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May 08
Transparent Confidence

What is your definition of confidence?

con·fi·dence/ˈnoun:

  1. The feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something; firm trust.
  2. The state of feeling certain about the truth of something.
  3. Certitude; assurance: He described the situation with such confidence that the audience believed him completely.

Applying this same noun to the Cloud industry you will no doubt be drawn to one of three descriptions above.

Depending on your exposure to 'Everything as a Service' –XaaS, then perhaps descriptive two is your take. A slightly muddled experience that perhaps left you wondering if some of the buzzwords you've brought into were creative at the least.

There will – unfortunately – be those who immediately focus on descriptive three; having perhaps been an early adopter or as three depicts; been sold with such certitude that XaaS is the way forward, it's only after the contract has been signed that they find themselves exposed due to their chosen XaaS shortcomings.

Finally we come to descriptive number one. This is the nirvana of the three descriptions and at least in this context implies a trusted and proven service with referenceable ~sic - success in the XaaS market. It is here that Applicable has established itself and continues to grow.

So why you ask; does Applicable have the confidence to place itself in such high regard?

The answer in one word is: Tran.sp.arency/'adjective:

  1. So fine in texture it can be seen through or detected.
  2. Free from guile; candid or open.

Given that an adjective typically qualifies, describes or identifies a noun by preceding it, Applicable's approach by default offers transparent confidence.

Transparency at Applicable starts and ends by us encouraging our customers to ask all the questions, including the painful ones without keeping two fingers crossed behind our back.

To offer a view of some of the questions and comments that we will always encourage our customers to ask of Applicable, we have put some together:

How can I get the data back in case of decommissioning of the service?

  • Will I be supported in the event I choose to migrate to another provider?
  • Can I download my data? You only have to look at SalesForce.com to realise that decommissioning can be a huge task.

Where is the service delivered from?

  • What geography are the servers that deliver you this service?
  • Ensure that your recovery data and operational data are kept in the same regionally compliant zones for you as both are subject to the same regulation.

Who is involved in delivering the service?

  • Request exposure of the full "supply chain" that delivers that service. Service is only as good as its weakest link.

Who owns the data while it is used by the service?

  • If a legal authority requests your data, who decides to release the information, Applicable's systems on which the data is located or you, the "owner" of the data?

What security processes & procedures are in place?

  • It's important you feel at ease with the security processes and procedures used by Applicable.

What privacy policies is Applicable subscribing to and how do we manage the user information? 

  • What are the responsibilities of the service provider?

How are you kept informed in case of issues?

  • How does the SLA translate to the real world, how will you be notified, what constitutes an 'issue'?

What responsibility is Applicable taking?

  • Be sure to ask exactly what underpins a service and where the demarcation of responsibility lies.

By being transparent, we have confidence that we are Applicable.

April 11
Unified Community

Human beings are hard-wired with the need for community.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was made of copper and iron wire designed to stretch 2,130 miles along the ocean floor. The first communications occurred on August 16th, 1858. It would normally take at least ten days to deliver a message by ship.

Queen Victoria sent a telegram of congratulations to President James Buchanan through the line; her message of 98 words took sixteen hours to send.

Since that day communication has continued to evolve. The telephone in 1876, the radio in 1896, the videophone in 1936 (yes video conferencing has been around that long), IP networks in 1969, email in 1982 and the modern day inception of the internet in 1983 which enabled a mesh of communication capabilities that included anyone, to anywhere but only if more than one person could afford it.

Fast forward to 2012 and we have Cloud propositions that enable modern day communication to be accessed from anywhere and communicate to anything. Unified Communication is no longer only in reach of specialists and cash rich businesses. It has become a commodity that for some is now a preferred method of communication as it almost – I will never suggest it replaces – fulfils the basic human/business needs for reciprocation in conversations.

Applicable's contribution to Unified Communication or indeed virtual communication has been achieved by recognising this fundamental need for community and ensuring our proposals embody this requirement for our customers. The end user, lest we forget, will always be king.

Applicable are a hybrid specialist in Microsoft Communications. Whether this is on-premise, private cloud or a mixture of the two, we have an award winning team of people who recognise and understand your needs, for your business.

Collaboration is clearly a top priority among both small businesses and Fortune 500 companies, according to the results of a survey from social project management platform provider Wrike.

With 83% of respondents already spending at least a few hours each week working outside the office, two-thirds say they expect their offices to go fully virtual within the next few years.

This escalation is already being witnessed in the growth of Applicable's UC deployments, whether it is hosted infrastructure or hybrid UC deployments for Microsoft Communication products such as Microsoft Lync or Exchange Unified Messaging.

Other key findings from the study include: 89% of respondents rated the opportunity to work remotely as an important fringe benefit in a job. In spite of certain challenges virtual collaboration can impose without the right tools in place, workers confess they would be willing to forgo certain other job perks for the opportunity to work remotely.

Amid the overwhelming demand for a virtual working arrangement, the vast majority of surveyed workers (87%) cite smart collaboration software as a vital, mission-critical factor in the success of virtual teams.

Welcome to the Applicable Community.


http://www.wrike.com/news/new-survey-reveals-overwhelming-demand-for-virtual-collaboration

Conducted in December 2011, the online survey gathered input from 1,074 respondents representing organizations of all sizes about their current and expected future work practices and the role virtual collaboration among remote teams plays in their work habits.

April 05
Applicable Expert

Remember the panic when someone called you an expert? For me I instantly thought of a dozen people who had A Levels over my GCSEs and I still do. The best example for me is a friend who leads in her field for her studies but call her an expert and all manner of self-doubt start to appear.

Human psychology aside, the natural reaction is for the room temperature to rise and for the pressure to increase well beyond the real proportions. The point is that being an expert is not necessarily just academic; all in all what sets an expert apart these days tends to be your experience and how you relay this to others who require your guidance.

Looking at the 'Twitterverse' and the usual blogs, websites and so forth there is a further common theme within the industry for voice and video solutions. There are now so many options to deliver a solution to a customer and more often than not, even a single vendor solution has many ways to deploy the same solution. This creates many different camps of experts with the obvious divide between those who have installed the solution through blood, sweat and tears or those who have read all the theory but lack the real-world experience.

Then there is the third camp, that of the Consultant.

The Consultant has always led an interesting existence that pirouettes between being a bungee rope specialist who may simply appear one-day, charge a huge amount of cash and disappear again to little effect; other than the murmurs of an urban legend. Or every now and then you might get a consultant who can provide what you're looking for; which is leadership and experience for your solution.

I've been a consultant, I've also been someone who's read all the theory but lacked the real-world experience and finally I've been the person who waded through the deep end minus any theory and emerged broken; but wiser for the experience. These days I also feel confident enough to describe myself as the consultant who doesn't have all the answers. Why is this?

The difference for me came when I was first described as an expert; amid my initial panic I realised that to meet that description I needed to know more than just product specifications and theoretical applications of a solution. I also needed to be able understand the wider implications of my advice and how it may affect business critical services for a customer. Most importantly, I needed to know what I didn't know, and be capable therefore to create a team ethos that would fill the gaps in my knowledge as it would for them. No one person can do it all alone.

I did and still do a lot of reading around Prince 2 Project Management, MBA Courses and also those delightful 'management' books but armed with all my academic 'experience' I realised that you cannot have 'academic' without the 'experience'. Chicken or egg has never seemed more apt. Just looking now at my books in my study, the three books that gave me the best academic experience were all about the people with the subject matter taking second place. I realised that this was the third part to being a Consultant, these are my three:

Who Moved My Cheese - Spencer Johnson; "Cheese" is a metaphor for what you want to have in life - whether it is a good job, a loving relationship, money, a possession, health, or spiritual peace of mind.

Almost Everyone's Guide to Science - John Gribbin; This is someone who tries to popularise the delivery of science into laymen's sentences that takes immensely complex subjects and package it into bite sized chunks that everyone regardless of their knowledge, rhetorical or not can understand.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late - Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon – This is a book which is actually about how the internet came to be; for me it gave me a real insight into the delivery of subtext and categorising long term projects for my customers.

What's my point then? For me I found that what I was missing was the personalities, not just the knowledge of academic and real world experience. While the processes in any business will remain reasonably consistent, the people rarely do.

Strong experience, leadership and confidence in your delivery is the only way to stop a customer Project Manager from defining a deadline with no contingency or a CFO from demanding the same for less but disguising it as value-added services. It doesn't however remove the need for planning, if there's no plan, no statement of works, or the wrong personalities then walk away, trust me I can tell you a story about a consultant who didn't…

We have Applicable Experience.

March 14
Quality of Service

Depending on your specific knowledge; many of you will know QoS to be a networking term used to define the level of priority given to data on a network. If you didn't; then hopefully you've just learnt something new.

The use of networks to deliver audio and video is nothing new, the advances moreover are found in the quality of the audio and video and therein the 'definition'. Be it high definition 1080p video or high fidelity audio with every advance claiming to be the new dawn for communication standards.

Applicable's ability to deliver a quality hosted infrastructure forms a key part of its drive with Microsoft Communications, yet Lync has a fundamental challenge. Its biggest advantage is also its biggest problem. The problem is found in the ethos behind the delivery of Lync; which is to create a communication platform that purposely allows integration with 3rd party products.

In turn this ensures the customer can create a bespoke platform that exists with Lync at its core; therein allowing the customer to cherry pick the appropriate eco-system for their requirements.

However it creates a daunting challenge for customers who can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choice, some of which can be seen below. It is however a problem that Applicable is at the forefront of and at present Applicable has a working relationship with 14 of these vendors, meaning Applicable's service and design capabilities are second to none when driving Lync into the marketplace as the communication platform of choice.

 

Taking a small technical diversion, as any Cisco UC person worth their salt will point out; it is the use of proprietary codecs for audio and video within a Microsoft Communication solution that causes the largest disgruntlement amongst those who collaborate across multiple-vendor platforms, particularly where video conferencing is concerned.

Other than to raise awareness I will – sort of - stray away from the political hot potato that is open standards. Cisco at the eleventh hour placed their concerns against the Microsoft Skype merger, stating that the merger must ensure that Skype – with 170 million active users no less, not including the 500 million plus dormant users that Cisco reported to add weight to their report – should be able to collaborate with other video products, by which they meant their WebEx product.

Unfortunately for Cisco; consumers are not tied into Skype. So If the European Commission forced Microsoft to open Skype then lawyers will rightly demand that all other video systems are forced to interoperate due to legal precedence. Can you imagine Apple agreeing to open FaceTime to its competitors…

It is however a fact that we are rapidly approaching an era where IP communications are the only communications and the core lines of business for many of Microsoft's competitors.

So coming back on topic, where am I going with this? Well to take the term 'the weakest link', quality of service is fundamental at all levels, not just networking but most importantly Applicable's greatest asset is now at the forefront, Service. This is Applicable's greatest differentiator and largely determines the experience for the end user rather than the product capabilities or interoperability of the product in question.

Lync is only going to provide a service that is as good as its providers/installers/support agents and so forth allow. As you saw earlier there is a wealth of options available for Lync and right now Applicable finds itself in an incredibly strong position in a rapidly growing market and is making it happen right now.

Applicable's key relationships established with major vendors, telecomm providers; means we have a key product that can successfully scale down – a key requirement in a volatile economy - as well as up, all whilst integrating across established core Microsoft products such as Exchange Unified Messaging, Office, CRM and 3rd party products.

The growing importance and prevalence of a single network across all lines of business means the market opportunity of Lync combined with Skype alone is our opportunity to lose; it will be defined by the Service and sold by the Service.

Service is Applicable.

December 30
Speaking at Lotusphere 2012

​I have been lucky enough to be chosen to present a Birds of a Feather session around the connections user community with my good friends Simon Vaughan and Stuart McIntyre.

BOF115 - IBM Connections 3.01 – Enhancement ideas from Connections users

With the anticipated release of Connections 4, the aim of this session is to review what users have requested in future versions of Connections and how these improvements are designed to help increase the adoption of Social business tools in an organization. Since the introductions of ‘idea blogs’ in Connections 3.01, an active community of users have been submitting, commenting and sharing ideas via the Connections User Community in Greenhouse - a community product managers and developers also participate in. With the audience's help, we will do a deep dive into some of these ideas. Simon Vaughan will focus on the user requests, Sharon Bellamy will focus on the technical improvements.

Speakers :
Simon Vaughan - Cardiff University, Stuart McIntyre - Collaboration Matters, Sharon Bellamy - Applicable

DATE: Wednesday 1/18, TIME: 7:00 am – 8:00 am, LOCATION: Swan Toucan 2 

If you are lucky enough to be at Lotusphere and are interested in Connections please come and check our session.


I will also be blogging and tweeting from Lotusphere as it is going to be a very busy and exciting conference this year.

There are a lot of new software releases and lots of new features coming - there is a lot of buzz in the Community that this year is going to be something big.


November 24
​So, what is the future of the collaboration desktop?

Well it depends on which vendor that you ask! Here is my view. On the one hand, IT is being more and more led by consumer demand. Examples of this are the rise of IOS and android as mobile platforms at the expense of Blackberry and of course Microsoft's Windows Mobile offerings (lest we forget). The other major driver is the improvements in user experience evidence in major players products. Examples of this include Facebook and Twitter with their stripped down Web 2.0, user interface. Interface and “User Experience is Everything” approach to product development.

Facebook is a good example of this. You hardly notice the applications that sit behind the user experience. You just consume them. The important thing here is that you don’t go away from Facebook’s user interface to do that. Twitter is moving down the same tramlines – “user interface is everything”.

So where does that leave Microsoft and IBM, our two favourite venders? 

Well, I’m glad you’ve asked me that because I’ve been thinking about it quite hard for some time and the conclusion I’ve come to is that they both have very different approaches to user interface and integration as a whole. Let’s start with IBM. Two years ago, at Lotusphere 2010, IBM announced Project Vulcan. Nobody really understood what this meant at the time but I think the fruits are now ripening in this project. I think it will define the user interface, user experience and product integration architecture for IBM for the next decade. I think the project brief for Vulcan must’ve run something like this: “We’ve lost the desktop war how can we win the interface war?” I think the answer that they came with was: Web 2.0, Ajax, rich user interface application development techniques with loose back-end, lightweight integration (well I had a little of help their because that’s what they developed!) This is what will lead to IBM Connections or Portal likely becoming the interface for all IBM collaboration technologies (including document management). This is obviously at the expense of IBM’s premier, and in my mind excellent collaboration client called Lotus Notes. It does have some advantages in terms of portability–Web 2.0 technologies can be consumed on a variety of devices without recoding.

Looking at Microsoft’s collaboration stack, Microsoft Exchange, Lync and SharePoint servers and the Microsoft Office client products, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and of course Outlook we see a very different approach. At least for the time being, Microsoft’s business model is predicated on the success of these products and changing the approach that they go to market would introduce risk. Supporting these products on multiple platforms is problematic and extending them to other form factors is costly. However Microsoft have dominance, which buys the time to change. And you can see this happening already. The Office 365 offering is a great example of Microsoft’s recognition that consumer led, cloud delivered collaboration is the way forward; and well executed too. But it can take some time to get there –  in the meantime collaboration will be delivered in their silo'd client user interfaces. Just look at the web apps (which are excellent by the way) to see the future in action.

So in conclusion: What is the future of collaboration and the desktop? Well in my opinion it will be a single screen with all the relevant information and people that you need to collaborate with and around for the task at hand. I suspect, over the next few years, we will see less single vendor implementations and more heterogeneous architectures where customers favour applications that can plug-in to their collaboration user experience and not disrupt it. This collaboration best of breed ecosystem will be identical on most form factors available to the 21st century knowledge worker, ranging from smart phone all the way up to high-performance workstation. Your 21st century knowledge worker will not even know the name of the server product that delivers his email or presence – it just lights up his or her world!​

November 19
Private Cloud Gathering Momentum

It’s been a busy couple of weeks on the event circuit; last week was the Applicable Power of Choice event with IBM at their new facility in Southbank. This event was all about how to leverage the cloud and assess how the cloud is not a binary debate about moving to it or not. The event had a very good attendance and some lively debate. It was clear that the cloud has certainly created disruption and that some of the marketing messages and dollars have served mainly to confuse or drive behavior in customers not always to their best interests. It isn't a surprise that public cloud offerings are being pushed hard from the big 3 Microsoft, IBM and Google. Google only has a cloud offer and both Microsoft and IBM have sales force s compensated on Office365 and LotusLive, guess what they would like you to buy?

For me and the vast majority of our customers the cloud debate isn't polar and it certainly isn’t about being in or out. For Applicable the cloud debate is about how to leverage it where appropriate and beneficial and how to stay clear when its not. The vast majority of people already use the cloud in their businesses today, who generates their own power for instance, we all buy that from the cloud, we call it a grid in the UK, and we have done for years. The same principles apply when considering software and services, albeit some more complex debates. We had lots of interest in the hybrid model and our opinion that you shouldn’t consider services as commodity. I hear it a lot that email is just commodity so that’s an obvious thing to put in the cloud. Well it’s not that simple, email is pretty well defined in the cloud but the service wrapped around it is what customers really care about at the enterprise scale. This is really driving fast adoption for private cloud services where the customer gets exactly what they want without having to run it, albeit at a different price point for cloud. We are seeing a rapid growth in this market as customers take their first steps towards the cloud. Will everyone be in the cloud in 3 years, of course not, outsourcing has been with us since the 70's and everybody didn’t jump on that. The market will in my view be a mix of on premise, private cloud, public cloud and we will see an increase in cloud aggregators who tie together the best services and features of multiple clouds to offer a rich and single point of service solution for their customers.

I was fortunate enough this week to speak at the IBM Accelerated Value Forum and this time I spoke about cloud and the disruptions in the market that are causing people to stop and think. The disruptions we are seeing driving debates around how are we going to deploy this stuff are around

 

   Unified communications

   Cloud Computing

   Social Computing

 

Together with the ever-present gloomy economic outlook means we effectively have a perfect storm of exciting new technology but little Capex to take advantage of it. This is driving many CIO's to look at ways to squeeze every last drop from the IT budget and this is inevitably leading to discussions about lowering TCO which forms the start point of many cloud or hosting discussions. There was a good discussion about how to approach cloud solutions commercially, with some delegates feeling that the per user per month price model doesn’t work at their scale as it often leads to a higher than expected TCO, compared to in-house delivery. As a private cloud provider you have to be sensitive that customers who want to leverage some of the new exiting technology want to do so at a small scale but at a price point that will scale for their organisation and this is not always easy for service providers as margin comes at scale. I discussed some approaches to how you deal with this as a customer when negotiating with a cloud provider so you can get on the path at the right price and with your provider still valuing your business. Many of the commercial debates that occur in a private cloud model always start with well I can get this for $5 in the cloud (public), to which the answer always is well why don’t you do that then, and of course they don’t because it isn’t the service they really want. Cloud providers should look to embrace the public clouds such as Office365 and LotusLive and transition customers there when it is appropriate and not try and sell against it. A private cloud service is a different proposition with a different price point and one which customers are really starting to want. It will be interesting to see how take up of cloud continues to grow and change into 2012 and beyond, my prediction is there will be large take up of private cloud up until 2013 with hybrid and public cloud continuing to grow as customers get more used to the model. We will end up in a very hybrid world and integration will become very very key to delivering diverse IT services.

 


October 30
Lync comes alive with Polycom

So after a morning talking about email migration and the all so often debate I here these days about what do we do with our legacy Domino applications the Applicable team headed over to the Polycom exec briefing centre. We are working with Polycom and our friends at BT to look at the integration of the Polycom range with our hosted Lync offering.

The briefing centre is as you would expect and a very high specification set of suites at the top of the office block with panaromic views across London, pretty impressive.

Polycom took us through the integration of their range of hardware and software with Lync. The integration appears native, very slick, easy to use and the functionality was right where it needs to be.

The ability to have proper multi-way HD video seeing all the people all the time whether they are on a lync client, IOS device, or one of Polycoms own systems really was very impressive.

The question for me is where does Lync finish and Polycom ​start and that is not an easy answer. Lync clearly has good video conferencing capabilities and its only by using and discovering these that you will understand its limitations. For instance I don't like the the way Lync seitches to the active participant so in a multi way call I cannot see everyone, which for me is key in a meeting so you can read the room. Clearly there are cost considerations and I see the market being pretty much like it is today with Polycom providng capabilities that segue into Lync and not trying to compete with it. Polycom have taken the right stance with Microsoft and the only one I think works for a vendor partner, embrace what comes out of Redmond and extend its capabilities with your own offerings that way Microsoft will support you and not crush you. There is clearly a very close working relationship between Polycom and Microsoft and that bring the tight integration and quality product. We have ordered a whole truck load of Polycom kit for our offices and look forward to seeing all that in operation very soon.​

October 22
Patch for Lync on OSX Lion

The Lync for Mac 14.0.1 update is now available from Microsoft AutoUpdate.

To use AutoUpdate, start Microsoft Lync or another Microsoft Office application, and then on the Help menu, click Check for Updates.

The Lync for Mac 14.0.1 update fixes problems associated with sign-in on Mac OS X 10.7.2 Lion, and also improves support for Office 365.

Downloading it now, will post if it fixes and if it has any new features or fixes.

October 15
Lync and the Journey to Enterprise Voice

​A question I get asked a lot is :-

Will people really use Lync for all their voice and replace traditional PBX's?

short answer is yes and it is already happening, slightly longer answer is there will probably be a roadmap to full voice. Many enterprises today have a wide range of voice techologies in play, from traditional analogue systems like MD110's(showing my age), to digital PBX's, VOIP enabled traditional PBX's like Nortel system 25, right the way to Cisco and Avaya type solutions. Will people look to replace all that investment in one project, probably not as the legacy systems will still have value both real and book value. We are seeing that a voice to voice replacement is much like a migration between email platforms, pretty pointless on its own. I always advise customers to look at the value they can get from adopting unified comms and build a roadmap of value which logically will end with voice but don't be obsessed about having a homegnous voice network as they never have before !

We are finding that the adoption roadmap for UC is becoming similar across organisations. We have tried to vuild a graphic for my various slide decks, below.

UC roadmap.pdf
What we are really saying is start with traditional instant messaging and presence, moving to desk to desk AV with web conferencing and replacing traditional AV conference bridges like webex and BT meetme to get real cost savings. The move to enterprise voice can then be rolled out in line with the PBX replacement strategy or at natural break points like hardware requiring upgrades, maintenance renewals or big software changes. We are seeing an explosion in UC right now driven aprtly by consumer IT expecting to have a rich social experience on any device at anytime and from anywhere. 

We are also seeing a growing number of enterprises looking to put UC into the cloud, currently mainly private cloud, to avoid the skill up required to run UC which is inherently more complex than something like Exchange as you generally have to have the comms people talking to the servers/OS and application guys, always a challenge ! As the market matures we are sure to see different adoption models and I will be sure to give inisghts into what we are seeing in the market.​

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About this blog
Welcome to the Applicable blog. Our blog gives you insight into Applicable, our strategy and the things which are on our mind.