Three recent trends in communications technologies – network convergence,
social media and consumerisation – have on the surface appeared to be about
simplification, but they have actually made life more complicated for some.

Convergence takes all of the silos of proprietary telecoms functions –
voice and data, fixed and mobile – and blends them together around a single
common set of universal open protocols borne out of the IT industry and the
internet. All services are becoming combined and unified.

It sounds simple in principle, but all these proprietary technologies
existed for a reason – commercial control – so the reality is that many
vested interests need to be dragged sometimes kicking and screaming into
line. The fallout has been the emergence of dominant vendors like Apple,
Google and Amazon from the IT world and some casualties in the telecoms
industry, perhaps most notably Nortel, but also the significant weakening
of giants like Motorola and Nokia.

While the economies of scale achieved through the unification and
convergence on common standards are evident in the massive boosts in
performance and reductions in the cost of sending data anywhere on the
planet, it is not without other challenges.

Converged networks can struggle to deliver differentiated and predictable
performance for services that need it. While common protocols mean that all
traffic looks the same, different needs mean it should not all be treated
the same. Network neutrality is a worthy aspiration for equality of access
to technology, but it is not adequate for the deterministic transport of
packets of data.

What of social media? It democratizes the provision and supply of content.
Anyone, anywhere can be a citizen journalist, organise an uprising or share
pictures of funny looking cats with an army of friends, followers or
like-minded ‘individuals’. The opinions and wisdom of the crowd has never
been more accessible, but the signal-to-noise ratio has dramatically
worsened. Finding relevant, accurate and accredited information is getting
harder even for those organizations with the power to search ‘big data’,
let alone for individuals.

As for consumerisation (in particular the use of mobile devices) this means
that the same tools are available and usable for business or personal
activities – the work/life division is completely blurred. Many individuals
find this liberating, but those tasked with managing services, costs and
security in organizations consider it a nightmare.

Many of the historical barriers – between work and home life, between
network services, between friends – might have seemed arbitrary and often
opaque, but they provided some control and resistance to anarchy. Without
some elements of structure and separation, systems become error prone,
difficult to test properly, impossible to identify root causes – in short,
unreliable and insecure.

Many will suggest this is not a problem; this ‘hyperconnectivity’ (a term
once promoted by the now absent Nortel) is the natural evolution of
technology and its total adoption is vital for employing the digital
generation. This smacks of an abdication of responsibility by those who
suggest a ‘do nothing’ approach.

There are others, who will argue, like King Canute, that these changes
should be stopped, the clock turned back, the genie squeezed back into the
bottle. They ban social media in the office, ignore the appearance of
tablets and impose departmental firewalls to keep telecoms, office
facilities and IT functions apart. This is not a realistic approach for
businesses either.

Effective solutions need to emerge not for imposing total control, but
applying coordination – herding cats – keeping data safe, not behind
firewalls, but in ‘bubbles’ and protecting business processes in virtual
pathways. This co-ordination has to be built not around the vested interests
of suppliers, but about the needs of end users – business, social and
personal processes.

The barriers of old have crumbled and been torn down, but without some
shape and definition the revolutions that led to their destruction will
lead only to inefficiency and insecurity. Business processes no longer need
top down re-engineering, they need to be rebuilt from the bottom up from
their constituent tasks, virtualized and properly co-ordinated. Otherwise
these communication trends may not have created democracy, but anarchy.

Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Communication, Collaboration and
Convergence, Quocirca

People of a certain age often enjoy recalling for younger folk the size of the early mobile phones that were lugged around in the mid-1980s, whilst marvelling at the latest smartphones. These brick-sized devices could not even send text (SMS) messages (the first of which was sent in 1992); they were good for voice only. But, what would it have taken almost three decades ago to have had all the capabilities of a 2011 smartphone based on the available technology of the day?
 
This was one of the subjects covered in a recent New Scientist article titled “They said it couldn't be done: 7 impossible inventions”. To quote the article:
 
“The components for the iPhone à la 1985 we've listed so far would fill a large wheelbarrow. But we have left out something important.
 
“The processor at the heart of the iPhone 4 can perform up to a billion operations per second (the new iPhone 4S is even zippier). You might have matched that in the mid-80s if you had bought the Cray X-MP, then the world's most powerful supercomputer. But the Cray would have filled an office cubicle and also required an industrial-strength refrigerator to remove the waste heat. So cancel the wheelbarrow. To haul the 1985 iPhone around, we're going to need a truck.”
 
Interesting stuff, which underlines why the consumerisation of IT has become such a big issue. When I left the academic world for the commercial one in 1986, for the first time in my life, on my desk at work, I had dedicated access to a computer (albeit a text-only dumb terminal) which was linked to a network providing me with any information my employer had stored that it felt would be useful to do my job. I also now had a telephone with its own number; my friends and family could now contact me when I was at work (before that hand-written letters had been the main method).
 
The new entrant to the workplace now has all this and much, much more in their pocket. This is the issue driving IT consumerisation. Employers can no longer impress new recruits with technology and connectivity, they are more likely to disappoint. Competitive employers today are those that allow their employees to use the advanced technology they have become used to at home in the workplace.
 
Consumerisation does of course throw up many challenges, not least how data security, contracts and billing are handled. These issues were discussed in a recent free Quocirca report “Carrying the can” sponsored by ttMobiles and the subject of a recent conference organised by the Wireless Improvement Group (WIG). Quocirca’s presentation given at the conference can be downloaded here.

Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director, Quocirca

This week, Quocirca had a briefing with a security vendor which provided an insight into a fundamental change going on in the use of IT and one of the major drivers for that change. The vendor was Bradford Networks, named not after the city in Yorkshire UK, but the small town in New Hampshire, USA.

Bradford provides products to carry out a range of network management and control capabilities; network discovery, end-point management, network access control and policy enforcement around network usage. None of that is unique to Bradford, which is perhaps why, when it started selling this product line back in 2005/6, it focused on a niche – higher education. Not any old aspect of network usage in the sector, but specifically student dorms, or halls of residence as they are called than in the UK.

The problem Bradford helps university IT administrators manage is the wide variety and ever-changing identities of devices students want to attach to the network services offered in such places. Even five years ago, this included Windows PCs, Macs, gaming devices and early smartphones (mainly BlackBerrys). Today of course you can add Android devices, iPhones, iPads and others. The range of devices support by Bradford, which extends to CCTV cameras, door entry systems and firewalls is impressive.

Bradford has been successful selling to this niche in the US and also in the UK, where via a single reseller, Khipu Networks, it has signed up many universities, including Oxford, Nottingham and Durham. A case study for Durham University can be seen here.

What makes Bradford’s story interesting to Quocirca is the speed at which its business is changing. In the last couple of years Bradford says the profile of its business has switched from almost all higher education to 85% other sectors including healthcare, manufacturing and banking. Bradford says this change has been demand driven and is not the result of deliberate targeting (for example, it still has just the one reseller in the UK, but is planning to change that).

There are two reasons for this change in the business profile at Bradford. The first is the range of devices that organisations now have to support, as Bradford says: “Now the rest of the world has started to look like [the higher] education [sector]”.

But the second reason is perhaps more profound; the students of five or six years ago are the employees of today; the change at Bradford is surely a bellwether for the growing tide of consumerisation, a big driver for which is the entry to the work place of the IT savvy “generation Y”.

Of course, Bradford is not alone in addressing this issue. It will have to make its own case against a range of larger vendors all targeting end-point management and security. This includes end-point management vendors such as Kaseya, LANDesk and IBM/BigFix, but also IT security vendors – for example McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro are all now investing in managing end-points as well as securing them.

There is another vendor that could be added to both these last two lists: Microsoft. It too is in the end-point management business with it Systems Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) and recently announced InTune on-demand service, which Quocirca wrote about in a previous blog post. Microsoft is also in the end security business with its Forefront End-point Protection (FEP) product, which Quocirca wrote about here.

However, as both posts point out, Microsoft is missing the point. As ever it lives in its own Microsoft bubble. Its end-point management and security products only address Windows PCs, not even its own struggling Windows Mobile operating system. Generation Y has certainly found there is more to life that Microsoft and Bradford Networks is benefiting from this. If Microsoft does not change its game its fortunes will surely head south like that of its new mobile devices partner Nokia.

For Microsoft this tide of consumerisation impacts two of its biggest product lines that account for over half its business; Windows desktop and Office. Quocirca would not be the first to speculate about the long term future of Microsoft. In its June 9th leader celebrating the 100th birthday of IBM, The Economist speculated which of today’s IT vendors might reach a similar age. Microsoft was not one of them.

Two recent Quocirca reports sponsored, by Kaseya, cover end-point security are available for free download: The IT Profit Centre and The total MSP.
 
Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director, Quocirca