Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.

With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.

That’s good news for SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, but it’s bad news for CIOs all around the world - and (in the long run) worse news for proprietary software developers. Why worry about falling over a hole in your Windows Server 2008 licence if all you really need is a set of virtualised Linux boxen running Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl. Fractional licensing is water off a duck’s back to open source and free software.

So what do proprietary software vendors need to do? First and foremost they need to realise that the landscape has radically shifted. Microsoft made one step in the right direction when it realised that cores didn’t equal CPUs and switched its licence model to handle the change in server architectures. It was quickly followed by much of the industry. Now the industry as a whole needs to accept that a server is an ephemeral construct which is tied to a purpose not to a specific piece of hardware, and businesses will need to be licensed either for a maximum number of live instances or for a total number of licenses over a set amount of time.

Why should a company by three server licences if it’s actually only going to have two live at any one time? Two licences should be sufficient. Of course there’s also the issue of disaster recovery, but those purchased licenses should also be able to handle snapshot images of the virtualised servers that are ready to be put into play at a moment’s notice.

At VMworld, back in February, BT’s Stefan van Overtveldt said that vendors weren’t ready for virtualisation licensing. As he said, “On a generic level what I would say is as I come from a software background myself I understand that it’s very hard for software vendors to look at different types of commercial agreements because tracking usage is harder than tracking physical copies”. It’s a perennial problem that goes back to the days of the mainframe - and one that vendors are unlikely to approach with much enthusiasm, especially as most businesses are actually over-licensed.

Any shift to fractional licensing will be likely to result in lower revenues (at least in the first instance), but even so, van Overtveldt is optimistic, and expects vendors to come up with appropriate tools and licenses, “The industry hasn’t come up with standards that say if you transmit this kind of data in this format we will track it and reduce your licensing costs automatically when you get below a certain level of usage. But I believe something will come.”

Let’s hope he’s right.

–Simon

But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.

Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.

O2 will finally have a business tariff for the 3G iPhone, including a single bill for multiple handsets. And if you only want Exchange ActiveSync. O2 will be able to set that up for enterprises directly rather than making you put iTunes on each user’s desk to do it. You’ll be able to install apps you write for your own business without iTunes as well, according to Alder, but if you want to buy apps for the iPhone they’ll still have to come from the iTunes store - and you’ll still have to install them to each phone individually, through iTunes.

That’s going to hold back acceptance of the iPhone in the enterprise, which is used to the security and manageability of the BlackBerry. Even Microsoft has got the message, using industry standard OMA DM to control Windows Mobile 6.1 devices with the new System Center Mobile Device Manager using Active Directory. If you want to, you can force files on Windows Mobile handsets to be encrypted, block any application from Facebook clients to pre-installed games or stop users synching POP3 and IMAP email at all, as well as installing and updating apps automatically over the air to specific users or particular AD groups. And the VPN on Windows Mobile now uses IPsec and IKE (Internet Key Exchange) v2 rather than SSL for improved security and better management of mobile connectivity. Apple is picking IPsec too - but Cisco’s proprietary implementation of it.

O2 probably didn’t get the choice about getting involved in installing apps on iPhones; Apple is taking a  generous 30% royalty and doesn’t want to share that with operators now that it has to subsidize the cost of the phone. O2 plans to produce some apps of its own, which fits in with chief operating officer Julio Linares’ view that the future is services - the usual mobile operator to becoming just an Internet pipe. Even iPhone cynics like me have to be impressed by the usability; 80% of O2 iPhone users are actually using email, Web browsing and the other tools that make it a smartphone.
-Mary
 

(or “The return of the co-processor”)

The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.

Those days are on their way back.

Last week Toshiba announced a new range of consumer notebook PCs. Like many of Toshiba’s systems they’re designed to be media players, and in a side swipe at BluRay, they now come with an upscaling DVD drive. That’s where the coprocessor magic comes in, as Toshiba is using a derivative of the same Cell processor in Sony’s PS3 to drive its imaging software. A quad core version of the Cell sits alongside a dual core intel processor, and it’s used to handle a range of processor intensive tasks - acting as a feed to the GPU that drives the screen. Not only does it upscale DVD streams (very impressively) it also can be used to handle file transcoding (so your movies end up on your iPhone that much quicker), and also works well as a way of quickly indexing images and video.

Focused on video, Toshiba’s co-processor is also taking advantage of bundled web cams for a limited form of gesture control. Stopping a film by holding up a hand is effective, as is using a clenched fist as an in air mouse. Bill Gates’ departure reaffirmed his belief in alternative user infterfaces, and this is one approach to delivering those new ways of working.

Co-processors aren’t just for flashy graphics. Back in the 1990s I was writing mathematical simulation software, and at one point I had some electro-thermal models running on one of the MOD’s Crays. It wasn’t just any old Cray - it also had a co-processor in the shape of an additional vector processing unit. That vector co-processor made short shrift of my arrays of partial differential equations. Its direct descendent is a lot closer than an MOD research facility.

In fact, if you’ve got an NVIDIA graphics card it’s right in your PC’s GPU.

Back in January we wrote about Tesla and CUDA, and NVIDIA updated us on the next generation of the Tesla hardware earlier this week. The new G10 Tesla systems are looking very impressive, and the CUDA parallel programming language extensions are now able to work with standard multicore PCs as well as NVIDIA’s GPUs.

Memory is important when you’re using co-processors, and you need a lot if you’re signal-processing seismic data. Tesla will now support 4GB of directly attached memory per GPU, so a quad-GPU system can work with 16GB of data at a time. The numbers look good - and using Folding at Home a single Tesla 10 comes in at more than 40 times faster than a standard CPU, and more than 6 times faster than a PS3. Other demonstrations showed significant savings in space and in cost - one finance house has reduced its annual costs 9 times, replacing a 600 CPU options valuation system with a handful of front-end CPUs and 12 Tesla GPUs.

Of course with Snow Leopard around the corner, one of the obvious questions was about Apple’s support for OpenCL. It turns out that CUDA is best thought of as a personality layer on top of NVIDIA’s parallel thread execution (PTX) hardware, and it produces device-specific assembly code. There’s no reason why other GPU programming environments can’t produce the same PTX code - but CUDA will remain NVIDIA’s own route to the GPU as a processing tool, and it will be adding support for additional languages beyond C and C++ with Fortran just around the corner.

The future of the co-processor seems assured, for now at least. It’s time for software companies to start taking notice and to deliver on the promise of additional power beyond the CPU.

–Simon

For years, I’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.

Silverlight is a lot of things, from Microsoft’s answer to Flash to Microsoft’s answer to Web based applications. Leave aside the video plugin side of it; the fact that Silverlight 2 (beta 2 due at the end of this week) runs .NET and programs written in dynamic languages on Mac and Linux as well as Windows is the most interesting part. And it’s not just for consumer Web apps; Facebook and Hotmail users aren’t happy with line of business apps in dreary basic grey when they get to work, and Silverlight is an easy way to spruce those up without slaving over a hot CSS schema for hours.

Adobe’s Air tackles much the same problem; how do you make powerful applications for the Web that work online and off, that look good and that work without installing anything (once you have the initial plugin or runtime). Air builds on Flex, so if you’re already writing Flash, you’ve got a head start. But there are a lot more .NET developers writing business apps, so although Microsoft demos consumer apps like the Crossfader social video sharing tool it talked about today, most Silverlight apps might show up at work, using Workflow Foundation and making data from SQL Server look good.

Silverlight is a subset of .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation, so developers are using familiar skills and Visual Studio plus Expression Blend for designers, who get to work on the live project, not in Photoshop mockups.  The visual development tools also appeal to disenfranchised Visual Basic developers who’ve been wondering what Microsoft has done for them lately….  Microsoft VP Soma Somasegar said Crossfader is being built by six developers and two designers in three months, which is more like Internet time than standard Microsoft time scales.

If Silverlight’s so good, why would anyone be creating Windows applications at all? Bill Gates finished his Q&A trying to balance that question. “Yes, you’ll be able to do amazing things in Silverlight, but there will always be things that you can do in Windows Presentation Framework that you can’t do in Silverlight. Why is that so? Well, it’s so because with WPF we get to assume we have the full power of the PC; we’re not just running in a browser environment. So, take things like 3D type things, virtual world type things, take things like ink recognition or playing video back at arbitrary speeds. WPF will, because it can connect in to all of Windows, expose those services and let people do new things.

“We need to keep the Silverlight download to be fairly modest. So, if you think of what that will be versus the entire Windows environment, we have a much bigger runtime to call on. So, we’re not saying that those get absolutely merged, but we will have exactly the right relationship. And even as you’re in Visual Studio or in the Expression tools, you’ll be able to say I want to author for the Silverlight piece and to let you know that if you’re sticking to the things that work in that world.

“Silverlight will probably have almost everything WPF has today, but WPF will keep getting richer and richer as we go forward.”

That’s the Microsoft dream and it’s one direction things could go. Google is pushing in completely the other direction. Last week at Google IO, Chris Prince and Aaron Boodman (better known as the designer of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension) were explaining why they don’t want you to think of Gears as taking Google applications offline. Yes it does that, but actually Google wants it to give Web apps to have access to all the capabilities of your PC the way desktop apps do. Why shouldn’t the browser get the power of your 2GHz processor and your 300GB hard drive? Why shouldn’t they be able to send you notifications in another window or show a progress bar? Why can’t you access USB drives from inside Gears or use a GPS to tell the Web app where you are?

Google filed its name off Gears so that it has more chance of becoming a standard, either as part of HTML 5 or by becoming ubiquitous as a plugin in its own right. Personally, I’m not going to be installing it on any machine I use.

It’s not just because it has no way to limit the amount of disk space it’s going to take for its local database (used by MySpace to give you search across the whole site without having to take up space on their data centre for those pesky index files). It’s only partly because it’s going to be able to use your GPS or other tools to get your location and there is currently nothing to warn the user and no options for choosing if and when Gears can get your location. Google seems committed to harmonizing with whatever standards HTML 5 includes for the things that Gears does, and I’m not the one who will have to detail with duplicate APIs from Gears and HTML 5 to do the same thing – that’s a problem for Web developers to juggle. And the fact that Web sites like YouSendIt already have real progress bars without needing me to download a plugin is a quibble rather than a complaint.

Mainly, I won’t use it at this point because of how Chris Prince explains why he thinks Web apps are so good in the first place. “Everything in the browser is inherently safe,” he said at Google IO. “There is no cost to install a Web app, you’re not afraid to click a link, and you can navigate away with no fear it will take over your machine.” Compared to the near-paranoia that’s is Microsoft’s attitude to the Web, from the phishing filter to the way IE doesn’t get the same privileges as a desktop app to the security-first attitude that permeates the company, calling the browser ‘inherently safe’ seems a little laissez faire to me.

Adding binary data files to JavaScript will certainly make for more powerful apps. Some of them might be Trojans; if Gears gets everything Google talked about that would be able to scrape files off a USB stick, record you talking with the audio APIs, add in your physical location and do whatever you can think of with it all, good or bad. If I’m not too busy playing with whatever features the Web app disguising the Trojan has I can navigate away from it – but if it’s using Gears to run offline, has it gone away?

The browser sandbox limits the features on my system that Web apps have access to. That’s a pain when you want to build a better app in the browser – but it’s a security measure if you want to build a better way of attacking my system. I asked Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer dev team if I was being paranoid – he was the one who’d raised the issue about privacy with the GPS location in Gears at the end of the session. Maybe, he suggested - but with the number of security issues it raises, Gears isn’t going to be installed by default with IE any time soon…
-Mary

Do you speak fluent geek? Or would you rather your computer learned to speak your language? To those of us who’ve done a little programming, a regular expression is pretty clear. But when I’m reminding myself to call an airline or make a payment on my credit card, I think in comfortable phrases with fuzzy edges; Monday morning, any time before the banks close on Thursday. When it comes to doing the accounts, I’m more likely to think ‘last January’ than January 2007. When Windows XP said ‘My Documents’ it sounded like a toddler in a tantrum; when Outlook says Last Week, Last Month or A Long Time Ago, it sounds halfway human. A halfway human teenager, to whom everything more than four weeks old is ancient, but that’s more comfortable than inhuman precision.

Fuzzy human thinking is hard for computers, because sometimes the rules are hard to learn (when do banks close? When does my particular bank close? Is next Thursday tomorrow or in a week’s time if it’s 11.55 on Wednesday?). For other things they’re impossible to learn because we don’t know what they are. How do you tell the difference between a photo of a cat and a cartoon of a dog? You just know which is which, and you know instantly - but you can’t describe how you know well enough to teach the rules to a computer.

Jeff Hawkins, who once founded Palm, has been working on the neuroscience of what humans can do to turn it into something you could teach a computer. The neocortex of the brain, where this recognition happens, unfolds to about the size of a dinner napkin; ‘my dinner napkin is talking, your napkin is listening,’ as he puts it. And in the neo-cortex, recognition patterns are distributed hierarchically and in sequences. We learn spatial patterns and the sequences things happen in, which Hawkins calls hierarchal temporal memory. The brain is predicting what’s likely to happen next and confirming what you’re seeing, hearing and feeling by passing signals up and down the hierarchy. Hawkins’s company Numenta has software for working with hierarchal temporal memory; car manufacturers are using it to try and understand traffic, governments are more interested in identifying who is speaking on a particular phone call.

Even though Hawkins thinks HTMs in silicon can be millions of times faster than the rather slow neurons in your head, it’s going to be a while before computers really understand what we say. In the mean time, there are a few systems that can fake it quite well. Tripit is a travel service that knows the format of the confirmation messages you get from airlines, hotels and car hire companies; forward all the confirmations for your next trip and it will extract the information and combine it into an itinerary, along with weather reports and suggestions for local restaurants and activities. Instead of having to print out a sheaf of papers to carry with you, you can get the details you need in a single email on your phone.

Tripit doesn’t understand everything; the company needs to work out the format for every hotel chain individually and they haven’t started on conference registrations yet. ReQall aims to understand free speech, as long as you use the right keywords – like ‘remind me’ or ‘ask Simon’. You can email, text, IM or phone ReQall and use standard English – “remind me to call Virgin Atlantic at noon on Monday”- and come Monday you get a reminder by email, IM, phone or SMS as you prefer. It’s natural, it works the way people work and it understands at least half of the things you want it to understand.

It’s like asking a friend to remind you of something, but always having them remember to do it. In fact, sign a friend up, and as long as they agree,you can have them sent reminders too. Think of it as outsourced nagging…

-Mary

There’s a proliferation of online document editing services. At Web 2.0 Expo every man (and his dog) seemed to be demonstrating another cloud-based document service. Now Google’s applications have been bundled with Salesforce.com’s online business services. Are desktop applications doomed?

From where I’m standing the answer has to be no.

Microsoft’s Office file formats were often described as how it locked customers into a never-ending cycle of upgrades. New version, new file format. That changed with the arrival of tools that decoded Microsoft’s files and provided compatibility. Open Office and the like had effective file converters that meant you weren’t locked in, and Microsoft’s new XML formats mean you can get at your text no matter what…

Online the story’s different. Create a document in Google Docs and it goes straight into their database. Yes you can save it locally, but that’s not the point of cloud services - you want to be able to get at that file wherever you are. So it stays on Google’s hard drives with no SLA, and no guarantee that you’ll be able to get your files if the service is ever withdrawn - and no idea if you’ll even get notice of a service’s imminent demise. It’s the same for Zoho or for Buzzword or any of a myriad other services. The cloud may be big, but there isn’t enough market out there (especially at $5 a month a user) for all the services to survive. When one goes down, and one will, sooner than later, how will you get your documents?

It’s the ultimate lock in, far worse than anything Office ever did. Unless, of course, you explicitly remember to save documents locally (and it’s not surprising that you have to click an export button to do just that). The convenience of online access to files isn’t enough to give up the freedom to store files where and how you want.

That’s enough to make me stay away. Things get even worse when you actually try to use them for what they’re apparently best at: collaboration.

If two people are trying to work together on a document, it’s good to be able to share edits and to quickly change focus. Try to use Google Docs, and things get a little tricky. Is the current section of the document locked or not? It’s impossible to tell - and if it is, it’s also hard to find out when the lock times out. The locks vary from application to application, and vendor to vendor. It’s not difficult to lock on a per word or per cell basis, and Excel has been offering per cell locking for network collaboration since the mid 1990s. Flickr developer Kellan Elliot-Mcrea put it last week, talking about online tools, “Good model for lightweight collaboration. It’s great up to a point - for most people that point is when you leave your office.”

Then there’s the time warp effect, when you’re taken back to the heady days of Word 6.1 and suddenly all the functions you’ve come to rely on suddenly vanish.

It’s time to make a stand. If you want me to use your online applications then let me have easy access to local copies, give me an effective collaboration platform, and throw in a decade or so’s worth of UI and functional improvements. Until then I’ll stick with Office and I’ll just move my files around with Live Mesh or .Mac or whatever synchronisation tool works best for me.

–Simon

Steve Ballmer was kidding around with former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki at the MIX 08 conference here in Las Vegas, but there was an edge to a lot of the banter. Kawasaki had a MacBook Air hidden amongst his papers and he flourished it, asking if Ballmer wouldn’t like a machine that light and thin. Ballmer hefted the machine and bellowed that his notebook was lighter and a real machine to boot, complete with an Ethernet port. “That thing is missing half the features of a PC. Where is your DVD drive, let me look for that. I’ll have a bake-off with my Tosh versus that thing backstage…”

It’s halfway between good theatre and Ballmer’s enthusiasm, but there’s always a shrewd side to it. When one attendee persuaded him to stand up and do the “Web developers, Web developers, Web developers…” dance, Ballmer followed it up by saying if it was a bet, he wanted half the winnings. And there’s more to his PC than the weight.

If it’s ligher than a MacBook Air and it has a DVD drive, Ballmer’s machine must be the Toshiba Portégé R500, a notebook that’s so light I’ve seen it hanging from a helium balloon. The publicity might cheer Toshiba up after the HD DVD debacle, but it’s also a good way to look at what Silverlight and IE 8 really mean to Microsoft.

Today, most users need a DVD drive - for installing software or watching films on a long flight. In five years time, Ballmer said, “it may not make a bit of difference”. In five years, online applications and services may take over from desktop apps as well (although ubiquitous connectivity is years away - the only decent 3G speed we’ve ever had was in San Diego, home of Qualcomm, whereas travelling in Arizona you can’t get voice let alone data, because Cellular One has no international roaming agreements).

If they do, Microsoft will be ready because Silverlight is designed for applications: Silverlight 1 is video, Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform development platform that you can write for in a range of languages. AOL’s Silverlight mail app will look the same everywhere and be the same code everywhere. Even though it runs on a Mac or a Linux box (with Novell’s Moonlight plug-in), it’s not leaving behind the Windows heritage because Silverlight is a substantial proportion of the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Silverlight runs in the browser, WPF apps run on the desktop (and because Moonlight is based on the .NET clone Mono, WPF apps could come out of the browser on Linux but not on the Mac). Aston Martin showed a Silverlight app in Ray Ozzie’s keynote that lets you look at a car in great detail and pick the colours and finishes that you like, then make an appointment with a dealer; they showed the companion WPF app for the dealer to show you that custom car in true 3D, on a large screen controlled by a UMPC (the 3D model isn’t running on the UMPC, it’s on a high-end gaming PC with an NVIDIA card that the Aston team bought at the local PC shop in Vegas).

Same APIs, same programming model, same graphic files, same controls, same XAML markup. Cirque du Soleil’s recruitment app runs on tablet PCs today and they copy files by hand to review in an intranet application; they showed a prototype of a WPF app to use on the road for assessing performer auditions and a Silverlight intranet app that the Mac users in the office can use to review the auditions that are automatically synchronized.

Internet Explorer 8 gets synchronization too, with local storage for Web sites; so if you’re halfway through a document and you have to leave the office and get on a plane, the Web app you’re writing it in can switch to offline mode and let you save the file. To start with this will be like a big cookie in a simple text file, but the IE team plans to implement a local database for future versions, which will let developers write more powerful Web apps that work offline and on. Making the back button work on Ajax sites - so you can zoom in to a map and click Back to zoom out again - is great for users; the address bar will update as well, so when you get to the right place on the map you’ll be able to copy the URL to send to a friend. But that’s also good news for Ajax Web apps; the app could save your state locally and put you back to where you were last time you visited. A lot of IE is playing catchup, but the team is looking at the bigger picture too.

Silverlight takes Microsoft beyond Windows and beyond PCs. Silverlight for mobile starts with Silverlight 1 and video, so we have to wait longer for the cross-platform apps to go mobile. But Nokia is putting Silverlight on S60 phones - and Moonlight will run on Linux phones. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a version of Silverlight for Xbox - and at this point you should think of the Mesh service for syncing PCs and devices that Ray Ozzie hinted at in his keynote. Today you need the PC with the DVD drive and the Ethernet port and the full operating system and the full applications. In five years time you might be mixing and matching an app on your phone with an ultralight notebook for longer trips and a full PC back at base - and using Silverlight and WPF on all of them.

-Mary

Sometimes weeks have a theme. This last week’s was most definitely virtualisation.

Cannes in February is a refreshing change from an English winter, and it’s where HP were announcing their latest storage virtualisation platform - along with servers that come with VMware’s ESX 3i hypervisor built-in. Getting the right physical infrastructure for your virtualised server farm is becoming increasingly important, along with beign able to deploy your virtualised images quickly.

That’s where ESX 3i comes in handy - it’s a 32MB hypervisor that doesn’t need an OS. Boot your server, connect to the hypervisor from one of VMware’s handy management tools, and you’re ready to configure the hard disk and deploy all the virtual machine images you need (and if you’re using BEA’s Liquid VM thin Java servers that can be a lot!). Now that most of the major industry standard server vendors support ESX 3i, with hardware shipping from IBN, Dell and Fujitsu as well as HP, it’s going to be easy to quickly add new compute resources to a virtual infrastructure. All you’ll need to do is order the appropriate server from your usual vendor, shove it in the rack (or the blade host), and a few mouse clicks later you’ve got a server.

Microsoft is going to have to do a lot to compete with this. Its Hyper-V VM is still several months away - and it will still need its own partition to run and manage the rest of the virtual machines running on your server hardware. Sun’s xVM will have similar issues, as will the open-source Xen hypervisor.

HP’s launch was in its Sophia Antipolis offices, as VMworld Europe was just down the road. With more than 4500 attendees, it was definitely the place to be if you were running a virtual infrastructure. BT’s plans to roll out a service oriented virtual network with global load balancing was a benchmark for the maturity of virtual infrastructures, and a fascinating look at how businesses can encourage the move to virtualisation. BT’s decision to make physical server implementations subject to a rigorous review process and hefty chargebacks is intended to make this an economic decision - with virtualisation the clear winner on ease of deployment and lower costs.

At Vmworld Europe the thin client was one of the elephants in the room. While the server products got the stage time, client virtualization got a set of ropy demonstrations which were, to say the least, confusing. Conflating VMware’s impressive VDI virtualised desktop tools with managed desktop virtual machines, CEO Diane Greene demonstrated how virtual machines could be deployed to desktop PCs, and how thin client applications could be used offline and on the road. Given that presentation it would be easy to confuse two very different ways of managing virtualised desktop environments.

Microsoft made a lot more of client virtualisation at its 2008 server wave launch last Wednesday. That’s not surprising, especially when you consider that its big server success story of the moment is its relatively recent acquisition SoftGrid. Delivering applications over the network is a powerful way of controlling user desktops, and reducing your support costs. SoftGrid’s impressive sales figures are even more impressive, when you realise it’s only available through Microsoft’s volume licensing programme.

Perhaps the ideal infrastructure is a hybrid. VMware virtual servers hosting enterprise applications, with SoftGrid -wrapped applications streaming from the server network on to desktop PCs. The PCs themselves might be thin clients fed by Citrix’s tools running on an array of desktop blades somewhere in your data centre. It’s all a blast from the past - the mainframe is back.

This time, however, it’s an ever-growing array of industry standard servers hosting a virtual infrastructure, while applications are delivered to not green screens, but thin client devices with HD quality LCD panels. It’s a brave new enterprise IT world out there.

–Simon 

Actually, if you’re read your Dilbert, you’ll know that’s not true and it’s really photocopiers; employees come in around number nine on the list (and a copier manufacturer once sent me the statistics to back it up).

But number one or number nine, your employees are the source of your business’s knowledge and ability; you may think you have business processes but it’s your employees who actually get things done (often by entirely different methods). So what technology are you using to manage that asset and how much more can you get out of it?

HR isn’t just there for the nasty things in life; if you use it properly, HR could be a repository for useful information about the skills in your organization, the candidates who turned you down but might be worth approaching again in a year’s time - and when the most people will be out of the office, if you’re trying to pick a good time for a major network upgrade. The HR team knows when new employees will start work; you could get the manager to ask the IT team to order them a PC while the facilities team books a desk and a phone line - or you could have a system that does it automatically when HR enters the day they’ll start work.

You need to know when people actually make it to work, when they’re on holiday, ill or just AWOL. Do you let them enter that into the system themselves, or have them fill out a form, show it to their manager and send it on to a third person to put into the system? Sounds like an obvious choice but according to Chris Berry, MD of HR automation specialists Computers in Personnel, efficiency isn’t what a lot of companies are thinking about. At one large company that he’s too polite to name, when Berry suggested an automated system employees could use directly, the head of HR told him they couldn’t consider it; after all, what would the 50-strong admin team do then?

You can’t leave everything up to employees; there have to be checks and approvals for some processes. But there are plenty of approvals that can be automated as part of a workflow without taking up two people’s time. If I’m putting in an order through a purchasing system and it’s under my sign-off level then it shouldn’t need to be countersigned. If I want to update my bank details, I shouldn’t have to mail it to someone who prints of the email, hands it to an admin and has it typed in ‘to make sure it’s right’. I’m motivated to give you the right details in the first place, because I want to get paid, and if I get them wrong, I’m motivated to come back and correct them - or I don’t get my money. And if I’m using a self-service system, the form can have validation built in so I have to type in a sort code with six digits; you can’t do that in email!

It’s joined up business; not only do you save on admin time and get more of your data right first time, you’re bringing another layer of information into systems where you can analyse it. Usually we think about upgrading technology to make a server or application run better rather than because it’s slowing individual employees down; but if you could see that you get more transactions through a  server when half your team is away on holiday, you might have some different questions about load balancing.

There are the nasty things to take care of too; from compliance audits to spotting office bullying through odd patterns of who’s taking days off, to outright fraud - CIP has found more than one ghost employee, on the books just for payday every month.  And there’s one publicly listed company with tens of thousands of employees that’s started using CIP’s software and noticed that every single senior manager is within five years of retiring. That has to count as important business intelligence…

-Mary

My phone knows where I am, and when I flew to Geneva the other week it knew what time it was; the operator pushed a time signal and Windows Mobile 6 happily picked it up. It confused me when I took the phone out to change the time - but it also meant the appointment with the contact number for the taxi driver was up on screen where I needed it. I connected my PC to the Orange World Wi-Fi in the hotel (at the fifth time of asking; if you’re using a mix of numbers and letters as your username and password, please use a font that allows the user to distinguish 6 and G ). My PC sat there stubbornly believing it was on UK time, even though it had a French IP number.

I’m not expecting every PC to have a GPS in, and it doesn’t need to. Never mind battery life, it’s useless inside anything bigger than a garden shed and even in a city canyon it’s impractical; it took my O2 XDA Stellar 15 minutes to get a GPS fix in Covent Garden this week. What I’m after is a utility that uses the location services like Spotigo, Aruba, Navizon, PlaceSite, Skyhook and all the rest that give you location based on your IP address/what wireless access points you can see and when it gets a location that’s different from the time zone Windows is set to, up pops a prompt asking if you want to change it. If you want to be all social networking about it, the utility could upload my location to services like Facebook - or preferably just my timezone, as I’m sure burglars read Facebook too. I could have a widget in the Sidebar showing who’s in the same timezone as me or get an alert if someone I know is in the next street.

I’ve used Navizon on Windows Mobile for the last year to get locations and I like it but the desktop version is a Java applet and although the API supports time as part of the location info I haven’t found a timezone utility for it.

Skyhook’s Loki will do the locating and publishing bit. It’s pretty good at locating too; this is the service used by Google Maps on Windows Mobile and the iPhone and it knows where we live. Skyhook can use a combination of GPS, IP address, Wi-Fi and cell tower to cope with a range of environments.

Navizon uses user-contributed data for Wi-FI and cell tower and is either very accurate or about 2 miles out; Loki (and Google Maps Mobile) are either very accurate or not working at all.

Loki s obsessed with search; that’s because ads you click on make money. Personally, results in the same town as me may or may not be more relevant to be depending on how far ahead I’m planning and I don’t actually want any more browser plugins, thank you. But digging through the options - yes, it will change my timezone for me, or ask if I want to in case it’s wrong.

This would be a good service for tools like Xobni to use; this handy Outlook plugin shows a ‘heat map’ of the times of day a particular person sends and replies to email. That’s pretty useful already - it tells you that you have a much better chance of getting a reply from me between 10.30 am and 7pm or between 11pm and 1am than at any other time. Assuming I’m in the office; the location timezone service could tell you if I’m in California - and if Xobni was really smart and I said it was OK for you to know where I am (cue my usual call for an identity abstraction layer for the Internet), it could shift the heat map to California time. Or better still, it could calculate a different heat map for when I’m in California, when you’ll reach me between 9am and 11am, 2pm and 6pm and 9pm to midnight most days.

At the moment you can look at my Dopplr trips, or my Facebook status, or my most recent personal blog post or the last photo I posted on flickr to work out where I might be - if I’ve remembered to update them and you remember to check them (a friend assumed I’d be in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress this week, and ended up having a night in instead of coming round for dinner). That’s both of us doing extra work that the computer should be taking care of and I’m sure that’s the wrong way round. 

There’s two halves to this. One is that location is a really useful service (see my 2008 Technology Resolutions), especially as more of us work from home, travel around more and run out of time to arrange meetings with friends. And that’s the really big thing. I want computers to start saving me time and getting more done for me, not by making it faster to get my accounts done or by letting me try 90 versions of my Web site in the time it used to take to write one, but by working out the context and giving me opportunities. If my To Do list says I need to get something from the Lurgashall Winery for a friend and I get a message from a friend in Billingshurst needing help with something and a mail from a client in Horsham wanting to talk about work, having my PC suggest that I’m in Guildford on Monday is handy (and we think it’s why Microsoft wants Yahoo!); having it know I’m actually in Guildford today even though I didn’t update my calendar and give me an itinerary for the afternoon is even more useful. And it’s the computer doing the running around, not me. For that, I’ll put up with another browser plugin.
-Mary