Changing Landscapes

Yesterday I gave the opening presentation at the UCISA Changing Landscapes event organised by the Staff Development Group and held here in Sheffield. My job was really to set the scene for the day, and I decided to outline what the "Changing Landscape" was from my perspective as an IT Director, the way these changes are affecting how we deliver services, and the impact on the skills needed by our staff and students.

As usual, I enjoyed giving the presentation, despite staying up late the night before writing it - it doesn't matter how much notice you give me (almost a year in this case), I'll still be finishing it off
right up to actually standing up and talking! Changing Landscapes was perhaps an appropriate title for a conference given the effects of the weather at the moment!  The main trends I covered were:

• Consumerisation
• Mobility
• Cloud
• Social Media

All are linked, and together with the rapid changes in technology we're seeing, are having a major impact on the way we deliver services.

To illustrate consumerisation of IT I like to find some gadgets that are around, or just being developed - a sensor in a babies nappy with tweets you when it needs changing, a football with a sensor inside to tell you how to improve your game, an internet enabled fridge which send recipes depending on what's in it to your internet enabled fridge. These all go to make up the Internet of Things I mentioned the other day, or the Internet of Useless Things as someone referred to it yesterday....

We had some interesting stats on mobile, where the number of students owning tablets or eReaders has gone up from 7% to 29% in one year. We are definitely entering the post PC era, and its expected that tablet sales will outstrip PC sales sometime this year. A recent Gartner prediction is that by 2017 there will be more words typed on glass than on keyboards. And the iPad was only released in April 2010.

 I like to showcase a bit of what we're doing here in Sheffield, so I showed how we use social media to interact with staff and students, using our Twitter feed and Facebook pages as examples where our aim is to have a conversation, and not use them merely to give out notifications. And we're looking to engage with innovative videos and infographics. No-one can forget our Save it Like a Hero video (which despite much criticism from within the department has been a huge success with the audience it was aimed at - students), and today we have a Valentine's theme to our tweets and posts - Fall in Love with Safe Computing. Sweet.

The talk was filmed, so I'll post a link when it's up, just in case anyone is interested in watching it.

Flexible working and social media at Virgin Media

Next session from Virgin Media on a pilot they're undertaking about flexible working and social media

They have 20k employees in 800 UK sites. High amount of travel and entertainment expenditure. Very email centric. Lot of voice conferences.

A number of drivers for change including cost savings in travel and hotels. Also improving the experience for employees and improving the way people interact with each other. Their property footprint is high with only 45% utilisation so efficiencies needed there.

Obviously another driver is the trend towards consumerisation of IT. The best toys are now at home and everyone wants to use them, especially the execs with their tablet devices. The consumer experience is being defined by Apple and Google. Bring your own device, any device any time, and
enterprise apps need to look like consumer apps.

So, they Introduced Quad, social software from Cisco, and WebEx for video conferencing

In space terms, this has enabled a shift to shared spaces, more breakout spaces, less offices and cubicles. Wireless everywhere. Also removed loneliness of home working. They've seen a huge increase in flexible and mobile working.

Annual benefits have seen £5m savings in property and £2m savings in expenses.
Big increase in productivity, as staff have more time with less travel. Staff satisfaction has improved as has their work life balance.

There were one off costs in terms of infrastructure and licences, but these have been recovered.

Introduction of WebEx, especially video has made a huge difference to the organisation. Used for training, troubleshooting, meetings, working from home discussions.

Quad has created the opportunity for serendipity. Filtered, relevant, personalised information comes to you. The demise of the inbox. You find stuff you didn't know you needed to know. Also enables conversations between people that are previously unknown to each other. New relationships have been built.
Enables discovery of skills in people, and the unlocking of the power of workforce. Can ask question across the organisation or in a community. Very good search capability.

Good example of a major network outage. 1 engineer in a data centre used quad to find the engineer who knew who to fix it. He was in a hospital waiting room, luckily with his laptop. With the use of quad, WebEx and remote log in, he fixed it.

Virgin Media are currently running a pilot with 1000 people. Good take up, lots of WebEx sessions initiated from Quad. Lots of communities formed.

They've also seen evidence of the social software rule, which I'd never heard before of 1:9:90. 1 content creator 9 commenters 90 lurkers, apparently exemplified by Twitter.

The lessons they learned:
Preparation is key. Understand the business. Do lots of research. Have clear goals and objects, and know what you're measuring
Won't be successful without board level sponsorship and participation
Breadth and depth of Quad gave users choice of platforms which is essential.




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Consumerisation of work

Consumerisation of work is happening, can't stop it, have to accommodate it. Can be embraced and managed. Professional people like using their own tools to do the job. Changing nature of work, more communities instead of teams. Need to make employees more self reliant, empower them, so have to relinquish control of the tools they use to do their jobs.

What drives consumerisation?
Social factors: Personal preference, peer influence, personal goals.
Performance: generally speaking consumer products perform better that enterprise devices, easier to use, also have tools the employer doesn't provide such as microblogging,
Economic: consumer technology often costs less as market is bigger, affordable personal purchases, responsibilities and costs transfer to individuals.

Consumer devices have huge diversity in model, OS and capabilities. Smart peripherals are developing. Displays you wear on your wrist to see tweets. Bluetooth devices accessing cloud services.

Rigid standardisation is impossible. Can't hold the line at one platform.
Need to look at new ways of managing and delivering. Standardise on protocols, not platform.

Some possible exceptions:
It's possible that some organisations might standardise on Apple only policy.
Some may have security and compliance demands become too onerous to support multiple platforms
Support costs of diverse devices and platforms may prohibit it

Consumerisation of applications. Exponential growth of apps from app stores, will hit 80 billion by 2014. Many are free or cheap eg Dropbox, document editing and annotating. Corporate app stores being developed. Much easier to develop and deploy applications.

Consumerisation of services. Emerging device plus cloud services eg Kindle
Affordable cloud alternatives to classic applications eg google,docs.
Cloud services for data management, backup, file sharing.
Communication and collaboration in the cloud eg social networking, VOIP, microblogging.
Are challenges including security and support, but can be overcome.

Future technology developments include improved user interactions across multiple devices. Smart TVs interacting with smartphones.
Flexible displays. Transparent displays, looks like pane of glass when turned off.
Mind based interfaces. Already developed is a small hat with EEG sensors plugged into mobile phone which analyses brain signals which can act as remote control for other things.

Technology scanning needs to keep up with consumer technology developments.

Consumerisation of me. Personal informatics. Applications which exist to help you support your personal goals, collecting and analysing information:
Life logging, interpersonal informatics, health and exercise, personal brand management, email sentiment analysis, reducing emotional influence in decisions, email analytics, mobile apps for cognitive behavioural therapy.
Will throw up all sorts of issues in the enterprise. Keep an eye on this!

Corporate Benefits of consumer technology include user satisfaction,technical superiority, performance, cost reduction, innovation

CIOs are trying to balance 4 conflicting goals:
Social goals. Keep the employee happy. Much of the demand for device choice has a social component.
Operational goals. Have to keep the business running. Use of employee owned devices has support implications, what if employee loses own phone?
Financial goals. Have to manage costs. Issues such as roaming data, fixed data caps are a challenge with employee-liable contracts
Risk management. Stopping bad stuff happening, especially in areas such as security and data leakage.

CIOs need to decide how innovative they want to be:
Defensive- enforce rigid control
Reluctant toleration - allow more choice
Opportunists - explore new models such as bring your own
Aggressive - rip up all assumptions. Go for it!

Supporting "bring your own" technology:
Provide community resources.
Provide time limited support
Deliver secure and supportable applications
Have a contingency plan
Educated users
Suggest resources
Outsourcing

Recommendations:
Understand where consumerisation is already being used in your organisation
Review your technology strategy and propose how consumerisation is going to be accommodated
Harness employee enthusiasm for consumer technologies
Create an organisation that can accommodate and profit from consumerisation
Monitor key consumer technologies to better understand future application opportunities and support challenges

Good talk as always from Nick Jones.

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Portals, Collaboration and Content

The UUK Efficiency Conference is over, a very useful day, and I'm still in London for the Gartner Portals, Collaboration and Content Conference. When I first started coming to these the focus was very much on the technology, what portal technology to use, how to generate and store content etc. Looking at the programme for the next couple of days the emphasis has changed to much more about how software is used, especially for collaboration and the use of social media.

Will try and blog some of the sessions, probably in note form, whilst suffering withdrawal symptoms from missing Freshers Week in Sheffield. Am being kept in touch though by frequent updates through twitter and mail, and sounds like lots of good team work going on back there.

Given the emphasis on social media here, I was surprised there was no mention of using social media during the conference to interact with colleagues, and the hashtag wasn't pushed in the intro or displayed. Maybe Gartner needs to get social!

First session today was entitled Business gets Social, and in summary covered:

As individuals and professionals we have been quick to embrace the internet and a new generation of technologies born on the Web to change the way we communicate, connect, voice our opinions and concerns, or take decisions. We are changing faster as individuals than the organizations we do business with. As employees, customers, partners, consumers, citizens, or participants in open conversations, we expect those that employ us and those that want our business to engage with us differently. Businesses need to get social.

Here are my notes, a bit long, it was an hour of fast delivered information, but some interesting nuggets if you scan through it.

The many faces of social:
Public social networks started in the 70s and 80s, with The Well, The Source. Now Facebook, Twitter, Google plus. Difference is organisation, around content taxonomies in old ones, new ones organised around people.

Social behaviour is governed by the social behaviour of others. Social relationships are often based on trust and reputation. Social communication has moved form unspoken signals, to cave drawings, to storytelling, printing press, radio, Internet, twittering..... All forms of communication, just using different media.

Over last 30,000 years size of human brain has shrunk by 10%. One theory of why is we were less social then, and humans had to be more capable. As we live in closer proximity, people are smarter in a collective group, can rely on others. De-duplication of function.

Unconscious emotions, intuitions, biases, social norms and habits drive most human behaviour.can make assumptions about people based on 1/10 sec exposure to a face.

Social pervades our organisations. Within our teams, with peers, across the organisational structure, on the board. Social phenomena are an intrinsic part of everything we do. Social also transcends the enterprise. Networks of friends, family, etc which influence what we do. People respond to social cues and ignore organisational controls. Social collectives drive attitudes and purchasing decisions.

Social is not just new sharing and collaboration tools, or a communication channel. It also provides context - information, actions and agents. It drives relationships and reputation. Can't just use it like you'd use other media to broadcast messages.

Enterprise 2.0:
Bringing the social read/write web into the enterprise.
Austins Law. Internal hierarchical resistance to bringing social web into the enterprise. Based on number of employees and number of levels in hierarchy.

Where is social adoption fast:
Education at the top.
Youth using social tools and fuelling new employee demands
Smaller, more agile firms adopting quickly

Pace of Change:
1971 first microprocessor
1977 email
1981 pcs
1985 on line community The Well
1991 www
1995 Windows 95
1997 apple Newton
2001 Wikepedia
2002 Friendster
2003 Facebook
Then accelerates rapidly

Now we have things like The Pulse of the Nation. A Twitter sentiment analysis showing how happy are people according to tweets.

Behaviours are changing forever. Moving from personal productivity through knowledge distribution to collective empowerment. Is it revolution? Yes probably.

Rate of change is accelerating. Going to see new forms of social networking appearing with bigger impact. If you can't cope already, retire.

Customer relationship now about consumerisation of IT. Socially and digitally connected customers.
IT depts getting freaked out about it. "iPad provokes IT anxiety" recent headline. Companies buying them and then telling IT department to get them working.

Control is an illusion, get over it.
48% of companies ban access to Facebook during working hours. Completely pointless as everyone has smart phones etc. Like banning Internet back in 90s

Consumers more willing to complain than before, more willing to comment and talk about it, more likely to leave a bad company after one experience, social networks magnify these up.

And the point?
Recognise the massive power of people
Mass collaboration is the differentiator
You can engage with them, or ignore them. At your peril.

The future:

The Internet of Things, Embedded sensors, Image recognition, augmented reality, near field communication

Real time predicate analysis, big data, audio and video analysis, in memory computing

Natural user interaction, touch and gesture, media tablets, screen advances, natural language question answering

Life logging.
Ubiquitous cameras, wearable cameras, ultra cheap storage, instant upload to social media, Diminishing expectations of privacy.

Instrumentation and self quantification. Measuring blood pressure, Sperm count, etc. Uploading it and sharing it (hopefully with doctors..?)

Mobile devices are transformational. Smart phones will outship PCs in next couple of years.

Spend on apps rising rapidly. Question from consumers will be "Why can't this application be more like an app?" Prediction that soon we'll be spending more on apps from app stores than on big enterprise applications like SAP. And of course spend won't be in IT department.

How do we deliver apps through our portals? Portals will be much more personal.

Phew. That's it


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EUNIS round up

Interesting presentation yesterday from Campus IT, called from Zero to Live in 4 weeks.

They developed a postgraduate application system for the Dublin Institute of Technology, with a very tight time frame for implementation of less than 6 weeks.
The process consisted of a downloadable form which was printed, filled in, posted with attachments. No validation, lots of missing information. Long slow process, and during it applicants were lost. 5 staff working on it. Needed quicker system, more user friendly and tailored, collecting better data.

The IT department had no spare resources, and coupled with the tight deadline, so went for hosted system which is in the Amazon cloud. The system was developed quickly, and a prototype produced in weeks which was tested on academics, who had to apply for own course, then deal with application, and reject it. This produced a list of change requests. Because the system is configurable by business users, not developers, the 5 staff in admissions office made changes in a few days.

System ready in 4 weeks. End users continuously improving it, changing questions, messages, workflows etc. Put onto web in 6 hours, on every course screen. Not integrated with student system, but could be future development.

Good example of rapid development and deployment, and interesting that it's hosted in a public cloud.

This morning we heard from John Dyer from Terena on how national research networks can serve the community. Terena is 25 years old, and is the association of research networks of Europe. Some interesting facts about networks including our own JANET which when it was formed in 1983 it had a 9.6kbps backbone! Now it's 100 Gbps, which is a millionfold increase. Good presentation on issues facing networks, including federated access, cloud, and security and privacy issues. Also the data deluge, the massive amounts of data being produced by research projects.

Final presentation from the conference was William Florance from Google Apps, on Consumerisation, Commoditisation,Cloud and the limits of the new normal. The Cloud is not a passing trend, it's here to stay. It matters to education, and there are risks, but they are addressable.

Lots of trends linked to cloud including consumerisation, bring your own technology, commoditisation. Email now heavily commoditised.
Why does cloud matter? If you don't embrace it, you'll miss the opportunity to innovate. Don't know what the future is, but there are clues. Students are in a totally digital world, don't know the analogue one.

Interesting hypothesis that in the end the amount of information we ingest will inevitable move to zero, (think thesis report, memo, email, twitter.....).
But, the capacity for the average user to access the information they they desire is limitless, the limit of depth goes to infinity.
Information wants to be free. The limit of price, at least in education, goes to zero. Think MIT course materials on line, and the Khan Academy.(60million lessons watched around the world, you tube videos, and an environment built on google apps).

Don't waste valuable resources on things that are commoditised.

The limit of privacy will be one of most difficult to solve. The risks of cloud computing are fundamentally no different than the risks with any other industry commoditisation. You need to Trust, but verify, look for clearly articulated privacy policies and a history and pattern of security.

Good final presentation and end to the conference. Slightly surreal this morning, as I was in a pub at 8am, before the sessions started, watching a guitarist break the world record for continuous playing. We've been watching him most evenings, and some early mornings. He played for 114 hours non stop, and when he reached the record everyone was sprayed with champagne, so I came into the conference sessions slightly damp and smelling of alcohol! And I had resisted the temptation to have a pint of Guinness for breakfast and stuck to coffee. Will probably write something and share some photos and videos on other blog.

Edit:  Here they are.

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Clouds, and the Internet of Things

Yesterday I was at the HEFCE  Cloud Advisory Committee, where we oversee progress on the workstreams that came out of the £12.5m from the University Modernisation Fund for Cloud Computing. Most going well, some slippage but being caught up, and there's some exciting developments which I 'm sure will benefit all of us in the sector. Hopefully there'll be a comprehensive news release and web page available in the next week which I'll be sure to link to which will give you more information.

Today has been an interesting day today. Two of our Unions were taking industrial action, so there was some organising and planning to do to make sure all services were covered, and I had an interesting "Back to the Floor" time when I worked on our main reception desk to help cover lunchbreaks. Luckily it was quiet, and nothing too difficult came up. It was good - nice to meet our customers. Interestingly not a single student who came in knew anything at all about the action - despite having been sent an email about it. More proof, if we needed any, that students don't read University emails often.

Today I tried to settle down to write a presentation I'm giving at EUNIS in a couple of weeks. It's so long ago since I agreed to do it that I had to look at the web site to see what title I'd submitted. Luckily its one I've got plenty of content for - Challenges Are What Make Life Interesting. Trouble is, I've got more challenges than I can fit in a 30 minute talk!  One of the biggest challenges facing us is the consumerisation of IT, and I read an interesting blog post about it yesterday from Brian Madden which sums it up well - The consumerisation of IT is about the fact that today's users can do whatever they want, and you in IT can't stop them even if you wanted to.  He calls it FUIT, and if you're interested you can read why in the post.  I'm looking forward to reading his next post where's he's going to give us some tips on how to deal with it.

The other topic I like to cover in these talks, especially for non IT people, is the Internet of Things. The  way everything is becoming connected to the internet. The fridge that will text you to tell you you've run out of milk, the washing machine that knows when it's broken down, alerts an engineer and orders the right part, smart buildings, the digital wine rack, (I don't keep wine long enough to need one) - the list goes on and on - the BBC had a good article on it today. Interesting stuff, and could lead to all sorts of applications and developments.

Disruptive trends

The second session yesterday morning at the Gartner HE conference had a great title: Enabling and disrupting macroforces affecting the expanding education ecosystem.

Basically we were looking at trends affecting education, started with an interesting comparison, showing that there are few new ideas, just new circumstances.  The Rhind Papyrus dates from 1600 BC, and contains geometrical and arithmetical formulae in what seems to be some sort of reference or revision document. It would have sold for about the price of a small goat.  Now we have iPhone revision apps containing very similar information, retailing at about 1/400th of a small goat. But given that an iPhone cost about 1.5 times the cost of a small goat, perhaps a different ROI calculation is needed!

A number of different macroforces were examined including changes in demand for education, especially globally.  There’s also the move to decrease public funding, and involvement of other suppliers in education provision. Education is continuing its transformation into a business with all the cultural and managerial impact that has.

Interestingly, the speaker suggested that the Green movement has lost momentum, and green IT is now more about cost savings than being green. I’m not sure whether I agree. There is uncertainty about the infrastructure, and whether it is sufficient for future developments. It is already difficult to build data centres in London because the power grid can't take it, and in India there are more people with access to mobiles than toilets. Green issues are not in the top 10 of CIO business priorities according to Gartner, although it does appear at number 9 in the UCISA Top Concerns survey as something likely to increase in priority.

In terms of the economy, Cost control is the word of the day (has it ever been any different?), and we need to understand the cost of our services.

Technology changes include the death of distance, or the huge increase in connectivity, coupled with consumerisation of IT. Facebook has 0.66billion users – that makes it the third largest country in the world behind India and China!

Some interesting heat maps about what our current priorities are – in a recent CIO survey the top strategy in every country surveyed was developing or managing a flexible infrastructure.  Technology, governance and cost all featured high.  There was little focus on the business, or customer facing services.

One of the other trends we looked at was outsourcing, especially the possibilities of outsourcing parts of the infrastructure. Interestingly Education is bottom of list in terms of percentage of outsourcing compared to other sectors.

In one of the later sessions as a group we had to list what we thought were the most disruptive trends affecting us, and then vote on the top, in the three different areas of technology, business and society. In summary:

In technology
Consumerisation and mobility came out top

In society:
Employability, and changing modes of learning eg lifelong and workplace learning won

In business:
Funding and Internationalisation were the most popular.

There are many ways of analyzing these trends and the affect they might have on our business, and Gartner provides tools such as the technology radar screen and the hype cycles. But, all trends need to be analysed from a business perspective, not a technology one.

10 things to tell the Executive Board

Yesterday I had a chance to talk to our University Executive Board. Always a pleasure, but doesn't happen often enough in my opinion - there are so many things to cover that I have to miss so much out or rush through things. I decided to concentrate on 10 things - 5 challenges I'm facing as an IT Director (and if I'm facing them, then so are they as as IT underpins everything the University does), 3 challenges the University is facing and how IT can help, and 2 questions I needed their help on.

The 5 challenges we're facing as a department are:

Funding (obviously!) - but not just internally. Vince Cable's letter to VCs telling them that they should consider cutting IT projects to save money hardly helps our cause does it? But, as I pointed out yesterday, IT projects in HE don't have the same reputation for overruning and going over-budget as those in the rest of the public sector. And anyway, we shouldn't be talking about IT projects, but business projects. IT is part of the business, not something separate.

Mobility - covered in previous blog posts

Consumerisation of IT, which leads to

Increasing customer expectations. At a time when our funding is being reduced, our services are more in demand than ever. And not just more in demand, people have higher expectations of good user interfaces, 24/7 support etc.

Data - storage, management, access to etc.

The three University wide challenges which I picked out to talk about were:

Reducing our carbon footprint
Doing things differently
Reducing complexity

Lots of cover in all of those, and I particularly emphasised different models of service delivery including out-sourcing, and simplifying our business processes. Both will have big impacts on the University. Designing to one good business process and reducing some departmental autonomy in the way things are carried out may not be popular, but I cannot see how diversity in basic processes can be justified in the current economic climate.

And finally - what did I want their help on? Well, the first was perhaps rather cheeky. How do we as an IT department know we're being successful? Particularly to them as an Executive Board when it sometimes seems as if we're judged on how quickly we can fix their phones or PCs?
Secondly - back to the Stop, Start, Continue debate we've been having. What can they do without so that we can stop doing it, what aren't we doing that we should start, and what should we continue doing that we're doing well?

I look forward to the answers.

Scales that can tweet your weight?

Spent most of the last couple of days in meetings or preparing for a talk I gave this morning at SROC - the Student Records Officers Conference. I'd been asked to cover Web2.0 in HE, and specifically address it for a non IT audience. I cheated slightly and expanded it to cover new technologies in general - including phone apps and cloud computing.

I used the wiki dictionary definition of web 2.0 - "The second generation of the WWW, especially the movement away from static web pages to dynamic and shareable content and social networking". There's loads of definitions out there, but this one is nice and concise and easy to understand. I also stressed the importance of user generated content and collaboration.

The CLEX report published last year - Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World - is still relevant and I used a couple of quotes from it to illustrate their conclusions:

Web 2.0, the Social Web, has had a profound effect on behaviours, particularly those of young people.....They inhabit it with ease and it has led them to a strong sense of communities of interest linked in their own web spaces, and to a disposition to share and participate.

The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms..... hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured.

The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change....they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications.... This is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating.

I also talked about the consumerisation of IT - technology and the internet are all around us. Internet enabled fridges, and bathroom scales that send your weight to a server over your wifi network are already with us. I can see the benefits of being able to connect to your fridge from the supermarket to see how much gin, oops, milk you've got left, but I really don't want my scales checking up on how much I weigh and tweeting me telling me to go easy on the chocolate!

So, we then had a look some of the technologies out there including Facebook, Blogging and Twitter, and also about some more "controlled" web 2.0 environments such as our own uSpace service, demonstrating how they can be used in an HE environment. I think I also successfully demonstrated how mad I can appear to non-users of this technology when I showed a picture of my desktop the night I was watching the debate on the Digital Economy Bill - with BBCiPlayer, Tweetdeck, Twitterfall and the Guardian live blog of the event all open at the same time and me actively reading, watching or participating in all of them. And watching the final of Masterchef at the same time.....

A demo of our mobile phone app CampusM, some thoughts on Cloud Computing, and we were on to the perceived risks of these technologies, including privacy and security of data, loss of control, copyright/IP issues and the ephemeral nature of some of the services. My view is that this is all about risk management - you have to know and understand the risks, and then decide which ones you're prepared to take and how you're going to manage them.

A good discussion followed, so I hope I made the audience think a bit about about how these technologies might be used to improve the services we provide to our students.

The Battle for the Cloud

Final round up of the talks from last week’s conference. There was a good one on Google vs Microsoft which looked at the different approaches of these two huge companies in the battle for the cloud computing crown. Google apparently fighting what was termed ‘asymmetric warfare” – they spend a dollar, and force Microsoft to spend 10. They are really pushing the industry and forcing it to change – they have a radical vision which is based totally on cloud computing and uses a technology architecture which they have designed. They are the current leaders in cloud computing, partly because of this infrastructure. Their revenue model is also interesting as about 97.5% of their revenue is from advertising. The remaining 2.5% being attributed to a rounding error!

Microsoft however are basing their strategy on a hybrid model – applications which will run locally or in the cloud. They make most of their revenue from their business division and the windows operating system. But, they are aggressively marketing their latest applications including Bing and Azure.

The Gartner prediction is that for the next 5 years there will be little change - Microsoft will own the office space and Google will own the advertising and search space. After that, there could be major changes.

I also listened to a session on Unified Communications – the growing driver being the multitude of different ways of communicating most of us use, and a desire to be able to move between them easily. We should be looking at this as a way to improve collaboration and personal productivity, and not be driven by cost cutting. Consumerisation is already driving user expectations, and it’s in this market that we’re going to see some innovations, especially in the use of video conferencing.

And finally the closing comments mentioned the back channel discussions that had been taking place during the conference on Twitter using the hashtag. The first time we’ve seen it at a Gartner summit I think – 600 tweets in total with 40 regular tweeters (including me of course), two of my tweets picked out as examples. Mind you, I’m glad I wasn’t the author of the first one to be picked out, which described one of the sessions as a car crash and suggested to the presenter that she kept her day job….