I was lucky enough this week to get a complimentary pass to the Gartner IT Symposium (thanks Gartner!) where several hundred C-level executives gathered to hear the latest on the state of the IT industry. There were no real surprises in the opening presentation from Gartner, we face many years of slow growth and we will probably never see IT spending return to the peaks we saw in the middle of this decade.

What was fascinating was hearing the new Telstra CEO speak. It was a “Parkinson” talk show style, which is a new format for Gartner, and David Thodey strode onto the stage looking very cool and comfortable, while the Gartner hosts seemed a little nervous.

David kept the message very simple and what he said applies to most businesses in Australia today.

1. Make sure new ideas or business developments have an ROI. Don’t let technology get ahead of the business value.
2. Focus on your core competencies. What is your unique expertise and how can you provide customers with a great experience?

These first of these messages was bundled in with the topic of the National Broadband Network. Telstra’s role is still unknown as they work through the regulatory issues, and David believes the timeline is a way off as the design work isn’t completed and there are still unanswered questions on how it will be implemented. Although he supports the concept he believes it is an incredibly difficult project that doesn’t have a great ROI at this point in time.

He is wary of investing in a technology before the business case is clearly defined, and questions how quickly consumers till take on this new technology. Today Telstra has only 5% of home users on 20mbs. On the other hand he points out that the Telstra network traffic is currently doubling every 8 years, and that growth is speeding up. He can also see great opportunities around education and schools and the huge household demand for video.

In illustrating the second key message about focusing on core competencies, David talked about the core of the Telstra business, networks and network services. Telstra will focus on improving customer service via offering network centric services and work side-by-side with IT vendors and systems integrators to deliver solutions to customers.

It was refreshing to hear a straight-forward and focused talk. Even made me start to think about buying some Telstra shares. Do you think David will have success at realising these strategies within Telstra?

Tracy Gumm
Program Manager
http://au.linkedin.com/in/tracygumm

The term Business Analytics is on everyone’s lips. It’s like when you buy a new car, suddenly you see that same car everywhere where previously you never noticed it on the road. That’s how I see business analytics, once the domain of math gurus, it is now talked about by all. Its even being referred to as a tipping point for our customers, something which can dramatically change their businesses.

But what does business analytics mean? Traditionally it meant complex mathematical algorithms, designed to simulate realworld scenarios, and generally visualised as a star trek style dashboard where management can control the business with the click of a mouse.

I have a slightly different view. I think it means the way the whole of the business is run, how all the business units come together to decide on their offers and how they combine strategic and operational level data, with the endgame being predictive modeling and the ability to evaluate what-if scenarios to make the best investments in ever changing markets.

The challenge to reaching this endgame is organisational not technological. How can we be nimble and self directing while, at the same time, being integrated and working with a whole view of the business? We are all frightened of the beaurocracy that can creep in when everything is a matrix, but if we can enable integration whilst keeping complexity at bay there will be powerful competitive advantages.

This is why all our key partners are investing heavily in business analytics. They know if they can help customers solve these issues there is a pot of gold for all involved. IBM GBS recently announced a new global Business Analytics & Optimisation Practice and have also set up Analytic centres in China, Japan and the US . They have 4000 people all dedicated to Business Analytics, helping enable their customers to discover predictive insights and turn them into operational reality.

Accenture and Capgemini are also focusing in on how they can solve this problem for customers. Accenture surveyed the marketplace in the USA and found that two-thirds of large U.S. companies believe they need to improve their analytical capabilities and only half believe they are spending enough on business analytics. “These findings show that business analytics prowess will be a high priority in the boardroom in 2009 and beyond,” said Royce Bell, chief executive officer of Accenture Information Management Services. “While executives understand that companies with enterprise-wide business analytics have an advantage over those still relying on nebulous sources to make decisions, they face institutional challenges to reforming their processes across the board. Leading organizations are moving from a siloed approach to more inclusive information management programs that work across the entire company.”

Soon business analytics will be common and well understood, just as CRM and the internet are today. We will wonder how we ever survived without it. This is great for Teradata as this has been our focus since inception. The challenge for Teradata is to partner effectively with the companies who are focusing on this area. Do you think Teradata can partner to deliver this vision to customers?

Tracy Gumm
Program Manager 

Australia's Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner recently heralded the Gershon Review and resultant reforms by Federal Government as a success. A review into the efficiency and effectiveness of IT, Gershon recommended cost reductions, program management rigor and the use of Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products amongst other significant cultural and operational changes. Minister Tanner has confirmed that approximately $430 million of savings have been reaped from Business As Usual (BAU) IT spending in Federal Government. But this is only part of the equation…development, management and delivery of new capability using agile methods and class-leading COTS products are still yet to become pervasive. So what does that mean: a success only in part? Perhaps. What is clear is that it is time to reinvest in the right capabilities.

Gershon identified that in order to change Federal Government ICT, the re-investment of half of all savings harvested would be key in future successes. The estimated ~$215m will be a welcome injection into the ICT economy which has seen a significant pull-back from Federal Government since Gershon's recommendations were tabled in 2008. So for many ICT organisations, 2010/11 is expected to be an exciting year to be working with Australian Federal Government.

Caution is advised, however. Cracking open the piggy bank to spend on home-grown applications using the minds and architectures of the past could be a perilous path. Similarly, COTS products that are untested, ill-proven and bought for the wrong reasons will not go unnoticed. Government needs to take the Gartner Magic Quadrants for each specific IT segment and actively engage the leading organisations, best in class, to take them into the new world. Federal Government agencies have to take the right advice from the right people to build the right capabilities. There will be many ICT organisations looking to ride on any waves made by Federal Government ICT reinvestment in the 2010/11 financial year.

Agencies should be very cautious, particularly in the data warehousing, data integration, business intelligence and analytics market. These are decision-enabling technologies for both strategic and operational arms of the organisation. Gershon was a somewhat innocuous refocusing of Government ICT; a cultural change exercise which gave Government the time it needed to respond. Tanner's announcement reminds us that there are new expectations - build efficient and effective capabilities, responsibly, transparently and defensibly. Spending public monies is indeed a privilege and providing insight into capability-building projects, outcomes and return on investment will be more than just a new trend but a given. Accounting for expenditure and measuring value, not just defending it, will become par for the course. Being able to report on projects mid-stream, make early decisions to "go/no-go" and evaluate project success are again capabilities that will support the project management rigor being demanded off the back of the Gershon Review. If your Government organisation does not have this capability now, it will only be a matter of time before it is politely requested - then required.

Buying, implementing and deploying COTS technologies that enable the wrong decision or do not deliver in a timely fashion will be inexcusable. Gershon brings about a new period of accountability and transparency which is a new Western Democratic mantra from Parliament House through to Whitehall, the Reichstag and the White House. Enabling capabilities to make better decisions in-time resulting in a valued difference empowers governments and public servants to act with confidence and account for decisions with fact. The game for the Federal Government has now changed and those who are best informed and have agile intelligence to support decisions on policy, service delivery and reforms will win the day.

Government agencies that choose partners like Teradata with COTS products, local expertise, a proven government track-record and contracts that can be leveraged for economic efficiencies will be achieving the Gershon vision. I would welcome contact from any government agency that need insights into operations and measurement of strategy; that will be all of you. Building an efficient and effective information capability will stand the Gershon test and enable insights and measurement performance and expenditure of public monies in a new government epoch of transparency.

David Bremstaller

Last week I attended the 16th Annual Computer Old-Timers Lunch, and it always provides an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of the Australian IT industry and the industry more broadly. To qualify as an “old-timer” you must have worked with paper tape, punch cards or floppy disks. But even with that qualification I am at least a “second generation” ITer and it is always a privilege to be in the presence of some of our pioneers, “the first generation”.

Australia’s first computer (CSIRAC) and the world’s fourth, was built at the University of Sydney in 1949 and turned off in 1964 (before I even started) and Australia was the world's third nation to enter the digital age. http://www.csiro.au/science/ps4f.html

CSIRAC has also been referred to as “the machine that changed the world”. It “was a supercomputer for its time - revolutionising everything from weather forecasting to banking, and playing the first ever computer music.” http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/csirac/default.htm

Back then, research aspirations focused on finding a way to store the instructions in computer memory along with the data so that the computer could respond to more complex instructions. Until that was achieved operators sat at a separate console and programs were fed into the computer on punched paper tapes. This was their “Storage Dream”.

"If a computer is finding its own way, you can put in branched or conditional instructions - 'If this is negative, do this'," says Thorne. "The computer can actually weave it's way through calculations autonomously. Once it's set up, it can run without intervention. This was the great dream."

By the time I got into the industry, there were still only postgraduate studies in computing none for the undergraduate but instructions could be stored in memory. To test my programs (on a CDC 3200) I would submit two batch jobs of cards a day with my modified program – and if it crashed I got a memory dump to work out what went wrong. This was certainly a big incentive to get your code right!

My “Storage Dream” came from the second machine I worked on, a PDP-8. To get the machine started I had to “key in” the boot instructions and I loaded my programs into the computer via “shoe boxes” of paper tape – but at least they got stored on small magnetic tapes and I didn’t have to do it every time I needed to run the program. Here's a Web link to a video of the booting of a DEC PDP-8 console .[Thanks to David Gesswein of pdp8online.com, who produced the video in 2008.] So for me, when the PDP-11 came out with a push button start I thought this was the “greatest thing since sliced bread”!

Our industry has continued to progress at a rapid rate and today the old problem or “Storage Dream” of bringing data and instructions together as fast as possible continues to drive invention and product enhancements. It came at a cost though – that of data management and storage management overheads. A full time job for many! At least all I had to do was read and write to flat files on tape in a sequential manner. The only overhead was a dual tape read/write for backup/recovery.

Today the “Storage Dream” solution continues to evolve as it solves both the physical means through solid state devices (for now at least) and database management systems to automate the management of data for optimal access and utilisation. For example, in the data warehousing context, Teradata has announced the world’s first solid state data warehouse appliance for hyper-analytics.

While these products are just another step along the “Storage Dream” journey we have all been frustrated by some aspect of our work with computers and each of us will have our “Dream” app. or invention that we claim to be “the greatest thing since sliced bread” – and believe me that was a great invention – so what is your dream app. or invention?

Christine Page-Hanify

*Image Source: www.abc.net.au

After Alec’s last blog post there’s a tenuous link to mine - Andre Mendes was CIO of Special Olympics International. I was playing badminton in the World Masters Games (The “Oldies Olympics”) in Sydney last month and I shattered one of my badminton rackets. I am now down to my last one of 5 I bought in the UK about 8years ago. So I need to get replacements. But guess what, racket technology has so moved on just in that short time and I can’t get anything like the same balance any more! They feel even lighter now and totally weird. It will take me a long time to get used to the new ones!

So it started me thinking about technology and how it’s used both in sport and commercially. I have been playing badminton for 40+ years, so that gives you some idea of my age and you can imagine that I have seen big technology changes. At the Masters Games there was a 101 year old woman competing in athletics and she would have seen huge changes in technology in her lifetime.

I was an IBM programmer back in the “old days” and the first commercial system I worked on was an IBM 360/30 that first shipped in 1965 with 64KB of memory with 60MB of disk storage

and programs uploaded & compiled via punch card!

At the Teradata Partners Conference in Washington last month there was an announcement regarding an Extreme Performance Appliance based entirely on solid state disk drives and can scale to 200TB!

Now if everyone has access to the same technology where’s the advantage? For example Rafael Nadal has his strengths over other players but he leverages the racket technology to gain further advantage. In sport, technology is normally constrained by rules and regulations and they constantly change to “manage” that change in technology, e.g. F1 racing. However commercial application of technology doesn’t have those rules, or does it? It’s not rules or regulations against the technology, just the application of that technology in certain ways, privacy etc. So the technology isn’t the differentiator, it’s how it’s used and it shouldn’t restrict capability or be a limiting factor. 

John Street 

I’ve been pretty quiet lately on Twitter and haven’t written a blog for a while. While there are many others who have formed the habit of fitting these activities in with their (I’m sure) overly busy schedules, my excuse/reason is that we have just been through the very pointy end of winning a major new customer.

The good news is that we have come through with the right result (more to come on that later when we have something to announce). I’ve been through this process a couple of times, and it is “all consuming” (even dreams end up about the sales process), hence my silence.

Unfortunately the process didn’t conclude in time to allow us to get our new customer to Teradata Partners. I really wanted to get there to provide that sense of confidence in their decision that only another customer can provide, and there is no better place than Partners to talk to customers. I also wanted to personally thank the many of my colleagues and account teams that helped us win the deal.

One of the many write-ups that came out of Partners came from Dr. Mark Whitehorn mulling over continuing speculation of an SAP acquisition of Teradata. He articulates four factors that any potential acquirer would need to make sure they understood in evaluating Teradata:

1. Teradata has only just become independent
2. The customers are unusual
3. The company culture is different
4. The people are different

The key summary point for me is this:

Teradata is genuinely different from most of the other BI companies -- it has a very unusual set of customers, a very unusual working/research relationship with them, a very different management ethos and very different staff. It is these differences that make it what it is and also make it successful.

The reason this resonates with me is because it is the key reason why we won our new account.
I’ve been at (or around) Teradata now since 1994. It really wasn’t until I went to my first Partners conference in 1996 that “I got it”. Since then, being part of the Teradata culture really has meant being able to tap into those points that Dr. Whitehorn calls out. In the sales campaign we had conference calls with the Teradata executive and many conference calls with accounts and account teams in Asia, Europe and America. Everyone is keen to contribute whatever they can to help grow Teradata.

And that’s what makes writing the “Thank You” email so enjoyable.

And already this week we are putting back in to help an account team in Europe.

Sean Kain

Last month I attended the 2009 CIO Executive summit in Sydney. There were a number of interesting and challenging presentations including the closing keynote by Andre Mendes, Global CIO of Special Olympics International.

Andre talked about a wide variety of topics and subjects from Genomics to Immortality, some of it quite challenging and all of it interesting and thought provoking. He also used a personal example of how he went from a young, determined and ambitious 24 year old to a 37 year old ‘dinosaur’ who suddenly started looking at the ideas from the 24 year olds in his team with a ‘that won’t work’ attitude.

I am now of that certain age and find myself being a bit grumpy about Cloud computing, something that naturally got a mention in Andres presentation. I don’t want to be a dinosaur - I genuinely believe the cloud has the potential to be disruptive and game changing and Teradata is already making moves into our cloud offer with Amazon EC2 but I have a couple of issues at the moment with some of the positioning around the cloud.

First security. I am getting increasingly concerned at the soundbite stating that security of data is the number one issue to consider around Data Warehousing in the cloud. Second, I don’t think this is the ‘number one reason for discounting the cloud for Data Warehousing or Analytics. If it’s yours then you probably aren’t really considering a proper Data Warehouse or real Business Analytics.

That security soundbite makes it sound as though the technology is not capable of the required security. I’m happy to stand up and say that Teradata can be used in a cloud environment and the data in the Teradata database can be secured from unauthorised access. Indeed our customers regularly use their internal clouds and secure data between business units and departments. Certainly we are more than up to the task of protecting any data and can be further encrypted using the capabilities that our partnership with Protegrity enables.

This is not the barrier that prevents organisations from moving into the cloud. The security worry is not a technical one, it’s a legal one. The small print of many cloud providers has to enable them to give up your data if they are mandated to by an authority that could be in a country that you were unaware your data had entered. I think this legal issue is the ‘security concern’. It’s important but not the number one issue.

On the second point I recall the numerous ‘lessons learned on outsourcing’ presentations I have attended in the last 5 years which all indicated that commodity business process is ripe for outsource but that IP and competitive differentiators should be guarded carefully. A Data Warehouse used effectively for actionable and operational business process carries both IP and requires strong service level agreements, neither of which put it in the ‘ripe for outsourcing’ category, nor therefore first in line for movement to the cloud. IP and service level guarantees are, in my opinion more important considerations for Business Analytcs in the cloud.

When we talk about the 5 stages of Data Warehousing, we talk about a chasm between stages 1 and 2 and then between 3 and 4. This is a cultural and all too often a technical issue that organisations get into. Whilst organisations can consider some basic reporting as a commodity that could be put into the cloud, they need to be careful that they do not inadvertently trap themselves and make it impossible to move through to value adding Business Analytics and operational intelligence.

In his presentation, Andre Mendes talked about his use of the cloud. In the case of his organisation, there is likely a need for some operational intelligence but the IP conversation is probably less relevant in a not for profit than a commercial business. I think the commercial sector will be watching leading organisations such as his for the lessons learned and best practices in this field.

What is your experience in the cloud – what do you think are the main issues to be addressed?

Alec Gardner