Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Get free AppWave download. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the productivity gap between modern
software and the aging manner in which most enterprises still distribute and manage applications on personal computers.At a time when business models and whole industries are being upended by improved use of software, we're also seeing mobility, cloud services, and data analytics. IT providers inside of enterprises are still painstakingly provisioning and maintaining PC applications in much the same way they did in the 1990s.
Furthermore, with using these older models, most enterprises don’t even know what PC apps they have in use on their networks and even across thousands, in many cases, of notebook computers. That means they're also lacking that visibility into how, or even if, these apps are being used, and they may even be paying for licenses that they don’t need to pay for.
So while the software inventory and business service management initiatives are helping along these lines, there's a general lack of control over PC applications. I don’t think you can solve that without including new ways to engage the PC users directly. This is really a function about the use and the users, not just the applications and the PC.
To learn more about how things can be done better, I recently interviewed the President and CEO of
Embarcadero Technologies, Wayne Williams, to examine the ongoing problems around archaic PC apps management and how new models -- taking a page from the popular app store model -- can rapidly boost the management of PC applications. [Disclosure: Embarcadero Technologies is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]Wayne has more than 15 years of experience in founding and leading companies. He was appointed CEO of Embarcadero Technologies in 2007 and he is a former COO, Senior Vice President of Products and CTO at Embarcadero.
I want to welcome you to BriefingsDirect, Wayne. It’s good to have you with us.
Wayne Williams: Good morning. Thanks for having me, Dana.
Gardner: As I said, it’s kind of ironic that, on one hand, we have software taking over in a larger sense how businesses are run and how industries are being innovative in reaching customers in new ways. This has been highlighted recently by Marc Andreessen in some of his writings. At the same time, the corporate PC, also driven by software, is still sort of stodgy and moribund, at least in the perception of how it’s being used productively.
So let’s unpack this a little bit, Wayne. How is it that software is advancing generally, but PCs remain, in a sense, unchanged?
Williams: I've been asking myself that question for many years. I've spent most of my life in software, and I'm embarrassed to say that the industry has really done a poor job at making software available to the users, which is the fundamental issue.
Windows is clearly the dominant PC platform but it has fundamental design flaws, which sowed the seeds for the problem.
Part of the story
But that’s only a small part of the story. Software vendors are so focused on building the next
great application and on features and functions in that application that they've lost sight of what really matters, which is making sure that the application that you build gets used, gets in the hands of the users, and that they get their work done.When I look at the PC industry and where it has come, the applications themselves have improved dramatically. I can’t imagine being as productive as I am without Microsoft Outlook, for example, for email and calendaring. And Adobe Photoshop. I don’t think you can find a photo anywhere that has not been edited with Photoshop. It’s incredibly powerful.
But unfortunately, a lot of the gains that really could be made have been wasted, because it’s very, very tough to get an application from a vendor into a user's hands.
Gardner: It seems to me that while the technology is somewhat unchanged since the '90s, the users are a different breed nowadays. We have different behaviors and different levels of anticipation and expectation around what productivity is all about. We used to call these productivity apps, but now productivity comes from being able to innovate, self-start, even learn from your peers -- that social fabric type of an interplay.
Are these some of the core problems? We're at a dissonance between expectations and behaviors on one hand and the same old local area network (LAN) level of management on the other.
At the end of the day, all technology is about productivity. Software certainly is about productivity.
Williams: Absolutely. That’s a great point. At the end of the day, all technology is about productivity. Software certainly is about productivity. And if you're going to radically increase the productivity of a team, the knowledge that team can share about what tools are used for what job is critical knowledge. That’s why we’ve built in the ability to rate and review apps into AppWave. Team members can find the best tool for the job based on peer feedback.
Gardner: What about this as it applies to application development and deployment? I know that Embarcadero has been involved with that for an awfully long time. Is there something of a disconnect between development, gathering requirements, creating an application, and then the operations, thinking about operations through that adoption pattern, and user expectation and behaviors?
It seems as if we're still stuck in this era, where there's a wall between the two, but some of the activities that you have been up to strike me as trying to close that, or at least create a feedback loop, or a life cycle benefit, between apps, how they're developed, how they're used, and then how they are iterated on.
Williams: There are a few ways to look at it from a development perspective. One way is that software developers are probably the most aggressive in terms of the need for productivity, the most aggressive users of applications and tools and all the issues that surround that.
At the end of the day, software developers, whether at a garage start-up or one of the large software vendors, are passionate about solving a problem, creating software that solves a problem, and getting it into the hands of their users. That’s what really drives developers.
Important disconnect
The problem is that there's a disconnect between creating your software and getting it into the hands of the users. You very rarely are talking about this happening in seconds, which it should. It’s something that happens more on the order of months or quarters in a large company.
Gardner: I have to imagine that this contributes also to the security problems. So many organizations now are really doubling down on what they need to do for security, recognizing that it’s not something you buy out of a box, that it’s really part and parcel of process, methodology, standards, and governance.
There must be some benefits by closing this loop, as you pointed out, when it comes to bringing better security and then making automated changes that bring even better security on an ongoing basis.
Williams: There's a whole host of problems that emanate from the root problem, the root problem that we're talking about, and security is one of them.
You have an environment which is high-friction. It reminds me really of a state of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution, where you had processes that were slow, expensive, unpredictable, and error-prone. That’s how PC software has operated over the last 20-plus years.
When you have an environment that is so high friction, users will go around it.
When you have an environment that is so high-friction, users will go around it. So you have this process with the PC, where IT tries to get more control and locks down the environment more, and the business users that need to get the work done find ways to get it done.
We have large customers that have a policy: When somebody is hired, all controls are turned off so that they can get their desktop together and get the apps that they need for the first three days. Then they'll lock it down. That’s not a good environment for security.
Gardner: That’s begging for trouble. You mentioned the core problem or the root problem. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind fleshing that out a bit for us. What do you think the real root problem is here?
Williams: The root problem is that software should move at the speed of light, yet it moves at the speed of a glacier.
Let me give you an example. In a mid- to large-sized company, if an employee is looking for a special pen for a new project, they can go to a catalog, take out a pen, and they can usually have it the next day, and that’s a physical good.
Software is virtual. So it could and should move at the speed of light, but for many of our large customers it takes quarters to get software into the user’s hand.
Looking for productivity
Gardner: So we've identified the problem internally. As I said, it's ironic, because when we look to the larger landscape of business, we're still in a tough economic situation around the globe. People are looking for productivity.
Marc Andreessen wrote recently that software is really revolutionizing how we procure things like entertainment and books and how we discover new products and services online. We can do this as a consumer. Doesn’t it seem almost absurd that, at a time when individuals using some of the tools that are available on a retail basis, are leaps and bounds ahead of someone who is just trying to get some basic work done in a large corporation?
Williams: Yes, you can take a fairly simple device like a smartphone from Apple or an Android device and find and run applications literally in seconds. Yet you have this sophisticated environment with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of software sold every year, powerful hardware and processing power, but it's like pulling teeth for a user to get the applications she or he needs.
Gardner: Wayne, you and I have been around long enough to know that the way to instigate change in an enterprise environment is not necessarily to attempt wholesale radical shifts. You need to work with what's in place and recognize that investments have been made and that those investments are going to continue to be leveraged.
So let's start defining the solution at a high level here. We want the applications that have been developed. We want the interfaces and data that folks are used to to continue to benefit them. But we also want to start energizing this new sense of empowerment that people have through their personal lives and their consumer roles and bring some of these things together.
What I see from our big customers is that for every commercial app that they license they will have 10 that are built internally.
Craft for me, if you could, the vision about retaining what's good about the enterprise and what's been invested in and brought to the daily grind, but at the same time start to bring innovation and allow people to exercise their behaviors and their empowerment.
Williams: As far as what's good and what can be retained, there's a great footprint of hardware out there, PC hardware. A massive investment has been made.
It's the same with software. There are tons of software, both licensed and built internally. And the internal part is really important. What I see from our big customers is that for every commercial app that they license they will have 10 that are built internally. And while there is very little visibility into how commercial licenses are used, there is some, but it's little. And there's zero visibility into who’s using internally built software, for the most part.
There have been massive investments made in software, and unfortunately, a lot of the productivity that could have been realized hasn’t been. But the good news is that it can be.
When I look at the opportunities, it's really two constituents, which you described. You talked about the user for a second and then you talked about the investment and what can be reused, and that’s really management, typically IT management, which is centralized. AppWave is about bringing these two stakeholders together.
Gardner: How can we do that? I'm familiar with what you've been doing with developers. Developers have unique requirements, but it seems like you've gained some insight and some technology in serving their needs in a fast-paced, agile environment, and can now bring that to the larger group of consumers within the enterprise.
Removing friction
Williams: If you look at mobile software, the friction between the user and the app is removed, and the results are fantastic. For us, that was a great proof point, because we started on AppWave before anybody had heard of the Apple App Store.
For PCs, the problem is much more difficult and it's much larger. Mobile software is about a $10 billion industry, and PC is somewhere around $300 billion. So the opportunity for productivity gains and overall results is much, much bigger, and the problem is much more difficult. Now, with AppWave the mobile experience -- find, run, rate, review -- comes to the PC. So the agile enterprise has tools to support it.
Gardner: So bringing that mentality of search, discover, share your experience, ease of access when you want to then act on that kind of information, almost instant gratification when the app comes down, being able to run it, and then upgrade it along the way with very little oversight, very little maintenance, certainly very little disruption, you have to ask yourself -- why would I want to do it any other way?
How do we bring these together? How do we bring the app store experience to IT? How do we enable them to bring that to their own constituents, their own users?
Williams: The key is the system. With the enterprise app store we bring two constituents together: users and management.
For users, there are really three principles that drive everything that we do. One of them is self-service, the next is socialization, and the third is instant gratification.
You mentioned a few things that are core principles. For users, there are really three principles that drive everything that we do. One of them is self-service, the next is socialization, and the third is instant gratification.
As a user, when I have a problem to solve and I'm looking for an app to help me solve it, I want to be able to find it myself, quickly. I want to understand what my peers are saying about that app. When I decide I want to try it, I click a button and run it. Everything we do goes through one of those filters. It’s about the user experience.
From a management perspective, for IT they need centralized control and visibility into real usage. So those are two principles that really drive everything we do with AppWave from a management perspective.
People talk about the consumerization of IT now, and initiatives like "bring your own device." The key for IT is to put an environment in place that draws users in and gives them what they're looking for, but you can still maintain overall control and have real visibility into who is using software and when.
Gardner: I'm curious. With AppWave, is there the opportunity to bring down apps fresh, or more frequently than the typical install, lockdown, patch process that we're familiar with now? Is there a hybrid model that incorporates some of the goodness from other trends like software as a service (SaaS) or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but allows the same PC apps, the rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the investments that have been made in the code and logic to remain?
Results is conflict
Williams: This is one of the difficult engineering challenges we had, and it goes back to my first point about Windows sowing the seeds of some of the problems. If you look at Windows, it's designed around the concept of sharing and sort of a utopian view, where applications could all share parts, and typically those are called DLLs in Windows. Unfortunately, the end result of that is conflict.
When a user wants to try a new application, that application is installed and will typically conflict with other applications that were previously installed. The problem gets worse when you get into new versions.
In the PC market, most vendors update their software multiple times a year. For example, we put out new release of every major product once a year and then we will have point releases typically quarterly. You have an awful lot of change, and every time there is a change, you stand to break other things that are already installed on your computer.
That was one of the things we had to tackle, and we did with AppWave. That folds into instant gratification. If I'm a user who has an existing version of a particular application, and I need either the older version or the newer version, I should be able to click a button and be productive. I should be using it in seconds.
Gardner: Well, we've defined our problem. We recognize that it's severe. We recognize that the environment is propelling people for change. We know that people have alternatives in the market for at least some apps, and we have been describing some of what is required of a solution, at least at a high level. So I guess it's time now to really dig in a little bit. Describe for us what AppWave is, what it does, and how it came to be?
At the heart of it, we removed the dependencies that applications would have with other applications and with the environment in general.
Williams: AppWave is an enterprise app store for PCs that provides self-service. Users can very easily type in a search term and get a result. The result is a set of applications. Then they can click and run those applications, read ratings and reviews from their peers, and they can be assured that when they do run those applications, they're not going to disrupt anything else that they have on their PC.
Gardner: Tell me a little bit about that problem you mentioned a moment ago, that ability to bring down new or quickly upgrade or change apps, but without losing the config, the importance of the legacy, the use and trail of what that application has done for the user. How did you solve that?
Williams: Years and years of engineering, but at the heart of it, we removed the dependencies that applications would have with other applications and with the environment in general. Each of these applications is able to stand on its own, which means you can have multiple versions of a particular app and move between them painlessly with no concerns.
I think that’s important for just about any knowledge worker. I've seen company after company -- and ours is no different -- afraid to move, for example, to the newest version of Office, because they're not sure if documents from the old version are going to work properly. Problems like that are gone, because you can easily move from version to version with the click of a button.
This is particularly important in R&D,where a tremendous amount of time is spent retooling to go from one configuration of applications for a particular system.
Prior to having AppWave, developers had multiple PCs, one for working on the new release that’s going to come out this year and then one for going back and fixing bugs on last year’s release.
What are the metrics?
Gardner: As you pointed out, Wayne, you've been doing this for some time. A lot of R&D, starting with tools, is probably the hardest category to crack. And you've seen how organizations have adopted and used your AppWave approach, creating this storefront, making those apps available to solve some of these issues that plague PC software distribution.
What have people gained from this? Do we have some metrics? Can we look at some examples? What do you get if you do this properly? How impactful is the shift when you go from say a traditional distribution to an AppWave and an app store distribution model?
Williams: I can give you a few examples. It's been amazing for us certainly. We drink our own champagne. We've made incredible gains, with the biggest gains being in two areas.
One is in R&D, where teams generally produce a daily build of most of the products. Those apps, when they come off the build machine, are now immediately available to all of R&D. It's particularly important for QA, because the downtime that you would have retooling and getting a new app is gone. It’s literally seconds. So we've seen some great gains internally with R&D.
We've also seen it with sales. We've got roughly 20 products. We put out a minor release once a quarter and majors once a year. So if you just looked at the explosion of that set of apps that a salesperson would have to have on their PC, just in two years, it’s 160. That historically has been a problem. It’s just a productivity drain and it’s error prone. Now that problem is gone.
What’s most exciting is when a customer really sees that this can help them get to market quicker.
There are certainly metrics out there as far as productivity and under-utilization of software and over-utilization of software, but I think what’s most exciting is when a customer really sees that this can help them get to market quicker.
A large financial services company had a nine-month rollout cycle for of a new version of a PC app. They had a really pressing business need to get this done before the holidays, their biggest season. It was impossible using their current methods for PC software distribution. With AppWave, users were upgraded to the right version of software in minutes.
The thing that they loved about that whole experience wasn't really the metrics. Certainly they put together their ROIs and they were impressive, but what that really did for them was that it allowed them to move quickly, to solve the business need in a time that would really make a difference.
Gardner: And at a time when software is more important than ever, they're going to gain an advantage by being able to deliver that software, put it in the hands of their employees, and also put it in the hands in the market, learn from that market and adjust, it just seems like you get generally better business agility, particularly when you are in a software intensive field which, as I said, most companies are nowadays.
Williams: One of the things that's frustrating for me, seeing how the software industry has matured and grown over the years, is that everybody talks about ROI. There's nothing wrong with the concept of ROI, but what I see often is a forest-and-trees problem, where people will lose sight of what the real goal is.
Losing sight of the goal
They will get so buried in a metric here and a metric there to build up an ROI, that they will lose sight of the goal. What’s the goal? The goal is to get my product or service to market sooner, better, and with better quality than the competition. That ROI is almost immeasurable.
Apple is a great example. This is a company that was in serious trouble for a number of years. It's the most incredible turnaround success story than any of us have ever seen. And all of that may not have happened if the iPod was a year late. Sony wasn't totally sleeping. They owned consumer electronics, and given a little more time, they probably could have stopped that move.
It’s so important for people to remember that software is going to help you get your product or service to market sooner and better, which is going to help you beat your competition.
Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time, Wayne, but I wanted to look just at a couple of the building trends now that point to the future. We're seeing tremendous uptake in mobile devices and tablets. We're seeing people who want to be able to combine their roles as consumers and individuals at home with what they do at work.
This is blurring the lines between on-premises, doing work within a corporate environment, or over a VPN even. But they need this. This is how they're going to be productive. It's putting an onus now, a different level of requirements, on IT, on developers.
It's all about getting the right app in the hands of the user as quickly as possible and that should happen on all relevant platforms.
Is there something about AppWave and what we've been talking about that can be brought into the mobile and even cloud spheres, these trends being sort of locomotives in the market right now, that brings together them and what we have been talking about?
Williams: Absolutely. Our view is that, at the end of the day, it's all about getting the right app in the hands of the users as quickly as possible and that should happen on all relevant platforms. So certainly mobile tablets, Android tablets, and iOS, iPads, are very cool and powerful devices that we are certainly going to support.
The important thing to remember is about getting the app to the user, regardless of what device they're using. So whether it's a tablet, a PC, or it's their own PC, as opposed to the company PC, they should still have access to all the apps that matter, with all the same kind of principles we've talked about, instant gratification, very easy to find. Those are all things that we're covering in AppWave.
Our initial focus was all about solving the PC problem, because in my view that’s the big problem. That’s where so much productivity has been locked away. We've solved that for the PC now and we certainly will support other popular platforms as they emerge.
Gardner: Well, very good. I hate to say we will have to leave it there.
You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity improvements and speed the value benefits for those PC users and across the applications that they are accustomed to. This is something that’s been of interest to IT departments and those users as well.
I'd like to thank our guest. It's been a very intriguing discussion. We've been with Wayne Williams, President and CEO of Embarcadero Technologies. Thanks so much, Wayne.
Williams: Thank you, Dana. Have a good day.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, as always, thanks for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Get free AppWave download. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.
A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between software development and improved PC software distribution and maintenance. Learn more about AppWave. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.
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Interesting interview! I really enjoy it!
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