While IP battles might not concern lesser players, the ones among the tech titans hurt us all by creating an atmosphere of uncertainty in the market.

A recent survey found that contrary to popular perception, only 20 percent of respondents felt that protecting IP rights was a big driver of their technology purchases.

When you look around at the news these days, you know that IP law is having a big impact on how big companies are spending their money. It seems that every company is playing defense with patents instead of taking the time innovate. High profile purchases such as Google buying Motorola Mobility was probably driven more by the company’s patent cache more than its technology holdings.

Last month Facebook bought a bunch of patents from Microsoft who had spent a billion dollars to buy them from AOL.

And on and on it goes.

Yet a survey conducted by Morrison & Foerster and 451 Research found that almost half of respondents (47 percent) didn’t consider patent holdings at all when making a technology acquisition decision. Of course the flip side of that, means a lot do.

Regardless, it seems that the patent wars are being fought at the highest levels of the technology sector among the mighty titans of the industry including Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft (not to mention Oracle). These companies in particular are always looking for leverage on the others, not content to battle it out in the marketplace where it matters.

What does it matter to IT? It matters because these lawsuits create uncertainty in the marketplace, which is of course the intended goal. Win or lose, if you create confusion, you might prevent IT from making a quick decision about whether to go with a cloud, open source or one proprietary solution over another.

The survey results are telling only to the extent they show that what concerns the titans in a deal, might not be the same thing that concerns you at a smaller company. As a CIO or IT pro, you just want to straight answers to simple questions such as, ‘If I use Java, and am I suddenly going to be in Oracle’s cross-hairs?’

Unfortunately, instead of leaving it to the market to decide these questions, we now have battles going on inside court where as you know anything can happen, or just as bad left to legislators who can’t get their own email, yet are making technology decisions that have a huge impact on you and your company.

While the survey might have found that IP interests don’t have impact on everyone’s M&A activity, the fact that the largest companies are clearly taking this into consideration has a huge impact on the rest of the market — spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt better than any misinformation campaign ever could.

Photo by duncan1890 | iStock Photo.

Web architect Nicole Sullivan says legacy systems present a big problem when it comes to fixing web performance issues.

IT management seems simple enough — in a vacuum. But the trouble is nobody has a technology vacuum unless you are a virgin start-up with no legacy systems in place. Most companies however, don’t have the luxury.

Most organizations are in fact burdened by a slew of legacy systems and if you are a hospital or insurance company, you could still have databases dating back to the 60s and 70s. When it comes to monitoring, this presents even larger obstacles.

So says Nicole Sullivan, a web architect and blogger at Stubbornella, in an interview with Mac Slocumb as part of the Velocity Profile Series. For Sullivan trying to manage the older systems while instituting a new one is particularly tricky.

“The balance between keeping the legacy running and managing to do improvements, until the legacy can be removed, is probably the hardest problem. And it happens on almost every project,” Sullivan said in the Velocity Profile interview.

And Sullivan knows from whence she speaks. She’s worked on some major projects over the years helping the likes of Facebook and Box solve problems, which she linked to the CSS. In Facebook’s case it was huge for CSS and it was having a big impact on performance. She says by working out the human issues behind the coding problems, she was able to solve the issue.

And that’s the tricky part of performance issues. What exactly is causing your problem? Sullivan said that Box also had issues related to a messy CSS, and when she helped them resolve those issues, many other performance issues settled into place.

The question is how do you find that key problem that can help resolve the major issues you might be having around performance on your site. The challenge for sites like Facebook and Box is that their sites may work fine for a time, but as they scale every upward by adding new users, performance can lag, and as a monitoring pro, you are charged with finding one or two trigger issues from a universe of possibilities.

Perhaps that explains why someone with Sullivan’s unique skill set is in high demand in Silicon Valley to solve these issues. Not surprising, she considers untangling CSS like she did for Box and Facebook to be her special strength.

For IT pros, whether it’s a monitoring issue or layering a new system on top of an old one, the legacy issue Sullivan brought up particularly rings true. Trying to make these old systems compatible with the new ones represent a huge challenge and figuring out which of the systems might be causing a glitch is even more difficult, the more complex the environment.

Photo by  cmnit on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Big Data may seem like a lot of hype, but the fact is data can give you a strategic advantage in your business.

It’s clear that we’re collecting more data, but the question is to what end? Whether it’s web analytics, web performance analytics or any other type of data, it doesn’t do us any good until we actually make use of that data to learn something.

And it makes sense that at least some of that data analysis is going to take place in the cloud. Why? Because the cloud can scale like crazy and there’s one thing we know about Big Data is that it’s big and just getting bigger all the time. That requires storage and processing power and analytics.

That’s why companies like Amazon and EMC are so ga-ga over the prospects of managing all that data for you because they sell these very services and they see a serious opportunity where Big Data is concerned. Amazon is taking it even further; they are not just helping you store and process that data they are also giving you access to public data sets through Amazon.

That’s right, Amazon is giving you even more data to process. Is that a good thing? Actually, yes it is because as it turns out, the more data you have, the better answers you can get and the more interesting things you can do.

As an example, Tim O’Reilly was talking about the impact of Big Data in an interview recently. O’Reilly used the Google Self-driven car as an example saying not that long ago, the Self-driven car could only go a few feet, but today it can drive miles without a hitch. What’s changed?

O’Reilly explained it wasn’t the technology that drives the car or the artificial intelligence that had improved so dramatically in the interim. It was the amount of data.

Just this morning a story broke that Apple may be dumping Google Maps from the iPhone in favor of its own mapping technology. My first thought was this might be good since Google Maps tends to suck resources on the iPhone and a native Apple maps app might do better. But on Google + another person suggested this was a bad idea because Google Maps is more mature than anything Apple comes up with and Google has better data.

There is it is again. The idea that data can be a strategic advantage over the competition, and if it works for Google, which has gotten quite good at collecting data sets and then making clever use of them, it could also work for your company

And all of that of course is going to require tools to process, understand and draw conclusions from all that data, whether it’s an individual decision such as which web page to serve a person based on what you know about them or a more complex decision about how to distribute resources around your data center, or something even more strategic such as which products should get the lion’s share of your marketing resources based on what the current data is telling you.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at Big Data as a term and say it’s just another nugget from the IT hype machine or to dismiss it because you’re not Google or Facebook,  and you don’t really have the volume of data to deal with anything that would be called Big Data. But the fact is you don’t have to be a mega company to take advantage, especially when you start mixing publicly available data sets with your own.

Sure Big Data is being over hyped right now, but just because it’s in a major hype cycle doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paying attention. Just remember he who has the most data is in a good position to win, so long as you can find ways to understand that data. That alone should get your attention.

iOS devices might be seen as toys in some IT circles, but a new tool that lets you run Unix applications might change that perception.

I saw a title the other day: iOS 5 Gadgets: Fun Toys That Can Mess With Enterprise Security. It got me wondering: Is that how IT pros see iOS devices — as toys? Well, a new tool from OpenText could change that perception because it lets you run Unix on your iPad. Now we’re talking a serious device, right?

The tool, Exceed onDemand, lets IT pros (and others) access Unix applications inside the enterprise from an iPad in a safe and secure fashion. In other words, your iPad can act as Unix terminal. How great is that?

The technology is built on the Thin X protocol, which OpenText claims means, it ensure fast access on any connection. What’s more it lets you share your active sessions between your desktop and mobile devices without a fuss. For engineers or others running high-end Unix applications this could be a huge productivity boost enabling employees to quickly shift between devices, depending on their requirements.

What’s more, Exceed on Demand has a central administration tool that lets you set uniform governance and security policies across all devices.

But that’s not all Open Text has been up to in terms of enterprise productivity tools for the iPad. OpenText recently released Tempo. Think of this as an enterprise-class Dropbox or Google Drive. It provides a secure way to share documents across devices including desktops, laptops and mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets.

In addition, OpenText Travel Receipt Management for SAP Solutions supports mobile capture of receipts. For those of you who travel, that means you can use your iPad to capture your receipts and SAP manages them for you. No more envelopes full or receipts, just capture them on the fly. (I recently found a similar app for my iPhone and it’s going to change my life.)

Of course, OpenText isn’t alone in catering to IT on the iPad. Last year VMWare came out with an IT monitoring tool for keeping watch on host servers and any virtual machines associated with the host.

Over time as these devices become more popular, you’ll continue to see more and more ways to access enterprise software from the iPad and other tablet devices.

And perhaps at that point, they will no longer be considered toys to the the pros, but useful portable machines that let you get your work done without being tethered to your desk.

Photo by psd on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

For some reason, people don't understand the value of monitoring when it's clearly all about the bottom line.

Chances are at least a percentage of the IT pros who read this blog are monitoring professionals. That means, you make sure your web site is running optimally and it’s important work. Problem is not enough people seem to get the value of what you do.

I read an interview with Sergey Chernyshev, who is Director of web systems and applications at truTV as part of the O’Reilly Radar Velocity Profile series, which helps publicize the upcoming Velocity Conference.

When asked what his biggest challenge as a Monitoring pro, Chernyshev answered this way:

The toughest is to make people believe that [Web Performance Optimization] is important and change perspectives on how to approach performance.

It doesn’t seem like it should be all that hard, but it remains esoteric for all but a few people inside the organization. People might not understand the down and dirty details of monitoring and performance, but surely they get what happens when things aren’t working.

You can be sure your bosses in the C-Suite get that performance relates to traffic, which relates to dollars. The more directly your web site deals with core business issues, the more important that becomes. If you’re doing business directly on the Internet as an eCommerce site, it’s inextricably linked to your bottom line.

Picture you’re shopping for books. You go to Site A and it’s slow. It takes a while for the screen to paint. When you try to conduct a search, it’s pokey. Most people lose patience quickly on the Internet. Chances are in fact, you might only have a few seconds to hold their attention. If you spend that decision time just getting up and running, you’ve probably lost.

Now compare that with a snappy site that opens immediately. You conduct a search and the results pop into place. You click an option. You click buy. It’s all smooth and easy and effortless. Which site do figure is going to get better bottom line results?

That’s why it’s so crazy that people don’t understand the implications of performance more clearly. As with so many things in IT, perhaps it’s just a communication issue. Drop all the geek-speak and just talk about dollars and cents.

Clearly if the site’s down you’re losing money, right? That’s simple enough to understand, but where it gets more complicated is break-downs by degrees, ones that affect just certain aspects of the population using one operating system or from one particular area. Sometimes it’s about something you’re doing. Sometimes it’s got nothing to do with you.

But regardless of the reason or who it’s affecting, your goal should be to be operating optimally (whatever that means to you) at all times. And when it’s not, it costs money. That seems easy to enough to comprehend doesn’t it? It should. It all comes to down to business.

IT apparently has a reputation problem. You’re aloof, overpaid and you don’t do enough. Or so says a post in The Tech Republic that suggests 10 reasons why you’re underappreciated and, well so sorry to say it, not very well liked or even respected inside your organization.

IT can't seem to shed its bad reputation, but if you look at finding ways to be more cooperative with business, units, you might find it improves.

I’m not sure I agree with many of these reasons or even that it’s true. Blanket statements tend to be just that, and while they make good blog posts (something I know a thing or two about) and generate some page views, and might even ring true; they certainly don’t apply to all companies at all times.

But let’s start with the premise that you have a less than stellar status in your company. Have you have stopped to consider why?

A little introspection never hurt anyone, right? Could it be that you’re seen as an obstructionist when it comes to new projects? Say, I’m a manager. I know I need some sort of technological solution to help my department. I do some reading and I find what I consider to be a good approach. I go to you and you shoot it down…every time.

There’s a security issue. It’s not compatible with the XYZ system. The lawyers won’t approve it or you’re just not familiar with it and you don’t want to learn another new system to satisfy the whims of yet another manager who did a little reading.

The trouble with this attitude today, is that there are ways around you. You are not the center of the company technology universe anymore. You are consultants working with other teams to solve the high-level technological problems. If you just say no all the time, nobody’s going to consult with you. They will just find a way to do it alone.

And as you know, there are plenty of ways to go it alone. Unless you plan to shut down the Internet at your company, you might as well face the inevitable. And before you think that’s a good idea, remember if it didn’t work for Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, chances are it will backfire on you too.

As Mubarak learned the hard way, when you shut down Internet access, dammit, it hurts your business.

So maybe it’s time to take that reputation problem to heart. Maybe you need to be a little more cooperative and leave the old-school protectionist issues behind. Decide what is truly important and why, and then work with business owners to set up reasonable guidelines everyone can follow.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, but if you want to shed that bad reputation, it’s going to take some work — and two-way communication.

Photo by  moonhouse on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Enterprise 2.0 social software could provide a more social way to communicate and collaborate with colleagues.

It’s Friday and that’s kind of a social day where you go out with friends after work or look forward to a weekend of social activities, and that got me thinking that perhaps it’s time for IT to be a bit more social too. Enterprise 2.0 social software could help.

In fact, Mike Vizard has a post this week on IT Edge about a new social software package designed specifically for IT pros. That’s fine as far as it goes, if you all you wanted to do was communicate and collaborate with your fellow IT pros, but what about when you want to communicate with folks outside the department.

There are actually plenty of tools available to help you do that. Just this week, for example, Jive released a product called Jive Anywhere, a browser plug-in that embeds Jive social functionality right into the browser, so you can use it to interact with live social sites on the Internet such as Facebook or LinkedIn or within browser-based apps such as your CRM or ERP tools.

This provides a simple way for you as an IT pro to share information with your colleagues, but it also provides a way to interact simply and easily with other employees in the company without providing a ton of intervention from you to make it happen.

There are other ways social software can help you as an IT pro too because users can help one another in a social system instead of calling IT for every little problem they encounter. If someone knows a work-around for a Word numbering problem, he or she can share it with the world if someone asks.

AIIM recently did a study, which was lead by Andrew McAfee, the MIT professor who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 to describe bringing social tools into the enterprise. (You can download the three PDF reports for free.). These reports do a good job of articulating when social works and when it doesn’t (because it’s not a panacea), but one area where it was particularly well suited was Enterprise Q&A.

Quoting the report, “We learned in our research that in many organizations social business technologies are used both to broadcast questions, and to broadcast updates and knowledge permanently and broadly throughout the organization.”

This has broad implications across the company in terms of easing information sharing and the business impact that can have. John Hagel from Deloitte speaking at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston told a story of a big city bus department that put Enterprise 2.0 micro-blogging tools to work to help bus maintenance garage managers share information about parts. It provided a way to find parts that was much more efficient than email or phone, and had the positive business result of reducing bus downtime and getting the busses back out on the street faster.

Socializing the enterprise has all kinds of great benefits. It can help you as IT pros communicate better with one another and with others across the organization in a much more natural fashion than email, a much more efficient manner than face to face meetings and much quicker than the phone because it’s one to many communication.

And it has the added benefit of accumulating knowledge and providing business benefits you might not have considered.

Photo by  Rob Enslin on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Big Data has the potential to transform the way we do business by giving you access to real-time data combined with the ability to make previously unseen connections.

Among the many trends slamming into IT today is the idea of Big Data, and while it is no doubt the buzzword of the day, there is definitely something happening around the idea of using data to understand your business better.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke to MIT professor Andrew McAfee about this notion of big data. McAfee is best known for being the guy who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, the idea of bringing social tools into the enterprise. He is currently principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Busines and recently wrote a book called Race Against the Machine with Center for Digital Business colleague, Erik Brynjolfsson.

McAfee likens Big Data to the invention of the microscope in that the microscope allowed scientists to see things that were previously invisible. By the same token, Big Data exposes information that you couldn’t necessarily find before. “We now have massive amounts of low-level details and pretty powerful tools to get abstract meaning,” McAfee said.

And he believes this is going to be as big for the world of business as the microscope was for biology. That’s because with a bigger body of data, the more you can learn if you are careful and rigorous in how you handle that data, he explained.

And in this brave new world of big data, we are going to need subject experts to ask the right questions. That could be highly trained data scientists or it could be just people who know a lot about a given subject because of their background.

McAfee says in the new enterprise where Big Data is going to be playing an increasing role, knowing what questions to ask is going to be key. He sees new jobs for people who can  ask the right questions because as he says, “Computers are great question answerers and fairly lousy question askers.”

He adds, “I haven’t seen a machine that knows what questions to ask. That’s a key issue. This is where good old fashioned experts still have a role to play,” he said.

As IT Pros, you are going to have to learn to process this big data and find tools for the non-technical experts and suits in the C-Suite to mix and match the data. The big difference between this and traditional business intelligence is that with BI you were looking back where you were at a given point in time, whereas with Big Data, you can analyze data in real time and begin to make more intelligent decisions about where to put your resources at any given moment.

As McAfee points out this is not going to reduce jobs. If anything, it’s going to require more people to work with this growing pile of data. “Big data isn’t going to drive out people. It’s going reduce the market share decisions we make by gut and that would be a good thing.” And IT pros are going to be on the front line of this transformation.

When Facebook engineers faced a monumental monitoring problem, they went to work on it themselves and developed a custom tool to help them sift through all the data.

For Facebook, and for many companies faced with the blessing and curse of so much data, Facebook could usually tell when something was amiss, but they couldn’t tell why. It’s a data problem that many large companies face — even if it isn’t quite on the scale Facebook has to deal with.

In a blog/note (whatever they call it on Facebook), Facebook engineer Lior Abraham explained how the Facebook team relies on real-time instrumentation to monitor how well Facebook is performing over time. The trouble is they accumulate so much data across so many different dimensions that their traditional data analysis tools couldn’t keep up with their need for information.

As you build larger data sets, it gives you the ability to develop more sophisticated queries and get answers to questions you might not have even considered as you mix and match data in new ways, but you need your tools to come up with the answers to those questions quickly.

When you’re Facebook, in fact, any slow down is unacceptable and when you’re dealing with literally hundreds of millions of people hitting your site every hour of every day and sharing tons of new data, you need to know if you’re site is performing up to par.

And if it’s not, you need to be able to figure out why, and for Facebook, even more so than your average large data center, it could be anything — from someone turning on a test to a new feature somewhere to a data center problem in one of the many countries where Facebook operates.

When faced with this issue, Facebook did what many companies are doing when it comes to processing and understanding big data sets. In the best hacking and open source style, Facebook engineers created a tool they call Scuba, by themselves on the fly. One engineer created the back end, another the front. An intern improved the speed and so forth, and it has become an invaluable tool for Facebook to track what’s happening on its systems and why.

Unfortunately, there is no indication that Facebook plans to open source this tool (as Netflix did with their suite of monitoring tools), but it shows the potential of big data sets, the creativity of engineers when faced with a monitoring problem and the power of need to drive innovation, proving after all these years that necessity is still the mother of invention.

You might not have the data issues that a company like Facebook does, but surely you can learn from what they did to solve their issues — and perhaps apply that same ingenuity to help solve the monitoring issues going in your organization.

Going green is not just good the environment, it's smart business.

When it comes to running a Data Center, what are your biggest costs? Chances are, it’s heating and cooling and keeping the lights on. Since you aren’t likely to start running your own electricity generating plant, there are many steps you can take to control the cost of heating and cooling your data center — and if it saves you money why wouldn’t you do it?

I’ve often said companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! are exploring green technologies to run their massive data centers, not so much because they care about the environment — although they might — but because it saves money and running those data centers is a significant part of the cost of doing business for these companies.

You may think your data center is too small to consider some of these techniques, but like an individual homeowner throwing some solar panels on the roof, there are steps even smaller companies can take make their data centers greener.

In fact, a recent ZDNet article looked at an Albany, NY company that is generating 75 percent of the electricity it needs to run its 1.5 MW data center using solar panels it installed on the roof of the data center building. Apple recently announced that solar panels will account for 60 percent of the Maiden, North Carolina data center’s power requirements and the new data center under construction in Prineville, Oregon will run on 100 percent renewable sources when it’s done.

The ZDNET article goes into other techniques as well including buying an older building, which on its face might not sound like an efficient way to heat and cool, it is as the author pointed out, resusing is ultimately very green, and you can design the interior of the building to work for your purposes.

If you analyze the biggest costs of your data centers, it’s probably not the hardware itself or the personnel. It’s the energy and you can look for ways to attack that. Even if a solar array on the roof will be a significant investment, it is one that will likely pay for itself in tangible and less tangible ways.

For starters, the more energy you generate with those solar panels, the less you are paying to the energy company, but you could also benefit from tax breaks for businesses the government is offering to encourage businesses to use cleaner energy sources.

But you also look forward-thinking when you go green. Those solar panels on the roof tell the world, you’re a hip and caring company (even if you’re doing it to please the shareholders more than the environmentalists).

But the real reason you should do it is because by using fewer fossil fuels you’re doing right by your planet and without that, there’s not going to be a business.

Whatever your reasons for taking a step towards making your company greener, you should just do it. Most will consider practical business reasons over egalitarian ones, but the end result is the same. Lower costs for you and a cleaner environment for all.