Top 10 news stories of the week: BPM is dead, coders are dead and soon the cloud will kill the rest of us anyway
It might be a few days until Halloween, but IT industry news this week had a definite theme of horrible demise. But which sepulchral story proved the most popular?
10. Opinion: The Nadella controversy has highlighted an opportunity gap, not just a pay gap
As the female CEO of Microsoft's only Gold Partner company in the UK, who better than Suzy Dean to continue the debate raised by Satya Nadella's ill-chosen words last week?
Dean argues that the conversation has rested too far on the side of discussing pay, when in reality it's an 'opportunity gap' that is the real villain of the piece.
With the IT industry still reliant on STEM subjects and not enough girls taking these subjects in schools, perhaps Nadella's u-turn on telling women not to 'ask for more money' isn't quite enough; instead, the industry should be working to promote equality and cross-gender engagement at the grass roots teaching level.
What began as a straightforward interview with Nottinghamshire Council about its new Windows 8.1 ecosystem replacing an incumbent BlackBerry fleet quickly turned into a conversation about Notts' plans for the future - and highlighted a real need for those now plunging into the tepid waters of Windows 8.1 to start discussing forward plans with Microsoft for what happens when Windows 10 arrives in 2015.
After all, if your software vendor is distancing itself so dramatically from its own product, wouldn't you want to know why?
Can app development platforms really result in 'low code' or even 'no code' environments to help the wider business more easily collaborate on applications that can be used without a beard and a degree in software engineering? LV= said yes, but Hargreaves Lansdown wasn't so sure.
However, both companies offered up development bosses who provided grounded and reasonable arguments, no matter which side of the fence they sat.
Why, indeed?
It turns out that the reason may be that companies are reaching a certain vintage - 20 years or more in the business, and they're ripe for modernising and improving. The lure of taking a company away from the critical eye - and control - of investors is tempting; it worked out for Michael Dell after he got his own company back in 2013, with a little help from private equity investors.
While time will tell as to whether these strategies pay off for the investors, this analysis explores the growing trend with a wide angle.
6. Choosing Google: An interview with United Biscuits' CIO Clifford Burroughs
Computing returned to the offices of United Biscuits three years after our last meeting with CIO Clifford Burroughs, and discovered that the purveyor of excellent Jamaica Ginger cake (under the McVities brand) and other kitchen cupboard favourites has become quite the Google shop.
Phasing out most on-premise office software and replacing it with Google on the cloud, Burroughs has saved money, introduced a huge amount of consumerisation for staff, and begun introducing forward-looking techniques such as Chromebook-based hot-desking and Google Hangouts as standard.
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Top 10 news stories of the week: BPM is dead, coders are dead and soon the cloud will kill the rest of us anyway
It might be a few days until Halloween, but IT industry news this week had a definite theme of horrible demise. But which sepulchral story proved the most popular?
5. Why is Salesforce so expensive?
Before attending this year's Dreamforce conference, Computing's editor Stuart Sumner asked a number of CIOs what their biggest question to Salesforce would be, and it was a simple one: Why is it so expensive?
Customers at the event were - understandably - defensive of their choice, responding in a number of ways. From arguing the service offers "great value" for the price, to sticking up for taking just the Force.com licence for a snip and leaving higher-price features out, it seems Salesforce is in no danger of losing customer good will any time soon.
4. Betfair rejects SAP, Oracle and Workday in favour of Fairsail for HR
While BG Group spoke to us the other week of chucking out SAP in favour of an Oracle Cloud-based HR system, Betfair's gone a step further and ousted both these goliaths - as well as Workday - in favour of Fairsail.
Citing the usual suspects as "too big", as well as SAP as being unconfigurable for the company's needs, Betfair was impressed with Fairsail's cheaper asking price, and comparatively open-ended customisation options.
Moving to the cloud is always a tough call, but doing it in such a heavily-regulated industry, when a lot of major stakeholders don't want you to, is tougher than ever. Luckily, Shell found a path through the services of Amazon Web Services, and the rest is history.
As the company explained at the AWS Summit in London this week, the cost savings became too enormous to ignore, as its entire portfolio of applications became controllable at the touch of a button, keeping what wasn't needed switched off, and building a far more robust itinerary of what resided where, and what it was meant to do.
2. How cloud computing - and other new technology - could lead to the destruction of humanity
As works such as Terminator, The Matrix and Harlan Ellison's classic novella I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream have warned, mankind's obsession with technological progress may just outweigh its capacity for knowing when to stop and think. And then, we may find machines have started thinking for us, anyway.
This analysis catches up with how far along the road such technology now is, and how resources such as cloud, AI and machines' growing ability to cope with unstructured data mean we should start seriously considering a future in which our IT is cleverer than us, and develops genuine self-awareness.
1. BPM software has 'nowhere to go' - says leading BPM software company
The value is in the title, clearly, but Appian CEO Matt Calkins makes some excellent points about the present (and questionable future) of business process management software.
In a world of cloud and mobile, Calkins explains how BPM needs a shake-up in a market that is now "much greater than BPM itself".
Custom applications, rather than packaged software, is the future of the market, he argues. But while Salesforce1 can be seen as a direct rival, Appian, says Calkins, still has the edge with model-driven design...
Find out more in Computing's most-read piece of this week's news cycle.
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