The companies are PanoLogic,  www.panologic. com, a small firm doing very interesting things with a zero client, tiny footprint hardware unit, a proprietary virtualization protocol that traverses UDP, and a front end server that sits in front of VMware or XenDesktop, and DataMex, a small. innovative company run by a friend of mine (full disclosure, smiley) that for years has delivered innovative remote access and security solutions to small and medium sized Canadian firms. www.datamex.com

My absolute lack of ability to manipulate images may have let me down. I hoped to show you a picture of the very sexy and tiny PanoLogic unit above. If it is a blank space accept it as my usual incompetence (smiley) and go to the PanoLogic website.

I fell in love with Panologic years ago because it was a zero OS solution and the actual client was tiny, sleek, and cool.  I piloted it in a previous life and it worked fine. Unfortunately it was a stretch to advocate them in a large enterprise because

1. They were a small startup. And in truth they did have some financial issues later which they overcame

2. Their deployment approach is to put a front end Pano server in front of VMware or Citrix XenDesktop. In large enterprises this tends to get architects and their ilk antsy, particularly when it is a small company

3. They use their own protocol versus RDP, HDX, etc

But the  power of the  Panologic model  is that the firmware in their unit never  needs updating, that connectivity and management happens through their controller, and that they put a small agent on the virtual desktop to maximize multi-media support, takeover of  USB ports on the h edge, etc.  A simple, self contained system ideal for small companies who don’t want to invest in Citrix or VMware expertise, and want to be supported by strong local VAR’s, service providers, et al versus build a large “in house” team. .

And that is precisely what my friend Allan Cowen at Datamex is doing.  He is selling to small/medium business where the ability to deploy that tiny sleek thin client is attractive, either to reduce support costs, office space, etc or often because the units are going into hostile environments like warehouses. The Pano is a closed unit with no fans, hard drive, etc and thrives in those hostile environments. And it turns out that in SMB it is often easier to reap TCO benefits for desktop virtualization. Getting simple h/w deployed with no support or patching requirements, and having a relatively smaller centralized virtual back end seems to make this fairly compelling cost wise for many small businesses. 

So this feels like a great story. A smaller desktop virtualization company that I admire but won’t utilize in a large infrastructure context is doing well, and a deployment pattern I absolutely believe in, desktop virtualization and thin client, is getting penetration in SMB, which is really the bulk of Canadian business.   In the larger context I operate in, Wyse Zero OS thin clients and their ferocious corporate focus on Cloud and large enterprise is what I need, but I still like to see Pano doing well.

I feel compelled to say a few words about Allan Cowen as well. He is a unique blend of a savvy technology strategist and old fashioned entrepreneur. He has made a living identifying niches where large firms are failing to address a market place.  On a serial basis he sources a compelling technology that meets a need, often at disruptive pricing, concludes a deal with the supplier to bring the solution to Canada, and then sells/supports the heck out of that product, usually into that SMB vertical.  But he makes occasional forays into large enterprise, again solving specific problems, and again shines at just maniacal focus on servicing the client. Over the years I have learned much from him about connectivity products, security products, and specialized authentication tools. It now a pleasure to watch him introduce desktop virtualization into the lower end of the  market.

If you’re in the SMB marketplace, or solutioning for that market, take a look at Panologic and Datamex.

So recently I discovered something on my Kindle App for IPAD that I did not know I had. There is a “documents” view in the application, and if you email documents of certain format(sadly or thankfully not PowerPoint) to your-email at Kindle.com, the document shows up on your IPAD and for all I know all your other Kindle clients. (have not checked my Android device yet)

Now as it turns out an E-Reader or E-Reader app is a pretty effective way to read documents. It is much easier to do than opening email attachments, and sizing and format make the content easier to read. Extremely cool!

The first thing I would do if I did not work for a regulated industry with significant commitments to privacy and information protection would to stop printing forever. Kindle viewing beats carrying paper any time. I honestly believe most managers in small firms should consider this. Managers tend to be consumers of content not creators, and you already love consuming content in Kindle.

The other cool thing is you can manage your content on the Web via your Amazon account.

So it’s not that I’m against Dropbox, Box, and all the “personal cloud” services. They do a good job at getting documents and files to multiple platforms in a simple, friendly way, and you can create and edit content as well.

It’s just that I am a manager with a strong literary and story telling bent, and reading a PDF from a research analyst on the same Kindle that I am reading the latest books regarding strategic planning on just works for me.

But I can only do it for public domain content, nothing related to my employer or job. If I worked in a less regulated industry I would consider handing out tablets not just for mobile applications, but also to finally break the back of wasteful knowledge worker printing. Imagine when mobile screens become foldable and bendable.Take away the printers!

So I think most people I know have been involved in a discussion at work about innovation, how to foster it..maybe even question’s about “what is it?”

I always write from my perspective as an Infrastructure Technology practitioner, and innovation becomes even more problematic, since innovation within Infrastructure invariably feels both smallish/incremental and of limited business interest, given that the best infrastructure is invisible and simply promotes business agility

I would view real innovation as something that radically changes business process or customer offerings.

All that said, a lot of my peers and colleagues spend a lot of time thinking about innovation and ways to foster it. Invariably it comes down to some sort of idea collection process or tool, or a small team dedicated to creating or reviewing ideas. Frankly it never seems to come to anything useful.

Which is why I was so thrilled to read “The Innovators Way” by Peter Denning and Robert Dunham.  They denigrate idea generation as the driver of innovation and focus on adoption, which they see as much more about culture and practices. Their definition of innovation is “the adoption of new practice in a community”.   That really resonates for me.

And their eight practice framework, highlighted below, really helps me think about how any individual, or team, could start to think about innovation and behaviors that drive adoption of new ideas.  Check the book out!

In particular there was a great report called Future Work Skills 2020

http://www.iftf.org/futureworkskills2020

Which is a view of what some of the macro skills knowledge workers will need. It is a bit esoteric and will probably feel excessively “touchy feely” for those of you wanting to see ” C ## programming” as a specific skill, but it provides a very interesting springboard for leadership thinking about the attributes of a new workplace.

I’m not smart enough or arrogant enough to try to expound on these ideas. Check them out for yourself! But to whet your appetite let me share some of the key ideas.

1. They identify six drivers of change in the future work world/society

- extreme longetivity
- rise of smart machines and systems (but not SkyNet, smiley)
- computational world (think big data)
-new media ecology
-superstructed organizations
- globally connected world

2. and ten key skills for the future workplace

- sense making
- social intelligence
- novel and adaptive thinking
- cross cultural competency
- computational thinking
- new media literacy
- transdisciplinarity
- design mindset
- cognitive load management
- virtual collaboration

Some of these need deep explanation in the white paper, but I suspect many of you will, like me, sense the truth even in the description. We live in a changing world and if you’re familiar with the thinking of people like Don Tapscott, Peter Senge, Kevin Kelly, et al a lot of this will look familiar.

For a geek and a policy wonk like me this is manna from heaven (smiley)

Anyway don’t take my word for it. Check the report out!

While I believe that to be true, I do acknowledge that Infrastructure has “self imposed” cost, complexity, and a lack of agility on ourselves. Some particularly egregious examples would include:

1. The fact that most enterprises I talk to have failed to “do the right thing” and consolidate essential core infrastructure (Active Directory, DNS, email platforms, File and print services, etc). This complexity invariably increases cost and reduces agility, making it much harder to respond to business changes. The people I talk to always understand the issue, but have failed to muster the energy to secure funding and resources to do work this necessary consolidation.and it leaves a lot of internal infrastructure looking tired, old, slow, and expensive compared to new cloud offerings.

2. Identity management. Infrastructure teams don’t always agree that Identity Management is ours to solve, preferring to leave it in the hands of developers (gasp), architects (sigh) or separate Security teams (yikes). The issue with that is that for all of those folk identity management is a theoretical problem, whereas for Infrastructure it is a massive cost and client satisfaction issue, where we carry all the blame for the huge percentage of Service Desk costs which are associated with password provisioning and management, and the end user discontent with having to remember so many passwords, with the length of time it takes to provision new users, etc. Essentially Identity Management is the ERP of IT teams, where skilled architects and consultants crash and burn on the vagaries of IT provisioning processes just like ERP consultants run aground on business processes like supply chain management. To avoid this I really think Infrastructure teams need to partner up with all the internal stakeholders and lead the effort. We have the most at stake!

3. Automation is an area most infrastructure teams have failed mightily at, in spite of the fact it offers huge cost and quality opportunities. Most infrastructure provisioning and administrative processes are ferociously manual, and where automation tools are deployed they are weakly used and tend to become stand alone islands of automation versus an integrated automation portfolio. I’m not entirely sure why this happens, but suspect it is about the amount of investment and belief IT leadership places in automation. If we leave it to the line staff, automation will fail due a mix of distraction and passive resistance, where automation, much like virtualization, is perceived as a threat to jobs.

4. Complex, slow change and intake processes are other area’s where infrastructure teams put themselves at risk. No one doubts the need for rigorous process to protect service availability and quality, but if they are honest most infrastructure leaders will admit their teams have chosen to hide behind these processes and become slow, focused on internal measures versus agility and client satisfaction, and to a large extent have become inhibiters to modern business, which needs to run at “internet pace”, or as Gartner says, operate real time. To me this is the “tipping point” for internal technology infrastructure teams. If we don’t find a way to merge rigorous process with much faster execution, the allure (if not the reality) of cloud based services will incent business lines to try the cloud, with us or without us.

In the end I don’t really know if cloud in all its flavours addresses the issues above, but I am relatively sure that if we Infrastructure folk don’t start to address these problems we will be cut out of future decision processes!

If we are capable of honest introspection, all technology pros will admit the reasons that “Cloud” computing is attractive to modern enterprises relate to the state of information technology in most large firms. I would argue that all large enterprise technology infrastructure environments suffer from the following challenges, and that as I look at it from teh perspective of a an infrastructure professional:

1. cost and complexity is a major issue, in two flavors

a. imposed on the infrastructure team by business, application, and architecture decisions and approaches

b. Self imposed cost and complexity, typically by failures to drive internal improvements

2. Agility and flexibility, again in two flavours

a. imposed by the same actors as per (1) and their decisions

b. self imposed barriers to agility

3. Inability to operate in a seamless end to end manner

So for this particular blog entry, I want to look at cost and complexity, focused on the attributes imposed on infrastructure pros.. Again, if we’re willing to take an honest look at the current state:

4. Cost and complexity imposed upon the infrastructure is threatening implosion of the entire approach, as the costs to operate the installed base continue to grow while the capability and reliability of that same install base erodes away:

a. way too many servers, most of them underutilized
b. way too much storage, growing uncontrollably, and often allocated but not used
c. way too many server OS versions, database versions, erc and huge hardware and software currency issues
d. way too many applications, many of them doing much the same function
e. enterprise staff struggling with far too many accounts and passwords

Quite a mess actually. And it was not infrastructure/operations folk who created it, although one might argue we let it happen.

e. Application owners always want separate server environments based on motives both good and bad. They are trying to prevent other applications from impacting the availability/performance of their application, and jealously fight to ensure they don’t pay for any resources used by a separate application

f. The same application owners vociferously fight concepts like thin provisioning of storage, demanding that terabytes be allocated to their application in advance, driven by fear that the storage might not be available later when they need it.

g. Server OS versions proliferate, adding almost immeasurable complexity to the environment, because application owners either go for application functionality at the cost of technology standards, or fail to allocate sufficient funds for the lifecycle of an application, so that the infrastructure becomes littered with out of date or EOL versions of Server OS or database.

h. Business owners, application owners, and architects get fixated on a specific, unique capability for a new application, ignoring the fact that an existing application can supply 85% of the functionality needed, and happily introduce more servers, databases, and complexity into the environment

i. and lets not even talk about authentication and authorization, where developers happily but or build new authentication routines rather than use an existing Directory, or when they do use LDAP, overcome challenges by hardcoding locations for the authentication calls, all in the name of deployment speed or initial cost minimization, since ongoing costs must be the fault of the infrastructure/operations folk.

5. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to take this back to that old operations versus development battle. As the old saying goes, some of my best friends are application developers or CIO’s (smiley). I think what I am saying is that the traditional enterprise technology team’s inability to harmonize objectives, constraints, and long term operating models is what got us to our current state, and those same constraints will prevent large firms from realizing many of the apparent compelling cost and agility disruptions of “Cloud.” As I have fun posting my next few blogs on this topic, I’m relatively sure I will talk myself into a position that only massive cultural and organizational change within both business and technology teams can dig us out of this hole, whether the goal is improved internal technology infrastructure or effective use of “Cloud” options. We are victims of our past where we focused massively on clear demarcation of accountability to ensure proper focus on skills and simple success measures, and have “balkanized” ourselves into a place where the various elements of a business technology environment often operate at cross purposes.

“Cloud”/virtualization demands that infrastructure teams break down their internal demarcation barriers, but I’m not sure what causes the same disruptive change across business units, CIO’s, and we, their technology operations partners.

1. There will be an appliance/thin client at every desk/cubicle. All end user data and applications will be in the data centre and access via virtualization techniques. Essentially call the access device “furniture”

2. If staff need mobility beyond roaming from desk to desk , I want to provide that in a way that dos not require my organization to perpetuate the evil of managing an enterprise laptop burdened with data, policy, encryption, and difficult to support applications

a. Ideally people are bringing in their own laptops (BYOD), using Wi-Fi networks and virtual agents to access data and applications

b. But if not, then I want a light/zero management mobile device that my firm provides end users

Google Chromebooks appear to be a real candidate here. They can be managed very lightly over the Web, and have a Citrix Receiver to access virtualized applications. Their proposed model of rental over three years and automated replacement also seems interesting as a means of enforcing currency discipline on support teams.

For the past 9 months it has been an adventure trying to get opinionated on Chromebook. We “smuggled” a few units in from the US (Acer and Samsung did not manage to do a Canadian launch) and it was devilishly hard to get any support.

In talking to some smart folk at Google, they have brought Chromebook to Canada in what has to be the quietest/softest launch ever. They are now taking orders for Wi-Fi Chromebooks in a direct contract with Google, and arranging some VAR channels. I also understand they are working with Canadian carriers to find a way to include a 3G connection into the three year deals. I don’t think I am betraying any confidences here, this is public info, just very quiet public info.

I really think Google and the industry should be making a bigger fuss about this. I know Chromebook has not been loved by technology pundits, but their perspective is that of consumers. I think Chromebook and the acquisition model should be:

3. Of massive interest to Education. Most schools cannot maintain legacy PC “plants”. The mix of a simple, inexpensive (special deals for education) device and virtualized back ends (ideally operated by third parties) should be a disruptive change for this sector

4. and as enterprises continue to drive towards more virtualization and BYOD, one would think new approaches like this should be of interest.

So Google make some noise! (smiley)

1. it is focused on an individual’s access to apps and data, and even if there is “work related” data at on of the cloud locations, the focus is on accessing facilities like I-Cloud, DropBox, a personal PC at home, etc. It is an individual relationship with “data stores’

2. It is driven by the move to mobile devices like tablets, as they are tending to become a second or third device for most people, and they want access to content from all those devices with worrying about having to move it themselves.

I confess I use Wyse Pocket Cloud to access files on my home Mac and WIndows PC from my IPAD. And I have documents on ICloud, SkyDrive, etc and love the ability to access those documents from anywhere.

So why does my tummy hurt? I get that this approach to accessing data is orders of magnitude “more comfortable” that the traditional ways enterprise”s allow people to access data, or move it around (think Remote Access, or encrypted USB thumb drives, or emailing data around). And that people will soon bring their expectations for a “personal cloud experience” to work. But,

3. It is not clear tools line Box.net, Drop Box, et al will ever meet enterprise security standards, so are we going to have to purchase/deploy our own tools?

4. Enterprises are never going to give up on key policy and security needs like two factor authentication, the ability to block downloads to certain devices and/or peripherals, etc and I suspect that will complicate the end user experience and the joys of the personal cloud.

Beyond all that what worries me is timing. If all of the enterprise data employees wanted to access in a ” personal cloud paradigm” was already centralized, maybe in Sharepoint with a “DropBox like” front end, this might well feel like a means of advancing the centralization/virtualization agenda most of we infrastructure folk want…but given so much data is still locked in hard to access Windows file folders or desktop c:drives, I fear that early personal cloud roll outs will increase the demand for remote desktop takeover of office desktops.I do think that presents both service issues (it is harder to provide 7×24 support of desktops distributed across a firm versus virtual facilities in a data centre) and security issues (it is much harder to secure a host PC versus Citrix server or centralized document sharing server)

So my tummy continue to hurt(smiley) even as I hear success stories of people eliminating laptops in favour of remote desktop takeover, essentially an early version of a personal cloud. I’m sure most of us will stumble towards some middle ground.

Although a lot of this is being driven by some mix of tablet frenzy, consumerization, and the inexorable rise of Apple in everyone’s technology view, at some level a lot of this is not new.

1. Microsoft has long articulated a “three screen” strategy. At one point I think that was a PC, laptop, and smart phone, now I think they would say laptop, smart phone, and slate/tablet.

2. Sony just started talking about a four screen strategy, where they add an Internet capability (and USB data access) to the television.

I’ve talked before about my “man purse” (sigh) where I carry multiple E-readers, smartphones, cameras and the like but it was a recent work experience that caused me to start re-thinking my view of device proliferation.

I found myself one day last week using both monitors on my thin client, my Blackberry, and a tablet all at the same time, and it felt good (smiley). It felt productive!! LOL

- I had a great presentation up from a vendor in PowerPoint on one monitor
- a blog entry from Forrester opining on the vendor product on the second monitor
- I was thumbing an email to a few of my staff on my Blackberry, merging points from both the presentation and the blog to identify areas of focus for the team
- and finally I was making notes in EverNote on the tablet, capturing key ideas I wanted to keep handy for further thought. I do confess that EverNote is a reaction to the fact most enterprises consider Outlook data proprietary and work hard to prevent it being synced outside the firm. I’ve lost too much great data in Outlook notes when changing firms. But is was also just a way to save more data without switching out of any of my other views.

So if I’m using 4 screens and happy, as an infrastructure professional how can I argue my end users should not have the same capability?

I don’t! But I do argue that all those screens and devices do not work with local data and applications. I actually think firms can afford to fund multiple screens IF

3. Windows applications and data are managed centrally in the data centre, and access via virtualization protocols or HTML5 (leaving the access device thin and unmanaged/lightly managed)

4. any data synchronized to a mobile device is done in the “secure caching” paradigm of BES, ActiveSync, et al where mobile devices and data can be managed from a central policy server, and very little active management done of the mobile device

If those conditions apply, then I believe most firms can fund more devices for their folk, but just as importantly virtualization and secure caching/syncing means that those employees who want to use more devices can bring their own.

Convergence on a single device? Pah! Bring on device proliferation IF we can control the apps and data.

But there is no way that the continued slow growth in Western economies, and resulting pressure on corporate revenues, is not going to have a major impact on IT. The challenge for we practitioners is to respond to the challenge and ensure that the IT impact is one driven by strategic investment and cost reduction, not knee jerk cost cutting that reduces service levels and erodes infrastructure health and currency. Let’s be honest. When revenue and employment is constrained, some Service Providers will be tempted to put in lowball labour arbitrage based outsourcing offers that if accepted will be long term service disasters for the enterprises accepting that offering. The traditional outsourcing model is dead (or at least dying) and it is important that IT infrastructure practitioners help lead/drive their employers to the technically complex (cloud, virtualization, SaaS, private/public mix) but economically disruptively positive future.

So what do we need to do?

1. Drive out complexity wherever possible. Most distributed IT infrastructures I am aware of still have massive embedded complexity due to lack of standardized hardware and software, poorly deployed infrastructure “glue” like Directories, DNS, ITIL Service Management tools, and a failure to build continual improvement into all infrastructure activities. It is time to come clean! Lay out the potential benefits in terms of cost reduction and agility improvements. Fight for the one time investment $$ to achieve perpetual simplification.

2. Embrace hybrid IT infrastructure delivery. There will be times when it makes much more sense to use SaaS or IaaS to drive out cost or respond much more quickly to business need. But we can’t let those deployments become islands isolated from the rest of the infrastructure. Build the capabilities now to allow seamless integration of public and private infrastructure…show the business we are true partners.

a. It is critical that we build federated identity capability for our end users. Provisioning/deprovisioning of SaaS identity should just be a step in the same processes used for in house applications and infrastructure. Make it simple and secure and once again we have enabled the flexibility and agility our business partners need from us. Look at Citrix’s Netscalar Cloud products or VMware Horizon – they take an end user centric view of federating identity versus a traditional, architecture centric SAML view. Same technologies and protocols, just focused on end users.

b. Build your internal server and desktop virtualization infrastructures so that they can migrate workload to an externally hosted cloud. It feels like overhead and security risk now, but once done you’ll have the ability to sustain sort term workload increases at low cost, arbitrage server providers for workload shifting on demand, and you’ll have built the flexibility and demand driven computing model firms will need to survive a low growth decade.

3. And always remember everyone is going to be stressed, and great service providers supply means of easing stress. Beyond internal cost pressures we will live in a world of bad/deflating economic and political news, labour unrest, likely political unrest, and depending on your belief system climate change. Add to that demographic challenges and people dealing with aging parents, unemployed kids, and frankly decaying transportation infrastructures and our fellow employees and LOB “clients” are going to be a stressed, cranky bunch. IT cannot cure that but to the extent we can anticipate the need for much better mobility and remote access to give people options on how/where they work, and deliver on that…and if we can just make it simpler and easier to use technology everywhere…we will be more valued and appreciated as an internal resource. Make simple, powerful “work from anywhere” technology a key part of your plan going forward.

Far smarter people than I will determine if there is anyway to avoid the economic and sociopolitical challenges of the next few years..but I think our success as IT Infrastructure pros demands that we recognize that as hard as we have worked to date, there are harder times coming and we need to take the right steps to prepare.