QlikTech wins with views at London 2012

As I wake bleary eyed from watching another spectacular opening ceremony at the London 2012 Olympic stadium, this for the start of the Paralympics  I have been reflecting on how much technology goes into, and around, the two sets of games. Alongside the go-faster swim suits, the blade-like prosthetics of Oscar Pistorius, the games management system, there are the on screen graphics used by the TV broadcasters, and the multiple streaming channels across the internet. Furthermore it is good to see that UK broadcaster of the Paralympic Games Channel 4, has pulled out all the stops for accessibilty on its website.
One the external 'associated' bit of cleverness that caught my eye, and became the basis for some highly charged (armchair) debates on athletics in the Davis household, was the  QlikTech Global Games App. (I am assuming that QlikTech was not allowed to use the term Olympic as that is heaviliy copyrighted throughout the ganes).  This promotional site illustrates the capabilities of the company's QlikView Business Intelligence product and the visualisation that it offers.
The App which includes a raft of historical detail enables the user to pivot and visualise data from all Olympic games in the last century.
Besides showing that the USA wins a lot of medals (QlikTech is NASDAQ: QLIK, but I don't there is bias) I personally think the site is a good way of illustrating to those who still believe BI is all about reports with numbers and tables, some of visualisations that are now available for business data.
QlikTech has undertaken similar exercises at previous Olympics and Winter Olympics, and given that this years is the biggest ever, and I have a son who plays a mean game of boccia, I am really looking forward to a site on the Paralympics.

Storage de ja vu

Back in 2003, a number of us in the analyst community viewed the acquisition of the 800 lb gorilla in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) marketplace, aka Documentum, to be an exercise based upon the premise of EMC having so much in the way of storage products available, it needed to offer enterprises something to put on those products.  Roll on nearly a decade and we have the offer of  Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glacier to replace tape archives. Ignoring the current (but relevant) debates on pricing, response times, and issues of bandwidth to the Glacier offering, I personally like the idea. It is a modus operandi that is already prevalent in the consumer community. We upload our pictures to the likes of Flikr, Facebook etc not just because we want to show off, but because we believe our valuable memories will be safe there. Many use the likes of BOX.COM and Dropbox as personal archives, and many put their online passwords into emails on universally accessible webmail sites. AWS could be on to a winner.with Glacier, expect Microsoft et al to follow.

"Life is like a box of chocolates"

(c) Paramount Pictures

"You never know what you're gonna get."
In the 1994 Tom Hanks movie Forrest Gump, the ex soldier was bought shares in a 'fruit business' by his former commanding officer and became financially independent from the dividends. At that time the shares in AAPL were trading at $39, having an IPO price of $25 ten years earlier. At time of writing in 2012 they are at $666, and Apple Inc. is the world's highest valued company. Will it stay there? Even with the iPhone 5 and (heavily rumoured) iPad 'mini' to be announced in the next month, and an Apple TV to follow that?
Well looking at the price of Facebook shares on the same day as Apple's achievement, they had lost half of their (admittedly bonkers) initial IPO price of $38 in just three months. So it is not going to be toppled quickly by the 'next big thing' in social software.
Competition in the smartphone market from Samsung and HTC,  may take the gloss away for some iPhone sales in the consumer market, and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 is my current 'wish list' tablet, but I am not expecting them, or a new range of Blackberry's to stop the inexorable penetration of the iPhone and iPad into enterprises as the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) revolution continues.
So as we head into autumn ('fall' for my US colleagues) it looks like the Apple will continue to ripen, and if it can deliver both in terms of product and availability/delivery, there should be lots of (again for US colleagues) 'holiday season' revenues to boost the price further.
So next time you buy a box of chocolates, and find an Apple in it, you may want to hesitate before taking it back to the store.

Outlook.Com does the job - including security

So it's been two weeks since I 'converted' from Microsoft's Hotmail to the new format Outlook.Com. And my verdict? I like it. The user interface is intuitive and migration was simple. The organisation features work well. What's not to like?
Microsoft desperately needed to improve on the tired and 'clunky' 1990's Hotmail interface (sic), where the likes of Google's Gmail and even Yahoo! have recently shown a much tidier set of functions.
And Microsoft has done what it always does best. Identify the features that users seem to work with most in rival products, and put those into its respective offering. This has meant that Microsoft software can never be seen as 'leading edge', and it may never be rated as the 'best' in a particular area, but it will be good enough for the vast majority of users/businesses and offer a reliable product. A while back I visited Microsoft Labs in Cambridge, UK, and was told that all the products developed in the labs are rewritten by a 'production team' to an engineering standard if they go mainstream, to ensure the reliability.
What has disappointed me about the launch of Outlook.Com is not the product, but the reaction of commentators that the 16 character password limit is not enough, and that Yahoo!'s 32 limit and the reportedly 200 for Google (and its ability to also use two-factor) are better for the job.
I know as well as anyone that the strength of a password is linked to its length. But so is the difficulty in remembering it! A lot of awareness raising has been done to push users to create complex passwords with a combination of upper and lowercase letters, characters and numbers. But the reality is that most home users, given the chance, will use the same, even complex, password on all their electronic accounts.
A much better way of getting users to make stronger passwords is to encourage the use of a standard pattern (algorithm). For example using a set string of characters and appending the characters from specific positions in the site's URL. Even at 8 characters that will be stronger than a 32 character password that is used on everything from Twitter to eBay.
Whist one of the arguments to moving to Outlook.Com was that it would look more 'business like', (just like the move of Googlemail to Gmail.com) the reality again is that the majority of Outlook.Com accounts will be home users, and the password will be protecting emails that mostly contain invitations to stag nites (sic) and the pictures of the dog/baby/etc. They may be protecting online banking, (which I would always recommend has a unique password), they will not be protecting accounts of large enterprises and 'national security' et. al. Those latter organisations use Exchange/Active Directory/Outlook client, etc. and are subject to polices that enforce 'secure' passwords, (although I would guess that many users utilise their 'work' password on 'home' accounts).
Outlook.Com is a 'good enough' product for the majority of the millions of users that it is aimed to support.
So which of Gmail, Yahoo! and Outlook.Com will I continue to use as my primary email address?

Can we visualise Big Data?

EMC hopes so. In "The Human Face of Big Data", a photo journalism project it is sponsoring, it is asking 100 of the world's leading photographers, in 30 countries to visually document the collection and use of data.

Working with photographer Rick Smolan, and his company Against All Odds Productions. The objective is to create a coffee table book and iPad app showing the best of the photographs, using the images to demystify the term that seems to have N+1 definitions for the N commentators writing about it. EMC is hoping that the book, to be published in the autumn will be a national "best seller" and is also intending to distribute copes to 'influencers'.

Of course EMC as a storage provider has a vested interest in Big Data, both on premise and in the cloud as a service. The company which recently announced $5.31bn revenues for the second quarter of 2012 makes a lot of cash from storage and with, most notably the Greenplum database, is aiming to offer organisations on premise and/or cloud solutions to meet Big Data needs. 
Illustration of Big Data by those of us in the the analyst community trying to communicate the issue to IT decision makers has always been an issue. We have reached for images of overloaded donkey carts and pictures of people running from tsunami waves. But whilst these raise wry smiles from an audience, they do not in my opinion convey the enormity (pun intended) of the subject, its challenges and opportunities for CIOs and other decision makers.

A long time ago, when I was an IT Manager in the UK NHS, I almost had sleepless nights wondering what I would do when our storage requirements reached 1 terabyte. Lately I have been known to show a photo of the 1000+ DVD collection we have at home, (don't ask) organised by genre/series or artist - that is 5 terabytes 'under management'. I wish the project well.

As a footnote I would (tongue in cheek) like to nominate this Dilbert cartoon http://bit.ly/MTQ97G suggested by @TonyBaer.

Big Data Forum - London

5 July - Attended Unicom's Big Data Forum in London really interesting session with James Howard (ex BBC) on the data requirements for sports journalism,(very relevant ahead of the London 2012 Olympics), and also multi-patent holder Andrew Byde of Acuna on what is big data - “if you can fit it in memory, it is not big data”.

BOX.COM launches in Europe

18 June – the team from BOX.COM are in London in advance of the announcement that they are expanding into Europe, in the first instance through a London base. BOX has (unashamedly) long been a favoured company for myself in that, whilst developed in a University dorm, it was designed from the outset to be an 'enterprise ready' rather than a 'consumer' product – (add your own names here). It will sync with corporate directories and the organisation retains control of all the content.

Previously described as 'ECM in the cloud' msmd advisors believes that BOX like Salesforce.com is taking a lead, in offering organisations an alternative to on premise proprietary solutions, whilst ensuring that corporate security strategy is adhered to. (It is notable that a little time before Microsoft announced it was to acquire the Yammer collaborative suite, and in msmd advisors' opinion, the Redmond behemoth was trying to address the same issue).

However, msmd advisors believes that BOX is a product of it's time. The 'perfect storm' of widespread wifi and broadband access across the world, the emergence of other form factors/devices, such as netbooks, tablets, Android and iOS phones as access devices, and the adoption of a increasing  range of standards for file formats has made this opportunity possible.

Alongside the expansion into Europe to support multinationals etc., BOX has added a whole range of extra tools to ensure differentiation from the 'cloud storage' competition.(again add your own names).
In addition BOX has used its rapid growth to date to recruit key industry individuals to support of its founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, such as general mangers and marketeers (such as Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck from EMC, Joely Urton from Oracle, and Meghan Hughes from Text 100). These people are not only highly experienced and referenced, but all have significant influence n the market(s) that BOX it is aiming to penetrate. They also, like the founders, seem to have a delight in making business fun (which is something that is missing in many companies today). Welcome to this side of the pond.