IT in Canada April 2012

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Contents

24

www.itincanada.ca

Vol 3 No 2 March/April 2012

Technospective

Features 4 Editorial 9 Technospective on Networking & Communications Networking takes a back seat to cloud, social media 12 Technospective on Cloud Whither cloud in 2012?

14 Book Review: Smart Trust

6 Cover Story: The increasingly-gradual recovery Features 16 In The Middle In the Middle: Forecast 2012 18 Technospective on Security Privacy pays when security breached 20 Technospective on Data Centre Empowering the cloud

24 Technospective on Personal Tech Tablets, OS and BYOD – prospects for 2012 26 Technospective on Collaboration/Social Social media and collaboration 28 Technospective on Software The software outlook for 2012

Online Extras: www.itincanada.ca Missed an issue? Misplaced an article? Visit www.itincanada.ca for a full archive of past It in Canada issues, as well as online extras from our many contributors.

10 Technospective March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 3

Canada’s technology research authority

Editorial

Editorial

CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER: MICHAEL O’NEIL

michael.oneil@itincanada.ca

Editor and Toronto Bureau Chief: MARY ALLEN

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OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF: STEFAN DUBOWSKI

stefan.dubowski@itincanada.ca

Contributors: Dave Chappelle, Chris Rogers, Harvey Schachter sales National Account Manager: Patricia Bush

905-727-4091 x336 trisha.bush@itincanada.ca

Reliability and diversity drive our forecasting for 2012

Events

y first experience with forecasting involved a sharp pencil and 10 pounds of accordion SSPS print. To find the story, I was enjoined to circle the anomalies – a methodology that was limited by human memory and patience with page flipping.

Happily, those days are long gone and forecasters now have digital memory, spreadsheets and other analytical tools to help coax significant trends from the data. One thing has not changed, however, and that is the need for industry knowledge that leads the researcher to ask the right questions of the right respondent population – and of results that are generated. IT in Canada is fortunate in having this expertise at hand in our IT Market Dynamics division, which combined have over a half century’s worth of experience deciphering the business implications of the story contained in quantitative resources.

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Publisher’s Mail Agreement: 42169527 IT in Canada magazine is published six times per year by Brighton Communications Inc., in partnership with IT Market Dynamics Inc. (ITMD) All opinions expressed herein are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or any person or organization associated with the magazine. Letters, submissions, comments and suggested topics are welcome, and should be sent to michael.oneil@itincanada.ca.

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Appealing to IT professionals and executives in industries that rely on technology to support their business operations, IT in Canada brings together the essential information assets of the 21st century – news articles sourced from established, reputable publications, video and other broadcast content types, interactive forums that categorize social media as well as data from our related research company, IT Market Dynamics – to add depth to our coverage and analysis. The resulting network provides a perspective that takes full advantage of the “new media” opportunities provided by the Internet, offering a rich destination that benefits readers and advertisers alike. www.itincanada.ca Reprint Information

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IT Market Dynamics is also fortunate in having a rich data set on which to base our forecast for the Canadian IT industry for the coming year – highlights of which are included in this issue of the IT in Canada magazine. Market trends across major hardware and software categories, which are reflected in Michael O’Neil’s central research feature, “The increasinglygradual recovery,” are based on survey of Canadian IT and business managers over a four year period. This year, conclusions based on trend analysis has been strengthened through year-over-year polling of a repeat respondent population (338 of the 1009 respondents included in our 2012 forecast survey also contributed to the 2011 data that we presented last year, and nearly 20% have provided their input for three or more years) – the motherlode of data miners everywhere which has helped build even greater reliability into our predictions.

For this forecast issue (IT in Canada’s second), we have also considered and presented the opinion of industry practitioners. In addition to our regular In the Middle feature, where we have asked the reseller community to pronounce on what they see coming down the pipe, we have also prepared Technospectives on six key technology areas, including cloud, data centre, networking, collaboration, software, security and personal tech. The goal in these feature articles has been to identify how trends seen in 2011 will shape expectations and developments in the coming year. IT in Canada’s editorial team has combined insights gained from exposure to a host of new product offerings and customer use cases with the opinions of thought leaders from across Canadian IT – many of whom will no doubt be familiar to readers. These pages contain a journey through the near-term future of IT: Chris Rogers talks tablets, operating systems and BYOD in personal tech, Stefan Dubowski considers shifting enterprise priorities in the networking realm and the integration of social media in the collaboration strategies of a growing stock of Canadian businesses; Dave Chappelle outlines the ongoing struggle of IT security – to whittle down the number of security and privacy breaches that could be better managed with policy and practice. In the software area, Chappelle considers the explosion of adoption of mobile apps and SaaS offerings, in the SMB space in particular, as well as the development of platform standards that will make this possible. We also consider cloud in this issue, with a lens trained on the new trust and governance issues that have evolved from the good news – growing adoption in Canada – and from the perspective of implementation in the data centre, where convergence trends are creating the preconditions necessary for greater cloud efficiencies.

In each area, we benefit from – and would like to thank – the many industry leaders and watchers whose observations on what to expect in 2012 enrich our Technsopective features, and testify to the inspired engagement of the Canadian IT community.

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Mary Allen Editor, IT in Canada

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A18908_2a_EF3_CAN.indd

rEsEarch FEaturE

By Michael o’Neil

the increasingly-gradual recovery Where is Canadian IT spending headed in 2012? With input from more than 1,000 Canadian IT and business managers, ITMD defines the next steps in a slow path forward.

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enerally, I wouldn’t begin a forecast In 2012, as in previous years, IT Market the ‘but’ by advising anyone to look back at a Dynamics – Canada’s most widely-read IT This year though, no good news can be depainful episode in our shared history research firm, and a sister company to IT in livered without adding a ‘but’. In this case, – but it appears that many businesspeople Canada – conducted a substantial quantitaour reservation is attributable to the pace of are still affected by the shadow of the Great tive survey to gauge Canadian IT budget expenditure growth anticipated by Canadian Recession, so I suppose there’s no harm in trends for the current year. From late 2011 management. When the complete survey naming the elephant in the room. until early March, 2012, ITMD surveyed data is fed into ITMD’s forecasting models, In my ‘real world’ travels, I see undeni1,009 IT and business leaders, representwe find that the top-level optimism does not able signs of economic health and recovery. ing organizations from all industries and translate into extraordinary growth rates. In After several years, people are being hired across all e-size categories. Included in this fact, our forecast Canadian IT growth rate for genuine, important jobs; marketers are number were 338 respondents who also of 3.49% is lower even than the 3.78% we looking to expand their reach, rather than provided input to our 2011 forecast (and saw in 2010, as we were emerging from the conserving funds to retain current staff; IT nearly 200 who participated in the 2010 recession. decision makers are starting to look beyond forecast survey as well). As is seen in Figure That said, as Figure 2 illustrates, a reasonreplacement of worn-out equipment to de1, this community is far more bullish than able case can be made that 3.49% in the ployment of new systems. And yet… bearish in its outlook, with a weighted avercurrent environment represents a continuThat lingering hesitation has cast a shadage of nearly 40% looking for an increase in ation of the ‘relatively good news’ story that ow over business culture, darkening our 2012 spending, as compared with just 7% Canadian IT has experienced since the end forecast for 2012. In its Update of Economic who expect a decline in 2012 IT budgets. of the recession. Unlike 2010, when we as an and Fiscal Projections (November, 2011), industry were scrambling to recover ground Statistics Canada presents an average of private sector forecasts for 2011 and 2012 Figure 1. 2012 Budget outlook by e-size economic growth; in the six month period from March to September, the averages dropped from 2.9% to 100% 2.2% for 2011, and from 90% 2.8% to 2.1% for 2012.

33% 39% 43% 43% 80% The fact that StatsCan’s own data indicates higher 70% actual growth for 2011 is 60% Increase at least somewhat symp50% tomatic of the issue: the No change 60% 40% residual pain of the 2009 54% 49% 51% Decrease downturn colours business 30% management’s perception 20% of current opportunities.

10% 8% 7% 7% It’s as though the long tail 6% 0% of the recession is wrapped 1-­‐99 100-­‐499 500+ Weighted around the levers of ecoemployees employees total nomic growth, pulling back on the brake each time N=1009. Source, IT Market Dynamics, the research arm of IT in Canada, 2012 momentum starts to build.

6 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

Research Feature

all sectors of the economy, that even the gross 2012 increase in Canadian IT lost over the previous 1-2 years and when modest gains have a major impact on spending is expected to amount to more most IT managers were wondering how to opportunities for both the organizations than $3.25 billion. As Figure 3 shows, IT fund even the replacement of end-of-life that rely on technology to deliver new is an important source of stimulus and units, in 2012, the increase builds on two capabilities, and for the providers focused innovation across Canada: 2012 will see previous years of growth, which will move on these customers. Even at 3.49%, a $1.25 billion increase in spending in the entire industry to a cumulative 12% above the trough of 2009.

Additionally, there is evidence that IT managers – perhaps Figure 2. Annual and cumulative growth in Canadian IT spending unlike their line of business colleagues – are putting some longer-term plans into action.

This year, for example, we see that operations, after a oneyear reversal, is again leading acquisitions as the primary focus for new IT investment.

Two years ago, a focus on operational expenditures most likely reflected a desire to retain staff in the face of uncertain budgets. In 2011, the growth rate for products surpassed the growth rate for operational categories like staff and services, as organizations scrambled to replace aging equipment. In 2012, the trend has flipped again, with the pendulum swinging back to an emphasis on operational expenditures. Is this just a Figure 3. Net new IT spending by region, 2012 reflection of the overall trepidation in the economy, with IT retrenching to protect jobs?

It’s possible – but so too is the notion that IT managers are gearing up to roll out complex systems, ranging from cloud to VDI to “SoLoMoN” (Social, Location-based, Mobile and Networked systems), which respond to new IT-enabled opportunities and promise new IT-enabled capabilities and competitive advantage.

Woven into the fabric The truth is that IT has become so large as a category and so entrenched across March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 7

rEsEarch FEaturE though, ‘higher’ is the more likely of the two alternatives. When we evaluate our forecasts, we always pay special attention to findings for small business. These organizations can be opportunistic in their approach to IT: they often lack formal budgeting processes, and may spend on IT when need or opportunity aligns with available funds. A forecast that relies on high growth in the small business segment carries a substantial amount of risk. In the case of the 2012 forecast, however, the growth rate predicted for organizations with 1-99 employees is roughly 20% below the rate predicted for mid-sized and large organizations. If the economy delivers as these larger enterprises appear to expect, it’s likely that there would be some upside in the small business spending outlook – and given the importance of small business to the Canadian economy, this would move the overall IT spending line north. We believe this will be a gradual process, but there is scope for more rapid advancement, assuming, of course, that we are able to shrug off the lingering chill from the 2009 downturn.

Ontario, more than $1.1 billion in the western provinces, another $665 million in Quebec, and nearly $250 million in new spending in Atlantic Canada. Planners in both the public and private sector should be aware of what this investment – and the new processes and business options that it creates – will mean to these regional economies.

At a more fundamental level, IT has become a substantial line item for nearly all organizations. Figure 4 combines our forecast findings with data from Statistics Canada and the Treasury Board of Canada to illustrate the proportion of sectoral GDP allocated to IT. Only in wholesale/retail and government is the proportion of revenue allocated to IT below 6% – and uncertainties in the government data make it possible that only retail, where hundreds of thousands of small shops rely on rudimentary automation, is lagging behind an economywide trend towards better productivity through increased use of technology.

over or under? Forecast scenarios

8 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

Figure 4.

The report is available to subscribers to ITMD’s All Points Connected research program at no charge.

Non-clients can order the report, which is delivered in PowerPoint format, for $2,495 plus HST. Please contact Stephen Symonds at stephen.symonds@itincanada.ca for more information.

it expenditures as a % of gdp by industry What is the rela+onship? 2012 IT spend vs. 2011 GDP

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By their nature, forecasts reflect a series of assumptions regarding future behaviour – of the economy, of buyers, of suppliers, and even of the environment, which can disrupt supply chains and purchasing activity. Given this uncertainty, it’s natural to ask whether the IT industry is more likely to wind up over or under the forecast growth rate of 3.49% at the end of 2012.

We are confident that the forecasted figure represents the most likely scenario. ITMD’s belief is that growth is most likely to land at or around the 3.49% figure, but we can see reasons why it might move higher or lower than that point. In our opinion,

ITMD’s Canadian Technology Market Demand Forecast – 2012 contains detailed examinations of 2012 Canadian growth rates by expenditure type, product category, enterprise size, region, and industry.

By Stefan Dubowski

on Networking and Communications

Technospective

Networking takes back seat to cloud, social media

“ Communications technology isn’t attracting the attention that it used to – but that certainly doesn’t mean it shouldn’t.”

H

ow’s this for irony? As cloud computing, social media and mobility have become the dominant infrastructure stories in the IT sector, the very technology that has helped pave the way for all three – advanced networking – now takes a back seat in terms of enterprise priorities.

While a few years ago this article would have highlighted the commingling of voice, data, videoconferencing and presence with new switching technologies, routing capabilities and other aspects of the good old OSI chart, those items – while still important – operate more as support systems than stand-alone trends.

“I’m seeing that mobility, cloud and social media are exploding for businesses, and they’re bigger fires, bigger things that need

Jon Arnold, principal, J Arnold & Associates, a technology advisory firm in Toronto

Canadian organizations have had access to a novel, efficient communications technology for nearly six years now: SIP trunking, which effectively replaces relatively expensive physical connections with virtual IPbased links. But companies aren’t exactly rushing to implement it.

“The Canadian take-up of SIP trunking

attention than UC,” said Jon Arnold, principal of J Arnold & Associates, a technology advisory firm in Toronto, referencing the once hot area of unified communications.

“These other trends are happening faster and they’re having a more immediate impact.”

For the near future, cloud will be the dominant force in advanced networking.

Network equipment providers and communications service companies will continue to push the envelope with novel connection schemes: • Avaya is betting on its Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA), which is meant to help reduce the time required for companies to turn on new services and support virtual machine migration – one of the building blocks of cloud computing.

is quite behind that of the U.S.,” said Jon Arnold. “It’s a less competitive environment here. Businesses tend to be a little more conservative; they like to stick to their incumbent telcos and their phone systems.

They’re not terribly adventurous or ready to enter into a technology they don’t fully understand or trust.”

Trust is a particularly sticky issue. Arnold pointed out that members of the SIP Forum have been working to create a common set of SIP standards that carriers and manufacturers can agree to so that everyone’s SIP equipment works with everyone else’s. But the standardization process has been slow.

“No one wants to take on the cost of doing

• Cisco has unveiled advancements in its Unified Computing System, which integrates network and computing resources that feature virtualization and management capabilities, with an eye towards helping customers accelerate their transition to the cloud. Enhancements include improved server density, a more comprehensive management system and Unified Fabric technology, which enable IT administrators to manage blade and rack servers as a common entity.

• Juniper Networks has set a new standard for data-centre networking scale with test results for QFabric, the company’s singlelayer network foundation. Conducted by benchmarking services firm Network Continued on page 10

the interoperability testing,” Arnold said.

“The telcos are waiting for the vendors. The vendors are waiting for the telcos. Until it happens, they just do SIP their own way.”

That hasn’t hindered SIP penetration in the U.S., where the enterprise mindset is less conservative, and where companies are doing all they can to reduce costs in this, the economy’s post-recession malaise.

But in Canada, lack of interoperability is one more reason for organizations to postpone implementation.

Companies will eventually embrace it, however, Arnold said. But for now, the industry is still waiting for the groundswell of early adopters to appear in this country.

March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 9

Technospective on Networking and Communications Continued from page 9

Test, and test and measurement company Spirent Communications, the test confirmed that the technology enables organizations to manage as many as 1,536 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports as a single device. The QFabric system also demonstrated record speeds, reaching 15.3 Tbps.

Meanwhile, communications carriers are focusing on wireless advancements. Watch for Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Telus to expand their LTE networks to support download speeds of up to 75 Mbps.

And their competitors – especially the relatively new wireless providers such as Mobilicity, Public Mobile, and Wind Mobile – are in for a rough ride. Now that the federal government has unveiled the rules for the upcoming wireless spectrum auction, these newcomers will have to rethink their business structures. The government elected to cap the amount of spectrum that the incumbents are allowed to acquire. At the same time, however, the feds said that from now on, small service providers (those with less than 10% of the market) are no longer bound by foreign-ownership restrictions. That means the new carriers may well invite substantial foreign investment to help them fund spectrum acquisitions. And it also raises the possibility of consolidation: the smaller carriers could opt to merge, giving them the opportunity to pool capital and purchase even more spectrum at auction.

“It’s possible, and it may be probable,” said Amit Kaminer, communications market analyst with SeaBoard Group. He added that consolidation isn’t inevitable, however, now that carriers like Wind and Mobilicity can solicit investment from beyond Canada’s borders. That may well give them the finances they need to acquire plenty of spectrum.

Canadian enterprises lag behind those in the U.S. in terms of SIP trunking take up for the moment; while it’s proving to be a popular product south of the border, it’s a tougher sell in this country. That will change, however, as businesses realize the potential cost savings SIP affords, and as they realize that the technology well suits the services they hope to use down the road, such as online collaboration or customer support.

10 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

Jean Turgeon, VP networking portfolio and solutions strategy for network equipment provider Avaya Canada.

Michael Strople, CTO for network services provider MTS Allstream

The cloud has moved beyond the concept stage into reality, according to Jean Turgeon, and that paves the way for a new network reality as well.

Avaya introduced its Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) a couple of years ago as a way to create data centre switching fabrics that support virtualized environments such as cloud infrastructure.

Avaya has also witnessed growth in customer interest in advanced enterprise wireless networking. “There’s a strong desire, not just from a best-effort point of view, for business-grade Wi-Fi,” Turgeon said. “We’ve seen some people come to the realization that running it as an overlay is no longer suitable.”

“There’s an acceleration of the convergence of wired and wireless,” he said, explaining that while in the past Wi-Fi and wired systems were managed separately, organizations are now seeking some way of bringing them closer together for lower management costs, reduced equipment costs, and improved network capacity.

Avaya is touting “split plane” technology that divides the wireless network into two areas: a software controller, which ensures security policies are enforced; and an Ethernet switch – one that is already deployed for wired connectivity – for the packet-forwarding duties.

“We’re shifting from legacy technology where VLANs used to carry a service in isolation across the entire network,” Turgeon said. “Moving forward we want to eliminate the need to use VLANs in the core of your infrastructure... We’re going to move to a fabric concept where you’re just going to connect your devices to the network and the fabric will figure it out for itself.” That will simplify the deployment and increase network reliability, affording faster time to service and lower costs, he said.

Last year brought no bright-light issues to the fore in the networking realm, Michael Strople said. But it did bring a lot more of the demands that were already underway in 2010.

“We saw a continued voracious demand for bandwidth. The whole nature of IP networking continues to be the way networks are connected. And the third trend is all around mobility – services anywhere and data anywhere. When you put all three together in the quantities we saw, that leads to the notion of cloud computing.”

For 2012, “I think we’re seeing the doubling down on each of those areas,” Strople said. Network bandwidth, IP and mobility are becoming even more important.

Asked how the service provider sees its position in the cloud, unlike so many other IT companies (virtualization providers, systems integrators, software vendors) which aim to convince the market that they are the cloud company, Strople was pragmatic. “We see ourselves enabling the cloud. We may not be the end destination...but we are the glue that connects everything together, without which there is no cloud.”

He added that advanced networking affords opportunities for customers, but it also spells certain obligations. “Businesses are going to have to be prepared for the consumers’ greater expectations – for real-time responses, and an always online presence.”

A SIP trunking provider since 2006, MTS Allstream has seen increasing customer demand for the product. But take-up hasn’t hockey-sticked yet. “We’re watching for the year when the real knee in the curve happens and growth starts to explode,” Strople said, explaining that increased online collaboration and cloud adoption will convince more organizations to embrace SIP as a cost-effective networking technology. “We’re beginning to see market uptake.”

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Technospective on Cloud

By Mary Allen

Whither cloud in 2012?

While providers hammer out full service portfolios, education has shaped a growing host of adopters that are looking to nail down provisions in cloud agreements.

C

loud is gathering steam as it paves a way into Canadian business operations. Over the past year, while the discourse has evolved from definition of a novelty technology to discussion of the “when” and “how” to implement, growth in overall adoption has affirmed the attraction of this new approach to computing. Research into use of the cloud by IT Market Dynamics, released in 4Q11, found that over 40% of Canadian businesses have deployed cloud in one form or another, and looking out 12 months beyond, a further 20% have plans to implement. By any measure, this commitment to a relatively new technology is impressive – when considered in the context of technology deployment that requires and inspires a radically different way of thinking about delivery of computing resources, the adoption rates are even more striking.

Despite this significant shift in weltanschauung, certain obstacles continue to dog broader acceptance of cloud computing.

The most frequently cited barrier is fear for data security, a control issue that in Canada is often accompanied by concern for data residency and the need to ensure compliance with Canadian regulation – particularly around privacy. In response, cloud vendors have mounted a fairly successful educational campaign, pointing to the relative superiority of service provider security expertise (as compared with capabilities in the typical SME), to the potential for building private clouds in Canada for management of sensi-

tive data or critical business applications, to offerings that allow users to set privacy and security protocols, and to reciprocity agreements between Canada and the U.S., which essentially mean that data is subject to the same government rights to subpoena, here or in the land of the Patriot Act. Over the past year, however, the security/ privacy/data location issue has transformed into a formidable challenge that may be more difficult to resolve and that, ironically, is a product of user willingness to experiment with cloud. ‘Trust’ and governance have emerged as a complex set of issues that are part and parcel of user experience with cloud. These are thorny practical matters that Cheryl Giblon, peer lead for ITMD’s Alternative Service Delivery management and contracting research service, enumerates as the need for stricter adherence to SLAs, legal recourse for users and meaningful compensation in the case of failure, particularly for smaller businesses, as well as issues around data portability and vendor lock-in.

On the supply side of the equation, if some providers have yet to hammer out a business case that would allow remedy of this kind, recognition of market uncertainty has led a number of the leading suppliers to cover all the bases with an augmented portfolio aimed at serving hybrid environments – the approach that offers the control and flexibility now preferred by many adopters. IBM, for example, added public cloud services to technology and service offerings for private

clouds last spring, and HP, which has been transitioning its hefty outsourcing business to private cloud services, announced a public cloud service in the fall that is currently in beta with 500 customers. For its part, Microsoft, which has developed a significant profile in the public cloud space with Azure’s PaaS and SaaS offerings, introduced a program to better support the building of private clouds this fall. Beyond full service portfolios, cloud vendors have also worked over the past year towards creation of specialty clouds that address the specific regulatory, governance or compute needs within a particular vertical. Clouds for government, the film industry (PEER 1’s high performance GPU hosted infrastructure, Scalar Decisions’ RenderCloud), and healthcare (Dell’s MEDITECH cloud services) now exist in Canada, offering real world demonstration of the efficiencies that can be achieved in particular industries.

In cloud, the pace of change is so fast that “what’s next” is often here today. This is a message reinforced by IBM Canada cloud leader, Aldo Gallone, who expects the lag in Canadian cloud adoption (behind the US) will disappear this year, driven by “the access world,” encouraged by ongoing education on governance, and inspired by a new range of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS appliances that can simplify deployment and management to remove one of the last barriers to broad cloud adoption – inertia. Stay tuned...

I believe 2012 will be the year of hybrid implementations where customers pick where they want to use cloud and how they want to use cloud. We believe in a world where customers will use the technology where cloud makes sense and has the highest ROI. I think Canadian customers are saying, ‘Less hype. Make it real for me and make it real for me by helping me understand where the highest ROI is on cloud. When we do that, we will be able to position the security, the privacy and the controls issues in the right scenarios...There’s no one silver bullet, but there are some examples of where there is great ROI. If we look at some customer examples for small and medium sized businesses, we think productivity solutions have great ROI... and cloud-based collaboration also brings great benefit to the Peter Doulas, director of the server business group for Microsoft Canada. startup.

12 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

on Cloud

Technospective

2011 was the year of demystifying the cloud – there was a lot of uncertainty around the different cloud models, the types of cloud, and how people might apply cloud to their environments. But we see 2012 as the year when we will see cloud adoption gain traction. In the conversations that we are having with IT leaders and the compliance teams of the client organizations, the talk is getting down to the details and the nitty gritty around what are the safeguards that are being employed, and the contractual relationships that allow their organizations to be comfortable with cloud services. Also, we are seeing the take up – companies and public sector organizations are using cloud services. This demonstrates that people have wrapped their heads around the philosophy, the processes and technologies, and are able to be comfortable in delivering services that way.

In terms of predicting what individual workloads will drive cloud adoption, I don’t think we have passed email adoption. A number of organizations continue to look at email as one of the applications they can leverage cloud power for. When we look at private cloud adoption, we are seeing much more emphasis on the management aspects... [such as] self-provisioning and billing so you can have finer grained management over how your enterprise makes use of those clouds.

John Weigelt, national technology officer, Microsoft Canada

In Canada we have been behind the [adoption] curve based on our conservative nature and the fact that we weren’t hit as hard by the recession, but I see us closing that gap this year. This is because IT professionals in Canada are starting to get their heads around what I call “the IT textbook” as it relates to cloud, which includes issues that have been holding them back like security and governance. Some of those barriers are starting to melt as people begin to understand that security in the cloud is not so bad – in some cases it’s better – and how to govern relationships with cloud vendors.

Mobility – smartphones, tablets – that ‘access world’ and the trend towards BYOD is really pushing and accelerating the need for cloud. IT departments are having to facilitate mobility and BYOD through cloud-like environments. Public cloud adoption is accelerating, but specifically around SaaS in the mid-market. In private cloud, people are accelerating their infrastructure build – getting IaaS in place or getting right to self-built paths.

We are no longer having to define and map cloud vs. traditional IT – people now understand the different deployment models and they’re asking specific questions such as ‘How do I move forward?’ The offerings are also maturing – compared with 12 months ago, we have many more applications and a much more extensive ecosystem of ISVs. In terms of innovation on the private front, we have expert integrated systems and modular appliances coming out that make building infrastructure and provisioning apps in private clouds much easier, and in the public/ shared/community cloud space, more industry solutions are evolving – on the government and municipal government side – and will become more real this year.

Aldo Gallone, cloud leader, IBM Canada

“Some funny stuff goes on with Service Level Agreements if you are not careful. How do you enforce them? Having real and enforceable penalties is a big issue.”

Ms. Giblon cites several different types of contract management challenges: • Alignment of priorities: customer and provider

• Tech support: how are after-hours calls handled?

• Data ownership: who owns the data and the licenses? How are upgrades and refreshes handled? What’s involved in migrating to another supplier?

“Large businesses have contract departments and they can work these things out. Small businesses, on the other hand, don’t have the opportunity to modify contracts to the same extent – they basically have to take what they are given, in terms of planned outages, for example.

In this situation, the brand name becomes very important. If you get cloud services from one of the big providers, and even if you don’t have an opportunity to negotiate the contract, you can say, ‘if it’s good enough for all these clients, it’s probably good enough for me.’ And that’s not necessarily a bad way to go.”

The best piece of advice is that you have to do your homework and you have to know what you need. This is difficult but necessary, because when you sign up with a provider, you don’t want to have to be moving one year, two years, or even five years down the road. It’s much easier for everybody if you just stay where you are. This means that the decision you are making today has far reaching consequences.

Cheryl Giblon, peer lead for ITMD’s Alternative Service Delivery management and contracting research service March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 13

Book rEviEW

By harvey schachter

smart trust i

n their look at well-performing government organizations around the world, The Three Pillars of Public Management, Ole Ingstrup and Paul Crookall identified trust as a crucial element for success. Trust is the lubricant that keeps relationships and organizations running smoothly.

But trust can be slippery, hard to get a handle on. We shouldn’t need a manual to be trustworthy – if we’re faking it, subordinates know – but in a networked world with today’s daily swirl and prevailing cynicism, trust can be complicated. Stephen M. R. Covey (author and the son of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People guru Stephen R. Covey) and Greg Link offer some assistance in their new book, Smart Trust.

Smart trust can be distinguished from blind trust. It follows the old Russian proverb that U.S. President Ronald Reagan famously revived in his dealings with the Soviet Union, “Trust, but verify.” In our own lives, it means starting with a propensity to trust but also combining that with analysis to figure out how best to manage that trust.

The authors say smart trust, at its essence, is judgment, a quality leaders are expected to have. It minimizes risks and optimizes possibilities. It requires overcoming our inherent distrust of others, instilled in us as youngsters by our parents’ warnings about strangers. “Although Stranger Danger may be a good thing to teach kids, it can become a large problem if it becomes the basic way we look at all relationships throughout our lives – if we allow a protective response to the five percent who can’t be trusted to drive the way we interact with the other 95 percent who we can. Stranger Danger can script us, at a young age, to be suspicious and distrusting,” Covey writes in one of the sidebars of the book where the authors give personal anecdotes.

The authors set out five actions that will help to make smart trust work for you:

14 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

1. Choose to believe in trust: belief is the foundation for getting results in any area of our life, and that applies in trust as well. Indeed, they note that what we believe is even stronger than what we know because belief drives our behaviour and our actions. “Deciding to believe in trust is a choice, the fundamental choice out of which all other Smart Trust actions flow,” they note.

2. Start with self: beyond belief in trust, you must behave with trust. And that starts with your own actions. It will be easier for people to trust you if you are seen as honest, straightforward, dependable, and genuinely concerned about their welfare.

Ask yourself whether your character and competence add up to a person or organization that others can trust.

3. Declare your intent: charity starts at home, and so does trust. Declaring your intent at the start of situations such as negotiations is an accelerator of trust. Let people know what you are seeking, and also be open so they can see you have no hidden agendas. Together, this will diminish suspicion.

4. Do what you say you are going to do: if you don’t live up to your commitments, you will squander trust. In almost every nation, culture, religion and philosophy for effective living around the world, the authors found “do what you say you are going to do” was an important value and significant measure of trust building. In essence, it’s a global standard, and so in a multicultural world, whether dealing with colleagues at home or folks in other countries, you want to avoid failing on this measure. “Delivering promised results – doing what you say you are going to do – generates trust faster than any other action. This is particularly true

by Stephen M. R. Covey and Greg Link, with Rebecca Merrill (Free Press, 296 pages, $29.99).

when circumstances make it difficult,” they add.

5. Lead in extending trust to others: most of us can remember a time when somebody extended trust in us, and how gratifying and empowering it was. We need to do the same for others. Acting with such faith and trust unleashes human potential and multiplies performance. It engenders reciprocal trust.

Government executives, of course, in an era of accountability and media gotchas have extra cause to worry when dealing with others. They must protect the government from rogues, and that can lead to blind distrust.

But the book makes a strong case for applying the notion of smart trust where you can.

Harvey Schachter, who writes The Globe and Mail’s Managing Books and Monday Morning Manager columns, is a freelance writer specializing in management issues.

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In the Middle

By Chris Rogers

From left to right: Rick Reid, president, Tech Data Canada; Richard Singh, infrastructure consultant, Ideaca; Dan Forbes, VP, Westcon Canada; David Toms, VP and GM, Metafore IT Solutions, Central and Western regions; Carlos Paz-Soldan, CTO, Tenet; Richard Lichtenstein, VP sales, advisory services, RunE2E; Paul Gragtmans, principal, ET Group; Lesley Andrews, Sr. Manager, business development, CompuCom Canada

Canadian IT channel players weigh in on what to look for over the next 12 months, highlighting the interconnection between major trend technologies.

M

any of the themes identified in IT in Canada’s 2012 forecast magazine are similar to the ones explored in our 2011 issue. Subjects such as cloud, mobility and security are as important today as they were last year – yet, in almost every case, it can be argued that these trends appear for very different reasons.

Take cloud. While much of 2011 was spent trying to define the cloud, towards the end of the year and into 2012, private cloud began to take hold in the enterprise, while small businesses began to take advantage of public cloud offerings.

Security in 2011 was as much about headlines as it was about securing data.

The Anonymous group, WikiLeaks, and the major RSA and PlayStation breaches kept security in the headlines. The opinions below suggest that in 2012 companies will focus more on securing devices than on the headlines.

The key point that emerges from our In the Middle conversation is that while we consider trends as separate entities, in real life they are actually tightly connected. More than ever before, it’s clear that end-users and IT alike expect a seamless experience – increasing the value of interoperability between solutions for security, collaboration, communications, cloud and mobile, inside or outside the data centre.

16 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

Q: Any good forecast starts with a review of the recent past. Were there any products or trends that you think were exceptionally successful in 2011?

Dan Forbes, Westcon: There have been many. First, SIP continues to gain significant momentum. In Canada, it is starting to become a regular topic of conversation.

Additionally, video continues to move downstream from enterprise boardrooms to mid-and-small enterprise. 2011 has also seen the tremendous growth in data loss prevention and data management. We expect this trend to grow in 2012.

David Toms, Metafore: In many ways, 2011 was an uphill battle. Customer budgets for IT remained static. Customers did invest where the return on investment was clear. Overall, they were looking for more consultative investment and partnership last year…where previously, they simply made vendor decisions unilaterally and usually internally.

Lesley Andrews, CompuCom: We saw strong demand for data centre, networking and personal systems. Clients are looking for innovative ways to reduce cost while increasing performance and maintaining security.

Richard Lichtenstein, RunE2E: In the enterprise software and infrastructure space, two areas continued to grow – virtualization and cloud. Two of the biggest winners were VMware and Amazon – ground to cloud. IT managers can now feel secure that their large IT environments will run in the cloud the way they did on other platforms.

Q: What products or product categories do you expect to increase in customer importance in 2012?

Lesley Andrews: BYOD is becoming the new standard. As clients increase their numbers of devices, we see increased need for additional storage options. We are also finding that VDI and cloud computing will drive data centre upgrades.

Rick Reid, Tech Data Canada: Really, it’s a continuation of 2011. Mobility products and tablets are hot topics. We are also seeing tremendous traction in digital signage – it’s starting to take off.

Richard Lichtenstein: In the enterprise software and infrastructure space, I believe that sales of virtualized bundled appliances like vBlock will grow. The ability to ‘plug and play’ a complete virtualized hardware solution into a large software environment

In the Middle

will be a game changer. This will lower TCO while maintaining power and flexibility.

Maintenance costs alone will be a tenth of what they were before.

Paul Gragtmans, ET Group: We expect that interest will continue to grow in all three real time collaboration technologies – web conferencing, video conferencing and IWB [interactive white board] conferencing. Real time interactive collaboration (vs. iterative collaboration) is making its way onto the radar of most companies. Customers are also sorting out how UC fits with collaboration.

– or “UCC,” as some refer to it. To better understand UCC, it is important to delineate between UC modes: “UC-B” is about using UC to enhance business processes by accelerating process communications, while “UC-U,” is focused on communication tools enabling collaboration between knowledge workers, executives, and other non-process job types.

Dan Forbes: We believe that there are several key areas for 2012. Of increasing importance to customers will be the further emergence of SIP in Canada. You’ll also see the explosion of big data and continued cloud adoption.

Richard Singh, Ideaca: I think that we’ll see greater adoption of System Center, more Opalis implementations to assist automation, and a huge push for SP 2010 upgrades..

Q: Which of the trends we’re always hearing about – cloud, mobility, BYOD, etc. – do you think will be especially important in 2012, and why?

Rick Reid: Those trends will all continue to be relevant as they are all key components of the next generation of technology. They

work in concert with one another so it’s really hard to say that one will dominate.

However, when you think about it, the cloud impacts all of the other trends mentioned in some fashion. Clearly, the cloud will be a major focus. Also, as mobility and the cloud continue to grow, so does the need for network and data security. It’s amazing how integrated the technology has become.

Carlos Paz-Soldan, Tenet: The big story will be the convergence of cloud, mobility and social, which will in turn generate big data and the need for better analytics.

BYOD will continue to be talked about, but organizations are not giving IT the required funding [to manage this] so BYOD will be a source of frustration – and possibly a security disaster waiting to happen.

Richard Lichtenstein: Cloud will continue to trend upward as it becomes more secure and affordable. The key is for providers to prove they can meet the needs of the evergrowing customer base. They can’t afford to have the blackouts that occurred in 2011.

David Toms: BYOD and consumerization of corporate IT is a given from here and beyond. We need to help our customers deal with it. Safely. Wisely. Securely. Cloud adoption will continue to rise… [but] there is still a lot of education [needed] regarding cloud, especially as relates to automation and security.

Richard Singh: Cloud and mobility and the two combined. It seems that more and more they work together as clients want their info on the go. I’ve seem more clients look for access to their ERP via mobile devices, so I think this will be a huge trend in 2012 (ERP via web and the SharePoint platform).

Q: Lastly, any “big picture” predictions for 2012 that you think will have an impact on the industry, the economy, or the environment generally?

David Toms: Predictive analytics. Being able to leverage the huge amounts of data that are collected and stored, and doing something practical and forward-thinking with it, instead of running legacy queries to summarize the past.

Paul Gragtmans: I think the environmental issues are a sleeping dragon (beyond 2012) and who knows exactly when that dragon is going to wake up. When the dragon wakes up, who will be prepared to deal with it?

Things are going to change – substantially.

But most of us are like a frog in a pot that is slowly heating up to the boiling point and we don’t notice the gradual changes, nor anticipate the ultimate impact Lesley Andrews: One trend is that while we have traditionally worked with different IT teams within our client base, we are now finding that those teams are working in conjunction with one another as solutions cross over the networking/data centre platforms to become all-encompassing.

Rick Reid: I think many of the trends mentioned previously will play a key role in 2012 in how the channel adapts and grows.

Some of the small and mid-sized resellers that rely solely on product sales will find it increasingly difficult to counter the impact of the cloud, shared services and BYOD purchased through retail.

March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 17

Technospective ON Security and Privacy

By Dave Chappelle

Privacy pays when security breached Expect security breaches that marked 2011 to continue into 2012 due to the increasing sophistication of attackers and nonchalance of IT users.

L

ast year the number of announced security and privacy breaches rose dramatically. From those we learned that many enterprises are nonchalant about securing our credit card information – or our logins and passwords.

Even security vendors were penetrated; one through a social engineering attempt that didn’t fool alert consumers. Some of those breaches were politically motivated, reminders of years gone by when malware was written for notoriety instead of profit, as it is now.

Perhaps most disturbing is that many governments are in the malware and criminal hacking business, seemingly using state resources to develop highly specialized malware and spyware. Of course these governments are in denial, a stance which brings to mind Bismarck’s observation, “Nothing is confirmed until it is officially denied.”

Since little has changed – especially human nature – this year we’ll no doubt see more of the same, along with new threats to our privacy and security.

Incident response investigators like Nick Percoco, senior vice president and head of SpiderLabs for Trustwave, for example, have discovered new levels of sophistication in malware targeting.

“Of all the malware we gathered from our investigations, traditional AV software only found 12% of it,” he said. “We often speak of the ‘Breach Triad’ – breaking down three phases of an attack.”

In the aggregation phase, attackers learn about the systems and who uses what information. Then they disappear.

“And then they come back with a piece of custom developed malware that gathers the information they want,” Percoco said. “For example, they’ll develop a tool that goes 18 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

right to the area where new data is being written, and gather what they’re seeking.”

Going forward, we should expect to see more targeted attacks because, as Toni Mazur, CEO of Mazur and Associates, explained, “Everybody has something of value; even dead people. You cannot stop the determined individual or organization from getting something, as long as they’re in the position to spend the time and money.”

He’s right about the dead having valuable information. The U.S. government has established a database for social security numbers of the deceased, an information resource that fraud artists are using to create new false identities.

“There’s always some criminal who wants your information, and who’ll do what it takes to get it,” Mazur said. “Every 20 or 30 years somebody breaks into the Bank of England. It’s the same as Chinese hacking into North American businesses. They’ve got tons of money and lots of resources.”

The other complicating factor is there isn’t a tangible component. IT security is virtual – you can’t touch and feel it. Remember when vendors begrudgingly added passwords to routers after consumer protest?

Mazur’s advice is to lock it up, relaxing security only as you need. Then verify.

“In government we once implemented a software product to distribute patches to all desktops,” he said. “Then we had a huge virus problem that infected all desktops.

The software reported the patches had been installed. That wasn’t true. They had only been delivered.”

Unfortunately, when information is taken, either by force or negligence, privacy pays the price.

“I think the two issues for this year are nobrainers,” said privacy advocate Tracy Ann Continued on page 22

I’ve got 43 years in IT, and see the same issue come up as technology changes – technologically illiterate clients who don’t want to use passwords and don’t think security is important.

In certain communities, people don’t even lock their front doors because they think they’re safe. The Internet isn’t like a little village – people can hack you from next door or from around the world.

In government we implemented passwords on Blackberries. A couple of deputy ministers were indignant about having passwords, saying they were too much trouble. They gave their passwords to their assistants.

You can only pass so many regulations. I think we’re talking about trying to change behaviour. How you do that?

I’m not a behavioural psychologist; it’s definitely a different way of looking at things.

More people than IT have to be concerned about security. It’s not an IT problem; it’s a business problem.

And security is not a corporate or government responsibility; it’s an individual responsibility.

Toni Mazur, CEO of Mazur and Associates, is the peer research lead for ITMD security research in 2012.

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Technospective

on Data Centre

By Mary Allen

Empowering the cloud Through integration of IT and facilities management, operators have begun to achieve the resource utilization and efficiencies needed to power the new data centre.

T

he need to do more with less is a refrain that rings familiar to data centre operators everywhere. Belt tightening associated with shrinking IT budgets of the last half decade, combined with new demands placed on infrastructure by the connected, automated and collaborative enterprise of today have created their own imperative – the search for efficiencies in data centre operation wherever they may be found. Traditionally, the data centre has been divided into two distinct categories – IT infrastructure and facilities – reflecting management roles, responsibilities and budgets within the enterprise, and each sphere has worked independently to innovate for better use of data centre resources. But in the pursuit of ever greater optimization, these two solitudes have drawn together, as facilities and IT have begun to recognize their interdependence and the benefits to be won through joint effort.

Virtualized IT At the IT infrastructure level, momentum has been building for some time now in the virtualization of servers, storage and even networking, as this is commonly viewed as the most direct route to better utilization of capacity. Implemented originally for cost savings, virtualization is used today to speed operational processes and server deployment, to build disaster recovery solutions, and increasingly, to prepare infrastructure for the creation of cloud architectures. According to area vice president for VMware Canada, Grant Aiken, one of the more visible trends over the past year has been “furthering of the journey to the fully automated, private cloud,” featuring management tools that enable self-service for enterprise users and which produce high levels of automation in the running of IT infrastructure.

20 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

While Canadian businesses tend to be further along the virtualization than automation/self service path (approximately 50% virtualized), Aitken also noted movement towards the “software defined data centre” where virtualization is extended beyond the compute layer to networking, storage and the desktop. This abstraction, in turn, has enabled a new approach aimed at producing even greater computing efficiency – the software managed convergence of server, storage and networking resources. Jeff Goldstein, NetApp Canada GM attributes “scale,” in terms of data centre size, infrastructure that has to be managed and the dramatic growth in the data itself as the primary driver behind convergence: while many organizations began to modernize the data centre through server virtualization, they have also come to “recognize that they have to virtualize the storage assets behind this if they want to drive efficiency out of this new paradigm.” Like other vendors, NetApp works with partners to deliver this new data centre infrastructure, which is variously described as ‘converged’ or ‘unified’, depending on the provider (for example, Cisco, HP or IBM), and characterized by high levels of standardization and automation that enable businesses to reduce maintenance commitments while achieving higher efficiency and productivity. In the storage area, Goldstein explained, value comes not from commodity hardware, but rather from a software stack that offers a multi-protocol, common platform to reduce complexity, drive out cost and enable the sharing of infrastructure: “you can’t share infrastructure if you can’t share the data.”

Converges with facilities This shift away from what Aitken calls a “hardware defined model in the data centre” has its corollary in facilities management,

where software-enhanced management systems are helping data centre operators to address the new pressures introduced by high density server environments. While a number of unique solutions, such as free air cooling, higher temperature set points in the data centre, design features like chimney venting or high voltage power solutions have recently gained recognition as novel means to improving PUE ratings, a software-enabled systems approach which follows the lead taken by IT has taken on increasing relevance in many data centre environments. Modular (as opposed to dual) ‘Virtual UPSs’ that can dynamically fire up to optimize power supply in virtualized server environments or sensordriven precision cooling are only a couple of examples of the way new facilities technologies are responding to IT requirements. As Emerson Network Power VP Peter Panfil noted, in response to several high profile failures over the past year, data centre managers have shifted focus from driving energy efficiency back to infrastructure management as a means of ensuring availability and reliability.

Achieved through “intelligent and integrated” solutions, approaches that integrate real-time monitoring, management and reporting now provide data centre operators with the visibility needed to optimize the deployment of IT infrastructure within the physical power and cooling infrastructure to further improve efficiency and utilization rates.

This shift towards integration of IT and facilities management has found its most clear expression in the modular and pod approaches to data centre design and operation.

Through integration of systems within the pod, for example, data centres have managed to realize very impressive PUE measures (the 1.3 range), and by plugging in and out modules and pods as needed, the ultimate in efficiency – the use as needed data centre.

on Data Centre

Technospective

Organizations that have been adopting virtualization as the primary means to reduce both capital and operating costs will continue that journey in a bigger way in 2012, and will try to move as close as possible to 100% virtualized as they can. As part of that, they will look to adopt as much as they can of the fully automated suite of tools – to create what I would call a private cloud.

The biggest challenge to broader adoption of private cloud is not the technology, it’s the people and process around implementation and management of this new paradigm. This is the biggest inhibitor to people getting to ‘end of job’ on the fully automated data centre. So companies need to rethink the work silos associated with the three major elements in the data centre – network, compute, storage , and in some cases security – and redefine the work roles of the individuals involved to make a more seamless and horizontal decision-making process now that those barriers are broken down by cloud and virtualization. People need to acknowledge that those silos aren’t going to come back and they need to rethink their IT lines around the notion that everything is abstracted.

Grant Aitken, area vice president for VMware Canada

It’s pretty amazing how quickly this whole notion of converged infrastructure, of converged stacks, has caught on in the last twelve to eighteen months. This is clearly a trend in the data centre as people try to drive cost out of the model and as they try to bring some of the promise of the cloud into their own data centres. The potential to centralize their assets, standardize their assets, consolidate their assets, virtualize their assets and begin automating IT services that used to take three teams to provision is a very big trend that is being driven partially by the threat of the public cloud. CIOs and VPs of finance see what Google and Amazon are charging to outsource some of these applications, and then turning to their internal teams, asking, ‘Why can I buy it so inexpensively when it takes so long and it’s so expensive for us to provision it in our own environment? We’re not seeing a lot of Canadian companies moving their mission critical data into the public cloud, but a lot of organizations are working hard to implement [converged infrastructure and automated provisioning] in their own private clouds.

Jeff Goldstein, general manager, NetApp Canada

2012 is all about continued virtualization and figuring out how existing and cloud infrastructures can coexist peacefully.

Server virtualization is well entrenched, but the trend now is toward making every server virtual for the convenience of being able to easily transfer installations between physical servers, regardless of whether it also enables some consolidation. Storage will continue to virtualize, enabling data centres to pool, consolidate and better manage server storage without rewriting existing business applications to access the data differently. Desktop virtualization, where a person’s copy of Microsoft Windows is actually running on a server and accessed through a browser-like window on their PC, is also growing in popularity as it makes mass software upgrades far easier. The coming next wave will be network virtualization, which will allow new networking technologies and protocols to be rolled out as they are developed, again without breaking existing systems.

On the cloud front, end user and small IT groups outside the central shared services IT organization are doing pilots with IaaS and PaaS, and in many cases are well along with using some form of SaaS, well out in front of what centralized data centres have been doing. CIOs are being asked if, when and how existing infrastructure should be moved to the public cloud. They know that the next round of questions to come will be about how all the SaaS systems used by various departments will integrate with existing systems, whether they’re on a traditional, private cloud, or public cloud infrastructure. Application integration has always been the bugaboo of corporate IT, and will continue to be for some time to come.

Larry Simon, president, Inflection Group and peer lead for ITMD’s cloud and data centre infrastructure research service

Customers want to optimize the design and operation of their data centre. They also have this companion need to optimize the management of their data centre. They want to simplify deployment, reduce CAPEX, and improve efficiency – though more than one IT manager has said ‘the data centre can never go down.’ So they want to increase efficiency, but not at the expense of reliability or availability. And they want to maximize existing resources – while simplifying deployment as they add to their infrastructure, or take multiple existing smaller data centres and roll them into a larger facility, or take the step into colo or cloud.

In our data centre user group polling, availability and infrastructure management are number one and two – they’re in a dead heat. Users want to improve the diagnostics and performance of their infrastructure, and to manage infrastructure in real time... they want to have a mechanism to take a look at what their infrastructure is doing, to understand how it’s performing, and to have a ‘smart architecture’ deployed that can give them variable capacity, but that will maintain availability, and keep efficiency and utilization rates high. This improves the asset utilization on the IT side, and in so doing, it flows into improving asset utilization on the infrastructure side.

Peter Panfil, Emerson Network Power VP March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 21

Technospective ON Security and Privacy Continued from page 18

Kosa, a doctoral candidate at University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “The first is mobile privacy, and the second is how much information is being collected on us by third party applications?”

“The right to be forgotten would have been important. Do we have one?” Kosa asked. “It came out of the European Commission, adding a right to be forgotten in the privacy law. It essentially suggests that companies like Google and its minions would have to get rid of data about you, and eliminate your digital footprint.”

You can imagine a lot of people are concerned with this.

“It would be expensive,” she added. “Who pays? Who decides what is to be gotten rid of, and when? And Facebook sells people; so purging personal data is forcing it to get rid of its commodity.”

This year, let’s make sure our data is not at risk.

Americans take an individualist approach — you’re responsible for your own privacy. Europeans take a government organizational approach – the government establishes the right, and the company has to act on that, regardless of whether or not people seek it out.

The European Commission is actively considering a right to be forgotten as part of privacy law. And of course that affects everything Europeans have access to – Wikipedia, Google, etc. It will come into play over this year.

Burn note (burnnote.com) purports to destroy communication after it’s read.

That ties into the right to be forgotten that we’re seeing the Europeans look at. That someone is offering this service indicates there is a market for it.

Privacy advocate Tracy Ann Kosa, doctoral candidate at University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

Self-detection makes up 16% of our cases, in which the victim organization has controls, alarms, or logs that indicate they’ve been hacked. That’s about a 44-day window.

Everything else falls into third party discovery – law enforcement or other.

The average time frame the attacker has in those environments is 173.4 days before they’re stopped. A couple of times each year we have cases in which the attacker got in three years previously.

There are many opportunities for victims to detect attackers during this timeline. They often go missed, however, because victims are looking for telltale signs of a breach. They expect AV or IDS to be triggered. They’re not looking for examples of compromise that we find in the investigation.

Suppose someone is scheduled to look at the network every Monday through Friday at 8am. If they look at 2am on a Sunday, that’s an indicator.

When a hard drive is filling up, IT sees that as an operational issue: business system X ran out of disk space. They’re focused on availability and uptime; they don’t think of security.

In one investigation, IT did two rounds of updating disk space for the attacker, who was running up to a terabyte of space.

Nick Percoco, senior vice president and head of SpiderLabs for Trustwave.

22 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

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14.03.12 17:25

Technospective on Personal Tech/Mobility

By Chris Rogers

Tablets, OS and BYOD – prospects for 2012 Mobility and the consumerization of IT will dominate in the coming year.

W

hether or not you have an affinity for the tablet, there’s no denying the tremendous impact the arrival of this form factor has had on personal technology and mobility. Though Apple’s iPad continues to dominate the tablet landscape, challengers are honing their platforms.

And while there may not be a sea change in market share any time soon, the effects of mobile-first devices and applications are changing the ways manufacturers and developers approach almost everything.

Many see tablets as pure consumption devices, and in 2011 it would have been difficult to suggest otherwise. However, as mobile OS environments evolve, application developers are learning how to best harness the power of the touch-enabled platform. Users are also quickly conquering

the learning curve associated with touch interfaces and demanding more from these devices.

Today users expect at a minimum that these devices will enable them to connect with others through email and calendar applications. This capability has been with us for some time, but today it is only a baseline as users look to be more productive on the devices – by writing documents, building presentations, even manipulating pictures and video. In 2012, decision makers will have to look closer at tablet devices as they continue to evolve and transition from consumption to productivity machines.

There still may be many mobile workers for whom tablets are not well suited.

Manufacturers in 2011 made huge leaps in their ability to create thin and light laptop

devices (some have dubbed this segment ‘ultra-mobile’). Intel’s Ultrabook investment, a $300 million marketing fund to encourage PC manufacturers to design and produce devices that push the limits of the form factor, aims to enhance the productivity of a laptop but avoid the pitfalls of the netbook experiment. As the next wave of Ultrabooks come to market in 2012, expect beefier performance and increased battery life. With specifications that already rival many mid-level business laptops, decision makers will have to seriously consider these devices for their more mobile workers.

In 2011, Microsoft quietly announced end-of-life for Windows XP (April, 2014).

Despite all the talk of refreshing desktops and hardware to Windows 7 environments, the majority of users still operate on XP.

Commenting on the overarching trends of last year, HP’s Leland Brown said that BYOD will remain an important topic in 2012 that continues to challenge IT with how to effectively respond to the trend while still meeting the overall needs of the business.

Comparing the BYOD trend to the consumerization of IT, she said there has been a lot of hype on both topics in the past, “but I think 2012 is when we’re going to start getting some clarity around bring your own device... [with] more thought leadership [from executives and school boards in particular] around what does bring your own device mean, what are the implications for security and application licensing, and around how you go about deploying this. How does IT incorporate bring your own device into [its] overall strategy, while delivering all the other key projects that it’s got?”

Linking the BYOD trend to other hot topics, Brown said cloud computing and virtualization will continue to shift the way users view their devices in 2012: “if you truly want to deliver bring your own device in a secure manner to your corporation, then the way to do that is with virtualized desktop infrastructure.”

Pushing things to the cloud will mean higher availability cloud storage tied to SOAs, and mobilization of the applications that users depend on for business. The increase of thin and light devices should also drive these trends though 2012.

Leland Brown, VP and GM, personal systems group at HP Canada 24 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

on Personal Tech/Mobility

Microsoft has pushed heavily for Windows 7 upgrades but now with Windows 8 releasing in 2012, IT decision makers will have yet another operating system to consider. While much has been made of the portability and style of Windows 8’s Metro interface (a design borrowed largely from the company’s Windows Phone platform), there has also been criticism that applications will need to be rewritten for the new interface. Early reports from consumer and developer previews of the operating system have focused on its touch-heavy interface,

but others have pointed out that Windows 8 could be the OS that brings true productivity to tablets through seamless integration with the rest of Microsoft’s Office suite, which is still the standard for business.

Smartphones also continued their trend towards becoming the norm in 2011 as users demanded access to email and calendars to stay connected. This evolution in personal tech has pressured IT decision makers to facilitate BYOD (bring your own device) in 2011 – and is a trend that will put the onus on business to pursue efficient

Technospective

mobile device management solutions and create forward-thinking mobility policies as it intensifies through 2012.

During launch of the new iPad, Apple CEO Tim Cook said consumers are living in a post-PC world. While that may be a stretch, it certainly emphasizes the state of the personal technology space. Although this generation’s workforce may never experience work in a true post-PC business, 2012 should lay more groundwork for the one that is to come.

“Towards the end of 2011, it became really apparent... [that] the industry and the market weren’t as large as we all thought,” ABI analyst Kevin Burden told IT in Canada, pointing to the difficult fourth quarter of nearly every smartphone manufacturer save two – Samsung and Apple.

Burden said those two companies are successful for different reasons: Apple creates the perception that it has the best technology, while few companies can match the size and scale of Samsung. Burden isn’t sure the market will come down to two vendors, “but it’s hard to find another OEM that has all those things all lined up.” It could lead to consolidation of devices or potentially of manufacturers in 2012.

There are two very different worlds in mobility: the very saturated, developed markets and emerging markets such as India, China and Russia that now have low subscriber bases. The lack of carrier subsidies in the latter creates a high barrier to smartphone adoption, but Burden said manufacturers will continue to focus energy on these growth markets in 2012.

In Canada, smartphone maker Research In Motion stumbled in 2011 with its PlayBook tablet device and has seen declining market share in the enterprise. “[RIM’s] somewhat a victim of their own success and they’re a testament to how fast the market moves and how quickly you have to move with the market,” Burden said. While RIM executives were still talking about the efficiency of the BES servers at CES in 2012, Burden said operators are no longer concerned with capacity. “[RIM is] trying to fulfill a need that’s really not a need any longer,” he said.

Burden also thinks we’ve seen the last of HP’s webOS, but he believes Windows Phone could be a good third player in the mobile OS space. He cautions that Microsoft has had many “starts and stops” in the past but feels the company has learned that the mobile space is different from the PC space, and has a great partner in Nokia.

Kevin Burden, VP and group director, mobile devices at ABI Research

March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 25 According to Joe Belinsky, one of the biggest shifts in 2011 came from tablet devices: “We now, for the first time, have a very usable, effective and efficient tablet form-factor that users can consume information on.” But how the tablet trend will play out over 2012 will depend on how the devices handle content creation, he explained, as “that’s where the war between laptops and tablets will ensue.”

Ultrabooks and players in the ultra-mobile space also have a good story to tell moving forward, but the key for manufacturers will be to create a story for the devices. Belinsky points to the current lack of cellular data options and batteries that need to be recharged during the work-day as areas where the value-proposition for Ultrabooks begins to erode.

Another question for 2012 is what the arrival of Windows 8, and its new mobile-friendly, Metro-style interface will mean. New applications will have to be written for the interface and Belinsky believes this means Microsoft will be moving into a head-to-head battle with other app stores, working to generate an appetite for developers and app manufacturers to migrate and create new applications for the platform.

“There’s something hugely interesting about what Microsoft could do developing Windows 8 in the mobile form factor,” he said. “They’ve been here before. The question is, ‘will they be able to deliver?’”

Joe Belinsky, VP technology services at AGF Management Limited March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 25

Technospective on Social Media and Collaboration

By Stefan Dubowski

Social media and collaboration: ask not ‘why?’ but ‘how?’

Though organizations now understand what social media it is, they still struggle with leveraging the technology for improved collaboration.

I

t wasn’t all that long ago – perhaps only a year or two – that organizations began to think that social media just might have a role to play in enterprise collaboration. But of course, in technology time, a year or two is an eon. Now businesses are well past asking, “What is social media?” and they’re deep into the more challenging (and wide-ranging) question: How do I use it?

How will social media impact the business?

How do we get started? Now that we have begun, how do we measure the impact of the technology? How are our employees using it?

How are our competitors using it?

Discussions with social-media observers

(see sidebar interviews with Greg Schiltroth, Andrew Dixon and Mark Kovarski below) reveal that organizations in 2012 and beyond will tackle those ‘how’ questions as they aim to integrate social media into their business processes, all in the name of improved information sharing, better business insight – and ultimately a leg up on the competition in whatever sector they happen to operate in.

And ‘how’ opens the door to a handful of new ideas. What, for instance, is the difference between ‘social media’ and ‘social business’? The former phrase increasingly indicates external-focused social projects designed to speak to the company’s custom-

ers. The latter has to do with internal-focused social projects designed to help employees collaborate.

Another question is: What impact does the practice of social business have on the value of social business? Greg Schiltroth from IBM Canada offers the idea of a trust cycle, whereby social technologies foster communication, communication fosters trust among erstwhile disconnected employees, trust paves the way for improved information, better information encourages more communication – and so the cycle continues.

While many organizations are keen to at least try social media, they may be wary

Ask Mark Kovarski to opine on the future of collaboration and social media, and he’ll point to a comprehensive acronym: SoLoMoN: Social, Location-based, Mobile and Networked.

From his perspective, those four elements – while always connected – will be heavily intertwined as organizations embrace social media.

Kovarski envisions a situation in which location-based services, social business, and mobile devices combined provide rich details enabling faster decision making and better information sharing.

Certain aspects of this convergence are underway in the consumer realm, he said: technologies like Foursquare feed users’ location information into social media sites like Facebook. Marketers are working up systems that feed text messages that advertise sales and other promotions to users’ phones when they’re near the retailer’s store. All of these solutions hinge on the mobile device.

But the potential solutions for internal communications are even more compelling, he said.

Let’s say you need information from your organization’s engineering group, but you also need input from a marketing rep. With a companywide location-based service attached to each employee’s mobile device broadcasting through the enterprise social-media system, you may well discover that the engineer you want to connect with is actually sitting with a marketing rep in the boardroom and the company-wide collaboration system would enable you to connect with them via instant messaging.

“Enterprise solutions are moving from communications tools to collaboration suites,” Kovarski said. “The implications are vast... Internal distributed teams can work together and collaborate while sales and marketing folks are looking to understand customer opinion and product positioning.

“These technologies allow us to fundamentally reshape how companies are run and how the company serves its markets.”

Mark Kovarski, peer lead for ITMD’s SoLoMoN research service 26 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

on Social Media and Collaboration of the costs associated with implementing the technology (software, servers, guidelines, and training). That’s good news for social-business providers operating on a SaaS basis; they’ll capture companies that want to accelerate their use of the software without investing in all of the overhead. But that doesn’t mean they’ll win the war all told against on-premise technology providers. It’s

still too soon to say.

But it’s easy to see that social is changing the way organizations operate. Line-of-business (LOB) managers are increasingly taking the lead role in investigating social-business technologies, yet the IT department’s role isn’t necessarily diminished. It does suggest greater collaboration between LOB and IT down the road, however.

Technospective

If ever the line between social media, collaboration and mobile technologies actually existed, it’s about to disappear completely.

Companies should prepare to view social as integrated with collaboration software and mobile platforms, since each informs the other and could well dictate success – or failure – for organizations implementing social-business processes.

The tenor of discussions with customers about social media and collaboration has changed, according to Greg Schiltroth.

Whereas prior to 2011, organizations were still trying to figure out just what, exactly, social media was and how it might – someday – impact their businesses, last year IBM Canada witnessed a shift away from defining social media, and towards figuring out where to begin.

“It has gone from, ‘What are we talking about?’ to ‘How do we get started?’” Schiltroth said.

Coinciding with that is an increasingly sophisticated point of view enabling businesses to split their social-media investments: some are focused on external social media designed to engage customers; and others are focus on “social business,” encompassing internal communications and information sharing, he said.

“If you do a search for content, now you can find people, and you build a connection and some context around the content that person has provided... That leads to the next step, which is insight.”

In 2012 and beyond, organizations will be pressed to use social to develop insight that could provide a competitive edge. But businesses will need to take a step back first. To begin, they’ll need to get a grip on employees’ current adoption levels. That helps identify users who may be able to help accelerate adoption down the line.

“There are probably departments already there,” Schiltroth said. “Who would be the tippers in the organization?”

Those tippers may well fill the role of community manager as social-business processes take hold. A community manager helps organize and steer social-media communities, with an eye towards ensuring that social-business practices result in insight.

“We’re actually working with some academic institutions on how to build this into our offering,” Schiltroth said. “According to some, it’s the largest growing area in IT.” Greg Schiltroth, business unit executive and regional brand leader for collaboration solutions, IBM Canada

Organizations are beginning to tie social business to their corporate goals – and that paves the way for a certain amount of angst for technology decision makers, Andrew Dixon noted.

“They’re not quite sure yet what the impact is going to be and they’re worried that their competitors are going to move faster than them to use this technology to their benefit,” he said.

That means more companies are interested in testing social-business software. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re willing to invest in licences, servers and other resources on premises to support the technology.

Dixon said that opens the door for the SaaS model that Igloo is using to approach the burgeoning social-business market. “We want to minimize the barriers to trialing our technology. We don’t want you to have to think about an on-premise situation. We don’t want you to have to think about your security model or the way in which you’ll need IT to customize it. We want to do all that for you, and we want to turn on a proof-of-concept model for you as fast as we can.”

Whereas technology decisions used to reside in the IT department’s wheelhouse, social business is more a line-of-business manager’s game. Igloo is finding that more often than not, it’s someone other than the IT manager on the phone, requesting information about the company’s product.

Does this mean IT will be relegated to second-class status in the social-business realm? Dixon said he doesn’t think so.

“It’s almost the opposite. IT spends a lot of time maintaining existing systems... They have this tremendous backlog taking care of what’s already there. To the extent that a technology provider can free them up so they don’t have to dedicate staff to maintaining servers, for example... that satisfies the needs of the business and frees IT up to do other things.”

Andrew Dixon, VP marketing and operations, Igloo Software March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 27

Technospective on Software

By Dave Chappelle

The software outlook for 2012 How is software changing in 2012? Here’s how six experts from different parts of the industry answer.

S

oftware is the most complex of the categories covered in this IT in Canada forecast issue – and our approach to software reflects a need to cover multiple subjects and include multiple perspectives.

For this year’s column, we’ve enlisted the help of six industry executives who cover the gamut of software options: corporate in-house development, applications in the cloud, and everything in between. Let’s step back and let them describe what to expect in software for 2012.

Alex Sirota of Newpath Technologies helps small businesses match their needs with the appropriate software. He’s certain that in 2012, more vendors will be trying cloud as a way of attracting SMB customers.

He sees hundreds of small firms with offerings in this area, and expects to see more solutions this year. That will bring more confusion, which will bring more companies dedicated to helping small businesses make sense of all the offerings.

“There are about seven SaaS categories, with 20 or 30 subcategories in each one – sales, marketing, HR and talent management, customer service, business operations, asset management, financial operations, and IT operations,” said Sirota. “The solution sets under these categories all run online, and provide multiple tiers of service, ranging from $5 to $150 per month.”

The expansion of solutions has already caught the attention of large vendors. They either buy up successful small vendors, or move into the SMB space themselves.

“The successful large vendors that have been selling to enterprise are starting to eat into the small vendor market share,” said Sirota. “For example, Google Apps offers a productivity suite. Although not as full featured as Microsoft Office, it’s available for $5 per user per month. Microsoft responded with Office 365. It’s surprising that large

28 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

firms like these two feel they have to compete with small upstarts. One of my clients switched from Exchange run by a provider to Office 365, for about half the cost.”

Barney Baldwin, director of IT at RBC Capital Markets, agrees on the effect the cloud is having on medium and small businesses.

“In retail and in support of SMBs; that is the growth area for cloud,” he said. “Larger businesses have just started to look at cloud technologies for internal deployment. It’s going to take a long time” for cloud to fully address enterprise requirements.

There have also been significant changes in platforms, mostly to do with mobile computing. Numerous smaller companies have spawned thousands of applications developed for mobile purposes. In the consumer space, software is overwhelmingly mobile; tablets and smartphones drive everything.

In the enterprise it’s different.

“To some extent I think it’s going to be standardization of HTML 5,” said Baldwin.

“I think that’s a big thing for the industry; not only for regular web development, but also for mobile computing. There will be convergence in that regard. Being a rich platform and a standards-based platform, it’s where most of the client development is going to be happening over the next few years.”

Service Oriented Architectures is the pattern for how enterprises and large application vendors are breaking down their applications. Refactoring and segregation are presented as services.

“In the enterprise it’s about web delivery and continued fat clients for some delivery,” Baldwin said. “HTML 5, and Microsoft has a pretty sharp platform in Silverlight for presentation, these will both continue for platform side and in-house development.”

Eugene Roman, chief technology officer at

OpenText, sees enterprise equivalents to the consumer app store as the next big thing.

“In the consumer space we use these apps and say, ‘boy it’s easy’, and then we enter the enterprise and say, ‘boy that’s hard’. It has to be easy, and apps are going to do that for the enterprise – take consumer apps and let them launch in days, not weeks or years.”

“It’s ‘Apps on Tap’ as in, ‘here’s your new employee kit’ and ‘here’s your benefits package,’” Roman said. “Isn’t that like an intranet? Yes, except the control is better. I call it the network-based computing era.”

Open Text recently launched Tempo, an enterprise dropbox. The info sits in Tempo at the OpenText data center, or in a secured shared cloud provided to customers, who require only a secure connection to it. If an employee leaves the company the data stays in the company cloud.

“It’s secured, encrypted, and gives me an electronic filing cabinet inside my iPad as if I’m in my office,” said Roman. “I click on the folder in my Blackberry or iPhone, and everything I need to know is right there. I can surf the web, read email, pull information, upload information to my virtual folders, cut out something, file it, and exchange it.

oN soFtWarE You try emailing 10 things to 100 people. I only have to click on a folder… We call it ‘Information in Motion’.”

For James Lambe, head of enterprise at Google Canada, the first trend of this year is acceptance of cloud technology as a real platform.

“Organizations want to ‘work in the future’,” he said. “We’ve made some tremendous strides by providing the number one requirement – collaboration. It’s not a feature in a product set; it’s inherent in the product sets. It’s not turned on or off; it’s the norm rather than the exception.”

The second thing he’s seeing is acceptance of the cloud by the public sector. It’s happening at all levels of government, in both Canada and the U.S..

“If you look at how the public sector is focusing on cost containment, [cloud] allows them to work in the future, as opposed to working in the past,” Lambe said.

“It provides the necessary functionality for different entities to give their users the power that’s necessary to transform. That means ‘mobile anywhere, any device’, and including social IT as products are brought to market.”

Known for its multiple software tools for creative individuals, about six years ago Adobe started selling them as suites.

According to Jeffrey Veen, senior director of product management, digital media business, Adobe, the next step is taking the Creative Suite model to the cloud, and making it available as a subscription.

“It’s the next version of the Creative Suite, along with touch apps, and a subscription service that ties it together. Cloud-based storage, a way of moving files between desktop and touch apps, and a lot of social and sharing tools go along with that.”

App stores push out new software versions when available. People don’t expect to wait; the software is continuously improved.

“We’re stitching [smartphones, tablets and other devices] all together with the cloud,” Veen said. “When you subscribe to a service like this, you don’t have to wait 18-24 months for the next version. We’ll continue to sell boxed software for customers who are used to that model, but this is absolutely the direction in which we’re heading.”

Most information workers view productivity in terms of desktop documents, word processing and spreadsheets, which was

tEchNospEctivE

how it looked 15 years ago. Microsoft connected the Office suite to server products 10 years ago to create a broader vision for the capabilities that drive productivity.

“Our vision of productivity includes scenarios which integrate unified communications, collaboration, enterprise content management, gaining insights through business intelligence and enterprise search as a very seamless experience,” said Amol Shah, senior product manager, Office, Microsoft.

“When we look at broader trends in the industry, the consumerization of IT continues to be a growing influence in how enterprises invest in productivity. They need to ask themselves some interesting questions, like how people communicate and collaborate in their organizations, who has access and control, and how does your compliance look?”

It’s also shaping end users’ expectations of enterprise technology use. They want to receive email and access documents regardless of the device they’re using “The vision is to provide an engaging and personalized experience across these multiple devices and platforms,” Shah said. “This is how we think of productivity going forward.”

Continued on page 30

Quotable a small busiware solutions, “With [saas] soft nd what it’s getoughly understa ness has to thor a service that you’re paying for ting. On one hand r hand you never time. On the othe gets better over em. ng as you use th stop paying, as lo ur business yo at th ur e or fo If you choose thre bit of money. up paying quite a needs, you’ll end ages. You’ll mbination of pack You may need a co ng them. And ckaging and selli see middlemen pa s, em in some case they’ll manage th vel le er gh hi a ht want because you mig ll wi r lle se re dleman of service. A mid apps] into plans S aa assemble [S , well.” - Alex Sirota that are tiered as es gi lo h Techno founder, NewPat

“If you go back to 2009-2010 , cloud computing became a term, then a capability . That’s when it hit the radar of executives as a tec hnology that they might rely on. Last year we saw mo re acceptance of that ...

It’s no longer the transfer of files back and forth.

It’s sharing the document wit h all workers, and providing inherent collabora tion...

Even the vernacular is differe nt – it’s not ‘will you send that to me ,’ it’s ‘will you share that with me ?’”

- James Lambe, head of ent erprise at Google Canada

March/April 2012 ITinCanada.com / 29

tEchNospEctivE oN soFtWarE Continued from page 29

Quotable

alytical tools e emphasis on an “There will be mor d tying it in , normalizing it, an for managing data des statistical actices. That inclu with business pr d cube technolor data mining, an analysis, tools fo that nature. gies and things of ta sets d tools for large da Front end tools an e role of the in prominence. Th will continue to ga ore important... se will become m relational databa l role in the ay a more critica and continue to pl enterprise. is gaining tracthough Windows On the OS side, al + on Linux is room, Java and C+ tion in the server is mainstream at ce. open source the stack of choi y rt of virtually ever this point. It’s pa the t bu , er iv dr st is a large platform. Co va no in d an ibility real reason is flex n ow ur yo r fo izing it tion and custom or ct re di n, wi ey Bald business.” - Barn s et l Mark of IT at RBC Capita

“I don’t think yo u can create te chnology in th any more, and e lab then give it to the marketing ment. I think yo de partu have to deve lop according to needs. user We don’t want to move files ar ound, we want be able to conn to ect and collabo rate with peop share files. Whe le an d never an idea oc curs to you, yo can capture it u with whatever device you have moment. I don’ at the t want to mess around with stuff. I wan t it to work seam lessly. It has to work like magic .”

- Jeffrey Veen, senior director of product manag ement, digital media business, Adob e

30 / IT in Canada March/April 2012

“We’re in a period of signifi the app cant dis tastic E ruption – ra .

En tactics to I call it be able to terprises need th e right a apps on ser ve th pps/ the cons eir clien ts. All th um world ov ese er will pro er side will shift how CIO vide ser ents. s the vices to th e ir consti That is s tuh erization owing up as the consum of IT. The re are tw see: the o drivers rise I of the sm ar apps...[a tphone optimize d for nd] givin g a sma a big scr rtphone een, so y ou get a Tablet W pad. It’s ars... - E ugene R OpenTex oman, C t TO,

be, and it isn’t t what it used to productivity is no ncing capabiliis. It’s about enha what you think it tter way. oductivity in a be ties that drive pr w – a smartray of devices no People have an ar able to have a . They want to be phone, tablet or PC across multiple tivity experience seamless produc or accessing and it’s email, social, devices whether ts... editing documen ns of people in different generatio e re th We have ration X/Y, and

by Boomers, Gene the workforce: Ba te differently, want to collabora Millennials. They fferently. Social ch productivity di and they approa that. is one aspect of these days but lking about cloud ta is Everyone rstand how enterprises unde it’s important that n ies to the cloud ca moving capabilit , ity ex pl m co nt of IT reduce the amou ile wh st co t and time, managemen d experience for en e m sa e enabling th t uc od pr or ni ah, se users.” - Amol Sh Microsoft Canada , ce fi Of , manager

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