On February 7, 2012, a press release stated that "Temenos and Misys today confirm that they have reached agreement in principle on certain key terms and are in continuing discussions regarding a possible all share merger of the two groups."

Now Misys and Temenos have about one month to finalise their merger — or abandon it. It is obvious that this merger has the ingredients to become one of the most significant mergers in the banking industry in the past few years. With the probability of the merger now sufficiently high, here is my initial take.

There are two obvious reasons for this potential endeavour of Temenos and Misys (let’s call the combined company MiNos for the time being):

• A broader and deeper product portfolio for banking and capital markets.
  While Temenos has been a Global Power Seller in Forrester’s global banking platform deals survey for years, Temenos has struggled to win a large number of major banks as customers for its banking platform so far. The combined portfolio could make MiNos more attractive for larger as well as smaller potential customers, with an even broader set of point solutions as well as integrated apps offerings such as banking platforms.
• A truly large banking software company.
  MiNos will leave the challenging space between the large powerful gorillas and the tiny fast antelopes — putting MiNos in a more powerful position to compete with its larger competitors in the business apps space such as Oracle and SAP as well as vendors with combined banking platform/services offerings such as Infosys and TCS.

However, there are also a number of risk factors:

• Overlap in the two product portfolios: The new portfolio will consist of both complimentary and redundant software products. Official statements (as far as statements can be official at this stage) say that MiNos is committed to maintaining and developing Temenos T24 and Misys BankFusion, as well as the Misys TCM portfolio. Does this commitment to multiple banking platforms make economical sense, particularly in the long term? What will happen with the remaining, in some cases conflicting, solutions? Let’s use lending as an example: Misys LoanIQ is more mature and maybe functionally richer, while the related Temenos T24 module is more modern and already pretty successful.
• Integration architecture: Even today, Misys may propose nine or ten Misys solutions (plus third party apps) to cope with the needs of a small to medium-size bank, while Temenos will likely offer a smaller number of solutions. In a combined product portfolio, this heterogeneity will be multiplied by heterogeneous application architectures between the Misys and Temenos portfolios and particularly also within the Misys portfolio. MiNos will quickly need to design an integration architecture/framework (which could nicely be based on the best conceptual elements of BankFusion’s architecture) to avoid perception of the combined solution portfolio as "yet another bunch of unintegrated banking applications".
• Different corporate cultures: Knowing both Misys and Temenos, I dare say that the corporate cultures of the two firms are not entirely compatible. This is particularly relevant when it comes to retaining key corporate staff in a situation like this (coincidental or not: Misys CEO Mike Lawrie will move to CSC in a few weeks). However, there is more. To use the wording of an email from South America that I received shortly before starting to write this blog post: Misys and Temenos have been "almost mortal enemies" in the core banking/banking platform space for years. Can the sales forces of those mortal enemies be convinced to work toward a common goal?
• Customer perception: Even right now, with no details regarding the shape of, for example, the new company, its future product portfolio and targeted customer segments, early client feedback ranges from deeply worried to slightly enthusiastic. This is not unusual. However, it is unusual that MiNos will need to cope with a thousand and maybe even close to two thousand customer firms that might see investment supporting the core business at risk. It will be up to MiNos to succeed in helping its customers in mitigating (maybe perceived) merger risk. And it will need to do this fast to avoid losing in multiple ongoing bid processes.

Right now, it is way too early to judge whether the (at this time still potential) merger will become a success. There are way more questions than answers. It is obvious that MiNos will need to define and communicate concrete road maps for the joint product portfolio to retain its existing customers and avoid any perception of risk as far as the future of the individual solutions — and thus also targeted customer groups — are concerned. Both companies are very experienced in integrating acquired companies. However, this may be exactly the risk when it comes to a merger of shares between two firms of comparable size and standing.

If you work on selecting a new banking platform for your bank right now, watch the ongoing developments carefully to be in a good position to mitigate selection risk. Do you see the merger to be a benefit or a risk for your ongoing projects— in terms of, for example, targeted customer groups, solution portfolio and roadmap, available functionality, solution architecture and well-tuned delivery capability?

As always, I am interested in what you think: JHoppermann@Forrester.com

Posted by Jost Hoppermann

6. ACTA favours IP right-holders. ACTA eliminates safeguards and exceptions existing under international law.

Quite to the contrary, ACTA is drafted in very flexible terms and contains the necessary safeguards to allow the participating countries to strike an appropriate balance between all rights and interests involved, in line with their economic, political and social objectives, as well as with their legal traditions. All safeguards and exceptions under EU law or under the TRIPs Agreement remain fully preserved.

Notice how the "myth" has two components, but that the European Commission only answers one of them. The whole treaty is predicated on the assumption that more enforcement is good: there is no consideration of the collateral damage it might inflict, for example on members of the public. That, of course, is because the public was never allowed to present its views; inevitably, the resulting document is incredibly one sided and biased in favour of the copyright industries.

This can be most clearly seen in Article 9, which spells out the damages for infringement (my emphasis added):

1. In determining the amount of damages for infringement of intellectual property rights, a Party’s judicial authorities shall have the authority to consider, inter alia, any legitimate measure of value the right holder submits, which may include lost profits, the value of the infringed goods or services measured by the market price, or the suggested retail price.

( c) at least for copyright, additional damages

Consider, now, how this might apply to sharing a few mp3s online. According to ACTA, the copyright holders can demand damages equal to the "lost profits" from those mp3s. And if you want to know how the recording industry calculates those, ask Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who was fined $1,920,000 for sharing 24 songs in the US. When that was later reduced to $54,000, the recording industries demanded a retrial because they felt it was far too low.

ACTA essentially validates this kind of deranged calculus, and enables copyright companies to demand huge damages "to compensate the right holder for the harm caused by the infringement", even though it is impossible to quantify that harm in any sensible way when you're dealing with digital file sharing. Indeed, arguably there is no harm, since file sharing can actually boost sales - just ask Paul Coelho; but ACTA's tunnel vision naturally cannot contemplate such a possibility.

Given the utterly disproportionate damages that can be claimed thanks to ACTA's wording, it is extraordinary how the members of the European Commission can claim with any seriousness that ACTA does not "favour" rights-holders. Perhaps they imagine everyone earns the same as they do - 240,000 Euros a year - and can easily find a few million Euros down the back of the sofa if they need to....

8. ACTA leads to "harmonisation through the backdoor". A study ordered by theEuropean Parliament's committee for International Trade (INTA) to academics says that ACTA will require changes to EU enforcement legislation and/or to national laws.

ACTA provisions are compatible with existing EU law. ACTA will not require any revision or adaptation of EU law and will not require any Member States to review the measures or instruments by which they implement relevant EU law. ACTA is also in line with international law, in particular with the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The INTA study does not show evidence of any concrete situation where ACTA would contradict, repeal or require the modification of a single provision existing in EU legislation. This has been confirmed in very clear terms by the two above mentioned Opinions of the Legal Service of the European Parliament.

Even if ACTA is compatible with existing EU law - and that remains unclear, despite the Commission's assertions to the contrary - that's only because the whole treaty is so loosely worded. It is full of options - clauses that signatories "may" implement in certain ways.

But this is the central trick of ACTA: it is not that the treaty itself imposes new laws on participants now - the studied vagueness makes that unnecessary. What ACTA does is to create a framework whose assumptions are that laws will be passed in the future to comply with the optional, more stringent parts. In other words, ACTA is not so much about today's legal landscape, but about tomorrow's. It will allow politicians to say: "well, we really have to implement these harsher enforcement laws because it's in ACTA, and all of our partners have done so, and it would look bad if we didn't follow suit."

In fact, European commissioners aren't even waiting for ACTA to be ratified before moving down this path: with the “Proposal for a Revision of the Directive of Intellectual Property Rights” (.pdf) they are already planning to bring in harsher copyright enforcement of precisely the kind that ACTA tries to establish as a benchmark.

In other words, it's the usual copyright ratchet, whereby a country's copyright maximalism in one area is used as an excuse to "harmonise" everyone else's. That's precisely what has happened with copyright term, for example, where the varying terms for different kinds of creation - text, music, sound recordings - have gradually been extended around the world in order to bring about "harmonisation" (isn't it strange that there's never harmonisation downwards, and that it's always in favour of the copyright industries and to the detriment of the public?) ACTA seeks to use the same trick to export the worst excesses of copyright enforcement first to all signatories, and later around the world through further treaties along the lines of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

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Together, these technologies comprise a new application platform for the Internet that will gradually replace today’s web platforms (HTML4, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Simple Object Access Protocol [SOAP] web services, Java EE, and .NET) for most applications. Forrester recently published research outlining the open web platform’s key components, their readiness, and how the platform is evolving.

Open web developers tend to use a variation of the façade pattern for their applications but refine the pattern to focus on standard web formats and protocols and services delivered via the web — so we refer to it as the open façade. Developers draw on three bodies of de jure and de facto standards to implement the open web façade pattern:

1. Client standards. Application clients based on a body of emerging standards collectively labelled HTML5.
2. Service plane standards. A service plane that exposes interfaces using the REST pattern and resource-oriented architecture principles. These services are often called RESTful web services.
3. Virtual infrastructure standards. A highly virtualised server tier (often a public cloud service) that is easy to deploy initial solutions to but that is also able to scale up or down on demand to meet surges in capacity.

HTML5 will end the halcyon days of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. HTML5 may not yet be as capable as Flash or Silverlight for digital rights management or adaptive video streaming, and there may not yet be what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tools that allow designers to build advanced effects. It doesn’t matter. HTML5 and an attendant set of APIs and standards are advancing quickly enough to drive the next evolution of cross-platform rich Internet applications.

The public face of the service plane is a set of RESTful APIs representing the information and services that your organisation chooses to expose. APIs are nothing new, but RESTful APIs embrace a particular design approach to programming interfaces that will lead your organisation to a broader, resource-oriented architecture and management platform.

Creating a set of well-structured REST/JSON APIs is just the beginning. As REST takes over as the dominant form of communication between systems of record and systems of engagement, application development and delivery pros will have to create an architecture and platform to support those APIs.

Cloud computing is so much a part of the open web movement that it barely rated a mention in our conversations with developers. Cloud platforms play a profound role in the open web because they level the playing field for open web developers and provide so many useful services for open web applications.

The open web isn’t some "geek-a-demic" techfest, it wasn’t born of developers, by developers, and for developers. It is a technology wave spawned by the need to more fully engage and delight an increasingly demanding customer base. Welcome to your new web platform; we advise actively engaging in the open web technologies now.

Posted by John R. Rymer

With consumer technologies increasingly finding their way into employees’ pockets, the Accenture Institute for High Performance surveyed over 4,000 employees of all age groups in 16 countries across five continents, as well as 300 business and IT executives of large firms.

The surveys found that some 23 percent of the employees surveyed are regularly using consumer devices, and 20 percent are using web and mobile applications, to get their work done. About 44 percent judged their own devices and applications available on the Internet more useful than the ones provided.

For companies looking to deal with the need and inevitability of IT consumerisation, the research found that the middle-ground strategy is the best bet, with executives tending to use four tactics. The first tactic is for CIOs to gradually open up the list of allowable consumer devices and applications. For example, one company collaborated with a vendor to customise a set of specifications, such as encryption, passwords and remote locking, for employee-owned phones to be used on the corporate network.

The second is to provide employees with IT allowances as a job benefit, helping raise job satisfaction among employees for whom corporate IT is both less effective and "uncool". Such a "gadget budget" option works well if employees are technically literate and can provide technology options to create a unique workforce culture in organisations.

Thirdly, management can develop a consumerisation profile for each role within the company, because figuring out which groups are most likely to use consumer IT to be more effective helps raise productivity throughout the organisation. A tablet may makes sense for physicians who have to look at MRI images, while nurses who are mainly focused on textual medication regiments are better suited with smart phones.

Fourthly, management proactively advocates the uptake of cutting-edge consumer electronics in their organizations. This can yield real business advantages. For example, look at the British Standard Chartered Bank, which gave iPhones and iPads to its 15,000 employees. Employees can now download enterprise apps from an internal site to remotely tap into their back-end systems and communicate with increasingly tech savvy customers from anywhere, at any time.

IT consumerisation will present one of the biggest tests, and the most exciting opportunities, for business and IT executives in the next five years. Make sure you learn just how extensively consumer IT has embedded itself into your workforce and experiment with ways to channel employees’ enthusiasm for consumer technology.

The goal is to develop pragmatic strategies that will keep employees engaged and productive while sharpening your competitive edge and safeguarding your corporate information.

Posted by Iris Junglas, research fellow, and Jeanne G. Harris, executive research fellow and senior executive, at the Accenture Institute for High Performance

Everyone who has regular conversations about technology must have heard this little gem come up. "My child knows more about computers than I do."

It’s often said and some go further, "my four-year-old knows more about computing than I do and I’m no fool".

In my profession I hear such pronouncements very often, so often in fact that they cause me to think negative thoughts about the person who is saying them. However, on reflection there must be something behind the sentiment, maybe even something important.

To ‘unpick’ the assertions we need Socrates, or rather the Socratic method. This is a good thing because Socrates was the first really annoying bloggist, or as it was then, agorist.

Rule out for the sake of argument that the speakers are in some way mentally deficient or deliberately misrepresenting a situation. In other words, we are dealing with people of normal intelligence who genuinely believe the statements to be the case.

Who are these people? I have collected enough anecdotal evidence over the years to come to the following generalisations:

They are all parents referring to their children not other people’s children.

This means that we cannot rule out narcissism of the kind that creates a (temporary) genius out of every offspring. For this investigation we shall admit the influence of parenthood, but deny that it can be the full story.

There appears no gender bias or professional bias.

Interestingly, this fact specifically excludes computing pros whom I have never heard ascribe any superiority to children.

It’s not an age thing.

By this I mean obviously parents are older than the children about whom these things are being said, but they are not old by my yardstick. If we assume the children to be aged between 4 and 14, and the parents to have started reproduction at 30, then their age range will be between 34 and 44. 

It’s not a pre-computer thing.

Windows 3.1 came out in 1992, which is 20 years ago, when the above parents were aged between 14 and 24. This puts them very firmly in the modern computing era since which almost nothing fundamental has changed significantly.

How would Socrates deal with this problem? Ah I know... he’d trash the interlocutor.

On the surface the phenomenon looks like ‘Doting Grandma’ syndrome; where everything the ‘young’uns' do is an object of equal admiration and bafflement, but surely these folk are too young to have sclerotic brains?

I think that a clue lies in the education of the parents. They don’t just belong to the computer user generation, they were the first National Curriculum generation. More significantly I believe, they are the first SATs generation.

For those not in the know, the SATs ushered in the present era of ultra-prescriptive education. Children are taught to pass exams, but that’s all. Drill and test. Twenty years of rising test marks provide the best evidence of this.

ICT education for example has been criticised more consistently, more vehemently and more widely than anything than I can remember. What for? For mindless prescription, of course.

On the other hand, exploratory learning and deep engagement, the vital key to mastering computer type skills and it is alive and well in young children. This is a cause for celebration, but it is steadily eroded by their schooling, being lost quickly towards the end of primary education gone by the time a student is qualified. If an adult needs a new skill, as we all know, they must be trained. How else could does anyone learn?

So here is my assertion.

Children, especially younger than 10 years old still have the intellectual apparatus and qualities to quickly master technologies. This ability is steadily eroded through years of drill and test education.

Their parents have, through their own education, become prematurely brain-aged. Their brains reflect their programmed disposition. New and different, self-taught: all this kind of stuff is anathema. They are my doting ‘Grandma’ referred to above.

This explains a lot. To such a parent the child would indeed seem wondrously adept, not because of narcissism, not because of parental stupidity and not because of what they know, but because of how they learn.

The scary bit is that in a few short years that child will have forgotten how it was for them once and will be saying similar things about their own children.

It follows that reforming computer education, which apparently we all agree is dire, means reforming education itself. Prescriptive test-based education is not compatible with good computing or anything much of worth, but is excellent at producing office-bound procedure droids who marvel at their kids but don’t see how sad their own loss is.

Pass the hemlock.

While the main arguments against SOPA have been focused on free speech and fair use, I have not seen any discussion of a provision that bears directly on the payment industry — the requirement that payment networks refuse to settle transactions with foreign websites alleged to have infringed on copyrights.

The precedent for this provision (Section 103 of H.R. 3261, attached below) is the successful embargo of Wikileaks in 2010 by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, American Express and other payment processors, which effectively put a stop to the site's release of classified government documents. While this action was justified at the time by the payment networks under their terms of service, it opened the door to further US government interference.

Under SOPA, payment network operators will be required to stop processing payments for foreign-based websites within five days of receiving a notification from a copyright holder that the site is infringing copyrights, unless the targeted site files a "counter notification". This will put the payment network provider in the middle of a dispute that may have little merit; as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented, rights holders have been all too willing to abuse the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) with frivolous or over-broad claims.   If the payment network does not cut off service within five days, it faces unlimited liability should the matter go to court.

Even worse, the provision governing counter-notifications contains a "poison pill" requiring the foreign site to agree to be governed by US law, a condition that no foreign site would be willing to accept.  Thus, it is unlikely that any counter-notifications would be received in these cases.  Therefore, SOPA effectively bestows sweeping power to copyright holders to cut off funds to sites they deem threatening. There is no requirement for a court order; just the notification is sufficient. The administrative burden on payment network providers will be heavy, as will the legal and customer service costs.

The long-term threat to the payments industry is that it will be become politicised, seen as a tool of the US government and a strategic weapon against other states. Just last week, the European Commission issued a green paper that reiterated the EC's desire for a European alternative to Visa and MasterCard.

Further use of US payments companies to achieve political ends will hinder the global expansion of the industry, as individual governments seek to preserve their sovereignty by establishing or reinforcing domestic payment systems. Since most of the growth for US payments companies is now overseas, this poses a serious threat to their future.

1. ACTA will limit the access to the internet and will censor websites.

Read the text of the ACTA Agreement - there is no single paragraph in ACTA thatsubstantiates this claim. ACTA is about tackling large scale illegal activity, often pursued by criminal organisations. It is not about how people use the internet in their everyday lives. Internet users can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA will not limit people's rights on the internet nor will it shut down websites, unlike the proposals discussed in the US (SOPA and PIPA).

There are some convenient half-truths here. Its supporters may claim that ACTA is about tackling large-scale illegal activity but nowhere in the document is there mentioned any minimum level for its operation. That is, potentially, it can apply to the actions of a single person, perhaps even sharing a single file, depending upon the circumstances. The problem is, ACTA's framing is so vague that it's not clear exactly who might be caught by its terms. Whatever the Commission may say now, it's how the text is interpreted later that matters.

After all, if the Commission had really wanted only to tackle "large-scale illegal activity", it would have added a minimum level to exclude the risk that ordinary Internet users would be affected. The refusal to add that minimum level to the treaty - something that would have been easy to do - can only mean that the Commission does indeed want the option of applying ACTA's rules to ordinary citizens, and that its claims to the contrary are simply whitewashing.

The next half-truth is: "Internet users can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web". But what exactly is "non-pirated material"? Who decides? Because copyright has become such a complex set of laws that it is rarely clear - even to copyright lawyers - what exactly is or isn't "pirated": often the courts have to decide whether something is covered by "fair dealing/fair use", for example. So how can ordinary citizens possibly know in every case whether what they are sharing is "pirated"?

In particular, there is the situation that the term of copyright varies by country, and what may be in the public domain in one, is still in copyright in another. So what happens when someone in a country where some creation is in the public domain shares it with someone in a country where it isn't? The continuing injustice of the O'Dwyer case shows us that the US tries to applies its laws everywhere in the world: so does that mean its copyright laws apply in Europe?

Finally, while it is true that ACTA will not "shut down websites" directly, there is another clause that is even worse (Article 10):

"judicial authorities have the authority to order that materials and implements, the predominant use of which has been in the manufacture or creation of such infringing goods, be, without undue delay and without compensation of any sort, destroyed or disposed of"

Now, by definition, a Web site "creates" infringing copies when it sends or streams them to users; so lawyers could - and almost certainly will, knowing lawyers - argue that ACTA provides for the destruction and disposal of any computers whose "predominant use" is copyright infringement. So, no simple censorship, certainly, just the seizure and physical destruction of computers (assuming they are in one of the ACTA signatories), and probably the domain name too.

Not only that, but another section (Article 12) allows for "materials and implements" to be seized without informing the party affected, and even without any guarantee that people can defend themselves afterwards - so much for due process and justice.

3. ACTA is a secret agreement. Negotiations were not transparent and conducted "behind closed doors". The European Parliament was not fully informed, stakeholders were not consulted.

Likewise, the public was informed since the launch of the negotiations about the objectives and general thrust of the negotiations. The Commission released summary reports after every negotiation round and the negotiating text since April 2010. It organised press briefings and four stakeholder conferences on ACTA, one of them evenonly a few days before the first negotiating round.

This is extraordinarily duplicitous. The text of ACTA may be available to everyone now, but that is after the negotiations have been concluded - in other words, as a fait accompli. Even though the ACTA discussions began in 2006, the first formal draft that was officially released was only in 2010. The only reason people knew what was in ACTA was thanks to a document posted in Wikileaks in 2008: in other words, if the ACTA negotiators had got their way, ACTA would have been negotiated behind closed doors for four years before the public was allowed to see anything (and had there not been the Wikileaks leak, it's possible that even the draft would not have been released.)

The Commission claims "the public was informed since the launch of the negotiations about the objectives and general thrust of the negotiations": but what matters, of course, are the details, not the "general thrust". A few press briefings and stakeholder conferences are no substitute for actually allowing the public to give some - any - input to the ACTA process. But in the many years of negotiations, there was no possibility whatsoever to do that.

And yet even though the public was denied any opportunity to comment on a treaty that would have important implications for their lives, certain privileged groups were not just given access but consulted on their views, as Wikipedia explains:

"Apart from the participating governments, an advisory committee of large US-based multinational corporations was consulted on the content of the draft treaty, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (which includes the Business Software Alliance, Motion Picture Association of America, and Recording Industry Association of America). A 2009 Freedom of Information request showed that the following companies also received copies of the draft under a nondisclosure agreement: Google, eBay, Intel, Dell, News Corporation, Sony Pictures, Time Warner, and Verizon."

Given the fact that major US corporations that stand to benefit directly from ACTA's disproportionate enforcement terms were allowed to shape its details from early on, while the 300 million European citizens who will be subject to those same terms had not a single formal opportunity even to express their views, the Commission's attempt to suggest that this was not a secret treaty, and that the public was consulted, is risible and insulting.

ACTA Update I
ACTA Update II

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I don't need to wax poetic about just how good the MacBook Air itself is. Plenty of testers have already explained just what makes the MacBook Air the ultra ultabook. See Engadget, CNET, Fortune. (And of course ultrabooks were all the rage at CES this year, see HP's showcased by Serena in Gossip Girl and Dell's XPS 13.)

But I do need to describe my experience with this travel-friendly, totally modern, and practical combination of hardware and software. I'll then also point out some things that are still challenging in using the MacBook Air in a Windows-centric business world. First, the experience in four bullets:

1. The machine itself is a wonder. I drop it on the floor and it keeps ticking. The battery lasts a flight across country. It fires up and finds a network in seconds. It's lickety-splitly fast and deliciously light. It's thin and light enough to slide unnoticed into my bag. (I have to look to check that I didn't forget it.) It boots in seconds, finds Wi-Fi in moments, and discovers new video connections without problems. And it draws looks of envy from colleagues and respect from customers. It's worth the price.
2. Parallels virtual machine is easy to use (and easy enough to set up though I'm not much of a do-it-yourselfer). The software is stable, and it behaves just like a Windows machine at work. No performance issues, totally compliant with our security and network requirements, running all our corporate software. It's like having your cake and eating it, too. (Colleagues also rave about the VMware Fusion virtual machine.)
3. Windows runs just like I expect it to. It was critical to me for this machine to run our business image. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to use it the way I live, where work and life blend together like milk & honey. I can keep the practical bits running while embracing the new bits. (Pun intended.)
4. The OS X Lion software is more post-PC (I like the new scrolling motion and touch-aligned things) and more fun than previous versions. The App Store alone makes the software worth running. You get the same app experience on the Mac as you get on an iPhone or iPad. And the number of apps is growing -- all my regular apps (like Evernote, TweetDeck, Kindle) are there. Apple says 100 million downloads to Macs already.

• I haven't quite cracked the code on iPass, our corporate Wi-Fi access software. It doesn't seem to find sites or log on from the Windows side. And I don't have a corporate-provided Mac version.
• Our Cisco softphone doesn't seem to run on the Windows image, either. That is, it might, but with my limited skills I haven't yet figured out how.
• The display drivers, particularly in PowerPoint 2010, don't always work well. Sometimes when going into slideshow mode in PowerPoint, the display goes a little whacko. I can usually bring it back to heel by alt-tabbing my way to a different application and back.
• Chrome (and Safari) run tediously slow. There's some network traffic thingy that I don't notice in the VoIP or video apps, but I do notice a lot (and detest) in the browser page loads. The Parallels people want me to disable my security software (no can do) and change the network settings (also can't do) to fix it. It ain't good, but I live with it.
• I live in fear that that some other Windows application will crap out. Early on, I had huge problems with an uncontrolled process in our security software. If it happens again, then I'm back to rebooting every 10 minutes.
• The ability to scale this solution up to every employee is still hard to imagine. I had to walk the machine upstairs and draw on highly expert IT resources to get the image ported and stabilised. I don't yet see how we could scale this up to meet the needs of every employee.

But these are far from deal breakers for a lone employee, and I am very happy with the Mac over our business machine. The coolest thing is that I can remain backwardly compatible with my organisation's requirements while embracing the new architectures of apps and devices. Nice work, Apple, Parallels, and our network & security team! For some real research on just how popular this Mac-running-Windows phenomenon is, see my colleague Dave Johnson's report, caught here in a blog post: Repeal Prohibition.

What's your Mac experience running Windows?

Posted by Ted Schadler

For the last three years, the OSI Board has been aware of a need for change. It’s mission needs a renewed expression. The Board decided the best way to achieve this was to switch from a Board-only organization focused largely on licensing to a member-led organization with an elected Board of facilitators. We discovered this was hard to invent, and last year eventually settled on the approach of incremental transformation. The first step of that transformation is now real. OSI now has the core of an Affiliate membership, with delegates from as many open source communities as are willing to participate. The Board has invited an initial set of Affiliates to join and collectively devise the new OSI.

What will that new OSI do? It will naturally continue stewardship of the Open Source Definition and the canonical list of approved licenses. But it will now also embrace the other parts of its mission:

• Build bridges between parts of the community, over which greater collaboration on open source can occur
• Provide a venue for that united community to speak with a unified voice when issues arise that affect us all, such as the ACTA treaty or the CPTN patent issue last year.
• Promote the understanding of open source through shared academic and advocacy activities.

I made three important announcements on OSI's behalf which initiate that embrace:

• OSI welcomes twelve non-profit communities as the initial Affiliates for OSI (see right). They will work with the Board to devise the governance and structures of the new OSI. OSI invites all non-profit communities committed to increasing software freedom to become an OSI Affiliate. Contact me to explore how to join. In the future, we hope to broaden the criteria for Affiliates to allow non-incorporated community entities to affiliate too.
• We will be introducing a way for you to join OSI personally. Please take our survey so we know what you want OSI membership to include.
• We are hosting a new project to create a “Body of Knowledge” to support academic curriculum. You could join this new FLOSSBOK initiative and contribute to a central resource for educators globally.

These are just the first steps; we’ve still a long way to go. Now we have a body of Affiliates on board, I hope both that they will accelerate the Board’s progress towards change and that they will self-organise as obvious opportunities are identified. I hope we can use an "open source" approach to create a new OSI for the new decade.

Follow Simon as @webmink on Twitter and Identi.Ca and also on Google+. First published at the OSI web site

There are many definitions of innovation outsourcing. The NOA innovation Steering Committee, spearheaded by Lee Ayling of KPMG and IBM’s Tony Morgan, define it as "the application of new ideas, ways of working and/or the use of existing ideas in a new context to deliver value through change".

The above definition is a mashup of other definitions from across the industry. That’s what innovation is mostly, a mashup. We in live in an age where hardly anything is new, everything is a bricolage of ideas and intellectual property that are already out there.

Five years in the making, a mega mashup of existing technology and ideas has landed in the Square Mile to give litterbug city boys and girls somewhere to drop their used newspapers. But it’s much more than just a bin. It’s got functionality that James Bond’s gadgetsmith Q would be proud of.

The Renew Bin is a receptacle for recycling with LCD screens providing transport updates and news headlines. Some critics say this is pointless, as people have mobile devices for both those functions. But this super-bin is capable of interacting with smartphones, and as it is fully Wi-Fi capable, it will soon be bringing internet hotspots to the streets of the City.  

For a rubbish bin, it’s good in a crisis too. That’s when they could really come into their own. Not only is it bomb proof - numerous explosions in the New Mexico desert bear testament to that - it displays vital information in times of emergency, such as bomb scares, to direct pedestrians away from certain localities or tube stations. So when the phone networks are overloaded, Londoners can remain in the loop and out of the danger zone. 

It’s an innovative outsourcing contract too. Although are the bins are rumoured to cost £30k each, no money is believed to have changed hands between the City of London and Renew. Instead, the ‘recycling unit’ manufacturer makes its money through sponsorship by companies wanting to adorn the bins, to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility credentials.

The Renew recycling unit is a classic example of innovation: bringing a wide variety of existing concepts together, to form something fresh that fulfils a need, profitably. 

Bravo Renew, bravo.

Along with many observers, I noted that the original SeaMicro server was well-suited to many light-weight edge processing tasks, but that the system would not support more traditional compute-intensive tasks due to the performance of the Atom core. I was, however, quite taken with the basic architecture, which uses a proprietary high-speed (1.28 Tb/s) 3D mesh interconnect to allow the CPU cores to share network, BIOS and disk resources that are normally replicated on eper server in conventional designs, with commensurate reductions in power and an increase in density.

18 months later SeaMicro, again with support from Intel, has extended this architecture to the Xeon CPU, and has introduced the SM1000-EX, based on the Intel Xeon E3-1260L, a 45W quad-core design targeted at low power single socket servers, currently widely deployed in HPC environments. The resulting system can be configured with up to 64 CPUs, for a total of 256 cores in 10U.

While impressive, this is not actually leading-edge density - there are other dense-pack servers that can deliver equal or higher core density with Xeon CPUs. What is significant is the power consumption - SeaMicro manages to do this on an aggregate power budget that comes out to a claimed 55W per core, only 10W over the power required for the core itself. In contrast, a conventional server design today would require at least 2 - 3X the power of the core itself, giving the New SeaMicro design a substantial edge in energy efficiency.

For Intel, SeaMicro represents a microscopic proportion of their business, but is a highly visible ally in the quest to prove that x86 servers can compete in an increasingly energy-conscious world as alternative architectures such as ARM raise the spectre of another competing architecture in the datacentre.

For the industry as a whole, I think the implications of some of the recent server developments from Intel/SeaMicro and Calxeda/HP are even more significant - if we connect the dots, we can see the developing shape of what may be the most significant evolution in fundamental server architecture in about 25 years - the transition to scalable fabric-based as opposed to bus-based architectures.

But in the best tradition of Charles Dickens, that’s a story for the next edition :)

Posted by Richard Fichera

For organisations that are targeting users in the developed world, many are simplifying this challenge to target smartphones only. However even here to create local native applications requires solutions that support Apple’s iOS, Windows, Android and Java (Blackberry).

There are many mobile development platforms available to assist with creating "write once deploy everywhere" apps. The main constrains here are that you end up with deployments to many different stores, and that quite often still write platform specific code to take advantage of platform specific features.

HTML5 has long been a strong candidate for mobile applications, but is it ready? Are mobile browsers upto date with HTML5?

The answer to this question can be a simple "No", no mobile browser supports the full HTML5 specification. Or a “Maybe” depending on what features (camera, phone book and GPS) of the phone you require you may have support from HTML5.

Push that up to a resounding "Yes", if you want to move an application that currently runs on the web to run on mobile. Of course, I should also caveat the above with 'there are grey areas' in between these responses, not very helpful I know.

For corporates looking to support mobile users with line of business applications I believe there are some great examples that prove HTML5 is ready for them. For a start Facebook is one such application taking full advantage of HTML5, and promoting its use for Facebook apps.

The key areas of HTML5 that are supported across mainstream mobile browsers are offline storage, geolocation, multimedia, graphics (canvas), touch events and large parts of CSS3. The mobile HTML5 site provides a list of mobile browser capabilities.

In the past marketers are argued that presence on App Stores adds value to "brand awareness", and whilst this is true, there is nothing stopping an organisation having using both native apps and HTML. For example, take LloydsTSB. You can download their app, which effectively once downloaded then runs a "browser" version of their Internet banking service.

There are also some great libraries out there that make cross platform mobile development much easier and provide features that make your web applications feel much more like a native phone app. JQueryMobile is a great example.

So what are you waiting for?

You may use this platform on the White House website to create and sign petitions that call for the federal government to take action on a range of issues. For each topic included in We the People, you can petition the Administration to address a problem, support or oppose a proposal, or otherwise change or continue federal government policy or actions. As explained below, if a petition meets the signature goal within the designated period, the White House will respond to that petition in a timely fashion.

The threshold for a reply is actually reasonable low - currently 25,000 signatures within 30 days. That's meant all kinds of interesting - and vaguely surprising - petitions have received an answer from the White House.

Here's one of them:

Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents

To return sanity to the software industry - one of the few industries still going strong in America - direct the patent office to cease issuing software patents and to void all previously issued software patents.

Even though that failed to reach the 25,000 signature threshold, the White House has nonetheless offered a reply, which is noteworthy in itself. Here's the main thrust of its argument:

The America Invents Act directly addresses certain categories of patents, like patents involving tax strategies, but it did not change the law regarding the patentability of software-related inventions. There's a lot we can do through the new law to improve patent quality and to ensure that only true inventions are given patent protection. But it's important to note that the executive branch doesn't set the boundaries of what is patentable all by itself. Congress has set forth broad categories of inventions that are eligible for patent protection. The courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have interpreted the statute to include some software-related inventions.

That's basically trying to off-load blame on to Congress and the courts. But that disappointing non-answer is following by something remarkable: a paean to open source software:

We understand that the concern about software patents stems, in part, from concerns that overly broad patents on software-based inventions may stifle the very innovative and creative open source software development community. As an Administration, we recognize the tremendous value of open source innovation and rely on it to accomplish key missions. For example, the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan recently announced that the source code for We the People and Data.gov would be open sourced for the entire world. Federal agencies are likewise spurring innovation through open source energy. For example, the Department of Defense issued clarifying guidance on the use of open software at the Department. And, the Department of Health and Human Services has become a leader in standards-based, open sourced policy to power innovations in health care quality and enable research into efficient care delivery. The tremendous growth of the open source and open data communities over the years, for delivery of both commercial and non-commercial services, shows that innovation can flourish in both the proprietary and open source software environments.

What's interesting here is that open source was nowhere mentioned in the original petition. So it shows a commendable savviness on the part of the person who actually wrote the reply - Quentin Palfrey, Senior Advisor to CTO for Jobs and Competitiveness at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy - that much of the concern about software patents is the deletorious effect they have on free software.

So even if the e-petition failed to get President Obama to agree to abolish software patents (admittedly a bit of a long shot), it did have the beneficial effect of eliciting this strong vote in favour of open source from a very high-profile site.

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There are many potential benefits from ITIL adoption, particularly around productivity, service quality, business reputation, and cost savings. However, ITIL is fraught with adoption challenges that could be prevented or at least minimised through better planning and execution.

The key ITIL adoption challenges and pitfalls (at a very, very high level)

• Focusing too much on the reactive elements of ITIL and ITSM (for some, however, this might be enough).
• Overstating ITIL and ITSM adoption levels - “We do ITIL.”
• Overstating ITIL and ITSM maturity - where IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) organisations often think that they are more advanced than they actually are - “We have a super-duper service catalogue.”
• Not focusing on the customer and business outcomes.
• Lacking momentum post technology implementation project.
• Noticeable dissatisfaction with traditional service desk tools.

With people-related challenges to be found in most if not all of the above.

Want more detail on the challenges?

These are explored in greater detail in the Forrester report from which this high-level extract is taken:

• Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL

If you don’t have access to Forrester’s online content (it's behind the Forrester.com pay wall), more information on the above (albeit in a more disjointed fashion) can be found in previous Forrester blogs:

• “We Need To Talk About ITIL”
• Top 10 IT Service Management Challenges For 2012
• The ABC Of ICT - The Top 10 People Success Factors For IT Service Management
• ITIL: What Constitutes Success?
• Top 20 (OK, 50) ITIL Adoption Mistakes
• What Next For ITIL?

So what are the 5 steps to help with successful ITIL adoption?

Despite these challenges, I&O executives and their teams can significantly improve the probability of success when adopting ITIL and reduce the pain of what is ultimately a considerable organisational and cultural change. The trick is to ensure that sufficient planning leads to optimal adoption, not just in the short term, for example, selecting and implementing a service desk tool, but also in the longer-term through an ITSM maturity vision, phased adoption, and support for continued improvement.

Whether you’re embarking on a greenfield ITIL adoption or wanting to improve the IT support and IT service delivery of your existing ITSM operations, Forrester recommends that I&O executives and their teams get started by following these five steps:

• Step No. 1: Understand what ITIL is all about, especially the importance of people.
• Step No. 2: Be realistic about existing ITSM process maturity and improve them gradually.
• Step No. 3: Evaluate technology only after you’ve addressed goals, people, and processes.
• Step No. 4: Get the initial planning right, but also plan beyond the “technology project.”
• Step No. 5: Regularly communicate ITIL’s value and involve the IT and non-IT stakeholder.

Finally, also consider how ITIL and enabling technologies can be used outside of IT. Think about how the processes and technology can be leveraged by other business functions such as facilities management, complaint management, or people management. Think about it early even if you don’t plan to do anything about it for a while.

The Forrester report from which the above text has been extracted and edited down, is aimed at helping I&O professionals plan for ITIL adoption success by understanding what commonly goes wrong and by employing recognised good practices to mitigate these risks.

Finally … Yes, this is a thinly-disguised but infrequent plug for the work that pays my wages. I would, however, still love to hear your thoughts, comments, and ideas.

Posted by Stephen Mann

Related Forrester Research

Unravelling ISO, CMM, And ITIL IT Management Frameworks

Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL

The State Of IT Service Management In 2011

Develop An IT Service Management And Automation Strategic Plan