2018 in Digital

Recently, the UK budget was set with a few old fashioned measures for increasing productivity, Investment in Infrastructure and More Money for Apprenticeships.

I then read someone's blog which suggested that this had missed the mark. His premise was that investment in technology usually fails and there is a need to continue to emphasise other traditional business change and simplicity measures such as clear strategic leadership, process design and email de-cluttering. He produced statistics to show that e-mail costs more than the UK's contributions to the EU's budget. Although I thought that this particular commentary missed the disasters caused by poor collaboration by business leaders and the failure to work together as a unified team.

At the same time, a commentary in Forbes suggested that 2018 will be the year of software automation with a sudden increase in the trading of enterprise data sets and a huge increase in the number of data scientists. Although the breaks to this are whether data sets are considered valuable IPR and the need to train up a lot more people in aspects of data science.

Contino and Gartner have identified 2018 as the year of DevOps with DevOps driving Agile (Gartner) and increasing competition between Platform Vendor services between AWS, GCS and Azure as well as the new wild card entry AliBaba. Interestingly, growth rates for all of these services are in the 50-90% p.a. area. Contino also mentioned that there are many new developments not just in the area of containerisation and serverless computing, but also in improved cloud security via projects such as Calico.

Surprisingly, given the recent frenzies, most commentators were muted on the impact of AI and Machine learning. Likewise, no one bothered to mention the rapidly maturing area of wearable technology or the new promises that quantum computing may at last start to deliver.

Overall, the impression is of Lean Digital becoming mainstream whilst other post digital technologies gradually insinuate themselves into leading edge enterprises.

Complacency at AWS Summit

Sitting there last week at the AWS Summit in London, I was struck by how similar Werner Vogel's message was to Googles at the GCS Next conferenece. It was just that AWS's CTO was far less punchy in his delivery and much more obsessed with technical detail. At the same time there was no recognition that AWS might actually have competitors. 

It is true that Amazon, with its AWS service, is far in front of Microsoft and Google in terms of richness of its technical offering and market penetration, but at the same time this gap is closing. Recently, I saw a great conversation on LinkedIn started by a recruiter for cloud specialists who had noticed a growing demand for Azure specialists, having spent the previous year only recruiting AWS staff. This shows, that in large corporates at least, a dual market is naturally emerging as Microsoft leverages the installed base of AD and Office products to move them to O365 and Azure. Also, I did not see the sort of financial innovation that Google is bringing to the market with its highly flexible pricing options.

In fact it took me a while to identify what differentiates AWS from its closest competitors. As much of Werner's pitch was spent identifying improvements to current offerings within its services. The things which stood out were:

• AWS has more virtual server type offerings than its competitors, with some services now into their 5th release or so of maturity. Although this comes at the downside of increased complexity and need for an intepreter to translate for the uninitiated as many of the services are labelled in the format AN (A = a character and N = a version number) in the manner of a technical labelling convention rather than a meaningful name.

• AWS is now offering "serverless computing" via its Lambda service using functions instead of virtual servers. Whilst this obviously offers a great deal of agileness for rapid delivery, it may be risky in terms of encouraging sloppy development resulting in monolithic resource hungry applications which are expensive to run and difficult to maintain. It also may present a new form of vendor lock in risk, as migration to other cloud platforms in the future would be less easy.

• AWS is now offering a niche service for FPGAs. Which allows a mature and tuned application to be "burnt into hardware" with corresponding double digit improvements in performance. This may be important for people with well proven machine learning applications

• The suite of security services available is also impressive with extensive DDoS capability embedded as standard.

• AWS now has a UK point of presence and others are being established throughout Europe to ensure that data privacy and export sensitive security concerns can be addressed. Although global coverage is still a little patchy and the Middle East in particular seems poorly served.

• AWS's IoT offering also appears to be maintaining its edge. It's still the only one to have a rules engine built in and additionally, Amazon is now launching a standalone environment which can be run on the Things (i.e. the intelligent devices which are networked in IoT networks) which is consistent with the rest of the service.

For me the most interesting part of the day was visiting the start-up partner stands and a presentation on Amazon Launchpad. Launchpad is its service for helping "ready to go to market" startups to promote themselves and gain extra visibility in the online market place, coupled with help in delivering their on-line presence. This is currently focused on "tangible product" companies, but may be extended to services in the future. Noticeable amngst them were Cocoon (a company which provides remotely manageable security devices based on infrasound), Beeline (a company which provides simple digital navigation devices for bicycles) and Roli (a company which makes electronic music generation simple and accessible).

So, to recap and summarise, AWS maintains its technical edge, but appears over comfortable and complacent. It needs to hone its marketing and value proposition to continue to remain relevant in the future.

IoT Platforms

Companies going down the cloud bases PaaS route for hosting their applications have some interesting choices. There are 2 main leaders: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. There are also a lot of other platforms built around major applications, e.g. Salesforce & SAP, or technology stacks, e.g. IBM and Oracle.

Most of these platforms have quite features around provision of virtualised servers and storage as well as load balancing, with extensive options for scalability, as well as pricing models. All come with various database management system services as well as data analytic services for BI/Big Data usage.

Whilst Gartner makes a great show of assessing them against its own set of  Enterprise requirement criteria, this is unlikely to be meaningful for long as the leaders are engaged in an arms race to introduce an increasing number of features and capabilities which means that any 3rd party analyst's assessment is bound to be out of data almost as soon as it is published.

Enterprises have a fair guessing game about which platforms are going to be dominant in the future. This is almost impossible to get right. So more pragmatic approaches are needed. If an enterprise intends to move almost everything onto cloud platforms, then some analysis of what services its main SaaS applications uses may be appropriate. For companies tied into .Net, Microsoft Office and AD, then Azure may be a no brainer.

However, when it comes to IoT based applications, this may not be so simple. At present Amazon appears to have the leading  IoT support framework of the big 3 platform providers. Google and Microsoft appear to be trying to get in on the end device with specialist operating system offerings, so that they can own the whole stack. Likewise, Oracle is aiming to lever its Java specialism with its technology stack to provide specialist SaaS applications which facilitate rapid development in the IoT area.

My take is simple. For now anyway, most applications are going to have to deal with at least 2 PaaS platforms. One for internal applications and a second for externally facing applications and IoT. In reality, most corporations may need even more, especially if they want to exploit big application services such as SAP's and Salesforce's.

Platform Schizophrenia

This year I became aware that there are two definitions to Digital Platforms. Whilst I had been meandering around in IT Space thinking that digital platform meant services like AWS and Azure, our friends in Marketing Space had decided that digital market places were Digital Platforms. So to them ComparetheMarket.com, Deliveroo.com and Uber.com are platforms. 

Anyway moving on from this diversion, it has for some time been a surprise to me that amazon has dominated IT thoughtspace and the market for PaaS based Digital Platforms, whilst belatedly Microsoft pushed into the market with Azure. 

In recent projects I have been involved with both AWS and Azure as well as all sort of fun with the OSS tools which are available on them. To traditionalists coming across the database as a service offerings available is quite amazing. I was also blown away when a Solution Architect who had no experience of Neural Networks was able within 2 weeks to knock up a fully working and trained prototype of a Machine Learning application on Azure.

So it has become increasingly interesting to see that Google, one of the most born in the cloud companies going, has recently started promoting its services. One has to ask why did they wait so long, especially as they have always made much of the fact that their products are all architected around a SOA concept and the ability to expose themselves as services, both internally and externally.

Oracle and IBM have also appeared actively in the market place this year promoting their own special blends. 

The thing about this is that they all have really good stories to tell. You will note that I am not stating any preferences, as to be honest, anything I say about them today will already be wrong tomorrow as this is an ever faster moving situation. Today's facts will be obsolete tomorrow.

So what does it all mean to the average business trying to go Digital?

Firstly, the means are there. You have to be comfortable with the fact that terms and conditions are what they are. You need to examine the pricing and understand how this would play out in some key real world applications. However there is plenty available to "Free Your business from the Tyranny of Infrastructure" and Focus on Value. If you choose reasonable sensibly, you will be able to scale costs with business activity and exploit platforms which support Agile and DevOps so you can move quickly and lightly in the pursuit of opportunities. All the major vendors are investing significantly in security and if you dig deeper, most offer localisation options if data cannot move outside certain jurisdictions. Additionally there are industry certification schemes which many providers are signed up to. So a lot of inhibitors have been addressed.

The key issue is going to be how much do you insulate yourself from the risk that you may need to change platform provider. Business Performance, Legislation, Pricing etc. will change with time. So you may need an exit plan. Therefore, some thought needs to be given to insulating yourself from future supply threats. Where your application is going in for short term gains, e.g. a new financial instrument which will only be around for a a few months or perhaps a couple of years, this is not a problem. But if you are locking yourself into a platforms specific machine learning solution for years, you may need to think how you would deal with problems if the platform vendor ceases training.

In the end, however, we have always faced these problems. Finding a totally vendor agnostic solution has always been too complicated and too costly. So its time to get comfortable with not being in total control. The System of Systems concept of de-optimising components to integrate and optimise the overall performance of the Big System applies. You just need to understand your risk appetitie, your risks, how you want treat them, what you will accept, what you need to insure against and get on with it. The risks of not doing so are far greater.