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Mobile data takes off in multinationals at last Pauline Trotter, Principal Analyst There is real evidence that mobile data is now taking off in multinationals. In our recent research with MNCs, many companies put mobile data among their top three concerns over the coming year (alongside IP convergence issues and cost management). Forthcoming projects include more remote access to the VPN for travellers and home workers, mobile security and WLAN activities. There is less talk of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) this year and more talk of practical integration projects. The uptake of mobile data services has been fairly slow in multinationals to date - arguably the rate of growth has been limited by lack of global contracts, international service availability & consistency and continuing high prices for international data roaming. Our ongoing research with global multinational corporations that are members of the Enterprise VPN Users Association (EVUA) shows that cost management remains a major area of concern. While many MNCs have had success in bringing core fixed voice and data network costs under control, there are still issues around the cost of provision in less developed countries. However, it almost goes without saying that in multinationals it is the cost of mobile (and, increasingly, mobile data) that needs most attention. This control is seen as a barrier to greater acceptance and usage of mobile data applications and convergence. Overall, balanced over all areas of expenditure, we expect telecom budgets to change little over the coming year. However, the great majority of multinationals do expect mobile data budgets to show significant growth. Traffic on EVUA members' networks also continues to grow - the areas of traffic growth map closely onto the areas of budget growth, although traffic is growing much more quickly than budgets. EVUA members expect their service providers to come up with increasingly competitive deals, especially internationally. EVUA members have spent much effort over the years in communicating their frustration with the level of support from mobile operators in supporting mobility on an international scale. While this is a continuing area of concern (since it makes managing mobile usage and costs difficult), we can report progress in getting 'enterprise-grade' service from mobile network operators. One sign of this progress is that major managed services or outsourcing contracts for mobile dominate new sourcing strategies this year. While many members surveyed still procure and operate mobile nationally, there is a trend to regional and even global contracts and agreements. Cost, performance (delivery to agreed SLAs) and geographical coverage are the highest rated delivery criteria for service providers among EVUA members. For mobile services - especially where they are primarily delivered nationally - the quality of billing and reporting moves up the agenda. Feedback from these MNCs to the mobile providers is that they need to improve their billing & reporting service as well as help with cost management. This is the fourth annual EVUA members' survey. The EVUA is an independent, non-profit, global ICT network user group for multinational corporations. For more information visit www.evua.org. The Campaign for Real Cloud? David Mitchell, SVP IT Research Just like on-demand and software-as-a-service before it, cloud computing has already started to create an unhealthy set of posturing across the industry - reminiscent of the big-endian versus little-endian conflicts in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Unlike the endian-wars though, one army has a greater responsibility to push for peace. The pure-cloud lobby needs to work much more closely to incorporate the legacy IT estate that exists in all businesses - from mainframes and mainframe applications, through client-server software and on to more modern software-as-a-service. Otherwise their own cause will suffer. Scientific revolutions versus IT revolutions Scientific revolutions do, approximately, follow the model of paradigm shift that the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described in his 1962 treatise - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. One generation of thinking generally does replace or usurp the previous generation - at least in terms of the theoretical sciences. After all there are few physicists researching new theoretical work around classical mechanics, but lots of theoretical physicists working on string theory and its derivatives. In the IT world there are distinct differences. There is new theoretical and research work taking place in mainframe architecture and distributed computing models; not all new theory follows the cloud model of research. Almost every generation of our historical IT legacy is still growing in research content and the generations of research intermingle much more than their equivalents in the physical sciences. At a practical level much of the IT in the world still runs on previous generations of IT thinking - mainframes - whose owners often have little desire to change. This is analogous with the world of physics when it is the approximations of classical mechanics that are used to launch space flights. Those looking for cloud computing to make a practical impact on business need to acknowledge that it does have links with other research patterns - be they software-as-a-service, service-oriented architecture, or transaction processing - and new cloud resources need to be joined together with the existing physical and financial IT assets that organisations have today. If it needs clean-sheet thinking then cloud computing will stall and ultimately will fail. From software-as-a-service to cloud computing When software-as-a-service was the new fashionable phrase it became vogue to argue that anything that wasn't a pure multi-tenancy model could not possibly be a real software-as-a-service offering, and that vendors not following that path either 'didn't get it' or were consciously trying to muddy the water for the purists. Other vendors countered by explaining why their offerings, although not multi-tenancy, had the same consumption characteristics and offered the same benefits for the customer. We are now in an era where only a few companies have decided to stick to their architectural purity arguments while the majority are heading towards architectural agnosticism, where consumers rather than suppliers control architecture decisions. Now we move forward to the start of the cloud computing debate. On the one hand there are those who would argue that a technical environment isn't pure cloud if you need to install software on your own computers, if the vendor offering the cloud solution tries to sell you hardware, you can't buy it using a personal credit card or you know where servers are physically located. Although probably technically pure and correct, the fact that the definitions are constructed as a rejection of previous ideas and architectures is what leads to the problems. Purist definitions will always be met by two reactions. First, the rejection of the purist definition and a focus on pragmatism - explaining that equivalent business and technical outcomes can be produced from different definitions. Second, there will be defences from those who feel that existing ideas and approaches are being unfairly challenged. In combination both of these reactions will generate an unhealthy debate that ends up confusing the CIO buyers who are being asked to make decisions on whether to adopt cloud computing or not. Ultimately confusion and ambiguity leads to indecision. The history lesson Most large enterprises have artifacts from all previous generations of IT - mainframe through to Internet applications. Over the years we are now able to get these various generations to work together. For cloud computing to be most effective the real cloud advocates need to get real and work on practical architectural ways that their ideas can work with the existing estate. In particular, the management framework for IT in major enterprises needs to be able to have an integrated and mature approach that can encompass cloud and non-cloud resources. This will need cloud computing providers to think of themselves as part of the traditional estate and avoid rejecting it. For further information Straight Talk is available exclusively to Ovum Advisory customers and is not available as part of a separate subscription. If you are an existing advisory service user, but are not yet registered for Straight Talk, please complete the following details to subscribe. Unsubscribe: Should you wish to stop receiving this email, simply click update your profile below. |
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