In a new survey from Embarcadero Technologies, over half (52 percent) of application developers say they don’t have enough time to complete their work and nearly a third (31 percent) said poor unit and system testing is their top challenge. Conducted in May, the 606 participants included developers, analysts, and architects. The full report, which includes questions on Windows 7 development, can be found at http://www.embarcadero.com/reports/developer-survey (no registration required).
Thirty percent of respondents said they must deal with insufficient or no requirements. Other complaints include “deficient planning, slow tools and technologies, and scope creep,” according to Embarcadero. Though communication is often a problem on projects, few developers said it was a problem for them.
The survey revealed that coding takes up most of a developer’s day according to 37 percent of respondents. “Designing, analyzing and debugging were also mentioned frequently,” the company noted. That’s in sharp contrast to how developers want to spend their day. Many lamented “about time constraints impacting their ability to focus on their own professional development,” and nearly six in ten software developers wished for “more time to learn new programming languages and technologies or to keep their skills up to date.” Over a third (36 percent) wanted more time for testing, and about 33 percent “would add documentation to notes and code if they had time.”
What new technologies should developers be studying? Mobile applications will be hot, respondents say: 56 percent say it will have the greatest impact on development, followed by 64-bit computing (50 percent), parallel programming (47 percent), cloud computing (31 percent), and virtualization (29 percent).
-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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Ahead of its user conference next week, SHARE (www.share.org) conducted a survey of its members -- enterprise IT professionals at IBM customer sites, including retail, distribution, education, R&D, health care, computer manufacturers and software developers. The organization asked participants to select the top IT issues they face.
Topping the list of 162 participating companies: Cost management (reduction and/or avoidance), which was cited by over half (55 percent) of respondents, followed by virtualization (46 percent), “improving value of IT to the business and/or deriving competitive advantage from IT” (43 percent), enterprise security (36 percent), and the aging/demographics of current IT staff (27 percent).
Of those putting virtualization in the top spot, server virtualization was the top issue, followed by storage virtualization and network virtualization.
Other issues noted include business continuity planning (27 percent), cloud computing (26 percent), and compliance (25 percent). Of the respondents ranking cloud computing as a key issue, the focus was on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), followed by software as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service.
Most respondents came from companies with 1000 to 10,000 employees (32 percent), followed by those with 10,000 to 50,000 employees (27 percent). The greatest number of respondents (35 percent) came from finance, banking, and insurance, following by computer and equipment manufacturers and software developers (these two categories were lumped together) at 20 percent.
SHARE is an independent association run by volunteers that provides education and training and networking opportunities. One theme of the organization’s Boston conference is the benefits cloud computing provides enterprise IT in lowering IT expenses. The conference will also examine “how virtualization is being used to foster rapid innovation and increase agility to respond quickly to the dynamics of today’s enterprise organization,” according to a release, as well as “how IT organizations are dealing with competing budget priorities in challenging economic times.”
--James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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Is agile software development the panacea IT is looking for to accelerate application development and improve application quality? Thanks to a tough economy and facing flat personnel and technology resources, enterprises may find useful the results of a new survey from consortium Requirements.net that reveals how enterprises are using agile IT practices and how they're getting the most from the development approach.
The appeal of agile is strong: improved application quality, increased productivity, and faster time to market. Business/IT alignment is also driving the adoption, with many respondents having visions of better end-user/IT collaboration. Projects "continue to be plagued with unacceptable levels of waste and rework," that agile, respondents hope, will solve. However, although the majority of companies (57 percent) are using agile methods in up to a quarter of their projects, only 18 percent are fully embracing the approach in 75 to 100 percent of their projects, according to the survey.
What makes agile projects successful? A majority (58 percent) said that "validated requirements (or requirements that have been reviewed, agreed, and accepted by key stakeholders) and requirements-driven testing are the top control points to ensure business and IT alignment when using Agile." Validated agreements make it easier for IT to meet goals. Also valuable: "clear and precise requirements ensure quality assurance efforts are tightly targeted and project goals are more achievable within tight sprint timelines."
Those requirements shouldn't be in the form of long, dry text descriptions. "Visual requirements provide the most likely chance for correct stakeholder understanding and more efficient development sprints," the report explains. "Process diagrams, visual use cases, and story boards" are the best techniques for expressing requirements according to 72 percent of respondents.
Respondents claim agile does genuinely bring benefits: 39 percent cited improved time-to-market for their software projects, and nearly a quarter (24 percent) said improved resource utilization was the top benefit of a shift to agile. Success also depends on the active participation of the line-of-business users, from participation in user-story reviews to validating requirements.
Survey participants came from a cross-section of industries, including manufacturing, technology, health care, and financial firms; 61 percent were from companies with at least 1000 employees.
The full report is available at http://www.requirements.net/downloads/agile_and_the_business_analyst_30062010.pdf
-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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In the wake of the recession, IT is replacing fixed costs with on-demand strategies and processes that can handle cost variability so it can be positioned to take advantage of business opportunities as they minimize risks in a today’s high-volatility economy. How? By exploiting new service delivery models that help an enterprise respond faster.
Tony Chauhan and Honorio J. Padrón III, the authors of The Hackett Group’s study, <em>On-Demand Sourcing: Driving Costs Down and Value Up in a Period of Increased Business Volatility</em>, note that “effective strategies link business performance with IT-driven initiatives, responsiveness, and the costs of service delivery, transforming the IT function into a valued business partner. This contrasts sharply with traditional, one-dimensional strategies focused mostly on just cutting IT costs.”
Say goodbye to capital-intensive costs that typically interfere with changes in capacity. Business demand is too variable these days, says Hackett’s analysts, pointing out that “the fragile economic recovery underway makes efforts to predict business demand riskier than ever.” Competition is tougher, too, especially from emerging nations, “which are projected to have higher growth rates than Western countries in the recession’s aftermath.”
What should IT do? According to Chuhan and Padrón,
We believe that the highly unsettled conditions that characterize the economic climate today will never fully abate. Therefore scalable, pay-for-use systems are favored over inflexible, fixed-cost, capital-intensive technology. Companies would be wise to redesign their traditional IT environment and embrace on-demand strategies that support variability in cost and capacity in their services as well as their technology.
Do these strategies pay off? It certainly seems so. The authors cite an IT agility study from last year in which 33 percent of all respondents said on-demand infrastructure sourcing (read: cloud computing) is highly effective compared to 67 percent saying so among top-performing businesses. Figures were also dramatically different for the effectiveness of on-demand application sourcing (software as a service): 25 percent for all respondents versus 50 percent of top performers. Likewise, 17 percent thought offshoring was highly effective while 67 percent of top performers thought so.
More recent results from Gomez, the Web performance division of Compuware, confirm the trend toward the cloud. Its survey revealed that “over 19 percent of Web site transactions include at least one element hosted from the Amazon EC2 Cloud service.”
In addition, Hackett Group’s analyst say IT can play a more important part of an enterprise if it can increase operating flexibility, becoming “a highly valued business partner rather than an inescapable ‘overhead.’”
--James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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In a survey conducted at Cisco's conference, Cisco Live, by Network Instruments, 71 percent of organizations say they've "implemented some form of cloud computing" though the term isn't clearly defined. The survey asked 184 network engineers, managers, and directors about their cloud environment and plans.
Of that 71 percent, half have set up a private cloud. Anything "as a service" is popular, too. Network Instruments reports that 46 percent of respondents have implemented a SaaS application, 32 percent report using an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution such as Amazon's EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), and 16 percent use a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology, such as Microsoft Azure and SalesForce.com’s Force.
What is cloud computing? Network Instruments says the majority (46 percent) think it means "IT services accessed via public Internet," and just over a third (34 percent) think it refers to "computer resources and storage that can be accessed on-demand."
Of those using cloud computing (however it's defined), 64 percent said application availability improved, and just under half (48 percent) said they were able to reduce the costs of managing their IT infrastructure. That's the good news. The downside: 64 percent said network performance remained steady or declined. Also lower: 65 percent said corporate data security remained the same or dropped; 35 percent said security improved.
“With proper planning and tools to ensure visibility from the user to the cloud provider, Cisco Live attendees are successfully deploying cloud services,” said Brad Reinboldt, product marketing manager at Network Instruments, in a statement. “I was a bit surprised by the number of companies lacking tools to detect and troubleshoot cloud performance issues, as they risk running into significant problems that jeopardize any cost savings they may have initially gained.”
-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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IBM has announced a new Financial Markets Framework that it says is "designed to serve as a springboard for transformation so clients can focus their efforts on growth and innovation." At its core: "speed and transparency to achieve new levels of collaboration, business insight, and smarter decision making," according to a spokesperson for Big Blue.
Several components squarely target the financial sector: there's an algorithmic trading program that speeds automated trading and reduces risks; capabilities to consolidate similar securities processes (to help cut operating costs); and a settlement risk-management feature that measures and watches over the risk from unsettled trades. Other components target increasing data volumes and the need to process transactions faster.
The Financial Markets Framework is a technology platform based on open standards that employ "ultra-low latency features with advanced information management, analytics, and process integration software," IBM says. Processing speed is always welcome, of course. The framework is designed to "simplify integration, improve interoperability, and enable the delivery of innovative customer-centric services" and combines IBM software such as WebSphere, Lotus, and Information Management products with server and storage products, and ,understandably, consulting services.
Innovation was repeatedly emphasized in the announcement. Big Blue points to a report by analyst firm Celent that says financial services firms have increased their reliance on technology to drive innovation and streamline operations -- as well as the more mundane reliability improvements and regulatory compliance.
IBM says it will soon release survey results of CIOs in financial service firms that show they expect to spend 20 to 30 percent of their budget on "transformation projects" (that is, innovation). IBM says "the laws of the IT budget calls for only 10 percent of the budget to be put towards innovation." Increased spending on innovation is good news, especially given the tough economy, but the Financial Markets Framework doesn't have much to show for itself -- at least not yet.
In citing examples of innovation, IBM pointed to Bolsa de Comercio de Santiago, the central stock exchange of Chile, which is using the IBM framework to meet regulatory requirements and improve performance. That isn't innovation.
The exchange's general manager says, "In addition to basing our new securities trading platform on IBM offerings, we are using the IBM Financial Markets Framework to guide our entry into trade surveillance and monitoring. We are performing specific correlation analysis on trades to watch for regulatory violations." This is new? Doesn't sound like it to me.
Chi-Tech, which provides exchanges with trading services, is also cited in the release as incorporating IBM middleware "into our platform, to meet their requirements and our high standards for speed and mission-critical reliability,” according to the vice chairman of the company, Gregory E. Smith. Sorry, but this doesn't sound like innovation either. It's more like keeping up with your competitors.
Heaven knows that financial firms are under increasing pressure to ensure fast and secure processing, but when announcing products that are designed to support innovation, it takes more than promises to get me to part with my money. IBM has to do more than provide examples of companies simply keeping their firms on an even footing with increasingly tough competition.
-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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The just-released 2010 Global SMB Information Protection Survey from Symantec shows that small and midsize firms (those with between 10 and 499 employees) have put "protecting information" at the top of their IT priority list. It's about time.
According to Bernard Laroche, senior director of product marketing at Symantec, this finding is in sharp contrast to conditions 15 months ago, when “a Symantec survey found one-third of SMBs did not have the most basic protection of all -- antivirus protection."
Yikes!
"It is exciting to see that SMBs acknowledge the risks they face and are taking action to protect their information more completely, Laroche adds. No doubt.
The survey of 2,152 SMB executives and IT decision makers from 28 countries was conducted in May. Symantec says the enterprises surveyed report a "heightened interest and increased investment in information protection." The respondents put data loss and cyber attacks at the top of their "business risks" list, beating out traditional criminal activity, natural disasters, and terrorism.
Companies are putting their staff's time (and a part of their budget) where their mouths are. Symantec says SMBs spend $51,000 a year on average on information protection, and two thirds of IT staff time is spent on such areas as "computer security, backup, recovery and archiving as well as disaster preparedness."
There's other good news: 87 percent say they have a disaster preparedness plan in place. Unfortunately, less than one-quarter of these firms (23 percent) say their play is "pretty good" or "excellent."
The rise in attention may be due to what SMBs have experienced: 42 percent have at some time lost confidential or proprietary information, 73 percent were cyber-attack victims themselves in the past year (30 percent of those attacks were rated as somewhat or extremely successful). All reported losses, including "expensive downtime, loss of important corporate data, as well as personally identifiable information of customers or employees." .It's no surprise, then, that 74 percent say they are somewhat or extremely concerned about losing electronic information.
Among the key concerns: loss of physical devices. Almost two in three respondents say they have lost laptops, smartphones, or tablet devices (such as iPads) in the last year. What's worrisome is that 100 percent report that they have at least "some devices that have no password protection and cannot be remotely wiped of their data to protect their confidential business information if lost."
Their survey announcement includes these four recommendations:
Educate employees: Develop Internet security guidelines and educate employees about Internet safety, security, and the latest threats. Part of the training should focus on the importance of regularly changing passwords and protecting mobile devices.
Safeguard important business information: SMBs are facing increased risks to their confidential information so safeguarding this data is critical. One data breach could mean financial ruin for an SMB. Implement a complete protection solution to ensure proprietary information -- whether its credit card information, customer data or employee records -- is safe.
Implement an effective backup and recovery plan: Protecting information is more than implementing an antivirus solution. Backup and recovery is a critical component of complete information protection to keep SMBs’ desktops, servers and applications running smoothly in case of disruption -- whether it’s a flood, an earthquake, a virus, or a system failure. One outage could mean customer dissatisfaction and costly downtime, which could be catastrophic to the business.
Secure e-mail and Web assets: Select a mail and Web security solution that can help mitigate spam and e-mail threats so SMBs can protect sensitive information and spend more time on day-to-day activities. Spammers and phishers will use current events and social engineering tactics to get users to give up personal information such as credit card and banking information.
You can access the report in PDF form http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/about/media/pdfs/SMB_ProtectionSurvey_2010.pdf?om_ext_cid=biz_socmed_twitter_2010Jun_worldwide_SMB here. No registration is required.
-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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Are you getting the biggest bang for your buck from your video assets? Today, Altus Learning Systems (www.altuscorp.com) launched an enterprise video search tool that's optimized for mobile devices including the Blackberry, Android-based devices, iPhone, and iPad.
vSearch Mobile strikes me as a useful tool for its target audience: sales teams and enterprises that want to improve their knowledge sharing.
Imagine being able to enter a key word or phrase and finding, selecting, and playing how-to demos (if you're an end user) or troubleshooting videos (if you're on the help desk) that match your term or phrase. vSearch Mobile is a software-as-a-service solution that stores, manages, and makes searchable by keyword your rich media. (Storing your video on their service may also appear to enterprises looking to outsource bandwidth issues, since video is a notoriously demanding medium.)
The program doesn't just display a list of matching media -- click on a match and the service takes you to the exact point in the video that's relevant. In addition, users can even mark videos in search results and save them in a collection for later retrieval.
For enterprises, accuracy is a top priority. Although Altus can rely on voice recognition to convert audio to text, it also offers a much more reliable (and accurate) transcription service, taking your video and attaching a transcript to your video. Better yet, if your device's screen is large enough (on tablets such as an iPad or on your PC, for example), the program lets you read the transcription (say, of a narrated PowerPoint presentation) as you listen to the speaker, keeping transcript and audio in sync.
If you want to distribute sales pitches remotely and around the clock (a key requirement in the global marketplace) or if you need to provide partners or users with the latest news about your products, you need to put your video assets to work. Altus' vSearch Mobile may be what you need to get it done.
-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ
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