|
Subscribe to the IT Agenda E-Newsletter
IT Agenda -- Insights for Technology Marketers
IT Agenda is a free monthly e-newsletter. The information
is designed to help you better understand the changing IT marketplace and plan
more effective marketing campaigns. The content is developed and written by the
same experts behind our award-winning technology media titles. View
a sample IT Agenda e-newsletter.
Receive access to our most popular recent content by submitting your subscription today.
Recent features include:
By submitting this subscription request, you are agreeing to receive this information at the email address supplied. Thank you for your interest in TechTarget's IT Agenda.
 |
Subscribe to the IT Agenda E-Newsletter
|
|
|
India…Indiana, What’s the Difference?
by Jon Panker, Senior Editorial Director, TechTarget International Media
India and Indiana are vastly different places. That’s some geography lesson, huh! But there’s another lesson here that’s best illustrated through a story.
I live in Los Angeles, meaning I’m about as far from India as is geographically possible – nearly 9,000 miles as the crow flies (though the last time I checked, the crow doesn’t fly commercial airlines). My job calls for me to make several trips to India each year. And, there’s really no easy way to get there that doesn’t require about 20 hours on a plane. So, I’ll typically fly east, overnight at our headquarters near Boston and then catch a connecting flight the next day.
On a recent trip, I arrived at Logan Airport but my suitcase did not. When I filed a claim with the baggage department, the agent asked me my final destination. Here’s how the conversation went from there:
Me: I’m going to Mumbai…in India.
Her: What state is that in?
Me: Uh....I’m not sure I understand. It’s India.
Her: I need the state.
Me: It’s in India.
Her: Well, then let’s just put down ‘Indiana.’ It sounds closest.
Yes, that seems like the height of bureaucratic ineptitude. But my point here isn’t to rip on airline baggage systems or their employees. (I am, after all, limited to just a few hundred words in this article.). Instead, I hope I’m highlighting the fact that many of our businesses’ systems and processes were designed from a distinctly U.S. perspective. In order to save my claim electronically, the agent had to specify the state I was traveling to. She had no choice. Unfortunately, “Maharashtra” (the state in India that Mumbai is capital of) isn’t on most drop-down menus here. And, in many cases, Mumbai, the economic hub of the second most populous country in the world, hasn’t really permeated our distinctly American commercial consciousness.
I tell you this because if you have designs on expanding globally, you need to understand the markets you’re preparing to enter, and then create systems, processes, and metrics for success geared distinctly for them. How can you do this without spending your life on a plane or earning a Masters in international business? Here are three quick tips:
Think globally, but partner locally: One of the best ways to enter a new market is to identify strong local players who know their country best because it’s their home. You may never be an expert on German labor laws, but you can bet that someone who runs a business there is. At TechTarget, we have more than a dozen international partners. We don’t have to be experts on each of their markets. We’re experts on IT media. It’s their job to know what will work in their own region; it’s our job to choose good partners and help them succeed.
Keep an eye on the tie: Sometimes we give off clues that we don’t know a market too well. I recently read about a failed print campaign in the UK. The ad featured a photo of workers sitting in front of their computers. Apparently, the company didn’t think twice about reusing a snapshot taken for their US marketing campaign – after all, workers are workers, right? Apparently not. Savvy consumers who were part of a focus group in the UK noticed something was amiss. The workers’ neckties were knotted in a distinctly American fashion and not in the popular full Windsor worn in England. The campaign might have bombed -- likely because it conveyed the notion (albeit very subtly) that the company wasn’t in touch with the market.
Talk really is cheap: Language barriers aside, there’s really no excuse not to communicate regularly with your overseas customers. The price of a long-distance phone call on the traditional carriers is now pennies per minute. Using some of the Internet telephony services like Skype, it’s free. Sure, face-to-face contact is always preferable. But if you can’t get on a plane, pick up the phone. The world has gotten a whole lot smaller. Check in regularly; it’s the next best thing to being there.
By the way, my luggage eventually found me in Mumbai – 3 days later. As a consolation, the airline gave me a small stipend in local currency (about $50 worth of rupees). Unfortunately, all the hotel shops charged US prices. It seems some Indian businesses have a pretty good idea of how to cater to the American consumer.
Back to Top
It’s Not Easy Being Green: If you’re Storage, That Is
by Rich Castagna, Editor in Chief, Storage magazine, TechTarget Storage Media
A couple of years ago, with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and a handful of other regulations in front of the minds for storage professionals, storage vendors unleashed a raft of “Compliance Edition” productions. Some of those products were bona fide software and hardware gear that, indeed, addressed specific issues related to regulatory compliance. Many, however, were warmed-over versions of existing products renamed in an attempt to catch the wave of compliance spending.
Spin the clock forward to 2007, and it looks—as Yogi Berra might say—like déjà vu all over again. But this time the focus is on power conservation rather than keeping the corporation out of court, and with ever-rising electric rates, it promises to have a far greater reach than even compliance. Predictably, some storage vendors have opportunistically switched their labeling from “compliance” to “green.” Some will be able to work that angle to their advantage—at least for a short while. But most will find that smart users—and potential customers—will see through the “green screen” and won’t be fooled by any “eco-marketing” campaigns. That might be bad for few vendors, but in the long run these smart users will help steer the storage market in the right direction.
Power is serious business, especially when you look at how big a chunk of the data center budget is allocated for it. Servers have long been the focus of energy conservationists—and for good reason—but now that focus is beginning to broaden, the mechanical systems in the data center are beginning to be scrutinized as well. Spinning disks and tape drives, and the robotics that feed tapes in those drives, suck up nearly as much juice as servers. By some estimates, storage accounts for as much as 40% of the electrical energy used in a typical data center.
Vendors tell us that energy requirements are more and more frequently showing up in user RFPs for storage products. And this isn’t an issue that’s likely to disappear, as energy prices are unlikely to dip anytime soon. Vendors don’t need new RFP requirements to make conservation a key issue—good engineering design requires that energy usage be considered at nearly every step in the process. And with today’s denser, higher capacity storage systems, it’s an even more critical factor.
But the problem is there’s no common language to describe energy efficiency. Six different storage array vendors are likely to have six different ways of stating the energy requirements of their products. This not only confuses users, it hurts the vendors, too, as it makes it difficult to make fair and accurate product comparisons. So, it would, in fact, benefit the storage industry to adopt consistent metrics for energy use. Maybe kilowatts per terabyte for storage systems is the best measurement, and perhaps kilowatts per port for storage switching gear would be a good basis of comparison. Whether it’s those metrics or others, consistency is the key.
There’s plenty of positive science related to power conservation, from systems that slow down disks when they’re not busy to those that completely turn off idle drives. But even benefits as apparent as those can get lost if the metrics used to describe energy consumption are all over the map. A few vendors trying to pull the wool over users’ eyes with only green sloganeering will wise up—or lose out. But ultimately, a consistent set of energy consumption measurements will benefit both vendors and users alike.
Back to Top
Is VoIP Really a Success?
by Leigha Cardwell, Editor, SearchVoIP.com
While there is little doubt VoIP has earned a place among communication mainstays, IT executives are not shouting praises from rooftops. As a technology, VoIP has overcome issues with sound quality and reliability and is providing end users with features and services unheard of with traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) solutions - and often at reduced rates - but is this enough?
Not really, according to Nemertes Research's latest benchmark volume, Voice over IP: State of Deployment, Architecture, Vendor Ratings. Nemertes Research interviewed 120 IT executives over a five-month period and found VoIP vendors are coming up short in three weighty categories: management tools, ease of installation and troubleshooting, and customer service. IT executives are actually ranking VoIP vendors lower than they did just last year.
Are IT managers expecting too much from VoIP vendors, or is there a real disconnect? Andy Abramson, a top-tier VoIP blogger, says VoIP vendors are focused more on securing their sale than what happens post sale. "It's not about selling in. It's about selling through," says Andy. "Too much time and energy is spent getting the deal, and not enough time is spent on what to do once the customer signs on."
Results from Nemertes' benchmark report substantiate Andy's sentiment. According to the report, executives most commonly cited a lack of assistance with VoIP implementation and operations. This shortfall in the customer assistance area could account for the rising popularity of managed service providers, which, according to Nemertes Research, increased year over year from 6% to 14%. Third-party management tools are also seeing an uptake among IT/networking teams directing VoIP rollouts in more than five locations.
Among VoIP vendors, Shoretel scored the highest for the fourth straight year, according to the report findings. Cisco and Avaya hovered in the middle rankings and Nortel scraped bottom among top vendors.
Robin Gareiss, executive vice president and senior founding partner for Nemertes Research, attributes Shortel's success to the size of their rollouts and that the company's deployments are generally not as complex as Avaya or Cisco's. Gareiss also attributes some of Shoretel's success to the company's culture, customer service and best practices.
Garrett Smith, another well-known VoIP blogger, does not consider VoIP a success, because he says, the industry has yet to effectively deliver on the promises of this technology to the common user.
Whether you think VoIP technology is a rousing success, in dire need of significant attention from VoIP vendors, or if your opinion falls somewhere in between, the technology has achieved some level of success. And while that may not be enough just yet - it's no doubt getting there.
Back to Top
The State of Software Quality
by Colleen Frye, News Writer, SearchSoftwareQuality.com
Quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder -- the user, in the case of software development.
While quality is indeed subjective, there are metrics the software industry has traditionally used to benchmark quality: Is the project or product on time and within budget? Does it meet user requirements? How much of the functionality is actually getting used? Is the code well written? Is it free of serious defects and security vulnerabilities? Does it deliver value to the organization? To the user?
To date, the metrics have shown that software has not been measuring up, and problems with poor quality have plagued the industry. Many experts say things haven't improved much over the last several years, despite the increased recognition and attention paid to quality issues.
"Over the last 50 years there has been very little improvement," said Watts S. Humphrey, who founded the Software Process Program of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and was the director of programming at IBM.
“But there are quality problems with the core infrastructure of many software products,” he said, “which makes modifying functionality difficult. And there may be few people left in the company who worked on the program originally.”
The time-pressure problem
It's not that individual developers and their C-level executives don't care about quality, but organizations face time/scope pressures and therefore often don't create an environment that actually helps programmers write better code.
Ken Schwaber, Scrum co-creator, has trained more than 9,000 programmers in the Scrum methodology and puts them through an exercise in which they are faced with retaining quality but missing a deadline, or dropping quality and hitting the deadline. All but 120 of them, he said, "were willing to drop quality. It's just a knee-jerk habit."
"I think most people care about the quality of their work," Cem Kaner, professor of software engineering at Florida Institute of Technology and director of Florida Tech's Center for Software Testing Education & Research said. "If a decent hiring decision is made, that person probably cares. Does that person believe he can do a good job in this environment is a different question."
That's why it's important to get executive buy-in for quality improvements, Humphrey said. "At the lower level, people are under enormous pressure; they're not thinking about the overall benefits," he said. "In most organizations, the things you have to do to improve quality cost one group money and save money for other groups." For example, he said, an added effort in development can cut service costs.
The good news
The use of Agile methodologies-- stripped down versions of unified process-- is also helping some organizations improve quality, although they have "a pretty wide range in how many steps in the life cycle, what the recommend dos and artifacts are, how much modeling goes into development vs. re-factoring. But [there are] core themes -- the focus on delivering software and the concept of tuning the methodology for characteristics of the projects," Burton Group's Joe Niski said. "Companies using Agile successfully are tuning for the culture and the kinds of projects they're doing."
In addition, Niski said, there are developments in the tooling space that have the potential to improve software quality, such as static code analysis tools, that scan code as it's being developed for security flaws and code defects as well as intellectual property concerns. "But having a tool isn't enough; it has to be deployed in a smart way," he said.
Clearly, even with better tools, there's no simple answer to how to improve software quality, and Kaner points out how broad the challenge is. "Very few people in the quality field define quality as freedom of bugs. A product has quality if it has enough of what makes people want to use it, and doesn't' have too much of what makes those same people not want to use it."
Schwaber is hopeful that the market will help drive change, but with a caveat: "I think what will happen is some places will really get it and will be so competitively compelling that others will have to rapidly change or go out of business. As an offset to that, consider that Ford has known for 40 years how Toyota builds cars."
Return to Top
|
