UK Government Destroys UAVs' Value Proposition

The UK Government has just ammended the Air Navigation Order of 2016 to ban the use of small Unmanned Automated Vehicle (UAV) aircraft and Remote Piloted Vehicle (RPV) aircaft (sometimes referred to as "drones") near people, private buildings, airports and large public events. Additionally, there's a height restriction of 400 feet. It is also pproposing to introduce a registration and licensing scheme, backed up by "safety tests" for operators or in effect the intrduction of a driving licence.

Whilst one can understand the need to assure safety around airports and large public events, this appears to have totally destroyed any means of usefully using the technology for valid reasons.

Firstly, Amazon, there's no chance that "drone based delivery can now be introduced into the UK.

Then, the police and border security people should give up because it cannot be used for any kind of patrol and surveillance work which helicopters often use.

If you are in mountain rescue, give up, you cannot fly the aircraft over 400 feet. Even if you did and were searching for someone to rescue, you risk breaching the 50 metre proximity rule when finding the people you are looking to rescue.

Use in many applications of building and engineering surveying now risks being outlawed.

Hobbyists should give up. If the aircraft takes off or lands within 50 metres of you, its a breach and there is a risk that someone will wander into whatever remote field that you have found and create a breach of he law.

Kids who have been given small flying helicopters with remote controls, are not even allowed to fly them in their own gardens or within their bedrooms without causing a breach.

At the same time, there does not appear to be any concern about privacy in the arrangements or regulation of what is an acceptable or safe design.

Note, for heavier aircraft, the rules become more onerous...

So, this looks like a well intended piece of legislation has largely hashed the issue and broken the value proposition for everyone. this can only be due to the lack of public awareness and therefore participation in any consultation process before the regulations were formulated.

Asia's Digital Dragons

Asia's Digital Appetite

According to experts in McKinsey, Asia is grabbing the opportunities available from digital to try and leapfrog traditional economic leaders in the west and compensate for historic lack of investment in infrastructure. They single out India, Indonesia and China as the countries with the most energetic approaches and the most innovation. They cite greater appetite for social media take up and openess to mobile and other new technologies as drivers to greater innovation.

This position is supported by Gartner's identification of Asia's 10 leading digital disruptors:

• Tencent
• AliBaba
• Baidu
• Ant Financial
• JD.com
• DiDi
• Xiaomi
• Yahoo Japan
• Naver
• Lufax

The interesting fact about this list is that it is dominated by Consumer oriented businesses. B2B opportunities are yet to be exploited. Even so, the power house that is AliBaba is reputed to dwarf western giants such as Amazon. So Asia is currently playing to its numbers and culture to establish scale.

Garnter recommends that western enterprises operating in Asia should consider adopting local platforms to guarantee penetration and better customer experience in Asian Markets.

Future Digital Directions in Asia

A recent survey of global CIOs by Logicalis showed that CIOs in the Asia Pacific area have been disappointed by slow progress overall in adopting digital business models. Like CIOs in other parts of the world they have seen typical barriers such as Organisational Culture, Scale of Investment, Legacy Infrastructure, Skills and Security holding them back.

However, overall they are typically planning to address them with moves to simplify and modernise infrastructure, work closely with other business colleagues to address specific opportunities, improve training, invest in culture change and generally increase security investments.

In doing so, they are preparing to lead change and more B2B services are likely to emerge, balancing Asia's digital economy.

The Way of DAU - The best a business can be

Just to let you know, The Way of DAU is now available from Amazon as a paperback. (click on Amazon to see) and the e-version should be available soon. 

This is a deliberately simple book on the quite complex subject of how to adopt a sustainable digital business model. It was inspired by my personal frustration with incomplete models and advice available for Digital Business.

Digital operations have now replaced traditional Business As Usual business models. The Way of DAU promotes 10 basic principles, an iterative Framework (the DAF or Digital Adoption Framework), and positive cultural values to achieve the behaviours needed in successful digital businesses.

The book is based on a mixture of personal experience (in an organisation struggling to reinvent itself) as well as collected best practices. The current edition represents an MVP version. I hope to collect constructive feedback via a LinkedIn Group to drive future releases of the book. (see: The Way of DAU Group ).

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.