computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 1
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
FT sold on cloud benefits
FINANCIAL TIMES KEEN TO EXPAND USE OF CLOUD-BASED DATA WAREHOUSE
20-26 January 2015 | ComputerWeekly.com
STEP
HEN
SIM
PSO
N/R
EX
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 2
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
THE WEEK IN IT
Networking ITHome Office cans Lot 4 of framework for Emergency Services NetworkThe Home Office has scrapped the fourth contract, or Lot 4, of the new Emergency Services Network framework, saying in light of new commitments undertaken by the UK’s big four mobile network operators it was now redundant. Lot 4 was designed to address mobile network access for the emergency services in remote and rural areas of the country that could not be covered otherwise.
IT careersHalf of UK’s top 100 employers plan to hire graduates in IT roles in 2015More than half (53%) of the UK’s top 100 employers will have graduate vacan‑cies in IT this year, according to the High Fliers study of the graduate market in 2015. Conducted in December 2014, the research is based on the organisations named as The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers 2014, which were selected in a poll of 18,336 students.
Banking ITUlster Bank to run two hackathons to discover the future of banking ITUlster Bank will run two hackathons to unearth some of the technology‑based services it can offer its customers in the future. The bank, owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, is holding two events in Belfast and Dublin. Developers will be given access to simulated data and APIs.
Retail ITRetail technology useless without back-end support, says John LewisRetailers can’t just rely on sophisti‑cated customer‑facing mobile apps and websites to be successful, according to John Lewis CIO Paul Coby. Speaking at the National Retail Federation event in New York, Coby said to succeed in omni‑channel retailing, brands must have good front‑end technology – but it is use‑less unless the back‑end technology is re‑engineered to cope with demand.
Banking ITChallenger bank to launch in UK after penning Oracle cloud services dealChallenger bank Hampden will start operating in the first quarter of 2015 fol‑lowing its decision to use a cloud‑based banking platform from Oracle. The Edinburgh‑based private bank is using Oracle Flexcube and cloud services for its digital banking operations. It will be the first UK bank to use cloud applications based in Oracle’s UK datacentres.
Healthcare ITN3 network outage puts NHS users offlineThe NHS is recovering from serious dis‑ruption to its IT infrastructure, after its internet gateway went down, knocking out parts of its internal N3 wide area IP net‑work in England and Scotland. The NHS in Wales runs a separate network which is not thought to have been affected.
access the latest it news via rss feed
ROBOTS GREET CUSTOMERS IN BANK BRANCHES
The digitisation of banks is entering a new phase as a Japanese bank uses robots to greet customers in branches and answer questions.
Banks are using technologies such as software robots to automate back-office processes, but an initiative at the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ uses 58cm-tall robots in the front office to help customers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The robot, known as NAO, has the ability to read people’s facial expressions.
FLIC
KR
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 3
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
THE WEEK IN IT
access the latest it news via rss feed
IT servicesTata Consultancy Services forced to quash mass redundancy speculationIndian IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services has been forced to make a statement on speculation it is about to lay off around 30,000 staff in India. The company said it has no intention of mak‑ing large‑scale cuts, but will continue to make cuts based on performance, as it does each year.
Cyber crimeFBI investigates hacked US Central Command social media accounts The FBI is investigating the hacking of the US Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube accounts by a group claiming to back Islamic State which calls itself CyberCaliphate. But CentCom has issued a statement describing the incident “purely as a case of cyber vandalism” and said its operational miltary networks were not compromised.
IT careersComputer science graduates in the UK have highest unemployment rateUK computer science students have the highest rate of unemployment among all disciplines, according to stats from the National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB). The NCUB revealed 13% of computer science students are still unemployed six months after graduating, compared with an average of 8% across all subjects.
Retail ITTGI Friday’s rolls out tablets and trials social media check-in technologiesTGI Friday’s is rolling out Microsoft tablets across its restaurant chain and experimenting with data from social media check‑in technologies. The restaurant is equipping its servers with 8‑inch Windows 8.1 tablets so they can quickly process orders and payments at the table.
Healthcare ITSheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust embarks on clinical portal projectSheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has selected HP Enterprise Services as the prime contractor to implement a clinical portal designed to improve care standards by allowing a more integrated view of patient information. Sheffield Teaching Hospitals is one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK and has five major hospitals under its remit.
Mobile technologyNFC to take off in 2015This year will be the year contactless payment methods such as near‑field communications (NFC) take off, according to Deloitte. The firm predicted larger banks are likely to offer NFC payments via smartphones by the end of 2015, with 5% of NFC‑enabled phones being used for contactless payments before next year. n
MOBILE RETAIL SHOWING SIGNS OF MATURITY
2012
2013
47%
138%
Source: IMRG
293%2014
Year-on-year growth in mobile retail sales
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 4
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
ANALYSIS
Aggressive stance on licensing antagonises customers and is increasingly losing Oracle business, warns Campaign for Clear Licensing. Cliff Saran reports
Oracle risks killing the goose that lays software licensing golden egg
In an open letter, the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) has highlighted the risk to Oracle’s earnings if the company doesn’t
soften its aggressive stance on licensing.The letter attacked Oracle’s approach to
software licensing success. “Customer sat‑isfaction, relationship strength and strategic value should replace audit revenue as a key performance indicator,” CCL stated in the open letter.
CCL also warned that Oracle’s licence revenue could be threatened if organisa‑tions using the company’s software consider themselves to be at risk of being audited and charged for being underlicensed.
“As more organisations mature in their gov‑ernance processes, more will shy away from Oracle as an unnecessary burden to manage. Oracle needs to engineer its products and licence programmes to reduce unnecessary risk. The focus of control needs to be placed in the hands of the business, not developers,” the open letter stated.
CCL said that Oracle was losing out because customers no longer trusted it.
“Oracle is not being invited to participate in key business conversations because of
mistrust. Oracle needs to step up conversa‑tions and provide clarity to regain trust,” the open letter noted.
CCL’s open letter listed a total of seven key areas the company needs to address (see panel, next page), including customer satis‑faction and audit clarity.
Aggressive sales tacticsOracle’s sales tactics are often regarded by buyers as aggressive. Computer Weekly recently spoke to an organisation that faced the prospect of a site being switched off due to a disagreement over licence fees.
Oracle has also been criticised over its vir‑tualisation licensing. Because the company does not recognise the virtualisation soft‑ware of any other supplier, businesses risk having to license Oracle on every physical server the software could run on.
Some companies have set up entire physi‑cal server sites just to run Oracle software, and so avoid the licence fee Oracle charges for running its software on VMware or other non‑Oracle hypervisors.
“In 2015, we want to see Oracle put in some steps to listen to the voice of its
user groups back licensing
but raise audit concerns
Users complain about
aggressive oracle tactics
Oracle headquarters, Redwood City, California
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 5
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
switches off the revenue tap, because cus‑tomers will be able to use cloud efficiency and utilisation to process increased Oracle workloads without increasing total core capacity,” he concluded. n
customers,” said Martin Thompson, founder of the Campaign for Clear Licensing. Previously he had told Computer Weekly: “Based on our research and conversations over the past six months, we have found that customers’ relationships with Oracle are hostile and filled with deep‑rooted mistrust.”
In a CCL survey of 100 Oracle customers, published in November 2014, 92% “disa‑greed” or “strongly disagreed” that com‑munication from Oracle had been clear and straightforward.
Sales overstretchForrester principal analyst Duncan Jones said the main cause of audit problems is a gap between Oracle sales staff targets and the real demand for Oracle products. “It is this gap, and the excessive pressure that Oracle places on sales teams to close it, that causes some reps to find creative ways to extract revenue from unwilling custom‑ers,” he said.
He added that many organisations are con‑sidering limiting their use of Oracle. “Even if you end up renewing your commitment to Oracle’s products, you’ll be in a better nego‑tiating position by having undertaken this review,” he added.
Jones said he often hears from software asset managers complaining about the difficulty of dealing with Oracle. “Now, I’m hearing that many real decision‑makers, such as CIOs and their direct reports, are reconsidering Oracle’s place in their tech strategy.”
Moving new projects to a non‑Oracle plat‑form is clearly easier than migrating existing software. “Threatening to direct new invest‑ment elsewhere will give you more leverage with Oracle’s sales teams,” he said.
According to Jones, part of the problem is that Oracle relies on anti‑cloud policies
to generate licence revenue, which makes the total cost of Oracle ownership much higher for
organisations that want to harvest the full benefits of cloud.
“If Oracle changes its core policies to compete better in the cloud market it
› Oracle highlights cloud commitment› TmaxSoft MD blasts Oracle licensing
› Oracle DBA certifications at risk
CCL’S ORACLE WISHLIST
1. Strategic focusCustomer satisfaction, relationship strength and strategic value should replace audit revenue as a key performance indicator.
2. Audit clarity Oracle needs to be crystal-clear with audit activity and adopt CCL’s code of conduct.
3. One voice, please Organisations want clarity over Oracle licence management from one voice. They don’t want to be passed between departments that don’t communicate with each other.
4. Knowledge baseOracle needs to invest in a well-organised knowledge base to educate its customers.
5. Re-engineer risk As governance processes mature in more organisations, more will shy away from Oracle as an unnecessary burden to manage. Oracle needs to engineer its products and licence programmes to reduce unnecessary risk. The focus of control should be in the hands of the business, not developers.
6. Software asset management evangelism Oracle needs to help educate its customers to assign appropriate resource for managing software and proactively assist with licensing training and management practices around Oracle software.
7. Communicate Oracle is not being invited to key business conversations because of mistrust. Oracle needs to step up conversations and provide clarity to regain trust.
Source: Campaign for Clear Licensing
ANALYSIS
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 6
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
CASE STUDY
House of Fraser innovates in bid to become elite multi-channel retailer
House of Fraser is staking its claim as an elite multi‑channel retailer by providing technology offerings in the
form of mobile in stores and buy‑and‑collect innovations, including a partnership with coffee shop Caffé Nero.
House of Fraser was described as elite and took a top‑five spot in Internet Retailing’s 2014 list of leading UK retailers, but the department store’s executive director of multi‑channel Andy Harding says he was amazed how “little old House of Fraser” had got there, after decades of unstable growth during the second half of the 20th century.
After a challenging period, the retailer finally launched its website in 2007, but Harding says the department store was well behind the curve of maturity, with competitor John Lewis launching online offerings six years previously.
Overhauling the mobile platformBut the business began to catch up by redeveloping its website for mobile and touchscreen in 2013. This was before it reno‑vated its online presence in response to a substantial increase in traffic from mobile.
Speaking at Internet Retailing’s conference in London in October 2014, Harding said 70% of House of Fraser customers still shop just in‑store, leading the retailer to focus on innovation for customers visiting its physical outlets.
He says that the retailer has been encouraging customers to get their mobile phones out of their pockets while shopping in‑store, as they are more likely to engage with the brand.
“Our app detects you are in‑store and slips into store mode,” says Harding, describing how it brings functionalities specific to store – such as scanning capabilities, stock levels and maps – to the front of the app.
House of Fraser also has staff equipped with mobile devices, as well as a buy‑and‑collect check‑in area and kiosks for ordering in‑store. “It’s a fundamental success because of staff engagement,” says Harding, adding that retailers really need staff to be on board with technology advancements.
“Staff have to understand the value of mobile for you to win the battle. If staff see it as an extension of the stock room and a sale they wouldn’t otherwise make, you really win,” he says.
Implementing beacon technologyHarding also says he sees real value from beacon technology and has seen customers really engage with its pilot of beacon‑enabled store mannequins, which it rolled out to its buy‑and‑collect store in Aberdeen in 2014. The technology allows passers by to shop from House of Fraser window displays even when the store is closed. “There has to be a business case in that,” he adds.
“We’re rolling out to all of our stores and windows as soon as we possibly can,” he says. “There’s a huge future for beacons and what they can mean for multi‑channel retail.”
Department store House of Fraser is providing technology offerings in the form of mobile in stores and buy-and-collect innovations. Caroline Baldwin reports
Monsoon provides
multi-channel promotions
John Lewis eyes IoT
and iBeacon technology
THEN
IKO
NK
ID/F
LIC
KR
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 7
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
Offering convenient deliveryHarding also points out how important delivery options are to customers who shop online. House of Fraser is now ahead of everyone else in the market in terms of its delivery proposition, he claims.
“Customers keep telling us home delivery is not convenient,” says Harding. “Most people work, and taking time off for even a 15‑minute slot is a pain, and some offices don’t allow delivery.”
The retailer offers evening deliveries until 10pm nationwide – a service it had to build from scratch because there was no courier that could provide it. “This will be a key battleground. In 2015 we will be launching incredible things – particularly around the buy‑and‑collect service,” says Harding.
Buy-and-collect partnershipIn 2011, the retailer also opened the world’s first stockless internet store in Aberdeen, which is an area without a House of Fraser department store. This allows customers who wouldn’t normally shop with the retailer to access a point to pick up online orders.
“Aberdeen has been a great success for us,” says Harding.
Its newest buy‑and‑collect offering is a partnership with Caffé Nero. A branch has recently opened in Cambridge which allows customers to visit the coffee shop at their convenience to pick up items they have ordered online from House of Fraser’s website.
“Buy and collect is truly incremental,” Harding says.
He adds the partnership has great potential for both brands because it increases awareness of the retailer, while Caffé Nero gains extra footfall from House of Fraser customers.
Future innovationsHarding says while it’s difficult to predict the future because the path of technology isn’t
clear, he could hedge his bets on a couple of technologies which are on the horizon.
In particular, Harding believes payments will change dramatically over the next couple of years, now Apple has launched a phone enabled with near‑field communication (NFC) and its Apple Pay mobile wallet.
“Apple has set the path for so many user experiences, and I expect to see a significant shift from credit card payments to mobile wallets in the next two years,” he says. “Mobile wallets will be the primary method of payment in that timeframe.” n
› Retail tech useless without back-end support› Tips for using beacon technology in retail
› Retailers need to plan for online peaks and troughs
CASE STUDY
“I expect to see a sIgnIfIcant shIft from credIt card payments to mobIle wallets In the next two years”andy hardIng, house of fraser
House of Fraser encourages customers to use their mobile phones while shopping as they are more likely to engage with the brand
THINKSTOCK
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 8
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
INTERVIEW
The FT on a quest for public cloud success with new revenue models
For publishers, inno‑vation in advertis‑ing strategies can
boost revenues. After finding success in using
cloud data warehousing products to make its subscriptions and financial data more efficient, the Financial Times (FT) is now looking to migrate its advertising data to the cloud and build new revenue models.
The FT’s CTO John O’Donovan says, fol‑lowing its use of public cloud services for mission‑critical data warehousing tasks, the IT team is more confident about using cloud services for other critical data workloads.
The FT’s IT team built its data warehous‑ing on Amazon’s RedShift offering. In doing so, it can now run 450,000 online queries 98% faster than with its previous traditional datacentre, and reduced infrastructure costs by 80%, according to O’Donovan.
Data warehousing is important for the FT, as data insights shape its business decisions. A data warehouse is a repository of data that an enterprise’s various business systems collect. It is designed to facilitate information retrieval and analysis. The data contained in a warehouse is often consolidated from mul‑tiple systems, making analysis across those systems quicker and easier.
Amazon announced its data warehouse product – Redshift – in November 2012 at its first re:Invent conference, making it available from 2013 onwards.
“Traditional data warehouse products are too expensive and have licensing complica‑tions,” said Amazon Web Services (AWS) senior vice‑president Andy Jassy at its launch. “Many large enterprises told us they are unhappy with the existing data ware‑housing services in the market.”
AWS Redshift is an automated, petabyte‑scale data warehouse service in
the cloud that helps enterprise IT automate labour‑intensive tasks, such as setting up, operating and scaling a data warehouse clus‑ter. It aims to help them provision capacity, monitor and back up the cluster, as well as apply patches and upgrades.
‘More pay than go’“We had a data warehousing system in the FT. It was not rubbish but it was inflexible, it had limited features, it was slow and it was expensive,” O’Donovan said at an AWS sum‑mit in 2014. “Besides, it was not in a single place.” This made data analytics and ware‑housing tasks difficult for the IT team.
“Our chief executive once said, ‘We quickly came to realise the real power of subscrip‑tion relationships comes from data,’ and this thought really shaped our strategy,” O’Donovan told delegates at the summit.
“Previously, we had used a man‑aged services data warehousing kit on a pay‑as‑you‑go basis. But it was not flexible, it was slow and it was more pay than go.”
Moving the mission‑critical task to the cloud has not just reduced processing time
Name: “xxxx”
Financial Times CTO John O’Donovan tells Archana Venkatraman about the newspaper’s cloud strategy as it migrates its data workloads to the cloud
Interview: Dan Taylor,
head of BBC iPlayer
Interview: Chris Birch, IT
Director, News UK
CW500 interview
O’Donovan: “Moving from a report-based scenario to a real-time data analytics situation is hugely beneficial”
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 9
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
by 98%, but also enables the FT’s IT team to deliver projects on time, and to budget. “It’s no more a case of a black‑box data ware‑house for the FT,” O’Donovan says. “Moving from a report‑based scenario to a real‑time data analytics situation is hugely beneficial.”
The project gave the FT’s IT team the confi‑dence to adopt more cloud services. “We’ve proved we can put pretty much anything in the cloud,” says O’Donovan.
After reaping the benefits of AWS RedShift for subscriptions data, the FT is now looking to migrate its advertising data to the public cloud platform.
“Advertising data is equally critical but it is more specialised and not as straightforward as subscriptions data,” says O’Donovan. “Advertisers can be very demanding but the cloud has enabled us to be innovative there.”
The FT’s IT team is now looking to set ad strategies based on the time readers spend looking at an ad, rather than just based on the number of clicks or views. “Platforms like public cloud give you a chance to innovate,” says O’Donovan. “Now we have the tech‑nology power to invest our time in strate‑gic tasks that add value to the business. Previously these kinds of ideas would have required huge investments,” he adds.
“I remember when it took months to get a server. It could be very disappointing.”
New era of computingO’Donovan urges other CIOs to look at new ways of doing IT. “People spend a lot of time in building resilient infrastructures and their strategy is, ‘build something so it does not fail’ – but cloud dynamics are challenging this process,” he says.
According to O’Donovan, IT must now automate the process to make it easy to kill
an applica‑tion instance and start all over again quickly. “We can spin up
virtual machines in 20 minutes and quickly move forward,” he says.
“IT cannot afford any more to spend weeks investigating why things failed in an infrastructure they build so resiliently and on a long time scale. Today, it is more
about preparing for failure and being able to stand up a new instance quickly to keep the business moving.
“Today, no‑one should be proud of a hero server that has been up and running for 2,000 hours. Those days are gone. Now, it is about the ease of destroying and creating new virtual environments.”
For those who worry about using cloud, O’Donovan has a tip. “Everyone worries about going to the cloud. We addressed this by tiering our applications,” he says. The FT has tiered its apps and workloads into three categories – bronze, gold and platinum.
“We chuck all bronze workloads on to the cloud. This helps build confidence and helps the transition to the cloud,” says O’Donovan.
IT automation is key to this, he insists. The FT’s IT team runs automated scripts for application deployment using Puppet soft‑ware. “We don’t buy a product unless it has an API [application programming interface],” he says.
The cloud‑friendly strategy has helped the FT’s IT team improve its speed to market. “Our speed to market has improved from 99 days in 2011 to less than an hour today and that is adding real value to the business,” says O’Donovan. It has also made the team agile and allowed them to focus on more strategic ideas, such as DevOps.
“In general, our whole journey to the cloud has been around finding the right balance,” says O’Donovan. But he is not getting rid of the FT’s datacentre infrastructure. He’s keeping it lean but won’t get rid of it, so there is something to fall back to, in case there’s a “cloud Armageddon”, he says. n
› Price cuts and posturing in the public cloud war› How resilient is the public cloud?
› Dedicated network to public cloud a priority
INTERVIEW
“our speed to market has Improved from 99 days In 2011 to less than an hour today and that Is addIng real value to the busIness”
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 10
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
EDITOR’S COMMENT
Time for information security community to lead privacy debate
It doesn’t feel that long ago the information security community was bemoaning the lack of attention it received from the government, national press and
wider public. No danger of that now, is there?Data protection, privacy and surveillance are leading
front pages and parliamentary debates, particularly after recent high‑profile incidents such as the Sony Pictures hack and internet snooping by intelligence services.
The Paris terror attacks have brought widespread calls from politicians for greater powers to monitor our internet activities, countered by privacy campaigners pointing out the terrible irony of terrorism causing a reduction in our civil liberties as a result.
David Cameron’s naïve and careless call to outlaw “communication between people which we cannot read” has rightly led to criticism of what would be a technically unfeasible and highly dangerous attempt to ban encryption.
Nobody can argue targeted electronic surveillance is anything but a good thing for fighting crime and terrorism. But blanket recording of all communications on the basis the data is stored “just in case” is self‑evidently a step too far in a liberal democracy.
When the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was passed in 2000, many warned its loose language and broad powers could be misused. Politicians assured us no such thing would happen, relying on the common sense and altruism of the authorities. Some 15 years later, we have seen how the law has indeed been abused.
There is no easy solution, and none will be found in knee‑jerk reactions. Both politicians and the public need to understand the arguments and issues, and reach an informed consensus on how best to balance privacy and national security. That debate is not currently taking place, and more education and awareness is needed before it can be conducted sensibly and fruitfully.
This is the opportunity for the information security community. They are finally in the centre of the debate they have always called for. They need to lead, to educate and to listen – and most importantly, we and the UK authorities need to listen to them. n
Bryan GlickEditor in chief
Computer Weekly/ComputerWeekly.com1st Floor, 3-4a Little Portland Street,
London W1W 7JB
GENERAL ENQUIRIES
020 7186 1400
EDITORIAL
Editor in chief: Bryan Glick 020 7186 1424
Managing editor (technology): Cliff Saran 020 7186 1421
Head of premium content: Bill Goodwin 020 7186 1418
Services editor: Karl Flinders 020 7186 1423
Security editor: Warwick Ashford 020 7186 1419
Networking editor: Alex Scroxton020 7186 1413
Special projects editor: Kayleigh Bateman020 7186 1415
Storage editor: Antony Adshead07779 038528
Business applications editor: Brian McKenna 020 7186 1414
Business editor: Caroline Baldwin 020 7186 1425
Reporter: Clare McDonald 020 7186 1426
Production editor: Claire Cormack 020 7186 1417
Senior sub-editor: Jason Foster 020 7186 1420
Sub-editor: Ben Whisson020 7186 1478
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
Sales director: Brent Boswell 07584 311889
Group events manager: Tom Walker 0207 186 1430
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 11
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
their business are collecting and processing personal information.
Unfortunately, businesses are likely to have their hands tied to some extent in dealing with these risks. While they could consider a complete ban on wearable technology, this is likely to be unpopular and difficult to enforce in practice. It would also result in missing out on the benefits of wearable tech.
Therefore, the best solution is for UK busi‑nesses to ensure they have a clear strategy in relation to the use of wearable technology. This will require an assessment of the indi‑vidual risks posed to the business and will require involvement from a number of teams, including management, HR, legal and IT.
Employment contractsContracts of employment should also be updated to ensure protection of confidential information and intellectual property. Con‑siderations about working time will also be required as wearable technology will enable staff to check emails more easily and fre‑quently. This could result in them working in excess of the 48‑hour working week limit.
It does appear wearable technology is here to stay and the use of it will no doubt become second nature to individuals. However, to reap the benefits businesses should assess the individual risks to their organisation and take action now while wear‑able tech is still on the rise, to minimise a fall‑out later on. n
OPINION
As it becomes increasingly inevitable wearable technology will be used more often in the workplace, Sarah Burke considers the legal implications for UK businesses
The legal issues facing businesses in the UK around wearable technology
W earable technology will be used more frequently in the workplace and its use will bring a number of
advantages to UK businesses. For instance, Goldsmiths, University of London reported findings that wearable technologies boost employee productivity by up to 8.5%.
However, UK businesses are also likely to have concerns about the challenges they may face by allowing staff to use wearable technology at work. They will need to assess their legal obligations, as well as the practical considerations of wearables being used in the workplace.
One concern is individuals are likely to find it easier to record information on a wearable device without being detected. Businesses face the risk of individuals recording confi‑dential information about affairs of the busi‑ness or intellectual property relatively easily. Subsequently, the business loses control over what happens to that information.
Even if individuals have consent to store such information on their wearable devices, it may end up in the wrong hands if the individ‑ual fails to adequately protect such informa‑tion with suitably robust security measures.
Privacy considerationsUK businesses will also need to consider pri‑vacy issues. Companies embracing the use of wearable technology – to enhance customer service, for instance – are likely to reap the rewards. However, such action is likely to result in the collation of personal data which will need to be handled carefully.
Unsurprisingly, the Information Commis‑sioner’s Office has reminded people the use of wearable technology is subject to the Data Protection Act and other applicable laws. However, it will inevitably be difficult for UK businesses to comply with their legal obliga‑tions when they aren’t aware individuals in
Wearable technology
creates new privacy issues
Can wearable
technology fit the enterprise
agenda?
Sarah Burke is a solicitor at law firm Thomas Eggar.
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 12
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
BUYER’S GUIDE
The software‑defined datacentre (SDDC) is an evolv‑ing architectural and operational philosophy, not a product you can buy with a demonstrated return on investment (ROI). The SDDC vision is built on three
fundamental architectural pillars: virtualisation at all layers; orchestration and automation; modular standards‑based infrastructure.
Traditional infrastructure provisioning and management methods are not enough to sup‑port the frequent changes required for massive and dynamic systems of engagement. SDDC architectures hold the promise of simplification and the benefit of hiding the complexities of infrastructure provisioning and management.
The SDDC software layer provides visibility into the physical and virtual resources and implements a spectrum of infrastructure management, from streamlined operator‑mediated interventions through automated policy‑driven provisioning and adaptation based on the demand patterns of the underlying infrastructure – for example, servers, storage, network, power and cooling.
Start with early building blocksToday’s technology infrastructure management practices are over‑complicated, posing a bigger barrier than the technology itself. IT managers should not wait for a “big bang” approach to simplify this complexity. Significant value can be gained from the interim offer‑ings and practices can then evolve along with technology innovations.
To prepare for the adoption of SDDC, enterprises must understand their requirements for physical and virtual resources.
Software-defined datacentres a work in progressThe SDDC is a concept in its infancy and, as such, IT managers would be wise to adopt interim offerings and build on them as the technology advances, writes Richard Fichera
BUYER’S GUIDEsoftware-defined everything part 2 of 3
OKSA
NA
KUZM
INA
/FOTO
LIA
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 13
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
BUYER’S GUIDE
In various discussions with technology suppliers and their customers, dialogue regarding SDDC starts and ends with their capabilities around orchestration tools and virtualisation. Though virtualisation is an important foundation for software‑defined environments, a true SDDC environment should also be able to detect even the bare metal servers, storage and network devices and converged infrastructure environments, as well as inte‑grate the workload orchestration and look at the power and cooling situation in the datacentres.
The reality of today’s market is that no product suites include all of the required SDDC attributes, but busi‑nesses should at least be aware of where their require‑ments do not match supplier offerings.
As a first step towards the SDDC journey, IT manag‑ers should identify the applications and environments that will need on‑demand provisioning and dynamic scale‑up and scale‑down capabilities. If deploying new workloads and provisioning resources on demand is a strong business case, they can work with suppliers such as Cisco, EMC, HP, VMware and others to implement SDDC in the enterprise environment.
In a Computer Weekly article, Forrester analyst Andre Kindness wrote that software‑defined network (SDN) products and concepts will need five years to mature enough for enterprises to use them in production. There is a lot of work to be done to tie the components together and fit them into other management systems, orchestration software, hypervisor management solu‑tions and Layer 4 to Layer 7 services.
Software‑defined offerings for compute and storage are more mature than for networks. Software‑defined storage is an important element of the SDDC picture, with new entrants such as Maxta, Nexenta, Atlantis Computing, Sanbolic, and offerings from established players such as VMware’s VSAN and EMC’s ViPR redefining how storage is provisioned and accessed. Additionally, new hyperconverged entrants such as Nutanix and SimpliVity are redefining expectations for scalable integrated infrastructure and software stacks.
Explore new ways of provisioning IT architectureCompanies are starting to use private and public cloud for their mainstream applications, with business line metering and billing becoming more common. With such economic con‑trols, IT managers will need to release unused resources almost instantaneously.
This adds to the complexities already engendered by the provisioning of new resources. SDDC is not the same as cloud computing, but it is a necessary foundation of any cloud service. As such, SDDC technology will increasingly focus on the automation of the complete lifecycle of cloud procurement.
Also, in the hybrid environment, management complexity has increased to the point where it is simply not humanly possible to follow traditional technology management practices for the underlying infrastructure. To manage complexity, you must have an abstraction layer in which software takes control of orchestration, with minimum manual intervention.
IT managers should identify the applications and services that are supporting customer‑centric innovation (system of engagement), applications that need to be replicated and copied to test environments frequently, and the application and service containers that need to be redeployed quickly (new instances) for new business units.
as a fIrst step on the sddc journey, It managers should IdentIfy the applIcatIons and envIronments that wIll need on-demand provIsIonIng and dynamIc scale-up and scale-down capabIlItIes
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 14
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
BUYER’S GUIDE
These applications will be the most suitable candidates for testing SDDC for the enterprise. Cloud service providers and colocation providers should explore SDDC technology to reduce the infrastructure provisioning time when taking on new customers and for scaling capacity.
There is a need to build hybrid cloud orchestration capabilities to handle the tsunami of data that will be generated by digital business, the internet of things and big data. It is a good idea for CIOs to press suppliers to deliver automation driven by simpler policies, making them do the hard work for you and hiding the complexity that is inherent in all SDDC‑capable automation tools. Automation that requires heavy human involvement is contradictory to the very principles of automation.
Team up for application development The real benefit of SDDC will come when application developers can relate the application performance to infrastructure components and dynamically provision new infrastructure components where there is a performance bottleneck.
For example, if there is high network utilisation in one datacentre, can the application provi‑sion a clone of the application in another datacentre and add the new node dynamically in the load balancer?
An accompanying transition for most organisations will be the move to a DevOps (devel‑opment and operations) style of deployment, as application lifecycles and time between releases compresses. DevOps is normally attributed to application software, but the same principles and techniques also apply to system software, the heart of SDDC.
IT managers should unify their organisation’s full service development by combining infra‑structure engineering and application development into a consolidated design process. SDDC is not about buying a piece of software or hardware – you will need architects and developers who understand how to harness application programming interface (API) based technology infrastructure orchestration. To harness the real benefits of an SDDC, IT leaders will need to empower their application developers and let them consume datacentre resources without compromising on the security, compliance and resiliency aspects of infrastructure.
Datacentre management within SDDC It will be important to correlate the IT workload with the physical asset management layer. SDDC is not just about a policy‑based approach for compute, storage and networks. IT managers should include feeds from datacentre infrastructure management (DCIM) to optimise the use of physical resources and govern workload movements on the load pat‑terns across all of the relevant resources, including power and cooling. It is important that they incorporate this broader perspective as loads span across server rooms, datacentres and geography itself. If SDDC does not address the physical infrastructure component of the datacentres, it will fall short of reaping the true potential of SDDC.
Anyone operating a datacentre of more than approximately 250kW will probably ben‑efit from a unified solution for physical infrastructure, such as power, cooling and asset management. This needs to be integrated with the management of virtual resources to assist in workload orchestration for dynamic services, includ‑ing any hybrid cloud environments. Integration between DCIM supplier solutions and management products for the
software‑defined assets is still a work in progress, but all major DCIM suppliers are making investments in integration with leading virtualisation management platforms. Horizon capa‑bilities include automated power‑down and power‑up of physical infrastructure in response to workload requirements and automation policy requirements. n
This is an extract from the Forrester research report: “The software-defined datacenter is still a work in progress – Tools and technology: The infrastructure transformation playbook” (August, 2014), by Richard Fichera. Fichera is a vice-president and
principal analyst at Forrester Research and serves the information needs of infrastructure and operations leaders.
› SDDC means agile, not bulletproof› SDDC benefits unclear to UK cloud players
› What does ‘software defined’ actually mean?
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 15
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY
If the previous decade belonged to the web, the current decade is all about mobil‑ity. The explosion of consumer devices, combined with the acceptance of the bring‑your‑own‑device (BYOD) trend in enterprises, is driving unprecedented growth in the use of mobile devices.
Developers are under pressure to deliver applications that run across a variety of devices, form factors, operating systems, frameworks and runtimes.
Hobbyist developers who are good at building mobile applications can monetise their skills by publishing apps in marketplaces such as Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Meanwhile, enterprise application developers are forced to enable existing line‑of‑business applications for mobile platforms.
This phenomenon is making an impact on every player in the ecosystem – including hard‑ware manufacturers, platform suppliers and system integrators.
Mobile application development is fundamentally different from traditional desktop or web applications. Mobile applications are designed to exploit processing power and native capa‑bilities of mobile devices, such as GPS for geopositioning and near‑field communication. This demands a unique design, where the application’s execution is split between the local device and a centralised server stack.
Building blocks in the back endEvery mobile application has a user experience layer that runs in the device and a back‑end infrastructure that hosts the logic and database layers. Most mobile applications depend on key building‑block services such as user management, data management, push notifications and social media integration.
These building‑block services can be hosted on a centralised server stack and exposed as a service. This hosted mobile middleware is called mobile back‑end as a service (MBaaS).
MBaaS empowers mobile developers by completely abstracting the server‑side infrastruc‑ture. Developers can assemble the required building blocks and just write the code that
Build an app store into
your corporate mobility strategy
How the development of standards will
affect the IoT
The state of mobile back-end
as a service
Mobile application services are increasingly being hosted on central
back-end servers – but what does that mean for the enterprise?
Janakiram MSV reportsTHINKSTOCK
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 16
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY
connects them. This lets them focus on delivering rich user experiences instead of dealing with mundane back‑end infrastructure.
Initially, MBaaS was all about offering common mobile building‑block services. But with the increase in enterprise adoption, the market is split between consumer MBaaS and enterprise MBaaS. Parse, one of the first MBaaS companies, was bought by Facebook for $85m. This was followed by PayPal buying StackMob for an undisclosed amount. With Facebook throw‑ing its weight behind consumer MBaaS, other players – such as AnyPresence, FeedHenry and Kinvey – quickly moved towards enterprise customers. Based on the current trend, the MBaaS market can be classified into four areas.
Pure-play MBaaS playersPure‑play MBaaS companies are startups less than three years old. These companies sensed an opportunity to create a dedicated mobile platform in the cloud and deliver it through self‑service, pay‑as‑you‑go subscription. They modelled their business around proven infrastruc‑ture‑as‑a‑service (IaaS) and platform‑as‑a‑service (PaaS) delivery mechanisms.
Some of the pure‑play MBaaS players are:n AnyPresence – started as an enterprise MBaaS company with emphasis on collaboration
and integration. It goes beyond MBaaS by offering a set of tools for designing, developing and deploying mobile applications;
n FeedHenry – started as a mobile PaaS before the evolution of MBaaS. The back end is based on Node.js, which supports a variety of plugins for integrating with third‑party data sources and applications. In September 2014, Red Hat bought FeedHenry to integrate it with its OpenShift PaaS;
n Kinvey – one of the mature MBaaS platforms with a focus on enterprise. It has an impres‑sive feature set and native libraries for popular platforms. Kinvey’s DataLink and AuthLink make it easy to connect with mainstream databases and identity providers;
n Parse – started with the vision of Heroku for mobile, aiming to becoming the default MBaaS platform. In 2013, Facebook acquired Parse for a whopping $85m. With a comprehensive feature set which covers the key mobile capabilities to custom hosting and analytics, Parse is the de facto MBaaS stack for developing consumer mobile applications.
MADP companiesMobile application development platform (MADP) offers end‑to‑end mobile application development capabilities. It comes with an integrated development environment (IDE), device emulators, frameworks, libraries, third‑party connectors and runtime to host mobile applications. The MADP stack has a mobile back end hardwired into the stack. Realising the advantages of MBaaS, MADP companies are now decoupling the middleware to expose it as an independent MBaaS layer.
Some of the companies in this segment are:n Appcelerator – has Titanium IDE and a cloud back end. Developers can use it as a single
stack or consume only the MBaaS layer.n Kony – a traditional mobile enterprise application platform that is transforming into an
MBaaS player. MobileFabric is an enterprise mobile back‑end service from Kony;n Verivo – launched a platform called Akula, which is a mobile back end hosted either in the
cloud or on‑premise;n Pegasystems – bought Antenna Software in 2013 to add mobile capabilities. Pega AMP, the
the unified application mobility platform, offers end‑to‑end mobile development capabili‑ties including MBaaS;
n IBM – entered the mobile application development market through Worklight and BlueMix. Worklight is the development environment while BlueMix is the Cloud Foundry PaaS. Though IBM is yet to tightly integrate both, it is in a good position to offer MBaaS;
n SAP – its mobile platform, called SMP, is integrated with SAP Hana, which can be deployed in the cloud or on‑premise. Integration with OData and OSGI makes it a strong contender.
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 17
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY
PaaS providersTraditional PaaS providers are adding a mobile‑friendly application programming interface (API) façade to attract mobile developers.
Some of the players in this market are:n Amazon – AWS Cognito is Amazon’s official MBaaS platform. Although it has a limited
feature set, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to bring additional capabilities;n Google – acquired FireBase to augment its existing offerings in the form of Cloud
Endpoints and App Engine. This will help the company in cross‑selling its cloud service to Android developers;
n Microsoft – Azure Mobile Services is a mature MBaaS in the cloud. Microsoft added sup‑port for non‑Windows platforms to attract iOS and Android developers;
n Salesforce – the company is consolidating Force.com and Heroku to offer end‑to‑end mobile services. The company’s Lightning platform will strengthen the position of Salesforce in the mobile market;
n Red Hat – when OpenShift and FeedHenry are integrated, Red Hat will become a dominant force in the MBaaS market;
n Pivotal – recently added mobile services to its Cloud Foundry PaaS, marking the official entry into the mobile back‑end market.
API enablersAs enterprises start to expose and consume APIs, managing them becomes critical. API management companies provide API virtualisation, governance, metering and billing.
These companies are logically positioned to exploit the MBaaS opportunity:n Apigee – one of the first API management companies with an MBaaS offering that came via
UserGrid acquisition;n CA – acquired Layer7 to offer CA Mobile API Gateway. Though it lacks some of the key
building‑block services, the platform is preferred for its enterprise features;n Intel – with the acquisitions of Mashery and Aepona, Intel has become the mobile mid‑
dleware API company. Enterprises developing and deploying on‑premise mobile applications prefer Intel for its compre‑hensive API management support.
The MBaaS market is one of the fastest growing of the cloud services delivery models. In terms of the number of players operating in the market, it surpasses the PaaS market.
Seeing the opportunity in this space, everyone from traditional platform companies to IaaS providers to PaaS suppliers to early‑stage startups is jumping on the bandwagon.
In the future, the trend for wearable mobile technology and the internet of things will drive MBaaS to support new use cases and scenarios. n
Janakiram MSV is a Gigaom Research analyst and the principal analyst at Janakiram & Associates.
› The pros and cons of iPads in the enterprise› Enterprise mobility is now all about applications
› More devices mean more enterprise challenges
The trend for wearable mobile technology will drive
MBaaS to support new use cases and scenarios
THINKSTOCK
computerweekly.com 20-26 January 2015 18
HOME
NEWS
ORACLE WARNED OVER LICENSING
PRACTICES
MULTI-CHANNELINNOVATION AT
HOUSE OF FRASER
THE FT’S QUEST FOR SUCCESS IN
THE PUBLIC CLOUD
EDITOR’S COMMENT
OPINION
BUYER’S GUIDE TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED
EVERYTHING
THE STATE OF MOBILE BACK-END
AS A SERVICE
DOWNTIME
DOWNTIME
be a solution to extend both their bat‑tery and their own life. For fitness fanat‑ics the breakthrough promises a life of never having to charge your phone again, instead using your daily run to boost battery power for the day – although you may need a new way to strap your phone, tablet, laptop and every other device to your body while you run.
Of course, committed tech obsessives rooted to the couch may also come to the conclusion that all they need is to sit on a big cushion so their feet don’t touch the floor, and swing their feet up and down while surfing to get the same effect. But every health revolution has to start somewhere. n
The get-fit solution for tech obsessivesResearchers in Germany claim to have found a way to generate electrical power from walking. Coming in the same week as news that a lack of exercise is a big‑ger threat to public health than obesity, the crack German boffins might just have extended the lives of millions of obsessive smartphone and gaming users.
The researchers have developed two devices that fit into a shoe, according to the BBC. One, called a “shock harvester”, generates power from the shoe striking the ground. The other, the “swing harvester”, does so from the swinging of the user’s feet.
For smartphone users forever moaning about fast‑draining batteries, this could
BIG WEE DATA
Hammersmith Hospital has just begun a molecular analysis programme, which will take a close look at what makes up urine.
Apparently, the machine doing the analysis produces as much data per day as the Large Hadron Collider.
Jim in QA has volunteered to provide a sample. Sadly for Jim, with the whole of Downtime watching, getting enough data was harder than the search for the Higgs Boson particle at CERN. What a drip.
Read more on the
Downtime blog
DEN
BOM
A/I
STO
CK
/TH
INKS
TOC
K
