The main additional features in 2.9 are:

• “Trash” – posts and comments are no longer deleted, they are now simply “moved to trash” (or tomb-stoned) – no more “are you sure?” messages on delete. NOTE: This feature is implemented for pages too!
• One-click batch upgrading of plugins – with plugin compatibility checking to ensure only plugins that work with the installed WordPress version are installed.
• Built-in image editing – so you can crop, rotate and flip images to fit into your posts and pages.
• Video embedding support – that makes embedding videos from the major video sharing sites much simpler.

There are also some “under the hood” features that theme developers will find useful:

• Support for canonical URLs (a hot topic in the SEO community)
• Updated version of the included WYSIWIG editor (TinyMCE).
• Extensible user profiles and registration.

This all makes the platform even more user friendly and easy to manage and maintain.

Next up for WordPress is the merging of the WordPress MU (multi-user) code. This will make WordPress even more interesting for Enterprise use, since it allows multiple blogs from a single WordPress instance. I’ve had the chance to use WordPress MU for a couple of projects, and I’m very excited about it becoming part of the core product. 2010 is going to be a pivotal year for WordPress. As of this moment, WordPress 2.9 has already had over a million downloads.

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This screencast shows how to take a image gallery from photo sharing site Flickr and place it into a WordPress blog post. The screen cast itself is embedded from Jing/Screencast.com to this site (which is a WordPress blog – did you see what I did there?).

Click here to view – it is a large file (40Meg) so may take a while on a slow connection.

Note: This method assumes that you have a WordPress blog hosted on an independent server, rather than the free WordPress.com service. If you want to know more about getting set up on your own domain with progress, do get in contact. If you are on the wordpress.com service, you need to use the vodpod feature and embed the flash file from there.

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2.8 builds on the developments that lead to the plugin browser, to add a theme browser into the WordPress interface. It enables you to search the WordPress theme directory, without leaving your wordpress blog. Tick box selection narrows down the theme choices from the thousands of free themes available. I’m not yet clear on how this will work for commercially supported themes, important to businesses that are blogging. Most businesses have a custom developed theme, so this will most likely not be an issue.

The release also adds syntax highlihting into the theme editor, which makes it much easier to customise themes and will be a boon for developers. Widgets have been enhanced at multiple levels too, starting with the interface to them. There is a lot more control over how you can interact with them, together  with support for multiple instances of a single widget, and a drag and drop interface to allow you to move widgets from one column to another. Again, this makes site customisation much simpler, and will cut down on the amount of coding required. There is also an “inactive widgets” pen, to save customisations of widgets for later use. This is a big improvement over the old interface, which simply lost customisations.

A Widget API has been added to simplfiy the widget development process, which will hopefully enhance the number and quality of widgets available for the platform. The administration interface is generally easier to customise, for example enabling changes to the number of columns and items per page, and scaling the page with the browser window. These features build on the improvements delivered in 2.7. There are some speed optimizations too, to speed up the process of blogging.

All in all, another step forward for the usability and flexibility of the WordPress platform, which is growing from strength to strength, particularly as it starts to eat into the CMS application space.

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However, Joe advised some caution, per transaction costs can kill you (this is ironic given that the concept of “Free” – so popular with the Web 2.0 world – is based on infinitely low transaction costs). Remember, with cloud computing, you can’t touch the hardware or see it, so monitoring is more important, he mentioned Nagios and Monitis which are great packages for doing just that.

Another  big issue with Cloud Computing is the data problem – it takes  a while to get data up, even if you have lots of bandwidth. That means it takes a while to get your data out in a hurry. You also have to deal with high latency, compared to working with servers on site.

The dynamics of programing in the cloud is transaction based, so you need to be thinking dollars. Poor programming costs you real money, so unit tests need to include a cost value. Security also needs to be at the forefront of what you do. Joe described the “The Britney Spears Problem “- you can’t expose your end user data to risk. Client side encryption will be needed in the long-term, but is a usability challenge right now.

In summary cloud computing is a great adjunct, but don’t get rid of your main servers just yet. Be ready to deploy to any other grid at speed, so that you have a recovery plan. Also, watch those transaction costs.

Here is a talk on Cloud Computing by Larry Ellison (of Oracle – who are set to acquire Sun):

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Today was CloudForce in London – SalesForce.com’s big event, which is touring the world, and touted as “your chance to get the insight you need to take advantage of cloud computing and salesforce.com applications in 2009.” And that’s probably where the problem starts. There wasn’t much cloud on show, at least not cloud computing as I understand it.

They had me in the palm of their hand. I was waiting to be wowed. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s highly energetic Chairman and CEO took to the stage and had at it like a fervent preacher, although one who’d slightly forgotten his gospel, having to glance down at his autocue as he stumbled over customer and competitor names, but that didn’t dim his obvious passion for what SaleForce.com had to offer. SalesForce.com has done a great job of selling to sales people. It is an excellent pipeline management tool for sales managers, and dashboard provider for exec teams, and I’ve used it successfully from both of those angles in the past.

However, during the day, salesforce was promoted as a customer service management tool, a financial data management tool, a content management tool and a social media monitoring tool. That’s a big stretch from where they started. Add to that, a firm claim on the cloud space. Benioff said that they had been “talking cloud” for ten years.

Salesforce.com is certainly evolving from a SaaS-based CRM provider, where it has done well, to a PaaS (platform as a service) provider. That puts it on a direct collision course with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft’s emerging Azure platform, as well as Google’s very own App engine. Those are big players, one’s that know their apples and pears.

During the morning Benioff made a big play about their ‘live demos’ and that’s where the wheels came off for me. Not in the demos themselves, they were super slick and flawless, almost too good to believe. And indeed they were. Orange was touted as a major customer, with 10,000 Orange customers claimed to be using SalesForce.com’s Facebook monitoring application. The problem was, the orange customer service twitter account used in the ‘live demo’ was a fake, as Redmonk’s James Governer discovered after tweeting about it (tweets in reverse chronological order):

And digging into the account they used as the example customer, well, that was a fake too, as you can see from their stream:

2 updates, 4 followers. In fact there’s a veritable ecosystem of fake accounts around ddbenson. Now, I have nothing against demos with dummy accounts. I’ve done the occasional one myself. Sometimes needs must, and they are important to protect people’s privacy, but when you do them, call them as such. Both James and I had asked our Twitter followers if they had any experience of interacting with Orange customer services via twitter. That’s a good few thousand people between the two of us. The answer? Nothing. Not a sausage. And why would there be? If Facebook asked you to install a SalesForce.com app into your profile would you? No, you probably wouldn’t. I even trawled Facebook trying to find this mystery app, but couldn’t see anything with more than 40 users. I’m clearly missing something here, since the Facebook integration was heavily promoted during the day.

There was much talk of how great SalesForce.com is, what wonderful things they do and their commitment to ‘the social contract’ (and their 1:1:1 model) and heavy claims for their social media credentials. A fair few people left during the keynote session, some tweeting their departure, and there was a general shuffling of feet around me as the pitch went on.

The sales pitch just didn’t seem to be connecting with those around me. Sure, the bloggers and journalists were comfortable at their big desks, with coffee and Ethernet connections, but talking to the customers and potential new SalesForce.com users in the pews, there seemed to be a general disquiet. “How am I going to use this for my support organisation?” asked one attendee, “the maintenance windows don’t allow me to run 24/7″. And indeed, while SalesForce.com proclaims >99.9% (the same uptime as this web hosting provider), that doesn’t include the scheduled maintenance windows, when they do their software upgrades. That’s the “No software” company’s software upgrades.

They are certainly transparent about system availability, with a real-time view of their operations, although that is fairly standard for a large service provider these days.

no software dude hugs me at cloudforce 09 on 12seconds.tv

Now, maybe I’m just smarting because I didn’t get hugged by the no software guy, but maybe that was because he was keeping his distance. I wanted to ask about the software the sales team had to run on their Blackberries to use SalesForce.com. I wanted to ask about the iPhone software from SalesForce.com. I wanted to know if they were going to support the Nokia platform that I happen to like, and what their plans were for Windows Mobile. Lots of software to ask about.

Anyway, you can watch the whole keynote - the SalesForce.com team got the content up quickly. I’ll write more about the new features just as soon as I have checked them out.

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Michael is one of the authors of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, and well know for his SharePoint expertise. He did a walkthrough of build process, from best practices perspective, covering small deployments with all SharePoint roles and SQL server on the same server, though SharePoint roles on a a single box, with SQL server on separate box, to a fully redundant set up with multiple query servers and an index server. That set up requires 5 servers, and is the smallest redundant farm configuration.

For larger user populations, SharePoint scales using multiple web role servers, query server, etc… That also provides the opportunity to have a production farm and an independent test/development set up. That can either be achieved with additional dedicated servers, or by making use of server virtualization. Microsoft server licensing allows for up to 4 instances of a virtual host on a server. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is an excellent option and cost effective, according to a number of conversations during the evening. Third party virtualisation is supported as well - see Knowledge Base Article 897615 – including VMware and Citrix XenServer. Michael’s advice was that not all roles should be virtualised, although the best candidate for virtualisation is the web frontend.

In anything but a smaller set up, the SQL database role requires a large amount of space, especially if versioning is turned on in document libraries (resulting in every version being stored). Likewise, reasonable hard drive space needs to be allocated to the index and query services. Given the continual fall off in hard disk storage costs, and increasing capacities, this shouldn’t present an issue in most deployments.

Michael suggested that the more memory and processor cores that can be given to SharePoint the better, in the following priority: the Database Role, the Index Role and lastly the Web/Query Role.

Something else to bear in mind is that 64 bit computing is now truly upon us, and a server refresh needs to be part of your strategic IT planning if you plan on running the latest Microsoft applications. The next version of SharePoint is x64 bit only. SQL Server 2008 is recommend, especially  if you require transparent encryption of databases for security (although that should only apply to high compliance environments).

There is relatively little complexity to the network-level security for SharePoint. Opening port 1433 on the firewall to let the SQL server talk to SharePoint servers is required, important if you are using the built in Windows firewall capability. Michael gave a number of recommendations for setting up accounts, and they are covered in the slides and the book.

Some analysts weren’t so convinced about SharePoint’s Web content Management capabilities (at least back in 2007), but things have moved on a great deal. There are third party applications to enhance search, provide backup management and also SharePoint-aware anti-virus products. From  the begining of April SharePoint Designer will be free, and there may well be some new tools too.

Something to remember with SharePoint is that it is a tool, and tools can be used badly as well as effectively. It isn’t uncommon to come across SharePoint installations that have turned into hundreds of information pockets, rather than an enterprise-wide collaboration tool. All too often, IT staff end up structuring set ups around organisational groups, rather than functional teams. The two things are very different, and achieve different results.

From my perspective, business should be careful not to use SharePoint to replicate departmental silos. Instead, it should be used to ensure that data and resources are both discoverable and protected.

The evening ended with a very extensive Q&A. If you want to develop your SharePoint skills, you might want to check out the April best practices conference. A number of tools that were discussed during the evening will be demonstrated there. Check out the site for details of the London conference.

SharePoint has certainly caught my interest again with its growing feauture set. There is still a long way to go for it to catch up with some of the more mature wiki systems, but the gap is definitely closing.

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Avaya’s focus is increasingly on unifying the user experience, from the desk phone to the mobile phone, from the office to the road. Avaya views workers as existing across one of four solution domains, based on in-office or remote, and fixed or mobile: the desk based worker, the tele-worker, the mobile worker (on-site, but no desk) and the road warrior. It is a nice segmentation, and one that proves useful in understanding employee needs.

Recent licensing changes by Avaya mark a shift in how the solutions are sold. Essentially, rather than the old model of buying a number of licenses for each of the different modes, you can now purchase one license per worker to cover all of the modes. That means you don’t have to worry about changes in the split of your workforce, which will make life easier for IT departments and Human Resources alike. I suspect that it also reflects increasingly dynamic work places, as businesses continue to adopt modern working practices, the working styles in use are changing.

The in-premise mobile workers are addressed with Voice over WiFi, while off-site workers make use of Avaya’s 1x capabilities to reduce mobile costs and provide a single telephone number. The functionality effectively extends the PABX out to wherever the user is. Interestingly, Chris sees more use of privately owned mobiles by employees.

The Avaya solution enables separation of business and personal calls and costs, together with the ability to set up a “business profile” on the user’s mobile handset. This means IT departments can integrate user-provided mobiles with the corporate phone system, something that is becoming increasingly common as mobile phone choice becomes more of a fashion statement than a technology choice. The solution’s text to speech and speech to text functionality allow a reasonable degree of hands-free use whilst on the move – from looking up an employee’s number, to reading the subject of an urgent email.

Telephony is becoming less and less of a stand alone application, with Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, as well as Avaya, pushing unified communications. From click-to-call desktop applications, to email integration, this is the future of the phone system. Despite Microsoft’s wrangles with the OCS APIs, Ayava still integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft software environment. I’ll tackle that topic, together with some case studies, in part II.

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Make no mistake, it is an area that is both murky and controversial. One of the shining lights in the space is Phorm – or perhaps “kicking boy” is more apt. They have had a far bit of churn in their senior management team of late. However, they were prepared to participate in a recent debate. A little while back I headed in to London for the NMK Behavioural Targeting event (very many thanks to Ian Delaney). The very distinguished panel included Guy Phillipson, CEO, IAB as chair, and included Nick Barnett, UK Commercial Director, Phorm, Rupert Staines, VP Europe, Specific Media and Ian Brown, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute. Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat Member, House of Lords was due to join, but was detained in parliament (it has been rather busy there of late, and I’m not talking about the Christmas Tree going up).

The session was titled ”Behavioural Targeting: The Fire and The Fury” – although I couldn’t help noticing that the event URL was actually “behavioural-targeting-the-filth-and-the-fury”. So, why is the marketing industry pursuing this technology and why is it so controversial? You could start with the Wikipedia Definition or this FAQ from Ottawa University. Let me summarise it this way: The Internet content industry needs advertising in order to continue. Today, most websites sell less than half of their advertising inventory. People are advertising less, because advertising is becoming less affective at driving sales. No purchases, no advertisers. No advertisers, no Internet content. Using user data to adapting the advertising gets users to read more and to respond more. That is good for business. This idea is not new. The Guardian has been using certain behavioural technology on their site for some time, as have many other sites.

Most implementations use cookies, stored via the users’ web browser, to create a ‘unique id’ for each visitor. This is a number to track where the user goes, when they visit and how regularly they visit. The technology needs volume and reach to make it effective. If I see that you have read five articles on fishing, it is probably a good guess that I’ll get a better response from showing you an advert for fishing kit than I would showing you an advert asking you to sign up to an anti-blood sport campaign. A little provocative, but you can see why people are getting hot under the collar about it.

Phorm, and others, are working with the IAB, which has set up a behaviour marketing workgroup to look at the many issues around the technology. As Ian Brown rightly pointed out, this sort of tarketed ad serving has been going on since the start of the Internet. However, Phorm, and particularly their rocky trials with BT, have thrust things into the spotlight. One significant difference with Phorm is that they can collect data based on all of the sites a user visits, rather just ones within the advertising network. More than that, Phorm potentially has relationships with 3 ISPs, giving them visibility into 70% of Internet users in the UK. That has privacy activists watching their every move.

Phorm provide an explanation of their technology on their website, although it would be nicer to see this coming via validation from an independent third party. It would also be good to see similarly up front information from others, including the likes of Google. According to the organisers, they were asked to join the debate, but declined to attend.

Many users, and even IT professionals, are not aware of how much data is handed over to websites behind the scenes. I’m not the snooping kind, but even the very standard stats package I use on this site keeps track of the site you came here from, pages you visit and where you went next. It is only collected anonymously and in aggregate data, so I have no idea who you are or what you did as an individual. Most other websites collect significantly more data. Are you sitting comfortably?

The site managers, and advertisers, would argue that using this data provides users with a benefit: we get to see more relevant ads. Alan Patrick and I both pointed out that most users probably would not see that as a benefit!  The issue of user benefit is an important one. Remember, we live in a country where most of us will happily surrender aspects of our privacy in exchange for a few discount vouchers – how many of us have supermarket loyalty cards? Phorm now position their solution as offering anti-phishing and malware/spyware protection – ie a user benefit. Later the discussion drifted on to the topic of the government collecting user data and monitoring, but that is an altogether different topic, although it should be noted that it isn’t a completely separate one.

A key issue raised was the nature of the relationship between the monitored user and whoever is collecting the data. You are a customer of your ISP, so you can exert pressure on them, even if that is by leaving them if you do not want behavioural data used. That isn’t the case for all users of behavioural data. It is a complex area, and not well understood. All too often users end up clicking “accept” on privacy policies and end-user license agreements that are either unread or too complex to interpret, as witnessed in the recent launch and subsequent changes around Google Chrome.

A case of surfer (and IT manager), be aware.

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“The pain of WAN communications continues to increase as organizations become more dispersed globally, and remote workers increase in number,” said Efi Gatmor, Chief Technical Officer of Expand. “At Expand, our goal is to solve that pain wherever it may be, with technology that has the capacity to be virtually everywhere.”

Recently I had a discussion with Michael Cucchi, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Expand. Not only have they been adding customers, but they have also added an ROI Calculator to their site (ROI calculator here). It is a web-based version of a more complex tool they use to help customers calculate the savings reaped from making more efficient use of wide area network bandwidth.

The Expand solutions enable network managers to trade CAPEX (capital costs in the form of purchasing WAN optimization boxes) against OPEX (spending less money each month on bandwidth bill from operating the network). WAN optimization has often been viewed as a trade off against bandwidth, but there are other benefits too. With Ethernet WAN services providing cheaper connectivity, it is increasingly obvious that bandwidth isn’t the only issue that affects network and application performance.

While network costs are going down, Michael pointed out that satellite bandwidth costs aren’t on the same price curve. Ethernet WAN services still have a relatively small reach, when you think about them in the context of a global business, or one with many remote sites. Traffic patterns on the network are shifting too. As well as “recreational” peer to peer traffic (read: music and video file sharing), there are a growing number of other IP applications that have peer to peer traffic patterns, for example VoIP and instant messaging. WAN optimization tools like Expand’s are looking to control traffic, as well as providing acceleration. Priority packets can be sent ahead of lower priority ones, boosting performance, and that is before any application-specific algorithms are used to reduce or accelerate the applications.

In all of this, the latency challenge remains – the speed of light isn’t changing, and that is a fundamental hard limit of the time it takes traffic to get from a data centre to a remote office. Applications are dependent on round trip time, and this is another area where WAN optimization can help. Long round trip times, due to high latency, make applications sluggish. That isn’t the only problem, because of the way that TCP works (using acknowledgement packets and sliding transmission windows), that latency can also limit the maximum bandwidth that an application can make use of. It isn’t unusual to see a high bandwidth link under used, because of high latency between a client and the server.

Digging into the Expand offering a little more, they have an interesting licensing model. Products are licensed by upstream bandwidth, that saves money if you are using large amounts of DSL, where the upstream bandwidth is more restricted. Something to bear in mind when costing out solutions. They are also doing a little bit of surfing on the virtualization wave, by providing a solution that can run inside a Virtual Machine. In general their offering seems to reach further than many of their competitors, since they have a server and desktop client. This gives more granular control, by user and application, and also reduces the amount of network hardware, where that is an issue.

The general trend towards desktop virtalization (eg VDI and see the post on VMWare), which is a server based paradigm with servers pulled back from branch into the data centre, means that network performance will become even more critical than it already is. Expand support a broad range of remote desktop protocols, supporting Sun, Citrix, HP and Microsoft solutions (and the open VNC offering).

One issue with adding additional hardware, such as WAN optimization boxes, into the network is potential negative impacts on reliability on performance for non-accelerated traffic. Expand are very conscious of this, and aim to ensure that no packet is on box for more than a 1ms and employ VRRP/HSRP redundancy protocols to deal with failure.

Expand is very strong in Satellite based networks, as well as the obvious applications in server-based computing mentioned earlier. However, businesses with large amounts of mobile traffic might want to investigate their solutions too, since the challenges are quite similar.

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Tagging makes navigating and organising large amounts of data significantly more efficient. Tactile CRM now even features a tag cloud, which makes a nice visualization to help you understand how your CRM tool is being used. As you’d expect, tags can be renamed, merges or deleted. 

I’ve blogged about Tactile before and we have given it a good try out here in the office. With the latest release, the number of sales opportunities supported in the ‘Micro’ and ‘SME’ versions of the service have also been increased. The team are very excited about the new functionality. I caught up with Jake Stride via Twitter earlier today, and over the course of a few tweets he said:

“It’s great to finally release all the hardwork the team has put into Tactile CRM based on our user’s feedback & suggestions over the last couple of months. We now have powerful searching and data maintenance, which even established competitors are missing and we’re not stopping there – we’ve already started on the next set of features which will see integration with other online services and some new graphing/reporting functionality”

For those wanting to dip their toes into the CRM water, you can sign up at http://www.tactilecrm.com/signup and use the code ‘redcatco’ in the ‘Sign up Code’ box, That will enter you into a prize draw for their business plan, which is worth £420. Sounds like a good deal!

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• Acquired on-line storage company Jungle Disk.
• Acquired specialist hoster Slicehost. (see Rich Miller’s post)
• Struck a CDN Deal with Limelight Networks (detail at CloudPundit)
• And launched a cloud strategy with Cloud Sites, Cloud Files and Cloud Servers.

I think they’ve rather swallowed this cloud computing thing, and swept in talent from the space. This week’s ecommerce expo in London gave me the chance to catch up with Fabio Torlini, Marketing Director of Rackspace.

We had a very feet-on-the-ground discussion around cloud computing. Fabio agreed that cloud wasn’t the future for everyone, but that it made sense for some. Rackspace sits very much at the premium end of the market, catering to mission critical needs. This has kept them clear of the commoditization of hosting, letting them invest in quality support and adopt a packaged approach to meeting customers’ needs.

I know from my time in the Valley that many a start up owes its success to Rackspace offerings, keeping servers going in all Internet weather. Cloud services haven’t had a great reputation, with some big players suffering a number of big outages. Fabio sees cloud services as a lower-SLA form of service. I’m not sure that I totally agree – cloud brings with it a very different philosophical approach than the one used to build web-applications on dedicated services. But there is a good argument for using cloud-based services for applications with elastic capacity demands and less stringent availability requirements.

Hosted and cloud services alike are a good way of moving spending from CAPEX to OPEX, smoothing big capital expenditures into recurring operational costs. That makes even more sense in times like today, when budgets are tight. It is also a more success-based model, since you buy more services as and when you have the business growth to justify them. No point being stuck with a huge, out of date building and servers for a business that didn’t hit its growth targets.

Another advantage of moving applications into a hosted environment, or for that matter a cloud, is gaining the economies of scale that a company like Rackspace have. Very few businesses would be able to afford to build their own state of the art data centre to match the recently opened facility in Slough. Rackspace understand dealing with customers directly, and also working with partners. According to Fabio, they have a strong channel model, with about half of their business being indirect.

Competition in the space is intense. When the likes of Amazon (with their S3 offering now out of beta) and Google appear in the competitive landscape, it is time for some strategic thinking and action. Even more so when Microsoft decide that they want to play in the cloud too. While many providers at ecommerce expo were holding their heads in their hands, Rackspace seem to be keeping their head above the clouds (don’t groan!). Their very high service levels, and the addition of some leading-edge cloud-based offerings, keep them at the top of the game.

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A blogger-in-technology that has much to say about the matter is JP Rangaswami of BT Design, and rightly so. His confused of calcutta blog is a firm favourite of mine, and of many others. “Learning about why people don’t adopt opensource” is a long, but worth-while read that circumnavigates many of the issues around open source software. It is in two halves. The first speaks to why people don’t use opensource:

They hate the principle.

They believe it’s insecure.

They’re out of their comfort zone.

They know a better way.

They don’t know about it.

They can’t do what they want with it.

The move represents serious operational risk.

The second half covers a case study that will make your head spin. As an IT manager and MD/CEO, the issues at the top of my agenda would be around skills and support.

• If there is a fault that affects my business, can I get it fixed?
• Do I have access to the skills to install and support it?
• Do the users have the skills to use it, or can they be trained?

• Zenoss - Network and system monitoring software.
• Enomalism - Build your own private elastic compute cloud.
• rPath -  Virtual appliances.
• Qumranet (part of Red Hat) - hypervisor technology.
• OpenAir - Project management software for professional service organizations.

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Talking earlier this month with Bill Beverley, Security Manager at F5 Networks, F5′s focus is clear: “deploying applications is really the central role of IT”. That’s certainly part of it. Keeping them up and running is too, and that has been bread and butter business for F5, delivering kit to put in front of servers to deal with the peaks in capacity and inevitable server failures.

Load balancing provides availability, but acceleration and optimization are also key in today’s infrastructures. That has made WAN optimization a hot area, especially now that bandwidth prices are no longer falling rapidly. Bill talked about how F5 are adding extra layers of security for web applications, something that is big in PCI and compliance driven environments. F5 see their solutions as complementary to the network firewalls, with the firewall dealing with the high-load, low-intelligence packet filtering. As Bill was keen to point out, “if you have a really efficient smaller piece of kit doing that job, then we can deal with traffic in an effective and more intelligent way.”

F5 boxes terminate the TCP connection and then regenerate it out of the other side. Since the devices have application-level visibility into the application streams, this is the perfect place to apply application acceleration and application security magic. However, this isn’t going to be a clean battle. The traditional firewall players like Cisco, Juniper Networks and Checkpoint, are keen for a piece of the action too.

A battle is brewing between the folks coming from the application towards the network, and the network folks heading up the stack to optimize applications. On the application side, F5 might be the baby gorilla, but there are a number of chimps ready to fight it out with them. Database security has seen specialist players like Secerno emerge. In talking to Bill about SQL security, his comment was “I think you will see consolidation in that area.” I wouldn’t take that as a statement that F5 is feeling acquisitive (although they have been), but rather that smaller players will get swept up or washed away in the coming quarters.

Hosting and data centres are becoming more and more sophisticated environments, as you can see from the diagram. Layers have been added to the network to provide security, then availability, and now application acceleration. Those layers are spreading in their functionality too, with SSL VPN being added to the security layer, and storage virtualization added into availability. The latter will help many IT managers to clear up the NAS(ty) mess on the network, by balancing across multiple NAS devices, and migrating data at rest to slower storage devices.

F5 solutions are purchased as a mixture of sticking plaster remedies and strategic design, where acceleration and availability are part of the fundamental architecture, rather than an add on when capacity gets exceeded. F5 have some interesting developments coming down the line in the virtualization space. Because they see the application performance, then can provide feedback into VMotion / ESX running on the servers, to tell it to provision extra servers or deprovision them. The integration works through SNMP and SYSLOG, so could potentially be open to other vendor combinations too. Certainly lots for F5′s channel partners to apply their expertise to.

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Despite what you read about IT cutbacks, the floors are packed with people catching up with the latest developments in the storage industry. Some are more human that others of course. Still, a friendly chap. Symantec is just one of the big names about.

Over the next couple of days I’ll share the best discoveries, together with an overview of how IT infrastructures are increasingly being optimized around storage. Its a large and rapidly growing space, wit new technologies and players to navigate.

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Jake Stride of Tactile CRM (photo: Benjamin Ellis)

It’s is fair to describe CRM as mainstream these days. It doesn’t take much convincing to get business managers and the sales team to see the value of tracking customer interactions.

Salesforce.com transformed the industry with their SaaS model (software as a service), but whilst they have wandered off to the shiny new pastures of PaaS (platform as a service) others have arrived to snap at their CRM heels. 

Most businesses need a finite set of features in their CRM system, and want something simple and usable that fits with their existing processes. After all, the whole point of Customer Relationship Management is to be able to understand customer behaviours and shepherd in repeat business. CRM is as much about process as it is about technology. One of the reasons new entrants are thriving is that users want something that is UaaS (usable as a service)!

A UK vendor that is on our radar, helped by their larger-than-life CEO’s presence on the recent Digital Mission, is Tactile CRM - They will be exhibiting at the upcoming Future of Web Apps in London.

Tactile CRM takes a pragmatic and open approach to CRM. They publish a roadmap of upcoming features, which is a good move for a SaaS player, especially as the SaaS model allows you to take advantage of new features as soon as they are released – no waiting to upgrade servers or desktop software, just fire up the web browser and go. 

It is free to sign up and try (pricing goes up to £75/month for 100 users) and provides an easy entry into the world of CRM. Contacts can be imported (and just as importantly, exported) easily to get you started and there is apparently an API in the pipeline.

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VMWare’s recent woes are well documented, a recent article on The Register gives a taster. Executive shuffles and iffy patches certainly haven’t helped the company’s image in recent times. But it isn’t all doom and gloom. The new CEO has been well received in some quarters and they have also announced a collaboration with Cisco to accelerate the virtualization of the data center.

The benefits of server virtualization are fairly widely understood (some of the main points were touched on in the “data center efficiency” post here a while back). Many people are also using VMWare on the desktop too, generally to support multiple operating systems at once. It is a big win for IT staff and programmers who have to cross between different platforms to get their jobs done. Virtualizing the OS means you get to work from one machine, but can quickly switch operating systems as and when you need to.

Things haven’t stood still on the server side though. The latest version of VMWare Fusion lets you go headless, meaning that the virtual machine has no consoles connected to it. Very useful in the data centre.

VMWare is also hooking itself to the Cloud, but not irrevocably so. Whilst they have strong competition, their technology remains strong. They know their space well and have responded to the challenges their users face.

With the introduction of new technologies such as VMotion (nicely explained in the depths of James Urquhart’s post on the VMWare and Cisco initiative) and vStorage, to go with vCloud – you get vNaming idea, right? – they continue to push the virtualization envelope.

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Why is that so bad? Well, it moves the security boundary for the corporate e-mail firmly outside of the corporate firewall. Hackers have recently had quite a bit of fun with a certain vice presidential candidate’s email (for the full back ground check out Michelle Malkin’s “The story behind the Palin e-mail hacking“. There are many different services out there, and the way that they handle authentication (the usernames and passwords) varies widely. A wily hacker could have access to a mailbox for months if not years before anyone realised.

What to do? The immediate sensible reaction might seem to be a big crack down, but actually it would be more productive to look at employee’s needs and provide mobile e-mail access. Monthly costs are now very low (on a par with line rental or a broadband account). It might also be time to take another look at a corporate webmail solution for laptop-based remote users.

You might not want users stuck in the office, but you don’t want their email running free!

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As Alan posts at Broadstuff, and as I’ve repeated like a stuck record all year, the money for the 2.0 crowd is ultimately in the enterprise. Not the big money, but the bulk of the money (ask me to explain some time).

The Inquisitr might be a little tongue in cheek with its list of wining ideas for TechCrunch50 2009 (worth clicking just for the LOLcat, srsly…), but as Alan says, they are on to something with the idea of jumping the technology into mainstream business IT. Get ready for the rush, it will probably arrive on a cloud too.

Meanwhile, the corporate IT vendor world is putting it’s 2.0 clothes on too. In a terrifying parallel – perhaps caused by sub-atomic disturbances from CERN - ESME has been born. What is ESME? It’s a plurk conversation that turned into a SAP Mentor project, and then to DemoJam. ESME is the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment. Twitter for Enterprise. Hang on? Is there an echo on the blog? Haven’t we been here before, at least twice.

Unlike earlier ideas of business twitter, ESME seems a very complete offering. There are instructions on how to use the code for yourself, and a desktop client too. Whilst many businesses are still trying to get to grips with Instant Messaging, the world has moved on. We are into persistent chat now, baby. And we can have it – either via Yammer, or open sourced via ESME. Time to get you staff chatting, Enterprise 2.0 style.

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I strongly agree with his thoughts on the interplay of search engines and recommendation sites. The fact is that people rely on both technologies to make their purchases, usually at different points in the buying cycle. Alan Patrick has a good discussion on the economics side on the Broadstuff blog. Interestingly, direct (human) recommendation still seems to dominate – even if it is via social media like Twitter - ultimately people still prefer to ask a friend.

But what about the Enterprise? Are we missing out in business? I’m not speaking about sales and marketing applications, or even about supply and sourcing, but about internal applications in knowledge management.

Search capabilities are often very siloed in the Enterprise, or at least incomplete across internal systems and applications. When we get on to the desktop seach is again fragmented (try searching inside spreadsheets as well as the inbox, contacts and files). OS X has some interesting functionality in this area; very suited for creative types and those of us who can never seem to remember where we filed things!

Recommendation provides significantly more intelligence that computing power can add today. The human element means that is can often outperform even the best search tools. This came across during the Q&A, where DSLR purchases seemed to be a common illustration (my photos from the session are in the Chinwag set here or extended out takes and arty shots here), as the questions spiraled up from understanding the content of the search, to understanding the context and broader semantic meaning.

Ultimately, search has to understand the intent of the searcher. Not just what they were after, but also why they were after it. This last piece is essential in delivering quality search results, since it shapes the best answer (rather than just ‘an answer’).

Humans do all of this automatically and intuitively: “Dave, do you know if we have any good sales proposal templates that would be good for a retail customer in the north of England?” We are a long way from getting that with a search engine, but recommendation and other social applications may well be beneficial to business for such applications.

A few more write ups (via the Chinwag team): Search vs Recommendation: different strokes for discovery? - the Chinwag Blog, Chinwag Live: Search versus Recommendation a no-brainer debate – Liberate Media, Search v. Review Sites – Wildfire, Chinwag live – recommendation and search -Hermione

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The customer set is growing from strength to strength, and already includes Boots, Edelman, John Lewis, Mastercard, O2 and other big names. Huddle.net inherits the usual benefits of web-based applications that make them so attractive. While the Headquarters might be in London, the service is available globally. There is no software to install, so users can be up and running in a few clicks (assuming you have a web browser already – a fairly safe bet these days).

Towards the end of the 90′s the emphasis shifted from intranets to extranets, as businesses started to use technology to drive better relationships with suppliers and partners. That sounds very retro now, but the systematic devide between the inside and the outside world still exists in many business applications. It grew out of the security religion of the time, but it doesn’t suit the modern business environment.

Today IT departments have to deal with cross-company virtual teams that are set up at the drop of a hat. Businesses rely on more and more on micro-outsourcing and relationships with customers and suppliers are more collaborative too, which all creates demands for new styles of working.

Huddle’s solution drops neatly into this environment, by providing project management together with an increasing range of collaborative applications. Starting with a free trial, there is a range of usaged-based charges. Recently I caught up with Alastair Mitchell, Huddle.net’s CEO, to find out more about the Huddle.net offering.

Huddle have their own blog and while the sandwich of the day feature might make you hungry, it gives a good peek inside of the company walls. There is a recently updated developer API, which enables external developers to build on the tool set (see here). The full version enables the creation of custom templates and the branding of workspaces. As you dig into it, it is a surprisingly feature rich application.

Huddle certainly isn’t alone in the market, but seems strong for document-orientated working, and is a very worthy alternative to on-premise applications like SharePoint et al.

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The post pivots around an interview with Harry Debes of Lawson Software. He predicts that SaaS will go nowhere, putting it in a bucket with ‘service bureaux’ and ‘application service providers’: 

“SaaS is not God’s gift to the software industry or customer community. The hype is based on one company in the software industry having modest success. Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability… …One day Salesforce.com will not deliver its growth projections, and its stock price will tumble in a big hurry. Then, the rest of the [SaaS] industry will collapse.

Salesforce.com’s Q2 Fiscal 2009 Financial Results (PDF) put them at $263 Million in revenues and GAAP EPS of $0.08. They were guiding at >$1Billion for FY09 revenues. Lawson’s Q4 2008 revenues were $233 million, so this is big boys talking big talk. Debes again:

“People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes.”

Selling services and selling products are fundamentally different. Yes, the big software houses sell services to back up their product offerings, but that is very different than being a services-lead business. Customers expect different things, which makes it very hard to transition from one to the other. Few businesses have done it successfully.

If you are looking to SaaS, you want to choose a supplier that has a good attitude towards data portability and security and an exemplary ability to manage and run data centers to strict SLAs. Either that or back-off to someone who has, and then have robust processes between the customer and that third party. That’s a very different set of attributes than you’d be looking for in an on-premise software vendor.

With the SaaS market growing so rapidly, that’s going to result in green eyes over in the on-premise software camp. Vendors can’t run build out SaaS on a product business model. The economics are different, and are currently changing rapidly. Back to Debes again:

“all your costs are up front and your revenue is over a five-year period, the more you sell, the more you lose… …You don’t break even till the four-and-a-half-year mark, but here’s a bigger problem: there’s no guarantee that that customer is still going to be yours in four years’ time”

The last part is exactly why businesses should be looking at SaaS – more leverage over the vendors. Yes, that’s bad news if you are a vendor, but only if you are afraid to play in a more competitive field. As to the economics, the SaaS vendors now have the opportunity to back the up front costs off to a Cloud service. These days, if a service is loosing more the more it sells, it’s time to take the product manager outside for a quiet word. There really is no excuse.

What we have is a win-win for the user and the application provider. The service bureaux was a rather wonderful thing, I’m just about old enough to remember them. They had a long and profitable life, and let businesses get on with their business. New applications could be turned up rapidly, and you had the benefit of their scale and buying power.

The ASPs got killed in the aftermath of the dot com bust, essentially collateral damage. So I’d say Debes is wrong, dead wrong. Far from off-premise software being a blip, I’d argue the exact opposite – our love affair with the PC and on-premise software is the blip. SaaS and Cloud Computing are simply the industry reverting to sanity.

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