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Cloud helps scientists save lives

PUBLIC CLOUD DELIVERS THE PROCESSING POWER REQUIRED FOR MALARIA AND CANCER RESEARCH

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THE WEEK IN IT

Hackers & cyber crime preventionNato overhauls cyber defence policyNato members will draw no distinction between cyber and physical attack follow-ing a policy decision at the organisation’s 2014 summit in Wales last week. The update of the 2011 policy includes chang-ing Nato’s mission of collective defence with respect to cyber attacks. “The cyber policy has been endorsed by Nato’s 28 member countries,” said Jamie Shea, Nato deputy assistant secretary general.

Education & trainingParents unaware of curriculum changeAs the new computing curriculum started last week, 65% of parents were unaware their primary school children had started learning to code at school. In a poll of 1,000 five to 11-year-olds and their par-ents, Ocado Technology found many parents did not know about the curricu-lum, while 29% of students said they already had some coding skills.

Financial servicesUK wants Russian businesses blocked from using financial messaging systemThe UK government is pushing for a ban on Russian businesses using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) network, as a sanction in reaction to Russia’s role in the crisis in Ukraine. Swift sends millions of financial transaction messages every day, across more than 200 countries. It is used by about 3,500 finance firms.

Privacy & data protectionHackers did not breach iCloud security to steal celebrity images, claims AppleApple said the security of its automatic backup system was not breached when celebrities’ iCloud accounts were compro-mised. The private photo-graphs of celebrities such as Rhianna were obtained in a “carefully targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions”, Apple said.

Retail & logisticsOnline fashion retailer Asos seeks CIOOnline fashion retailer Asos.com is look-ing to appoint a CIO following the depar-ture of Pete Marsden. Before joining Asos in 2012, Marsden held top IT manage-ment roles at companies including Royal Bank of Scotland, Egg and Orange. Asos has dedicated websites and local teams in the US, France, Germany, Australia and Russia, and launched in China last year.

Network hardwareAberdeen gets gigabit network Aberdeen will become Scotland’s first city to be fully covered by a high-speed fibre network. More than 6,000 compa-nies and hundreds of public sector sites will have access to gigabit speeds in Scotland’s third biggest city. The network will be implemented by infrastructure provider CityFibre, in partnership with Scotland-based IT services supplier, Internet For Business.

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1D DAY USES GOOGLE CLOUDSony Music adopted Google Cloud Platform services to handle popular boy band One Direction’s 1D Day event, a seven-hour live stream that drew 772,000 concurrent view-ers, 10.7 million playbacks and 15 million mentions on social media sites.

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THE WEEK IN IT

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Government & public sectorDepartment for Work and Pensions appoints Mayank Prakash as tech chiefThe Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has appointed Mayank Prakash as its director general of technology, replac-ing former CIO Andy Nelson. Prakash joins in November from investment bank Morgan Stanley, which he joined in 2011. He was most recently the managing director of wealth and asset management technology at the bank.

Government & public sectorSocitm calls for a local GDSLocal government needs a local version of the Government Digital Service (GDS) with dedicated in-house digital teams to improve local public services online, said public-sector IT body Socitm. The asso-ciation said a dedicated digital team for local government would be more effective in delivering digital transformation than current voluntary programmes.

Financial servicesCyber attacks on US banks fuel financial sector vulnerability concernsThe FBI is investigating what appears to be a series of co-ordinated cyber attacks at JP Morgan Chase and at least four other financial institutions, according to US reports. The attacks have fuelled concerns about the vulnerability of finan-cial institutions and markets, which a top US expert has predicted will be the next evolution of cyber attacks.

Hackers & cyber crime preventionHome Depot investigates data breachUS retailer Home Depot is investigating a possible data breach of customer pay-ment card information. Several banks have seen indications that a large batch of stolen credit and debit cards – which are being sold on the black market – could have originated from Home Depot stores. The company confirmed it is investigating.

Mobile networksOxford University replaces comms systems to drive collaborationOxford University will adopt new commu-nications systems to increase BYOD and collaboration across campuses. The project will replace Oxford University’s current systems with managed services systems from communications software supplier Unify, formerly Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Hackers & cyber crime preventionUK helps found Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce international agencyThe European Cybercrime Centre at Europol is to host the recently launched international cyber crime taskforce – which includes the UK as a founding member. The Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT) – which is being piloted for six months – will co-ordinate interna-tional investigations with partners target-ing cyber crime threats and top targets. n

MARKET SHARE OF SERVER MARKET Q2 2014

Source: IDC Quarterly Server Tracker, September 2014

HPIBMDellOracleCiscoOthers35.7%

15.2%

4.8%7%

22.2%

15.1%

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Karl Flinders looks at what banks expect to get out of their fintech investments

Why banks are so eager to support growth of financial services startups

Banks are investing time and money in IT startups, creating an industry seg-ment focused on digitising financial

services, but are they building an IT ecosys-tem or betting on the next Facebook?

Hardly a month seems to go by without a bank launching a programme to support IT startups, but what is the value of this strat-egy for frugal finance firms that normally spend money only if there is a return on investment and a clear business case?

So vibrant is the financial services IT startup sector that it has generated its own name. Now operating under the banner of “fintech”, small IT companies are being approached by bank after bank with offers of financial support and mentoring.

Banks commit to fintech startupsRecent investments in IT startups have seen Santander, Barclays, Lloyds, Nationwide and Wells Fargo make commitments.

In July, Santander announced a $100m venture capital fund for financial technology suppliers. The fund, based in London, will invest in emerging fintech companies world-wide, enabling Santander to gain access to the latest innovations in banking.

A month earlier, Barclays launched a startup accelerator programme to access fin-tech. The three-month intensive programme has attracted 11 new businesses to its Barclays Escalator premises in east London.

Lloyds Banking Group, MasterCard and Rabobank are providing startups in the European accelerator Startupbootcamp with mentorship and access to pilot customers, industry data, application programming interfaces (APIs) and capital.

Nationwide, Santander, RBS, Lloyds, Barclays, Citi, HSBC and Goldman Sachs will be supporting next year’s FinTech Innovation Lab in London by mentoring financial services technology entrepreneurs

during the 12-week programme to grow early startups.

Wells Fargo is the latest bank to launch an accelerator programme, promising mentor-ing and capital. Up to 20 startups a year, focused on payments, fraud and operations, can apply for the first round of the six-month, semi-annual boot camp until 1 October.

Reasons to investBut why are the banks doing this? Is it to make early investments in companies in a growth sector, as you would traditionally expect banks to do, or is it to establish a trusted IT sector dedicated to providing the banks with the digital services their custom-ers demand?

Since the financial turmoil that began in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or arguably with Northern Rock’s demise a year earlier, banks have reined in their

Banks are queueing up to help small IT companies grow

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Where do CIOs look to find startup tech0nology

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created an app store to provide banking apps to customers and get ideas from customers for new banking apps.

The Credit Agricole Store is a platform that puts developers in touch with the bank’s customers. Customers can download any apps they want and make suggestions for new ones. The store currently offers 21 apps, offering services such as balance checks and fund transfers, as well as one to help visu-ally impaired people use the online banking

interface. This is an example of a new way to outsource software development.

Rik Turner, financial services analyst at Ovum, said there is still a lot of in-house work at the big banks, but it is mainly around core banking systems. By investing in startup pro-grammes, he said banks can help to develop and guide a group of suppliers: “If they can be shareholders, they might get better deals and could influence technology direction.”

Robert Morgan, director at outsourcing consultancy Burnt-Oak Partners, said banks have a more traditional interest in the IT startup community. “They are investing in these IT companies early on because, if they are successful, the returns are very high for a small investment,” he said.

One source in investment banking said the main reason for banks to invest in IT start-ups is to gain access to the technology, but that the investment and possible returns help to justify the spending. “IT teams are trying to get access to technology that they know they would never be able to develop in-house,” he said.

The investment and a stakeholding gets around strict controls on spending at banks, the source added. “IT teams would not be able to get the budget for open-ended pro-jects that may not yield a return. But to get around it, you treat it as an investment that might get a return and give you new technol-ogy,” he said. n

spending, cutting IT budgets and thousands of IT support staff.

There has been a paradigm shift in banking IT. No longer does everything need to be built in-house. Third-party suppliers are seen as viable for even the most core IT systems. But it is the digital revolution that is driving the biggest change. Core system maintenance and the challenge of meeting ever-tightening and changing regulation consumes vast amounts of the IT budget. According to research from IBM, 64% of 27 European banks interviewed said that maintaining core banking systems takes up a high proportion of IT budgets. While replacement of these legacy systems is nowhere in sight, banks cannot avoid investing in apps to provide customers with the services they want.

The IBM research also revealed that the replacement of core banking systems is not on the agenda of European banks, with investments instead being made to main-tain current systems and make incremental changes to meet business needs.

Online and mobile banking services, con-tactless payments, mobile-to-mobile pay-ments and even the use of wearable tech-nology for banking are all being designed, implemented, planned or discussed.

Buying in expertiseWith in-house development no longer a default choice for banks, the digital revolu-tion means they need to find new ways of developing IT. And they can’t rest on their laurels because IT-savvy firms such as Google and Facebook are gaining regulatory approval to offer some banking services. Although core banking functions will not be attractive to them, they are perfectly posi-tioned to provide information enrichment in financial services.

To keep their dominant position, banks need to introduce digital services quickly. By investing in IT startups that offer services to finance firms, banks will create an ecosystem of trusted suppliers from which they can eventually obtain products.

The idea of bank app stores is an example. Digital banking services from trusted suppli-ers can be made available to customers via app stores – and there are already examples. French banking giant Credit Agricole has

The digiTal revoluTion is driving The biggesT change in banking iT

ANALYSIS

Barclays launches

fintech startup accelerator

Startups selected for

fintech Innovation

Lab 2014

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Graham Tottle joined ICL in the vanguard of computing but it was his exploits behind enemy lines that inspired a futuristic dystopian novel, writes Cliff Saran

The real-life adventures behind an IT pioneer’s science fiction novel

IT worker Graham Tottle was in Saddam Hussein’s HQ when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. He had gone there to

redesign the Iraqi government’s agricultural projects database – previously held as a Lotus spreadsheet – to create a networked relational database built on dBase.

The database was designed to hold a large amount of information about 850 projects, including areas, crops, inputs, expected outputs, finances and historical production records, says Tottle.

This could then be summarised, crop by crop, to predict total production. This was a much more efficient way to model the data than using a spreadsheet such as Lotus.

Tottle was working as a United Nations farming consultant, teaching his Iraqi coun-terparts in Baghdad and helping to develop the production database for Iraqi agriculture.

Programmer’s progressGraham Tottle became interested in com-puting systems while serving in the British Army’s Royal Signals Corp in the 1950s. Responding to a quiz in The Times, he ended up being hired by the English Electric Company, later to became ICL – the UK’s first major computer company.

“I was hired as a systems analyst and I fought to become a programmer,” he says. This was the era of mainframe, when there were no operating systems. “We wrote our own systems program,” says Tottle. Among the software he created was the UK’s first index sequential file handler.

Returning to 1990, the system he built in Iraq modelled the country’s agricultural output, based on a detailed production return from the previous year’s data. Clearly, such a database could prove a powerful strategic tool to limit the impact of UK and US sanc-tions on Hussein’s government.

Rebuilding Iraq: the role

of IT staff

Weather analytics

project taps big data to

optimise farm irrigation

Tottle says: “Saddam’s capacity to be afflicted by sanctions was a vital considera-tion in the US and UK decision on whether to rely on sanctions or go to war.”

On 2 August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Tottle was in the Iraq government’s Agriculture Planning Division, three floors above Saddam Hussein’s office in a robustly fortified building in Baghdad. He was soon to find himself among 3,000 foreign nationals rounded up and moved between hotels.

Tottle eventually took refuge in a UN library. “We used our shortwave radios to listen to Margaret Thatcher ‘vomiting poison like a spotted serpent’, as Saddam Hussein put it,” he says.

During the day, he spent his time training UN staff, designing a database for peach production and playing on Microsoft Flight Simulator 4: “Practising take-offs from Saddam International airport,” he explains.

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“The events in Iraq were quite traumatic,” says Tottle. “Saddam Hussein wiped out 40,000 of his own population by bombing them with chemical weapons. What would happen if he bombed the world?”

In 2040, Tottle explores this premise and the development of computers and informa-tion systems, looking at the dangers to individual liberty and the surveillance society.

The novel depicts an alternative reality – called Downside – in which the Iraqi dicta-tor uses chemical weapons on the West. The novel is set in the future, when Scotland has become independent and government snooping on civilians is commonplace.

Tottle says people have become too toler-ant of CCTV and internet monitoring following their every move. “We are tracking almost every human activity,” he says. “I try to picture this in the book, where individuals are controlled and monitored.”

Now imagine how the state could use information gleaned from the internet of things. In his book, Tottle describes how a young woman gets stuck in an internet-con-trolled toilet in Macclesfield. In another example, a couple driving a car are stopped by the police and asked where they are going because the car “should not be there”.

Mainframe redemptionBut there is hope, in the form of KDF6, a “tight little 1960s mainframe” built by English Electric for one of its first custom-ers, says Tottle. Why choose a 1960s main-frame? Machines of the time predate the internet, says Tottle: “Due to the web, people’s privacy is not sustainable. So why not use this ancient computer instead?”

As for Scottish independence, Tottle says: “I am against it. I feel people have forgotten what a great joint history Britain has had.” n

A week later, while trying to escape across the border with Jordan, Tottle noticed a missile hidden under a motorway bridge. His group was turned back at the border and, on returning to Baghdad, he briefed MI6 about the hidden rocket. “I found out it was an Al-Abbas long-range missile [a variant of the Scud], which the Iraqis had kept on the eastern border, and were shifting to attack Tel Aviv,” he says.

Agricultural planning and warIraq’s agriculture program started life as a paper Tottle wrote in 1959. This was based on some of the ideas in the US Program Evaluation and Review Technique project management tool, which had been created to support the development of the Polaris submarine weapon system in the 1950s.

Tottle left ICL in the late 1970s to form software company Agricultural Computer Systems International, which wrote pro-grams for the farming sector in developing nations.

The firm’s software was used in countries such as Malaysia, which now produces a quarter of the world’s rubber. “There are 300,000 rubber farmers in Malaysia,” says Tottle. “The program produced plans for replanting rubber trees, and an action list.”

Literary inspirationNow, 24 years after the outbreak of the first Iraq war, Tottle has committed his experi-

ences to print as the back-drop to his novel, 2040, which was

published in July. It describes a farming consultant working on an agricultural pro-duction database before the war.

› The IT challenges of an independent Scotland› A smarter agricultural industry

› Scotland could get internet independence

“i feel people have forgoTTen whaT a greaT joinT hisTory scoTland and england have had”

ICL’S EARLY DAYSThe English Electric Company, where Tottle began his IT career, took over Leo – maker of the world’s first commercial computer – and later merged with International Computers and Tabulators under Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1968 to form ICL, the UK’s answer to IBM.

ANALYSIS

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CASE STUDY

Versarien’s chief technology officer faced the challenge of creating a cloud-based enterprise resource planning system to combine two groups. Lindsay Clark reports

Startup Versarien moves to SAP cloud

Startup firms can offer IT departments a clean slate, avoiding legacy applications that slow progress. But

this is not always the case.Versarien was founded in 2010 to make

engineering products exploiting porous metal foams, for which it owns intellectual property rights. In June 2013, it bought Total Carbide, a firm with a history, dating back to the 1930s, of making hard-wearing engineering components. It came with IT legacy applications from the more recent decades of that history.

Will Battrick, chief technology officer (CTO) at Versarien, says the challenge was to create an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for the two groups, while

managing the enterprise resources for 2D-Tech, a graphene specialist Versarien bought not long before the upgrade, after it was spun out by Manchester University.

“During the acquisition of Total Carbide, we highlighted that good enterprise software would help the integration of the group. It was a subsidiary of Elektron. It used the services of the company IFS, group-wide, but it was primarily interested in using the firm for management information and business intelligence,” says Battrick.

Recognising the need for ERPBattrick says Total Carbide was something of a “black sheep” to its previous owners, and one of only two divisions dedicated

Are large ERP suppliers

worth the price?

Case study: How SAP runs

Cape Town

Gloucestershire-based Versarien makes engineering products

that exploit porous metal foams

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ERP system aimed at small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), hosted in the cloud by Asis Solutions.

“SAP offered an opportunity to roll into Total Carbide quickly. It has all the functionality we needed in the short term and has the option to develop best practice,” he says.

Asis also suggested add-ons, including Beas, which is designed to help SMEs with manufacturing management and cost accounting. Meanwhile, the software was adopted with few customisations – it was more a case of adapting processes to the new system, Battrick says.

Change managementAs the company taking over Total Carbide, Versarien had to approach change carefully. It selected a systems and process engineer at Total Carbide to manage the transition. “He has been pivotal in establishing what needed to be done and highlighting risk,” says Battrick.

The CTO also met the Total Carbide team from the beginning of the project to make them feel involved and ensure they did not think new processes were foisted on them. “They’d had a couple of ERPs in their lifetime, and a couple of guys didn’t necessarily want to start the process again, but they could see the opportunity for improving,” says Battrick.

Business benefits have not yet been measured, but are expected to be accrued from better visibility of manufacturing work in progress, improved efficiency of procurement approvals and a longer term view of working capital.

Meanwhile, exploiting cloud technology has helped Versarien avoid capital investment in IT infrastructure and servers, a good advantage for an expanding startup. “We didn’t want to invest our hard-won cash in IT infrastructure when we could use the cash for investing in people and materials that help our business grow,” says Battrick.

The IT team will continue to enhance and refine Versarien’s SAP Business One, giving senior management an operational and strategic view of the whole business from wherever they log in to the cloud system.

“The next year will be exciting, not a slog,” says Battrick. n

to advanced materials manufacturing. Versarien realised the implementation of IFS in Total Carbide was not helping with tactical or operational decision-making.

“I said early on that we would have to select an ERP system,” says Battrick. “The business has a £3.5m revenue, and there were challenges around a material inventory. We process high-value materials and have long lead times for the manufacturing process. We saw the opportunity to use a good ERP system as a real advantage.

Because IFS was not used for enterprise resource planning, it left a void in the Total Carbide business, filled by spreadsheets and individual knowledge.

“There was a lot of Excel and inherent knowledge about how many materials need to be in stock and how much demand flexes over the year. It was ingrained in the people here, but that’s a risk to the business,” says Battrick.

He says the ERP investment would also support Versarien’s expansion plans: “The CFO wanted to have a good view of where capital was flowing around the business to facilitate growth.”

The move to a new ERP system was also viewed as an opportunity to create new processes, making the business more efficient and closer to industry best practice, says Battrick.

Choosing an ERP supplierBut the Versarien team had to work quickly to select a new ERP supplier. After completing the acquisition, it had three months to transfer to a new system before links to the parent IFS system were severed.

Battrick considered sticking with IFS, buying a competing commercial product or using open-source software. The firm eventually opted for SAP Business One, an

The move To a new erp sysTem was viewed as an opporTuniTy To creaTe new processes

CASE STUDY

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INTERVIEW

Harmonising IT systems at the London Symphony Orchestra

Jeremy Garside started out as an orchestra manager,

managing, booking and paying players for the

Hallé Orchestra and the Welsh National Opera (WNO). He turned to technology to alleviate days of manual calculation and improve the financial planning of the WNO.

Garside then moved to the BBC to busi-ness manage the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and spent 10 years combining tech-nology and information management sys-tems with broadcast production processes for TV, radio and online.

After freelancing in digital project management and web development from 2000, during which time he learned TCP/IP, Wi-Fi, streaming, web, audio and video production, as well as editing skills though experience, he became head of technology at the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in 2004.

The LSO is a globally recognised brand that tours the world. Despite its fame and the fact that it transports more than 100 musicians

and their instruments around the globe regularly, it has only two in-house IT staff. Garside is one of them.

“We operate a two-person team support-ing our IT systems – a core of Hyper-V sup-porting Microsoft Exchange and file services plus finance, fundraising and other specialist software,” says Garside.

All the organisation’s arms have specific technology needs, which the IT team advise on and support. The LSO contains record label LSO Live; LSO St Luke’s; the LSO’s venue on Old Street; its education and outreach team, LSO Discovery; and its marketing team.

Key migrationsThe two in-house staff perform most imple-mentation and support, occasionally using external consultants around key migrations and changes, says Garside.

The IT department’s biggest challenge relates to the LSO’s international touring schedule, during which it supports the man-agement team with more than 40 concerts a year in 20 countries outside the UK.

Jeremy Garside leads an IT team of two that handles the technology needs of one of the world’s top orchestras. Karl Flinders reports

LSO improves

touring with single SIM

London Symphony

Orchestra fine-tunes

Wi-Fi

CW500 interview

THINKSTO

CK

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To support this, the organisation recently signed a mobile services contract with Truphone to enable its staff to have consist-ent quality in mobile communications at the same cost, regardless of where they are in the world. The logistics of getting more than 100 people with musical instruments to ven-ues across the world, as well as the everyday organisation of matters such as travel and accommodation, make mobile communica-tion critical.

High-definition mediaBut the growth of data is a major challenge as high-definition media is used to distrib-ute LSO content widely. “LSO Live audio albums generate 30Gb of data each and we have over 100,” says Garside. “We are now involved in video production and in shoot-ing and editing HD [high definition] and 4K [ultra HD] content.

“Data volumes, bandwidth and digital asset management systems are all being augmented to ensure we remain in control of data and have it securely replicated to multi-ple locations and formats.”

Current IT projects include enabling staff to work from any location to support chang-ing working patterns and protecting against IT outages. But Garside says the migration of some or all services to Microsoft Office 365 is likely to be the biggest project of 2014.

The LSO may be more than 100 years old, but it has kept pace with changing trends in how people buy and enjoy music. “We were the first independent classical label on iTunes and we are now present on the majority of download and streaming platforms world-wide,” says Garside.

Determined not to stand still, Garside says the organisation is constantly look-ing at its digital offering and, through this, ways to spread its brand globally. “We were also involved in establishing the YouTube Symphony Orchestra with Google,” he adds.

A lot has changed during Garside’s 10 years at the LSO – and often in unexpected ways, he says.

Garside believes the role of CIO goes way beyond IT. “In general, I see CIOs needing to understand the core business and culture of the companies they work for, so they can integrate the right technologies with the pro-cesses the business needs to thrive,” he says.

New products and servicesIT evolution is also more of a challenge for today’s CIO, says Garside. With new products and services constantly being developed and technology trends changing rapidly, CIOs need to be well-informed, he says.

“Picking the right technologies at the right time in their development cycle and avoiding sales-led trends is important. It will depend on each business where that sweet spot is and it is a key skill for the successful CIO.”

Garside says CIOs must also be able to explain how new technologies can transform the business.

“Communicating strategy to senior manag-ers in ways that are clear and comprehen-sible is going to be even more vital as the complex balance between in-house, cloud-based and software as a service changes in the coming years,” he adds. n

INTERVIEW

“picking The righT Technologies aT The righT Time in Their developmenT cycle and avoiding sales-led Trends is imporTanT”

THINKSTO

CK

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Ditch the jargon and align the language of IT with that of its users

We all had a bit of a giggle, didn’t we, when the Daily Mail tried to explain “the cloud” to its readers. In a story about the apparent

hacking of Apple’s iCloud service, that led to the pub-lication of various celebrities’ naked selfies, the Mail wrote: “The moment you snap a photo with an iPhone, for instance, a copy is uploaded – not to an actual cloud – but to a bank of gigantic humming and whir-ring computers in vast warehouses thousands of miles away in California or North Carolina.”

BBC’s News at Ten also struggled to describe the cloud in terms that would make it clear to the everyday viewer – although it didn’t stoop quite so low as to suggest viewers might start looking up to the skies for pictures of Jennifer Lawrence.

It’s easy to be smug – but the fault here lies not with the Daily Mail or the BBC, but with the technology industry. This is yet another perfect example of the continuing desire of the IT sector to wrap itself in jargon and buzzwords. Once upon a time, IT relied on its own obscure language to justify its existence. Never heard of virtualisation? Don’t worry Mr CEO, the IT guys under-stand it, so you had better give them a pay rise and a decent budget.

That has never been an acceptable situation. The single biggest complaint from business managers about their IT counterparts has been the inability to speak the same language. Jargon has been a major contributor to the gap between “the business” and the IT department that has existed since the first business computer.

That gap has protected IT for too long – but now it’s a threat, not a salvation. IT no longer controls the draw-bridge between jargon and understanding. Technology belongs to everyone now, thanks to consumerisation. If the IT industry cannot speak the language of its cus-tomers, those customers will simply look elsewhere.

It’s no good IT simply expecting its users to do the thinking – why should they know what is meant by a cloud? More than ever, IT needs to talk the language of its users. Please, let’s finally scrap the jargon and use words that people understand. n

Bryan GlickEditor in chief

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its strong heritage in software, engineering and hardware development, the UK is well placed to take advantage of IoT.

That is why last summer, Tech City UK, Cambridge Wireless and the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, introduced a £1m Launchpad competition for startups and SMEs in London and Cambridge to help accelerate development in this space.

Better togetherTech City UK hopes the IoT Launchpad will drive collaboration between the London and Cambridge clusters, seeding the foundations for a critical mass of expertise in IoT. The vision is to pool Cambridge’s expertise in hardware and network connectivity with London’s design heritage and application development, while tapping into the rest of the country’s relevant IoT expertise, such as artificial intelligence in Edinburgh and media. There are promising signs already.

In London, Clerkenwell-based Evrything, an IoT data enabler, recently received £7m in funding from Cisco. Meanwhile, BleepBleeps, which manufactures connected gadgets to help make parenting easier, is part of an emerging hardware collective of startups in east London, pushing the boundaries of where hardware meets software.

The conditions are right for the UK to take the lead in a technology that may prove to be the next electricity. n

OPINION

Gerard Grech explains the opportunities available in IoT and what Tech City UK is doing to encourage further innovation and development across the country

UK well-placed to take advantage of internet of things, says Tech City CEO

The internet of things (IoT) is a real phenomenon that will take off in much the same way as the World Wide

Web did in the 1990s. But it will probably play a bigger role in business-to-business applications than in the consumer market. This technology will come into its own when adopted by the heavyweight industries that stand to gain most from transmitting data wirelessly.

Connected industriesAerospace and automotive manufacturing, pharmaceutical and chemical production, transportation logistics, oil and gas processing are just some of the industries already boosting their operations by tagging wireless devices to people.

The opportunities for cost saving and return on investment are enormous, which is why IoT will be so transformative. Research analyst Gartner predicts that by 2020, almost 26 billion physical devices will be transmitting data to each other via the internet. Research company IDC predicts the IoT market will be worth $7.1tn in 2020 as businesses and consumers adopt smart technology for homes, cars and accessories.

However, the perceived lack of leadership or innovation among many British businesses beyond the role of the chief innovation or information officer could present a problem.

I see too few British companies including IoT horizontal technologies in their external products and services or applying them to critical internal operations, such as product development. According to The Economist Intelligence Unit, since 2012 only about 30% of organisations have seen double-digit growth in IoT investment.

This game-changing development needs the full attention of CEOs and boards. With

Top hardware firms join

forces on IoT standards

UK backs consortium’s

search for IoT standard Gerard Grech is CEO of Tech City

UK, a body that liaises between the government and tech community.

This is an edited excerpt. Click here to read the full article online.

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Amicro-datacentre (MDC) is a smaller, containerised, modular datacentre system that is designed to solve different problems or to take on different workloads that cannot be handled by traditional facilities or even large modular datacentres.

Whereas an average container-based datacentre hosts dozens of servers and thousands of virtual machines (VMs) in a 40ft shipping container, a micro-datacentre includes fewer than 10 servers and less than 100 VMs in a single 19in box. Just like container-ised datacentres, MDCs come with in-built security systems, cooling systems and flood and fire protection.

Their size, versatility and plug-and-play features make them ideal for use in remote loca-tions, for temporary deployments or even for use by businesses temporarily in locations that are in zones at high risk of floods or earthquakes. They could even serve as a mini-datacentre for storage and compute capacity on an oil tanker.

The industry is seeing increasing use of modular or containerised server systems, with organisations such as Microsoft using a combination of approaches for its datacentres.

THIN

KSTO

CK

Time to rethink x86

datacentres

Modular datacentres

yield 30% more savings

What IT problems can a micro-datacentre solve?A micro-datacentre provides modular, pre-designed, fully functioning engineered systems that suit a variety of needs, says Clive Longbottom

BUYER’S GUIDEmicr0-datacentres part 1 of 3

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Moving away from bricks-and-mortar datacentres containing multiple servers, storage and network devices that required purchasing, implementing and maintaining, enterprises are seeing the advantages of these pre-designed, fully functioning engineered systems.

These engineered systems can come in many guises. The older, more traditional view of an engineered system would be of the mainframe or mini-computer, self-contained with its own compute and storage capabilities, with network interface cards (NICs) to connect the system to the rest of the world. A more modern approach is through the use of converged systems, such as Cisco’s UCS, VCE’s V-Blocks or Dell’s Active Systems. These are pre-integrated, pre-built systems that can be implemented and used rapidly in an existing datacentre – provided suitable space, power distribution and cooling are available.

Another mode of deployment is containerised systems – a standard road/shipping container packed with all the required equipment that just needs plug-ging into the mains, and sometimes water, for it to become operational. The container is otherwise self-contained, and once it has done its job or its capabilities are no longer enough for the job, it can be removed from the rest of the system and replaced with relative ease.

But these options do not suit all needs. They are all mainly aimed at the larger end of the market, yet many small and medium-sized enterprises would like easier access to acquire, implement and run systems that can be used as standalone platforms without needing a specific datacentre facility. Even large organisations may need a more specific system that enables them to run a more physical workload or to airlock an application from the rest of the technology platform for reasons such as data security.

The idea of a micro-datacentre is to take a standard rack-mount environment and add capabilities that a standard rack or a converged system would struggle to provide, creating a self-contained platform where a containerised system would be too large or expensive for what is needed.

Companies such as Rittal and ASTModular cater for this market. AST’s micro-datacentre offering – Smart Bunker is designed to host 85 VMs in a 42U rack assembly, while other, newer MDCs are even smaller – 23U size deployed in a single rack enclosure.

Optional extrasEach system provides a secure enclosure that is self-contained with heat management, insulation and low-cost energy management. Many have optional extras, such as defence against external fire and flood threats, as well as biometric entry systems – for systems administration and physical entry for equipment replacement – and fully monitored events, such as any attempt to vandalise the system or to move it from its installed position.

Being based around a standardised 19in rack, these micro-datacentres can house any IT equipment that would normally be found in a rack in a normal datacentre. However, the idea is for a micro-datacentre to be pre-configured and delivered to carry out specific tasks.

For example, ASTModular’s Smart Data Safe is a highly secure NAS-in-a-box system designed to provide data security against fire, flood, theft, vandalism and electromagnetic pulse. The Smart Data Safe is an on-site backup system that gets around any issues of latency and transactional loss as seen in most off-site backup systems. It comes with exten-sive in-built systems monitoring capabilities, enabling a remote administrator to be advised

The idea of a micro-daTacenTre is To Take a sTandard rack-mounT environmenT and add capabiliTies ThaT a sTandard rack or a converged sysTem would sTruggle To provide

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of any problems. If a problem is perceived to be critical, the Smart Data Safe will automati-cally shut down to preserve the validity of the data stored on it.

The micro-datacentres of another supplier, Panduit, are not designed to be as rugged and secure as Rittal’s or ASTModular’s, but are specifically designed to bridge the gap between the “standard” IT environment and the industrial platforms of, say, production line systems.

Aimed at industrial systems integrators (ISIs), Panduit’s system provides a hardened, secure environment in a half- or full-rack unit. This allows, for example, an ISI to implement a Cisco/Rockwell Automation recommended Converged Plantwide Ethernet/IP architecture for manufacturing, including a demilitarised zone (DMZ) with firewall appliances and redun-dant compute and switching resources in a single unit, pre-configured off-site for fast deployment.

Built for expansionMost of these systems are also built for expansion – extra units can be bought and plugged in along-side existing units to give a rapid, easy means of providing extra resources.

A micro-datacentre can also be a good solution for organisations that deal with applications and data requiring higher levels of security. With the right resources in the rack, data can be air-locked so it remains in the rack except when the right, multi-factor identification factors have been provided.

Even users with access privileges to the rest of the IT environment can be excluded from the system. Only those who have to have access are granted it without the need for additional security software being added to the architecture.

An example here is Elliptical Mobile Solutions and its Raser DX and HD systems. Elliptical has also created a complete standalone Vplex system in conjunction with EMC, Microsoft and Avnet.

Correctly configured micro-datacentres can suit the needs of SMEs that do not have estab-lished datacentre infrastructures.

Gain flexibilityA company without a physical datacentre could use a self-contained micro-datacentre to gain the flexibility of having multiple servers, along with required storage and networking, in a single unit that can be positioned pretty much anywhere in its building. Even where an organisation is looking at using a co-location facility, the extra security and disaster-proofing that a micro-datacentre can offer might be worth looking into.

A surprising player here is Huawei, whose MicroDC3000L 24U systems can be used in environments of less than 100 users in an unattended, lights-out operations mode.

In a world where it is getting increasingly difficult to pick the right mix of physical and vir-tual platforms for a business’s needs, micro-datacentres may be seen as just another confus-ing tool in the box. However, they make sense for specific types of workload and for specific types of environment.

Micro-datacentres may not come into play too much for large enterprises overhauling their big facilities – they are more suitable for SMEs without datacentres, or for a big enterprise’s remote branch that is located in a developing, or natural disaster-prone, area.

The age of build-your-own, based on racks with self-assembled compute, storage and network components, is well on the way out. Modularisation, along with the use of external cloud-based systems, is the future. The key is to ensure that datacentre professionals choose the right mix. n

correcTly configured micro-daTacenTres can suiT The needs of smes ThaT do noT have esTablished daTacenTre infrasTrucTures

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Corporates, scientists, engineers and researchers need access to high-performance compute power, low latency and high bandwidth for their data-intensive workloads. Now they are increasingly using supercomputers on demand via public cloud infrastructure to access the high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities

they need at affordable costs. HPC uses parallel processing to run advanced applications efficiently and quickly. HPC systems typically execute in excess of a teraflop or 1,012 floating-point operations per second.

Steve Conway, IDC research vice-president for HPC, says high-performance computing systems can handle more complex queries and variables, and faster turnaround requirements. “The move to HPC has already saved PayPal more than $700m and is saving tens of millions of dollars per year for other commercial companies, on top of the benefits reported by established HPC users in government, academia and industry,” he says.

THIN

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CK

New HP servers and

software built for cloud, HPC

Airbus deploys

modular datacentre strategy to boost HPC

capacity

Scientists and enterprises are turning to the cloud for HPCThe cloud is aiding projects to fight malaria and cancer, and helping banking firms simulate the financial health of clients. Archana Venkatraman reports

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According to IDC, the broader HPC market of storage, servers, software, middleware and services is projected to grow from $20bn in 2013 to $29bn by 2018. “We are now forecasting a 7.4% compound annual growth rate for the HPC server market from 2013 to 2018, and we expect the HPC server market to exceed $14.7bn by 2018,” says Earl Joseph, IDC’s HPC vice-president.

Organisations in several market segments are turning to HPC technologies to tackle big data analytics workloads effectively, according to IDC’s Conway. HPC systems are typically used by scientists, academics, pharmaceutical companies, engineers and government agencies such as the military, and some are taking these workloads to the cloud. One US-based company wants to build a 156,000-core supercomputer for molecular modelling to develop more efficient solar panels.

The company used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch a supercomputer system simultaneously across the US, Ireland, South America and Asia Pacific. Running at 1.21 petaflops of aggregate compute power to simulate 205,000 materials, the system crunched 264 compute years in just 18 hours. “This made this system one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world,” says AWS technology evangelist Ian Massingham.

With its cheap costs, public cloud has democratised access to supercomputing or HPC, which used to be financially unviable for many organisations and limited to those that could spend tens of millions on hardware.

HPC software company Cycle Computing, for example, would have had to spend $68m to run a supercomputer of the size and scale it needed in a traditional IT model, says Massingham. The AWS bill for the system was $33,000.

Cycle Computing itself offers cloud HPC software to enterprises such as Novartis and Johnson & Johnson.

Research projectsOther companies, such as Pfizer, Unilever, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), Bankinter and Nokia, are using AWS to speed up research and reduce IT costs by creating cluster compute and GPU servers to meet their workload requirements on demand.

Oxford University also uses AWS in its research for the Malaria Atlas Project, which is creating detailed global malaria maps to help in the fight against the disease.

Pete Gething, of the university’s department of zoology, says current knowledge of the disease is surprisingly patchy, which hampers efforts to target funds and resources to the people most in need of them.

“All models use top-end spatial statistics, and these don’t come cheap when you’re mapping things down to 5km by 5km pixels across the whole world,” says Gething. “Up to now, computation and storage have been major restrictions, placing constraints on the models we are able to run. With AWS, we now have access to the kind of serious parallel processing we need to implement model runs in feasible timescales and the storage to deal with the massive model output.”

Pharmaceutical company Pfizer is using HPC services for research projects ranging from the deep biological understanding of diseases to the design of safe and effective therapeutic agents. The company’s in-house HPC software and systems support large-scale data analysis, research projects, clinical analytics and modelling. But when it wanted to expand its HPC capabilities further in 2010, it turned to AWS.

By using thousands of off-site servers, as well as its own machines, Pfizer compressed

“wiTh aws, we have access To The kind of serious parallel processing we need”peTe geThing, oxford

universiTy

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compute time from weeks to hours, making quicker decisions and saving millions of dollars, according to Michael Miller, the company’s head of HPC for R&D. Public cloud HPC helped Pfizer cut R&D costs by $600m. The primary cost savings have come from avoiding infrastructure spending. “Pfizer did not have to invest in additional hardware and software which is only used during peak loads, and that saving meant we could invest in other research activities,” says Miller. “AWS is not a replacement but an addition to our HPC capabilities, providing a unique augmentation to our computing capabilities.”

Cancer Research UK uses AWS for the back end of its Genes in Space game, which allows people to help classify cancer research data while playing a game. And gene analysis now takes Unilever hours, instead of weeks, with productivity quintupling as a result of cloud HPC.

Cloud in financePublic cloud HPC is not restricted to academia and scientists. Financial institutions in Europe also exploit the cheap infrastructure for hyperscale computing. Spain’s sixth largest bank, Bankinter, uses HPC on AWS to run credit risk simulations to evaluate the financial health of its clients. With supercomputers on the cloud, the bank has brought down the average time for running simulations from 23 hours to 20 minutes. It estimates it would cost 100 times more in hardware alone if it chose to exit the cloud.

Another European financial sector player that performs sales-based HPC in the public cloud is insurance firm Mapfre, which uses it to calculate solvency. Every month, insurance companies have to perform a company solvency check to test their risk under the worst-case scenario. All customer policies have to be entered into mathematical calculations to check whether the company can meet the potential payout. Running these calculations requires expensive HPC machines that are used only a few times a month, according to AWS.

The cloud service allows the firm to spin up a supercomputer on demand and shut it back down when it is finished. This is helping Mapfre make substantial savings – the on-premise hardware investment for three years is set at more than €1m compared with €180,000 on the cloud for the same period.

AWS has released cfncluster, a sample code framework that deploys and maintains HPC clusters on the Amazon cloud. “We have made it available free for the community to use and it is available on GitHub,” says Massingham. Yet cloud still forms a small part of the total supercomputing segment, with 36% of enterprises using the cloud for HPC, according to HPC research firm Intersect360.

“Even with these enterprises, it tends to be just 5% of their workloads,” says Addison Snell, the company’s chief executive. “But it seems to be growing. The assumption that it is cheaper to do HPC on the cloud is concerning. HPC usually maintains a very high utilisation rate and that was one of the biggest unique selling points of cloud services.”

So, while Cycle Computing’s $33,000 AWS bill was cheaper than the tens of millions it would have spent on on-premise infrastructure, it was only cheap because it spot-purchased unused capacity. AWS Spot Instance is a purchasing option that allows a customer to buy unused Amazon EC2 computer capacity at a heavily discounted rate. AWS Spot Instance gives Amazon a flexible way to sell extra capacity. The instances are acquired through a bidding process in which a customer specifies a price per hour they are willing to pay.

IDC’s Conway agrees: “Enterprises may be using cloud for HPC, but it is really for high-compute and large but simple workloads. It will be used more as cloud and HPC evolve.” n

“The assumpTion ThaT hpc is cheaper on The cloud is concerning”addisson snell,

inTersecT360

› How HPC systems infiltrated the enterprise› Emulex targets HPC with Ethernet› DDN HPC storage calculates risk

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How do you accurately determine the value of a footballer? It’s a conundrum that has troubled club owners for decades, and has been given added torque by the popularity of applying data science to sports. Historically, player valuation has been a far from scientific process, according to Paul Boanas,

senior account manager at Prozone Sports.“Clubs would rely on traditional scouting methods, such as an eye test,” says Boanas.

“Very basic information, such as the number of goals and assists might have been used, alongside other considerations, such as contract status, commercial implications and biographical details, including age, would come into play.”

Today, however, most clubs are “exhaustive in their pursuit of information on potential signings”, with performance data playing a vital role in this valuation process.

Objective information“Data enables clubs to engage in a far more rigorous and robust due diligence process, supplementing the intuition of scouts with objective performance information,” says Boanas. “Where scouts may go to watch a player three or four times in person and arrive at an informed opinion, there is still the risk that they might have seen the player during a particularly good run of form that is at odds with their long-term form.

“Prozone’s wealth of performance data enables clubs to assess a player’s performance over a far longer period of time, giving them a more accurate picture of the player’s on-field outputs and what might be expected of them if they were signed.”

Sports performance

data analytics fuels Opta’s

business expansion

Wearable technology will up the

game for sports data

analytics

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Data companies score heavily in evaluating football talentData analysis companies are making waves in using technology to calculate the worth of footballers. Simon Creasey reports on their latest techniques

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Clubs can also use data to compare various transfer targets against each another, and against players in the existing squad, to reach a more accurate valuation of their worth based on their performances relative to similar players, says Boanas.

Some clubs are incorporating data taken from wearable technology devices to gain a more accurate insight, says Boden Westover, marketing manager at Australian wearable technology company Catapult Sports.

“Many of our teams put devices on players in pre-season games to test them out and evaluate their worth,” says Westover. “Some teams will even send a device to a player they are keeping an eye on in another country and have that player’s data synchronised with their team’s data to see where they rank.”

As the quality and breadth of data gathered by companies such as Catapult, Prozone and Opta continues to improve and evolve, clubs have a growing opportunity to drill deeper into a player’s worth, says John Coulson, Opta’s head of professional football services.

“Beyond the number of goals, we can measure the importance of a goal, say in a 1-0 win or a 6-0 win,” says Coulson. “Then the strength of the opposition and the quality of the goal itself in terms of the difficulty of the strike and the impact of the goalkeeper, not least including whether it was a penalty or a goal from open play.

“All of this analysis creates a much more detailed view of the player’s on-field value. Then, by looking at how these variables have changed in line with the player’s age and experience, we can start to estimate where the player is on their career curve and whether there is still room for improvement and an increase in value.”

Player marketabilityAnother increasingly important factor that clubs are adding to the valuation equation is potential commercial income. How marketable is a player to the club’s fan base and how much revenue might be derived from image rights and sponsorship deals?

Specialist London-based consultancy Orb Finance has devised a set of bespoke analytical tools and proprietary software to help professional football clubs take such factors into account when producing a valuation. The ability to produce statistics such as these will ensure data and analytics play an increasingly important role in valuing players in future. But Coulson, for one, warns that analytics can only take us so far.

“You still require the subjective assessment of a scout or coach to identify whether a player will fit into a particular team and thus justify a certain price,” he says. “There are many off-field factors, such as the languages a player speaks, his ability to integrate with team mates and, perhaps most importantly, how coachable he is – can he be improved, and is he willing to learn?

“All of these need to be factored in somewhere. Even medical records still require a subjective assessment. We also cannot predict what injuries a player may suffer. We can only use the data to guide us and lower the risk in how we value the player,” adds Coulson.

Of course, establishing a valuation of a player’s worth is just part of the total equation, he says. The desire of both teams to buy or sell the player will ultimately be influenced by whether the teams compete against other in the same tournaments, and perhaps also by the known financial budget of the buying team. So, even though data and analytics might produce an accurate valuation of a player’s worth, what the buying club ends up spending could be vastly inflated by the peculiarities unique to the football transfer market. n

“beyond The number of goals, we can measure The imporTance of a goal, say in a 1-0 win or a 6-0 win”john coulson, opTa

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were repeatedly treated to the car-crash image for all their queries on different browsers, even after they had cleared

their cache.“Looks like Google Images

got hacked by someone in Russia. First few rows appear as normal. After that it shows this image of a car accident,” said a Twitter user.

The search giant has not yet commented on whether Google Images has been hacked, affected by a bug or an error committed by one of its interns.

Downtime senses nothing new here. Facebook has

clearly been hacked by the ALS Ice Bucket challenge and Twitter by the Emmys and even #GoogleImagesHacked. n

Google Images users drive straight into a pile-up of car-crash photosAnother day, another internet cock-up. Last week, users searching for any pictures on Google Images – kittens, puppies, flowers, food and even Google’s own logo – were flooded with the same picture of a Russian car accident in the results page.

The alarming image was not an isolated incident, with users in Germany, Brazil and Canada all taking to Twitter and Google’s own user forums to question whether the company’s servers had been hacked. While it did not affect all users, many

MAKING A MULE OUT OF PAYMENT

A few years ago, donkeys in Israel donned Wi-Fi-enabled collars so riders could check their emails while enjoying the views. Well, now the famous donkey rides of Blackpool are accepting contactless payments from tech-savvy tourists. Mark Ineson, owner of company Real Donkeys, said many beach-goers don’t carry cash, and often disappoint their children as they are unable to pay. So Ineson approached Barclaycard, which provided Dillon the donkey with a contactless-payment enabled saddle. When asked what he thought about the gadget, Dillon said that PINs and cash can be a pain in the ass.

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