Has CardSpace become Passport?
Ben Laurie of The Bunker Secure Hosting has a
provocative post about the two emerging (and that's important) leaders in user-centric identity: OpenID and CardSpace. He quite rightly points out that at present OpenID's:
popularity is entirely on the provider side. There are no consumers of note.and that CardSpace:
appears to live in its own little world, supported only by Microsoft productsI think this is to be expected given that we are still in the early stages of both.
Where I find myself disagreeing with Ben, however, is with his conclusion about CardSpace:
So why does this make Cardspace like Passport? Well, the fear with Passport was that Microsoft would control all your identity. The end result was that Microsoft was the only serious consumer of Passport. When Cardspace is deployed such that all providers and consumers of identity are really the same entity, then all its alleged privacy advantages evaporate. As I have pointed out many times before, when consumers and providers collude, nothing is secret in Cardspace (and all other standard signature-based schemes). So, there’s no practical difference between Cardspace and Passport right now.Ben's right about the implications for privacy when the those consuming identity information collude with those providing it but that's not an issue peculiar to CardSpace.
Even Microsoft would (and indeed does) agree that Passport was a failure due to the company's control of identity data, I think Ben doesn't tell the whole story. It wasn't just down to control of an individual's identity data. It was also due to the fact that Passport and Hailstorm were designed from the outset to wrest control of identity data from Microsoft's business partners and customers. The same can not be said of CardSpace and that's why I believe there is a difference between CardSpace and Passport. There are already examples,
Otto in Germany springs to mind, of organisations other than Microsoft using CardSpace and, as I said, it's still early days.
Labels: CardSpace, identity, Microsoft, OpenID
Rethinking IT projects? Think service, not product, focus
I've read a number of articles and thought pieces recently that explore the problems with approaches to IT delivery that focus too much on projects as the organising concept - particularly when it comes to SOA adoption. The shortcomings of an overly project-focused approach are something I can agree with wholeheartedly. The research we conducted for
The Technology Garden (Wiley, 2007) convinced me that driving IT delivery using a project-focused organising principle is one of the worst things you can do if you want to try and increase the business value delivered from IT investments.
But if projects are
passé, what should they be replaced with? Most of the commentary I've seen suggests that a better approach is to think as if you're developing commercial software products. The excellent Todd Biske has one such piece
here.
You have to be think carefully before diving deeply into a product management mentality, though. The trouble is that taking too literal a view of IT delivery through the lens of product management can prevent you from reflecting reality the way that "customers" (regular business people in your organisation, and quite possibly those external customers that ultimately pay all the salaries) see it.
Why? Because software products have no business value, no matter how well-managed the processes to create them were. Business value only comes when you implement a software product and get business results. A shrink-wrapped DVD by itself doesn't get you any results, only a coaster for your coffee cup. Electronic software delivery doesn't even get you a coaster - it just fills up your hard disks with useless ones and zeroes.
You have to wrap all kinds of IT services - install and config, integration, customisation, training, administration, user support and so on - to turn a product into something that delivers real business value to real business people. The interface that regular business people have with IT isn't with products, it's with IT services. Even Microsoft, the ultimate software shrink-wrapper, has realised that enterprise customers don't buy products, they buy outcomes (see
this old post for info).
That's why the only way to deliver sustainable improvements in business value delivery is recognising that for the customers of IT organisations, "service is king", and starting to organise IT delivery around that. The first obstacle to overcome is to find ways of bridging the incredibly harmful divide that so often separates software development teams from IT operations teams.
If you take too much of a product management centric view, the danger is that you focus all your energy creating the right kind of development and deployment capabilities, without thinking of the broader service experience that customers need and expect over the lifecycle of a long-term commitment. IT operations is where the rubber meets the road, and where customer expectations are met or dashed. Too simplistic a focus on product-style management for IT delivery perpetuates the development-operations divide and squanders a great opportunity.
Labels: governance, inside-out IT, sustainability
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Not just ink
For many many years in analyst circles, it was almost obligatory when talking about IT vendors to say "well of course, HP makes all its profit from ink". I remember looking, year after year, at marching rows of red figures as HP focused in on the performance of its software division in particular. It was kind of uncomfortable for everyone involved - lots of shuffling in seats was done.
I know I'm a bit late (the results were announced in mid-August), but I've recently had an update briefing on HP's software business, and HP's acquisitions are doing some good. Like IBM, HP has made a strategic move to acquire higher-margin businesses in an attempt to avoid the commodity trap. Mercury, Opsware, SPI Dynamics - they're not all that huge, but they are all in high-growth areas (compared to network and systems management tools, where HP used to be centred, at least ;-).
The result is that in Q3 this year, HP's software business brought the highest operating profit (as a percentage) across all of HP's business units. It's not just about ink any more. In this light, it's pretty difficult to see HP as "not serious about software" (something that it's competitors have regularly said to customers). Alongside one of the companies HP competes regularly against, BMC, the 14.6% operating profit within HP's software business looks pretty decent (if my maths is right, BMC's operating profit is currently running somewhere around 13% of revenues).
That said, of course, when you compare HP's results against Microsoft's 36%-odd operating profit, things take on a different colour...
Labels: financials, HP, Mercury, Opsware
Market activities this week
There have been two notable events this week in the collaboration software market - firstly the acquisition of Zimbra by Yahoo! on Tuesday, followed by Novell's reach into the broader collaboration market through the release of two new products, Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming and Conferencing.
Yahoo's purchase of Zimbra, a small, California-based start-up which provides Web 2.0-based online and offline email and calendaring as well as document and spreadsheet capabilities, is notable as much for its price tag of $350 million as for its impact on the market. Founded in 2003, Zimbra's three rounds of funding amounted to $30.5m, making the company an excellent investment. In this market where there is such an unusual mixture of broad suite vendors and numerous start-ups and small, independent players, this demonstrates a key concern for enterprises - whether they can really afford the risk of best-of-breed tools in a consolidating market.
Novell's announcement is another illustration of the draw of collaboration for vendors; a long-time player in the email and groupware market with GroupWise, Novell is finally building on this experience and client base to deliver team-based collaboration. With core technology gained through an OEM agreement with SiteScape, Novell's solution leverages its heritage in identity management and email/calendaring to provide a solid, competitive first release product. It also puts Novell in an interesting position - while it is a familiar vendor in IT departments within enterprises, Novell will now need to shift its focus to the business, which will mean a different set of partners and a different marketing focus. It will also have to be careful not to over-emphasise the Linux angle with business users - something it is prone to doing. Many vendors find it hard to make the IT-to-business transition; time will tell whether Novell can do it.
Labels: collaboration, Novell, Zimbra
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- Managed information cards for secure online purchasing
Kim Cameron's highlights the collaboration between Ping Identity and ACI (whose software processes more than half the world's credit card transactions) who are building a prototype to allow secure payment using info cards
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Is this really collaboration?
As part of a report I am writing on collaboration, I have been mulling over the increasingly broad use of the words "collaboration" and "collaborative", and wondering how appropriate they are in certain contexts. Let me explain.
"Collaboration" literally means "to work together". As I see it, this necessarily implies that the parties involved are conscious of their co-involvement in the activity.
However, increasingly the term "collaborative" is being used to describe tools where the central value is gained by the participation of a collection of users - but where the individual users' contribution is not made in the name of the collective - it is made for their own personal benefit. For example, users of social bookmarking systems may tag pages for their own reference or to help them find things again - not explicitly to add to the broader network of tagged content. But, since there is no explicit intention to participate in the collective activity, surely this cannot truly be collaboration? Just because there is a collective benefit from multiple people using the same system, doesn't mean the people involved shared the same goal.
It may be that the term collaboration is simply the best-fitting umbrella for these tools and methods, but with all the confusion in the market over what is meant by collaboration - especially with terms such as Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0 etc adding to the mix - I think we need to be more careful about how we describe emerging social software and services.
Labels: collaboration
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A new face at MWD
Hello there, I'm Angela Ashenden, and I've recently joined Neil M and Neil WD to establish a new research area for MWD covering collaboration. I'm not new to the analyst world - you may have come across me in my previous role at Ovum, where I advised on many technology areas, including search, content management, portals, workflow and e-learning - so I have quite a background in this area!
At MWD, I will be coming at collaboration from a different perspective from most other analyst companies - but in line with MWD's broader strategy of IT-business alignment - taking the enterprise need as my primary consideration, rather than the technology. Of course technology is an important factor, but rather than simply drilling in on the individual features and functions of the tools available, I will be looking at the technology in as far as how it addresses the organisation's broader business need. Few organizations have the luxury of selecting new technology without taking into account their existing infrastructure and applications, and so I aim to keep the focus on how the technology fits within and complements that structure.
The other important consideration with collaboration is the practicality of changing people's ways of working; collaboration is not just about using a particular set of tools, it's about working together as a team, making best use of each person's skills, and taking responsibility both individually and collectively. I'll be looking at what makes collaboration work within an enterprise, and what techniques and methods you can use to implement collaborative working patterns within your organisation.
Interestingly, there are some strong relationships between collaboration and several of the existing competency areas within MWD (which of course is no accident!), and so the Neils and I will be exploring those too.
In the meantime, I will be posting comments and interesting links here on the blog regularly, so please feel free to offer your reactions to my musings!
Labels: collaboration, MWD
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