Will end of XP support spark rash SaaS and Office 365 decisions?

Takeaway: When some firms realise how little time remains until Microsoft pulls the plug on XP support next year, they could cut corners with software as a service and end up making some unwise decisions.

Foot-dragging over upgrading from Windows XP could be followed by a series of hasty decisions, as organisations realise the scale and cost of the task facing them.

With Microsoft support for XP due to end on 8 April 2014, some firms may be tempted to try software-as-a-service (SaaS) products such as Office 365 to speed up migration and testing, an analyst has warned.

Failure to consider long-term strategy

People who are only just realising how much time the migration of XP desktops will take may look to SaaS to shorten that process without thinking about the long-term strategic view, according to Ovum principal analyst Roy Illsley.

“There are some cases where [SaaS] will be used as a way of mitigating a massive cost and people won’t really look into the true cost of doing it,” he said.

“If people are saying, ‘Actually, we’re going to use Office 365′, that’s a great piece of work that they don’t have to test.”

According to Illsley, some 41 percent of people are still running XP. “By this time next year they’ve got to be off it because support ends,” he said.

Earlier this month, a study from Accenture- and Microsoft-owned software consultancy Avanadesuggested 52 percent of UK IT departments have yet to put in place a strategy for dealing with applications that currently run under XP, first released to manufacturers in August 2001.

Illsley warned against making plans for life after XP rooted in cost and expediency. “Do not make decisions based purely on the economics of migrating off XP. Think strategically,” Illsley said.

Migrating XP desktops

Making short-term decisions that help with migrating XP desktops could have longer term implications, he said.

For example, the consequences of move to a SaaS product such as Office 365 may not surface immediately.

“When they’ve been in it for a couple of years, they’ll think, ‘Right, OK, we don’t really like this Office 365 malarkey. Let’s try something else. Oh crikey, getting the data out and doing this and that, that’s going to be expensive. We can’t do that now’,” he said.

“There’s a bit of, ‘I’m stuck with this for a long term once I’ve made that snap decision’.”

Losing control of where the data resides, for example, may also in the future prove to be a critical issue. A business might ultimately prefer data is held secure in the country of incorporation, Illsley said. “If you have moved from on-premise, can you get [the data] back, and at what cost?” he said.

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End of XP support: Why so many CIOs are still not ready

Takeaway: With Microsoft’s cut-off date for support for XP just over a year away, a worryingly large number of IT leaders seem to be unprepared. 

Microsoft’s end of support for the venerable XP operating system on 8 April 2014 could have unfortunate consequences for most UK organisations, which still lack a plan for migrating XP legacy apps.
According to new research, 52 per cent of UK IT departments have yet to put in place a strategy for dealing with applications that currently run under XP, first released to manufacturers in August 2001.
However the study, from Accenture- and Microsoft-owned software consultancy Avanade, suggests that IT leaders are aware of the scale of the problem they could be facing in 14 months.

Eight out of 10 of the CIOs and IT directors surveyed say large volumes of unsupported apps represent a concern to them. XP continues to account for 43 percent of enterprise desktop infrastructures in the UK, according to Avanade figures.

The reason for the inertia in preparing for the end of support for the OS is attributed to a lack of a business case, which was cited as the key barrier by 79 per cent of the XP organisations polled.
The legacy software infrastructure of XP includes a number of business-critical applications, some of which the IT department may not even be aware of, and other programs that are seen as too costly to migrate, according to Avanade.

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Offshoring jumps as cash-strapped companies step up outsourcing

By Nick Heath

Takeaway: The global economic crisis is sparking a boom in IT offshoring as India’s major IT suppliers grew four times faster than their competitors in 2011.

India’s largest IT suppliers grew four times faster than their international competitors in 2011, as companies in struggling European economies stepped up their IT offshoring.
In 2011 revenues at the top five India-based IT service providers grew at 23.8 per cent, compared to 7.7 per cent growth in the global IT services market, according to a report by analyst house Gartner.
The top five Indian suppliers made particularly strong in-roads in Europe, where their growth rate almost doubled to 25.9 per cent in 2011.

”This reaffirms Gartner’s theory that the troubled economic environment will be the catalyst to faster adoption of offshore services,” Arup Roy, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in the report.
”We are seeing European companies, particularly on the Continent, openly embrace offshore services engagements — and the Indian providers have been the beneficiaries.”
Despite the strong EU growth Indian suppliers’ European market share is still lower than in the US, and almost 70 per cent of their European revenues come from the UK.

India’s major tech suppliers typically grow faster than the wider IT services market, and the country’s top 10 providers are expanding at an increasing rate, with growth of 21.8 per cent in 2011 compared to 19.9 per cent in 2010.

The global economic crisis is not only fuelling an uptick in IT offshoring, but also increases the chances that companies will outsource entire IT departments as Gartner recently warned.
The sustained growth of India’s IT suppliers is gradually eroding the market share of major international IT vendors, according to the report.

“The top five Indian service providers have continuously chipped away market share from the large multinational corporation providers,” Roy said in the report.
“In the past five years, they have been increasingly winning large outsourcing deals with a total contract value of more than $100m.”

India’s top five remain focused on winning business from Fortune 1000 companies, Roy said, and in recent years have expanded their offerings from a limited pool of low-cost services to a much wider portfolio including infrastructure services, business process outsourcing (BPO) services, cloud and analytics services.
Last year saw TCS, the biggest Indian IT supplier, become one of the top 20 largest IT suppliers in the world. The company stands at number 16 in the global rankings, with a revenue of $9.31bn in 2011 and 1.1 per cent of global market share.

The fastest growing India-based IT services company in 2011 was Cognizant, which grew revenues by 33.3 per cent to $5.875bn, making it the third largest India-based IT service provider and putting it at 27 in the global rankings. Cognizant is headquarted in the US but Gartner defines India-based IT services companies as those that deliver more than 90 per cent of their services from India.

IBM remains the world’s largest IT service provider, earning just over $60bn in services revenue in 2011, up 6.6 per cent from 2010. However, its 7.1 per cent share of the global services market was down 0.1 per cent on the previous year.

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Raspberry Pi: Five ways business can use it

Think the Raspberry Pi is only good for teaching kids to code? Think again. Photo: Raspberry Pi

By Nick Heath

Takeaway: The $40 Linux computer is a tempting replacement for expensive, high-end machines in a number of business tasks.

The $40 Raspberry Pi packs a lot of computer into a small and low-priced package - so it makes sense for businesses to try and exploit its potential.
The Pi computer may have been designed as a programming platform for kids but modders are thinking up a growing number of ways that enterprises could use the device.
Here are five business uses for the Pi inspired by suggestions from TechRepublic readers.

1. Simple server

The Pi is worth considering by anyone looking to set up a low-cost server to handle light internal or web traffic.
TechRepublic user DesertJim is hoping to string together 14 boards to make a cheap server cluster.
“At $40 a piece, a 14-way Beowulf cluster is $560 using my spare 16-way Gigabit switch and an old network-attached HDD,” he wrote.
There’s plenty of debate about whether the Pi is powerful enough to act as a useful server, with its 256MB of RAM, 700MHz ARM CPU and 10/100 Ethernet - but the consensus on the Raspberry Pi developer forums is that it could handle light traffic.
“I’d have thought it’ll easy run Apache, PHP & MySQL,” wrote one forum poster, who described running a test server using an old system with similar specs to those of the Pi - a Celeron 533MHz system, with about 256MB using i386 Debian. The writer added, “Obviously it’s not going to stand up to a lot of load but I’m sure it’ll work.”
Anyone thinking of turning their Pi into a web server should check out the PHP and MySQL guide on the Pi forums.

2. Computer troubleshooting tool

Testing whether computer components are working or resolving connectivity problems should be within the Pi’s capabilities, according to TechRepublic readers.
“With some custom code and a basic LCD touchscreen and battery, [it's] a great tool for checking IP connectivity or using other USB attachments to check and test computer components,” said TechRepublic user Fredden in a comment.
The Pi could even be a perfect pocket-sized tool for testing information security, according to one poster on the Raspberry Pi developer forums, who suggests pairing it with network-penetration software and using it to find weaknesses in corporate systems.

3. Business intelligence dashboard

Many companies use computer dashboards to allow staff to compare their performance against departmental targets or to monitor behaviour of key computer systems.
However, dedicating an entire PC to running the simple graphical front-end on these dashboards is overkill, and TechRepublic commenter rickyhobson (sic) thinks the Pi provides an affordable alternative.
“We are going to place them behind big screens and use them for department dashboards without the need for a Windows/Office PC,” he wrote.

4. Development platform

The Raspberry Pi is also a candidate as a low-cost development platform, both for software developers and network engineers.
“As a network engineer, [I think] it should make a good test base for a firewall design we are working on,” said TechRepublic commenter mickey.
On the software development side there are already several integrated development environments (IDEs) available that will work with the Pi. The Pi’s Linux Debian Squeeze distro includes the Python IDE IDLE and the simple IDE Geany, which supports a wide range of programming and scripting languages.
However there’s debate about whether the Pi compiles code sufficiently quickly to be a development platform - though plenty of people think it can - and whether more demanding IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans would run well on the machine.

5. Digital signage

Running a digital sign using a PC or similarly expensive piece of kit is another example of wasting money on overpowered equipment.
TechRepublic commenter brian sees the Pi as a cost-effective alternative: “I intend to use the Pi to replace some very expensive digital signage boxes we have purchased in the past,” he wrote.
That commenter is not alone. A poster from the Raspberry Pi forums describes a similar plan to use the Pi to run digital signs around a university campus.

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The next digital battlefield: Your wallet

By Steve Ranger

Takeaway: Handset companies, mobile operators and banks are wrestling for control of the mobile payments market.

Mobile operator O2 is the latest to unveil a mobile payments service as the battle to control the wallet of the future continues to intensify.

The company’s O2 wallet service allows customers to transfer up to £500 via their mobile phone, with retailers including Debenhams, Comet, Sainsbury’s Direct and Tesco Direct signing up to accept payments.
While the mobile payments market is at best nascent, in the long term all sorts of payments are likely to go contactless and mobile, so mobile operators, handset makers and credit card companies are jockeying for position and launching a variety of payment options, none of which so far have reached anything near critical mass.

Earlier this month Barclaycard showed off PayTag, a miniature credit card it hopes customers will stick on the back of their mobile phones to make contactless payments. Back in February Barclays unveiled its Pingit app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry handsets, which allows users to link their mobile phone number to their bank account and make payments to anyone who owns a mobile phone in the UK.
Meanwhile, Samsung is working with Visa on a soon-to-be-released NFC enabled smartphone for athletes at the London 2012 Olympics.

Mark Austin, head of contactless at Visa Europe said the Olympics is likely to be a big driver for contactless payments as there will be 3,000 contactless point of sales devices and 350 contactless vending machines.
Contactless has a number of benefits for retailer – including cutting fraud and increasing spending, he said:
“People are limited by how much cash they have in their pocket: the transaction value is inflated when you are using a card because you are less constrained – which is why retailers accept cards.”
Nearly every major retail brand has a contactless plan, he said.  Visa has issued 21 million contactless cards in the UK and there are 104,000 contactless terminals.
And he added: “People still prefer to make contactless payments with cards now but more and more will use phones,” he said.

And it’s not just the existing players that are interested in mobile payments: to complicate the situation further there are new entrants into the market like Google – with its Google Wallet service - that also want to swoop in and take over the mobile payments business.

“This is exactly what Google is aiming to do with its mobile wallet service and if it gains critical mass then it will have a disruptive impact on operators,” said Eden Zoller, principal analyst at Ovum.
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