February 19th, 2010 | 
Author: Mobility has been one of the ever-present items near the top of IT managers’ priorities for some time. The potential for using mobile technology to get closer to customers, to improve employees’ work-life balance, and to reduce the cost of office facilities, is well known and obvious.
Yet for most organisations, mobile working means little more than a laptop with access to corporate applications through a virtual private network, or a Blackberry to read email on the move. There are few examples of companies truly mobile-enabling processes or systems to change the way they work for the better.
We have talked about “next-generation workplaces” and “paperless offices” for years, and the technology is certainly in place to make it happen.
So why hasn’t it?
Without doubt one of the reasons is a lack of confidence in the ability of mobile networks to support reliable, high-speed data and application access for critical corporate systems.
3G networks are fine for consumers wanting to access apps and the internet on the move. If the network connection is poor, they will tut and moan but simply try again five minutes later.
But for business users, those five minutes mean money, and time that would have been more productive sitting in an office on a wired network.
For all the desire of the mobile operators to encourage corporate use, to promote data traffic and support new services such as video, the reality is that congestion and patchy coverage makes the networks too unreliable for many businesses.
Our report this week from the Mobile World Congress event, highlights some of the problems. The rarely spoken truth is that if we all started pumping data and video and other such high bandwidth applications across the airwaves, the networks that are still essentially designed and operated for voice, would near collapse.
If companies are to realise the true potential of mobile technology, they need network operators to deliver the reliability and connectivity upon which corporate IT depends.
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You see, it’s not so easy being big. That, at least, is one lesson Google could learn from Microsoft.
After the search giant stormed the web’s news outlets and blogs last week with the launch of its Gmail-based social networking tool Buzz, so this week it is reaping the pain from getting it so badly wrong.
Sometimes even the firm the helped define the phrase “working at internet speed” finds it needs to slow down and think first.
Buzz has been widely attacked for having some of the weakest privacy guards yet created by a major web player. Google assumed that all the people that Gmail users emailed regularly would automatically be considered part of their social network and thus free to publicise.
The negative feedback generated proves that even the most social of us like to keep a lid on some of our socialising. As privacy experts have pointed out, there might be a very good reason why someone is using a private email service to communicate with people they would rather not be seen publicly communicating with. You have to wonder if footballers John Terry and Ashley Cole are users (allegedly).
Google is now frantically back-tracking and apologising, having admitted that it bypassed its usual testing procedures. The fuss goes to prove that even a giant like Google has a lot to learn.
Privacy, as I’ve written before, is one of the defining issues of the internet age – just look at the furore Facebook generated when it tried to change the terms and conditions around its users’ personal information.
Being big and successful does not make you immune from mistakes or from criticism. Microsoft learned that the hard way – in Redmond’s case, through the anti-trust courts. Google needs to be aware that it is fast approaching the size and influence when people – and governments – expect it to be a responsible leader and not perceived as a monopolistic manipulator.
And from an IT perspective, even with the technology world and the web developing and changing so quickly, there is no substitute for testing. There are plenty of software developers who would smile knowingly at the thought.
Cloud computing. It’s one of the big buzzwords in the tech world. And whether you’re excited by it or turned off by it, cloud computing has the potential to change the way we use our desktop computers, laptop computers, and netbooks.
The idea behind cloud computing is to move applications off your desktop and on to the Web. That opens a very large digital can of worms, though. While you get access to your favorite applications no matter where you are, your information is in someone else’s hands. You don’t get much control.
Whether you are fed up with a tide of “greenwash” marketing from IT suppliers; whether you are a climate change sceptic put off by revelations of dodgy research; or whether you are an active environmentalist – if you are an IT manager too, none of those will matter soon, because green IT is about to get serious.
From April, the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) becomes law, forcing around 20,000 private and public sector organisations to measure and benchmark their CO2 emissions with potential financial penalties for the worst offenders.
The statistics for IT’s environmental impact are well known: 2% of global emissions are attributable to IT – the same as the aviation industry – and a quarter of that comes from datacentres. The large organisations targeted by the CRC are likely to be among the heavier users of datacentre power.
Of course, green concerns have become a staple of most IT strategies by now. But delve deeper into the practical steps that most firms have actually taken, and you tend to find that strategy really translates into projects such as virtualisation, reducing printer paper or turning off PCs at night.
These “low hanging fruits” are important staples of green IT, but are not enough to be called a truly sustainable, carbon-reduction plan for corporate technology use.
Many companies will point to outsourcing as a way to lower their datacentre energy bill – but those outsourcers will be among the hardest hit by CRC, and the fiscal effect on them will find its way back to customers.
CRC means that one-off CO2-cutting initiatives will not be enough – the law effectively forces firms to continuously improve or find themselves dropping down the league table of emitters and paying higher costs as a result.
The emphasis will be on measurable, ongoing improvements, constantly seeking and implementing the latest best practice and for IT managers to share their experiences with their peers. Forget the weather, the climate for UK IT is going to change.
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Several years ago, I sat next to then-Oracle UK managing director Ian Smith at an industry event. At the time, the software giant was pursuing an aggressive and increasingly contentious purchase of rival PeopleSoft, and for a while looked like losing.
Discussing this with Smith, he turned to me at the end of the conversation and said: “I’ll tell you this: what Larry wants, Larry gets.”
Sure enough, Oracle’s famously confident chief executive Larry Ellison got what he wanted. Since then, he has got a lot of what he wanted as the supplier went on an unprecedented spending spree that took in Siebel, BEA Systems, niche software firms too numerous to mention, and most recently, Sun Microsystems. In the process, Ellison has revolutionised the company he founded, from a database and business software specialist to one of the true giants of the IT sector.
Why? Because Ellison wants to take on the biggest of them all – IBM.
To reinforce the point that Smith made, just look to the waters of the Mediterranean off Valencia this week. In 2000, Ellison, a keen yacht racer, set his sights on winning the America’s Cup, sailing’s most prestigious prize. After several unsuccessful attempts – and a long and costly series of legal cases – Ellison’s BMW Oracle Racing team is facing off against holder Alinghi in one of the most technically ambitious, complex, and expensive racing yachts ever built, a 90-foot trimaran featuring a 220-foot wingsail – the largest ever fitted to a sailing boat.
What Larry wants, Larry gets.
So once he gets back to his Redwood Shores HQ in California, what will Larry want next for Oracle? If IBM is the target, there is an obvious gap in his current strategy. So much of IBM’s success today is founded on its Global Services operation – the IT services, outsourcing and consultancy group that leads so much of Big Blue’s sales efforts and high-level customer relationships.
Surely, if there is one thing Larry wants – and needs – it’s an Oracle Global Services. With Sun in place as the hardware arm to take on IBM’s server business, an IT services firm is surely the next target for Ellison’s acquisitive wallet. If he could have anyone, I’ll bet he would take Accenture – with EDS now in the hands of HP, Accenture stands out as the only truly global outsourcer that remains independent.
There may be other, less ambitious, targets – CSC, Capgemini, the big Indian firms – that cannot be ruled out, but none would give Ellison the immediate global reach and opportunity of Accenture. With a market capitalisation of $25bn, it would be one of the largest takeovers in IT history, and perhaps even for Ellison it remains an acquisition too far – although Oracle itself is currently worth some $118bn.
But as Ellison pursues the sailing trophy that has so far eluded him, you cannot question his ambition. Rule nothing out – what Larry wants, Larry gets.
Once upon a time, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, which most of us know as Web addresses or links) were short and simple. Often, they looked something like http://www.geeks.com. If you had a personal Web page, your URL might look something like http://www.facebook.com/ComputerGeeks
Times change, and URLs have expanded. A lot. Just do a search at the Web site of a large corporation or your favorite online retailer. What often comes back is a long and convoluted URL. And that becomes a problem if you’re into microblogging. Services like Twitter limit you to 140 characters. Some long URLs exceed that limit by quite a bit.
So, how can you tame those impossibly long URLs? With a Web-based service called a URL shortener.
If you want to boost the signal of your wireless linksys router all you need is configure the router. You can type on the browser 192.168.1.1 which is the default IP address assigned on the router. After logging in you can go to wireless then click advance settings. Most configuration in this area is based on default configuration, change the following value.
- Beacon Interval – 50
- Fragmentation Threshold – 2304
- RTS Threshold – 2304
After setting the values you can save the configuration and turn off the router for several seconds. Turn it on again to use the canges made on your router.
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The iPod Touch is more than just an MP3/MP4 player. And it’s far more than just a crippled iPhone. It’s a portable entertainment center, and a powerful tool for the mobile worker.
The key to the latter, though, is finding the right apps. Many of the applications for the iPod Touch that are available through Apple’s AppStore are fun. There are some that are … well, they’re interesting. Others are downright useless.
The apps that this TechTip covers are perfect for the geek on the go. They range in price from free to under five dollars. Best of all, they can keep you productive and connected.