SAP’s Afaria mobile device management tool is now available on Amazon Web Services’ cloud, offered as a way to make it easier to start using the platform, SAP said at the Sapphire conference on Monday.

The availability of Afaria 7.0 server on AWS gives enterprises a fast and simple way to buy and implement an enterprise-ready mobile management platform, according to SAP.

“We have a number of customers that don’t want to deal with and implement their own device management infrastructure in-house, because they view it as non-core, and instead they want a cloud-based offering,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Ecosystem and Channels at SAP.

With the cloud version of Afaria 7.0, administrators can just go to Amazon’s Marketplace, enter their passcodes and start provisioning it. >more

IT Services and Consulting

Developers around the world believe IBM Watson’s sophisticated analytics capabilities will transform industries that are managing massive amounts of data, according to the 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report released today. Survey respondents selected education and healthcare as the areas that could benefit the most, with financial services, life sciences and government also ranking near the top.

The 2011 Tech Trends Report surveyed more than 4,000 Information Technology (IT) professionals from 93 countries and 25 industries who provided their views on future IT trends. The results also show a growing need for technical skills in the areas of business analytics, social business, mobile computing, open source technologies and cloud computing. Read the report at: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/techtrendsreport, share your opinions at #TechTrends and see what IBM experts are saying about the findings at: www.youtube.com/IBMEcosystem

According to the report, business analytics software is the most widely used technology of those surveyed. In fact, business analytics software is being incorporated in almost every business process within organizations. Forty-two percent of respondents believe that business analytics will continue to be in demand for software development. The report also outlines the growing importance of open source platforms such as Apache Hadoop and Linux for business analytics software developers.

The report provides IT and business professionals a roadmap of the technologies and skills that will be in greatest demand in the coming years. Key findings in the 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report include:

• Eighty-seven percent of respondents believe open source and open standard technologies will play a key role in the future of application development.
• During the next two years more than 75 percent of organizations will engage in cloud computing.
• Fifty-one percent of respondents cited the adoption of cloud technologies as part of their mobile strategy.
• Regional cultural differences impact social business adoption. India is strongly embracing social business with a 57 percent adoption rate, followed by the US with a 45 percent adoption rate and China with a 44 percent adoption rate. Russia shows the strongest resistance with a 19 percent adoption rate.

“The results are clear. Mobile computing, cloud computing, social business and business analytics have gone beyond niche status and are now part of any modern organization’s core IT focus,” said Jim Corgel, general manager ISV and Developer Relations, IBM. “IT professionals who can develop the skills needed to work across these technologies will be ready to meet growing business demand in the coming years.”

IBM developerWorks, the company’s online community for IT professionals is the industry’s largest and most visited global site for them to gain technology skills. More than eight million IT professionals have visited the community to gain no-cost access to software tools and code, IT standards and best practices across various industries. Visitors also tap skills training in open technologies, business analytics, cloud computing and mobile computing, among others. In addition, IBM Business Partners and entrepreneurs can access advanced training and resources at IBM’s network of 40 Innovation Centers around the world to further build their skills.

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Gartner on Thursday upgraded its forecast for worldwide IT spending, saying it will grow 7.1 percent this year to US$3.7 trillion as companies migrate to the cloud and spend more on software and IT services.

The research firm previously forecast a growth of 5.6 percent in worldwide IT spending compared to last year, in which spending totaled $3.4 trillion and increased 5.9 percent from 2009. Growth in IT spending will continue through 2012, said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement.

The revised projections reflect the minimal impact on tech spending of the Japan earthquake and tsunami on March 11, which affected supply chains and caused extensive damage to buildings and factories along the country’s eastern coast. The earthquake may have caused problems in supply of components, but it hasn’t affected overall IT spending, Gordon said.

The hardware segment is poised for the fastest growth, but the greatest amount of spending will take place on telecom, according to Gartner’s forecast. Spending on telecommunications will increase to $2.1 trillion, growing year-over-year by 6.9 percent, but slower than the 7.3 percent growth last year. Hardware spending is expected to grow faster that other sectors, at a rate of 11.7 percent to $419 billion, albeit slower than last year’s growth rate of 12.1 percent.

Spending will grow in the software and IT services segments, partly driven by the growing adoption of public cloud services and software-as-a-service. On a percentage basis, spending on IT services will more than double, growing by 6.6 percent to reach $846 billion. Last year, spending on IT services totaled $793 billion, growing only by 3.1 percent. Software spending is expected to grow by 9.5 percent year-over-year to $268 billion, Gartner said.

Though a marginal part of overall IT spending, cloud computing services are emerging as a driver for IT spending in some markets, growing by more than four times than overall IT spending, Gordon said. The effect of migration to public cloud services spending likely will spill over to the software sector as companies spend more on software-as-a-service.

“At about $10 billion, software as a service … already accounts for 10 percent of enterprise applications software spending, and by 2015 this share is expected to increase to close to 15 percent and to exceed $20 billion in annual spending,” Gordon said.

But the overall spending on the cloud is still nominal, Gartner said. Spending on public cloud services will be roughly $89 billion this year, compared to $74 billion last year. The market will continue to grow and reach $177 billion by 2015, but at the time be only 5 percent of the total IT spending.

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Managed IT Support Services – Percento Technologies

IBM on Tuesday reported quarterly sales growth across all its major divisions and raised its earnings outlook for the full year, the latest sign that business spending in the IT sector continues to recover.

IBM’s total revenue for the quarter ended March 31 was US$24.6 billion, up 8 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, or up 5 percent on a constant currency basis. Net income after one-time charges climbed 10 percent to $2.9 billion, IBM said.

Revenue was up in all geographies, with sales growing 12 percent in the Asia Pacific and 9 percent in the Americas. The recovery in Europe continued to lag behind, with sales up 3 percent for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

“On the strength of this performance, we are raising our full-year 2011 operating earnings per share expectations to at least $13.15,” IBM Chairman, President and CEO Sam Palmisano said in a statement.

Revenue from Global Technology Services increased 6 percent to $9.86 billion and revenue from Global Business Services increased 7 percent to $4.7 billion, IBM said.

In a conference call to discuss the results, financial analysts asked why IBM’s service signings for the quarter were down 14 percent, or 18 percent when adjusted for currency fluctuations. The figure shows the total value of service contracts signed during the quarter, even though revenue from those contracts often is not recorded until much later.

The signings were down partly because public-sector spending is down, said Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge. Also, signings vary widely from quarter to quarter and were up 25 percent in the fourth quarter last year, so it’s not surprising if IBM was “rebuilding the pipeline” in the first quarter, he said.

Its hardware sales increased 19 percent to $4 billion. “This was the best first-quarter growth in over a decade,” Loughridge said. IBM’s mainframe business continued its recovery, with sales up 41 percent from a year earlier, and its Power systems also did well, with sales of those Unix products up 19 percent, IBM said.

Software revenue climbed 6 percent to $5.3 billion. Within that, sales of IBM’s middleware, including its Websphere and Tivoli products, were up 16 percent to $3.3 billion. Revenue from Websphere alone jumped sharply at 51 percent, IBM said.

IBM’s business was relatively unscathed by the massive earthquake that hit Japan on March 11, Loughridge said. It incurred about $20 million in damage to its infrastructure in the country, but there was otherwise little impact from a business perspective.

Japan provides about 15 percent of IBM’s revenue, mostly from service contracts, which tend to be stable even in turbulent times. “Our employees there are safe and that’s the number-one thing,” he said.

IBM raised its earnings forecast for the full year to at least $12.73 per share on a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis, up from $12.56 previously.

After the results, IBM’s shares were down about 2 percent on the after-hours markets, at $162.09.

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To be sustainably successful, enterprises have to manage the technologies of now, the technologies of next and the technologies of later. Of those, “now” and “later” get a lot of attention. Every organization understands the current period budget (though perhaps they aren’t delighted with it). And most organizations have a vision of how they want the enterprise to look in the distant future, 60 months out or more.

But very few enterprises are masters of the technologies needed for the critically important middle period, the meso-future. The meso-future occupies a no-man’s land that’s outside both the current period budget and the imagined future end state. This time horizon, lying three to five years out from now, is where IT heroes are created and competitive advantage is born, which means it shouldn’t be so frequently ignored by management teams.

Geoffrey A. Moore, author of Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future From the Pull of the Past, likens IT’s three-pronged management task to agriculture. Farmers must “simultaneously harvest the current crop, till the ground for next season, and investigate new crops for the future.” But not enough organizations invest in tilling the ground for the next crop of high-value technologies. >more

Managed IT Services

UNCG will begin offering a graduate certificate in health information technology that will allow students to master the competencies needed for jobs in one of the nation’s fastest growing professions.

“Depending on who you ask, there is a shortage of between 50,000 and 100,000 trained health care information technology professionals in the United States that needs to be filled over the next five years,” said Dr. Eric W. Ford, the Forsyth Medical Center Distinguished Professor at UNCG. “In addition, it’s one of the fastest growing professions, not just in the U.S. but around the world.”

The online certificate program in the Bryan School of Business and Economics is designed to meet the needs of two groups: people with clinical experience seeking to move into other aspects of health care delivery, and individuals without clinical training who want to make the transition into the health care industry. For example, there is great need for nurses knowledgeable about health care information technology in order to implement the electronic health records requirements mandated by the federal government. Having health care information technology competencies and experience will be an essential skill set for effective managers in both hospital and clinical settings.

“It’s an opportunity to work in a sector of the economy where you make other people’s lives better,” Ford said, noting it’s also a sector that is recession resistant. “The hospital never closes, so there are always jobs available.”

“Health care organizations often provide tuition support for educational programs such as the certificate to fill the need for HIT expertise,” added Dr. Lakshmi Iyer, director of graduate programs for the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management. “In addition, certificate holders can apply some of the credits earned to a master’s degree in business, information technology or nursing offered by UNCG. It is a great way to advance one’s education and create future opportunities.”

The 12-credit hour certificate, which will launch in the fall of 2011, is a flexible, online program that could be completed in one calendar year. Applicants are not required to have taken the GMAT or the GRE for acceptance into the program. Students interested in pursuing a master’s degree in information technology management can apply the certificate credits.

For more information, visit http://www.uncg.edu/bae/online/certificates.html or contact Dr. Eric Ford at ewford@uncg.edu.

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IT Management

Services Outsourcing Contracts have witnessed an increasing trend in Application Development and Support, Business Process Outsourcing and IT Consulting Services. During the calendar year 2010, the IT contracts awarded globally were up by almost 15% in H2 2010 as compared to H1 2010.

However, all the Indian vendors together have captured less than 20% of the global IT outsourcing market, leaving great scope for entering new markets and capturing new IT Services contracts.

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IT Consulting and IT Outsourcing Services – Percento Technologies

Like many budget-constrained IT executives, PHI Inc. CIO James Quinn will be heading into 2011 with a list of worthy projects that the global helicopter transportation company will nonetheless be deferring — at least for the time being. But there are certain kinds of projects you won’t find on that hold list.

Key among them are projects that are “customer-facing or anything that saves dollars,” says Quinn. “Anything that involves process improvements and anything that can show a fairly fast ROI is also getting pushed to the front.”

On the expense side, PHI will continue to reduce costs by outsourcing “keep the lights on” operations, even farming out the maintenance of production databases. The company is also renegotiating its agreements with just about all of its IT and services providers, including those whose contracts haven’t yet expired.

IT shops in all industries are approaching 2011 the same way Quinn is: They plan to vigilantly manage flat budgets and further slash already significantly reduced costs. Indeed, IT executives who responded to Computerworld‘s 2011 Forecast survey ranked budget constraints and economic pressures as their No. 1 challenge in the year ahead. And six out of 10 respondents indicated that even though the economy appears to be improving, the cuts they made in the past 18 months or so will become permanent.

Even more notable is that the projects IT executives say rank highest on their 2011 priority lists are those designed to cut costs even more. Most of those projects fall into three broad categories: revamping and then automating various business processes; consolidating data centers and implementing technologies that help save money, such as virtualization and cloud services; and outsourcing or using software-as-a-service providers for routine tasks. The idea is that by automating and outsourcing the work that just keeps the lights on, IT departments can focus their valuable staff resources on innovative projects designed to grow the business.

But don’t expect a big run-up in IT job openings. For the most part, CIOs don’t expect to invest in additional full-time staff next year. Rather, the focus is on investing in new technologies that will automate operations and lower costs — and decrease the need for additional employees. The technologies that survey respondents said they are piloting or beta-testing are server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and mobile and wireless devices.

“We’re being very aggressive, going back to vendors to work multiyear deals in exchange for cost reductions today,” Quinn explains. “We’re seeing our customers do that to us, and we’re doing the same thing with our vendors.”

“Even in this downturn, we’re seeing a significant investment in technology,” says Adam Noble, CIO at GAF Materials Corp. So are his CIO peers, he says. “They’re not hiring, but their investments are going up.”

Energy company Southern Co.’s generation business is contemplating virtualizing all of its servers and desktops, says CIO Marie Mouchet. “It’s an option we’re considering systemwide. We have application virtualization and desktop virtualization pilots under way. We have had a lease program for our desktops, which we rotate every few years. As they expire, we’ll be evaluating moving to virtual desktops,” she says.

As for new IT jobs, “we are not looking to hire additional people to meet needs,” Mouchet says. Instead, the company plans to upsize and downsize using contractors.

But there are also organizations where investments in both technology and staff are at a standstill. Among them is the Tennessee Technology Center at Shelbyville, one of 27 such centers across the state that along with six universities and 44 community colleges make up Tennessee’s higher education system.

“One of the biggest problems is that there isn’t revenue flowing into the state, and one of the first places they look to cut is education. We’re doing without 20% of the IT budget we had last year, and last year we had 10% less than the year before,” says Steve Mallard, the center’s IT director.

He says he’s looking for any and all ways to keep costs down, including using more open-source software, bringing on student interns to work in IT, recycling hardware, and building 40% of the computers and virtually all of the servers in use at the center.

Push-button Processes

At the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, automating the state’s vital-records systems is the top project queued up for 2011. By making birth, marriage, death and divorce certificates and other documents available electronically, the state hopes to both cut costs and improve services to citizens, says CIO Bob Martin. The project comes on the heels of a recently completed $4 million statewide data center consolidation project.

But completing the vital-records project — as well as the dozens of smaller “cleanup” projects Martin has in the works for 2011 — will be difficult, since the agency doesn’t plan to fill the 10% to 15% of IT positions vacated through attrition in the past year or so.

Making matters even worse is that statewide, about 35% of government employees, including many in IT, are eligible to retire in the next three to five years.

“It’s a tough balancing act because at the same time that we’re being asked to automate more and more — which makes perfectly good sense — there is a shifting and shuffling of roles and responsibilities among existing staff,” Martin says.

“We can’t fill those positions, and they may be taken away for good as part of a statewide budget fix,” he adds.

Anoka, Minn.-based Rural Community Insurance Services, which provides crop insurance to the agricultural industry, is looking to revamp and streamline how customers interact with the company online. “Our customers have to do a lot of work and provide a lot of information, but we can actually prepopulate much of that information with data we already have from other agencies,” explains CIO Rick Greenwood.

By prepopulating crop data and codes and other information into applications, “we can complete 70% of information that customers would otherwise have to key in. After that, all they have to do is validate the information and provide a digital signature, which is a big efficiency,” he notes. “We’re looking for internal efficiencies, but we also have to look at how to make our customers more efficient.”

Similarly, Jeffrey Pattison, CIO at Inttra Inc., a Parsippany, N.J., company that provides e-commerce systems to the ocean freight industry, says, “We’re trying to keep service levels up and keep costs as low as possible.” One way to do that is to build more rules-based technology into customer-facing systems, which can then be customized by individual users to streamline their own operations.

“If we can run and grow more efficiently, we can free up more dollars to do R&D and innovative work,” Pattison says.

In the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, CIO Daniel Chan’s biggest project for 2011 is called Functional Roadmap. The initiative involves working with an outside consulting firm to review just about all of the organization’s business processes and then re-engineer them, automating wherever possible.

“Right now, we have 27 different programs that our clients may be eligible for, and each program is administered very differently. We’re looking to consolidate to one or two processes from 27 different ways of doing things,” Chan says. “Ten [percent] to 20% improvement is not acceptable. We’re looking for multipliers of five or 10.”

Running for Cloud Cover

Chan is also looking outside of his IT organization for solutions. “I think we spend entirely too much time tinkering with hardware,” he says. “Over time, we can outsource most of our IT infrastructure. Instead of buying and building and managing servers, potentially we could engage a cloud provider and rent capacity. We are experimenting in-house with cloud, but there are still a lot of security-related concerns.”

Haggen Inc., a 32-store chain of supermarkets in the Pacific Northwest, has already extensively consolidated its data center operations by virtualizing servers. “Now we’re looking at storage rationalization and optimization,” says CIO Harrison Lewis. “Before, we might just acquire more storage, but now we’re looking at Tier 2 and Tier 3 data and moving it off to a private cloud.”

A recent internal study showed that 49% of data that Haggen had been storing hadn’t been accessed in two years. This has prompted a more rigorous review of all IT assets, with an eye toward distinguishing exactly what offers a competitive advantage and should be kept in-house and what should be outsourced.

“If it’s not an area where we need to do a great deal of customization, software-as-a-service makes sense,” Lewis says. In 2011, Haggen will be evaluating other SaaS options, including Google’s suite of productivity applications. “From everything I’ve seen so far, it can make sense for us,” notes Lewis.

The bottom line, says Forrester Research analyst Bobby Cameron, is that companies will focus on continuing to drive down costs throughout 2011.

“As the IT organization focuses more on process, they’re also consolidating IT, moving to shared services, and there is a huge acceleration in their ability to automate services,” he says. “The whole concept of preprovisioned environments — with cloud and virtualization — takes automation to the nth degree.

“All of these accelerants are going to continue to drive down the cost of delivering IT,” adds Cameron, not only in 2011, but for the foreseeable future.

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Managed IT Support Firm – Percento Technologies

It’s no wonder IT leaders are focusing concern on IT infrastructure and operations costs when it accounts for 60 per cent of total IT spend. Since things are still uncertain despite the economy showing signs of improvement, this area of IT “strikes a resonant cord,” said Jay Pultz, vice-president and distinguished analyst with Gartner Inc. (IT)

“It has such a high interest among CIOs because they’re not going to meet their budget goals if (infrastructure and operations) doesn’t meet its (budget),” said Pultz during a recent Webinar discussing ways enterprises can cut costs in their IT infrastructure and operations (I&O). Gartner defines I&O as everything in IT except business applications.

There are 10 ways to cut costs in I&O that, if done completely, will reduce spend by 10 per cent within 12 months and 25 per cent in three years, said Pultz.

1. Defer those I&O initiatives that don’t meet business needs. “Look at your key initiatives and focus on those that help you meet the business needs, help you reduce costs and help you keep to uptime requirements for crucial systems,” said Pultz. Preferred initiatives include data centre modernization and consolidation, virtualization, improving processes with ITIL, upgrading PCs, unified communications, and a mobile enterprise strategy.

2. Re-examine networking costs. “These tend to be the largest contracts that you have if you’re not doing a significant amount of outsourcing,” said Pultz. By reviewing current telco contracts, enterprises can renegotiate a lower rate, identify billing errors and things they should no longer be paying for. Pultz also suggests revisiting the network architecture and refining uptime requirements.

3. Consolidate I&O. “You must ask yourself if you have consolidated all that you can,” said Pultz. Most data centre managers understand the benefit of replacing distributed and standalone servers with new form factors in the data centre such as rack and blade. Yet less than 10 per cent have consolidated their servers, said Pultz.

4. Virtualize I&O. “Virtualization is an incredibly powerful technology to reduce hardware costs, reduce power costs, improve utilization and so forth,” said Pultz. For instance, reducing server count by 75 per cent will reduce power consumption by a similar amount. Pultz suggests: “Don’t go slow, accelerate as much as possible your plans to virtualize servers” because of the advantages that can be reaped from high levels of virtualization.

5. Reduce power and cooling needs. “We’re just creating more capacity which creates more heat in a similar space,” said Pultz. Don’t think of the data centre holistically. Instead, break it down into pods or modules and design each individually. One module might be designed for heat density with hot and cold racks, while an other designed for higher uptime, said Pultz. Don’t forget energy monitoring tools are useful for knowing your usage and for optimizing that.

6. Contain storage growth. “We’ve got to do more than just throwing terabytes at the problem,” said Pultz. Yet, that’s the popular response among data centre managers. Some techniques include data deduplication to reduce repeats of the same data, thin provisioning to make better use of storage, and compressing files.

7. Push down IT support. “Institute self-service to get end users to do more on their own and call the service desk less often,” said Pultz. Each level of IT support has a different cost, be it self-service, service desk, technical staff, strategic staff. Having end users help themselves is cost efficient because self-service is one-tenth the cost per transaction.

8. Streamline IT operations. “Change management is a very large source of problems that generate incidents that must be solved by the service desk,” said Pultz. Applying an ITIL framework can ensure change is done correctly. Streamlining processes in general, said Pultz, can reduce the operations part of the IT budget. It also means an enterprise can reduce the need for expensive highly skilled IT professionals.

9. Enhance IT asset management. While improving IT asset management won’t result in cost savings, Pultz said having that data source is invaluable for analyzing potential cost savings across I&O. Some areas that the data can highlight are the need to extend server life, combining contracts into volume purchase agreements, and eliminating software licenses for staff who are no longer employed.

10. Optimize multi-sourcing. “I&O over the years has got much more complex with greater demands from the enterprise,” said Pultz. But it’s not a “binary decision” whether to outsource or insource, he added. It deserves a granular look at function, process and platform. Pick one of those areas to outsource. But be careful not to outsource so much that it becomes costly to manage the slew of service providers.

Overall, Pultz has observed enterprises having only completed a third of his 10 recommendations. He suggests comparing I&O costs to that of other organizations to get a sense of where one stands.

Along the same vein, a study last March by Germany-based infrastructure company Software AG found that the majority of IT directors polled considered services-oriented architecture (SOA) to be a good cost-cutting measure in this tough economy.

Specifically, 83 per cent said they will use SOA to cut costs and 40 per cent said they planned to implement SOA governance in the next year.

The reusability of infrastructure components that SOA affords means greater return on investment for an organization, said Tim Holyoake, lead technologist with Software AG. “Tough economic challenges have forced many businesses to break free from traditional application constraints and re-use existing systems to help keep costs down,” said Holyoake.

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