Opalis Was NOT Acquired By Microsoft

The IT management software and operations communities have been buzzing this week about reports that Microsoft acquired IT process automation vendor Opalis Software. We have unequivocally confirmed that this rumor is incorrect. Opalis has NOT been acquired by Microsoft. It remains an independent entity, at least for now.

Opalis, based outside of Toronto, has repeatedly reported impressive revenue growth over its short history. For the past few years, it has been a desirable morsel for larger vendors seeking to add strong process automation to their portfolios. Many have expressed interest, but its success allows Opalis to command a high premium that no suitor has yet been willing to pay.

Some argue that Opalis actually should not be acquired at all. It has built several tight partnerships, including one with Microsoft and this rich ecosystem positions Opalis as a viable standalone vendor. Of course, this requires Opalis to continue innovating aggressively to retain its desirability and prevent commoditization. So far it has been successful at keeping its innovation edge. If it slips, so will its valuation and that will certainly accelerate an acquisition.

Process automation technology is too important for the major IT vendors to ignore and our client inquiries corroborate that the Opalis technology is well regarded in this category. Process automation is a cornerstone of advanced IT automation that conceivably enables cloud computing and automated self-service service request fulfillment. Even at a high valuation, the return on this technology will also be high.

Regardless of its stamina on the innovation treadmill, we do believe someone will eventually consume Opalis. It is premature to say who will prove to be that successful shopper. That includes Microsoft.

By Glenn O'Donnell

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Mobile Devices Find A New Home

Following my colleague Andrew Jaquith's eloquent post, I thought it fitting that I add a post about changes in coverage and how they'll affect me. Before I do, however, I want to lend my voice to wish Natalie all the best in her new endeavor, it will be fun to run into her on the "opposite side of the table" in briefings in the future, and I'm thrilled that I'll be able to maintain professional ties with Natalie as she moves into the next phase of her career.

So, what's going to change for me and my coverage at Forrester as a result of Natalie's move? Well, as some of you know due to some communication I had with you last week, as a result of coverage shifting around, I'm very happy to announce that I am taking over Enterprise Mobile Device research for the Infrastructure and Operations team at Forrester to provide Ben Gray with some bandwidth to take on some of Natalie's virtualization coverage, details of which I'll leave best shared by Ben.

What's in store for my research?

• Mobile device hardware: As a an area of intense personal interest for me (ask anyone on the team, I should have a holster belt I'm always toting so many various devices) mobile device hardware is an area of research I can't wait to embark upon. I think we'll see many interesting things over the course of 2010, namely a continuation in the growth of the type of mobile devices enterprise IT departments support and the solutions that are made available to users on those devices, which brings me to the next element of new coverage for me...
• Mobile device operating systems: If there's a battle afoot for the hearts and minds of users - both enterprise and consumer - it's among the various operating systems Android, RIM BlackBerry, iPhone OS, Palm WebOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile and others. I'll be leading Forrester's enterprise IT user-focused coverage on this space.

What's not on my plate?

• Mobile device management: While I'm likely to be looking at mobile device-specific management tools as a the analyst covering mobile device use in the enterprise, the convergence of PC and mobile device management is a topic Ben Gray will be focusing on. In short, Ben and I will be playing roles of primary and secondary analyst, respectively, on this very important area of innovation for IT users.
• Mobile device security: As Andrew noted in his post, he will be taking on client security, which will deal with the anti-virus, anti-malware protection of all client devices and I'll leave matters of security in his more-than-capable hands. 

I will maintain my coverage of Wireless LAN, Remote Access, and Branch Consolidation/Optimization, however, stay tuned for some exciting developments in the networking space over the coming quarter!

Please reach out to me directly with any questions you have.

By Chris Silva

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Your New Client Security Analyst

After seven years, my colleague Natalie Lambert is leaving Forrester. In the year that I have been at Forrester, she has been a good team-mate, sounding board for ideas, gleeful mischief-maker, and collaborator on shared research topics. I will miss her insights and energy, and I wish her the best as she begins her next adventure.

Natalie covered quite a bit of ground: client security, client management, endpoint virtualization, Bring-Your-Own-PC programs, full disk encryption and several other topics. While it would be impossible to fill her shoes, I am strapping on my hip waders and immersing myself in several of her research topics.

Specifically: henceforth, I will cover all client security topics for Forrester. These include:

• data leak prevention (DLP) on the client
• full disk encryption
• client security (anti-malware and anti-virus)

I am pleased to cover client security topics again. I wrote extensively about client security for three-and-a-half years before coming to Forrester. Among other things, I correctly predicted that Windows Vista would have no effect on the Windows security aftermarket — six months before Vista launched. And in 2006 and 2007, I anticipated the rapid move of anti-virus to the cloud, which we see today in Panda Security’s “collective intelligence,” in McAfee’s Artemis project, Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network, and in new startups like Immunet. For cloud coverage of client security, I will partner with Chenxi Wang, but security topics that have anything to do with stuff sitting on endpoints, I will be your analyst.

I will not take on any of Natalie’s IT operations topics, such as BYOPC, mobile management, client management. These areas will be covered by other analysts on the infrastructure and operations (I&O) research team, chiefly Chris Silva and Ben Gray. Rather than speak for them, I will let them speak for themselves. I will collaborate with Ben and Chris on security strategies and best practices as it affects their topics.

I will also retain my coverage of data security topics, notably data leak prevention (DLP) and enterprise rights management. A few subjects will transition to my other colleagues on the Security and Risk team. We will likely announce details after we conclude those discussions.

In the meantime, Forrester customers who would like clarification on what the shift in security coverage means for you should contact their client services representative. I would be happy to speak with you! But the short answer is that not much is changing. You will talk to me rather than Natalie. She provided excellent coverage of client security topics, and I will strive to do the same.

 

[posted by Andrew Jaquith]

Client Virtualization Will Help You Create Your Next Generation Desktop

2012. That is the year in which our clients are predicting that their next-generation desktop will be up and running. However, no one company defines this new desktop the same way. Some believe that this desktop will be fully virtualized in a data center and accessible from any device, others see this desktop as only a set of applications delivered to a user when required, and others just look at this desktop as a more manageable, supportable, and lower cost environment than today.

Regardless of how you define your next generation desktop, there is one thing in common factor that will make this all possible – client virtualization. Client virtualization will be the underpinning of all of these new ways of approaching the desktop as it will decouple the desktop and applications from the underlying hardware. Applications will be delivered to users using application virtualization, and users will interact with their desktop using desktop virtualization. In the end, these virtualization technologies are allowing IT to scale their desktop environments to new heights, while at the same time providing greater flexibility, security, manageability, and support than has ever been possible.

When Forrester thinks about client virtualization, it splits into four categories:

• Hosted desktop virtualization: the technology that allows a desktop environment to be run in a data center and gives users the ability to connect to that “desktop” from any internet-enabled device in the world.
• Hosted application virtualization: the technology that allows an application to be run in a data center and gives users the ability to connect to that application from any internet-enabled device in the world.
• Local desktop virtualization: the technology that allows a desktop environment to be run on a user’s device (either directly on bare metal or as a guest on top of the host/native OS).
• Local application virtualization: the technology that isolates applications from other applications and the underlying OS to insure a conflict-free application environment.

According to “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch” report by my colleague Alex Cullen, companies’ infrastructure strategy and associated architecture will shift over the next three years to provide “greater scalability and flexibility while reducing support costs.” Client virtualization will be a key technology in the IT service platform. Just think: in 2012, IT organizations will only focus on delivering the capabilities that truly enable the business – the applications and the productivity environment (AKA the “desktop”) – while dropping the tasks that bring no competitive advantage to the business. On the flip side, users will be thrilled by the opportunity to work from the device of their choosing (including a home PC, thin client, netbook, or even the latest and greatest Mac) in a secure fashion. The way I see it, win-win!

By Natalie Lambert

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Why Mobility Will — And Does NOW — Matter To EAs And IT

Here at Forrester, we spend a good deal of time talking about the future of the mobile enterprise. Whether that's an emerging standard for a faster, more capable mobile network or a future of all-out mobile connectivity with applications and devices ready to tap into it.

The fact is, while much talk about mobile has a tone of "impending trend" to it, there are currently many mobility initiatives afoot in your organization, some of which IT knows about, some which it may not. So, as it turns out, while mobile seems to be a lot of futurespeak, it turns out it does actually matter to CIOs, and has been highlighted in Forrester's recent "The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch" report.

When Forrester thinks about mobility, it splits into three categories:

• Mobile infrastructure — The networks and services that devices tap into, users rely on and mobile applications rely on to function.
• Mobile devices — From laptops and netbooks to iPhones, BlackBerries, and other smartphones, these are the devices hosting those mobile applications and tapping into that mobile infrastructure.
• Mobile applications — What use is a capable, highly-connected device if users can't use a portable or mobile version of an application on the device?

According to the "Top 15..." report, all three areas: mobile networks gaining in power, mobile devices strengthening and mobile apps going mobile each represent an area of high business impact. The upside of arming your users with the combination of these three technology elements can reap great rewards in productivity, user satisfaction and business efficiency.

Why watch these areas of technology development so closely, then? While mobile devices and networks gaining in capacity and capability is more of an organic trend, reflected by its "medium" label in the "newness" category, understanding which applications will make the best use of these devices, and offer users the best potential for more flexible, efficient workstyles is something many organizations Forrester speaks to are still trying to figure out, hence the "very high" ranking in newness?

What to do, then? Take on the least "new" technologies into consideration first and create a strategy around that platform decision.

Step one, understand what the network and device mix is shaping up to be in your organization. As one example; are you focused exclusively on external network use and are a BlackBerry shop? Explore how external carrier-owned networks can extend users' connectivity and establish a device migration timeline to take into account RIM's newest BlackBerry platforms and when and how they'll enter your environment, how they'll be managed and secured. Step two, once this is in place, work with application development teams to ensure the capabilities of both the devices and networks that your organization is standardizing on are taken into account when developing mobile applications or evaluating mobile platform vendors.

Thinking about mobile as not just a "now" technology, but taking into account networks, devices, and software as one connected ecosystem will ensure an investment in one of the three, key areas of mobility does not adversely affect the others. After all, successful implementations of technology will allow it to change business for better, not for worse. See the list of recommendations for IT leaders in our Top 15 technology report here.

So next time you're on a plane, or simply logging into your VPN from the local coffee shop, take note of the experience; is this the way your entire organization should be served in the event of a disaster?

By Chris Silva

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Why You Should Care About Having A Diverse IT Ops Department

Diversity (or lack thereof) in IT has been a hot topic in the news and among our clients in recent months. And it's true, IT departments are notorious for their lack of diversity, and the problem is only getting worse. Over the past few years, the number of women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) in IT has been dropping steadily. In IT Infrastructure and Operations, the picture is even grimmer — data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that IT job titles such as computer hardware engineer and network and computer system administrator have some of the lowest participation rates of women and minorities (see figure). Although some IT careers are more diverse than others — computer operators, for example, show evenly represented women and minorities by participation in the workforce — very few women and minorities can be counted in the ranks of management.

"Why should I care?" many firms ask. Besides issues of equality and social responsibility, there are several major advantages to taking steps to improve diversity in your workplace:

• Your team will be more innovative. Recent studies have shown that more diverse groups produce more innovative results. Additionally, diverse backgrounds also promote diverse approaches to problem solving, solutions being found more quickly, and teams that are more likely to experiment, be creative, share knowledge, and fulfill tasks.
• Retention and job satisfaction will improve. 52% of highly qualified women in science, engineering, and technology quit their jobs and that almost half of all minorities leave technology jobs to enter other occupations. Taking steps to improve the workplace experience for women and minorities, such as promoting work/life balance and setting up mentoring programs and affinity groups will reverse this "brain drain" and also increase job satisfaction.
• You will attract the best and the brightest of the Millennials.  Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) have remarkably different attitudes towards work and home life that previous generations. New data shows that full-time employed Millennials (both men and women) expect to spend more time during the workweek caring for children, and will therefore be looking for more flexible work situations. Promoting work/life balance and a flexible workplace is also the single most important factor when attracting and retaining women and minorities.

I encourage you to read the full report with more specific recommendations on how to recruit, develop, and retain women and underrepresented minorities in your Infrastructure and Operations department

By Rachel Dines

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2009-2010 Forrester And Disaster Recovery Journal Survey

Two years ago, Forrester and the Disaster Recovery Journal partnered together to field surveys on a pair of pressing topics in Risk Management: Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR). The surveys help highlight trends in the industry and to provide organizations with some statistical data for peer comparison. The partnership has been a huge success. In 2007, we examined the state of disaster recovery preparedness, in 2008, we examined the state of business continuity preparedness and this year, we examine the state of crisis communications and the interplay between enterprise risk management and business continuity.

We decided to focus on crisis communications because as last year’s study revealed, one of the lessons learned from organizations who had invoked a business continuity plan (BCP) was that they had greatly underestimated the importance and difficulty of communication and collaboration within and without the organization. In any situation, a natural disaster, a power outage, a security incident or even a corporate scandal, crisis communication is critical to responding quickly, managing the response and returning to normal operations.

Organizations approach crisis communication differently. In some organizations, crisis communications is a separate team that works together with BC/DR planning teams to embed communication strategies into BCPs/DRPs and in other companies, BC/DR planning teams do its best to address crisis communication.

For IT operations professionals responsible for Disaster Recovery planning, you of course need to develop an IT recovery strategy but unless you also include a communication strategy in your plans, a successful invocation of your DRP under duress will be difficult.

If you want to take part in the survey, click here.

An executive summary of the results will be available in January 2010 at www.drj.com. I’ll also write a series or reports analyzing the data from industry, company size, and other perspectives on www.forrester.com later in 2010.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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Cloud Is Defined, Now Stop the Cloudwashing

This blog post is a response to an article by Alex Williams on ReadWriteWeb. Thanks for the shout out, Alex, and for bringing more attention to the contentious issue of cloud computing definitions. While Forrester research reports are created exclusively for our clients, our definition is freely available:

A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way.

We first published this definition back in March 2008 in the report, “Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise,” and have held to that published definition ever since (in fact it has been leveraged in multiple Forrester reports, speeches at industry events, news articles, blog posts and tweets since that original publication). Our definition was also used by NIST and several other Federal government agencies as a resource used to create their definition.

One of the key values Forrester Research provides to its clients is helping them navigate the technology trends and delineate what is a new type of technology and what is simply last year’s technology in new clothing (what I call “cloud-washing”). Thus it was imperative for us to publish our definition early and we have since been striving to provide clear taxonomy and categorization of cloud services, as shown in our latest Forrester Tech Radar.

In this Tech Radar we lauded NIST for their definition, and contrary to your statement, do not believe we need the “circus” of more or better definitions at this stage. Rather we believe we need broader recognition of what is and what isn’t cloud computing to get past the marketing hype and make it easier for customers to identify and then consume these valuable new service offerings. That’s why we’ve stuck with our definition since 2008 and are glad to see NIST sticking to theirs.

By James Staten

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Cloud Computing Belongs On Your 3-Year Roadmap

Welcome to the fourth quarter of 2009; what we at Forrester call planning season for most IT departments. In a typical year, this is the time that infrastructure and operations professionals spend lots of cycles burning through what remains of the 2009 budget and building plans for investment in 2010 with the hope of gathering a bit more budget than last year. Of course this is no ordinary year. Economists and financial prognosticators, like our own Andrew Bartels are predicting a long recovery from the recession and further delays in IT spending. That means another year of your infrastructure getting older. There’s two ways of looking at this problem and thus your budget proposals for 2010:

• You can either predict when you will get the rights to refresh the systems and return to the infrastructure spending patterns of old, or

• You can realize that a long recovery means a new normal for IT spend is in order.

We think the latter is far more fruitful even if it isn’t entirely accurate. It’s both prudent and different because your go-forward infrastructure strategy likely isn’t the same anymore either. If you are like the respondents to our Q3 2009 Enterprise and SMB Hardware Survey, North America and Europe, you:

• Continue to consolidate infrastructure like a mad clear-cutting logging company.

• Are repackaging workloads into VMs faster than an Amazon.com shipping manager.

• Are standardizing like McDonalds – everything from hardware, golden master server images to change management processes as consistent and repeatable as possible.

• Are racing like Usain Bolt to shorten deployment times from weeks or months, to new world records.

• Are learning to love automation – if only in a small way.

In other words, you aren’t buying, running or managing infrastructure the way you used to. So why plan your budget the old way. And further, why budget for the new now, when you can budget for what’s next in your journey. As we noted in our report, Assessing Your Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity, there is a clear path of improvement for infrastructure architecture and that’s toward customer empowerment, deployment standardization, provisioning and capacity management automation and further consolidation – even across business units. Yes, I said it.

In other words you’re evolving into an Infrastructure as a Service cloud. But despite vendor claims for products such as the VMware vCloud, Eucalyptus and Elastra offerings, most enterprises can’t just drop in an IaaS platform and they have a cloud. You have to prepare your organization and your operations staff for this. But that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve this aim in a short time horizon or that you can’t embrace public or hosted cloud infrastructures in the near term.

Forrester feels that cloud computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so you can gain the experience necessary to take advantage of it in its many forms to transform your organization into a more efficient and responsive service provider to the business. Find small non-critical projects to start with so you can learn how best to apply these services to your business and combine this learning with the advice in our Tech Radar to help plot the timing for these investments. Also read through the many cloud computing case studies like those on USA.gov and CryoPort to see how others are doing this. By investigating these top 15 technology trends and shifting to a strategic rightsourcing approach to IT portfolio investment you can hollow out the MOOSE and become more strategic (and viewed more as a change agent) to the business.

By James Staten

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The Role Of IT Operations In Archiving

Yesterday IBM announced the availability of their new IBM Information Archive Appliance. The appliance replaces IBM’s DR550. The new appliance has significantly increased scale and performance because it’s built on IBM’s Global Parallel File System (GPFS), more interfaces (NAS and an API to Tivoli Storage Manager) and accepts information from multiple sources – IBM content management and archiving software and eventually 3rd party software. Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is embedded in the appliance to provide automated tiered disk and tape storage as well as block-level deduplication. TSM’s block-level deduplication will reduce storage capacity requirements and its disk and tape management capabilities will let IT continue to leverage tape for long-term data retention. All these appliance subcomponents are transparent to the IT end user who manages the appliance – he or she just sees one console where they define collections and retention policies for those collections.

It’s a solid (albeit a few years late) announcement from IBM. As a leader in content management and archiving software, it was always puzzling that IBM lacked an attractive archive storage platform to complement these offerings. In addition, archiving is still a priority for both the business and IT. Business leaders remain concerned with archiving data appropriately for regulatory compliance and legal discovery. IT struggles to keep up with storage growth which continues to grow at 30%-40% each year and to control storage costs. IT has always wanted to archive infrequently accessed data from expensive production storage platforms to less expensive archive disk and tape but their hands are tied unless business owners, legal and knowledge management professionals define appropriate retention policies as well as their functional requirements in a solution.

Which leads to a question that I’ve always struggled with myself? What is the role of the IT operations professional in archiving? It’s clear that IT operations professionals are not responsible for defining the actual retention policies but what are IT’s responsibilities and how can IT influence business owners, legal, internal auditors and knowledge management? I’m still fleshing out the list responsibilities but here’s what I have so far:

1. IT can recommend a retention policy for certain data sets based on an analysis of the storage environment. For example, if you’ve examined your environment and you’ve determined that users have not accessed 60% of your files in two years, these file are good candidates for archiving.
   
2. IT researches, shortlists, and participates in the evaluation of archiving software or service based on the functional requirements that business, legal, audit, and knowledge management professionals define. This could include the evaluation of on-premise solutions, cloud-based solutions or a hybrid of both.
   
3. IT researches, shortlists, and selects the appropriate storage archive to physically store the data. This could be a generic disk storage system or a purpose-built storage system and it also includes tape and even cloud storage services.
   
4. IT defines the architectural requirements, scalability requirements, and performance requirements of the archiving software or service. At the end of the day, IT operations will manage the archiving solution end-to-end. IT operations will be responsible for maintenance of the archiving software, the database, operating system and the virtual or physical server that it runs on and of course, IT is responsible for the disk and tape that physically stores the archived data. This is one area where IT operations must really exert itself influence and its own requirements. Too often, performance, scale and system manageability are not taken into the selection of the archiving software or the determination of the total cost of ownership. When a software solution doesn’t scale or perform IT ops answers the calls from the help desk and is on the hook to solve it.
   
5. IT is partly responsible for maintaining the long-term accessibility of the data in the storage archive. This issue here is the backwards compatibility of tape formats. Tape formats such as LTO are only backwards read compatible with the previous two tape format generations. This means that you’ll need to periodically recall tapes from the deep archive and migrate the data to the latest generation. This address tape media deterioration and tape format obsolescence but it doesn’t address the obsolescence of the application that generated the data. Call the knowledge management team for that one.

This is just a starting list. I’m interested to hear from other IT ops professionals if I’ve missed something or if you disagree with anything on my current list. I’m also interested to hear the struggles you have with archiving.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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