Just picked this out on over ComputerWeekly.com
Wow - If that isn't a sore enough one for everyone involved in it... read down to see MS still able to recoup £50m from unlicensed software proliferation, and that is before they have been upset by an early contract cancellation.
Those EA true-ups don't half cost.
Project Liberate anyone?
At times reduced to a Barcode...
Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce
John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid
and
Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5
So there was a lot to see...
Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit). Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.
If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working. That is about 1% of a working day. So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101. With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010. So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment.... think you should be considering this stuff? I do.
For a £20k average salary
1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
For a £40k average salary
500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
or
1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.
Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right? Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.
Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone. Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.
Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles. Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified. If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine
From the love of maths to the futility of technology...
You can find out more about xkcd here see he's done some stuff for IBM's Smarter Planet - which I like but I suspect someone in IBM's marketing dept will be shot for going this far out there
Looks like the date is in for our next IPCCTV Event -Thursday May 06, 2010, 09:30-12:30
We've been working with Guys at King Communications to get the tweak the agenda for the intended audience. We've listened to the feedback from the last three events and think this one will be even better than the last.
The event will be held at the Dakota Hotel at Eurocentral will feature a number of in depth demonstrations of Milestone XProtect Corporate software and you will be able to see the systems running on IBM System X Servers and Storage.
XProtect 3.1 and Smart Client 5.0 Launch Webinar MIPS 2010 from Fredrik Wallberg on Vimeo.
The last event had over 60 attendees and we expect more this year. You can register on the Kings Event landing page here and if you want to let your network know what you are up to you can declare you are attending on linkedin.com by adding the event to your linkedin profile.#ipcctv #ipcctvscotland
IBM scooped the Best Security Company at Secure Computing 2010 Awards. Click these here links for a full list of finalists and winners. IMHO this is cos IBM has been going all aquisitive on us and snapped up, it would appear strategically (well done guys), all sorts of niche solutions over the past four or five years. Noteably for those of us at Seric Towers are of course Watchfire (2007) and Ounce Labs (2009) and we do see a fair bit of ISS (2006) out there in cyberville. Throw these bad boys into the already reasonably juicy mix and rub some GBS on it and IBM have a good story to tell those enterprise boys. Good enough to win the Security Company of the Year from SC at the largest awards in the Security Industry Calendar.
Here are some of the factoids about what IBM is doing to get just such an accolade
Why am I telling you this - well this would be the shameless plug section of the blog, we do this stuff! We supply and support the IBM's Rational AppScan Suite - covering black and whitebox application scanning. If you want secure code out there that won't leave you with egg (a fine) on your face (balance sheet) get in touch! Look, I even have a snazzy graphic for this stuff on my blog - yes, I spotted it should read PROTECTED
There are are 10 different siblings in the AppScan Family. You can compare the members of the AppScan clan here - though it is a particularly bad page as the row headings don't change with teh product changes and products look devoid of features when they are in fact irrelevant. Anyway - pick three and compare like-for-like, find what you like and then call us 0141 561 1161 - we'd like that ;-)
Steve Legg, IBM CTO Storage popped in to Seric Towers to give our team a briefing on the one of the more recent updates to the IBM storage portfolio VDS - and very interesting it was too.
Steve Legg (right) is pictured here along with Abdo Gadmour (left) who is heading up the charge on VDS in our region and our main technical lead here at Sericville Mr William MacLeod. As I said it was all very interesting and once we have done our appropriate training (very shorlty) we will be taking the message out to folks around the UK though of course focussed on Scotland, NI and the North of England.
For anyone looking to do a bit of background reading you can do well to have a look at the UK VDS landing page in IBM land.
Thanks to Steve and Abdo for your time today at Seric Towers.
... but this look pretty interesting for folks going down the in house social software route... but perhaps looking to take it out to the network edge and (eventually) beyond.
The offering extends the functionality of Connections to include more of the Twitterlike ( @stuart-seric ) microblogging functionality. Here's a wee demo from Youtube land
There's a 30 day trial available and I can see this being useful for at least a decent subset of staff in an fully online business and a smaller proportion in others. No news/comments on whether mobile support will be offered or how this fits in on what Lotus are up to with RIM for Connections
This year's (Scottish) Lotusphere Comes to you Event has been announce and the word on the grapevine is it will be a corker, with even more great demos. I know David Hood has been working on bringing the right people to the show. We'll be there along with the usual suspects and of course hoping to see many more new folks along. Why not tell a friend...
You can get updates and register (not quite yet) for the Edinburgh event at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/events/lcty2010/europe.html
If in the meantime you want to let your contacts know you're interested or are planning to attend I've created an event on Linkedin so you can let folk know you are going and get some of your own networking done at the event too.
ClearCase 7.1.1 and ClearQuest 7.1.1 introduce support for Microsoft Windows 7
You can get trial of this stuff to put onto your shiny new Win7 clients and start to test those vendor promises right away... Rational Clearcase Download Site
Unfamiliar with Rational ClearCase? Well there is plenty to learn, Rational ClearCase is a software tool for revision control (e.g. configuration management, SCM) of source code and other software development. Here's a screenshoot and details from IBM Support describing the explorer window.
The Rational® ClearCase® Explorer window consists of several panes and a toolbar.
By
default, all panes and the toolbar are displayed.
Under the view icon Rational ClearCase lists the view tag, which is the name by which you reference a view.
Move your mouse over the root directory to display the view tag and its associated path.
When you open the Rational ClearCase Explorer for the first time, with no view selected, or when you click the Getting Started tab in the Shortcut pane, the Details pane then displays a Getting Started Help topic.
The details pane is replaced by a browser pane when it displays information in a Web browser.
Ok so that was a bit of Brain dump... but I'm not guilty cos ClearCase is pretty decent and I like what you can do. That said I am generally more interested in the Rational stable based on the Jazz plaform which you can find out about at Jazz.net here is a description from draft 0.24 of the Detailed Architechture Overview of the site.
"The goal of the Jazz Integration Architecture (JIA) is to enable diverse tools to be used together providing an integrated experience to their users. This document provides an overview of JIA, and introduces the notion of a Jazz Team Server (JTS) that provides the Jazz Foundation Services (JFS) that allow groups of tools to work together. It also explains the relationship between JIA and Rational’s Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative."
The fulcrum provides flexible bridges ... simple, logical, functionally rich. Very nice.
More info on World of Rational sometime soon... S
As reported recently online by Nick Heath and others Companies that lose individuals' sensitive personal data will face a
fine of up to £500,000 under powers expected to come into force from
April.
The powers will allow the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office, to fine private and public sector organisations that commit a serious breach of the Data Protection Act.
Justice minister Michael Wills laid a statutory instrument before Parliament on Tuesday, setting the maximum fine at £500,000. The instrument will become law by default on 6 April this year, unless Parliament objects.
All very topical since we are (in conjunction with IBM) running an Event covering - The importance of Web application security - today's most significant online threat.
A few of the guys from our team will be heading along to this Scotland IS event in Edinburgh. Especially since in this area we have the skills to pay the bills ;-).
So if you are one of the majority of people whose spending on IT Security is in all the wrong places perhaps we and this event can help. The event is targeted for IT staff.
IT is a useful truth however that the buck rarely stops with IT in my experience from a Data Protection responsibility perspective. So if that's you and you are not IT we can come and speak to you about this stuff and help you determine whether you are properly protected or not. It's all about the due diligence - not the geeking out. Though I, like many others enjoy geeking out.
Here's a little something to chew on from a cost and risk perspective...
Are you
confident this won’t happen to you?
A North American
Retailer claimed that over 45.6 million cards belonging to customers were
compromised in an intrusion that went undetected for over 18 months; however,
several banks suing the company claim the actual number is 94 million cards,
a vast majority of them issued by Visa. The breach prompted numerous lawsuits
and calls for stronger data protection laws. By the retailers own estimates,
the company has spent or set aside close to US$250 million for costs
stemming from the incident.
I've been speaking to a number of folks recently about their concerns of how to connect the right people within their organisations and we currently had a few people looking at Lotus Connections - Lotus' Social software. I don't think IBM have quite figured out how to sell this stuff fully yet - though there are plenty of refereneces world wide but I think it is highly apposite for organisations going through classic VC acquisition plays where staff don't know who one another are, what they do or what their inherent value may actually be to one a
nother.
This lack of information or transparancy may be through ignorance, sheer geography, speed of acquisition or any combination thereof and more of the same. For the guy who has an inbound call for X that he needs to route, for the guy who doesn't know what else he can promote to his exisiting accounts, for the answer to that question you know nothing about ... social software holds the key to making connections (geddit) and delivering the intrinsic value held within the staff to clients of the business.
IBM definitely have the lead in this area and do eat their own dog food to particularly good effect on this one but how they communicate the message to the market ... still not quite there. That said, for organisations with issues like this - well worth an afternoon's time to find out if there is something in it for them.
Oh, and for folks with End Point Data capture issues or for folks who want to have their reps dazzle clients with their connections into to the back end skills and knowhow to get those client queries answered in double quick time then recent releases on Blackberry AppWorld may also be of interest as announced recently on ZDNET. You can find out more and see some flash demos for a number of apps on Blackberry site here.
