Linux operating system back in 1999, and more recently announced its intent to build cloud offerings on an open platform. Grow20 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
ing commercial user adoption - outside the university community and inside the enterprise data centre – means that this open movement has edged into the sweet spot for Cisco’s cloud-building UCS platform. But Cisco’s strategy, as Tucker explained it, is about more than blind faith in landing a foot in multiple market camps: it is about establishing platforms for innovation that will solve some of the issues that continue to dog data centre operations, while addressing some of the trends that are putting increasing pressure on the network. Big Data, including the video component, the explosion in device connection that is anticipated for 2020 (50 billion by Cisco’s count), high levels of server virtualization (71% by 2016) and the increasing deployment of enterprise apps in the cloud (80% in 2012) are oft-cited challenges that are no less critical for their familiarity. In Tucker’s view, however, these mega trends are also driving “a virtuous circle of innovation,” the aim of which is automation, scale and control by applications of data centre infrastructure and the creation of “’as-aservice’ everythings” which is best achieved through open source crowdsourced development. The ultimate goal is a platform for building cloud-based applications that includes developer APIs for software management of each component in the data centre - compute, storage, networking, identity/authentication and the VM image catalogue - that Tucker described with the loaded term “operating system.” On the networking front, the challenge has been to build intelligent systems that can match the increasingly dynamic nature of virtualized workloads to deliver on the promise of cloud agility. This is something that Cisco has been at for some time with development its Nexus series of intelligent switches and routers (NX-OS) and FabricPath, networking fabric designed to address the connectivity demands of increasing east-west and north-south server traffic. According to Tucker, use of “spine and
leaf” networking fabric is on the rise, as is the need for better management which is especially critical in hyper scale data centre environments that are in “continuous deployment mode” due to shorter VM lifespans. In the Cisco schema, the answer to this need for better management is ‘programmable’ networking infrastructure, or the Open Network Environment, which consists of three elements: the One Platform kit, or programmic APIs for network hardware - a Quantum plug-in; Controller software for SDN; and virtual overlays or tunnelling with multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud, multi-service and OpenStack support. The Open Network Environment has been designed to help customers with heterogeneous environments through support for OpenStack. But the platform owes much to Cisco work on the creation of intelligent networking. As Dino Marasco, Cisco Canada VP, data centre and cloud infrastructure sales, noted, data gathered from intelligent switching serves as a key “information feed” to applications to enable SDN. SDN is achieved through OpenFlow, an open standard that effectively separates fast packet forwarding (data path) from the high level routing decisions, leaving the control path on a separate server - the Controller software in Cisco’s case. The result of this two-way communication between the switch and controller, according to Marasco, is “better decision making” at the application control layer, which relies on raw packet traffic information in addition to other architectural considerations. At this level, the reciprocal nature of OpenStack engagement is clear: while Cisco SDN is built on the OpenFlow protocol, third-party access and control of Cisco networking hardware is a novel proposition in its own right. But what of vendor competition in this age of code sharing? According to Tucker, the proof is in the pudding - or in the implementation, a contest that Cisco intends to lead.
CASE STUDY
By Kevin Priddle
Stratocast: from PaaS to VSaaS Genetec is targeting the SMB IP security space with a new cloud-based Video Surveillance-as-a-Service (VSaaS) offering powered by Windows Azure
G
enetec is a Montreal-based provider of IP video surveillance, access control and license plate recognition solutions. Over the past 15 years the company has developed its expertise in building largescale, on-prem, enterprise-class systems for customers like airports, casinos, universities and government facilities. For example, one of Genetec’s largest customers currently manages over 150,000 video surveillance cameras on a single system. In June 2013, Genetec will change gears and focus on an entirely new type of customer – the SMB – with the launch of its brand new cloud-enabled Video Surveillance-as-a-Service (VSaaS) offering called Stratocast. The company has had its eye on ‘the cloud’ and bringing the capabilities of its enterprise-class unified physical security suite, Security Center, to the mid-market for the past few years, said Christian Morin, director of Genetec’s Stratocast product group, in an interview with IT in Canada. But the economics of it didn’t make sense until
more recently with dropping bandwidth and cloud computing costs. “Stratocast is a very big shift for Genetec,” Morin said. “The cloud is what makes it possible.” More specifically, it’s Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and infrastructure, Windows Azure, which has made Stratocast a possibility.
Powered by Windows Azure Launched in February 2010, the Windows Azure cloud application platform provides both Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services and supports a range of different programming languages, tools and frameworks for building, deploying and managing applications and services through Microsoft’s global network of data centres. When the Genetec team began work on the Stratocast solution over a year ago, they decided to take advantage of their longstanding relationship with Microsoft and leverage both the PaaS capabilities of Azure May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 21
CASE STUDY and the technical expertise of Microsoft. “Microsoft isn’t just a supplier of cloud,” said Morin. “Microsoft is really putting skin in the game and they’re really helping us build Stratocast. They’re helping, obviously, with the technology that they bring to the table, but also the access that we have to some of their experts to help us make the best use of Windows Azure.” In terms of Windows Azure features being leveraged in Stratocast, Morin said Genetec is making heavy use of SQL Azure, Blob storage, load balancing and CDN capabilities. He also they are using Azure Active Directory Access Control to allows users on the Stratocast platform to use their existing Microsoft, Yahoo or Google accounts for authentication and signing in. “If you make intelligent use of Azure you can actually shortcut some of your development,” he said. “It’s a great simplification for us.” “The idea with Platform-as-a-Service is not having to worry about the underlying operating system and keeping it patched and maintained or how it scales out,” David LeBlanc, product manager for Windows Azure at Microsoft, said in an interview. “[Customers] just need to focus on the application, which is so strategic to their business.”
Design and Delivery Development of Stratocast was started last year in June, a Beta version was released in February, and a Stratocast launch party was held at the ISC West security industry conference held in Las Vegas at the beginning of April. The first phase of the project focused on the video surveillance capabilities of Stratocast, while the next phase and future releases will add access control functionality (i.e. doors/locks that require a key card or biometric signature to gain access) to deliver a fully unified solution in the cloud for SMB customers. Morin said the main value of using the Azure platform has been the expertise and support provided by the Microsoft team, as well as the integrity and security of the Azure infrastructure. “It really allows us to extend our enterprise 22 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
Christian Morin, director, Stratocast product group, Genetec
offering,” Morin said. “For us, it’s a means to take all the great technology we’ve built through the years… and really make it available to people that typically wouldn’t be able to get access to such technology. It allows us to penetrate these new markets.” “Genetec is not a company that operates data centres,” he said. “By partnering with somebody like Microsoft it really gives us great credibility in the market.” Stratocast is set for release on June 3 in the initial launch markets of Canada, the U.S., Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Holland, with future expansion focused on Latin and South America. SMBs looking to leverage the VSaaS solution will be looking at entry-level prices of $7-$35 a month per IP camera.
Channel value-prop Because Genetec’s traditional channel partners are specialized security vendors that cater to large enterprise-size projects, the company has had to go in search of new resellers to partner with in the SMB space. “Most our channel partners today work on large scale security projects… and they don’t do a lot of small business,” Morin said. “Less than 5% of our channel partners are actually a good fit for Stratocast, so we have big channel recruitment activity.” Genetec is currently in talks with about 100 channel partners worldwide that range from existing security dealers that cater to SMBs and traditional IT VARs/systems integrators to Internet service providers (ISPs) looking to differentiate their service offerings.
Genetec is always looking for new partners to work with them on Stratocast, but Morin highlighted the fact that the company prefers forming strong relationships with a smaller tight-knit group of partners rather than “signing up everybody and their mother,” so to speak. “As we’re looking at our territory map, we’re really looking to ensure there’s as minimum amount of channel conflict as possible,” Morin said. “There’s always going to be channel conflict, but we try to minimize that.” Stratocast will be sold 100% through the channel worldwide and reseller partners will own and manage the end user relationship in terms of provisioning and installing the systems and invoicing/billing. “We do not want to place ourselves in between our channel partners and their customers,” Morin said. “The portal itself is built so that our channel partners are fully self-sufficient.” He also said that development team built Stratocast and its user interface the SMB and channel partner experience specifically in mind. “We are not only designing the product so that it is easy to use by our end user, but we’re putting a lot of energy into making it easy to use by our resellers,” Morin said. “This product was designed from the ground up to work with small and medium businesses, but it was also designed to be resold through channel partners.” In summary, Morin emphasized that Genetec doesn’t just see Stratocast as an ‘experiment’ and that the VSaaS solution is simply the company’s initial foray into the cloud – benefiting both end user customers and channel partners. “This is really a strategic initiative for Genetic,” he said. “We’re going to be investing quite heavily in the cloud and this is just our first step.”
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CASE STUDY
By Mary Allen
Timing is everything
IN CLOUD
Salt Technologies opted for Background: Technologies Inc. is a mobile paySavvis cloud as the best Salt ment platform provider with two lines currency to build out its of business: cloud-based merchant paye-payment platform. ment processing services, and brandable, mobile wallet technology that is currently in pilot mode with several key clients. Salt focuses on infrastructure solutions, primarily for customers in the carrier
24 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
space, which in Canada include TELUS and Mobilicity. Salt timing has been good. It has benefited from growing interest in ecommerce and mobile payments on the part of banks and carriers, and since founding five years ago has expanded from its original Toronto office location to San Francisco and now employs approximately 30 staff.
CASE STUDY
WITH 54 GLOBAL LOCATIONS INCLUDING THREE DATA CENTRES IN CANADA AND A FLAGSHIP CLOUD CENTRE IN MISSISSAUGA, SAVVIS COULD MEET SALT NEED TO REPLICATE ITS SOLUTION HERE AND ABROAD. SAVVIS ALSO OFFERED DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE IN THE FINANCIAL AND TELCO INDUSTRIES – “A GOOD FIT FOR WHAT WE WERE BRINGING TO MARKET,” — Jerry Bokser, VP, strategic alliances & channels, Salt Technologies, Inc.
The company’s cloud decision was also a matter of timing. As Jerry Bokser, Salt VP of strategic alliances & channels, explained, when its on-premise, Linuxbased applications and hardware reached end of lifecycle, Salt opted for cloud as a bet on future market expansion opportunities, with its mobile wallet solution in particular. The challenge of maintaining in-house IT staff, especially for advanced services that can be sources through a third party, was a third cloud driver. Salt was also attracted to the inherent benefits of cloud infrastructure, such as the ability to scale for seasonality, a requirement of many Salt customers.
Implementation: “Salt Technologies is new to cloud,” Bokser explained, having launched the first instance of its merchant services application on cloud infrastructure this April. It has also deployed on a relatively new offering – the Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Centre (VPDC) IaaS solution which was introduced into Canada last summer. In opting for the Savvis solution, Salt took into account customers’ data residency requirements as well as anticipated expansion. With 54 global locations including three data centres in Canada and a flagship cloud centre in Mississauga, Savvis could meet Salt need to replicate its solution here and abroad. Savvis also offered domain knowledge in the financial and telco indus-
tries – “a good fit for what we were bringing to market,” Bokser noted. Before mounting its software stack on Savvis infrastructure, Salt “had to go through a number of iterations of our internal software to ensure that it would work in a cloud environment,” Bokser explained. Salt had built some “hooks” into the software and as a result, has to use Maven build and Jenkins integrations tools to “self-contain some of the modules” before cloud deployment and to automate deployment across different environments. Salt also reviewed and updated policy and procedure on matters such as customer references, DR, passwords or access. A key pre-launch exercise involved PCI certification for the cloud-based solution. To achieve this payment card industry standard, Salt worked with a Quality Security Assessor who evaluated the structure of Salt’s end-to-end application stack, Salt’s deployment in the Savvis environment, the Savvis VPDC instance as well as documents verifying audits on Savvis data centres, including compliance verification from Visa on the physical security, managed firewall and NIDS control of its facilities. While PCI compliance remains a Salt responsibility, Savvis security subject matter experts advised on best practices, and the provider offers internal vulnerability scanning services that will help Salt meet ongoing scanning PCI requirements. A final implementation process involved
load testing to ensure that the Savvis environment was designed for optimal performance management of Salt’s current and future payment transaction load volumes. Today, Salt has a developer environment for software creation, a platform for “user acceptance” testing and a staging environment which are essentially on-premise; and the production environment which has launched on the Savvis cloud. It also maintains a legacy infrastructure for existing clients who will be migrated to cloud over the next three months. To manage business requirements and enable teams across two continents to work as a cohesive unit, Salt uses other cloud applications, including a RingCentral virtualized VoIP phone network, Salesforce.com and Office 365 for the delivery of email and business productivity.
Measuring benefits: Weighing the outlay required for update of on-premise infrastructure, Salt reckoned reinvestment would entail another “multi-year window that we would have to leverage those assets against.” In Bokser’s opinion, “timing was right to move to the cloud” in view of the company’s intent to develop new markets with it mobile wallet technology. Rather than invest in local implementation and ongoing maintenance, Salt has opted for the central management of deployed facilities that cloud uniquely can bring. May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 25
Q&A: BIG DATA
Big data
By Paul Crookall
drives value
If technology is the driver, then the management of information must be the outcome. Jill Dyché is vice-president of SAS Best Practices, and an author of three books on the business value of technology. She is a frequent speaker and blogger, and her most recent book is Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth. She spoke with editor emeritus Paul Crookall. What are the data management issues at the forefront of your work with governments? I’m hearing two main questions. One, “How do we bring people together around data?” In the public sector the drivers are largely the regulatory issues around sharing, the creation of policies around data, and the understanding of how to execute them. Executives are also interested in the organizational implications of interagency data sharing. The second question is, “How do we better achieve our mission using big data?” Executives on both the business and IT sides want to understand how big data and analytics can help their agencies provide better service.
Would one example be Canada using existing data to automatically enrol citizens in the Old Age Security Program, rather than have them complete a paper form that contains information government departments already have? That’s a good one. There are lots of examples of operational efficiencies driven by analytics. Managers want to understand not only the strategic promise; they want to know the tactical next steps. And with big data, this includes how to deploy unstructured data, like social media interactions. 26 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
Do you find that CIOs are increasingly being asked to take a leadership role in change management? Yes, but it is in proportion to the vision of the deputy minister seeing the business promise of IT. CIOs for too long were seen as responsible for “keeping the lights on.”
They’ve been measured on things like system “up time,” rather than business value. Increasingly, though, they’re being asked to provide strategic insights, and their innovation potential is being recognized. We’re seeing two changes in support of that. More CIOs are reporting directly to the CEO or deputy minister, rather than
Q&A: BIG DATA
YOU SHOULD DEFINE THE NEED, THE PAIN POINT, OR THE PROBLEM THAT DATA WOULD HELP YOU SOLVE. FOR EXAMPLE, DATA ANALYSIS AT A MAJOR POSTAL SERVICE SHOWED A BIG PROBLEM WAS FRAUD AND THEFT OF THE MAIL. THIS NOT ONLY AFFECTED PROFITABILITY BUT CUSTOMER TRUST. through the chief operating officer or ADM Finance. And the average tenure of a CIO is increasing as they become more familiar with business strategy.
As a non-IT manager, what do I need to know about big data, data management, and data analytics? First, now is the time to start adopting analytics and big data solutions, if you haven’t already. Costs have come down, the enabling technologies are cheaper and better, there is a lower barrier to entry than ever before. Second, you should define the need, the pain point, or the problem that data would help you solve. For example, data analysis at a major postal service showed a big problem was fraud and theft of the mail. This not only affected profitability but customer trust. Third, consider what new processes you want to add. Maybe new customer data can help your agency refine outreach campaigns or improve financial reporting, and that means enlisting different stakeholders or adopting new information deployment methods. Fourth, leverage the data. For example, in Michigan, they had a problem with deadbeat dads, who weren’t paying their child support. The state passed a law that
enabled agencies to share data, so now the agency managing child support payments can connect with other government departments, including the Department of Motor Vehicles to prevent licence renewals until payments are up to date. This led to both an increase in payments, and a corresponding decrease in public aid. So in a sense the program stimulated both cost savings and tax revenues. As an IT specialist or general manager, how do I drive innovation and foster a culture where data is used to drive value into the organization when my staff are demoralized from budget cuts and feeling a loss of control? The “eureka” phenomenon doesn’t just happen. Leaders need to support more formal analytics that can help better achieve the mission while saving money. Show an early “win.” For example, one agency we worked with used data visualization tools to pinpoint geographic “hot spots” for food stamp fraud, saving money for the program. This had both “hard” and “soft” benefits, and the ROI was critical in ongoing funding for the program.
Your article in Harvard Business Review describes “knowledge discovery.” What is that, and why is it new?
level of hypothesis, but mining big data reveals relationships and patterns that we didn’t even know we were looking for. It is mining data with no starting hypothesis, to see what might be there. Software tools find the patterns and tell the analyst or data scientist what, and where, they are. In health care, for example, Stanford University researchers were looking for trends in breast cancer cells, expecting to see trends in cell proliferation rates. But they also discovered that surrounding non-cancerous cells contribute to cancer cell growth. This technique is used less in government; it will likely come later, after trust in analytics is established. Once there’s a critical mass of detailed data, data analysts can then start looking for natural patterns. Comstat seems to be an early example, where police, fire, welfare, housing inspectors, and other diverse departments shared data, numbers, and maps to identify problem areas, connect incidents, and share tactics and responses. It helped drive down crime (and fires and derelict housing) in New York, Baltimore, and other cities where it was used. Yes, there are great big data case studies in the law enforcement arena. Tax and health care agencies are also early adopters of big data in government. Data is extensive in these areas, and we need to find ways to share and analyze it across jurisdictions. And that’s where not only government agencies but citizens themselves will see the value of analytics.
This article originally appeared in Canadian Government Executive vol. 19, no. 3. For more information and an online version of the article, please visit: www.canadiangovernmentexecutive.ca
Traditional database inquiry requires some May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 27
FROM THE INQUIRIES DESK As more Canadian businesses move their data and mission-critical applications to the cloud, the important of having a properly configured cloud network is becoming increasingly clear. Q: How do you ensure you have adequate network support for cloud?
As cloud computing moves from infancy into adolescence, the importance of ensuring you have a properly optimized and managed network is becoming increasingly clear. If you don’t, the benefits of moving to the cloud will be for naught. To learn more about what IT decision makers should take into consideration when building a cloud network, IT in Canada went to the experts and gathered advice from Matt Leppanen, director of product management at Primus, Matt Stein, CTO at Primus, as well as Dean Prevost, president of Allstream. Below you’ll find four key issues that should be taken into account when building a cloud network.
Quality of Service All of our experts agreed that it is important to find a service provider with a good Quality of Service (QoS) overlay and to make sure that it is properly configured for your network. QoS is set of standards and protocols used across the telecom industry for ensuring the high-quality performance of critical applications. QoS ensures that performance-critical technologies like VoIP, video conferencing and other cloud-based applications get maximum bandwidth priority over less important functions like simple web browsing or email. “If somebody has a slow web page loading that’s less of an issue than if they have a jittery voice conversation… or a critical application for your enterprise that is slow to refresh and to work with,” Prevost said. “You need a provider who will work with you to actually configure the various applications that you’re using to make the network aware of those applications so it knows which QoS to apply to them.”
Matt Leppanen, director of product management, Primus 28 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
Dean Prevost, president, Allstream
Latency “You can put in a great access service… but if your physical location [is far from where] those cloud service offerings are being managed, it can increase latency, which will reduce overall performance,” Leppanen said. Since the majority of latency occurs on the infrastructure outside of a company’s network or building, most customers won’t have much control over this problem. Stein suggests that customers put the question to their service provider and ask upfront what the latency will be between their offices and wherever the cloud platform is hosted. “Latency is really the killer for application performance,” Stein said. “[At Primus], we offer both cloud infrastructure and network access to cloud infrastructure. By offering both, we’re able to deliver a latency number all the way to the cloud application, as opposed to just for a piece of the picture.”
Monitoring tools It’s also important to have a set of real-time monitoring tools and analytics that allow you to track the health and performance of your network and cloud infrastructure. Stein and Leppanen said it’s important to be able to track things like your SLA metrics (i.e. bandwidth speed, data usage, etc.) and service availability. Don’t just take the word of your service provider – monitor it yourself.
Security and backup Security, privacy, data backup and disaster recovery are all aspects of your cloud infrastructure that also need careful attention. “Cloud is new and so anytime we have new technology and new infrastructure immediately security comes up,” Stein said. “It’s important to understand exactly which portions of the access infrastructure are
By Kevin Priddle
shared and how it is secured.” He also pointed out that it’s a common misconception to assume that once you move your data into the cloud it’s automatically backed up and safe. It’s important to either take the responsibility to backup your data yourself, or to explicitly make sure your service provider is doing it for you. “If you’re not asking the question and your provider isn’t offering the answer, the answer may be that your data is not getting backed up,” Stein said.
Matt Stein, chief technology officer, Primus
Final considerations Both Prevost and Leppanen said it’s a good idea to try and work with a single service provider that can provide a fully integrated solution (cloud expertise, Internet and data access, security and management) and which can provide national coverage if you have locations spread across the country. “If you split it up too much… the customer has to negotiate and ensure that all these things work well together,” Prevost said. “You want a supplier who gets close to you, who understands your business, understands your cloud strategy, and makes sure you’ve got the network, managed services and security surrounding it to make it work well.” Finally, it’s important to review your cloud infrastructure regularly to ensure the network continues to meet your business needs. If your business is expanding and evolving, it’s important to perform an annual or biannual audit with your service provider to ensure your network is being upgraded and optimized to manage that growth. “What I warn most substantially against is undersizing and underinvesting in the network,” Prevost said. “It’s going to be a fundamental aspect of the service delivery experience that your users will have… and you want to make sure that it’s robust enough.”
By Mary Allen
PaaS play for
“time” and “money” Building on the Force.com development platform brings “social ecosystem” benefits to HR cloud provider. Background A provider of cloud-based HR software for the SMB, Vana Workforce.com is on a rapid expansion trajectory with 10% monthover-month growth, based on targeting the underserviced, under 1,000 employee organization. Launched in October 2011, the company now has 70 live customers and boasts over 6,000 user licenses representing over 50,000 employees. To support this growth, the company has also adopted what VP of sales, Patrick McGuire called “an aggressive roadmap for our infrastructure.” Since lift-off, Vana Workforce has engaged in persistent update of its product: this spring, the company released version 10 of its software, with enhancements to features for the management of individual profiles, career objectives, work and vacation times.
Implementation: With the October launch, Vana Workforce migrated from another platform to Force. com, a PaaS environment designed to simplify the development and deployment of cloud-based apps and websites offered by Salesforce.com. Summarizing Vana’s decision to deploy PaaS rather than rely on its own development environment, McGuire pointed to “time and money,” and describing the Force.com’s value proposition, he added “it’s simply better.” According to McGuire, the workforce needs of the SMB are not dissimilar from those of the enterprise. The difference lies in the total infrastructure required to support employee numbers, and in the scarcity of HR knowledge within the smaller business. To support knowledge needs and to help SMB customers navigate the user interface,
Patrick McGuire, VP sales, VanaWorkforce.com
Vana created a user experience that McGuire described as “simple,” “clean” and “intuitive,” based on the “look and feel” developed by Salesforce.com. On top of this, Vana Workforce has built an architecture designed specifically for HR, based on the IT and domain expertise found in its internal development staff. In this work, Vana was able to take advantage of an architectural template, programming shortcuts or drag and drop features in the Force. com apex code platform to code, McGuire estimates, approximately five times faster than other software companies. Except for the company website, which runs on internal Vana servers, the entire Vana Workforce offering operates on the Force.com platform. The company maintains a 30 person implementation team to help onboard new customers, a process that typically takes about 12 weeks, and so far has not experienced any issues with platform scale, despite solid growth.
Benefits According to McGuire, developing on the Force.com platform has meant that that software updates have been “more rapid and more impactful.” Using Force.com, Vana has been able to quickly make changes that
CASE STUDY
make a difference to the way the user uses the product: “we can totally revamp that,” McGuire explained, “in seven to thirty days.” In addition, platform update does not affect any custom development that a customer might have implemented. But beyond time and cost advantages, McGuire also stressed Force.com’s advanced reliability and security. Noting the recent introduction of competitive PaaS offerings (Google and Oracle), McGuire pointed to the release of Force.com for public consumption nine years ago, a fact that underscores the comprehensive nature of the Force.com offering. McGuire listed cloud infrastructure, security, permissions, SAS 70 and ISO compliance reports as key attributes, but added: “the platform reliability and stability is probably the most robust and powerful of all those out there today.” He also emphasized the importance of transparency - detailed information on what is on offer, including SLAs, downtime, service disruption and traffic slowdown and global compliance reporting. Deployment on Force.com also provided Vana with access to a sharing ecosystem. Salesforce.com is developing a “social economy” and businesses that build natively on the platform architecture can easily opt in to share/transfer data and objects via social and file sharing tools such as Chatter. To ensure the integrity of this ecosystem, Salesforce. com insists that developers create code so that 70% of the solution will achieve a 90% passing grade on security. Building on Force. com, McGuire added, provides the Vana service with “instant credibility.” In fact, the company has been named to Salesforce.com’s Social Enterprise Showcase, a designation recognizing Vana as one of 16 social vendors of note out of thousands reviewed for the last Dreamforce event. In addition to this promotional push, Vana has also benefitted from mutual customer wins working with go-tomarket partners in the ecosystem, including Salesforce.com and Force.com. Increasingly, Vana is resonating with customers who already use the Salesforce.com platform, as these can easily integrate and train on the Vana HR solution, while taking advantage of single sign on. May/June 2013 IT in Canada / 29
BOOK REVIEW
By Paul Kennedy
How the Net is replacing
OLDER KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTIONS
David Weinberger explores the Internet’s impact on knowledge, offering suggestions on how to negotiate the ‘Internet is making us stupider’ minefield.
Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room David Weinberger, Basic Books, 231 pages, $29.00 CAN
A
uthor David Weinberger has an interesting resumé. When I read that he had been “a gag writer for seven years” (for the comic strip Inside Woody Allen), I expected some levity in this book: there is none. This is not a light book. One of Weinberger’s previous books is “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, a publication targeted at business people, particularly marketers, which promulgates “95 theses” that attempt to clarify how the Internet is changing the nature of company-to-consumer communications. When I read that Weinberger had been a marketing consultant and executive at several high-tech companies, I expected a business book. This is more than that. When I read that he has a Ph.D. in philosophy (from the University of Toronto), and now works as a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, I realized that this 30 / IT in Canada May/June 2013
would be a serious book. Indeed the book’s domain is all knowledge. The title is a contraction of the observation that “The world is too big to know.” Weinberger begins by declaring a crisis – “Our skulls and our institutions are simply not big enough to contain knowledge.” Prior to the Internet, the pyramid of knowledge (data-information-knowledge-wisdom) was governed by institutions (publishers, editors, libraries, physical books, etc.) that filtered out much information in order to present a final product. Weinberger refers to this as “long-form thought.” The Internet, however, has enabled a “network of thought” that may be any length or shape. It is a better way to know our world, in Weinberger’s view. The book spends much time on the process by which scientific knowledge is created – before and after the Internet. The author contrasts the way Darwin and his contemporaries discovered, proved and communicated theories with the way it’s happening today. He declares “science... is [now] too rich and complex for reduction into theories.” And so the processes are changing. Old institutions no longer “filter out information”: the Internet “filters it forward,” bringing the data or information in a website into our perception, but with links that enable almost infinite connection to additional background data and information. Weinberger explores the impact of the Internet on the concepts of credentialing and expertise, of decision-making and leadership. For example, just as knowledge is now a property of the network, so leadership is becoming a property of those being led. But he ignores several realities: the fact that half of Internet transmissions are generated by machines rather than humans, and that
the two leading human applications are porn and gambling. Weinberger does acknowledge that the Internet is making the world of knowledge a messier place. But he and his colleagues at Berkman are proponents of, among other things, an “Open Science Model.” Because the old peer review process does not scale, some scientists (including those in five of nine Harvard Schools) are making all their work available on the Net. MIT is pioneering OpenCourseWare, making videos of all lectures available for free. Only powerful computers and the technology to link them (“hyperlinked science”) will make it possible to increase our understanding of the colossal volumes of data being gathered about our genetic structure and the galactic universe. He uses Linux as a leading example of how the Internet changes the formerly hierarchical structures for creating complex products. And of course Wikipedia is cited often for its strengths and weaknesses as a model for Net decision-making. Weinberger seems to realize that he’s writing about a revolution while standing in the middle of a riot. Nevertheless he concludes this very readable book with suggestions to avoid Nicholas Carr’s contention that “The Internet is making us stupider.” Several are aimed at professionals in the information and knowledge fields, such as open up access, provide hooks for intelligence, link everything, and leave no institution’s knowledge behind. But Weinberger‘s key message for the general reader is “teach everyone.” That is, teach children from the earliest possible age to use the Net, make sure they know how to differentiate poor from quality information on the Net, and encourage them to embrace the diversity they will find there.
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